Writer, professor, and gourmand John Harvey returns to PODRE for a very special edition of Bad Dads. Chris, Brad, and John look to their beloved poets of ancient Greece to determine which is worse: being a deadbeat dad, murdering your father and marrying your mother, or simply swallowing your children whole without even so much as a nice sauce or side vegetable. We also reach back into the past to hear Julian at age three teaching his mother the plot of The Odyssey (professors' kids: what are you gonna do?) in this full Greek immersion experience of PODRE.
If you're in the market for a new translation of Homer's Odyssey--and you probably are--you'll want to get a copy of Emily Wilson's superb and modern version, published in 2018 by Norton. Wilson is the first woman translator of Homer's poems, and her much-anticipated Iliad will be out this fall.
https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-odyssey
Julian's board book is available here. Thanks Uncle Mik!
Please go to our website and sign up to join our email list so we can be in touch when season 2 is set to premier.
Writer, professor, and gourmand John Harvey returns to PODRE for a very special edition of Bad Dads. Chris, Brad, and John look to their beloved poets of ancient Greece to determine which is worse: being a deadbeat dad, murdering your father and marrying your mother, or simply swallowing your children whole without even so much as a nice sauce or side vegetable. We also reach back into the past to hear Julian at age three teaching his mother the plot of The Odyssey (professors' kids: what are you gonna do?) in this full Greek immersion experience of PODRE.
If you're in the market for a new translation of Homer's Odyssey--and you probably are--you'll want to get a copy of Emily Wilson's superb and modern version, published in 2018 by Norton. Wilson is the first woman translator of Homer's poems, and her much-anticipated Iliad will be out this fall.
https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-odyssey
Julian's board book is available here. Thanks Uncle Mik!
Please go to our website and sign up to join our email list so we can be in touch when season 2 is set to premier.
Chris: Dads. They've been around since the beginning, but what do we really know about them? It's time to start asking questions. I'm Chris Brunt. This is PODRE.
Chris: Hey, everybody. We're still here. The wildfire smoke hasn't killed us all yet. I don't think it's done trying, but we're still here. Motherfucking... global warming, El Nino, heat dome ass continent. I'm from Texas. I'm used to this shit. Oh, the air quality is bad? I grew up in Houston. Is it a little hot outside? Is everything on fire? Do you get second degree burns when you walk out barefoot on the pavement? Yeah, okay, it is pretty bad, guys. But here's the good news for me. Not for North America or Earth in general, but for me. PODRE is about to be off on a long Italian holiday, ending the summer the way all summers should end, on a beach in the Mediterranean, wearing loud silk shirts, strolling down ancient cobblestone streets as mandolins play from unseen balconies. The smell of lemon trees in the air as I try to keep my children from getting run over by Vespas. I'll be at a writer's residency in Tuscany for two weeks, and the whole family's coming. Julian and Nico are coming. Grandpa Mike, star of season one, episode eight, is coming, and we'll be visiting some of Brad Franco's favorite places. Sienna, Florence, bunch of medieval hilltop villages where some 15th century duke got beheaded, and then the head was probably fed to his children. All as punishment for, like, snitching on his set, on his clique. You don't fuck around in Italy. You don't fuck around. You never could do. We're off soon. I may podcast a little bit while we're there. I'll certainly have some glamorous and exciting parenting stories to tell upon our return. If you're just joining us this summer, this is episode two of our Bad Dads miniseries. You can hear episode one on our feed, on the website wherever you want, but here's how it works. My co host for this series is Brad Franco, a historian of medieval history from the University of Portland. And Brad and I are taking a look at some of the worst fathers in the history of humanity, whether real or fictional, as long as they were influential in some regard. And we're trying to see if we can learn something from these monumental failures or at least come away with a better appreciation of their impact on all of us parents as we hoe the happy row of parenthood in their wake. I episode one, of course, we considered God, the original father and still champion of emotional manipulation, attachment disorder, toxic masculinity, et cetera. I think we dealt with him very fairly. And this time, a special guest is joining me and Brad, someone who, if you're caught up on last season, you're going to recognize. He's an award winning father, an audience favorite, and one of my favorite people, John Harvey, our special guest co host. Now, to get us into the show today, I've got a quick little opening feature for you. When Julian was still a baby, one of my best friends gave him a board book of The Odyssey as a present. You know what a board book is if you're a parent. It's a picture book. Each page has a nice, big, colorful picture, and at most, one or two words. Now, Julian loved this book. I used to read it to him every day. And because it's a board book, I had to make up the story. So it'd have, like, a picture of the sirens or the lotus eaters or Scylla and Charybdis and I just kind of freestyle that part of The Odyssey in the manner of the original ancient bards, and he couldn't get enough of it. Weeks and then months go by, and we're still reading this book every day. And without me realizing it, he's committing all of this to memory. Chanelle actually found this video on her phone recently from when he was just a three year old. He's going on eight now. So this was recorded about 100 years ago. So here you go. This is PODRE's very own Julian sometime in 2018, having a typical dinner table discussion about Homeric poetry with his mother, Chanelle, who helpfully repeats most of what he said, so you'll be able to understand it. In three, two, one.
