Where It's Always 1895

What’s Happening

Over the weekend, the Pentagon released a new list of religious identities military members could select from. It’s a shorter list than the old one eliminating about 180 religions and leaving just 31, 22 of which are prefaced as Christian. 

Some of the groups removed were quite esoteric and New Age in a way that feels much more rooted in the 1970s than today. Sec. Hegseth’s main justification for the change is the list had simply grown too long and was unwieldy. You’d think someone at the Pentagon could run a pivot table to group people whatever way they need, but it’s at least comprehensible why Asatru paganism didn’t make the cut. (How cool that it was ever an option, though!)

Less comprehensible? You can still select agnosticism as an option, but atheism and humanism no longer make the cut. Neither did Universal-Unitarianism. Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism are all single categories (there’s a lot of theological and cultural ground covered there!), and as I said there are 22 branches of Christianity listed separately. Some are quite specific.

The one that’s really attracting attention, though, is the Church of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). 

What Vox Said

Gone were “atheist” and “Wicca” from the new list — and though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was included as a religion, it was not labeled “Christian.”

That set off an explosive reaction from Mormon elected officials, including some normally aligned with the administration. To them, the government seemed to be saying that Mormons are not Christians — a highly offensive statement for LDS Church members, who see Jesus Christ as the center of their faith.

“I can say confidently that the U.S. government has no business recognizing the Christianity of literally every other religious sect that worships Jesus Christ — with one exception,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) posted on X, one of many complaints he raised over multiple days.

On Monday, the Pentagon said the move was unintentional — and amended the original document that blew open this controversy. “The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks,” an official statement read. Lee said he was “thrilled” with Trump’s response after he discussed the issue with the president in a phone call.

What it Means

Vox also has a good history of the fight to include (or exclude) LDS from the Christian umbrella. Do read the whole thing. It’s quite good.

This question of whether LDS are a Christian denomination is an interesting one, at least academically, because it gets at how we define religions. At least with western, Abrahamic religions, there’s often a natural dividing point when you add a new testament to the religious canon, which Mormons certainly did. So it’s not unreasonable to consider them a separate religion in a way Baptists and Catholics aren’t. With Catholicism the question’s more complicated because Catholics and Protestants disagree over whether  the Apocrypha are rightly part of the Christian Bible, but this seems like a different kind of cleavage point than accepting an entirely new revelation. 

There are also some important theological differences; most notably, while Mormons recognize Christ’s divinity, they deny the trinitarian nature of God and view God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as distinct beings. I’ll spare you the full theology rigamarole. But at a factual, analytical level, people treating LDS as a separate religion aren’t entirely out in left-field.

Of course that’s not the only thing worth talking about here, because the DoD staff that drew up this list aren’t academics studying the nature of religiosity in modern-day America. They’re trying to run a military, and – being as charitable as we can toward them – they want to make sure the chaplain corps is equipped to support everyone serving. They may also want to know what religions particular military-members are, for everything from dietary requirements to death rituals. Knowing how many soldiers, marines, airmen, etc. are Mormon matters; deciding whether the LDS is a Christian denomination, much less-so.

So why did the Pentagon group preface all those other groups as Christian and exclude LDS? With this crew it could just be basic incompetence. The sheer number of Christian groups may not be an intentional effort to puff up Protestant Christianity’s importance, but just the effects of committee-thinking. Even that would be concerning, because if the military can’t even little things like this right, how are we supposed to trust them with Iran? At a minimum it does reveal the kind of religious diversity the people drawing up that list thought were important, and what kind of variety we didn’t really need to measure.

The DoD’s since issued a revised list. Aside from “Christian (Non-Denominational),” the other Christian groups are just listed by their denomination’s name and alphabetized with the non-Christian groups. Good call. Though, again, it makes you wonder why they didn’t catch this might be  problem before they released the first list.

The bigger question, though, is why it matters to LDS that people think of them as Christians, or to so many evangelical Christians especially that we exclude them. This was never about good theology, like I said. It’s almost like there’s social and political capital in being able to claim the C-word - and that truth should be as concerning as it is obvious.

