An absurd tragicomedy

After the world wars, theater in the West took a turn for the absurd, as it attempted to make sense of the trenches and then genocide. Irish ex-patriate Samuel Beckett's plays were the epitome of post-war existentialism, with their nonsensical plots of people buried up to their necks in sand while snatches of disjointed language came out of their mouths.

I wonder what the likes of Beckett or Eugene Ionescu would make of the theater in which we've been living since Donald Trump came down that gaudy escalator to announce that he would seek the presidency. Show business is the best way to look at the chaos of the last six years, cheap entertainment for the groundlings, overseen by an orange carnival barker.

Yesterday, with the announcement of fifteen (15!) criminal indictments against the Trump Organization—the name of which sounds like nothing other than a low-rent mob operation from The Sopranos—we have entered the fifth act of this sordid tragicomedy. 

I've made the comment again and again: Trump would rue the day he descended that escalator to a rented crowd. If he had laid low, kept his silly show, kept cheating on Melania with porn stars and whatnot, his malfeasance would have been passed over. He could have kept screwing everyone over and enjoyed his pathetic life until, ultimately, dementia would take him the way it took his execrable father. But the greatest of sins to the gods is hubris. His egotism, and his desire to undo everything Barack Obama did, propelled him on a course of action which seems to be leading to his undoing.

Tragic heroes are responsible for their own downfall; however, the thing which makes them likable characters, or at least understandable, is that they eventually recognize that they are the cause for all which happens to them. That "a-ha" moment is the point of a tragedy, when the character's humanity is laid bare.

We have no such satisfaction in this our real-life tragedy. Trump is never to blame. His world will lay wrecked about him, his life destroyed, and he will never have that moment of revelation, the "This is all my fault" moment. If he survives his diet, if he avoids prison but is relegated to penury, if he lives to eighty or ninety while soiling his undergarments, he will always blame others for his downfall. The narcissist and sociopath cannot contemplate his own role in his comeuppance. It's a conspiracy of those envious of his genius. On his deathbed he will replay the yuge rallies, the obeisance and kowtowing lavished on him when he had power, wealth, and fame. His broken mind will be too far gone by that time, lost in its own fantasies. Although, even now it seems as if he's lost in those fantasies; nothing much will be different, save for his body's ultimate betrayal.

As Sophocles wrote in Antigone: "[E]vil appears as good in the minds of those whom God leads to destruction." Trump's destruction won't be immediate, but it has begun. Hubris has again been punished. It happens rarely, but when it does, the universe is reset.