It was my first day in England, where I had flown with my brother to join the cast of a play. We were wide-eyed and jetlagged, and all of a sudden these guys in a pub are grabbing my arm and asking if I was American, and that somebody had flown a plane into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Within minutes we and our baggage had been led into the Soho YMCA and we watched the unfolding disaster from the comfort of orange waterproof furniture alongside a bunch of increasingly teary-eyed muscular men with immaculate eyebrows.
The play my brother and I were there to perform in was a joyful anti-war comedy by Aristophanes called “Peace”. It’s the tale of an Athenian farmer caught in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, who just wants to be able to grow his food, drink his wine, and screw women in peace. He travels on the back of a giant shit-eating dung beetle to Heaven to complain to the Olympian Gods, only to find that they have vacated and left that brute War running amok, and the poor damsel in distress Peace trapped under a rock. So the farmer hero calls upon his all-singing all-dancing farmer buddies (including yours truly) to band together and let Peace out from under the rock. She brings out her hot to trot handmaidens, Bounty and Jamboree, and it ends with the farmers having a big party where everyone dances and sings and gets all the wine and sex they want.
Now that’s a story I can get behind.
Our joint American-UK effort ended up performing at literally the same time as another joint American-UK effort was aerially bombarding Afghanistan. “Ah, the delicious irony”, thought the innocent children who were caught in the crossfire, as their bones were crushed or their entire bodies engulfed in flame.
“Peace” was, by far, Aristophanes’ most optimistic anti-war play. He wrote it at a time when things were looking up for a peaceful resolution to the Peloponnesian War. Athen’s most prominent hawk, Cleon (who hated Aristophanes) and Sparta’s most prominent hawk, Brasidas, both managed to get themselves killed in the same battle. So Aristophanes was in a good mood. And indeed, there did end up being peace for a few years before the carnage resumed again.
And now it’s been a few years since our carnage resumed again. In the aftermath of 9-11 we Americans got to feel inside what it’s like to be bombed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to have created much empathy for all the other people who we then went out and bombed for it.
But to look at it in another light: it certainly was one hell of an opportunity. I’m sure Aristophanes would agree with Jon Schwarz on this one: Leaders love war. That’s why there’s so much of it.
Sometimes the most obvious statements are the deepest.
So is our best hope for peace to put all of our bloodthirstiest warmongers in a single battle and hope they happen to knock each other out simultaneously? Or is it to get a band of farmers together to pull a goddess out from under a rock?
Alas, they both seem just as unlikely. Here’s to all the current victims of war, and my fervent wish that they manage to find some nice peaceful food, wine, and sex as soon as possible.