Thread by @apistone

Every time I see someone RT this with a comment about this being why we don't have debt-free college or universal healthcare of all the other things this money could (should) fund, I'm always distracted by their use of Her-cu-les here. I know they're trying to be 'fun' buuut 1/

It actually feels like an inadvertently apt use of Hercules. In Greek tragedy, Heracles is consistently a hero whose heroism has grave and terrible domestic consequences. The price of his kleos is too high
(shout out to Katherine Lu's AMAZING dissertation on this topic) 2/

At the core of many of his stories is violence against the very people he should never ever hurt. His family, his friends. In many ways, his is a cautionary tale about the impossibility of containing violence. 3/

If you want a hero who can kill all the monsters, you'll get a hero who kills good guys too. We see violence erupt in the domestic sphere in both the Trachiniae and Heracles Furens -- it's not a conscious choice by Heracles, but maybe it's an inevitability. 4/

And Heracles highlights how the price of individual physical glory is often communal pain. A *lot* of people always suffer so that heroes get to win their kleos. Maybe this is a bad model, and it's not worth the internal violence just to have that hero? 5/

And lest we think that these monsters had it coming, and we NEED a Heracles to make the world safe for normal (non-heroic) Greeks, stories of Heracles also offer us a sympathetic monster in Stesichorus' Geryoneis (adapted into Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red). 6/

Is this really the death of a monstrous monster?
"the arrow held straight on the crown of his head, and it stained with gushing blood his breastplate and gory limbs; and Geryon drooped his neck to one side, like a poppy which spoiling its tender beauty suddenly sheds its petals."

So, in conclusion, it feels right that the DoD invoked Heracles, though they almost certainly didn't mean to invoke this element of his story. But maybe we SHOULD think about the cautionary thread woven through stories about Heracles as we look at an "angel of death' plane 8/

And maybe think about the communal damage and unrestrained nature of violence. Maybe some of the 'monsters' we think we need to fight aren't so monstrous and maybe the ethical cost of individualized heroic glory isn't worth the (ethical and economic) price /end