“The Centauromachy” by Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734) oil on canvas-ca 1715
The original Petraeus of ancient Greece was a centaur, a mythical chimera with the body of a man from head to waist, the physique of a horse from loins to hooves and—thanks to this potent hybridization—a voracious sexual appetite. As legend tells us, when he and several other centaurs attended a royal wedding in Thessaly, Petraeus got totally smashed on the king’s fine wine, then proceeded to grab the bride and ravish her, as his fellow horse/men, also violently ... and horny, commenced attacking the other female guests, turning the wedding party into a stampeding gang .... With the cunning of a man and the genitalia of a stallion, Petraeus and the other centaurs proved formidable rapists and might have succeeded in their beastly assault. But several human guests, the legendary King Theseus among them, saved the day and the wedding party, fighting off the rapacious beasts, killing Petraeus and several other centaurs in what became known as the battle of the Centauromachy (a favorite classical art motif), while the rest ran off galloping for the Thessalian hills.
Fast forward to modern American reality mixed with a hefty dose of media mythologizing, and we have *our* Petraeus (though his folks are Dutch, the name still bears the old Greek meaning), famed former CIA chief and four-star general who recently confessed to surrendering to the embedded charms and well-toned arms of his hagiographer, tight-bodied and loose-lipped army reservist Paula Broadwell. This put them and a few of their friends and colleagues in the center of a superstorm of internecine investigations, horn-honking headlines and titillating gossip at the highest levels of the U.S. “military industrial complex” (MIC).
Of course, David Petraeus is not a mythical centaur, though he does run at a pace that’s close to galloping, his “smart bombs” have ruined a few wedding parties, his war heroics have been greatly mythologized and his sexual appetites, blended with that other old Greek intoxicant, hubris, certainly made him “...” enough to fall from a dizzying height of American grace and prominence.
What else but hubris—that extreme arrogance most often exhibited by people in power—explains why the CIA’s chief secret keeper couldn’t foresee that his own agency’s über-invasive cyber-snooping surveillance apparatus could be used (in this case, by the FBI) to peek right into his pathetically insecure “system” of saving and viewing unsent email messages in an anonymous Gmail account, and catch him with his pants down?
Go to: http://bloggamy.com/petraeus/ to continue reading...