antitheatricality and politics (bye bye Bidey)

The bullet and the ear resulted in a conspiracy a-go-go bonanza of theatrical tropes - it was all staged, Trump as crisis actor, false flag operations etc etc - way too many to monitor, although I did retain this tweet from one Coffeetimes: 

Now we know why Trump was missing for 11 days

Rehearsals

Then came the Republican convention aka Trumpamania:

“We are in the bread-and-circus stage of American decline…faced with an electorate that’s given up all sense of civic responsibility or never learned it in the first place, it’s rational to offer them spectacle in lieu of solutions to their problems....  We live in an un-serious country”

- Nick Catoggio, "The Bread-and-Circus Stage of American Decline" (at The Dispatch)

Not only is Trump too old, his whole vaudevillian festival of hate act is just tired.

advice from one actor to another (Bradley Whitford)

And then as Biden seemed to be cooped up and digging in, and the analogies with King Lear swirled, the gamechanger: 

Biden’s selfless decision to drop out sets stage for an entirely different election 

- The Guardian

Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker went all the way with the analogies:

Joe Biden exits the stage: The Shakespearian end to a distinguished reign

The painful but essential self-removal of Joe Biden from the race for President—one that he has run so hard and, in many ways, in so distinguished a manner—holds some of the shape of a Shakespearean tragedy. So obvious is the seeming connection that it was already a pregnant comparison before there was even a likelihood, much less a certainty, that Biden would cede the stage. The Times has been full of talk of “Shakespearean” falls, its pages touched by leavenings of Julius Caesar and mutterings of King Lear. Indeed, a few weeks ago at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the paper’s own Bard-obsessive columnist, Maureen Dowd, asked two eminent Shakespeareans, Stephen Greenblatt and Simon Schama, just whom in the canon Trump and Biden reminded them of. Neither, tellingly, at that moment, had a strong analogue for the President—though, for Trump, Schama chose Dogberry, the clownish sheriff with the incompetent posse, in “Much Ado About Nothing,” albeit a Dogberry with a darker heart.

An analogue that immediately comes to mind for Biden at this dramatic moment in his and the nation’s life is John of Gaunt, in “Richard II,” the deeply patriotic, yet superannuated and out-of-touch grand old man who, on his deathbed, delivers a matchlessly beautiful speech in praise of the England he has known and of the values he fears are passing. “This earth, this realm, this England,” he chants, warning with desperate alarm that his opponents’ “rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last”—meaning, of course, that he thinks it might. Gaunt resonates because of the depth of Biden’s patriotism and the self-evidence, post-debate, of his own superannuation—of the pathos of his devotion to his country and of the increasing impotence of his rhetoric, however deeply felt and however right the warnings that he offered were.... 

Biden was lost and wandering on a heath of his own devising, and the attempts by his supporters and his friends to rally around him recalled not so much a character out of Shakespeare as the medieval epic hero El Cid, who is mounted on his horse in the desperate hope that the memory of his courage might still be enough to frighten the enemy.

[This comparison between Biden and his dead-enders with El Cid  (the Charlton Heston movie based on a real Iberian warlord - Rodrigo Diaz - known as El Cid) had struck me too. But Gopnik has garbled it a bit:

Here's how it goes in the movie:

Rodrigo dies, and a rumor of his death spreads. His allies honor Rodrigo's final wish. With help of an iron frame they prop up his body, its eyes staring straight ahead. Dressed in full armor and holding an unfurled banner, he is strapped to the back of his horse, Babieca. Guided by King Alfonso and Emir al-Mu'tamin riding on either side, the horse leads a mounted charge against Ben Yusuf's now terrified soldiers, who believe that El Cid has risen from the dead. In the panic that ensues, Ben Yusuf is thrown from his horse and is crushed beneath Babieca's hooves, leaving his scattered army to be annihilated..

And this is the "true legend" of history:

After his demise, but still during the siege of Valencia, legend holds that [Rodrigo consort] Jimena ordered that the corpse of El Cid be fitted with his armor and set on his horse, Babieca, to bolster the morale of his troops. In several variations of the story, the dead Rodrigo and his knights win a thundering charge against Valencia's besiegers, resulting in a war-is-lost-but-battle-is-won catharsis for generations of Christian Spaniards to follow. It is believed that the legend originated shortly after Jimena entered Burgos, and that it is derived from the manner in which Jimena's procession rode into the city, i.e. alongside her deceased husband.]

