Letter to the editor: Calling "fowl" on Musk's Helen of Troy decoy

First published in the Brunswick Beacon, 08.06.26

Elon Musk doesn’t mind that Matt Damon and Charlize Theron don’t look Greek. So, why does he care that Chris Nolan cast Academy Award-winning Black actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in “The Odyssey”?

Musk is using Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic to stoke racism and promote white supremacists’ Great Replacement Theory. He gave a “100%” endorsement to a post claiming, “If white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered.” Musk wrote, “Whites are a rapidly dying minority.”

When a poster falsely claimed Helen was a “fair skinned blonde,” Musk replied: “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity.” He later elaborated: “Chris Nolan desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar. What a worm.”

But Homer’s only physical description of Helen simply praised her “beautiful hair” and “beautiful cheeks.” He never called her “fair-skinned” or “blond” — others did, centuries later. Even the iconic line proclaiming hers “the face that launched a thousand ships” came from Christopher Marlowe’s play “Dr. Faustus” in 1604.

Helen is a fictional character. Not like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, or Cinderella. More like Minnie Mouse, Miss Piggy and Daisy Duck. Like Helen, they didn’t have human parents, either.

Some ancient Greek texts say Zeus fathered Helen by his daughter, the goddess Nemesis. Desperate to fend off his incestuous assault, Nemesis transformed herself into one creature after another. When Zeus, who had morphed into a swan, finally impregnated her, Nemesis was a goose. The egg she laid hatched Helen, who was raised by Leda, Queen of Sparta.

Helen hatched from a goose egg — insisting she be played by a white woman is laughable, like insisting she be portrayed by a swan, a goose or a duck.

Musk encourages such silliness as a decoy. The world’s richest person is stoking racism to distract you from asking why so many have so little while so few have so much.

Kristine Garrity

Calabash