Julian: Cersei, the good witch.
Chanelle: Good witch?
Julian: Yeah.
Chanelle: What if I eat the cattle of the sun?
Julian: Don't.
Chanelle: Don't.
Julian: No. Or you'll be pigs.
Chanelle: I'll be a pig?
Julian: Yeah. Don't do it, or you'll become pigs. Don't be pigs.
Chanelle: Did Odysseus become a pig?
Julian: The men did.
Chanelle: The men.
Julian: Yeah. What is the boy's name?
Chanelle: Cersei.
Julian: No, Odysseus. Yeah. First Cersei said to Odysseus, give me a favor first, and then turn them back to men. Then she'll turn them
back into men.
Chanelle: Did she save him from the Cyclops?
Julian: Who, Cersei? No, she doesn't live there. Okay. First he's going underground. To the underworld. Don't go to the underworld. But there's a snake there that you can bring here.
Chanelle: A snake?
Julian: Yeah. Attaching to the ghost. And you can bring that here. I'll help you get there. It's right underground. Like a subway.
Chanelle: Like a subway, yeah.
Julian: And you can bring a tiger in a ghost boat.
Chanelle: A tiger boat?
Julian: A tiger boat, yeah.
Chanelle: Then what happens?
Julian: And skulls. Yeah, take them.
Chanelle: Where do I go? After the underworld.
Julian: To Cersei's island, and she'll she'll she'll, turn the pigs back into men.
Chanelle: Oh, then where do I go?
Julian: Then you can go to the Cyclops cave.
Chanelle: Then to the Cyclops Cave. What happens there?
Julian: But I'm little so he try to eat me first. But I'm too quick. I'm the littlest so. I can hide under the sheep's fur.
Chris: Unfortunately, that's all the clean audio I can give you from that clip. So if you want to know how The Odyssey ends, whether the wily old seafarer makes it back home, stay tuned, because that is very much our topic today on the Greeks edition of Bad Dads. Now, we're having some fun here, as always on Bad Dads. We're not pious about this literature. You can't be, because these stories, these stories are incredibly dark, incredibly graphic, and upsetting and frankly, quite sick. But there are stories. They belong to Julian and to me and to Shakespeare and to you and to Brad Pitt. No matter if you've sat down and read them or not, they've been in the water for a long, long time. There's a reason Freud turned to the Greeks to name all of his best complexes. This shit is deep in our coding. Discount it at your own peril. We're going to help you sort through some of it right now. All right? Stay tuned after Bad Dads for a few updates on PODRE's upcoming episodes. And remember to subscribe to the show feed so you don't miss anything. Here we go.
Chris: Well, welcome back, everyone. Here we are with Brad Franco, our old friend, which means it's time for.
Brad: Brad to say the thing. Right? Bad dads with Brad.
Chris: Yeah, you can say that thing if you want.
Brad: Are you going to have Julian say it?
Chris: We'll probably have something better than you saying it. Saying it. But we should. We're back. We know Brad. We don't need to introduce Brad, but we have a special guest. We're so happy to have John Harvey. Back in the building. Back in the PODRE attic. You're in the attic. Maron has his garage. I have my attic, guys. But John, welcome back. It's good to have you.
John: It's good to be here, Chris. And it's good to meet Brad and.
Brad: Good to meet you.
Chris: Right? That's right. So, see, these guys don't know each other. This is part of the community building that we're doing on PODRE.
Brad: This is how the magic happens.
Chris: Bringing people, stirring new ingredients, bring people in my life together. And fathers. Bringing fathers together and building a network.
Brad: Sounds like an intellectual orgy of sort.
Chris: Yeah. Well, speaking of, you know, one thing that we try to do here on PODRE is look to the past, to look at past legacies and models and even whole cultures of fatherhood, of what a father is. And I know that you guys would fundamentally agree with this. The first place that I go when I'm looking for that model of fatherhood is the Greeks. The ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks, right. The Bronze Age, Mediterranean cultures of honor.
John: Serious dysfunction.
Chris: Right. Of the warrior culture of Kleos. Right. Of seeking glory.
John: Wow, that's pretty stirring there. It's really the positive outlook there.
Chris: That's my St. Crispin's Day. That's my okay, so today we're going to talk about the ancient Greeks. We're going to see if there's any of these dads in Homer, or in the tragic playwrights or sort of the archaic mythologies that that literature is built out of, see if there's any dads that we can take a couple pages from their playbook. Right. Who among us doesn't need a little help sometimes? You both have daughters, right? I don't have daughters. I have sons. I have only sons.
Brad: But I'm sure that makes us better parents than you. Just right there.
John: Yeah. Two sons and a daughter. Two older children who have already exiled me, and the younger one who's been practicing for a long time to kill me.
Chris: Yeah. Which is what makes you such an expert on this subject matter. And you know, you taught the ancient Greeks for many, many years as a professor at the University of Houston. You've written about them. You've really lived in their footsteps, have you not?
Brad: I mean, you've emulated them in your parenting, in your.
