According to Aristotle, who started the conversation, tragedy, real tragedy, occurs when a great man falls from grace on the basis of something he does, something generated from an individual and fatal flaw in his otherwise heroic character. Such a fall is instructive, but never pretty.
Our ex-President will never be a tragic hero because he never was a great man, nor was he ever particularly good, or even nice. The whole MAGA scheme was a fairy tale from the beginning, a conservative wet dream that made cranky white folks believe that somehow their hero was so rich and so powerful that he could, in fact, take the whole country back to, say, 1953 maybe. Make America Great Again created the illusion that there was a time when everything was sweet and peachy.
Trump was a louse, a grifter, a textbook narcissist who must have been taking a leak behind the bushes when the rest of us were being factory-equipped with shame. He has none. For some reason, he finds it impossible to think of anyone other than himself. Case in point--Herschel Walker, his hand-picked candidate for the Senate. Once it was clear that poor Herschel wasn't a shining star, Trump dumped him, didn't give him a cent from that barrel of cash he's got from some scheme or another. Walker's great benefactor finally showed him how to get under the bus.
So this week, he proudly announced that a grand new strategy was coming, to be announced yesterday. Watch for it!
The great news, it turns out, was the grand release of a series of on-line trading cards ($100 @ pop) featuring guess-who. Stupid things, idiotic things that even Steve Bannon despised. For years, The Washington Examiner and the New York World wrote puff pieces about the Orange Savior. Yesterday, they lambasted him and his goofy pics. Even his besties turned their faces.
It's not tragedy. Tragedy, Aristotle said, is personally purgative, cleansing because it's impossible not to see ourselves in the tragic hero. Nope.
The nation will most certainly be better off with Trump under the bus, but his dying (metaphorically) will not prompt pity and fear, as Aristotle claimed. It'll do nothing more than a good aspirin does--it'll spell relief, awesome relief.
Still, the burn and crash won't be pretty. The Donald doesn't like to lose, and he's going to, big-time. His descent has already begun, and it's already moving toward some train wreck to come. It won't be pretty, won't even be particularly sad. I predict there will be very few tears, and a ton of I-told-you-sos.
But this guy here--take a look.
Superman is going down. You can watch if you will, but let me remind you that train wrecks are ugly. Not that long ago, this guy was President of the United States and leader of the free world. Now, he'd like to believe he's this--whatever this is.
No comments:
Post a Comment