- Operation Odyssey Dawn?!

The title is the name of Obama's latest foreign war - the war to pacify Libya. My classic Greek probably isn’t what it should be, but didn’t Homer’s Odyssey detail the travails of a man who got in trouble on his way home from an imperialist was of conquest? The way I remember it, Odysseus was delayed on his way home from the sacking of Troy. He got lost, and his delay led a group of usurpers back home to pronounce him dead. They proceeded to party it up in the state capital, where they gave each other no bid infrastructure contracts, lavish free health-care, and exceedingly generous retirement packages. They did no work, but they consumed vast amounts of resources, and claimed that all of it was their ‘right’.

As I recall, Odysseus’s son Telemachus took some exception to their partying it up on his father’s dime, but when he tried to eliminate their collective bargaining and establish a system to rank each man by his own merit, they fled the palace to the kingdom next door and prevented him from reaching a quorum. Or maybe Telemachus was the one who fled the palace – I’m not sure. Someone ended up going to Sparta for a while anyway, where they hid out for a few weeks in a motel six near the Ithacan border. In the meantime the suitors continued to hang around the capital banging drums and telling each other poems (most of the Hey Hey, Ho Ho variety) and generally made a nuisance of themselves by making sure nothing got done.

Odysseus meanwhile bopped around the Mediterranean coping with various tribulations. He dealt with a Cyclops, he coped with the lotus eaters (who were trapped in the 15th century) and he tried to squeeze between the Scylla and Charybdis. He got help from some people, and grief from others, but eventually he found his way back to the party at his house, disguised as an undocumented day laborer.

At this point, Penelope, his wife, convinced all the partying suitors that a shooting competition was the way to decide who gets her hand. But being mostly anti-gun advocates, they couldn’t handle the weapon well. When Odysseus, still working in disguise, finally got his turn, he managed to load his weapon, shoot through the axe heads, and with the help of his son (who by then had his own daytime talk show on Fox News), slayed the lazy useless suitors, and eliminated collective bargaining in the kingdom forever.

Kirk Douglas played Odysseus in the movie, and if I’m not mistake the chief suitor was played by Richard Trumka. I don’t remember too clearly, but he looked a lot like him to me. I think Jesse Jackson made a cameo too… but what he said wasn't really relevant to the story in any way, so it's tough to recall.

Like I said, my classic Greek may be wanting – I did go to a public school. But the similarities to today’s news does seem worth noting.