If you’ve gotten a glimpse of Netflix’s Kaos and Jeff Goldblum playing Zeus, you’re in for a wild time. It’s a modern retelling of some of the Greek and Roman myths. It would even be a comedy, if it didn’t all feel so familiar. Hera and Zeus live on a mountaintop mansion that looks like a blend of Palm beach meets Versailles. Poseidon lives on a yacht that looks like Russian oligarch meets Saudi prince, while Hades and Persephone run an Eastern Bloc bureaucracy. The underworld looks exactly like the DMV. 

The unfunny problem is that oligarchs and princes and bureaucracy exist in our world today. CEOs and movie stars live and travel in luxury while multinational corporations drain the resources of the land and its people. Like Icarus, tech bros make contraptions that fly too close to the sun or dive too deep in the sea. 

America specifically has borrowed its philosophy, politics and style from the Greeks and Romans. The architecture of the White House, Senate and Supreme Court buildings are made in the neoclassical style with columns and a domes. Our representative democracy is straight out of the ancient playbook. While we have had many successes and there are also failures too. Our floods, famines and plagues are heightened due to our misuse of the air, land and sea. Our leaders are often motivated by money more than morality. We have idolized the power and grandeur of past while forgetting its failures and fall.