Thete of Being

Every so often, we'll be trundling down the street, whistling a happy tune, and someone will stop us to ask, "Perfess'r Harris — you know so damn much — why is it that poor people are so screwed?" And we'll stop, scratch our rapidly balding head, and reply, "Well, to answer that we'll have to go all the way back to Homer."

Americas dirty little secret is that most poor people, including those who don't have a place to live, work for a living. They just don't make enough money to stop being poor. Full time work at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour simply does not go very far. Here in the Great State of Washington, a workers paradise if ever there was, the minimum wage is set at a whopping $6.72. At that rate, the lucky worker takes home just over a thousand bucks a month to wisely invest in whatever manner he or she likes.

Should a full-time worker need food stamps, a public subsidy, to feed their family? Our Congress, which voted down the last minimum wage increase proposal, would evidently reply, "yes."

In Homer's time, poor people were just as screwed. The Greek word was thete, which meant to be a serf or a menial or to work for hire. In ancient Greece, to be a lowly wage earner was in some cases worse than being a slave. At least a slave belonged to a community and could not be killed outright. The wage earner had no such protection. There was no Department of Labor and Industries.

The word "thete" occurs just three times in all of Homer. Let's review, shall we?

In the Iliad, Apollo and Poseidon reminisce over the days of their youth, when they were exiled from Olympus by Zeus to go work for King Laomedon. Poseidon built the walls of Troy and Apollo herded his cattle. At the end of the year, when it came time to be paid, the King refused and threatened to cut off their ears or sell them into slavery if they pressed the issue. Years later, they remained bitter. Were Laomedon now living in Wyoming, where the state minimum wage for agricultural workers is just $1.60 an hour, he could easily afford to pay them both and avoid any lingering grudges. But he probably wouldn't. Kings are like that.

The promise of low-wage work is used in the Odyssey by Eurymachos, one of the ill-mannered suitors who plague poor Penelope, to taunt a jobless beggar. When a disguised Odysseus replies by challenging Eurymachos to an old-fashioned grain-reaping contest, the suitor hurls a stool at his head. Later, during the climactic killing spree of Book Twenty-two, we are thrilled when Eurymachos is one of the first to die.

Our own favorite occurrence of the word is when Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld. Our wily hero remarks that Achilles, being the above average sort that he is, must be running the place by now. "Don't get me started," Achilles more or less replies.

Then, by the Fagles translation, poor Achilles says "By God, I'd rather slave on earth for another man, some dirt poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive, than rule down here over all the breathless dead." The absolute worst fate Achilles can think of, outside of being dead, is to be a wage slave in somewhere like Wyoming.

So there we have it. Poor people are screwed because they don't make the rules by which they are forced to live. This is why so many of us, like Achilles, would do almost anything to avoid this fate. Unfortunately, not all of us have the option.

Sex, Revolution, and Lysistrata

Ever since we watched Lysistrata, one of the more erotic classics available on video, we at Classics Corner have been preoccupied with the idea of sex, revolution, and smashing capitalism, and we owe it all to the Seattle Public Library.

Should you want to see, oh, say, Tom Cruise in Magnolia, there are 85 holds on the library's 21 copies. The wait is two weeks to a month. But tonight, the SPL's single Greek language production of Lysistrata is ready whenever you are. Obscurity has its rewards.

Lysistrata is one of the three surviving plays by Aristophanes to plead for an end to the devastating war between Athens and Sparta. Unlike the other two, this play was produced at a time when Athens was militarily and economically on the ropes. By 411, no peace was possible without capitulation. Yet Aristophanes produced a drama in which the women of Athens and Sparta end the bloodshed and untangle the animosities driving the war, just as they would a knotted mess of yarn.

The basic plot is that the women swear a pact to withhold sex until the men agree to a lasting peace. The men, who have all become big and tense, eventually come around to their point of view.

There is much to love about this play, not the least of which is that the women embody common sense and resolution in the face of folly and arrogance, and that their revolution is both playful and serious. Their protest is an eruption of life and love in opposition to the everyday work of death and commerce.

"For myself," says the Chorus of Women, "I will never weary of the dance; my knees will never grow stiff with fatigue. I will brave everything with my dear allies, on whom Nature has lavished virtue, grace, boldness, cleverness, and whose wisely directed energy is going to save the State."

Speaking of life opposed to death and commerce, Seattle's Little Scab Newspaper recently compared our WTO anniversary demonstrations to Mardi Gras. The "reporter" went on to spend a good many paragraphs discussing the improbable fact of bare breasted Lesbian Avengers in late-November.