Chris: Yeah.
John: Well, certainly I situate my family somewhere near the House of Atreus, maybe not right next to the House of Atreus, but might know a few houses down, but it's on the same street in.
Brad: In the cul de sac.
John: Yeah. Oh, God, you know, that just warms me. That that's a term of the suburbs, and I live in Sweden right now on a mountaintop, and I see a. But oh, I would give it all up if I could be back on a cul de sac. And there's, next to the House of Atreus, nicely cropped, long, the driveways with no weeds.
Chris: Two cars in the driveway at all times. Right. At least two, maybe three. Right.
John: And neither of them is leaking oil. There's none of that.
Chris: No.
Brad: This is upscale.
Chris: Right?
John: Yeah. So I was going to talk about the House of Atreus and Tantalus as kind of a beginning point. Tantalus, who in the house, would probably be in the sub basement or in the crawl space, because, of course, he killed his son and then cooked his son in a particular way and served to the gods to see if they could tell. Do the gods know their meat? Do they know their taste of flesh? Can they tell the difference between lamb or veal and human and boy?
Brad: Sort of a trick question.
Chris: What's really the purpose of this, though? I mean, he's trying to trick the gods, or did he have, like, one.
John: One-up yeah, I think it's classic one-upmanship. And apparently Demeter didn't notice because she was all grief stricken because her daughter had been abducted by Hades and her father was kind of in on it to set up this abduction and rape.
Brad: It's interesting when it comes to serving god's unbeknownst meats of unknown origins. I tried this with my daughter recently, who's a vegetarian, by just sneaking in some bacon into things. And no, I wouldn't actually do that, but that would be total bad dad behavior, right. To just sort of slip this in. But I do think it's worse sneaking.
Chris: In your offspring, your actual yeah.
Brad: Yeah. Rather than serving your child unknown meat.
Chris: You're right, Brad. I think it is, just saying it's subtle, it's a nuanced take. But I think I would agree.
John: That's why, you know, and I understand that. Except, again, in the Hannibalization of know, I can think of like a steak and kidney pie, know, different stews with the body parts.
Chris: Right.
John: I mean, you could do it up in a nice sauce, and maybe this is what Tantalus did. So I guess I have some sympathy.
Brad: Use the whole body, use the whole.
John: Everything, the whole animal, from nose to tail, nose to tail, human eating, because then it's sustainable. So in that sense, I have sympathy with Tantalus and I can't really put him as a bad dad. So I'm going with the father who didn't even bother to cook his children, but just stuffed them whole down his throat. And that's Kronos, also known as Saturno in the Roman world.
Brad: Sushi style consumption.
John: Yeah. Now, there is a rarefied dish that I think is now illegal in France where you would take, like, a songbird and drown it in cognac and then kind of roast it with a nice little flamethrower. And then you were supposed to pop it in your mouth entirely and chew.
Chris: Yeah. This is on an episode, actually, of Succession, right. In that sequence where they're eating this sort of rare songbird, they have to put a napkin over their head.
John: Yes.
Chris: What is that about? Is that shame?
John: Shame but it heightens the thrill. Oh, we certainly shouldn't be doing this. I'm going to wear a napkin.
Chris: Because it's a mock shame. Right. Because this is now part of the custom of eating it. So it's not even real shame. It's just become yet another kind of trapping of the elitist practice of eating this innocent bird.
John: And if that's elitist, fine, so be it.
Chris: But John, so Kronos, of course, feels no shame. He's out in the open and he's just stuffing all of his children down his gullet. Right.
John: And I met him, actually.
Brad: Kronos.
Chris: Yeah.
John: Well, Saturno, but yes, I met him. It was 1979, I was 17. Between silk shirts, bell bottom pants.
Chris: I was going to say, what were things like back then? Because I don't really know.
Brad: I was born in 79. Wow, got that going. I was there in the Prado did.
John: You weren't born in Spain by any chance, were you?
Brad: I was screaming in front of a painting, that's all I remember.
John: So I was there. It was my Spanish language high school class. And we flew to New York and met up with Spanish language high school classes from around America and then flew to Madrid, where the drinking age allowed us to take in copious amounts, which means most evenings were spent with awkward, hesitant, fairly shameful orgies, where you kind of knew what the body parts were.
Chris: Orgies of shame, rather.
John: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
John: I mean, you tried, but it didn't work. And then you just felt bad. And so one morning we went to the Prado, and I'm walking through and I turn around and you know this guy. Saterno just there he is, maddened look, wide eyed, chomping down raw on a child. And I just sat down and looked at it. And looked at it.
Chris: Yeah.
John: It seemed to say everything to me about fatherhood that I had experienced and.
Chris: Known that you'd absorbed so far in your 17 years.
John: In the House of Harvey, just a few houses down from the House of Atreus.
Chris: Goya had a direct line then to the House of Harvey. He saw to the essence of things.
John: Yeah. To me, this is the emblem of all the tendencies in a father to psychologically consume the children, to have them completely be shaped by his maybe best intentions, but invariably fears complexes, anxieties.
Brad: Hungers.
