This, obviously, is an artistic rendering of Medusa. I pulled it off of Creativecommon.org, an organization that makes certain images legal to feature. Apologies. Had I my druthers, the image I would have featured would have been that of the much fairer Elizabeth Koch (https://images.app.goo.gl/fj7wdVB2Z38XsJ6R6) daughter and heir apparent of Charles Koch, ALEC supporter and billionaire once behind Americans for Prosperity along with a laundry list of other Republican think tanks that have conglomerated to weaken federal regulations – particularly those on the environment as they impede on Koch Industries profits. He is also a participant of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC): A group that originally splintered off from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1972 realizing that if the working poor could unionize to improve their life circumstances, why not the wealthy?
ALEC decided the best way forward to organize would be to invest in lobbyists to write laws that would enable fossil fuel industrial companies like Peabody Energy and a slurry of others to push climate change denial hence relaxing EPA regulations and enabling Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Shell et al to prospect public areas, offshore areas, and wherever else they deigned. This way they could produce synthetic products that were non-biodegradable like polyester. In so doing they would also frack mountains and build the nation’s energy portfolio but at great cost to the forests, new frontiers like Alaska, animals, mountains (potentially creating man-made seismic activity), and pollute our land, water, and air so egregiously that some people’s water became un-drinkable and cancer rates in certain areas, particularly BIPOC areas, began to skyrocket.
Where did Charles’ and his recently deceased brother, David (48% equal partners of Koch Industries) money come from? Their dad, Fred C. Koch (radical conservative charter member of the John Birch Society), who by virtue of being restricted from drilling in certain areas he wanted to explore for fossil fuel energy by that same regulatory agency, decided he could only accomplish these dreams abroad. He began in the Soviet Union (even though the U.S. officially ended ties with the communist nation) and opened up their first oil refineries. When his five year contract with them was over he decided to give aid and comfort to another burgeoning American enemy, Nazi Germany, by prospecting for oil in their country and finally acquiring success with an oil field that yielded over one thousand tons of crude which would be refined into high octane fuel for the Luftwaffes which would go on to kill more than 40 thousand civilians and destroy over a million homes. He praised the Axis powers as he excoriated American workers in 1938: “Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard” and “The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.”
You know. Because dustbowl U.S.A. during the depression was no excuse Americans should feel as though they were being overcome by adversity. Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps people! No boots? Buy some boots on layaway and pull yourselves up by them people! After he himself was criticized for doing business with a fascist enemy nation he offered the all-too-common excuse {paraphrased}, “Well, everyone was doing a little hanky panky with Nazi Germany during those years. It’s not like anyone had any real idea what it was they were doing in their concentration camps.” Of course he wasn’t wrong. Here’s a list now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust
You may be or have been a customer to one of these yourself. I know I have. And I was bar mitzvahed in 1984! However, two wrongs or 37 wrongs, as was the case here, do not make a right.
What does all this have to do with Elizebeth Koch? How does any of this have anything to do with Roman Myth?
Well. Let’s start with the latter. As most of us know Roman and Greek myth are essentially the same, the names of the gods being the only major distinction. Gods like Jupiter (Roman Zeus), Neptune (Roman Poseidon), Mercury (Roman Hermes), Minerva (Roman Athena) et al, but the stories were almost identical and Ovid, Roman poet, reinterpreted a lot of them. Jupiter, like Zeus, was basically a serial rapist. This was his chronic, routine behavior, and rather than offer to pick up the dinner check and broadway show, felt, as a greater god, all of creation was his to subordinate. Prolifically cheating on Juno (Roman Hera), whom he also raped, and would essentially blackmail into marrying because she would otherwise have a child out of wedlock. That’s how the gods rolled back then. No computers? No #metoo movement! I think he raped over twenty naiads (water nymphs?).He would shape change into something aesthetically pleasing, lowering their defenses, and then >pounce< Now, Medusa was a Gorgon. I’m not entirely sure what a Gorgon was supposed to be. There were only three of them, allegedly immortal (except Medusa somehow), and she was the prettiest of all three sisters. She was an AVID Minerva cleric and took the vow of chastity to devote her life to this goddess’s temple, the rectory for which, I believe she slept in. Though one might think Jupiter would set his sights on this cleric with beautiful locks, this time Neptune beat him to it, he taking a shine to this fine Gorgon. In Hesiod’s Greek interpretation Poseidon “seduced” her, but Ovid’s interpretation of Neptune’s trespass of Minerva’s temple led to him “violating” the priestess. Minerva was not pleased. And it wasn’t her uncle to whom she would take great umbrage but rather her very own cleric – for breaking her celibacy vow in her own temple, no less (since, of course, she’d dressed provocatively or something) – and transformed her into the monster we think of when we think of Medusa today: a creature with snakes for hair who was so hideous that anyone who’d lay eyes on her would turn to stone. Then Minerva flew her over to some desolate rock of an island far from any other to strand her there until Perseus would invade her cave and decapitate her.
