One of the Achilles Heels of the Would-Be Liberators of Humanity: How Can You Emancipate Those Whom You Are Also Emancipating from Self-Respect?

Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two (perhaps like Marcus also CIA-sponsored?) Marxists who helped Marxism to become again "bourgeois" or something like a mildly cultured flu for the new post-war middle class, saw in Homer's Calypso who dines and wines Odysseus, the first heroic and clever egoist of the West, a symbolic combination of power over fate and the sensibility of "bourgeois housewives." Of course, American stay-at-home women might have surprised to learn that they were supposed to play a role of Calypso. 

Adorno and Horkheimer, in the spirit of cynical Marx, call both Calypso and Circe, the goddesses, "prostitutes," and Penelope is "like a harlot." With this attitude toward woman which was, in its core, indistinguishable from any other cultured "capitalist pig," one can understand why and how post-war Marxism began to lose the battle for the hearts and souls of the women in the West. Cynics don't inspire, and this attitude and approach fails to deliver even the basic which elementary human dignity demands--self-respect.

In this painting of Calypso and Odysseus by Bocklin, the face of the former does look way too much like a bored bourgeois wife from the late 19th century.