Winter II

He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.

He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for the notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.

He has always had wealth; he was born into it and makes ample use of it. But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination, He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble or wince in pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult.  These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.

His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than he desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. 

Excerpt from Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. by Stephen Greenblatt.

Now who could that possibly be about? If you read my first post of this year titled Winter of Our Discontent. you can probably guess this passage describes the character of King Richard III from the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. *1

If you haven't read the post (you can find it here), these words might remind you of someone else.

And if that someone else happens to be the current occupant of the White House, the resemblance is not an accident. Although he doesn't address any current political figure by name, Dr. Greenblatt's Tyrant was published in 2018, well into the first administration of this POTUS.  And if there were any doubt where he's going with all of this, other passages in Greenblatt's chapter on Richard, and indeed elsewhere in the book, include obvious clues such as references to "the adults in the room" and "making England great again".

There's a long history of Shakespeare productions where the characters hint at real life, often contemporary figures. A 2012 production of Julius Caesar at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis was set in modern times with the title role performed by an actor who was made up to resemble the current president at the time, Barack Obama. Then in 2017, The Shakespeare in the Park Festival in New York City featured a production of the same play, the lead character again resembling the current president, this time sporting a much too long red tie and a ridiculous combover.

Needless to say, halfway through the play, the character dressed as the current POTUS in both productions is assassinated. 

Before that happens, this is what he says:

I could be well moved, if I were as you.
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me.
But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks;
They are all fire and every one doth shine.
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world: 'tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion; and that I am he
Let me a little show it, even in this:
That I was constant Cimber should be banished,
And constant do remain to keep him so.

Then he gets stabbed by members of the Senate including some of his closest allies for being shall we say, a little too full of himself, as is so often the case with tyrants. *2

It's no secret that presidents have enormous egos and no small amount of arrogance; that's in the job description. And while it may be a bit of a stretch to take this beautiful late 16th century verse and place it in the mouths of contemporary politicians, the spirit fits both 44 and 45/47.

For example, who said the following?

I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.

Perhaps not who you might think. What about this?

I alone can fix it.

Both statements capture the hubris of that quote from Julius Caesar, making both presidents candidates to have the role of Julius Caesar, if not his eloquence modeled upon them.

Bits and pieces of attributes of all sorts of Shakespearean characters can be associated with real people, perhaps none more than the current president. King Lear is a good example.

For starters, there's little secret of this POTUS's vanity and narcissism. 

At the opening of Shakespeare's play, the eighty-something Lear announces his plan to go into semi-retirement, leaving the day-to-day running of his kingdom to his three daughters. Lear's plan is that each daughter's share of the kingdom will be determined by her public display of love for him. What follows could pass for a Cabinet meeting in the current White House, with the daughters, two of them anyway, each waxing poetically about their deep respect, love and affection for their old man. Spoiler alert, they're both lying. The third daughter, well I'll get to her in a moment.  

One can imagine after that scenario; things don't work out so well. A couple acts later, Lear finds himself stranded out of doors, having been expelled by one of his ungrateful daughters and left defenseless in the middle of a horrific storm. 

In the following passage, I can't help be reminded of the time the current president attempted to change the course of a hurricane with the swipe of his magic Sharpie.  Here is Lear admonishing the elements:

Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the
cocks.
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking
thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.

We could see signs of his creeping dementia before, but this tells us once and for all that he is now completely off his rocker. 

But wait a minute, am I talking about Lear or the POTUS? 

Take your pick.

Unlike the senile Lear, I'm sure this POTUS would love to be compared to Julius Caesar. But other than having been a charismatic populist leader with authoritarian tendencies, sporting a combover to boot, Julius Caesar was also a great military leader and a brilliant writer. The current POTUS well, not so much.

Shakespeare gives us very little in the way of a backstory for the first eighty or so years of the fictitious King Lear's life. Was he a good king or not? We'll never know because in terms of the story, it's irrelevant.

But even in his decrepitude, during brief moments of clarity, Lear turns out to be a wonderfully complex character, not the one-dimensional cartoon villain we've come to expect from our current POTUS.

I've contemplated a couple times in this space about possible antecedents in classic literature for this president and have concluded that one would be better off looking in the fables of Aesop rather the plays of Shakespeare. *3

But the one character in Shakespeare who comes closest to being a one-dimensional cartoon villain, at least among the characters with the title of "King" in front of their name, is Richard III. 

One aspect of the character of this POTUS that Stephen Greenblatt overlooks, because his book was written before it surfaced, is his desire for retribution.

We learn right at the outset of Shakespeare's play that the entire motivation behind Richard's treachery is his desire for retribution at the entire world, for having been born disabled.

