Reality vs mythology!

Tuesday, July 14, 2026 at 10:36 AM

   The great filmmaker, Christopher Nolan, is presenting The Odyssey, this weekend, as his final film. He says this about all his films, but keeps on giving us some of his best works. The Odyssey is going to be a blockbuster, according to all the reviews by those who have seen the final cut. Apparently, he has transformed Homer’s epic tale of love and war and jealousy and magic into something special. I cannot wait to go with my son this weekend to enjoy this spectacle! After all, Nolan is the director that gave us Oppenheimer, The Dark Knight, Inception, Dunkirk, Memento, to name just a few of his blockbuster movies.

   In this version of The Odyssey, Helen of Troy is black. She is being portrayed by Lupita Nyongo! Oh, the tragedy! Oh, the shame! Oh, the calamity! According to Elon Musk, and most of the right-wing media, especially Newsmax, everyone knows that Helen of Troy was white! How could Nolan perpetuate such a travesty, of miscasting a black woman to portray her? It is an affront to our sensibilities, I tell you; an affront to decency, to history, to white supremacy.

   Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. I presume all those people in right wing media have at least a college degree, which in reality means nothing these days anyway. Surely, they know that this blind man, the great storyteller that could neither read nor write, made up this story through an overactive imagination. To me, Homer is the greatest storyteller ever. He told the story of the Odyssey and the Iliad, about Achilles and Hector and Paris and Odysseus and Priam and Cassandra and all the other characters he dreamed up in his mind, and who will all live on forever, until we are all sucked into that black hole in an ever-expanding universe.

   None of these people actually existed! Yet, here we are, opining on whether a black woman should portray a woman who never existed! Apart from the racist connotations of all this, it just goes to show how much rampant stupidity is common among these people. I suppose they also believe in the Greek, Roman, Norse, and all the pagan gods and demons that have been written about. Maybe Icarus did fly too close to the sun, or maybe Orpheus did go down to Hades to rescue Eurydice. Wat a ting!

   This is what happens when our educational systems break down. This is what happens when misinformation takes over from facts. When myths handed down become real history, like the Battle of St. George’s Caye, or Emory King’s version of how we, in the Jewel, were happy slaves, who loved our massas as they beat and raped the sh*t out of us. We were apparently suffering from Stockholm syndrome back then, and some of us Belizeans still are. Or that the 2020 elections were rigged! Myths that become reality!

   The thing is, I read all those stories when I was a child. I read about Zeus and Thor and Loki and Superman and Batman, and in my still unformed mind, I knew that they were fairytales. I never believed in magic, except for the magic of women and falling in love. Now, if as a child, not gifted or blessed with a brilliant mind, I could separate fantasy from reality, please help me understand why we are discussing Helen’s race in 2026? Again, none of these people or gods existed. And yet, I have spoken to grown a** adults who believe that it was all real. Like those who believe in angels!

   I am going to see this movie and lose myself in the fantasy of it all. Escape from the present and wish that Circe and Polyphemus and the Hydras really existed. To me they are much less scary than the times we are now living in. Wat a ting!

   “I am part of all that I have met;

   Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

   Gleams that untravel’d world whose margin fades

   For ever and forever when I move.”

   — Ulysses by Tennyson.

P.S.: My reference in equating The Battle of St. George’s to being a myth is not regarding the battle itself, which was fought in 1798. The myth, in my opinion, was that slaves helped in defeating the Spanish armada. It was a naval battle and the reef did most of the damage to their ships, and not slaves with pocono bwai sticks! That is the part which I believe is mythology. I was called out for my opaqueness in referring to the battle as a myth. It was not!

Glen