An English degree dooms a person to a lifetime of quixotic ideas and fits of fancy. After countless hours spent picking through archaic and classical texts, one does glean analytic skills, mental discipline, and linguistic prowess. Unfortunately the actual knowledge of, say, the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost or the context of Beowulf has little practical application in today’s media-saturated market-driven world of disposable heroes and disparate belief systems.
Yet these little berries of scholarship refuse to lay dormant in my temporal cortex, causing some ‘crazy notions’ to come to fruit. Like on January 21 2007, when I extolled the chivalry and valor of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and even likened him to the virtuous Trojan prince Hector. After news of his possible wedlock paternity with his ex-girlfriend (here), clearly, Tom Brady is no Hector.
Hector would not be romping around Paris with a nymph named Gisele after refusing to commit to Andromache and knocking her up with Astyanax. Of course, maybe Andromache purposely got pregnant because she sensed Hector and her were drifting apart… or maybe Zeus made one his infamous ‘divine interventions’ (wink wink nudge nudge). Regardless, Brady’s unchinked moral armor has been breached. He must now prepare to be strung behind a chariot and dragged through the mud by the tabloids.
Join me next time, when I’ll compare Hillary Clinton to Dido, Howard Stern to Ozymandias, Steve Jobs to King Midas, and the cast of Ocean’s 11, 12,and 13 to the Argonauts.