Here are the first lines of The Tragedy of King Richard III:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York,
And all the clouds that loured upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbèd steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. 

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;
I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them—

This is Richard telling us that he cannot share the great joy of the peace brought to England by his brother, King Edward IV, because of Richard's bitterness and shame over his own physical condition, so horrible that even dogs bark upon first sight of him. 

Therefore... 

...since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate, the one against the other;
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mewed up
About a prophecy which says that “G” *4
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.

Richard lives up to his promise by disposing of everyone who stands between himself and the throne. And unlike Macbeth who is forever burdened with crippling guilt over his own treachery, Richard carries out his dreadful work with no remorse, but with aplomb, and even sheer delight.

As I pointed out in the earlier post, in Shakespeare's time, the physical deformations Richard suffered from were considered windows into the soul, peering into an equally deformed personality which would by nature explain his behavior. 

Today of course we see physical afflictions separately from the personality, however with the potential given the wrong circumstances.to contribute to the psychological profile of the personality. In Richard's case, the wrong circumstance proved to be his mother, a real piece of work, who from his birth, never concealed her disgust over her youngest son. It was she who informs him during the play that it would have been better had he not been born. 

Not too hard then to understand what made him such a loathsome creature.

I've heard this president's niece Mary, a psychologist by trade, describe her uncle's somewhat complicated relationship with his own mother, so there's maybe another connection between the two.

What are we all to learn of this? After all, in our time as in Shakespeare's, vile creatures such as these are a dime a dozen.

It only gets interesting when we contemplate why people follow such characters and ultimately their orders, thereby turning merely despicable people into tyrants.

In his book, Stephen Greenblatt using the example of Richard III's "enablers", divides them  into several categories. Again, it's a little hard to tell whether Greenblatt is sincerely referring to Richard's story or to that of the current POTUS. Here I've compressed his categories into five using my own labels followed by quotes from the author, then my comments on the enablers of the POTUS:

The duped. Those who are "genuinely fooled by Richard, crediting his claims, believing in his pledges, taking at face value his displays of emotion." These are the prime targets for populist demagogues, folks who are swayed by emotional appeals to their desires and prejudices. In our time, these folks could be referred to as the Base.

The scared. "Those who feel frightened or impotent in the face of bullying and the menace of violence." The obvious contemporary counterparts are the Republicans in Congress who express their disdain for the president in private but wouldn't dare cross him in public, lest they fall victim to one of his vicious tantrums and real threats of endorsing another candidate, resulting in ending not their lives as Richard's enablers, but their cushy political careers. 

The dismissive. Those who figure "He's kind of a joke. He can't be this bad, there will always be enough adults in the room." These are the folks who once believed that our system of government under the Constitution was stronger than any potential tyrant. There were plenty of these working in the Executive Branch during the POTUS's first term, but none of them are left. To quote the last line of Leoncavallo's opera I Pagliacci: "La comedia è finita."

The cynical. Those "who persuade themselves that they can take advantage of him... watching the casualties mount with cool indifference". This would include pretty much everyone working in the administration today with the exception of the following group.

The thugs. Here I'll quote directly from the book: 

Finally there is a motley crowd of those who carry out his orders, some reluctantly but simply eager to avoid trouble, others with gusto, hoping to take something along the way for themselves, still others enjoying the cruel game of making his targets, often high in the social hierarchy, suffer and die. The aspiring tyrant never lacks for such people, in Shakespeare and, from what I can tell, in life."

On second thought, the line between the last two categories seems quite blurred, if it exists at all. 

Three characters in this president's cabinet who are clearly defined by both categories immediately stand out to me. They are the current (at this writing) Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Director of Homeland Security, all of whom seem to take pleasure, or at least express indifference, in the suffering and yes, even the death of the targets of this president.

The amazing thing about the time we are living in, is that there is a new source of inspiration for these political posts of mine virtually every day.

One example: as I was conceiving this post last week, the Attorney General testified before Congress regarding her Department of Justice's handling of the Epstein Files. 

As members of Congress including a few brave Republicans tried to get to the bottom of why she and her department are stonewalling the complete release of the files, the AG armed with her "burn books" filled with information she deemed unflattering to the lawmakers who world question her,  mocked, chastised, obfuscated, pouted, twiddled her thumbs and did everything possible to avoid answering any questions. It was such a humiliating, disastrous performance for her that even Fox News refused to broadcast it.

As they say, it was a performance for one, her boss, who must have been pleased because despite the fact that just about everybody, Democrat and Republican alike in Washington is demanding her head, at this point she still has her job.