Related News

Military.com: “DOD Officially Drops 180 Faiths From Military's Recognized Religion List” (PF)

Slacktivist: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for Pete Hegseth tells me so”

The Amazing Times: “Every faith the Pentagon just dropped from its recognized religions list”

Mark Hertling, The Bulwark: “Pete Hegseth Said Military Chaplains Are ‘Degraded.’ He’s Wrong.”

In lieu of a musical break

Okay, just a little of that theological rigamarole. The fun version, though, I hope.

More News about Religion

The Pillar: "In the clubhouse with Christ — the ministry of MLB chaplains"

New York Times: “One Is the Pope, the Other an Atheist. They Both Oppose Trump.” (PF)

ARC Magazine: “How Christian Should America Be?” (PF)

Reason: “The Pentagon's New War - Canceling American Religion and American History” (PF)

Forward: “I’m an Orthodox student in NYC. I’m grateful Mamdani vetoed the school buffer bill” (PF)

Salon: “Right-wing Christians want to exclude people like me — I’d rather reach out” (PF)

Foreign Policy: “On AI, It’s the Pope vs. Trump” (PF)

Vox: “Why everyone is talking about the Antichrist” (PF)

Religion News: “Why the pope’s authority is confounding and maddening for Trump” (PF)

Slate: “The Catholic Church Fired an In-House Exorcist for Saying UFOs Are Actually Demons. I Can Explain.” (PF)

& more news about the US military

Charlie Sykes: "Hegseth's D-Day Disgrace”

Mark Hertling, The Bulwark: "The Military Meritocracy Is Under Attack"

Patrick Granfield, The Bulwark: "Hegseth’s War on the Press Is a War on the Pentagon’s Credibility"

Fortune: “Data centers could help determine who wins the next war, and a shortage of compute would be ‘catastrophic,’ retired general says” (PF)

The Conversation: “Why the US military is stuck using $1 million missiles against Iran’s $20,000 drones” (PF)

Anxious Bench: “Just War, Non-Violence, and Pete Hegseth” (PF)

Reason: “The Draft Is Unpopular. Registration Becomes Automatic in December Anyway.” (PF)

Stat News: “How the military may be fueling eating disorders in men” (PF)

The New York Review of Books: “Siphoning Morale” (PF) (on the attacks on the military paper Stars and Stripes)

JSTOR: “The Civil War Fight over Underage Soldiers” (PF)

What’s Happening

Every few years some research group releases a study examining the political leanings of America’s professoriate. The libertarian news-site Reason recently highlighted a study from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE; previously ___ in Education) that found – quelle surprise! – that American universities are even more of an anti-conservative cesspool than it’s been for years.

I wanted to be fair, so I read their mission and history. Harvey Silvergate’s and David French’s names were both familiar to me as smart men but with a definite libertarian ideological bent, and if you need more convincing this study might have a bias problem, just keep in mind their group is founded around the idea that freedom of speech on college campuses is the issue they wanted to organize their activism around. They’re convinced it’s a problem heading in.

The specific conclusions they drew, though, are still interesting, though I think they say more about Americans generally than they do about modern academia. 

What the Study Found

As described in The Reason article:

“The study scored academics' political ideologies based on the voting records of the candidates to which they donated. It found that academics are increasingly donating to far-left politicians like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”

“That most university professors prefer left-wing politicians is no new insight—but the near-disappearance of any right-wing counterweight is. The study found that among the donor sample, the interquartile range of opinions—a measure of how much the most moderate 50 percent's views vary—"has essentially shrunk to nothing over time.””

“An analysis of Yale faculty members' political alignment made headlines some months ago when it uncovered that 27 of the 47 undergraduate departments (including American studies and English) didn't have a single registered Republican on faculty. It also found that Yale's history, economics, philosophy, political science, and law faculties included just one Republican each.”

“An exploratory report on "curriculum degradation" at the University of Chicago, for instance, found that since 2012, courses whose titles or descriptions contained a "progressive signal," such as "racism," "equity," or "implicit bias," rose from 12.7 percent of the catalog to 28.3 percent. Meanwhile, the share of those with a "Western canon signal," which includes the Enlightenment and "classical literature," fell slightly from 13.2 percent to 11.9 percent.”

