Friday
Now that Donald Trump has instructed his flunky in the General Services Agency to fund President-Elect Joe Biden’s transition, we have as close to a concession from Donald Trump as we are likely to get. Last week I compared Trump to King Lear, a leader who departs the scene badly. Thanks to an article in Town & Country, I recall that Shakespeare also provides models for leaders who step down with class. Trump would do well if he modeled himself on Cleopatra.
Having lost Antony and determined not to become Octavius Caesar’s battle trophy, Cleopatra opts for suicide by asp. Her last words represent her finest moment:
Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me: now no more
The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip:
Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
Antony call; I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
To excuse their after wrath: husband, I come:
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life. So; have you done?
Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.
Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.
Daniel Mendelsohn writes,
But if history and literature have anything to tell us, it’s that the figures who have earned the greatest admiration are often not the ones who won the battle or the election or the girl/boy, or whatever, but those who knew how to lose gracefully.
And
[T]he fictional characters we love best are those who yield to life’s harshness while preserving an inner, inviolable aplomb…
Mendelsohn mentions Hector’s farewell speech to Andromache as well. The situation isn’t exactly the same as Hector intends to return victorious. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that his wife’s premonition that Achilles will kill him may be well founded:
Then tall Hektor of the shining helm answered her: ‘All these
things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame
before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments,
if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting;
and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant
and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans,
winning for my own self great glory, and for my father.
For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it:
there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,
and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.
But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans that troubles me…
as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured
Achaian leads you off, taking away your day of liberty,…
But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I
hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.
(trans. Richard Lattimore)
Compared to Cleopatra and Hector, Trump has it easy. Come January 20, Biden will not be parading him in chains down Pennsylvania Avenue or dragging his body three times around the Washington beltway. Trump could issue a short, dignified note and go off to play golf in Florida.
Instead, like Lear, he rages at everyone around him. No one is surprised.