John: Hungers.
Chris: Appetites.
John: Appetites. And the ultimate rejection of fatherhood. There shall be no children.
Chris: There shall be no more back into my body.
John: Right.
Brad: Ugolino style.
Chris: Ugolino.
John: Nice shout out to one of the best of scenes. Yeah. Archbishop Rugieri and Count Ugolino.
Chris: I knew you guys were going to fucking nerd out about Dante if I got you together. I was worried about this. I was concerned. My concerns were well founded.
Brad: But back to the Greeks.
Chris: That's it for you, John? It's the psychological reading of Kronos.
John: Yeah. That he consumes all, except, you know, mom kind of figures out what's going on. And obviously also I find this gross, actually, on Saterno's part Kronus's part, I've.
Chris: Never heard you say those words before. I found this gross. I didn't know you were capable of speaking those words.
John: Yeah. The gross part know, he's duped. He's given a stone to eat, a stone to swallow, and he takes that to be his son. Takes that to be Zeus, which obviously, no taste buds. Obviously no sense of differentiating between probably some succulent baby flesh and stone.
Chris: That is unfortunate. Yeah. Unsettling even.
John: Yeah. Isn't it?
Chris: All right, so we have Kronos as our first nominee for the baddest dad of the Greeks. Brad, who do you got?
Brad: I'll go with Oedipus.
Chris: Oedipus the king.
Brad: The thing with Oedipus is for those I mean, everybody sort of knows on some level, what did he do? He's the original motherfucker. Right.
Chris: That's what it is.
Brad: Yeah. Many people have killed their fathers, but who's fucked their moms? That's always the question that we must consider. Which quite obviously makes him a terrible son. Right. It makes him a pretty terrible husband to his mom wife. But of course, on this episode of Bad Dads, we want to say, is Oedipus himself a good or bad father? And the evidence is pretty bad.
Chris: Yeah.
Brad: I mean, he's also definitely a sibling.
Chris: Right.
Brad: Half sibling.
Chris: Right.
Brad: He is the same mom, not the same dad, because he is the dad. So when it comes to his let's let's sort of review the evidence.
Chris: We've got Antigone, we've got, name, his kids. Brad.
Brad: Eteocles.
Chris: There we go.
Brad: Polyneices. And he hasn't figured it out that he had been told long, long ago in a prophecy that he was going to kill his dad and marry his mom. And he kills a king on a bridge. Doesn't seem to put together that this could possibly be his dad because he had been adopted. Doesn't realize that if you're marrying somebody who is widowed, hey, maybe this could somehow reflect badly on you. When he's told not to pursue this by Tiresius and by Jocasta's wife, he won't leave it. So, you know, ultimately his wife ends up hanging. So now he, as a dad is left with his children knowing that they are now motherless. And so what does he do? How does he respond? He goes and gets their hair ties and just stabs his eyes out, right? Like, oh, you guys are going to need more support from your parents. I got an idea. Now, I don't have eyes, right?
Chris: But Brad, imagine if he hadn't done that, right? They would have been left with a terrible sense of sort of narrative irresolution, right? Like, dad, you put us through all of this. Where's the appropriate know, climactic action to help us at know, make a good play out of this one day.
Brad: Imagine if he apparently no one told him that there was going to be a sequel, okay? Because as an ending that would have worked. But now you got to imagine now he's just helpless, right, in the ancient.
Chris: Greek world, it got renewed for another season, right?
Brad: And now he's just like blind. I mean, honestly, Sophocles should have restored sight somehow. That would have been better because instead what you get is now he just needs full time aid. And so he has his children, expects his children. You guys take the kingdom, Eteocles and Polyneices, and this is a stupid plan. You can switch power every year because that always works everywhere, always, forever, right? And while you're king, you can support me, okay? And then Antigone, I'm just going to go wander around in exile, so you take my hand and lead me because I'm blind now, because I stabbed my eyes out, right? So he set up his sons for failure, set them up for dispute, and he's forced Antigone to be his service guide, right? And so the brothers go on and ultimately kill themselves. And I don't even know what ends up happening with Antigone, where they wander.
Chris: You don't know what happens with Antigone?
Brad: No, there's a play called that but I don't know how the wandering goes. I forget that piece of it before, of course.
Chris: Yes.
Brad: Then she's going to end up killing herself. Creon's going to end up alone. The dead wife, dead child, and dead mean. I would say that Oedipus is responsible.
Chris: So B minus on the outcomes then.
Brad: Well, yeah, great inflation is a thing.
Chris: So I think like a Harvard A minus is what we're giving. Yeah.
Brad: Which is really like a B, which is really bad. He certainly didn't eat his children, but in many ways that would have been quicker.
Chris: Right.
Brad: The way that he goes about this leads to generational trauma and misery for not just Oedipus's children, but the people of Thebes.
Chris: Is it possible that he doesn't see himself as a father at all at this point? That he sees himself as more their sibling than their father? I mean, did you ever consider that?
Brad: I don't know, have you ever asked your siblings for like, hey, take care of like, I'm going to curse you. He curses his own kids. I didn't even mention that. He curses them.
