White House chief strategist and all around gross beast-man Steve Bannon is occasionally considered something of an intellect in Washington, D.C., due to the rumor that he literally has read a book once. To Beltway types, someone in a position of power who has some basic knowledge of literature or historical events is pretty much a wizard. The only book most politicos/business majors have heard of is the ancient Chinese guide to scoring loose chicks, The Art of War, so anything beyond that is a cherry atop the literary sundae.
Slate reports on Steve Bannon’s confused fixation with ancient Greece, which is all sadly very predictable. Specifically of interest to Bannon is the work of Thucydides, the dry scribe behind the documentation of the agony of the Peloponnesian War, the generation-spanning conflict between the city-states of Athens and Sparta and their various allies/client states. Thucydides writes with rigorous attention to authenticity and accuracy, and hits on themes such as the clash of civilizations and realpolitik amorality that naturally appeal to a dermatological nightmare like Bannon. Obviously, this self-appointed defender of Western civilization is no doubt beset by frequent wet dreams of the wine-dark sea and alpha Greek authority figures like the Olympian gods who were by turns bitchy, crass, violent, and utterly lacking a conception of consent, which is all too typical of right-wing “thinkers.”
Thus, Bannon’s veneration of the good ol’ days of antiquity is hardly unique. It’s been long documented that conservatives—whether they be country-club paleo-cons, sadistic neo-cons, or the hentai Brownshirts of the alt-right—seem to have this supremely lame but pathological urge to view themselves as the inheritors of the Greek legacy that “saved” a nascent West from unstoppable (yet also soft and weak and non-hetero!) Oriental despots. More often than not, these right-of-center dweebs specifically feel an affinity for the Spartan legacy: the brutal city-state of austere killjoy proto-fascists that routinely exposed “weak/undesirable” children to the elements and relied on a massive population of slaves for their labor force.
But back to Steve “Woof” Bannon. His entire life is built around a desire to hasten the end result of these clashes of fair-skinned civilizations with slightly less fair-skinned civilizations. He’s the guy in the highest circles of government who believes in the inevitability of a literal final apocalyptic battle between, er, who the hell knows? ISIS and Jared Kushner? Most ancient Greeks didn’t have the spare time to LARP their fan-fic fantasies, but Bannon certainly is picking up their slack.
And yes, even though the Spartans would have certainly left baby Steve Bannon on the side of a muddy road to freeze to death, here are some well-researched guesses about which Greek and Greek-adjacent figures/historical events resonate most strongly with Steve Bannon, the grumpy guy who routinely puts his unctuous tongue in the ear of the most powerful idiot in the world and says, “Do the shittiest possible thing, Mr. President.”
The Spartan king whose wife, Helen, absconded with the dashing Trojan prince Paris. It’s not that Steve Bannon admires him, but he does appreciate his role as history’s foremost cuck.
Steve Bannon is a man of culture, the sort of aspiring Hollywood loser who tried for many years to launch any number of films about Crusaders retaking the Holy Land from the Saracens and other such lame shit. Thus, it’s almost certain that he is at least passively aware of the literature and poetry of the Golden Age of Greece. One of this era’s most well-known plays is Medea (Tyler Perry) by Euripides, the summer blockbuster about a scorned wife taking vengeance on her no-good husband by murdering his new wife and literally her own children. You know, just to make a point. That’s the Steve Bannon guarantee, folks: Half-measures will no longer be tolerated, and sometimes you gotta just do something a little bit out there (racist travel ban) to get truly noticed.
A speechwriter. Steve Bannon loves a good speech, and he appreciates Lysias in general, but why did he not take a stronger stand against the international globalist cabal?
The hard-as-hell Spartan who finally forced Athens to capitulate and thus conclude the agony of the Peloponnesian War. A guy whom everyone likes, though. No points for originality there, Steve!
A complicated Athenian statesman whose shifting loyalties no doubt befuddled the black-and-white entry-level brain of Steve “I hate the brown guys” Bannon, Alcibiades and his Breitbart-ian impulses for performative pandemonium absolutely strike a chord with the severely bloated right-wing provocateur who probably whispers to Donald Trump sentences such as, “Hi Donald, it’s me, Steve. Well, talk to you later then, I guess. Bye.”
“Thanks to the helots (slaves) who worked so the Spartans could play with swords and be jerks to each other and everyone else, I hereby declare slavery was actually good,” Steve Bannon intones to a bewildered crowd at a $5,500-per-plate GOP fundraiser. “I mean, just when the Spartans did it. Okay, I mean, it’s probably pretty good in general. Lock her up! Lock her up!”
Known to history as the entrepreneur who did some classic Silicon Valley–level disruption on the concept of “fire” to burn down the Temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) for no goddamn reason other than he wanted to be famous. Some men just want to see the world burn, and others still just want to burn one specific building so that one day they can have a moderately long entry on Wikipedia. The destructive vanity of Herostratus must give Steve Bannon the odd boner, as nothing really gets sweaty ol’ Bannon charged up like dumb, pointless anarchy.
Despite casting himself as the type of guy not particularly enamored with neoconservative aims, Bannon’s stated preference for the Spartans over their Athenian adversaries is surely tested when daydreaming about the gorgeous efficiency in which the Athenian war-machine decided to bring the violence to the neutral (and tiny) city-state of Melos, concluding in a jolly good little genocide that culminated with the wholesale slaughter of the Melian menfolk and forcing the women and children of Melos into chattel slavery. Carnage is good stuff, indeed.
There’s no way Steve Bannon doesn’t wipe away a single vinegar smelling tear of joy from his puffy jowls each time he reads Thucydides describe the lethal and horrifying pandemic that descended upon Athens, which ended up killing something like 25 percent of the population. “That’s what they get,” Steve Bannon mutters to himself as he sits in a dark room wearing only crunchy and soiled boxer-briefs. “That’s what they get for not wearing red Spartan cloaks and refusing to kill their ugly kids!”
Old Ephialtes! Best known to people who don’t read Herodotus as the failson who wanted to join Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae before betraying them to Xerxes and the Persians, Bannon exclusively sympathizes with the fictionalized Frank Miller Ephialtes of 300, because he’s both less successful and more deformed and gross than Steve Bannon, and boy, that’s not a combo you come across every day.
Steve Bannon’s favorite film. The joke is that Steve Bannon has bad taste in everything.
Usually depicted as a three-headed dog with a serpent’s tail that guards the gates of the Underworld, Cerberus appeals to the part of Steve Bannon’s dark heart and slovenly brain that is fully cognizant of the fact that he is himself is a disgusting rabid dog that has positioned himself at the mouth of hell and is basically just a sweaty monster whose entire purpose is to make life materially worse for any who cross his nasty path. What a monster, what a fucking vile bullshit man, I mean my God, this guy really has so much power. It’s truly upsetting. No more jokes.
