Until I started listening to Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, my primary association with the name Telemachus was from The Illuminatus! Trilogy, in which the Roberts Shea and Wilson make fun of Atlas Shrugged with a cult novel called Telemachus Sneezed. I thought that was a funny spoof title for the trippy spoof novel.

Imagine my surprise, a dozen years later, when I encounter this passage from the Odyssey, in which Penelope addresses a servant:

“As for the suitors, let them take their pleasure indoors or out as they will, for they have nothing to fret about. Their corn and wine remain unwasted in their houses with none but servants to consume them, while they keep hanging about our house day after day sacrificing our oxen, sheep, and fat goats for their banquets, and never giving so much as a thought to the quantity of wine they drink. No estate can stand such recklessness, for we have now no Odysseus to protect us. If he were to come again, he and his son would soon have their revenge.”

As she spoke Telemachus sneezed so loudly that the whole house resounded with it. Penelope laughed when she heard this, and said to Eumaeus, “Go and call the stranger; did you not hear how my son sneezed just as I was speaking? This can only mean that all the suitors are going to be killed, and that not one of them shall escape.

Apparently, the ancients considered a sneeze to be a good omen.

(And, apparently, the ancients considered mass murder to make a happy ending.)

And they can’t even claim it’s “really about slavery” this time.

From blog.Mises.org:

She actually considered breaking up the union: thought crime

September 2, 2008 10:56 AM by Jeffrey Tucker | Other posts by Jeffrey Tucker | Comments (0)

Alaska only became a state in 1959, but somehow we are supposed to believe that it is part of the enternal natural law that it should always and everywhere be part of the union, and any thought to the contrary–the mere thought!–is grounds for permanent exclusion from public office.

Such is the implication behind the completely bizarre claim that Sarah Palin’s involvement with the Alaskan secession movement amounts to a disastrous revelation for the McCain camp.

Why precisely this is such a horrid thought is never explained. Alaska would surely be better off, and does anyone in the other 49 states really believe that some calamity would befall the U.S. if Alaska became independent? It’s nuts. Separating off territories from a mother country is at the very core of U.S. history and its founding, and we really saw many examples of peaceful secession in the old Soviet Union.

But somehow in the U.S., the very idea that the existing configuration of the nation state should ever be diminished by a single inch is a great taboo. And why? Because the media tell us so.

This book on secession clearly needs broader circulation.