And what did she do that pleased him so? She sang his praises at every opportunity. As a handful of Epstein's victims looking for justice stood directly behind her, she took pains to ignore them, then went on to point out, how her boss is the greatest president this nation has ever had (George Washington and Abraham Lincoln be damned), and how well the Stock Market is doing, among other non-sequiturs.

From an article published last September in the online magazine Medium, Leigh Silverton writes that this AG "has the diction of a high-school guidance counselor and the moral compass of a slot machine." She goes on: The president "of course adores her". This AG "is what you get when you cross Lady Macbeth with a press secretary and give her a Sephora gift card."

Another Shakespeare reference. But I'm afraid Ms. Silverton here is giving the AG a little too much credit. Lady Macbeth was the brains behind her husband's treachery; she pulled all the strings, while the AG, at least for now, is a mere apparatchik. I'd save the Lady Macbeth role in this administration for the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, the little man who bears a strong resemblance to Joseph Goebbels, both physical and ideological. 

For the Shakespeare version of this AG, I'd pick King Lear's second daughter Regan. If you recall, the King offered his daughters pieces of his kingdom, based upon how much each expresses her love for him.

The eldest daughter Goneril goes first:

Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter, 

 Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, 

Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, 

No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; 

As much as child e’er loved, or father found; 

A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable. 

Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

Next comes the middle daughter Regan who essentially says: "yeah what she said, yet ever so much more." 

And the king, like the president, was very much pleased.

Yet this president should take heed as these two are the daughters who when push came to shove, betrayed their father, leaving him out in the cold to face the tempest on his own.

The third daughter, Cordelia, the king's favorite up to that point, would not give in to her father's vainglory. When it came her turn to speak, she told it like it is:

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth.

I love your Majesty According to my bond, no more nor less. 

You have begot me, bred me, loved me. 

I return those duties back as are right fit: 

Obey you, love you, and most honor you. 

Why have my sisters husbands if they say They love you all? 

Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry 

Half my love with him, half my care and duty. 

For this affront to the king's ego, he banishes his beloved daughter.

Inspired by Cordelia, and by events that have taken place since Dr. Greenblatt's book was published, I'm adding another category to his list of enablers, the true believers who nevertheless have a limit. For these people, despite their commitment to the cause, there is a line of truth, decency and morality which they will not cross.

The two prime candidates for this category that immediately come to mind are former representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Chaney. They may not quite fit the mold of true believers, yet as Republican lawmakers during this president's first term, both of them voted overwhelmingly along with his agenda. Yet their first commitment was to the Constitution and to the rule of law, and when the president set in motion an insurrection to overturn an election he wasn't happy about losing, they, unlike most of their Republican counterparts, world not go along with it, and paid a heavy price. Did I mention they are former lawmakers?

Dare I say another former lawmaker, one who was surely in the true believer camp, is Marjorie Taylor Greene, at one-point hands down the president's most ardent supporter in Congress. Yet she was moved by the victims of Jefferey Epstein and could not stand by silently as the administration refused to give them justice by protecting the powerful wrongdoers who abused them. For that, like Cordelia she was labeled a traitor by the president and knowing she could not survive reelection without his support, resigned from Congress. 

As we live in a democratic republic, a tyrant has no power over us without the will of the people, at least initially. This president, despite a long public history of corruption, illegal activity, much of it directed against the Constitution and our system of government, as well as other misdeeds, legitimately won two out of three national elections, receiving even in defeat in the third, the support of over 70 million voters who shrugged all that off, as they had other issues more important to them. 

Which in a democracy is their prerogative.

Yet after the tragedy that befell the Twin Cities last month where American citizens were murdered by federal agents, all in the name of rounding up and deporting as many "undocumented" human beings as they could get their hands on, I must say it's more than a little disheartening to hear folks brush it all off by saying "Well, that's what I voted for."

Not surprisingly, Shakespeare has something to say about that too.

I'll leave the last word for him and his greatest living interpreter: *5

NOTES:

*1) It's important to emphasize here the phrase "the character of King Richard III" to distinguish it from the historical King Richard as there is much debate over how much (or more likely how little) the character in Shakespeare's play resembles the real person. For more on this, please refer to my earlier post on the subject. 

*2) For more on the Minneapolis and the New York productions of Julius Caesar, check out this post.

*3) Here's my post with the Aesop connection.

*4) Before he became King, Richard was the Duke of Gloucester and was referred to as such, or more informally simply as Gloucester, hence the "G". Here he is referring to himself.

*5) From The Stephen Colbert Show which aired this past February 4. Click here to see the entire segment featuring Sir Ian McKellen, 26 minutes well spent.