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 SPENGLER
George W Bush, tragic
character
It is hard to label
"tragic" anyone as cheerful and optimistic as President
George W Bush. Perhaps more than any leader in history,
Bush is a Christian. Religious conversion is the
defining experience of his life, and it is in his nature
to convert others. Because he is a 21st-century American
and not a 12th-century Crusader, he preaches the ballot
box rather than the cross; as I have argued elsewhere (
Mahathir is right: Jews do rule the world
, October 28) that amounts to the same thing.
Telling in this regard was the president's London
oration last week. No less than five references to
"ideals" and "idealism" showed where his heart lies;
recall his campaign declaration that Jesus Christ was
his favorite political philosopher.
Mephistopheles introduced himself
to Faust as "ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das
Boese will und stets das Gute schafft.
(a part of that power, which
always wants to do evil, but always does good)." Reverse
this, and you have the tragedy of Bush: he wants
universal good, but he will end up doing some terrible
things.
The more Bush preaches idealism, the
more the course of events pushes him towards imperial
methods. The sort of "Iraqification" Washington has in
mind does not differ much from what I foresaw in early
October: "He wins who best can tolerate instability.
Once upon a time the British were quite good at that.
They ruled India with a tiny civil service and a small
army, recruiting local forces and using them to
excellent effect in a fragmented, multi-ethnic
sub-continent. In essence it means recruiting Turks to
patrol Basra, Kurds to patrol Tikrit, Shi'ites to occupy
Baghdad, while offering bribes, territory and other
inducements to Iraq's neighbors to meddle." (How cherry-picking militant Islam can
win October 3).
Something
quite like this is on the menu. Here are two relevant
news reports:
Item 1: Jalal Talabani, leader of
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, wrote (in the November
20 Wall Street Journal): "There are over 60,000
peshmerga [armed forces] who have fought
alongside the coalition and who are keen to contribute.
We accept the sensitivities that preclude using Kurdish
troops in Arab areas. However, the peshmerga can
be used to provide backup and guard facilities, as well
as protect the borders of our country, thereby freeing
up Iraqi forces for operations in the Sunni triangle."
Item 2: "Iranian President Mohammad
Khatami has quietly announced his recognition of the
Iraqi Governing Council and acceptance of the US
timeline on the transfer of power in Iraq. The
announcement speaks to a partnership that will direct
the future course of Iraq. The alliance is of direct
short term benefit to both countries: The United States
gains a partner to help combat Sunni insurgents, and
Iran will be able to mitigate the long-standing threat
on its western border," reported the Stratfor website on
November 19.
Reverting to the old imperial
methods of handling unruly locals is not what Bush
wanted for himself, but the tragic logic of events
impels him in this direction.
"American tragedy"
(despite Theodore Dreiser's dreadful novel) is something
of an oxymoron, for America is the land of new
beginnings. Tragedy invariably takes the form of a
shadow from the past darkening the present and future.
But something like the River Lethe girds the American
continent, through which immigrants forget their past
and with it their past tragedies. One might say that the
American tragedy is the incapacity of Americans to
understand the tragedy of other peoples. America can
cherry-pick out of the nations those individuals who
wish to be Americans, but it cannot force back on the
nations its own character. Its efforts to do so have
perpetually destabilizing consequences for other
peoples. Not idly does Osama bin Laden denounce
Americans as "crusaders".
Tragedy, I have argued
on past occasions (See above, "How cherry-picking
militant Islam can win") trains the mind to distinguish
the necessary from the merely accidental. Men do not
risk everything on a throw of the dice of war unless
they must. What we loosely call the great tragedies of
history are just that, collisions which men no more
could forestall than the shift in the earth's tectonic
plates. In another location I have discussed the tragic
character of the Napoleonic wars and World War I (Do not click on this link,
October 29, 2002).
