All these slop purveyors post about the new Odyssey movie but never actually say anything of interest about the Odyssey or the Iliad.

It’s all performative.

They only like “the classics” because it seems high status to do so. They don’t connect to, resonate with or understand the Odyssey/Iliad for what it is — a tale of primordial sorcery and chieftain warfare. If they had read any of it, they’d feel deeply uncomfortable about the superstitions of the ppl who wrote it. Because they themselves, as moderns, simply cannot engage honestly with it. All they can do is defend the status of the work as a cultural relic. This, to them, is “elite-coded” and the text itself is secondary.

That’s all of Western civilization — culture put into a glass case at the museum. And the political divide is between people who want to smash the museums and those who want to preserve the museums. There is no third option of those who want to storm the museums to take back the culture there and reintegrate it into society.

Put another way, it is “elite” to write about the importance of preserving the old cultural relics. It is not “elite” to actually engage with this culture and integrate and share it.