It seems that everyone is talking about two things these days: The Odyssey (or, to be more strictly accurate, The Odyssey as reimagined by Christopher Nolan) and the Smithsonian Institution, specifically the National Museum of American History (NMAH), one of the roughly 20 museums that huddle under the taxpayer-funded umbrella of the Smithsonian.

I have not seen the film version of Homer’s epic. But I feel confident in reporting that, for sheer entertainment, the televised cross-examination of NMAH’s longtime director, Anthea Hartig, easily beat out the cinematic version of The Odyssey. How can I say this, not having seen Matt Damon emoting around in his beard and shiny armor? Well, Sydney Smith (1771–1845) said that he never read a book before reviewing it because he found that the exercise prejudiced him. So it is with me. I shall endeavor to escape prejudice, bias, both intentional and the other kind, as well as parti pris altogether, by boldly commenting on some aspects of the Nolanized version of the story without having seen it. And seeing it is work, dear reader. A look at the screening schedule tells me that it runs nearly three hours, 172–173 minutes by the clock, though no one has been able to tell me why, in this homogenizing age of atomic clocks, we can’t get a more precise reckoning of the time.

By all accounts, Nolan’s Odysseus, unlike Odysseus in Homer’s telling, is a troubled, guilt-ridden specimen, forever agonizing over his aggressive behavior and mistreatment of others. He has, not to put too fine a point on it, anger issues, unlike Homer’s Odysseus, who experienced anger but no anger issues. In Homer’s version, Odysseus is a hero. He is clever, yes, both cunning (“πολύμητις”)  and complicated (“πολύτροπος”). But even more often than Achilles, Odysseus is described as πτολιπόρθιος, “sacker of cities.” He was a warrior. He didn’t anguish about those to whom he caused anguish. It was part of who he was. He gloried in it.

Given the length of the movie and the many liberties taken with the script, I am surprised that no one suggested having Matt Damon pay a visit to the Smithsonian or at least the congressional hearing about the Smithsonian. We know that Anthea Hartig is keen on beginning meetings with a “land acknowledgment.” It’s all a little masquerade, of course, a rancid bit of virtue signaling that costs its performer exactly nothing. But I suspect that behind the theater—by which I mean the hypocrisy—is a timid bid for expiation or absolution. There is a lot of unearned guilt sloshing around the National Museum of American History these days, and the ritual of land acknowledgment, though ever so specious, might be seen as a moral or existential hedge, drawn from the same sort of calculation Pascal conjured with in his famous wager about how individuals ought to think about the odds when it came to the existence of God.

What I want to know, however, is what Odysseus, the Homeric hero, not the movie mannequin, would have thought about the practice of land acknowledgments. Let me put cards on the table and say that I believe he would have treated the people insisting on them as he treated the Cyclops Polyphemus or, come to that, the suitors pestering the patient Penelope, his wife.

I said that the best entertainment I enjoyed last week was the cross-examination—not to say the thorough exposure and humiliation—of Anthea Hartig. And the best of the best, I thought, was the brilliant surgical evisceration conducted by freshman representative Brandon Gill (R-TX). In under 5 minutes, he performed an elegant posterior sagittal anorectoplasty on Hartig’s long tenure at the National Museum of American History. And he did it by the simple, revelatory expedient of confronting her with the Smithsonian’s own public educational materials. “Are you a white supremacist?” he asked. “Oh no, no,” replied Hartig, smiling weakly. “Do you think we all have implicit biases?” asked Gill. “If so, what are yours?” Oh dear. “Do you think it is important to be polite?” Gill wondered. “Oh yes,” quoth Hartig, perhaps thinking that if she said she approved of politeness, Gill would be polite to her. No such luck.

Politeness, you see, is one of the many bourgeois virtues that literature distributed by the Smithsonian has identified as a symptom of white supremacy. Other behaviors and attitudes that raise the alarm about lurking white supremacist tendencies are hard work, rational thinking, respect for private property, delayed gratification, and rugged individualism.

You think that I am making this up, but I am not. It’s all there in an official NMAH brochure called “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” File it under “Things are always worse than you think.” Here’s a thought experiment: What if these habits and behaviors really were signs of “whiteness” or “white supremacy”? What then? Or to put it another way, how much of a racist would you have to be to promulgate a brochure like “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States”? (It would be interesting to know whether most of the authors of that odious document were themselves white. I’d wager most of them were liberal white women.)

The point is this: the Smithsonian Institution was created to preserve and celebrate the American heritage. By the same process of moral entropy that has undermined American educational institutions, transforming them from unapologetic repositories of our storied past into tenebrous havens for those “men without chests” that C. S. Lewis delineated, the Smithsonian Institution has abandoned its original mandate. No longer is it about celebrating America’s past, where by “celebrate” I do not mean “exonerate” past evils and failures, the sort of deficiencies that are part of every nation, no matter how great. The Smithsonian should not be about covering up America’s failings. It should be about putting those failings in the more capacious context of America’s stupendous achievements. This the Smithsonian under its current leadership has conspicuously failed to do.

Some observers are puzzled that President Trump should lavish so much attention on what is, after all, merely a cultural institution. He does so, I believe, because he understands that the ulterior motive of the Smithsonian Institution in its current incarnation is to rob us of our heroes. As I have put it elsewhere, Trump’s attention to institutions like the Smithsonian is part of his ambition to give America back its heroes. That is why he has overseen such meticulous criticism of the Smithsonian. Admonition, Montaigne observed, is one of the highest offices of friendship. Criticism takes time and effort to formulate and dispense. If he didn’t care, President Trump could, like presidents before him, just pass by cultural institutions like the Smithsonian and our educational apparat. But he does care, which is why he devotes serious attention to improving them.

Above all, The Odyssey is a story about νόστος, homecoming. The National Museum of American History, like so many aspects of the Smithsonian, has strayed far from its original purpose. It is wandering amongst monsters, enchanted by Sirens, lost in its fatuous, puerile disillusionment. It is time to bring it home. Perhaps Donald Trump is the Athena-like guide who can pull it off.