What This Means

Let’s take this one point at a time.

(1) Professors who donate politically tend to donate to politicians like AOC and Bernie. But when’s the last time you’ve donated to a political moderate, as an individual and particularly as a liberal or progressive. Firebrands attract viral attention and pull in donations from all over. More moderate folks just don’t donate as much to politicians, and if they do they’ll do it through the party.

(2) Republicans have all but disappeared from college departments, especially at elite schools. This is not the big flex the authors seem to think. University faculty tend to be pretty sticky, and people who once self-identified as Republicans are probably still there, and probably still relatively consistent in their ideology. But smart, thoughtful people spending a lot of time reading and thinking aren’t comfortable owning what the label “Republican” or even “conservative” means these days. It’s the label that’s shifted, not the faculty.

(3) Course descriptions at elite schools are more likely to use “progressive coded” words, and less likely to tag the historical period they’re based in. Reason thinks this means the courses have gone woke. Maybe; but more likely, based on the trends I saw developing when I left academia (I was a philosophy Ph.D. student and left at the ABD stage in 2014), it’s got at least as much to do with adjuncts needing to fill up a class so it wasn’t cancelled and they lost their check. That was much easier to do if a course seemed topical or relevant to what students already cared about, than if it was marketed as about a certain historical period.

The deeper truth lurking behind the details, I think, isn’t that professors are Antifa or Marxist or anything along those lines; it’s that they’re both high-information and idealistic in the most literal sense. They care about the ideas they study, and they believe in the value of people really consider ideas outside what’s common in the world they’re born into. Of course political pragmatism and moderation operate differently in that space. And even if they don’t think universal healthcare (say) would work, they still see the value in questioning the old paradigms and think through why people find that idea alluring.

The real trick is to still have enough restraint that you can introduce a student to an idea without browbeating them into accepting it. There’s a pedagogical art involved, and some professors and instructors do it better than others. I always told my classes they never had to agree with anyone we studied; they just had to be able to explain why not.

A lot of FIRE’s and Reason’s ideals seem like good ones. I wish I’d had more professors who’d taught the giants of conservatism’s intellectual history. It can be hard sometimes to balance students’ need to feel safe with being challenged, and ideas as intellectual abstractions versus lived realities. At a minimum students should be given space to defend whatever ideas they find convincing. (Professors, too, in the realm of academic research.) And at the risk of descending into snark, having a political conservatism that was intellectually defensible or even cared to be wouldn’t be a bad start, either.

The real problem is with the solution Reason proposes. The Trumpian criticism of universities as biassed is warranted, and public outrage is well-placed, to hear the authors tell it; and the best solution is “strict institutional neutrality positions” (basically, academics as groups should just shut up about controversial and especially political issues) and some sort of DEI for conservative academics. There’s room for improvement, as there always is, but also much better ways to do it than that.

Related Stories

The Fulcrum: “This Year Colleges Raced to Embrace Viewpoint Diversity. That’s a Mistake” (PF)

Reason: “Are Historians Really Apolitical?”

Musical Break

More News about Higher Education

The Atlantic: “Commencement Speeches Are Supposed to Be Boring” (PF)

L.A. Times: “Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM applicants” (PF)

The Conversation: “Trump administration’s lawsuits against Harvard and UCLA have roots in a decades-old fight over civil rights law” (PF)

The Atlantic: “Why College Students Are Booing AI” (PF)

ARC Magazine: “The Quiet Surge of Alternative Micro-Colleges” (PF)

The Atlantic: “Harvard Needs a Cap on A Grades”

The Fulcrum: “Democrats and Republicans Express Bipartisan Concern Regarding Loan Caps for Graduate Nursing Degrees” (PF)

Slate: “The Best Place for a College Student to Truly Learn” (PF)  (Their answer: prison.)

