The Suitors, or Acid Trips with Homer

(No, not Homer Simpson, although that would be interesting too.) I want some of whatever Ben Ehrenreich was smoking when he wrote The Suitors, a modern retelling of The Odyssey. It's a timeless, placeless setting, in which there are sidewalks and cars and televisions, but sometimes there are no phones and people run around naked. Oh, and creating a moat and filling it with sewage when you can't find crocodiles makes sense. And there are chamber pots. And a band of free spirits (although that's too high-minded a phrase) who spend their days loving and gamboling and huffing paint thinner. Until our modern Odysseus Payne comes along and conscripts them into his dream.

What is his dream? Well (and it sounds a little something like some presidents we know):

...the everlasting glory of a nation founded on the vital principles of freedom and opportunity, of the responsibilities that accompany good fortune, the sacred obligation to boast of one's virtues and display one's wealth for all to see, and thereby, he said, spread freedom to the farthest corners of the globe [...] A free people always wins.

And now he gets them started on his arsenal. And then the looting and the wars. And coming up, the War.

And you wonder, what binds Payne and Penny together? And why are you willing to continue to spiral downward with them?