WHERE THE FOUL HARPIES REIGN: ON ROBERTA KAPLAN
When in need of elegant yet primal imagery, the Aeneid is the place to go. Virgil’s timeless tale of persecution and triumph, adventure and piety, is replete with profound metaphors and exciting images.
For instance, Sinon the Greek, preceding Macbeth (and the Bangles), lifting his supplicant palms towards the heavens, making a vow by the starry “eternal flames.”
Another memorable string of images has to do with crazed and vengeful women. This is actually quite the repeating theme. Beginning obviously with Juno who is determined to persecute Aeneas throughout the known world. The Queen of Heavens is described as “never-forgetting, “savage” and “wrathful.”
Then there are the Furies, and especially their chief Alecto. Armed with snakes and torches she is the “daughter of eternal night.” She’s a “tear-bringer from infernal shadows,” even her father, Pluto, hates her monstrous being.
Virgil really gets creative with the Harpies, the vulture-bodied, woman-faced monsters of classical mythology. They too are sent to persecute Aeneas and they do so by… defecating on his food whenever he sits down to eat.
The Harpies, we are told, are so horrible that “no monster is more wretched, no pestilence more savage, no greater wrath of the gods flows on the waves of the River Styx.”
Their looks are hardly more delicate than their characters. The winged creatures’ faces “are of virgins, yet their bowels overflow with the most fetid thing; their hands are taloned and their mouths are ever pale with hunger.”
This brings us to Roberta Kaplan.
She too is a kind of woman chimera. A lesbian-Jew of sorts. Her talons, like the Harpies’, are relentless. Here she is bragging about seizing the homes and garnishing the wages of the organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. Mind you, the organizers, whose identities she had to glean from a leaked online chat, are all lower-middle-class Americans without the means to afford any kind of legal defense against Kaplan’s Stygian powers.
Such “courage” in persecuting Americans she disagrees with, naturally brought with it much success. Kaplan was quick to found Kaplan Hecker & Fink: A law firm where the big money of woke corporations such as Uber and Goldman Sachs merges with the zeal of progressive not-for-profits.
“She’s brilliant, she’s unrelenting, she can’t be intimidated and she’s not going to back down!” Thus Kaplan was described by a client suing President Donald Trump.
While much of Kaplan’s firm deals with bread-and-butter corporate law, representing Pfizer and AirBnB, it seems like the “activism” of Roberta and her acolytes offers a sort of indulgence. Attorneys and clients can rejoice and virtue-signal despite being useless barnacles upon the body of American business. That’s because some of the barnacles are motivated by “social-justice,” thus redeeming the rest.
Kaplan’s latest line of business is to sue Donald Trump. Since deposing him by the Congress or through the Special Counsel has failed, and since voting him out was clearly not enough, Kaplan busies herself in a frenzy of filing lawsuits against the former president. She has three going on, as far as we can tell: One, so imbecilic it may succeed, represents disgruntled viewers of “The Apprentice;” another involves Trump’s niece, angry about losing her share of an inheritance; and another involves a Ms. Carroll suing Trump for defamation.
Will Roberta prevail? Who knows, recently two similar lawsuits against Trump have actually failed.
In a testament to the eternal literary power of the Aeneid, Kaplan’s bowels clearly overflow with the most fetid contempt for traditional Americans. This harpy, much like the mythical ones, wastes no opportunity to defecate on Anglo-Western conventions of jurisprudence and to relentlessly use the law as a means of revenge and persecution.