The New Yorker: “Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans” (PF)

The Atlantic: “College Should Be Way More Fun” (PF)

& more news of the K-12 Variety

The New Yorker: “What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?” (PF)

The Atlantic: “The Broken Promises of Ed Tech” (PF)

Salon: “From campuses to classrooms: Turning Point USA’s next frontier” (PF)

The Fulcrum: “Talent Isn’t the Problem. Belonging Is.” (PF)

Daily Nous: “Grieving What AI Has Taken from Learning” (PF)

Mother Jones: “Report: Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is Flunking” (PF)

The Conversation: “The lasting appeal of homeschooling: What motivated families to continue after schools reopened post-pandemic” (PF)

Curmudgucation: “Should We Pay More For The Best Teachers?” (PF)

JSTOR: “Worried About Teens Today? So Were Adults in the 1920s” (PF)

For those of you who “only” know the movies, this is the last of the six chapters covering the hobbits’ journey from Bag End to Bree that Jackson left out. Again, I can hardly blame him: it’s a very different kind of adventure story, and it doesn’t really move the larger plot forward. Frodo & Co. finally left the Shire, got waylaid by a magical (or at least mystical; certainly malign, if you’ll allow me my own bit of Bombadillish alliteration) ancient willow-tree, and spent a day and change in the house of Tom Bombadil learning some equally ancient prehistory (... ish …) and building up their spiritual strength by being surrounded by good if silly songs. 

Now they’ve got to continue on their way. But before they can get back on the road and eventually on to Bree, they’ve got to pass the barrow-downs. In the appendices we learn these are ancient graves, some of which built by the “forefathers of the Edain” (the elf-friends among the Men of Edain; the Numenoreans are descended from one of their tribes). The cairn where the hobbits are held captive is said to house the “last prince of Cardolan,” one of the kingdoms ruled by Argorn’s ancestors. As Tom Bombadil told it (almost in passing), the human remains buried there were essentially reanimated by evil, incorporeal beings: “A shadow came out of dark places ar away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds.” Tolkien doesn’t get more specific, at least not in Lord of the Rings; the Tolkien Gateway speculates those spirits are either “perverted Maiar (Úmaiar) or spirits of Orcs, Avari, or evil Men.”

What matters is they’re almost indefinably evil, and treacherously old. Here, they sort of parallel the Old Man Willow, which Tom told them about in the last chapter: “In [the Old Forest] there lived yet, aging no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords. The countless years had filled them with pride and rooted wisdom, and with malice. But none were more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green.” Technically he’s not an ent or huorn like we later meet in Fangorn, though consider the source. Tom Bombadil is nothing if not imprecise, and I’m not a good enough Tolkien scholar to know how much he’d worked out what we read in the “Of Aule and Yavanna” chapter of The Silmarillion.

But assuming we take this description somewhat literally, Old Man Willow is an ancienter-than-ancient literal tree that’s been corrupted by time. Something odd seems to be going on in this corner of the world, whether it’s proximity to Bombadil himself or the effects of Angmar. Things persist longer than they should, they go sour, and they go vicious. Evil is afoot, and it’s not the more political evil of human machinations and power struggles. I don’t want to imply too much of a one-for-one parallel (you know, allegory), but the closest description I’ve got is spiritual warfare.

And just after leaving (or being left by) Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, they get into another remarkably Old Man Willow-ish scrape. They’re making good progress (again: ish) across the open country between the Old Forest and the Road that will take them to Bree. They’re enjoying the sun. They have a big picnic lunch and decide to take a nap. They sleep too long, and are surrounded by a cold, dark fog when at last they try desperately to get past the barrows. They’ve been warned to make it past the territory before dark. And – speaking here as someone who generally dislikes horror as a genre and doesn’t read or watch most of it – we get some of the best written horror that I at least have ever read. This is a bit long, but you all deserve a good taste.

‘Come on! Follow me!’ [Frodo] called back over his shoulder, and he hurried forward. But his hope soon changed to bewilderment and alarm. The dark patches grew darker, but they shrank; and suddenly he saw, towering ominous before him and leaning slightly towards one another like the pillars of a headless door, two huge standing stones. He could not remember having seen any sign of these in the valley, when he looked out from the hill in the morning. He had passed between them almost before he was aware: and even as he did so darkness seemed to fall round him. His pony reared and snorted, and he fell off. When he looked back he found that he was alone: the others had not followed him.

