In colloquy with Brad DeLong, I expressed doubt that Odysseus was a fit hero for moderal liberals. My friend Philip offers a different viewpoint on Odysseus and his fellow marauders considered as literary characters to be presented to the young.
Wile E. Coyote
Wile E. Coyote –
super-genius,
western Daedalus or Icarus,
Prometheus or Tantalus unchained,
tortured less by the bird
than his own desire –
has been edited
from his cartoon hell
of dry river beds,
boulders, and anvils,
treacherous hand-grenades
and fickle physical laws,
into a worse purgatory,
(not spared the mid-air
realization
that he has run too far,
the shock that the Sisyphean stone
is rolling back to him)
where he must fall,
pursued by half a cliff,
but never crash,
be crushed and crawl away,
impossibly alive and hungry
to try again,
by some who’d rather children read
of the slaughter of the Trojan War,
of Pyrrhus’s words to Priam,
of Odysseus’s hall spattered
with blood and the twitching
feet of his sluttish servants
hanged like doves in the garden.