Chris: Yeah.
John: That's a big. It worse than well, Kronos swallows them, but then he ends up vomiting them back up, which it's traumatic going sounds like regret traumatic going out, but yeah, they do come. Yeah.
Brad: That seems like something you could apologize and walk back in a way. You can't apologize for your eyes now not being there and somehow restore know.
Chris: I don't know if this will tip the scales in any way, but I want to push back just a little bit on this notion that Oedipus is such a terrible son, because whether that bears on him as a father, I'm not sure yet. But you sort of stated this as if it was sort of a priori. Oedipus is famously a bad son, and I think that there may be some flaws in that statement.
Brad: His mother really liked him? She really found him to be very arousing, and thus look, he gets points for that. What are you talking about? Killing the dad on the bridge? Is that good son behavior? Come on, Chris.
Chris: Okay, so you have to actually look at his entire history as a son, not just those two moments where he yes, murders his father and marries and impregnates his mother. Yeah, those are low moments. Those are troughs, those are valleys. However, why was he at the crossroads in the first place? Right? How did he get into this?
Brad: He didn't want to kill who he believed to be his dad, and he didn't want to fuck who he believed.
Chris: To be his adoptive parents, who he believes has no reason not to believe are his true parents. Right. The king and queen of Corinth. Right. Who raise him and who give him their name and make him heir to their throne. He's raised.
Brad: So what's he do? And runs away.
Chris: When the oracle tells him that you're going to kill your father and marry your mother, he assumes they're talking about those parents, and he immediately turns on a dime and gets the fuck out of Dodge. He leaves behind his kingdom. He leaves behind his throne. That's a good son behavior right there.
Brad: Listen, Chris, if you had a prophecy that you were going to kill your dad, fuck your mom. I think you would be like, okay, I'm going to make sure I don't do that. Rather than just fleeing.
Chris: Right. That's what he was trying to do. He's trying to make sure he didn't do that. He was removing himself from.
Brad: How would you accidentally do that? How play that out in your head? How that makes any kind of narrative sense?
Chris: I don't know. I mean, haven't you're ever worried?
Brad: I'm sorry, mom. My dick just slipped inside. No. Okay. It's never, ever been a concern. And I would guess, Chris, you've never had that concern either.
John: There are some several steps, I think, before that moment of, hey, mom, sorry.
Chris: Now I have that concern. I didn't before, but now that you've implanted it into my psyche, I'm now a little worried about it. Yeah.
Brad: Now that I've stuck it in there.
Chris: Because the whole point is the inadvertent nature of it. He did everything in his power to prevent it from happening. Right. Short of killing himself. In that moment, he jumps on his horse and he gallops out of town, never to return. But as John points know, he probably picked a bad direction because he runs smackdab into his actual dad, and after a bout of road rage, kills him and then is awarded that man's widow as a wife. He didn't pick her. He just showed up. Defeats the Sphinx, is welcomed into the city as a conquering hero, as their savior, as this sort of messiah figure. And they give him a bride, right? This queen who needs a husband, but.
Brad: He knows that she's widowed, and he knows he just killed someone. And if you have this prophecy on your life that made you flee, maybe put two and two together, but he.
Chris: Thought he killed a regular person. And regular people don't matter. Brad, he thought it was just like a farmer. It's not a big deal.
John: The guy had servants with him. Guy had servants with him.
Chris: A rich farmer. A rich farmer, but a farmer nonetheless. Okay.
John: Do you look down on farmers, Chris?
Brad: Yeah, clearly.
Chris: I'm just saying. Guy in Greek overalls. If you were to kill, on the one hand, a king and on the other hand a know, it's a bigger deal.
Brad: I'm glad to see, Chris, that you buy fully into the stratification of society as the Greeks laid out.
Chris: Okay. What did Marx say about this? Right. He said that it's fine to kill farmers, I think, didn't he?
Brad: That was Jesus.
Chris: Oh, that's right. All right, well, I think it's my turn, and I would like to you.
Brad: Can'T top our
Chris: I'd like to bring things down a little down to earth here. Okay. I'd like to keep things maybe a little more grounded and a little more simple because I want to think about Odysseus, father of Telemachus. So much of the story of The Odyssey is a story about a father and a son, right? Trying to reunite, trying to find each other. At least that's the version they want you to believe, right? That it's this sort of heartwarming coming of age tale of a father and a son, but Homer sort of selling out, right? Trying to finally get that number one record, which I also just learned from a friend today, know, that was like a great obsession of Miles Davis's latter sort of working years that he was sort of obsessed with finally getting that number one, like, after all, like Homer. Exactly. Exactly like Homer. So he wrote The Iliad, which was a banger, right? And then he's, like, trying to get a number one hit, so he writes The Odyssey, which he thinks is going to be this feel good, warm and fuzzy father son narrative that people are gonna, like, give to each other on Father's Day, et cetera, et cetera. But it's bullshit. It's fucking bullshit because Odysseus is a terrible father, and here's why. What's his first act? We see him perform as a father. It's when Achilles comes to his farm in Ithaca to recruit him to set sail for Troy, right? To sort of recruit him into the war effort that Agamemnon and Menelaus are leading. John, your brothers of the House of Atreus, right? Odysseus sees him coming for some reason, sort of has a premise, knows what it's about, and he says, I'm not going to go fight in this stupid fucking war. Like, my place is here. I've got a infant son and a hot wife, and I don't want to go anywhere, which is the correct way to feel about things. But his method for getting rid of Achilles and getting rid of this recruitment envoy is to act like a lunatic, is to pretend to be insane, right? He pretends to be crazy. And what's Achilles' first move? He's like, let's take the baby and throw the baby in front of the plow. And if he's really crazy, he'll just keep on going and run right over that baby. But if he's not crazy, he'll have to pick the baby up, and then we'll know that he's fine and he's fit to serve and he'll have to come with us, which is you could say that this reflects poorly on Achilles. Fine. I won't argue with that. The reason it reflects poorly on Odysseus is because it works.
