Warriors. Come Out to Play-yay!

It's been a long day, and I have reading to do, but the OCD Gods must be appeased. Here's a Classics Corner retread from 2001 and a clip from my favorite B movie of all time.



Richard O’Leary of Brooklyn, NY writes to tell us that when he came upon Classics Corner while in Seattle last summer we made such an impression that he now seeks our advice on all things classical! “Does Xenophon fall into your bailiwick? I’m curious, because I have heard that the 70’s movie The Warriors was based on The Anabasis. I know, I know… I could just go to the bookstore or library and track something down and read. Just looking for a little guidance in this direction, if there’s any to be had.”

We at Classics Corner would like to take this opportunity to say, “Thank God for the Internet,” which allows freaks like Richard to avoid anything resembling effort by emailing freaks like us, who may or may not provide accurate information.

Having both read Xenophon’s Anabasis and seen Walter Hill’s 1979 thriller on more than one occasion, we are uniquely qualified to answer Richard’s very important question.

The Warriors concerns a Coney Island based gang who fights their way across New York after getting stranded deep in enemy turf. While under a general truce, they travel more than 100 miles to hear Cyrus, the leader of New York’s biggest gang, call for unity against the police, which the gangs collectively outnumber. Cyrus’ dream, however, is cut short when Luther, a young sociopath who looks like Roger Daltry gone to seed, shoots him in the chest and blames the Warriors. Their leader Cleon is wrongly killed by an angry mob while the Warriors narrowly escape. The truce is off, and the Warriors, now hunted by every gang in New York, confront one 70’s fashion casualty after another as they fight their way home.

As the Warriors square off with the Baseball Furies, who effectively combine KISS make-up, bad hair, and baseball uniforms to inspire sheer terror, their leader Swan delivers one of the best lines in cinematic history: “I’m gonna shove that bat up your ass and turn you into a popsicle.”

While Xenophon’s Anabasis lacks the depth, realism, and artistic quality of Hill’s cult classic, it does depict 10,000 Greek mercenaries who are led deep into Persia to overthrow King Artexerxes. Their leader Cyrus dies when a lance comes in contact with his eye. When the other officers are killed at a dinner party gone bad, the now leaderless mercenaries must fight their way home. In the tradition of armies ever since, the Greeks travel to exotic new lands, meet strange new people, and kill them.

While these similarities provide The Warriors an indisputable classical pedigree, other likenesses bear mention as well. Both tales depend upon large numbers of young men with nothing better to do. Both stories also feature random acts of violence, and use the declaration of war to sanction outright theft. As one Warrior says, “Cyrus was right about one thing. It’s all out there. All we gotta figure out is how to steal it.”

Courage

My idea for this morning was to talk about courage. When I used to write Classics Corner for Real Change, before the twins were born, I came to think of each 600 word column as a sort of a mini-sermon, but funny, and with classical references. And a lot of ambivalence about God.

It’s been more than three years since I wrote that column, but I never really got out of the habit.

So I’ll tell you something about myself.

When I need to rise to the occasion for something, whether it’s picking up the phone to call a donor or testifying at a hearing or telling someone what I really think, I think of Macbeth.

I love the Orson Welles movie. You probably know the scene. Macbeth needs to go up and kill King Duncan in his sleep, so he can become the Thane of Cordor, and he’s sort of dithering around, and Lady Macbeth sets him straight by saying, “Screw your courage to the wall. Then you’ll not fail.”

I always hear it in my head with this Scottish brogue thing.

And I visualize Jeanette Nolan.

And that kind of does it for me. But there’s this sort of secondary process.

First I ask myself, “Is what I’m about to do more noble than ascending the throne by means of assassination.”

And the answer to that generally being yes, I ask myself the next question.

“Is what I need to do easier than plunging a knife into the heart of a sleeping monarch?”

And I find the answer is always yes there as well.

So, that’s what works for me, but the point is, we live in very trying times, and it seems sometimes that the hardest thing for us to do is to grasp the reality of the situation we’re in without looking away.

And to not be overwhelmed by the horror.

And to do what we need to do, even when it’s not comfortable. Even when there is risk involved. Even when we’re not sure of the right way forward.

When we become activists for a different kind of world, no one hands us a road map that says turn left at the democratic party and keep going up hill until you see the brick wall, and then, transcend.

It sounds trite to say, but phrases that become worn with use often get that way because they’re just right.

We make our road by walking. And it always begins with a first step.

For the last year, we at Real Change have been deepening our understanding of our unique position in the community. We have allies. We bridge issues. We have more freedom than most — thanks to our large community of grassroots supporters and our earned income through circulation and advertising — to say what we mean and mean what we say.

And, we have 270 vendors each month selling the paper, reaching more than 12,000 readers each week. And there is a bond there. And that’s where our power lies.