A little known factoid would occur after this. Just as Minerva was born, cleaving open the forehead of Jupiter, somehow Medusa’s and Neptune’s issue would be the white winged horse we now know as Pegasus, somehow climbing out of her severed neck. Ipso facto: Something beautiful emerging from something hideous.
And I compare. What is Elizebeth Koch – conveniently apolitical – publisher of Catapult and its series of offshoots (Soft Skull, Balloon, and Counterpoint – the Sierra Club quixotically publishing one of their stories in one of her labels) doing to oppose her father and his father’s repulsiveness? Yes, she’s the Pegasus of this story. Great beauty emerging from great ugliness. She cares about people’s thoughts on some level, or she wouldn’t publish them. Yet she cautiously cloaks her own, I think, because she’s either worried about the emotional discord she might provoke in her life by opposing daddy or worried about her inheritance (or both?) It’s not as though Charles and David hadn’t attempted to blackmail their brother Fred Koch because they suspected he was gay. Charles and David fired William Koch in 1981 because they suspected he was attempting to take over of the company from Charles. A family of sharks, indeed.
Don’t mistake me. Elizabeth’s brother, Chase, in my view, has an equal role in repudiating his family’s fortune and the means to which they acquired it. And he’s backed some admirable charities including one’s that focus on urban impoverishment and black kids winding up at the business end of many a cop’s gun, but in light of the fact he ultimately joined his father’s company only a few years before he publicly eschewed it and got a slap on the wrist remonstration for a vehicular homicide involving him slaughtering a 12-year-old boy after running a red light he, like many marketing majors, is something of a black hole of charisma. It doesn’t appear to me like he’s going to “Take on the establishment from the inside.” He is a Koch, and, apart from a series of philanthropic positions he’ll surely endow to shine up his golden turd, will always be one.
I may very well be wrong, but in Elizabeth I see actual conflict. She seems to be haunted by her legacy, and her development of Catapult is like a solution in search of an agenda. In its intro landing page she acknowledges she’s not entirely sure of what she is, what she thinks, and she’s looking for writers who share her puzzle.
And Elizabeth, if you ever wind up reading this: You could be the little mouse who stayed mum, hid behind her pampered station in life, and opened up a publication or two to give a voice to the voiceless? Or you could be the little mouse that finally roared. Yes, there would be consequences. But it’s not as though you would ever starve or be alienated from the world. If anything you would be embraced by it wholeheartedly for the first time. Some capital, like political capital, is earned not by hoarding but by giving away. John Cleese, John Lennon, and David Bowie were all approached to be knighted. Bowie twice. They all refused the honor because they took issue with swearing allegiance to “church and empire.” In doing so they proved there is at least as much prestige in refusing an honor as there is in accepting one.
You could probably run for president being the one Koch who could have been a billionaire, but refused to recuse your opinion out of principle and not simply some gauche philanthropic polished turd to be tossed out to the public so that you can continue to avoid politics. You could be a heroine to nation, the star of TED talks, and fascination to the world while conclusively owing nothing to no one. The world needs its Pegasus. Mobil (before it became Exxon-Mobil) once chose it as its logo and did so for good reason. People responded to it, and, as sure as I’m typing here, they would respond to you.
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Elizabeth Koch and Roman Myth
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