Wayward Landlubber

Those of us who admire the Democratic process and proclaim it's strengths, even though it's greatness has become something of an irony of late, have arrived at an inflection point. It's not working out. To be fair, it has often not worked out, at least for those of us citizens not on an inside track. The eponymous CRT would be just one example. But we could always say before, that we were improving, we were reaching for what was beyond our grasp. Sometimes we were able to hold on to that thing that was just out of reach, but our grasp was not quite solid enough to hold on firmly..      I'm an admirer of philosophy. The act of philosphyzing, not necessarily the philosophers. It is the only option for those of us untutored in philosophy. Had I been born a century earlier, I'd be one of the old men around the pot-bellied stove at the hardware store, solving the various problems to come before our discussion group. Naturally, the Greek philosophers, though we know them ...

     Literary history gave us the story of Casandra, daughter to King Prium of Troy. Most people know that she had the gift of seeing into the future. What few of us know is that, because she had rebuffed the attention of a young God, Apollo I think, her gift was never to be believed by others, though she could never decieve people with her predictions.  Consequently, when she warned her famous father, to, "beware of Greeks bearing gifts" he ignored her warning and accepted a Trojan Horse from the army of Greek islanders mobilized to recapture Helen, her brother Paris' wife and return her to King Meneleis harem. Women's independence was not valued in the thirteenth century BCE, so we can only speculate that Helen fled the Island of Sparta, and Menaleus harem willingly, preferring the handsome Paris, who had offered her a home in Ilium, to the attentions of a warrior king and a place in his harem. There is more to this story of her short life, but I will save that for...