I will talk about the movie in this essay. This is going to connect to Christopher Nolan's new movie The Odyssey... eventually. However, we have a bummer of an opening first, then historical/philosophical context to get through. Maybe step out now if you're having a good day, I don't want to spoil that. If you just want to know about how cool the ocean looked in IMAX or if the cyclops was awesome, I'll write that review at the end of year when I'm doing my Top 15. First I have some other stuff to talk about.
In the poem and movie, it takes Odysseus ten years to come home from the east after destroying Troy in Homer's epic. He was the military genius who made possible the sacking of city that included the rape of innocent women, the murder of babies, the annihilation of a nation from history forever. The gods are punishing Odysseus. They are also granting him and his island kingdom, Ithica, a kind of mercy. Thousands of years later, outside the world of myths and gods, we live in the United States, in the general European "West". We still go east, and we still destroy. But no gods will be merciful to us.
On February 28th, 2026, the US military fired a missile into the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran just next to the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex. The attack was ordered by sloppy leaders based on faulty intelligence, just one of the many miscalculations in a war that was based on complete fantasies. There was no coup d'état, no quick victory, no easy way out of the conflict, and nobody wanted this*. Our government just did it on a whim, erupting a quagmire of confusion and incompetence that has lasted months and destroyed the freedom of global trade. In a way though, commerce and politics feel trite compared to the human impact of this one act. It feels disgusting to worry about gas prices when you consider the infinitely larger cost to the families in Iran. We do not yet know whether this particular attack was an accident or an intentional act of terror. Intentions matter a lot less when you look at these kinds of consequences. The missile collided with the structure, exploding instantly, causing the roof of the school to collapse sometime around 10:30 AM, only minutes after the American-Israeli joint attack on Iran began. They were hit before there was any hope of evacuation. 156 civilians were murdered. The estimate now is that 120 of them were little girls guilty of nothing more than sitting in a classroom.
We may never know the name of the operator who fired the missile, this soldier, agent, or contractor, just somebody who pressed a button. The person who fired that missile was probably sitting at a desk behind a computer in a room full of coworkers on a base. They took illegal orders from criminal officers, on the direction of a criminal civilian government, and pressed a button. On their screen, a little dot connected with some structure, followed by a flash, and that was as close as they ever got to their victims continents away. It was just another task in probably a very busy, very stressful day of many more buttons being pressed. Maybe they have reasonable deniability that it was their button and their missile that killed 156 people, 120 little girls.
I'm going to engage in some fiction writing to imagine who this person is, because we'll never have the truth, let alone justice. I imagine they were here in the US as they worked. Some minutes or hours later, this button-presser's shift ended and they left the room. I imagine they just clocked out, said goodbye to their exhausted coworkers, got in a car, and drove outside the military checkpoints, putting the war behind them. It is that easy to go from killing hundreds to going back home now. They drove on an American highway next to a thousand strangers in their own cars, no monsters, no adventures, just making a final turn on some regular street, down a perfectly mundane neighborhood, to return to their home and family. I bet they smiled as they were greeted at the door. Their dog welcomed them, their children told them of their day at school, they had a meal, and their spouse shared their bed.
That's how easy it is to welcome that much evil back home. That button-presser, that family, that nation, that culture, will never wash the sin away. You may think there are no consequences because things appear so normal, but you could never imagine the psychic horror that is seeping out of this house. This is the most haunted place in the world, we should bury it in a sarcophagus of concrete for 10,000 years to seal away the radiation. We won't, and that moral pollution is spreading to all of us. One day every single one of us will have to explain why we killed those 156 people, 120 little girls. I have excuses, but I've been here long enough, breathing in this air, drinking this water, these are my countrymen, and I'm guilty too.
Nobody will write an epic about this button-presser's journey, or direct a blockbuster about it. It is an awful story with no ending.
