A Systemic Inability to Be Human

The Iliad

I know a man who killed his wife’s dog.

Having a bad day. Stressed. Anxious. Hours and hours working in the hot sun and the little bastard just wouldn’t stop yapping. Heat you know. Does something to you. And, of course, maybe he didn’t get a good breakfast that morning, or, maybe someone said something to him earlier at the grocery store. Who knows the reason. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe. Maybe… that’s just how humans are.

We tell ourselves otherwise. There’s a veneer on our personalities, a crown, a cap disguising a rotten and stunted stump of a tooth. “Not me.” We say. “I’m peaceful.”

I remember once, at my daughter’s t-ball game, the subject of a local sex offence came up. Rapist. High profile crime. High profile, at least, for a small town out in the country. The verdict had come in and it was all over the news. Life. I remember this soccer mom with her baseball cap on at the game, prim, proper, snarling. “I hope they do to him in prison what he did to that girl.”

This is “normie sadism.”

In every American, there is at least a small cheerleader for prison rape.

Anyway, all of a sudden he just snapped. Screamed at the dog. Threw down his tools and ran over to it with frightening speed and snatched it up, shaking it. Shaking it. Shaking it.

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up!!”

Shook too hard.

Normal guy. Kind. Nice. Good father. Killed the dog. I think, probably, it feels good to kill. I think that’s why we hunt. I think that’s why we have wars. Economic reasons, wars of religion, wars of ideology, wars over territory… what if all those are just excuses? What if, honestly, it just feels good to kill? Friend who did a couple tours in Iraq told me it did. Said the prospect of shooting another human being made him slightly aroused. We’re quick to judge such statements and such behavior. Maybe we shouldn’t be. The default death for almost all life on planet earth is to have your neck snapped between a larger creature’s jaws. That’s the standard.

Who knows?

I, sorta, am the product of a war bride. My great-grandmother’s country was one of many that the United States occupied (and still does) in the aftermath of World War 2. She saw first hand how the allies (the good guys) raped and pillaged her country in the wake of victory. I mean that literally by the way. Like, allied soldiers pulled women off the street and maybe their families saw them again and maybe they didn’t. I’m not blaming anyone. How could I? Without that kind of behavior I wouldn’t have been born. Dig back far enough into your ancestry and you discover that we’re all rape babies. Try not to moralize it. It is what it is.

Some years later her daughter, my grandmother, was seduced by an American G.I. stationed in her town (an occupying force) and impregnated out of wedlock. Was it consensual? Yes. Can you really consent to one of the men holding your country at gunpoint? Debatable. Again, who knows. They came and killed all the young men and then their own young men had their way with my grandmother. That’s the truth of it. Nobody likes to say it that way though. He did “do the right thing” and marry her before my mother was born, true. But, frankly, he was a physically violent abuser and it would’ve been better if he hadn’t. Held a gun to my mom’s head once. When she was five years old he took one of her kittens, put it in a bag, and threw it against the wall in front of her, killing it with blunt force trauma.

My mom grew up to be a good lady. I always thought though that maybe she should’ve seen a therapist.

A few years after high school one of my good friends died in a car crash. Big fellow. We’d been on the football and wrestling teams together and his father didn’t make a lot of money. Was a house painter. We hired his dad to paint our house once and he did an excellent job. Killed a groundhog in our front lawn with a 2x4 if you can believe it. Very brutal. Took it home and made a stew out of it and my friend brought it in a Tupperware bowl to one of our wrestling tournaments. Groundhog is very greasy. You’ve probably never had it. Sticks to your ribs. Great to fill up on after you’ve been cutting weight though. High in protein. Anyway, because his dad didn’t make much money my friend was trying to put himself through college by working nights and weekends. Too much. He fell asleep behind the wheel one day coming home at about two in the morning and veered into a metal light pole at an intersection. Fifty to zero in the span of about 2 feet. Internally decapitated. Dead on impact. I’ll never forget the funeral.

He was… well… my friend was a young black man from The South, a Jehovah’s Witness, and his funeral had all the stereotypical trappings of such. Big eulogies with exaggerated hand movements. Hard hitting sermons. Hymns that most white people have never heard. It was sad but tolerable until the end when his mother got up to view the casket. She couldn’t walk. She just… I dunno, her legs were Jello. She just kept falling. Crumpling under the weight of her despair. Four or five men stood all around her, holding her by the arms, dragging her forward down the aisle to the casket as she wailed these terrible, blood curdling screams. “That’s my son!” she’d shout, pointing at the corpse as her own body twisted and contorted about the waist with heaving chest. “That’s my son! Get up! Get up! Oh God! Oh God please! Son please get up!”

10 minutes of that.

10 minutes. Listening. Watching that happen.

