Logistics of Transportation and Information in the Odyssey

As I mentioned today in class, one of the interesting elements to the Odyssey is that logistics aren't very efficient, and that the transfer of both people and information can be a long and tedious process, especially in comparison to today.

In the modern world, traveling from Troy (located in what is now Turkey, along the western seaboard), to the island of Ithaca (an island just off of Greece) would be no big deal. A distance of only a little over 300 miles (as the crow flies) separates the two, so a flight would be quite short (average flight speed these days is ~600 mph) and luxurious. Instead of worrying about sails and various monsters, Odysseus could take a nap while he cruises through the sky.

On the other hand, Odysseus's journey was ANYTHING but easy. This was long before the invention of the airplane, the cell phone, or the Internet. You had to sail to go to another island, and that was pretty dangerous by itself, without any interference from the gods. He pretty much wound up going all over the Mediterranean Sea (I found this really cool map inlay which shows that) over the course of twenty years, and nobody knows anything about him during that time period because there is no real way to send information besides through messengers, who would be terribly inefficient having to go from Troy all the way to Ithaca. The only word people could possibly get is from other ships who happen to meet Odysseus on their way. To me, this illustrates the hardships of getting around in this time period much better than anything I have heard in the past. When it takes you 20 years to travel about a 1000 miles (from Troy to Ithaca that is, not for the entire journey), you're going about 0.006 miles per hour. That's a terribly slow speed. At that rate, Odysseus and his men may have just had better luck walking around the Mediterranean shoreline back to Greece!

While we all know that Odysseus's journey was a difficult one (it's an odyssey, after all!) a lot of us associate it with things like the Sirens, the cyclops, as well as Circe and Calypso. Looking at all this, I've come to realize that one of the major challenges of Odysseus's journey was the journey itself, which just became worse when he had to deal with all the problems from gods and monsters.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while the interference of the gods as well as the incidences with the Cyclops and other monsters did make Odysseus's journey difficult, it would not have been an easy one on its own, even if Odysseus had a veteran crew. While Odysseus's return is made exciting by the problems he faces along the way home, it only further worsens an already difficult situation, instead of making the situation difficult in the first place.

Social Media and its Effect on Heros and Villains

A while back when we discussed Batman and Goetz, we also brought up the topic of George Zimmerman. I remember mentioning that with the advent of modern social media, it's practically impossible for these figures to fall out of the human eye.

Two examples of this have happened in the last few days, where people who have been villainized by the media have been brought up again, a while after their acts. First off, T.J. Lane escaped from a prison in Ohio, and was subsequently captured. For those who don't know, T.J. Lane was the killer in a school shooting back in 2012, murdering three students. This, along with his actions in the courtroom (which included swearing at the victims' families, and wearing a t-shirt with "KILLER" written across the front) made him a constant face in the media for a while after the shooting. The attention died down after he was given three life sentences in prison, but swelled back up again, almost two years later, when he escaped.

A prison escape is a pretty big deal. Criminals get out on the loose, and that often times worries a community. But many times this only makes the news in the surrounding community. Because Lane had already become a national figure in the media, he became one once again when he escaped from prison. A much larger scale incident happened in the Nashville area a little over a week ago when 32 juveniles escaped from a special juvenile detention facility, where inmates had to have committed at least three felonies to be admitted. While some were captured shortly thereafter, two are still out on the run today. The outbreak of a much larger number of potentially dangerous criminals received much less national media attention than that of the escape of Lane and two others, who were all apprehended rather quickly. Why is this? Isn't news about multiple felons who've managed to escape police detection for over a week more important than that of an escaped killer (and national figure) who's captured within a day with little to incident?

The thing is that for these news publications, people remember about what happened with TJ Lane, and have formed emotions about what he did. As such, people remember him, and by bringing him back up again, media sources like CNN and ABC can generate money because people want to know about TJ Lane's escape, since they know who TJ Lane is. They don't care about 32 escaped felons, because they didn't do anything to be remembered by. For the media, it's not as much about public awareness as it is generating readers, who in turn generate revenue. Media is a business, and as such, you need people to access your media. Bringing up familiar villains will definitely bring people to your news stories and broadcasts and what not.

The other incident has to do with George Zimmerman himself. We all probably know about the controversial story of Zimmerman and the killing of Trayvon Martin, still a controversial subject a year later. Last night, news broke that Zimmerman was involved in a road rage incident, and then appeared to be following the guy whom he had gotten mad at. No charges were even filed, yet it still made nation news! Meanwhile, if one of us was to be charged in a road rage incident, it'd probably only make it into the News-Gazette, if even that. This has not been the first incident to make the news involving Zimmerman after the infamous Martin incident. He made the news for saving people from burning cars (something which could possibly redeem himself to some), and also got mentioned practically any other time he brushed up with the law (hurting his reputation to the public). There are plenty of people out there who have problems with repetitively getting involved with the cops. They don't make national news every time they do it. Once again, the emotions that people had formed during the Zimmerman case are being exploited again to generate readership (and thus profit) for the media.

Now imagine if Bernard Goetz was around in this time...he would make a headline anytime he rode a subway, and his private life would be scrutinized and stalked by the media, then exposing it to the public. Sure, he made the tabloids with his squirrel antics and whatnot, but that wasn't constant live updates on him. The difference is that publications can only happen so often, and bringing up the same thing time and time again is boring to the readers. With modern media, people can choose what they want to see and if they want to read about Goetz's latest antics, they can. And that is why modern media is able to keep on bringing up the same old people: because only those who want to hear about them can hear about them.

While the two examples I used here happened to deal with villains, the modern media, with its constant updates, can be used to not only keep heroes and/or villains in the public eye, but can also be used to make these heroes and villains look a certain way. The media can focus on the bad someone does, or the good someone does, but regardless, the current media has the power to not only keep people in the public eye, but to alter their reputation to the public eyes.

Everybody Needs a Hero (Even Heroes!)

Whenever we hear about heroes, like Superman or Michael Jordan (if they are what one considers to be a hero), we always hear about their "heroic acts", whether it be saving the city of Metropolis or hitting a game-winning shot. Up until this year, I was rather fine with this view of the hero. But then I read Victory Lap by George Saunders.

Basically, in Victory Lap, the character we see as the hero (Kyle) saves a classmate (Alison) from being abducted and raped. After incapacitating the abductor, Alison is able to escape and Kyle's job as hero is done. But then he almost kills the abductor, who has now became the victim and is at the mercy of Kyle. Kyle almost kills the man, but Alison yells at him to stop, leading to him putting down the rock. Even though we see Kyle as the main, big hero, Alison's actions save Kyle from becoming a killer, a decision which would likely haunt him through the rest of the life. Allison's actions also saved the reader's perception (at least mine) of Kyle being the hero, because the killing of the abductor, who was not dangerous at this point, would be a very unheroic, and even criminal act. It's really hard to see one as a hero when they've committed a crime. This opened my eyes to the fact that even heroes need heroes of their own at times.

To some, this may seem pretty obvious. But I've always seemed to have overlooked this, until now. Kyle may be a hero, but Allison is his own hero as well. I don't know too much about Superman, but he must have had people who were there for him at times, and Michael Jordan definitely has heroes of his own. The thing is that we don't really hear about these heroes, because we are too busy hearing about the heroic acts or view of heroes like Superman or MJ. I don't think this will change, but I do think that's of importance to realize (as I have recently done) that even the most heroic figures have had heroes of their own.