A storm punctuates a summer of epic anxiety — and pelts hapless mortals with ancient truth

Dark clouds swarm a late summer sky, possibly signifying storms ahead. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

The hail storm that struck a couple of weeks ago was violent.

On Constitution Street, the quarter-sized hail drummed on the roof, ricocheted off our windows and dimpled the hood of the Jeep as if it had been peened with an icy hammer. The barrage came at 10:58 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 5, and it hit Emporia with such precision that you might have thought there was a target painted on the street.

I’m not typically afraid of storms, even though I’ve seen more than my share of death and destruction at Greensburg and Joplin, but this one put a lump in my throat. I didn’t hear the NOAA weather radio warning because I had my headphones on listening to the James Horner score for “Legends of the Fall” while attempting to write that week’s column. I knew it had been thundering, and the wind grew fierce, but the hail got my attention. It was the kind of loud that you feel.

I removed the cans and left the writing desk and went to the front door to peer at the white pellets pinballing across the porch. Kim had heard the radio alert and appeared out of the darkness behind me. I sputtered something about the windows and the cars and the roof, which we’d had repaired after a previous storm.

“It’s just hail,” she said.

We’ve had unusual weather here in Kansas this summer, and it seems to match a collective sense of cultural unease. It’s been too wet or too hot and much too windy. There were too few days that felt normal, not enough meals cooked on the grill, not enough time spent casting a lure or chasing a ball. Now summer was all but gone. My reaction to the hail could not have been sharper had it scattered flaming on the ground, as it does in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille movie, “The Ten Commandments.”

At least the Cottonwood River hasn’t yet turned to blood.

Kim was not indulging my invocation of the Bible and Hollywood technical effects. The cars will still run, even with hail damage. If the roof leaks or we have broken windows, we’d deal with it the next day. Go write your column, she said.

The hail storm wasn’t even a big event, at least not historically.

The hail that pelted Emporia was, at its largest, the size of a quarter, just about one inch in diameter. The heaviest hailstone in Kansas history fell Sept. 3, 1970, at Coffeyville, according to the National Weather Service. The “hideous hailstone,” as the weather service dubbed it, measured 17.5 inches in circumference, was 5.7 inches in diameter, and weighed a whopping 1.67 pounds. It held the record for the heaviest in the United States until 2010, when a hailstone weighing nearly 2 pounds landed in South Dakota.

The recent Emporia hail storm set no records, but I’ve been thinking of that storm often. While there’s no correlation between politics and the weather — none, that is, if you don’t count how federal policy is contributing to global warming — the barrage was the end of a summer of unease and the beginning of an autumn of uncertainty.

In Greek mythology,j Zeus is the god of storms, hurling thunderbolts at hapless mortals. He’s the supreme deity of the pantheon, the sky father who has rules about how you treat strangers. If you’ve seen Christoper Nolan’s “The Odyssey” then you know mortals break the rule of hospitality at their own peril. If you haven’t seen the film, get a good pair of earplugs before you go, because it is loud. Like all pieces of art, the movie isn’t about the ancient past but is a lesson about now, with Matt Damon as the hapless hero who’s been 20 years away from home because of his own hubris. He must pay, among other debts, for his transgression in using the Trojan Horse — an ostensible gift — to topple Troy.

After Odysseus has his crew tie him to the mast so he can hear the singing of the sirens, something no mortal has listened to and lived, he’s asked what the song was like.

“All the things you wanted to be and then all the things you wished you never wished for,” Nolan’s Odysseus answers. “It was a delicious itch you want to scratch but you find it under the skin and can’t reach it. It told you what you most want is what you most can’t have and that the most you can’t have is what you already had and lost. It was a song of all the promises I failed to keep.”

While Nolan’s film impressed many, Emily Wilson — whose translation of “The Odyssey” was published in 2018 — was having none of it. In the London Review of Books, she declares that she would have been “ashamed” to have written any part of the script.

“Nolan’s spectacle threatens to drown out his story just as the towering waves of the wine-dark sea — more grey than purple — threaten to overwhelm his hero’s ship,” Wilson writes.

The film doesn’t show that war or killing are wrong, she observes, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it. There is no perspective from the victims of Odysseus’s violence, and we know nothing of the Trojans because they are unnamed and hidden by masks.

The dialogue between Nolan and Wilson has defined the summer of 2026.

It is a dialogue of two powerful and informed perspectives, addressed not to one other but to their respective audiences. In Wilson’s case, the missiles are sometimes barbed with wit. This isn’t an argument, but more of an exploration of what it means to make art now. There is a sense of disappointment in Wilson’s piece, a longing for what could have been had Nolan taken one of Western literature’s oldest stories as seriously as he did Dunkirk or the race to build the atomic bomb in “Oppenheimer.”

This is not to say there is no art in “The Odyssey.”

But it’s difficult to hear it.

Fitting, because this has been the summer of loudness and hope and desperation. The volume at which events were flung at us increased as the weeks burned away, and foremost among these was an ever-widening war in Iran. That war has claimed the lives of 18 service members and left nearly 500 wounded. More than 7,000 have been killed in Iran, according to reporting by the BBC. These thousands of nameless and faceless dead should haunt the conscience of every American.