‘Sam!’ he called. ‘Pippin! Merry! Come along! Why don’t you keep up?’

There was no answer. Fear took him, and he ran back past the stones shouting wildly: ‘Sam! Sam! Merry! Pippin!’ The pony bolted into the mist and vanished. From some way off, or so it seemed, he thought he heard a cry: ‘Hoy! Frodo! Hoy!’ It was away eastward, on his left as he stood under the great stones, staring and straining into the gloom. He plunged off in the direction of the call, and found himself going steeply uphill.

As he struggled on he called again, and kept on calling more and more frantically; but he heard no answer for some time, and then it seemed faint and far ahead and high above him. ‘Frodo! Hoy!’ came the thin voices out of the mist: and then a cry that sounded like help, help! often repeated, ending with a last help! that trailed off into a long wail suddenly cut short. He stumbled forward with all the speed he could towards the cries; but the light was now gone, and clinging night had closed about him, so that it was impossible to be sure of any direction. He seemed all the time to be climbing up and up.

Only the change in the level of the ground at his feet told him when he at last came to the top of a ridge or hill. He was weary, sweating and yet chilled. It was wholly dark.

‘Where are you?’ he cried out miserably.

There was no reply. He stood listening. He was suddenly aware that it was getting very cold, and that up here a wind was beginning to blow, an icy wind. A change was coming in the weather. The mist was flowing past him now in shreds and tatters. His breath was smoking, and the darkness was less near and thick. He looked up and saw with surprise that faint stars were appearing overhead amid the strands of hurrying cloud and fog. The wind began to hiss over the grass.

He imagined suddenly that he caught a muffled cry, and he made towards it; and even as he went forward the mist was rolled up and thrust aside, and the starry sky was unveiled. A glance showed him that he was now facing southwards and was on a round hill-top, which he must have climbed from the north. Out of the east the biting wind was blowing. To his right there loomed against the westward stars a dark black shape. A great barrow stood there.

‘Where are you?’ he cried again, both angry and afraid.

‘Here!’ said a voice, deep and cold, that seemed to come out of the ground. ‘I am waiting for you!’

‘No!’ said Frodo; but he did not run away. His knees gave, and he fell on the ground. Nothing happened, and there was no sound. Trembling he looked up, in time to see a tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars. It leaned over him. He thought there were two eyes, very cold though lit with a pale light that seemed to come from some remote distance. Then a grip stronger and colder than iron seized him. The icy touch froze his bones, and he remembered no more.

“Nothing happened, and there was no sound.” – This always struck me as absence as a positive thing. No-sound has existence. Darkness isn’t just the absence of light or sight, it’s an oppressive being, and it’s powerful. This is why I’m personally of the view that the zombifying spirits that took over those Dunedain corpses are powerful, probably minor former-Maiar that served Morgoth and then Sauron after him. They’re more built for immortality than Old Man Willow, maybe, but they’re corrupted, and they’ve bound themselves into some very human bones for way too long. There’s a finitude about them, a physicality, and it’s gone sour af.

Frodo at least is better equipped to face them, though. He’s spent the last two nights having what I can only describe as fortifying dreams, or perhaps visions. The chapter opens with him hearing “a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.” I’ve often heard this described as a vision of Valinor, which it might have been. I wonder if it’s more like an echo of the Great Song that started creation in the Silmarillion, the same song Legolas hears when he comes to Gondor that awakens his sea-longing. Whatever it is, it’s almost from outside time, again almost unaccountably ancient (or timeless) but without the corruption Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wights carry with them.

He’s also been listening to singing quite a lot. It matters that Tom Bombadil is almost constantly slipping in and out of song. In Tolkien, song and dance is a kind of magic, certainly a kind of power and a spiritual power at that. Think of how the Old Forest got riled up when the hobbits started singing even before they met Tom Bombadil, or looking further back how Luthien’s songs broke Sauron’s enchantments when she rescued Beren from him, and lulled even Morgoth to sleep. Frodo seemed best able to follow Bombadil’s half-sung history, and he sometimes (not always, but sometimes) seemed to answer with a more singsong rhythm to his speech. 