Brad: So you're saying he should have run him over, literally know?
Chris: No, not exactly. No.
Brad: What I'm saying is, Chris, give any other outcome that you would have preferred other than him? Because clearly you're indicating that running him over with the plow was the answer.
Chris: No, he got the first part right. Pick the baby up off the ground, don't run the baby over with the plow.
Brad: And then say what?
Chris: And then be like, Get the fuck off my farm, man. You just threw my baby in front of my plow.
Brad: And he'd be like, Hi, you're not crazy. You. Come with me.
John: Remember on how you're defining Odysseus, you're defining him as a farmer? You've said farm many times, and you yourself have schooled us on farmers.
Brad: So you're saying Achilles should have killed.
Chris: The farmer, which he could have.
John: Right?
Brad: That's why he came.
Chris: But Odysseus is like, oh, you got me. I'm not really crazy because I'm not ready to plow over my infant son. So now I have to leave. And he's gone for 20 years. 20 years. So that was, like, the last day he had with his kid, and he's gone 20 years and ten of those years. Ten of those years or maybe nine. And change he spends on Calypso's Island.
John: Yeah, right?
Chris: Which we all remember the Kevin Sorbo TV adaptation.
Brad: You're just jealous.
Chris: Calypso played by Vanessa Williams! I'm just saying, did you really have to spend a decade in this sort of depressive? Looking out at the waves as they crash?
Brad: We get it, Chris. You would have been done in 30 seconds.
John: He never would have left.
Chris: And Calypso is like, what's wrong? And he's like, I miss my wife. And she's like, no, you don't. And he's like, yeah, come back to that. I don't miss her that much. It took him ten years to finally be like, all right, I'm ready to go home now.
John: It was good.
Brad: Greek stallion. The Greek stallion. What do you want?
Chris: Because he's in paradise with a goddess. And then we're supposed to believe that just one day, ten years into that, he suddenly remembers his duties as a father and as a husband and as the Lord.
Brad: I'll grant you that it would have been better if it had been after eight years. Seven years, okay? But he remembered, okay? He wasn't so far gone that after a couple of decades, like, all right, I have a child.
Chris: I think those teen years are pretty formative years in a child's life, right? Like, he missed year eight to 18 just hanging out on Calypso's sex island.
Brad: We'll see how you are when your kid's 18. You might have been like, you know what? I could have missed the last decade.
Chris: If that's not a deadbeat dad, I don't know what is. Okay, so fine, he finally comes back from fucking Miami and arrives.
John: Didn't Tom Brady do something similar? Like, just spent 25 years playing football. Did you really need to do that? Did you really need the Tampa Bay Super Bowl?
Chris: That would be equivalent, John, if the Trojan War had lasted for 20 years, right? And Odysseus just refuses to leave the gridiron. He refuses to leave the field of battle because he's chasing glory.
Brad: No John has a good point, because the last year was clearly us or them. And he's like, oh, I'll do play one more year.
Chris: But this would have been like if Brady retired after 20 years and then spent another ten years on Tahiti recovering and recouping from his you don't know where he is.
John: Right?
Chris: I think Brady's pretty involved in his kids.
Brad: Let me hear let me get this straight.
Chris: He kissed that one kid on the mouth. They seem like they had at least spent time together before.
Brad: Stop bringing up Oedipus okay.
Chris: I'm not done yet. I'm not done with, fucking no, but.
Brad: I want to point out that so far, all you've said is
Chris: Why are you shouting?
Brad: Being a deadbeat dad is worse than, I don't know, eating your fucking children.
Chris: I said I was bringing things back down to earth, okay? It doesn't have to be weird voodoo shit to be bad fatherhood, okay? So I'm not done yet.
Brad: Obama had a deadbeat dad and he became president, okay? I'm just saying, if his father had eaten him, he wouldn't have been a good president.
John: Well, he could have swallowed him and vomited him back up.
Brad: Trauma.
John: Yeah, trauma.
Chris: Okay, so the end of the story is that Odysseus finally drags his dusty ass back home and instead of going straight to the palace and saying like, hello, wife, what are all these fucking suitors doing here like a normal person? Or even going straight out to find his boy who's now a 20 year old, kind of like, manchild, this sort of underdeveloped soy boy cuck of a son.
