The Big Picture
When you travel on vacation with a group, as we have done many times in the past with our motorcycle group, you end up spending time here and there with people who you might not otherwise go deep with. This happens at unusual times and places and under circumstances that perhaps even influence the nature of the conversation. Six years ago we did a flurry of travel in the fall of 2017. We visited eleven countries that fall on what was really four separate trips. The first was a few days stop in Iceland followed by a second on a cruise through the Baltics where we visited eight countries that bound that sea from Denmark to Russia and most of those in between. Then, not long after that we flew to Istanbul during a time when most Americans were barred from Turkey (we had gotten our visas before the temporary ban was put in place) and had the strange experience to be in as global a city, where East literally meets West and which has existed under three different names (Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul) over the millennia, at a time when people found American presence there unusual. The experience was even more energized by staying in the hotel near the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, which used to be a notorious prison and where they filmed Midnight Express. All of these things tend to influence your thought patterns as you travel.
The final trip of the year was when we carried on from Istanbul to Athens to begin a 10-day motorcycle ride through Greece. We started in Athens, went south through the Peloponnesus, up to Corfu and then across the central mountainous regions of the country, past Delphi and back to Athens. While some of us had been to Greece before and had hit the highlight sightseeing spots, it is hard to be in a city like Athens and not revisit those central tourist destinations. Whenever I go to Rome, a city I have lived and travelled to as much as any, I always pass the Coliseum and stare at it in appreciation. The same happens in Athens with the Parthenon. This famous temple sits atop the Athenian Acropolis at the heart of this ancient and storied city, named for one of the major Greek deities, Athena. Athena was considered the goddess of reason, wisdom and intelligence. She was a symbol of both peace and warfare, all at once. The statues of her depict her usually wearing battle gear like a helmet and armor and holding a spear in one hand while her sacred animal, the owl of wisdom, sits on the other arm. She seems to straddle that guns and butter reality that pervades our worlds political sphere over the ages. and yet Athena also wears what is called a Gorgoneion, which is an almost pagan-looking shield that someone like a Maori warrior might brandish with a scary face to ward off evil spirits. Strange.
While the Parthenon was built to honor the great victory of Greece over the invading hordes of Persia, it was used less as a temple than a treasury for the Greek government. That dual purpose was not unusual for temples of those days and may give rise to the architecture of banks right up to present day, where stability and grandeur serve the purpose of making people feel comfortable that their money is in safe and sound hands. In the hierarchy of human needs, security ranks almost as high as anything other than food and basic shelter. It is no wonder that government has as its primary purpose the provision of security to it’s people and that such security easily morphs to pecuniary safety. Man is comforted by money because it signifies an ability to sustain life in a comfortable manner into the unforeseeable future. Uncertainty is a bitch and money helps alleviate that uncertainty. But the dark side of money has been understood by man from the very beginning. The craven idols of the Biblical era were blasphemous for two simultaneous reasons. They represented extreme greed, never a good thing, and they also related to an abject lack of courage, which enjoys universal disrespect. That actually all makes sense since those lacking courage are the ones who crave security more than anyone else. Hunkering down under the shield of a deity with extra money in the bank seems about as craven as anything I can imagine and all of that is perhaps the least complimentary explanation of what goes on up on that Athenian Acropolis, though I doubt the Greeks would cop to that.
At the start of our motorcycle trip through Greece, we spent a few days in Athens and naturally planned a day to walk up the Acropolis to see the Parthenon up close and personal. On that walk, Kim and I happened to find ourselves alongside one of our pleasant but ultra conservative members. She is a pert and buttoned-up businesswoman of high standing in her community who has accumulated significant wealth and also done many charitable deeds. In many ways she would be considered a proud representative of modern American cultural success. I think it is fair to say that we liked her and enjoyed her company for the most part. She is also very fit for a woman her age (she is slightly older than us) and we found ourselves trudging up the rocky hillside of the Acropolis next to her, letting her set the pace and trying to keep up. this was a full year after Donald Trump won the electoral college vote to become the 45th President. During that year, we had all had time to digest the firehose of information that had come out about him over the election cycle and during that first year in office. His crass behavior ranging from his purported sexual exploits to his commentary about the White House and the sanctity (or lack thereof) of the Office of the Presidency were very much in the national conversation.
For reasons I can only blame on our general disgust with Donald Trump’s overall demeanor and comportment (and, to be honest, our disagreement with many of his political policies and pronouncements), we had a hard time not engaging with our friends who were pro-Trump on the irony of their conviction. How could such a prim and proper person as our trekking mate up the Acropolis be comfortable with the clear and obvious debasement of the office that was underway in Washington and the misogyny and greed that was in evidence in most everything Donald trump did? Did she feel they were misrepresentations of reality or falsehoods? We’re there alternative facts at play? No. She did not deny he likely reality of those reports, though neither did she fully acknowledge them, since to do so would make her follow-on stance all the more tenuous. What she did way was that we had to consider the “Big Picture”. This was her way of saying that the ends justified the means. Pure and simple. Remember, the Parthenon is not only about honoring the deities, but also about storing the gold.
We are now confronted with Justice Clarence Thomas and the evidence recently uncovered that shows that he has ignored Supreme Court doctrine, rules and conventions about conflicts of interest by accepting lavish personal gifts in the form of travel and lodging and, as was just revealed, direct financial assistance for him and his mother in a manner that is as close to bribery and influence peddling as any ethicist could define. I wonder if our friend would define that as falling within the “Big Picture”. Silence by her fellow Republicans would suggest she would. Man is forever confusing godliness and greed and raising temples to distract us from what is behind that “Big Picture”.