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The "ugliest of gods ... the truest maker" is setup to make the set up. The fiction is notpolitically innocent, it serves the Chiefs for theirown reasons which do not bear much lookinginto.It is typical of Porter to introduce questionsof the power of representation at the point whenhe presses hardest to invoke a physical actualitywhich he despairs lies beyond language and hiscontrol. Those who enjoy the "doing" don'tresort to voyeurism, such unsatisfactoryrepresentations are the desperate measure of theinfirm, the old, the hypocritical -like the Chiefsof Staff, poets and readers. The elision betweenfigures in the story - the old voyeurs, from bothHomer and today - and the implied figure ofthe reader, the elision between historic past andcontinuous present, suggests an assumptionbasic to Porter's use of anachronism: humannature is a matter of universal and unchangingtypes, history is the seasonal reincarnation of anancient drama where character is action.Such a view of psychology and politics hasbecome unfashionable, particularly sinceinvestigation into the cultural specificity andhistorical rootedness of religions and mythology.Porter has recounted Les Murray's warningagainst transposing the Classical gods from theirgeographical and politically specific origins toAustralia (1987, 76). In Mars the gods knowbetter than to chance their arm against Murrayand his native genii; Porter makes minimalreference to the Anzac cult with its centralposition in Australian identity, no doubt anabsence which some readers will regret.Porter's narrative framework describes aclosed and fixed if elusive meaning which to mesits oddly with the overall sceptical, ironictemperament. Change in time becomes theprerogative of external forces represented by thewilful gods and they themselves cannot change.The tale of human oppression and suffering laiddown in the patterns of mythology is a spectacleand diversion for the gods above time. Thejubilantly indifferent divine "he", in "He SaithAmong The Trumpets, Ha Ha", exults:It's human nature anywayto kill and to be slain -of those the battle mangles, somewill have been born again.Let's toast the gods of film and stage,sleek Venus and bold Mars:for once the fault is not in usbut surely in our stars. (p.107)WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989Whether or not Porter's mythological frameis convincing as historiography it does functionsuccessfully as limited metaphor. And it doesusefully remind us how actions are often closelypatterned on cultural stereotypes, and so revealhow cultural models can interpret humanbehaviour sometimes better than more"scientific" demographic and economic analyses.Certainly examples abound in contemporarypolitics where life imitates soap-art and suggestsuch a motivated attempt to "make" history.Porter's impeached hero, Major Mars,complains in the fashion of a docu-dramatizedOllie North: "God damn it! they'd all seen themovie: they were keen/ to make America fit forHenry Fonda to live in" (p.46).A further question remains: if history is there-enactment of unchanging rituals dramatisedin Classical Mythology can the poet do anythingmore than follow along in the shadow of Homer?When war is represented to be "natural", withus always "like the poor" (p.68), and the problemis the condition itself then satire can be littlemore than an inward turning consolationleading to madness. On the other hand, tocelebrate war and violence, like a Futurist-poetexclaiming over the beauty of the bombingpattern, or like the stern nationalist urging bloodand earth for the nation's "moral fibre", is evenmore absurd and terrifying. The persona of"Mars Bar" speaks with such a tone of buttonedupcraziness:Society is unravellingthrough lack of wars - our worldhas spawned stock like thoseunsavoury Euro-slobswind-surfing beyond the point.Meanwhile poems tangletheir fingers in the windand say much less than they intend to. (p.86)The passage, and the many others like it inMars, send me back to re-read the poem topinpoint the ironic signals, because it must beironic? Uncertainty even in the teeth of suchcertainty is perhaps the point. The poemunsettles and compels re-assessment of attitudesand beliefs. The magisterial disdain and wildgeneralisation recall the rhetoric of newspapereditors and letter writers "concerned" at theirhelplessness in the face of a bewildering worldof change.The ironic register is signalled in the title (aswith many of the poems in Mars), but it is105