Imagining Trump's Border Plan as a Guantánamo for 'Illegals'

The new play, “Building the wall” envisions mass deportations and unlawful detainment as Greek tragedy. His play Philoctetes, Sophocles tells a story of deceit: The Greek commander Odysseus wants to convince the titular exiled war hero to fight again, and he enlists Neoptolemus, a young, impressionable boy to lie for him. “I know, my boy, it isn’t part of your nature to tell untruths or resort to double-dealing,” he says to Achilles’s son, “but victory’s a prize worth gaining.” Neoptolemus is persuaded, and the plot centers on his uneasiness with these double-dealings, and on the growing trust between him and Philoctetes. In the end, Neoptolemus’s compassion and integrity override the Greek interest, and he comes clean, confessing Odysseus’s scheme to Philoctetes. The play represents the failure of rhetorical manipulation in the face of one’s own natural moral intuitions, our own sense of right and wrong. To read more, click here.