“Well, you have mettle I can say that for you. So now you are trying to scale the glass walls, are you? Go on go right ahead, perhaps one fall is not enough for you.”
Wak has returned from exile and this new reality has unleashed the full range of extreme emotions in Odie. He is by turns sarcastic, dismissive, passionately angry and politically hyperbolic. The stage is set for how this relationship has come and gone right from the first and in these lines and those immediately preceding and succeeding is a portrait of the patriot as a hypocrite.
“Cows, cowards and commanders, mere mortals and mortars.”
The play is a panoply of dramatic devices. One of the most effective that recurs throughout the text is the strategic use of repetitive tricks of the trade. The alliteration employed here by Odie also brings to mind the long-time effectiveness of that particular rhetorical maneuver in the sphere of political propaganda.
“Do you think I have time for a sausage and bacon returnee.…”
Another example of a successful technique among politicians who want to win the war of propaganda if they are in danger of the losing the war of facts. Nicknames should by all rights stay back on the playground and never enter into the world of political debate. And, indeed, that was pretty much the rule for pretty much every big time player for pretty much the entire history of modern civilization. For others, however, the power of a quip to demean, devalue and call the opponent’s lifestyle into question trumps every other consideration. “Sausage and bacon” is Odie’s playground-level phrase intended to implicate returning exiles as having live a life of luxury while those staying behind suffered.
“There is nothing as abominable as being a refugee, let me tell you. Shouted at. Your dignity is lowered. Hell, man. It is a blight”
Odie eventually gets a lesson in the real world of sausage and bacon and eventually his hypocrisy will be disclosed and his need for penance will be sought. But before all that what is most required of Odie is a little lesson in humility and the truth about the world out there which he has never known or seen for himself.
