Thursday
When I visited my son Darien and his family in Washington, D.C. last week, he cautioned me against attaching too much importance to the January 6 takeover of the Capitol. As he sees it, the insurrection was nothing more than cosplay, various blowhards acting out their barroom fantasies. Although we didn’t pursue it, I had the sense he would say the same about a lot of rightwing posturing, from Michigan yahoos brandishing automatic weapons to Cyber Ninjas in Arizona looking for bamboo in the presidential ballots. Nor does he worry about Trump, whom he regards as far too incompetent to pull off a coup. As Darien sees it, America’s fundamentals are solid enough to ride out such political bullshit, and liberals like myself should stop overreacting.
Macbeth’s best-known passage comes to mind as I think about what he had to say. Macbeth applies the analogy to life itself but try it out on rightwing braggarts:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
It’s certainly true that we’ve had a whole series of sound-and-fury idiots in recent times, from Pat Buchanan to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to, currently, Marjorie Taylor Green and Ted Cruz. As one fades into obscurity, someone else invariably steps up to take his or her place. It could well signify nothing.
Of course, Duncan thought that Macbeth would stand by his oath of allegiance and look how that turned out. It’s not unlike Trump swearing to uphold the Constitution.
I don’t know whether or not Darien is right, but I pray that he is.