I’m suffering from mythology overload. Last night I watched the mediocre 2010 version of Clash of the Titans on DVD. Since I’ve been grading students papers on mythology non-stop for over a week now, I felt that I needed to see what all the fuss was about. Again. I saw the movie in a theater earlier this year and wrote a post on the post-modern perspective the film has on the gods. To get a better sense of a movie, however, a repeated viewing is awful helpful. The fact is that the public exposure to mythology is often limited to the movies. Students frequently ask if something they saw in the Disney version of Hercules is the way it really happened in the myths. Nothing really happened in the myths.

Meanwhile angry letters have been pouring into the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Rounding out a new losing season, Rutgers University football coach Greg Schiano remains the highest paid employee of the state of New Jersey. Academic voices are feeble, but economics makes people sit up and pay attention. Money talks. Brains are lazy when it comes to rigorous thought. As the collection of heroes gathered in the forest of Calydon to chase the great boar Artemis let loose on the city, the academic world has also chased the glory of the pig-skin. And poor Meleager paid the price of the public outcry when it was over. Even though his team won the biggest college bowl ever.

It is hard to tell the real villain in Clash of the Titans. The writers suggest it might be Zeus, or Hades, Medusa, the “Kraken,” Acrisius, Cephus, or even the “fire priest.” Everybody’s looking for someone to blame. Things aren’t right in Argos. Others blame state legislators, the president of Rutgers University, or the football coach himself. The fact is in both the movie and in the university priorities have been skewed. Nobody is driving except the money, no matter which box office it goes into.

Who's got the pig-skin?