The hobbits are captured by the barrow-wights and held in the graves of that last prince of Cardolan, like I said. Merry, Pippin, and Sam are all asleep, or perhaps deathly unconscious, but Frodo wakes up halfway during the night. Again, this is long but is worth quoting a long piece of it. This is one of those chapters where you lose the flavor if you only look at snippets.

As [Frodo] lay there, thinking and getting a hold of himself, he noticed all at once that the darkness was slowly giving way: a pale greenish light was growing round him. It did not at first show him what kind of a place he was in, for the light seemed to be coming out of himself, and from the floor beside him, and had not yet reached the roof or wall. He turned, and there in the cold glow he saw lying beside him Sam, Pippin, and Merry. They were on their backs, and their faces looked deathly pale; and they were clad in white. About them lay many treasures, of gold maybe, though in that light they looked cold and unlovely. On their heads were circlets, gold chains were about their waists, and on their fingers were many rings. Swords lay by their sides, and shields were at their feet. But across their three necks lay one long naked sword.

Suddenly a song began: a cold murmur, rising and falling. The voice seemed far away and immeasurably dreary, sometimes high in the air and thin, sometimes like a low moan from the ground. Out of the formless stream of sad but horrible sounds, strings of words would now and again shape themselves: grim, hard, cold words, heartless and miserable. The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered. Frodo was chilled to the marrow. After a while the song became clearer, and with dread in his heart he perceived that it had changed into an incantation:

Cold be hand and heart and bone, and cold be sleep under stone: never more to wake on stony bed, never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead. In the black wind the stars shall die, and still on gold here let them lie, till the dark lord lifts his hand over dead sea and withered land.

He heard behind his head a creaking and scraping sound. Raising himself on one arm he looked, and saw now in the pale light that they were in a kind of passage which behind them turned a corner. Round the corner a long arm was groping, walking on its fingers towards Sam, who was lying nearest, and towards the hilt of the sword that lay upon him.

At first Frodo felt as if he had indeed been turned into stone by the incantation. Then a wild thought of escape came to him. He wondered if he put on the Ring, whether the Barrow-wight would miss him, and he might find some way out. He thought of himself running free over the grass, grieving for Merry, and Sam, and Pippin, but free and alive himself. Gandalf would admit that there had been nothing else he could do.

But the courage that had been awakened in him was now too strong: he could not leave his friends so easily. He wavered, groping in his pocket, and then fought with himself again; and as he did so the arm crept nearer. Suddenly resolve hardened in him, and he seized a short sword that lay beside him, and kneeling he stooped low over the bodies of his companions. With what strength he had he hewed at the crawling arm near the wrist, and the hand broke off; but at the same moment the sword splintered up to the hilt. There was a shriek and the light vanished. In the dark there was a snarling noise.

Frodo fell forward over Merry, and Merry’s face felt cold. All at once back into his mind, from which it had disappeared with the first coming of the fog, came the memory of the house down under the Hill, and of Tom singing. He remembered the rhyme that Tom had taught them. In a small desperate voice he began: Ho! Tom Bombadil! and with that name his voice seemed to grow strong: it had a full and lively sound, and the dark chamber echoed as if to drum and trumpet.

Frodo sings a song of power Bombadil had taught him, and Bombadil comes back to save them. In a weird way it reminds me of Gandalf using the light to turn the trolls into stone back in The Hobbit, but both Tom B. and the barrow-wight and so much more ancient and other-worldly, the comparison just highlights what a different kind of story this is. 

What most struck me is how Frodo is also something of a vessel for thoughts and impulses not his own. “A wild thought of escape came to him.” “The courage that had been wakened in him.” For all that, though, he’s much more intentional than he was when the other hobbits were first seized by Old Man Willow. Then he just ran down the path and cried out wildly for help because he couldn’t find anything else to do; now, he knows the right songs to sing, and he summons Bombadil. He invokes him, almost in a religious sense. For all that he’s enabled by almost external thoughts and virtues coming upon and into him, he’s the one manning the wheel. To a point; but as much as anyone could expect any mere mortal to manage against a corrupted, arguably timeless spirit.

