The gang serves lies, the passionate Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth Hunts in no pack. -Robinson Jeffers from "Be Angry at the Sun"
Imagine you awoke one morning with total amnesia. You had no idea who you were or had been, who you knew or had known, where you had ever lived, where you worked, went to school. You could remember nothing before that morning.
When you opened your eyes there was a woman standing beside your bed who said good morning and asked how you felt. When you tell her you can’t remember anything, she says she knows who you are and why you remember nothing. If you’d like, she says, I can tell you.
Yes, please, you say.
So, she tells you your name, the names of your wife and kids, and the address of your house. She tells you you are a real estate agent and were on your way to meet a client when a car ran a red light and put you in a coma for six months. She tells you her name and explains she is a staff member at the hospice where you’ve been living since you left the hospital.
That’s what she could tell you.
She could also tell you that you are the ringleader of a dangerous white supremacy terrorist group whose plan to spray paint swastikas on Jonathan Greenblatt’s house was thwarted when the only other member of your group besides you turned out to be an FBI agent, and when he called in the Special Command Air Borne Incel Elimination Squad to take you out just as you were buying a can of spray paint at the Home Depot, the thousands of rounds of ammunition they fired, while killing dozens of shoppers, somehow missed you. It did, however, set off a chain reaction of exploding cans of spray paint, which launched you all the way over into the bathroom fixtures aisle, where you hit your head on the base of a toilet, sending you into a coma for six months. And a vengeful Jonathan Greenblatt has sworn, if he ever sees you outside the hospice, to call you an antisemite.
History matters. Your life will be radically different depending on which set of facts the woman at the hospice gives you.
Odysseus Unsheathed is interested in where our facts come from, who sent them, and why. We even have a “magic fact:”
When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, they razed thousands of churches, but left the synagogues untouched. Then they murdered 66 million Russian Christians.
Just think of the (magical) power in that (completely unknown) fact.
In addition to launching history’s bloodiest genocide, the Bolsheviks stripped Russia to the bone and her wealth was shipped abroad, primarily to the United States. Russia’s wealth entered the US via the Port of New York under the dead gaze of the Statue of Liberty. It was unloaded onto the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where, reportedly, it was a common sight during the 1920s to see street peddlers hawking the wedding rings of Russian housewives. Along with Russia’s wealth, however, America imported Russia’s fate, which, all stone, approaches. That approach is the subject matter of Odysseus Unsheathed.
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