Brad: Stop talking about yourself, Chris.
Chris: He goes out and he sees his favorite slave, right? His cowherd, his swine herd. Eumaeus. And Telemachus just happens to be there because he's basically grown up, being raised by this swine herd who's incredibly loyal to his father. Odysseus, of course, shows up in disguise like he always does, like a weirdo as a poor person and in rags, doesn't reveal himself to Telemachus right away. He wants to kind of test his loyalty first. He tests the loyalty first of the swineherd, and then he tests the loyalty of the son. And finally, paranoid narcissistic Odysseus is satisfied enough that he can trust his own kid.
Brad: Surprise.
Chris: And he says, all right, so here's the plan, right? I'm actually your dad, and we're going to go kill all of the suitors who are in our living room right now. You and me.
John: Father son bonding, man.
Chris: Yeah. Epic. And Telemachus is like, my dad's finally here. He's finally home, and he's finally paying attention to me, and he needs my help, and this is going to be fucking awesome, right? It's very much like a Rad Dad. It's like the first half of the Fresh Prince episode where Will's dad comes back right after all that time. The happy part. Then that's what they do. They execute this insane, like, Navy Seal plan to go back into the palace, and the three of them slaughter. What's the number, John? I forgot I used to know. How many, suitors?
John: 60, 70? 80?
Chris: You're saying numbers now? You're saying numbers.
John: A small midwestern city, several scores.
Chris: They kill like a hundred people in an afternoon, including Telemachus's, tasked with hanging the serving girls who had slept with the suitors, right. Which was seen as some kind of violation of the patriarchal honor of the household. Right? Meaning, like, these are Odysseus's slaves, so how dare they sleep with these suitors? And it's Telemachus' job to kind of mop that situation up so he presides over their execution after the other kind of military operation is over with. And this is the happy ending of the Odyssey. This is the culmination of the coming of age story. This is the triumphant reunification of father and son. And the son has now learned how to be a man. From Big Papa. From Odysseus himself.
Brad: I love it when you call him Big Poppa.
Chris: And that's the end of the book, right? That's where that one ends.
Brad: So, Chris, let's be clear. You're not really indicting. Oedipus. Sorry? Odysseus, you're really indicting. No, I know you're indicting. Greek culture as a whole.
Chris: I love Greek culture. I love hummus. I love islands. I love sunshine.
Brad: But what you're saying is their view of what it means to be a good father is inherently awful.
Chris: Only in this instance. The ones you guys mentioned are fine, okay? But my guy, actually.
John: I don't think you've come to bury Odysseus. I think you've come to praise him. And I think that's exactly what you've done.
Brad: That's what we've yeah, okay. Either you're denigrating all the Greeks see.
Chris: I actually love my children, and I want them to grow up around me and under my guidance and under my protection. Unlike, you know, you guys don't feel that way.
Brad: You know how old is Julian?
Chris: He's seven. He's seven years old.
Brad: Okay, so what you're saying is the formative years you were talking about were between eight and 18. You might decide in a year to run off to Ithaca.
Chris: I mean, Ithaca is only an hour away. I can get there.
Brad: Exactly.
Chris: 81 south, baby.
Brad: And you know what? There's farms around Ithaca.
Chris: You have a target rich environment.
Brad: Yeah.
Chris: All right, so what do we think, guys? If these are our three wait, let me ask the question this way. Which of these three do we find the most relatable?
Brad: How would we possibly answer that in a way that makes us anything other than total monsters?
Chris: The question is sustained. Which do you find most consonant with your particular worldview? Brad?
Brad: Obviously, Kronos. Who among us hasn't violently overreacted and then had to sort of take it all back?
Chris: Have you ever just taken something from your kid and put it in your own mouth?
Brad: No.
Chris: Your kids are fine?
Brad: They have dirty hands?
Chris: No, but no, I know I would never eat after my children. That's a hard rule of mine. Like, if they're eating something and they're like, you want some? I'm, like, absolutely fucking not. But if they are, like, fighting over a bag of popcorn or something, and I don't see a better way of dealing with diffusing that struggle. I might just grab a huge handful myself and sort of Kronos that fucking popcorn, you know what I mean?
John: I will say in terms of Oedipus and in terms of, let's say, a practical, real world experience in America, there's no health care and Dad's just dumped himself on the kids, on the girl. Right?
Chris: Haven't we read Curse the Sons and Make Yourself a burden on the I.
John: Mean, just cursing the sons and yeah, yeah, you have to take care of my healthcare. That's how often does that happen?
Brad: Yeah, see, you're seeing it my way.
Chris: Is that your plan, John?
Brad: Yes, that's why he moved to Sweden, so he doesn't have to have that plan because he has healthcare now. All I know is I have two daughters and two eyes, so I'm automatically a better dad than Oedipus, you know, because share the burden and I can see!
Chris: And I've met both your parents, Brad, and that seems fine there. That seems totally normal and not at all weird.
Brad: Yay.