Sadly, we at Classics Corner were not personally in attendance. Opposing international capitalism that day took a back seat to our fundraising mailing, which also held a certain charm.

Yet we remember our youth, when we too had energy and ambition to smash the state full-time. In those days, certain professors made us read Marxist-Freudian philosophy at gunpoint as part of our indoctrination to the liberal democratic tradition.

Happily, this included Eros and Civilization, by Herbert Marcuse, the most radical philosopher we'll never really understand. According to Herb, meaningless work, deadened sexuality, commercialized entertainment, and other unfortunate aspects of civilization will always contend with an irrepressible life force that refuses to be contained.

We wonder whether the sweater-challenged Lesbian Avengers might offer the same advice as Aristophanes' Chorus of Women: "Be ever like a bundle of nettles; never let your anger slacken; the winds of fortune blow our way."

Democracy Goes Out With A Wimper

As GW Bush is named 43rd President of the United States, it would appear that democracy is in some trouble.

We don't much care that he lost the popular vote. If the Electoral College was good enough for Imperial Rome, it's good enough for America.

Nor are we concerned that Governor Jeb, who happens to be the son of an ex-CIA chief, delivered Florida for his brother. It's nice to know folks can still depend on family when the going gets tough.

No, it's worse than that. What's got our knickers in a knot is that we can't seem to remember the day before yesterday, and are thereby doomed to repeat. Doomed to repeat. That's how history is.

The title for World's Longest Running Democracy, of course, goes to Athens, which threw in the towel after a mere 280 years. This has the normally optimistic staff of Classics Corner wondering whether we perhaps might be due.

When democracy collapsed in Greece, no one really much noticed. It was unspectacular. The wealthy just became more and more central, until one day, well, they were back in charge. Of course, the rituals of democracy persisted in a most reassuring manner. Citizens continued to gather and vote, officials were elected, and democracy was celebrated long after it had in fact ceased to exist.

The rise and fall of Athenian democracy is story that begs to be told.

As ordinary people in the ancient world accumulated wealth, the wellborn began to lose control. The first challenges came from fellow aristocrats, who found that power over their peers could be had by playing to the people. These proto-Perot's were some of early antiquity's more enlightened rulers, and beginning about 700 BC, opened the road to democracy. By around 550, the people had gained enough power to approximate the real thing.

By the Fifth Century, all of Athens' free male citizens had a direct vote in the affairs of government, and they seemed to like it. Of course, all this rabid democracy rested upon empire and slavery, but that's another story for another day.

Just when things were going well, the Peloponnesian war broke out, and democrats and oligarchs did their best to do each other in for more than 28 years. Through a series of stupid but democratic decisions, Athens lost. There were several bloody attempts to restore oligarchy, but the people prevailed and democracy was restored.
Alexander the Great, who conquered most of the ancient world, was a big fan of formal democracy, but the real thing soon vanished.

When democracy worked, a balance of power had been maintained by soaking the rich to support the arts and the military. After Alexander, this became voluntary. The kings, posing as democrats, bolstered the power of the rich. The wealthy gained in power, and deployed their assets to suit their own interests. Before long, only the wealthy held major political office. Average people could still speak, but money talked much louder.

Yet, they still called it democracy. They always will.

The Great Bushippias/Agoreaborus Debate

After watching all three Presidential debates and most of the painfully shallow post debate commentary, we at Classics Corner have just one question: What the hell was that? BORING! And that's coming from a guy who reads Thucydides for fun.

Let's face it. Focus groups can't script a debate for shit. We want reality. It’s obvious these guys hate each other, so let's see some eye gouging. They're both assholes, and they should have the courage to say so.

We say if the debates are going to be scripted, let’s have them composed by Aristophanes, the profane comic playwright of 5th century Athens. If they were, they'd go something like this:

Bushippias: Should the people elect me, I will abolish taxes, reinstate slavery, and declare April 15th to be "Government is Very Very Bad Day."

Agoreaborus: Should the people elect me, I'll surgically attach a computer to every middle-class kid in America, and I'll build enough prisons to house the others. This will grow the economy by creating another 40,000 good paying guard jobs by the year 2004.

Bushippias: Fuzzy Math! Fuzzy Math!

Agoreaborus: Blow it out your ass, Monkeyboy!

Bushippias: At least I have one.

Agoreaborus: I can see you do, and the money you got from Big Oil is hanging out of your hole.

Bushippias: Did someone fart?

Demos: Tweedledee and Tweedledum. We go ho and we go hum. We yawn and then we scratch our bum. We pat our heads and chew our gum. We love TV and we are dumb.