The economic costs of the war are felt every time we buy groceries or put gas in the car. Prices are up by 3.4% over last year, according to reporting by the New York Times, while the nationwide average for a gallon of gasoline was $4.06. Gas is somewhat lower in Kansas, according to the American Automobile Association, averaging $3.78 on Aug. 12.

The day before the Emporia hail storm was the August primary in Kansas, another source of anxiety. But voters soundly rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have resulted in the popular election of state supreme court justices, so there was some hope.

The right to abortion and equity in school funding was nowhere in the text of the amendment, but those were the reasons the GOP majority in the Kansas Legislature put the question on the ballot. Had voters approved the change, it would have opened up the Kansas Supreme Court to the big money and regressive politics that hold sway in the statehouse. It was a replay of a 2022 ballot question, in which voters were asked to approve a provision to the state constitution denying the right to an abortion. Both the 2022 and 2026 questions failed by margins close to 60-40.

Collectively, Kansans are not as regressive as the legislative majority.

This is a gubernatorial election year in the state, and those races were set by the August primary results. There are also contests for U.S. Senate and all four Kansas House seats, but there’s no need here to describe any of these races. They’ve been amply covered elsewhere and you’ll be deluged by campaign ads soon enough. What is worth noting is that for every general election of the last 10 years, it has seemed like democracy itself has been on the ballot.

But there is even more gravity to this November’s midterm.

The federal government is broken. The imperial presidency of Donald Trump has wreaked havoc on the mechanisms of government built to preserve the health and welfare of Americans of all ages. Health insurance has been denied to millions, thousands of food safety inspectors, scientists, and other federal workers have been fired, and the government has clawed back billions in federal funding to local health departments. At the same time the administration has been busy gutting protections for average Americans, it has rewarded tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and influence.

The administration has also waged a campaign of retribution against nonconforming “others” — those of a different political or cultural persuasion, those who choose to define themselves differently in sexual or social relationships, those who insist on a factual and sometimes uncomfortable narrative of America’s past. Above all, the administration has sought to punish immigrants, and it has empowered a virtual army of federal agents and built a chain of concentration camps to do so. It also plans to give ICE officers shock gloves, a bit of stolen lightning to help “remove uncooperative subjects from cars and houses,” according to the Associated Press.

This last would invite the wrath of Zeus for violating his sacred law of hospitality. The Greek word is “xenia” and it means food and shelter must be freely offered to weary travelers, even though they be strangers.

“Those who traveled to an unfamiliar land used the norms and expectations of xenia to form bonds with people who might otherwise have treated them as too ragged and dirty to deserve a welcome,” writes Wilson in the introduction to her translation, “or as too dangerous to accept into their home.”

It is a complicated concept, Wilson notes, because it can be used not only to encourage hospitality but also to punish those who are reluctant to welcome possible pirates or bandits. It is the ethical dilemma of the most ancient of times — and of now.

Simplified, it’s the Golden Rule.

Given time, it evolves into western liberal democracy.

Just as our democracy was inspired by the Athenian model, so too have the classic Greeks shaped our ways of thinking about politics, power, and justice. It’s why we turn one of the oldest stories in Western literature into a summer blockbuster and debate its merits in forums ranging from the London Review of Books to your local newspaper. It’s why it rankles that Trump attempted to evade a “credible threat” while leaving Turkey in July, according to the Washington Post, by hiding in a catering truck that secretly carried him away from an older version of Air Force One to a waiting military jet. What kind of hospitality are you showing the journalists and Cabinet officials who travel with you when you let them think you’re on the same plane, when they’re just sitting decoys?

Back in May, Chinese president Xi Jinping alluded to the Thucydides Trap in his meeting with Trump in Beijing. The trap, named for the ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War, refers to the threat of war when a rising power displaces an older one. Two and a half millennia ago, the rise of Athens resulted in a 10-year war with Sparta.

Today, the administration has plunged the United States into sharp decline, both domestically and internationally. While Xi declared the U.S. and China could avoid the trap and establish a new power paradigm, he was also implying that a weakened America had left a power vacuum the Chinese were eager to fill.

Since then, the war with Iran has only exacerbated that weakness.

As we squander our missiles in a war with no identifiable realistic objective, our foreign policy has been dictated by chaos and disorder. Our leader hides in a catering truck from the threat of assassination while the world stumbles closer to catastrophe.

Whatever the weeks and months were like before the Second World War, it must have felt something like this — hoping for the future while steeling oneself for what nightmares may come. A feeling that you were a hapless mortal tossed on the wine-dark sea of history, a target for the vengeful gods and fodder for the foolish kings without empathy.

That’s why I had such a powerful reaction to the Emporia hail storm. It just took me a little while to figure it out. And, as usual, I’ve been in my own head, thinking of Odysseus and Agamemnon and the toppled towers of Troy.

Kim, meanwhile, sees no signs and wonders in hail storms or Hollywood blockbusters. Tomorrow, she says. There will be time to assess the damage then. Get some sleep. She is Emily Wilson to my Christopher Nolan. Later, Kim hands me a copy of Wilson’s translation, whose first line is: “Tell me about a complicated man.”

Sometimes we’re home and just don’t know it.