Chris: So it's Odysseus, then? Odysseus. I win.
John: Just stop.
Chris: No, but I hear what you're saying. You have to interpret these characters within their cultural context, and it's sort of silly to pass judgment on them, given using the sort of values and conventions of our time. However, it's also fun to do that, Brad.
Brad: I obviously agree, Chris, but I guess I'd say that given how Odysseus acts when he returns, being a deadbeat dad was clearly a gift to his son.
John: Okay?
Brad: He was saying, you too can be Barack Obama, right?
John: Oh, man, cue the music.
Brad: Cue the and and then when he came, right, he realized that all he had to teach him was his murderous ways. And thus we got to recognize that in his desire to have sex with not his wife for a decade.
Chris: Goddesses.
Brad: Yeah, he clearly was looking out for.
John: His son and then gave his son some sweet survival skills. No one's going to mess with Telemachus.
Chris: So he's basically like a deadbeat dad who gets it. Come out here, boy. I'm going to show you how to use an AR, et cetera.
Brad: See those men looking at your mom?
Chris: This is a grenade launcher, boy. You need to learn how to use these right here in our culture. Yeah, this is Texas, boy.
Brad: But he's not the worst of them. That's all.
Chris: We're down here in Texas. Yeah, I'm going to go with Texas, because I have the right to say that. Okay, final question. It's a serious question. If we can't then condemn these fathers, given their enmeshment in Bronze Age...
Brad: No, we can condemn. We just aren't condemning Odysseus lower than the others. This is a Bad Dad.
Chris: Fine, fine. But given the way that you're trying to restrain me from condemning Odysseus, can we then not also take any positive value from these texts from these portraits of fatherhood, shouldn't you also be sort of barred or restrained from saying, there's something good here, there's something worth learning from?
Brad: Go ahead, John.
John: I was just thinking back to something that Donald Barthelme had said. Donald Barthelme, the.
Brad: I thought you were going to say Donald Trump, actually, but you're going in a different direction.
John: I did Tom Brady earlier. I thought I'd maybe show some education.
Chris: Donald Barthelme.
John: Yeah, the Dead Father. But Barthelme had made a comment about because I think he was kind of a very tense father and kind of aware of the whole preposterous proposition of the whole thing of being a father, like a long term father. And he thought at best, maybe you wouldn't make the same mistakes your father made, but regardless, you were going to make them, right. It was like fated. You're going to fuck up your children. You might tell yourself you're not going to do it the way your dad did. Yeah. You're going to invent something new. Yeah. They will hate, so that's my message.
Chris: That's nice. I like that.
Brad: That's nice.
Chris: And thanks for bringing in a fellow Houston writer, Donald Barthelme, Rest in Peace. Brad. Anything?
Brad: I would say the lesson from this pretty, pretty obviously is when you are a burden on your children, let them know that there is great historical precedent for that.
Chris: Yeah. Any suggestion as to how to let them know?
Brad: I mean, you can have them read Oedipus.
Chris: Is that what you guys do? Instead of watching TV at night, you guys sit around the fire lit living room and you read to your children from Oedipus in the Greek, is that?
Brad: Not only, yeah, but I mean, it's always about what not to do. I think ultimately that's our job as parents, right, is to let our kids know not what to do, but to make them feel really concerned that every choice is potentially wrong and they're really aware of all the ways it could end up horribly. So there's no better way than reading.
Chris: The tragedy around every corner, right?
Brad: Tragedy in every hands. And you're probably going to fuck up anyway.
John: Yeah. It's the very prophetic words of Philip Larkin. They fuck you up. Your mom and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.
Chris: And with that, another episode of Bad Dads with Brad. Thanks, everybody. John, thanks for being here.
John: Thank both of you.
Chris: See you guys next time. Bye, Brad.
Brad: Thanks, Chris.
Chris: Bye.
Chris: That's all for PODRE. We're off to Italy. We got more Bad Dads coming at you soon. After which we'll start releasing our second mini series of summer bonus episodes, the PODRE Review, a literary salon where I'll be sharing with you and thinking through some of the most poignant, meaningful heartbreaking, or just, like, really cool works of literature that have something to say, that offer a portrayal, that speak to the experience of parenting and parenthood and bring some clarity of thought and word to this often messy and chaotic and confusing part of our lives. And I'll be doing that in conversation with some very brilliant and renowned writers, poets and critics. These are great episodes. We've got a few in production already. And I'm excited to share them with you. So stay tuned. Season two of PODRE is coming. Not going to say when, but it's coming. Please spread the word. Get your friends and associates and colleagues, your underlings and lackeys, your admirers, your side pieces, your rivals and antagonists. Yes, even your nemeses. Put them all onto PODRE. Tell them to subscribe. Take their phone away and subscribe for them. Tell them it will change their life, or at least keep them company. Remind them it's free. Thanks to Brad Franco, John Harvey, and our in-house Homeric scholar, Julian Benz-Brunt. See you next time. Va bene, ci vediamo, ti parlo dall'Italia. Ciao. Arrivederci, ciao. Ciao e buonanotte.