She only stopped because she fainted. Physical exhaustion left her unable to carry on. She sort of trembled and threatened to vomit on the floor and they pulled her away out the back, head lolling, eyes rolled back in the sockets, her whole body covered in sweat. It was like seeing Jesus in The Garden of Gethsemane. She loved him so… so much.

He didn’t get up.

He stayed in that casket and, a few minutes later, they shut the lid of it, and his face never saw the light of day again. Another woman I went to church with had a baby and purposefully left it to die in a hot car in the middle of July but tried to make it look like an accident.

“Whoopsie. I forgot she was in there.”

Text messages between her and her husband were pretty incriminating though. Court ruled it was planned. Was it?

Who knows. Jury thought so.

They had a GoFundMe or something like that for the legal fees at first because nobody believed they could’ve done such a thing. Everyone thought it must’ve been a mistake.

The duality of Man.

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Some months back there was a meme going round where women would ask their husbands or boyfriends some version of the question, “Hey… how often do you think about the Roman Empire?” and laugh that the response was almost always something like, “Everyday.” Of course, I believe “Everyday” is for most an exaggeration played up for the camera but, still, it does seem to be true that a lot of men actually do spend an unusual amount of time thinking about the ancient past. Ancient Rome at least. Also Ancient Greece. I certainly do. Someone had the courage to question this the other day though because, certainly, on the surface it doesn’t make much sense why we should. There aren’t very many Ancient Persia enjoyers, or armchair hobbyists of Ancient Babylon or Mesoamerica. Why the ancient Greco-Roman world should be of such interest to us is somewhat baffling because, by almost every metric, their cultures were almost… not even opposite but, I dunno… orthogonal to ours. Very little overlap, no matter where you sit on the sociopolitical spectrum.

Like, if you’re a conservative person, idolizing the Greeks doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because they were gay. By the same token, a liberal idolizing them doesn’t make sense because they were racist. If you’re a communist well… they had slaves and a rigid aristocracy. If you’re a fascist… the ancients were decidedly democratic. They were very “pro-family” while also practicing infanticide. They believed strongly in their equivalent of “The Second Amendment”, yet prohibited arms in public places. Endless examples like this. On almost no socio-political-cultural axis would a modern person of any stripe find much common ground with the people of the Ancient World and so the tendency (frequently recurring throughout Western History), to harken back to that period as some kind of halcyon days of Man does not, on the surface, make a lot of sense.

So…

Why the obsession?

Who knows.

I can’t speak for everyone.

For me though, I think about The Roman Empire, and Greece, and the Classics because they feel human.

Human in a way that the modern world barely tolerates. Human in a way that’s maybe no longer even possible.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the modern world. All this medicine and books and absolutely zero danger of famine. It’s great. Factory farms suck but you know what, they’ve probably saved at least a billion lives from starvation so, hey, maybe cut them some slack. Industrialization, globalization, and their consequences have certainly created problems… pollution, destruction of ecosystems, erosion of traditional cultures, the erasure of languages, and so on and so forth… all that. But, on the whole, I can flip on a light switch and it works. Net positive. Thumbs up for modernity.

Still though.

When one reads a work of ancient literature, The Iliad for example, or The Aeneid, or the works of Plato or the Greek Tragedies, or even the Hebrew Bible… I don’t know it’s… I mean… the range of emotions on display in those texts… the rawness of Life they depict… it’s incredible. It’s… It’s almost like, I dunno… were these people even the same species as we are?

Men falling in love with their own mothers and stabbing their eyes out because of the shame. Warriors covered in blood, taking women as plunder yet sleeping in bed with their male “friend.” Rage so complete that you would drag the corpse of a man behind your chariot for ten days, fuming that you cannot kill him more. Women so desperate for a child that they drug their own father and rape him while he’s intoxicated. Men binding their children on pyres to sacrifice to an exacting god.

Where else do you find that kind of passion?

That kind of lust for being alive?

I mean, who among us could sustain a level of jealousy and desire for a single woman for decades, enough to cause us to murder all her male suitors, as Odysseus did, or care about our honor enough to let the departure of a single pretty face launch a thousand ships? The entire era reeks of a kind of excess of life. A Life that oversteps its bounds. An era of passion and desire so deep that you could literally rip someone’s head off for it or, alternatively, lose your own in an orgiastic embrace.

Where is that now?

Gone.

And, like I say… maybe for the best.

All the instances I listed above where, in my own life, I saw that level of emotion, that level or raw, base, animalistic passion seep through…

The modern world was quick to tap it down. Suppress it.

To say “No.”

We are, today, allergic to the full range of human emotion. We pathologize it. Manage it with meds or therapy culture or throw it in prison. We see it as dangerous, because it is. Afterall… if you love somebody… really, genuinely love somebody…

At what point would that cross over into possession?

Into an instinctual and overriding desire to keep them?

