OPINION:
Thanks to the movies, the flavor of this summer has been Ulysses, who, upon returning from the Trojan War, slaughtered his wife’s suitors.
Who among us has not had that sort of thing happen?
Regardless, a few recent events have made me think more about Orestes than Ulysses. Orestes, as you may recall, was the son of Agamemnon, who, upon returning from the Trojan War, was killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus.
To save him from his mother and her lover, Orestes was spirited away by his nanny and raised on a mountain.
Several years later, Orestes, now a man, returned to his home and, with the help of his sister, Electra, killed his mother, which understandably sent him into a bit of a tailspin.
I was thinking about Orestes as I read the news that President Trump had asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate journalist Kristen Welker for suggesting that he had not enjoyed unalloyed triumphs regarding his campaign endorsements.
There has, of course, been the usual outcry from the collectivists in the legacy media about censorship, freedom of the press and whatnot.
I get the propaganda behind all that, but on an entirely different level, I do not really understand the complaints at all. The media and their intellectual predecessors spent the past century carefully and lovingly creating the federal behemoth.
They have diligently spent their entire careers making sure that the federal government is as large, expansive and intrusive as possible.
They made sure that a pointless agency, such as the FCC, existed to better control the plebeians.
In short, they created the intrusive and dangerous leviathan, and now, inexplicably, they seem surprised that someone has turned it on them.
Similarly, this has been the summer of data centers. The seemingly unstoppable force of the tech bros has, in many places, been stopped. How? Well, ironically, mostly through the use of the tools provided by the tech bros themselves.
Social media — which for most of the past two decades has contributed to social deterioration, isolation and an epidemic of loneliness — has been the primary means of arresting the progress of data centers.
It turns out that social media can also be a powerful organizing tool. Who knew?
In these three stories — Orestes, Kristen Welker and the tech bros — the creature wound up killing its creator. In Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” trilogy of plays in which Orestes is ultimately saved, one of the points Aeschylus makes is that it is wise to consider second-order consequences, especially regarding matters of revenge and justice.
In other words, people should be careful before setting in motion things that might eventually come back to hurt them.
If you have concerns about a federal government that investigates reporters for saying the most obvious and anodyne things, you might want to consider limiting the size and scope of that government.
Or, if you are ultimately going to need people to unite behind a common good — economic supremacy, better healthcare or winning our current contest with the communists in Beijing — you might want to use your awesome educational power and technical prowess for the good of individuals and groups rather than as a way to isolate and fragment people.
How did it all turn out for Orestes? After he was driven to madness by the Furies and then made healthy again by Athena, he settled in and ruled Sparta for a number of years.
I doubt that such a fate waits for either the American media or the tech bros; acknowledging and learning to live with one’s mistakes requires too much humility.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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