Barack, Hillary stars
of a modern-day ‘Odyssey’

Robyn’s Hood
By Robyn McCloskey

I have a vague recollection of reading The Odyssey in my high school English class.
It’s the eighth-century epic story of one man’s journey to find his way home after the fall of Troy. It supposedly was written by a man named Homer — the one of ancient Greek poetry fame and not the Homer of pop-culture animated-sitcom fame.
One of the few elements of this story I can actually recall without resorting to Wikipedia are the names Scylla and Charybdis. Which, much like my high school algebra class, is not necessary for daily life. The only time this tidbit of information has served me well was when "Ancient Greek Mythology" was a category on Jeopardy and know-it-all Mr. Trebek posed the answer, "The two sea monsters Odysseus had to choose between."
I was able to shout out the question, "Who were Scylla and Charybdis, Alex?" Unfortunately, I was home alone at the time and therefore unable to impress anyone with my mastery of Greek mythology, which is a little like a tragedy itself.
To make Charybdis’ long story short, she apparently did something a little untoward the almighty Zeus that caused him to throw her into the open waters, thereby turning her into a sea monster. Charybdis’ dad was a man by the name of Poseidon.
Thanks to the acting talents of Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters and Red Buttons, just to name a few of the stars who studded the 1970s disaster flick, you get a pretty good idea of Charybdis’ heritage, not to mention attitude.
Scylla’s story isn’t much happier. Seems there was a messy love triangle in which her competition, rather than fight fair, decided to turn Miss Scylla into a hideous sea creature that devoured unwitting sailors as they passed by.
Not the best way to catch a man.
Scylla and Charybdis are now two rival, revenge-seeking, PMS-ing sea monsters on opposite sides of a very narrow waterway — one that our hero Odysseus must traverse. He is advised to sail closer to Scylla than to Charybdis, since she may devour only a few of the sailors, whereas Charybdis’ anger is just a little less latent and she will devour the entire ship — most likely turning it upside down, making daddy proud, all the while humming the Maureen McGovern tune There’s Got to Be a Morning After.
Having said all this, you’ve probably figured out by now that the term caught between a rock and a hard place originated with these two warring water women. It’s a phrase we throw around when there is a decision to be made but the answer isn’t quite clear — times when we have a choice to make but aren’t quite sure which is the best or worst one.
It’s also a term I believe serves as a parallel for today’s political pulse. As our most recent Pennsylvania primary can attest, we, like Odysseus, are caught between a Scylla and a Charybdis, a Barack and a hard place. Wanting to know the better choice, we must decide which side will hurt less, which will cause the least damage?
But unlike Scylla and Charybdis, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are not unwitting characters in a long-ago, made-up tragedy full of mythical creatures. They are not sea monsters, or ordinary everyday monsters for that matter, even if Obama’s former senior foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, would disagree, especially after she caused a big brouhaha by calling Hillary a monster who’d do anything to win.
Barack and Hillary are seasoned professionals who jumped into these dangerous waterways with eyes wide open and plenty of ammunition. They have fired more than their fair share of arrows, trying to find each other’s Achilles’ heel. Like the ancient sea creatures, they appear evenly matched. But only one can win.
While I’ve yet to personally figure out which of these candidates is Scylla and which is Charybdis, let’s hope that no matter who wins these Democratic primaries, it will have been an odyssey worth taking.
We need our capsized ship to right itself so that, much like Odysseus, we will all find our way home. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net