The Sunday Poem

The White House war memes reveal the dishonor and degradation of this administration

We’re in it now.

The war that President Donald Trump launched by himself (at the instigation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman) is now in its third week, and Trump is flailing, desperate for a way out.

His public statements careen from triumphalism to petulance, from ominous threats to desperate pleading. We are led by a man in over his head.

Trump’s political superpower is his ability to transform falsehood and flimflam into reality for tens of millions of Americans simply by declaring it with a con-man’s relentless patter and a blowhard’s decibel level. From his lies about Barack Obama’s birth, to his attacks on the 2020 election, to his happy talk about the middling economy over which he presides—Trump plays the tune, and MAGA dances.

But war is different. You can’t BS your way out of a war. The immense energies—kinetic, psychological, spiritual—that are released in every war are unpredictable, and they will often run courses that were unimagined by the belligerents. And, always—the enemy gets a say.

This is why character is so critical in war.

War is not merely a military event. It is a moral environment, and the most dangerous one human beings ever enter, because it removes almost every ordinary constraint on the worst things we are capable of. Precisely because it removes those constraints, character in our political leadership—and in every citizen’s soul—is a kind of lifeline that tethers us, amid all the fury and killing, to those “better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln put it, at the moment our nation was descending into the worst war of our history.

Morality thins on the battlefield, sometimes dissipates altogether. Law seems very remote, and combat can render conscience mute. Only character counts, and it must do so from the inside, without prompting, in the dark, under pressure, when everything in the immediate situation argues for expedience and brutality.

There is an ancient tradition—from the Greeks, through the “Just War” theologians of the Middle Ages, through the modern laws of armed conflict—that has always insisted that war requires better men in command, not merely competent ones. The stakes of character failure in peacetime are limited. In war they are not.

This is why the Trump White House’s relentless “meme-ification” of this war is so stupid, degraded, dishonorable, and ultimately counter-productive. It treats the Iranian dead as “ungrievable,” a concept developed by the philosopher Judith Butler, during the Iraq War:

"One way of posing the question of who ‘we’ are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable,” Butler writes. “We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives…”

I've seen some of war (Nicaragua, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Central African Republic, Ukraine). I’ve seen men killed. It's shocking. It doesn't make you giggle, like the idiots at the White House are giggling as they craft their silly little social media posts. It takes your breath away every time, the instantaneous transition from whole person to torn flesh, from man to meat.

Homer understood all of this.

Three thousand years ago, the poet who told the story of the Trojan War refused to let a single death be anonymous or meaningless. Every man who falls in the Iliad falls with his name, his father's name, the river of his home, the life he will not now return to—all commemorated in the scene. Homer stops the story of the battle to tell you this, to give you the tree beside the river, the father who would not be repaid. The poem is, among many other things, a sustained act of moral instruction in what it costs to kill: the specific, irreplaceable, cosmic cost of one particular human life extinguished before its time.

Honor. Honor the dead. This is great vocation of all true warriors. And of every true citizen in time of war.

So to Homer for this week’s poem, from Book 24 of the Iliad, the last pages of the epic.

A little context: Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greeks, enraged at the killing of his close friend Patroclus, kills Hector, the Trojan hero and the last surviving son of old Priam, the King of Troy.

That night, wrecked with grief, Priam walks out alone across the battlefield, into the camp of the Greeks (also called the “Achaeans”) to beg Achilles for the return of the body of his son.

This is a long passage, but every word of it rings with honor, the honor we need to hold on to in this war, under this president and his minions.

The translation is by Caroline Alexander.

—Terry

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From “The Iliad,” Book 24

Homer

                             The old man went straight toward the quarters, 
where Achilles, beloved of Zeus would always sit, and found him
inside; his companions were sitting apart; two alone, 
the warrior Automedon and Alkimos, companion of Ares,
were busy by him. He had just finished his meal, 
eating and drinking, and the table still lay beside him.
Unseen by these men great Priam entered, then standing close
with his arms he clasped Achilles' knees and kissed
the terrible man-slaughtering hands, which had killed his many sons.
As when madness closes tight upon a man who after killing someone
in his own land, arrives in the country of others,
at a rich man's house, and wonder grips those looking on,
so Achilles looked in wonder at godlike Priam,
and the others in wonder, too, looked each toward the other.

And in supplication Priam addressed him:
"Remember your father, godlike Achilles,
The same age as I, on the ruinous threshold of old age.
And perhaps those who dwell around surround him and
bear hard upon him, nor is there anyone to ward off harm and destruction.
Yet surely when he hears you are living
he rejoices in his heart and hopes for all his days
to see his beloved son returning from Troy.
But I am fated utterly, since I sired the best sons
in broad Troy, but I say not one of them is left...
He alone who was left to me, he alone protected our city and those inside it,
him it was you lately killed as he fought to defend his
country,
Hector. And for his sake I come now to the ships of the Achaeans
to win his release from you, and I bear an untold ransom.
Revere the gods, Achilles, and have pity upon me,
remembering your father; for I am yet more pitiful,
and have endured such things as no other mortal man upon the earth,
drawing to my lips the hand of the man who killed my son."

So he spoke; and he stirred in the other a yearning to weep for his own father,
and taking hold of his hand, he gently pushed the old man away.
And the two remembered, the one weeping without cessation for
man-slaughtering Hector as he lay curled before Achilles' feet,
and Achilles wept for his own father, and then again for
Patroclus; and the sound of their lament was raised throughout the hall.

But when godlike Achilles had taken his fill of lamentation
and the yearning had gone from his breast and very limbs,
he rose suddenly from his seat, and raised the old man by the hand,
pitying his gray head and gray beard,
and lifting his voice he addressed him with winged word:

"Poor soul, surely you have endured much evil in your heart.
How did you dare go to the Achaean ships alone,
into the sight of the man who killed your many and your noble
sons? Your heart is iron.
But come and seat yourself upon the chair, and let us leave these sorrows
lying undisturbed within our hearts, grieving though we are;
for there is no profit in grief that numbs the heart.
For thus have the gods spun the thread of destiny for wretched mortals,
that we live in sorrow; and they themselves are free from care."

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