There’s a boy on my son’s soccer team who has two dads. A regular one and a step one. Every practice, the boy’s biological dad arrives early and sits on the side of the field to cheer for his son and the rest of the team and, every practice, he has to watch his wife and child arrive in the car of another man. He’s honestly a great guy. Both of them are. They appear to get on great and have made peace with the situation so the following is only an indictment of my own feelings and not upon his character but…

A part of me hates him.

The bio-dad I mean.

I hate that a part of me hates him, but, a part of me does.

It’s just the… I dunno… I sit there and think… how can you watch another man go home with your kid? With your wife?

“Do something about it.” I think to myself.

“Do something about it.”

…

Do you see?

…

…

If he won’t fight for them does that mean he doesn’t love them?

But, that’s it, isn’t it? What happens to true love if unreciprocated? What happens when those you love want to walk away?

I mean… can you imagine Achilles being served divorce papers?

And yet… no one could ever accuse Achilles of not caring.

And maybe that’s why God kills so many people in the Bible. Maybe that’s why he kills his own son. Maybe love…. real love… is to the death. Maybe God’s the kind of husband who hears his wife say “till death do us part” and determines to make an honest woman out of her after the divorce.

Maybe Love is really really scary.

Maybe we don’t want it.

Maybe that kind of passion is better left in the past, back with leprosy and starvation and locusts and drought.

Maybe.

But, it’s undeniable that, instead of that, the highest calling of a modern, “civilized” person in our society is to always be placable. Agreeable. Even-keeled. The “well adjusted” person does not lose her temper. The “enlightened” man does not hold a grudge. Maturity is taking everything as it comes and letting it go just as easily. Even people. Don’t become obsessive. Don’t become a fanatic. Don’t…

Care.

At least,

Don’t care too much.

A lot of words have been spent trying to come up with an answer for why people aren’t marrying and having children or long term relationships, or why they aren’t picking up religion, or patriotism, or what have you.

Maybe the answer is that nobody wants them to.

Maybe, as a society, we’re actually terrified of people that care?

Emotion is dangerous.

It really is.

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Growing up one of my Dad’s coworkers used to go hiking in Alaska.

Every year he’d do this. Two-week trips. Alone. Him and his dogs, two huskies. One had beautiful blue eyes.

One year, it was, oh, maybe ‘97 or so, he got lost. Two weeks came and two weeks went and nobody’d heard from him and he hadn’t returned home. Local search and rescue was dispatched. Guys on foot. Helicopters. Dogs. Nothing. He was presumed dead. Fell of a cliff maybe or been eaten by bears or simply lost his bearings and starved to death walking in circles. He turned up alive in Anchorage some weeks later though. Alone. No dogs. He’d spend the next decades of his life telling and retelling the story. I think it was cathartic for him to do so. To relive it, to process. He’d stepped off the trail to relieve himself and somehow couldn’t find it again. A more common problem, he assures you, than you might think. He and his dogs wandered for days and days looking for it, turning circles he guessed, but, probably, just drifting further and further off into the woods. The forest was scarier now that there wasn’t a well-worn path beneath his feet. Scarier and, every night in their tent he thought they could hear animals in the dark. Big animals. The dogs would growl beside him in the night or sometimes whimper. Once, he tells you, he thought he heard voices whispering behind some trees. “I’m going insane” he thought to himself. Only later did he realize that, wait… no. “I’m actually starving. What’s happening is that my brain is starting to shut down because I’m beginning to starve to death.”

He ate his dogs.

No choice except of course there always is. Killed them. Took the little hatchet he had in his kit and cracked one’s skull open, then the other. He’d tell you that he loved those dogs. That they were his best friends and that, ever since, he’s made it a point to adopt shelter animals as a kind of repentance for his choice to stay alive. “I couldn’t choose between them,” he says as he tells you the story. “And… I couldn’t look the one in the eye after I’d just killed its brother.”

Anthropomorphizing here maybe. I don’t know how dogs process trauma. Maybe the one would’ve been okay and forgiven him.

I always remember how the story ended. He’d smirk a little and raise a finger and point it at you in a kind of cocky way. “And don’t kid yourself, they tasted good.”

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Maybe that’s what we have to do. Forgive ourselves for our barbarism. The message of The Iliad is that such things are always with us, like gods, like immortal spirits. Rage. Jealousy. Resentment. Spite. Brutality. Lust. Hunger. Banishing them is impossible and yet, every decade, every War, Humanity forgets this and wonders again at itself, flabbergasted about how it can be so cruel. We like to think we’re only our better angels but we’re not. We’re our worser angels too and when we express those, when, as must inevitably happen, those immortal spirits come forth…

We will find pleasure in them.

“Don’t kid yourself. They tasted good.”

Normie Sadism.

And maybe that’s what you have to forgive. Come to terms with. Maybe that’s what you have to make peace with even though you know you will always be at war with it.

Maybe that’s what God forgave on the cross.

…

…

Thus they buried Hector. Breaker of horses.