[back to Gopnik]

So, yes, let us go there: of all the Shakespearean figures whom Biden’s fall recalls, it is Lear. Lear in his sense of self-loss; Lear in his inability to understand, at least at first, the nature of his precipitous descent; and, yes, Lear in the wild rage, as people sometimes forget, that he directs at his circumstances. “Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain / Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters. . . . Then let fall / Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.” This was all too evidently Biden’s emotional tone in these past weeks. When he announced to George Stephanopoulos, in an interview meant to recover his position, that he’s “not only campaigning” but “running the world,” the forced grandiosity of the wounded King was all too apparent. (For his daughters, read passim, his one-time supporters, with Nancy Pelosi cast as Goneril, and Barack Obama as an improbable Regan, a double betrayal by those whom he had trusted.)

But the President stands, or sits, in relation to Lear with this significant addendum. Until his decision to stand aside for a new Democratic Party nominee, Biden seemed to be solving an ancient literary question: What would have happened if the King had not given up the throne? And that answer was plain; it would have been even worse than what happened when he did. Lear, let us recall, begins the play by giving up his office in exchange for the gratification of the praise of his children, all of whom ostentatiously flatter him—except for Cordelia, the only one who genuinely loves him, who fears seeming insincere. The loss of office and the betrayal of his daughters leaves him soon alone and friendless, save for his loyal fool, out in a wild storm.

With Biden, though, unlike Lear on the heath, raging in the company of only his fool, we were out there on the heath with him, being rained on and blown about, too. The final chapter of the Biden campaign was not pleasant or pretty, with the rage of the President lacking the dignity of age and the instinctive patriotism of service that he had shown for so long, replacing it with sheer frustration and echoes of another, forgotten Joe Biden. That was the Biden whom chroniclers had long seen as profoundly ambitious, easily frustrated, and in his way already unduly embittered by the neglect of the élite for whom so much, including political elevation, seemed so much easier. The Biden whom Richard Ben Cramer portrayed in “What It Takes,” a chronicle of the 1988 Presidential race—awkward, amiable, and angry—seemed uncomfortably reanimated. On a daily basis, we were watching a man who might well have mulishly pushed aside the evidence of his cratering support. For weeks, there was the very real chance of civic catastrophe, with the fierce blaze of riot likely to set the whole country on fire.

Today, Biden, just as Lear does at the end, seems to have made his peace with the necessity of accepting the sheer injustice of his condition and his predicament, while seeking comfort in the saner corners of his life. Now, with the knowledge that he has finally made the right call for the general good, we can look back in sympathy with his personal predicament. It is unjust; he did a good job. The injustice extends to the reality that, while Biden is old and frail, his opponent is, and sounds, old and nuts. To reflect on Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention is to see true madness: a disjointed sequence of grievance, self-reference, and unmoored stream of consciousness, offered in a disturbing flow of disjointed imagery, bleeding ears backing into Hannibal Lecter. The whole sounded less like poor Lear and more like poor Tom, the lunatic on the heath whom the disguised Edgar impersonates. Who gives anything to poor Trump?, the ex-President said, in effect. Whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, and through ford and whirlipool, o’er bog and quagmire . . . to course his own shadow for a traitor. Bless thy five wits! Trump’s a-cold!

Biden, by comparison, deserves to be ennobled, not ejected. But if there is one theme that runs through Shakespeare it is that the search for justice is almost always doomed, and that the best we can hope for is self-insight and compassion. And so, unjust or not, Biden’s act is also essential—the good job he had done was over. He has, unlike Lear, who ends his life in the midst of a civil war, the gratitude of his country, too, or at least that of part of it not already despairing.

The great lesson of “King Lear” is not that it is wise, or unwise, to give up power, but that power is always insufficient balm to the human condition. Shakespeare’s point is that we should seek comfort neither in empty flattery nor in the exercise of office but in the presence of those who genuinely care for us. Biden has all that which, as poor Macbeth, who has none of it, says, “should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends...."