Bushippias: I believe the death penalty is a deterrent, so once a year I'll use my cheap hand gun to shoot a random Washington Insider.

Agoreaborus: I like the death penalty even more, but I believe in gun control and a clean environment, so twice a year I'll personally garrote a Litterbug with piano wire.

Bushippias: As a Compassionate Conservative, I'll see that all Homeless People get turkey dinner on Thanksgiving.

Agoreaborus: Well, here's another area where there's a big difference between us. I'd empower them to work for their dinners, and teach them twentieth century skills, like biotechnology and aerospace engineering.

Third Party Candidate (offstage): Both of you are so far up the ass of Corporate America I can barely see your ankles. I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down.

Bushippias: Did you hear anything?

Agoreaborus: Uh-uh, not a thing.

Chorus: How many words will fall from their mouths, before they say something real. Yes and how many times will we believe lies, like a clubbed and dazed baby seal? The answer, my friend, is it will never end, unless there is campaign finance reform. It doesn't even rhyme, and it will take some time. But what we need is campaign finance reform.

Slade Gorton Has No Soul: The Socratic Proof

We at Classics Corner do not know everything. We are human, and have most of the same limitations as other mortals. Sadly, our lack of absolute knowledge sometimes extends into the political realm, where tough choices must be made based upon imperfect evidence.

For example, our wife recently told us to vote Cantwell, despite our preferences for Senn, because Cantwell could beat Gorton and Gorton must be defeated. "Slade Gorton is pure evil," she said.

We wondered whether this was possible. We became obsessed by the ratio of Gorton's goodness to evil. We were beyond politics and into pure metaphysics. The real question, we decided, is essentially this: Does Slade Gorton have a soul? Naturally, we turned to Plato for our answer.

Many of us have been forced to read The Phaedo at some point or another in our wretched lives, and may remember it as the dialogue in which Socrates offers three proofs for the existence of the soul before serenely sipping his post-prandial hemlock and finally shutting up.

We at Classics Corner thought it might be illuminating to apply these general proofs to the particular case of Slade Gorton.

Our first proof is the Heraclitean doctrine of opposites. Heraclitus, one of the first philosophers to appear in Greece, said the world is change and is based upon opposing tensions. Day turns into night, sleep into wakefulness, life into death, and so forth, in continuous cycles. This insight was extended substantially by Hegel and transformed into the basis for communism by Marx, so it would be very ironic if we proved the existence of Gorton's soul through the logic of communism. We at Classics Corner love irony, so we'll chalk one up for Slade's soul.

The next proof offered by Socrates is the doctrine of reminiscence. The notion is that we understand ideal concepts even though we've never actually seen one; therefore, we must have experienced the ideal prior to our births. Ironically, the example Socrates offers is equality.

We went to the candidate's website, at www.slade2000.com, and the Dump Slade 2000 site at www.whopaidslade.org, and found little to no evidence that Slade Gorton understands the principle of equality, whether approximate or absolute. We are sorry to report that the doctrine of reminiscence, in the case of Slade, offers insubstantial proof.

The third, last, and lamest proof is that of constancy. Socrates argues that if the soul embodies ideal qualities, then those qualities are not subject to change and must be eternal. But constancy does not seem to be Slade's strong point. His campaign website, for example, says we "need to support our natural resources as a precious gift." Yet the League of Conservation voters says Gorton only voted the right way on the environment 11% of the time last year. His score the previous year was 0%.

This lack of constancy does not make a good case for the existence of Slade's soul.

So there we have it. We at Classics Corner, despite our best efforts, remain perplexed. Does Slade Gorton have a soul? We still don't know. You'll have to decide for yourselves.

Socrates Hates Democracy

Looking back over the last 100 issues of Real Change, it occurs to us that we may not be loved by all. This makes us sad, because despite all our tough activist posturing, we are still desperate for approval.

But facts are facts, and facts must be faced. Not everyone thinks the words “homeless” and “empowerment” belong together in the same phrase. There are those who believe the homeless should simply become the non-homeless, and barring that, should just shut up and stop bothering the rest of us.

Socrates would probably have been among them.

We at Classics Corner have always found the Socrates/Christ conflation quite unfortunate, since their opinions regarding the poor couldn’t have been more different. For those unfamiliar with their respective philosophies, we’ll clarify: Christ loved the poor, and said so regularly. Christians still occasionally recognize this odd quirk of his, but more often than not prefer to do so in the abstract.

