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Thursday
An article comparing ex-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy to various tragic heroes recently caught my attention since the idea seemed so absurd. And in fact, Professor Rachel Hadas ultimately comes to the same conclusion. Asking whether the fall of the first Speaker ever deposed by his own party fulfills the criteria for a dramatic tragedy, Hadas concludes with a resounding, “Uh, no.”
Along the way, however, she offers us a tutorial on tragic heroes. And she also comes up with what I think is the perfect literary parallel for McCarthy: Lepidus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
What, you don’t recall Lepidus from the play? There’s a reason for that. I’ll explain in a moment.
First, however, let’s talk about all the heroes that McCarthy is not like. Hadas essentially tells the former speaker, “You, sir, are no Oedipus, Creon, Ajax, Cassius, or Brutus.” She does, however, note that Claudius from Hamlet might be a match. And Lepidus.
The fun of Hadas’s piece is what she says about real heroes. First, there’s Creon in Sophocles’s Antigone, who takes a principled stand in refusing his foes (Antigone’s brothers) a proper burial, only to see it backfire on him as first Antigone, then his son Haemon, and then his wife commit suicide. Hadas draws a dramatic contrast:
McCarthy says he will “serve America in new ways.” When heroes are defeated, they don’t usually retire into private life, claiming that a new chapter lies before them.
Rather, classical heroes admit and enact drastic reversals. For instance, Creon… withdraws from the scene, admitting to his disastrous errors of judgment…Oedipus himself, at the close of his eponymous tragedy, blinds and exiles himself.
McCarthy, on the other hand, is retiring in mid-session so that he can get an early start as a highly paid lobbyist.
I can’t figure out why Hadas mentions Sophocles’s Ajax since the two men don’t belong in the same ballpark. This becomes instantly clear from her account of Ajax’s downfall:
[The] hero is so enraged and shamed by the fact that the dead Achilles’ armor has gone to Odysseus rather than to him, that he butchers innocent livestock, deluded in his madness that he is killing his fellow Greeks.
McCarthy is susceptible to jealousy, so there’s that. But a more two-faced, calculating politician it’s hard to imagine. No raging warrior he, unless one counts how, in a fit of peak, he elbowed a colleague in the kidneys before running off. Hadas appears to have included him only for the sake of contrast:
[Ajax’s] madness, sent by the gods, ebbs, and Ajax falls on his sword rather than live with the guilt and disgrace of his actions. But although he accurately attributes his spell of madness to the gods, Ajax also takes responsibility for what he has done.
There’s no such accountability in Kevin’s case. As Hadas wrly remarks in a subhead, “to fall, you need height.”
How about Brutus and Cassius? Well, he’s no kin to “the noblest Roman of them all.” On the other hand, I do find some Cassius similarities. For both, their actions seem more promoted by ego than the good of the republic. But I suspect Hadas brings in Julius Caesar only so she can float her best parallel:
Kevin McCarthy, with his pleasant face and unconfrontational style, reminds me of another passage in Julius Caesar. Late in the play, the victorious Antony and Octavian send the third man of their triumvirate, Lepidus, on an errand to retrieve Caesar’s will. No sooner has Lepidus scurried off than Antony vents his contempt for their associate:
This is a slight unmeritable man,
Meet to be sent on errands…
Historically, Hadas observes, Lepidus “never got to share in the spoils of victory over Caesar’s assassination.” Instead he was banished by Antony and Augustus and went into exile.
Now to Claudius:
But although McCarthy surely felt wronged and wounded by his ouster, he didn’t say so. On the contrary, McCarthy’s special quality, his insistent good cheer, calls to mind another applicable passage from Shakespeare. Noting his uncle Claudius’s urbane and courtly manners, Hamlet observes, “One may smile and smile and be a villain.”
As with the Greek figures she mentions, however, Hadas proffers the Claudius parallel only to withdraw it:
Is villain even the word for McCarthy? Only in the swamp of Washington, D.C., politics does he look, if not like a virtuous character, then like a relatively innocent victim. His chief hubris was in gambling that his maneuvers would work.
If we’re bringing in Hamlet, rather than Claudius I’d suggest Polonius, the scheming courtier who coaches his daughter into serving as a spy and then gets accidentally stabbed when one of his plots goes awry. Polonius grovels before Claudius and Gertrude as McCarthy did before Donald Trump, bringing him back from the political dead after January 6 when he realized that he needed Trump’s fund-raising lists. What Hadas says about McCarthy can certainly be said of Polonius: “To be humiliated, to fall, you have to have attained some height to begin with.”
So Hadas’s article is an exercise in defining by contrast. Except for the Lepidus comparison, which is gold. “Slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands” says it all.
Further thought – In T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the speaker at one point admits he is a Polonius rather than a Hamlet. McCarthy could say the same:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
He was also second in line to the presidency.