And it’s about damned time, and a good warm-up for what Frodo more than any of them will be up against. to quote another story entirely:

.... You're in one.

What’s Happening

The new Odyssey movie is coming out, and some of the worst people online have opinions. The internet often has opinions about movies, especially when non-Caucasian people are cast, or not cast. I lived through the hateful posts over Rue’s casting, and Ariel’s in the new live action Little Mermaid. And of course as a longtime Tolkien fan, I know the story of Naz Hamphreys, the British woman of Pakistani descent who was told she couldn’t audition to play a Hobbit (and hobbit) extra because she was too white.

If anything, this Odyssey dust-up hits closer to home, probably because it involves the classics. I’m a medievalist by training, so I understand something of the frustration with people twisting your own special subject into an intellectual pretzel without wanting to understand what the scholarship actually shows. Here, Christopher Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the mythical face that cast a thousand ships. 

What Thomas Williams Wrote

A beautiful movie star is cast in a beloved story. The character is fictional—she isn’t even fully human. Nonetheless, activists and purists insist that the actor is the wrong race.

I’m speaking of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, the 2017 film adaptation of a popular Japanese manga series. Critics accused the movie’s creators of “whitewashing” the heroine, a cyborg whose physical form is entirely prosthetic and whose race and gender are, in fact, mutable. She’s implanted with the consciousness of a Japanese woman, but her memories have been suppressed and edited. The story is an examination of how unstable identity is, and how untethered it can be from the body. Yet for detractors, the politics of representation—the simple fact that Johansson isn’t Asian—overrode the power of the film’s philosophical inquiry.

Audiences are willing to suspend all manner of disbelief in service of a good story—except, apparently, when it comes to race. Hence the controversy surrounding this year’s most anticipated movie, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. [...] 

Such selective indignation relies on an idiosyncratic reading of Greek myth. In the most famous telling, Helen of Troy is not born but hatched. Zeus appears to Helen’s human mother, Leda, under the guise of a swan. After a sexual encounter, Leda lays eggs. Out comes Helen (and her sister Clytemnestra, also played by Nyong’o). Which is to say, Nolan’s critics seem to be committing themselves to the idea that Zeus—the god of gods; the onetime waterfowl—was “white.” His offspring, therefore, could not possibly be portrayed by someone with dark skin.

What It Means

With respect, Williams’s pointing to details of the Leda myth somewhat misses the point, and the danger. It’s not that Musk and the rest suffer from two little imagination, or that they’ve convinced themselves that Zeus in swan form must have been white; it’s that Helen of Troy was beauty personified, and that the greatest heroes and warriors of western civilization would have gone to war over anything other than alabaster skin.

The irony is, in the classical period, whiteness wasn’t the prestige-point it is for Musk and all the rest. In their known world (so setting aside China, the Americas, and the like), culture and power really did center around the Mediterranean, not just southern Europe (which historically had its own limited claims to whiteness) but also the Near East and northern Africa. A black Ethiopian would likely seem more familiar and as part of the in-group than a pale-skinned Visigoth.

I’m reminded of a favorite lyric from the Avenue Q song, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” (VIDEO):

Gary: Now there was a fine upstanding black man. Princeton: Who? Gary: Jesus Christ. Kate: But, Gary, Jesus was white. Gary: No, Jesus was black. Kate: No, Jesus was white. Gary: No, I’m pretty sure Jesus was black. Princeton: Guys – guys – Jesus was Jewish.

As if that would settle a damn thing.

The reality is, people living in what would become Greece and Italy back in Homer’s time wouldn’t have looked like people in Greece and Italy today, much less like the northern European “white” people they want to connect to that history. As the Vox interview (below) points out, though, this isn’t a one-off impulse. It’s worth thinking about why so many people are drawn to that connection.

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Salon: ““This is a mythological story”: Nyong’o responds to criticism of Helen of Troy casting” (PF)

New York Times: “A Black Helen of Troy? Fine. A White Obama? Not Yet.” (PF)

In lieu of a musical break

The whole episode is both applicable and good TV on its own terms, if you have the time.

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