Socrates, on the other hand, was an elitist — ‘scuse our French — sum’mobitch, and despite the fact that the world around him had gone rabidly democratic, still believed in the rule of kings. Let’s be clear. Aristocracy, for Socrates, was too democratic. Rule by the people, he thought, was dangerous, wrong, and just plain dumb.

Socrates would have found the opinions expressed in Real Change annoying at best.
The issue of democracy, for Socrates, revolved around the idea of whether virtue could be taught. He didn’t think so. People had virtue or they did not, and generally speaking, the better one’s breeding, the more virtuous one was. He therefore despised the sophists, or wisdom teachers, of the time, who were busy teaching the rising Greek middle class how to effectively reason, debate, and get their way in the public assembly, which he also despised.

This is why the Protagoras is our favorite Platonic dialogue. Protagoras was a famous sophist, and he and Socrates clash over this very question. Oddly, Socrates loses.
Protagoras relays a lovely creation myth in which Epimethus, the god who peopled the world, makes all the animals first and forgets to save any of the good stuff for us.

Prometheus, to his later peril, tries to save our pathetic asses by stealing art from Athena and fire from Hephaestus. This helps, but it’s not enough. When we try to live in communities, we just fight and kill and make a mess of things in general.
Zeus brilliantly sends in Hermes to give us mutual respect and a sense of justice.

The messenger asks who he should give these talents, and Zeus says “to all.” Protagoras’ point is that democracy works because we all have the potential to participate.

Socrates gets all pissy and diverts the conversation to hairsplitting word games until everyone, including the reader of the dialogue, just has a big headache. But Protagoras’ argument stands unchallenged: There is something about the democratic process that makes us complete. We are born to it. All of us.

So what’s our point? Love us or not, Real Change is here to stay. Join us next time, when we ask, “Does Slade Gorton have a soul?”

Sappho Junction, Washington

“I think that someone will remember us in another time.”

—Sappho of Lesbos, circa 600 BC

It’s sad but true. When we read Sappho, the Lesbian poet of seventh century BC, we find fewer poems than pieces. They are mostly teasing little bits, like “Eros arrived from heaven wrapped in a purple mantle,” or “with what eyes?” It’s not a lot to go on.

We know that Sappho was born in about 630 to an aristocratic family, was orphaned at six, had a daughter named Kleis, and died in around 570. She is said to have been short, dark, and ugly. While her woman-centered poetry was widely known, very little survived the Dark Age.

But the poet’s memory happily lives on at Sappho Junction, a little town in the Olympic Peninsula at the intersection of U.S. 101 and Highway 113.

Here, behind the Texaco, stands one of the more unlikely literary monuments in Washington State: a chainsaw sculpture of a toga-clad, dark-skinned woman with pouty lips and big wide eyes.

“I needed something for the tourists,” admits Texaco owner Sam Gaydeski. “I could have had a fish or a bear or something, but Sappho being Sappho, I had her carved instead.”

Sappho, population 13, could have been the shipping center of the upper Quillayute valley, or so hoped town founder Martin Van Buren Lamoreaux, who moved there in 1889. After Seattle’s Great Fire, Lamoreaux decided his land near Lake Union was a bust and took a chance on the middle of nowhere.

Lamoreaux, his wife, and their eleven kids took a steamship to the Pysht Indian Village on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, hiked through 20 miles of wilderness, and homesteaded their claim. In Lamoreaux’s town, each member of his family had a good job: postmaster, hotel owner, general grocer, hospital administrator, and so forth.

According to several sources, Lamoreaux named the town Sappho because he felt Sappho’s poetry, with its “intense but controlled emotion expressed in everyday, down to earth language,” struck a nice tone for building a life in the Olympics.

The town founder was jailhouse lawyer as well as an amateur classics scholar. Locals called him “The Judge.” Despite his lack of a law degree, he became Justice of the Peace.

Lamoreaux died in 1901. His family gave it up and split for Vashon in 1909.

Yet Sappho persisted. It was a timber town of sorts, and hosted a logging camp from the 30s forward. By the early 70s, the advent of the logging truck rendered the railway, and the town of Sappho, more or less obsolete. That’s when the post office and the town tavern closed down for good.

Now Sappho is Sam’s Texaco, a junk shop about a mile down the road run by a guy named Biff, and a nice old couple who raise Australian Sheepdogs. “It’s not much of a town really,” says Sam. “Just a big old name on the map.”

But what a name. On any map of the Olympic Peninsula, you’ll find Sappho, just a big as Forks, or even Port Angeles. There isn’t much left, but we at Classics Corner are happy she’s there.