The End of Act Five, Fade to Black

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Imagine Willie Shakespeare on a bad day.

     It's raining at Stratford-on-Avon, he has a hangover from the night before, he's four acts into the play he promised the theater manager who's teething on his ass for the completed manuscript and the players are itching to rehearse their lines. But the Bard had written himself into a corner. For four acts, each one encompassing a year in the life of a despot and tyrant, he had created something no one has ever seen before: A leader so completely bereft of morality, empathy or self-awareness that he's even willing to throw his own kids to the wolves just for a little more money from the kingdom's Treasury.

    He realizes the limitations of such drama: Without a real-life precedent like, say, Henry V or Richard III, his creation, his villain, lacks plausibility. Surely, such a monster could not actually exist in polite human society, could it? Even those around him in this part history, part farce are evil beyond measure. They are all Iagos, bereft of anything even remotely resembling a human soul. They have shamelessly bankrupted the Treasury for the nobles and barons and, of course, themselves. They have imprisoned the unwashed rabble from other countries, placed their children in cages and all while declaiming from the royal balcony that he is representing the basest fears, prejudices and hatred of the people.

    Willie smokes his pipe, looks out at the dreary, rainy Stratford-on-Avon countryside, and bites the bullet to complete the 5th Act. That 5th Act of this otherwise most wildly implausible character, this downwardly-spiraling, self-destructive homunculus who's a tragedy to some, a farce to others, is Donald Trump today.

   Donald Trump is that incompetent tyrant who strains credulity, threatens to upend Coleridge's suspension of disbelief, that wouldbe Hitler without a war, that fascist constrained by the creaking and smoking wreckage of a still albeit barely functioning democracy. He is Oedipus in the midst of his kingdom's plague, so completely divorced from reason that he does not realize that he is the one who ravaged his realm through his inaction.

    Donald Trump is now flying to Georgia, whose governor he berated on the phone today. Just a couple of days ago, he called Brian Kemp, that most able and capable of presidential jesters, a "moron" and a "nut job". By today, he was whining and pleading for Kemp to call an emergency session of the Georgia legislature and to twist enough pricks to force the Georgia legislature to elect their own Trump-friendly electors (The national deadline to cast their votes is in nine days, December 14th). He also demanded that Kemp order an audit of the ballot signatures (it's been done already), which would be a violation of the law. The man who'd two years ago interfered in his own election as Secretary of State, in a stunning display of self-preservation, said, "No, I can't do that." neither can Georgia legislators elect their electors, ergo disenfranchising the people of Georgia.

     So now he's flying to Valdosta so he can hold a much smaller version of his indoor super spreader events from earlier this year. He vows to keep campaigning, to keep running, even though the election was over a month ago. Even while still flying on Air Force One for one of the final times, still he was tweeting insults aimed at Kemp and AZ Governor Doug Ducey. Obviously, at 7 PM he'll begin tilting behind the podium as surely as he tilts at the windmills he believes cause brain cancer and that cost him the election. He'll be there ostensibly to rally support behind full time Wall Street tycoons and part time Senators David Purdue and Kelly Loeffler.

     But they'll get lip service, if that. It'll be all about poor me, they stole the presidency from me that I never wanted to work at, it was rigged, thereby undercutting the Georgia GOP's most dogged efforts to get out the vote for their people. The mad king, enraged and baffled by the proletariat turning on him, responds by executing his jesters.

Act V, Fade to Black

One of the most entertaining of those jesters, those practitioners of the art of the cap and bells, was once a great ruler in his own great kingdom. Like Daffy Donald the First, when his own realm was attacked out of the blue, he called for the election to be suspended so he could be given a then unprecedented third term, in essence using the deaths of nearly 3000 human beings to extend his power. So it's not very surprising this power-starved purveyor of conspiracy theories and cheap hair dye, surrounded by his own, lesser partisan jesters, would call for the same for Mad Donald. They shrilly scream, "Off with their heads!", "let's draw and quarter them and shoot them at dawn" and we all nervously laugh.

    But this isn't a laughing matter and isn't fit for a Shakespearean farce. The mad king is calling into question, and exploiting the feeble mindedness of a significant portion of an electorate, the very bedrock of our most valued and hallowed constitutional rights: The right to vote in a free and fair election. It is simply the very foundation upon which our democratic republic sits. And to sledgehammer it in a never-ending fit of infantile pique and wild abandon cannot possibly lead to any good in our nation.

    Certainly not to his own party that nervously titters and looks the other way as he pulls down his pantaloons and exposes himself to the nation time and again. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, indeed.

    Donald Trump is about to take that tiny little stage in Valdosta, Georgia, to hurl insults at their governor and other governors who have shown a shred of respect for the law and, however reluctantly, certified their respective states' elections and called them for Biden.

    Trump, in his constant infantalizing of the American people and the sycophants in his baleful, bloated shadow is damaging a core institution in ways even he, in his most Machiavellian machinations, could not have envisioned. Nearly one half of the country will be suspicious of future elections, starting with the two January 5 runoff elections in Georgia that will determine the balance of power in the US Senate. He will instill fear and more grievance in these voters, a grievance to which they haven't the slightest right because they had already voted five weeks ago in a free and fair election.

     But the shared grievance, however real and imagined, the shared hatred and bigotry of his base, is all part of the show and, as the old adage says, the show must go on. They are riotously flinging money at his feet, $207.5 million at last count, because he suckered them (There's one born every minute, you know) into believing they're fighting voter fraud when 75% just goes straight into his pocket, the other 25% to the RNC and that they'd have to donate a whopping $5000 before even a penny goes to fund the pathetic roadshow of right wing grievance that are Trump's lawsuits.

     If Shakespeare had ever submitted such a manuscript with such a 5th act, the theater manager would have pissed on it and handed the soggy remains back to the Bard and told him to start over with something that more capably subscribes to reason.