President Margites
Since Homer-mania is all the rage
There was a man neither farmer nor soldier, neither cobbler nor king by the old reckoning of kings, yet President he was named, and sat in a white house of many rooms, ringed by twelve counselors none of whom he could name, and behind him always an eagle wrought in gold, wings spread as if it too were tired of listening.
Many things he knew, and he knew them all badly: he knew there were wars, but not who was winning them; he knew there was money, but not where it came from or went, though men in dark suits with wires in their ears assured him it was Somewhere Very Good; he knew the great sea touched his country on two sides but forgot, mid-sentence, which two, and called them both “the ocean, the big one” until an aide, wincing, supplied the names.
He could not tell a tariff from a trident, yet swung both as though they might frighten the enemy fleet, and declared to the assembled cameras that he alone understood the tides, the markets, and the will of the people, all three of which had gone out without telling him.
His scribes wrote proclamations behind him all the day — not on tablets of clay but on the small glowing rectangle he carried like a scepter — and he issued them gladly at three in the morning, the way a child signs his name in wet sand, delighted by the shape of it.
Once, they say, he stood before the assembled elders of Congress and called for silence, though none had been speaking, and thundered a speech of such magnificent confusion that the interpreters wept, not from feeling, but from duty, and the man beside him held up a sign that said APPLAUSE though nothing had yet been said worth applauding. He praised his own wisdom in the third person, as though Wisdom herself were a distant cousin from the home state who occasionally returned his calls.
He knew he should be loved, and so demanded it, the way a man demands the sun rise twice if the first rising did not flatter him enough, and had built for himself a great silver bird that carried him from one gathering of the loyal to the next, so that he need never learn what the unloyal thought. His generals rolled their eyes where he could not see, which, being a man who saw badly all directions but one — the direction of mirrors — was almost everywhere.
Zeus, watching from far off, is said to have laughed the long low laugh of a god who has seen every kind of fool and finds, still, that mortals invent new ones. “Behold,” he said to Hermes, “a man who governs a great country the way a child governs a bathtub: certain he is the captain, sure the boat is enormous, proud of the flag he has stuck to its prow, never once noticing there is no sea.”
And so he ruled, badly, but with tremendous confidence, which the poets note is not nothing — for many a wiser man has ruled with less, and none so loudly.
He kept, too, a council of advisors, and this council he summoned not to a hall but to a long table shaped like nothing so much as a rectangle of misery, and each advisor was made to speak in turn and praise him, and this they did in escalating verses, the way rival singers once traded boasts at funeral games, except here the prize was not a tripod of bronze but simply not being sent home in disgrace by sundown.
And it came to pass that a rival king arose from the northern provinces, a man of oiled hair and much television, and challenged him to a contest of words before the multitude, and the two men stood at their podiums like heroes before the walls of Troy, except neither had walls to defend, only polling numbers, which are worse, being invisible and yet somehow always falling on someone’s head.
President Margites opened his mouth to answer a question about the price of eggs and instead delivered, unprompted, the full history of a golf course he had once built upon a swamp, praising its greens as Homer once praised the beauty of Helen, and the multitude sat in the silence of men who have watched a chariot lose its wheel mid-race and are too polite to say so.
He had, besides, a golden eagle that was not alive, and a smaller eagle that was alive, and he often confused which was which, addressing the statue with great tenderness and startling the living bird into flight. His scepter, as before, was the glowing rectangle, but now it had grown heavier in his hand, so laden was it with proclamations, until his arm ached from the sheer weight of his own opinions, and still he would not set it down, not even at the feasting table, not even in sleep, so that servants whispered he dreamed entirely in capital letters.
Once a comet crossed the sky, as comets do, meaning nothing, as comets mean nothing, and he declared before the assembled priests and generals that it had come to congratulate him personally, and appointed a commission to determine the comet’s opinion of his trade policy. The priests, who knew better than to argue with a man holding both a scepter and an eagle, nodded gravely and began, without conviction, to consult the entrails of nothing at all.
And when at last a storm struck the coastline and the waters rose into the streets of a great city, he flew over it in his silver bird and dropped, not aid, not comfort, but paper towels, rolled one by one from the window like a man feeding gulls, and called it, from the great height at which he flew, “a beautiful sight, really, one of the best I’ve seen,” and the gulls, unimpressed, did not even gather.
Zeus, watching still, could no longer laugh, so entirely had laughter failed to contain the thing before him, and turned instead to Hermes and said only, “Write this one down exactly as it happened. No one will believe it otherwise, and yet it is the truest thing I have shown you all year.”