The Menelaus Gambit
Seeing Beneath the Illusions
In Book 4 of Homer’s Odyssey, Menelaus recounts how he and a few picked men snuck up on the sleeping god Proteus, grabbed hold of him, and hung on as Proteus changed into several fearsome shapes until Proteus tired, regained his natural shape, and consented to answer Menelaus’s questions.
In my play Penelope and Odysseus (A True Story?), I have Menelaus say “I focused on what my hands could feel beneath the illusions, and I won through.”
That is the guiding principle of this Substack.
Winston Churchill reportedly said that courage is the most important virtue, because without it none of the others will matter.
Seeing beneath illusions can give you courage of substantive convictions and useful information to serve you well every day of your life.
My post A Field Guide to the Menelaus Gambit gives an overview of what some posts address.
About me:
My parents met as garment workers and union activists in a Maidenform factory. My father, Archie Lieberman, invested his working life in defending industrial workers successfully against all abusers: bosses, union bureaucrats, and communists, the last listed of whom he said were the worst. He would stress from time to time, in discussing this or that matter, the need to figure out what other people were thinking beneath the surface.
I grew up in Bayonne, N.J., where many families drew their incomes from industrial workers or from selling to them, and I had many friends and classmates who came from those families. They were fine, decent people who were better adjusted than many people I met in college. And yet these good people were being roundly criticized by major media for being war mongers, racists, and overpriced, shoddy, lazy, and troublesome workers who were causing America’s economic decline (hollowed out industries and cities, inflation, lost jobs), military debacles, and—viciously slanderous false charges of—war crimes.
This matters because work that is evaluated and rewarded in real-world measures—industrial production, business success, hard science, most sports, etc.—produces a hard discipline of looking clearly at reality and dealing with it well, at least in those areas where performance is measured. And the more existential the metric-based activity is, the more it tempers everything a person does. In contrast, when people can “BS,” or when their wealth or power protects them from the consequences of their actions, they can stray very far from reality, with disastrous consequences. We are seeing this now. Ditto for people prevented from working or seduced into accepting “peanuts” in “welfare” for not working.
I got a BA in 1967 from the University of Pennsylvania, Magna Cum Laude with distinction in physics, two varsity letters in track (48.0 sec. PR, quarter mile), and the Frazier prize for the varsity athlete with the highest academic average. I got an MA in 1970 from Princeton University in an engineering area with an insignificant published paper (liquid crystals). I then worked for Western Electric, then American Cyanamid, as a computer programmer/analyst, in systems and in applications.
My health was permanently shattered by the 1976 Swine Flu Shot. I took to writing to address and understand what was happening in the world, so that I may gain from useful information, to compensate for what I had lost in health.
My book Unfit to Manage! (McGraw-Hill, 1988) got book-jacket endorsements from John Kenneth Galbraith, Tom Peters, and Bayard Rustin (all via “cold” letters I sent them). I can’t help it if Bill Clinton and Ross Perot reversed the meaning of my words, “high-skill, high-pay jobs,” and the madness of “subsidizing foreign competition” (for documentation, see a coming post). I showed that American workers could compete internationally with high pay if managements worked smarter. Both men took positions that American workers could not compete and needed massive government help to do so; Clinton, with massive reeducation programs; Perot, with big tariff walls and other protectionist measures. All were DOA. There are profound lessons in this for today. Look for my posts on it.
Later, my interest turned to understanding financial markets and their interactions with political government so that my wife and I could do better than what bank accounts were offering. Again: profound lessons for today; look for my posts, including under “political economy.”
I wrote Penelope and Odysseus (A True Story?) for the pleasure of it, to feel good. Just as negative emotions hurt the body, positive ones help and heal, via the adrenal glands and other organs. Having good people in your life is a blessing. Thinking about them can also be a blessing, even if far removed in time and space. I would go back to reading this or that section in the Odyssey many times to visit the wonderful heroes in it. The people portrayed, including the villains, seemed to be so real that I set out to see if real events could underlie the grandiose story being told. They can. Furthermore, taking that approach makes the story ever more thrilling, inspiring, and surprising. Read it and see for yourself.
All along, for over 50 years, I have been building an ever-larger base of practical knowledge in nutrition—supplements and foods—and other health areas. Applying them has helped me greatly to deal with an ever increasing load of health challenges brought on by multiple effects of aging on top of continuing crippling, disabling, and life-threatening effects of the 1976 Swine Flu shot. I will be sharing useful health information in some of my posts; look for them under “Health.”
Finally, THANK YOU to all the giants on whose shoulders I stand and walk among.
And THANK YOU to the people who made and make Substack possible. Without it, I would not have this opportunity to share what I know with the world.