So this year, we’re kicking off what will be a great experiment in cross-class organizing. We know that poor and homeless people need to have a stronger voice, but we can’t do it on our own. We know that our readers and other allies have political clout, and that their interests, and the interests of poor people, are linked.

We’re not really exactly sure where we’re going, but we’re taking the first steps toward building a space where people can come together and find their fire.

Real Change isn’t just a community. Real Change is many communities. Our work, we think is to increase the size of those spaces where these communities come together.

Text of speech for Real Change 13th Anniversary Breakfast, 10.24.2007

God and the Little Guy

To bring my blog almost up to date, I thought I'd repost this column that I wrote seven years ago during our annual pilgrimage to Lake Crescent. If you like this sort of thing, you should check out my Classics Corner archive blog, which I'm still in the process of completing.

From time to time, each of us needs to stand back, look ourselves in the eye, and ask, “What has the Protestant work ethic done for us lately.”

We at Classics Corner hid out at a mountain resort last week to do just this. For fun, we brought along Hesiod, a seventh or eighth century BC farmer-poet from the backwaters of Greece. As it turns out, Hesiod is one of history’s first workaholics, but even he says to rest in August, when work is done, the sun is hot, and “women’s lust knows no bounds.”

“Then,” he says, “ah then, I wish you a shady ledge and your choice wine.” He also recommends thick goat’s milk, freshly baked bread, the meat of a free-range heifer, and sparkling wine mixed with three parts water. Having none of these essentials on hand, we substituted scotch and tried to avoid fried foods.

While we did not find Hesiod’s remarks upon the habits of women to be particularly accurate, we were still obsessively drawn to Works and Days, his 829 line poem on how to work hard, marry well, lead an honest life, have good crops, and avoid drowning at sea or blaspheming the gods.

Hesiod’s poem is addressed to his lazy brother Perses, who bribed the local “gift-devouring kings” to lawyer the poet out of his inheritance. Perses is exhorted to end his scheming, get off his butt, and “Work!”

Ever since Prometheus egged the gods into hiding the “means of livelihood” in the earth, most of us poor humans have had to scratch out our precarious existence with constant toil. This, says Hesiod, is the way of the world. Life is struggle, he says. Get used to it.

From the perspective of our lakeside adirondack chair, we found all of this quite bracing indeed.

But we were drawn most to Hesiod’s obsession with justice. Having recently survived the prayer-soaked public coronations of Bush and Gore, we found the poet’s idea of a people’s god immensely appealing.

Belief in justice, says Hesiod, transcends the individual to concern the entire community. In an immoral world where might makes right, “grief and pain will find us defenseless,” and “evil doers and scoundrels will be honored.”

Hesiod believes there are spirits who function as the ethics police, invisibly roaming the earth and seeing that justice is served. When corruption is allowed to spread, he says, the entire community is punished, so everyone has an immediate interest in behaving morally.

Even Hesiod, however, has his moments of bitterness and doubt. “As matters stand,” he says, “may neither I nor my son be just men in this world, because it is a bad thing to be just if wrongdoers win the court decisions.”

In Hesiod’s world, god looks out for the little guy, and his faith in this keeps him an honest man. Hesiod’s practical mind would see a god of the rich, powerful, and corrupt as worse than no god at all. His is a useful belief, and 2,800 years later, with god half-dead, it still rings true.

The Return of Classics Corner

In the mid-nineties, as I was settling into Seattle and getting Real Change going, I decided to make a point of having a life outside my work. The best idea I could come up with on how to do that was to cultivate an interest in ancient lit, and find a group of folks who shared my obsession. Some people play bridge. Some people golf. I looked for people who wanted to discuss Thucydides. Call me a freak.

One by-product of this fateful decision was my Classics Corner column, which I wrote for Real Change from 1999-2004. This was a literary column of sorts in which I referred to myself in the first person plural and tried to be funny while discussing current affairs and, mostly, ancient Greek literature.

It doesn't sound like it would work, but it did. People started buying the paper for the column, and three years later I still meet people who ask for it back. My twin daughters came along in March of 2003, and within a year it was clear some things had to go. These included practicing the guitar and banjo, teaching myself ancient greek, and writing the damn column.

I put the old columns up on a website, but no one really seemed to care or notice. When the renewal notice came this month, I decided to let it go. But today, as I scraped moss off my roof and meditated on my love of the Northwest, it occurred to me that I could put all those columns on a blog for FREE!

So I did. The Classics Corner blog now lives, and I put a link underneath my profile. Today I put up most of the columns from 2000. It was bittersweet to come across a column where I prognosticate that G.W. Bush could not possibly become President. A few favorites include a column on King Lear, a short history of the town of Sappho on the Olympic Peninsula, and the Socratic proof that Slade Gorton has no soul. As I find time, I'll get all the Classics Corners I ever wrote onto the blog, even the ones that sucked.

It's still hard for me to imagine me taking up this column again, but this, I suppose, moves me a step closer.