Did you get your deer yet? It’s a common question around Vermont these days. Trees are bare, snow is common, if not ubiquitous; driving on rural roads, one often sees men dressed in camouflage and blaze orange out walking, rifles slung from their shoulders. It’s easy to imagine a small insurrection is under way.

There are fewer hunters in Vermont than there once were, mostly due to shifting demographics. Some people here are opposed to hunting, but there’s little public debate. Anyone who’s hit a deer with their car, or even had a near miss, may think kind thoughts when it’s time to thin the herd. Problem is, the herd is not getting thin. All up and down the east coast, the deer population is exploding into city parks and suburban back yards. The U.S. now has more deer than ever, as far as we can tell.
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Those whom the gods would destroy, they first drive to madness. If we’re not there yet, we must be getting pretty close. Weeks ago, almost all the respondents in my informal poll, more than anything else, just wanted this election to be over. The optimist sitting on my shoulder says when Florida absentee ballots are counted tomorrow, we will have elected a new president. The pessimist, sitting in the pit of my stomach, knows better. He thinks Florida will go at least another week and when it’s nailed down, Warren Christopher and James Baker will take their show on the road to Oregon, Wisconsin or New Mexico.
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The political season is old and stale and even the candidates are getting tired of hearing the same old lines and they’re groping for something else to say. Last week, Ruth Dwyer, the right-wing Republican who’s running for governor in Vermont, was railing against the state’s civil union law, the one that allows lesbians and gays to enjoy the legal equivalent of marriage. Ms. Dwyer reminded voters that if such excesses of liberty are to be tolerated, Vermont could well wind up going the way of Rome.
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I’ve been reading classic Greek literature lately, trying to improve myself. So far, I’ve covered the cycle of stories around the Trojan War – the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Orestia and the Aeneid. I read some of these stories when I was young. I remembered them as being about heroes and battles; extraordinary feats of strength and courage, glory and valor.

It’s odd how a story written thousands of years ago could change so much in the 25 years since I first read it. This time when I cracked open the Iliad, it was not about courage and valor, but about pettiness and vanity. The poem opens with the pouting of Achilles, the original spoiled brat. His mother was an immortal and his father was a king. Almost invulnerable, he is the strongest and most capable of all the Greek warriors – and yet he sulks in his tent, because a slave girl, a person he won as a prize, was taken away from him.
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