And then another instant-classic trope-a-dope bit of theatricalism - from West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin 

How I Would Script This Moment for Biden and the Democrats

The Paley Center for Media just opened an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of “The West Wing,” the NBC series I wrote from 1999 to 2003. Some of the show’s story points have become outdated in the last quarter-century (the first five minutes of the first episode depended entirely on the audience being unfamiliar with the acronym POTUS), while others turned out to be — well, not prescient, but sadly coincidental.

Gunmen tried to shoot a character after an event with President Bartlet at the end of Season 1. And at the end of the second season, in an episode called “Two Cathedrals,” a serious illness that Bartlet had been concealing from the public had come to light, and the president, hobbled, faced the question of whether to run for re-election. “Yeah,” he said in the third season opener. “And I’m going to win.”

Which is exactly what President Biden has been signaling since the day after his bad night.

Because I needed the “West Wing” audience to find President Bartlet’s intransigence heroic, I didn’t really dramatize any downward pull that his illness was having on his re-election chances. And much more important, I didn’t dramatize any danger posed by Bartlet’s opponent winning.

But what if the show had gone another way?

What if, as a result of Bartlet revealing his illness, polling showed him losing to his likely opponent? And what if that opponent, rather than being simply unexceptional, had been a dump truck of ignorance and bad intentions? What if Bartlet’s opponent had been a dangerous imbecile with an observable psychiatric disorder who related to his supporters on a fourth-grade level and treated the law as something for suckers and poor people? And was a hero to white supremacists?

We’d have had Bartlet drop out of the race and endorse whoever had the best chance of beating the guy.

The problem in the real world is that there isn’t a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden. And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesn’t really put a lump in our throats.

But there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.

At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.

Nominating Mr. Romney would be putting our money where our mouth is: a clear and powerful demonstration that this election isn’t about what our elections are usually about it, but about stopping a deranged man from taking power. Surely Mr. Romney, who doesn’t have to be introduced to voters, would peel off enough Republican votes to win, probably by a lot. The double haters would be turned into single haters and the Nikki Haley voters would have somewhere to go, Ms. Haley having disqualified herself when she endorsed the leader of an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government.

Does Mr. Romney support abortion rights? No. Does he want to aggressively raise the minimum wage, bolster public education, strengthen unions, expand transgender rights and enact progressive tax reform? Probably not. But is he a cartoon thug who did nothing but watch TV while the mob he assembled beat and used Tasers on police officers? No. The choice is between Donald Trump and not-Trump, and the not-Trump candidate needs only one qualification: to win enough votes from a cross section of Americans to close off the former president’s Electoral College path back to power.

Part of the wish fulfillment of “The West Wing” was that oratory can be persuasive. So Barack Obama could come forth at the Democratic convention next month in Chicago and remind us, once again, that we’re not red states and blue states but the United States by full-throatedly endorsing his old rival. And Mr. Romney could make the case that the Democrats are putting country before party in ways that the MAGA movement will not, and announce his bipartisan cabinet picks at the convention as well.

After the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump last Saturday, rallygoers pointed at reporters and shouted, “You’re next!” and Republicans in Congress and on television were blaming Mr. Biden and D.E.I. for the shooting, so it doesn’t look as if that terrible moment will serve as the healing event we’ve all been waiting for. But Democrats nominating a Republican could be. And when it loses the popular vote for the eighth time in nine presidential elections, the Republican Party can then rebuild itself back into a useful force for democracy.

The writing staff would tell me I was about to jump the shark, that this is a “West Wing” fantasy that would never, ever happen. But as Bradley Whitford used to say, “Isn’t the biggest fantasy on television a mafia boss in therapy?” The Democrats need to break the glass and this is a break-glass plan, but it’s more than that. It’s a grand gesture. A sacrifice. It would put a lump in our throats.

But mostly, it would be the end of Donald Trump in presidential politics.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Stray bits of theatricality, sources often unknown

Biden flips the script — and Republicans forget their lines

Someone asked why Obama had not endorsed Kamala yet, and gets this reply"

You still don't understand campaign theatrics...this is a well choreographed stage play. He IS the last voice because he is the most powerful voice.

And then

Gotta say, as a Canadian, watching this season of America has been absolutely riveting. Kudos to the writers.

I just hope it’s not the series finale