On Tragedies Ancient and Current

There are two basic forms of Greek tragedy. The first is a man confronted with two moral imperatives that conflict with each other. Agamemnon, when he returned from Troy, was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. That left his son Orestes with a real problem: to honor his father by avenging his murder he has to kill his mother. (As the story goes he does, then gets hounded by the furies for the sin of kinslaying. I think there's a trial at the end where Athena ultimately absolves him. It's been a while since I've read up on these things.)

The other form of tragedy is hubris that leads to nemesis. There was a satyr, I forget his name, who carved a wonderful double flute out of some bones. He bragged that he was the greatest musician who ever lived. Then Apollo jump right up on a hickory stump and said, "Boy, let me tell you what." There's a contest. The way I heard it Apollo won because he was able to turn his lyre upside down and still play it, while the satyr couldn't get any sound blowing on the wrong end of his flutes. I don't recall what happened to the satyr, but I can tell you he didn't win no golden fiddle.

I'm going to vote for Donald Trump this coming fall. I'm not thrilled about another season of the Donald Trump show. Whenever they cancel a TV show and bring it back it gets worse. Aside from that, from a raw politics point of view, there are problems with his candidacy. There's not a man in America who doesn't know how he feels about Donald Trump. And while I'm usually the first one to discount statements like "he can't win", he ain't over the 50% line, and he's going to have a real hard time persuading the folks who already don't like him. Even if he manages, that there's the "election integrity" issue. I've seen plenty of arguments that something was in fact wrong with the last election and not nearly enough attempts to correct things.

Even so, I'm caught in one of those Greek tragedies. If there were a candidate I liked better I couldn't vote for him. Because of the past couple years where I've been told that January 6th was the equivalent of Guy Fawkes striking a match in parliament. Because of all the prosecutions for any sin they could impute or invent for him. I have one thing I can do to tell the DC types that I see the dirty tricks they're pulling, that I think they're a bigger threat to freedom than the Orange Man could ever be, and that's vote. Even if I was convinced that Trump couldn't possibly win I'd vote for him anyways. That's the first type of tragedy; I have a duty to save the republic that I have to fulfill and am unable to fulfill.

Then I look across the aisle, at Joe Biden. Pretend for a moment there's absolutely nothing ideologically wrong with him. Pretend for a moment that all his corruption investigations came back proving him clean as a whistle, and that Hunter is the kind of upstanding citizen Superman only wishes he could be. Now in the moment before your powers of imagination crack, would you vote for that guy? Of course not! The man's not all there mentally and physically. Ideally we'd hand the candidacy off to someone younger and more fit; a man in the fresh bloom of youth that comes from only having recently reached retirement age. So who are the Democrats looking to replace Biden with?

That awkward silence is how you know the left is stuck with the other kind of tragedy. You don't get to be a major political figure without believing against all evidence that you're the only man for the job. And if there's one thing that Joe Biden knows (an open question) it's that Joe Biden is the only man for the job. That's hubris right there. Ah, but the Democratic party can shuffle him off to the side using the powers of ... well, no. He's locked in as the candidate on all the primary ballots, and they've tightened up the delegate rules since Bernie Sanders almost won a shot at the title. That's hubris as well. They're stuck propping up a scarecrow who, patently obvious to everyone who sees him, has no brain. Hubris, meet nemesis.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Lamest Show on Earth. Here we see the Stoppable Force colliding with the Movable Object. When both sides must surely lose, who can possibly win? I don't know. While noting that old saw about living in interesting times, the least you can say for said times is that they are in fact interesting.

Now if you'll excuse me, popcorn awaits.