More tragedy than history,
Thucydides' Peloponnesian War illuminates the
flaws in the Athenian character which sent Athens to
defeat. Modern historians, eg, Donald Kagan, purport to
improve on Thucydides by correcting factual errors, but
instead dilute his message. Americans have difficulty
distinguishing the tragic from the trivial. The trivial
as opposed to the tragic view of history begins in the
modern period with Machiavelli's Discourses on
Livy, a too-clever-by-half critique of Roman
generalship. Niccolo Machiavelli's interest was to
flatter Cesare Borgia into believing that his capacity
to manipulate was infinite, if only he would listen to
Machiavelli. So much for the Straussians, for whom
Machiavelli is the founding father of modern political
science. Like Immanuel Kant, the Straussians believe,
"We could devise a constitution for a race of devils, if
only they were intelligent" (see Why radical Islam might defeat the
West, July 8).
What distinguishes
tragedy from comedy is the element of necessity, not a
sad or happy ending. The Old Testament story of
Abraham's family is a tragedy in structure, yet it holds
out at least the promise of a happy ending (through
eventual redemption). So are the Homeric epics of the
Trojan War, even though their endings are mixed (sad for
Agamemnon, happy for Odysseus).
If a piano falls
out of a 20th-floor window and lands on Daffy Duck, we
laugh. If a piano falls out of a 20th-floor window and
crushes a loved one, we do not laugh, but neither is it
a tragedy. September 11, 2001 was a tragic event. So was
America's invasion of Iraq. It is Bush's tragedy to be
the protagonist in the tragedy, rather than the
playwright.
The first "tragedy" of the modern
era, the original "Spanish tragedy", is a case in point.
Although he kills all characters, Fernando de Rojas
called La Celestina (1499) a "tragi-comedy"
because misadventure rather than necessity drives the
plot. Despite the high body count, it remains a
hilarious piece of black humor, next to which Bertolt
Brecht reads like The Little Prince. By contrast,
England (William Shakespeare), Spain (Calderon de la Barca), Germany (Johann Christoph Friedrich von
Schiller), and Russia (fill in any writer's name) knew
tragedy. Not so the French. Their national poet Victor
Hugo adopts the structure of French bedroom farce, with
the minor difference that violence takes the place of
sex. The beggars of Paris, for example, storm the
Cathedral of Notre Dame to rescue the gypsy girl
Esmeralda from a charge of witchcraft; the deaf
hunchback Quasimodo mistakes the attempted rescue for a
lynching and pours molten lead on their heads;
misinformed, the king orders his troops both to
slaughter the beggars and to hang the witch. Because
chance prevails, not necessity, the effect is not
tragic, but merely grotesque. It has more in common with
Grand Guignol than Sophocles.
Among the French,
Hugo's grotesquerie evokes cynical laughter. ("Victor
Hugo was a madman who thought that he was Victor Hugo,"
sniffed Jean Cocteau). The subject of tragedy baffles
Americans, though, and Hollywood misread the hunchback
tale as a sentimental story. Take the case of America's
greatest playwright, Nobel laureate Eugene O'Neill. Peel off the top layer of so-called "French
tragedy" and, as noted, you will find the structure of a
bedroom farce. Peel the top layer off O'Neill's Long
Day's Journey Into Night, and you will find the
structure of a 1950s television situation comedy.
Laudanum, whiskey and tuberculosis in O'Neill replace
the situation comedy's typical plot devices, eg, a lost
report card and the window broken by a baseball
(American readers will note that it is a long time since
I have seen one of their situation comedies). But the
dramatic structure is identical; there is no tragic
flaw, and no resolution, and everything will be exactly
the same in the morning, ready for the next episode.
For American readers whose O'Neill is a bit
rusty, here is a more current example, namely, the
purported tragedy of the season, Clint Eastwood's
acclaimed film Mystic River. "As close as we are
likely to come on the screen to the spirit of Greek
tragedy, and closer, I think, than Arthur Miller has
come on the stage ... The crime of child abuse becomes a
curse that determines the pattern of events in the next
generation," gushed the film critic of the New Yorker
magazine. Wrote the critic of the New York Times,
"Mystic River is the rare American movie that
aspires to - and achieves - the full weight and darkness
of tragedy." In fact, my web search suggests, every
critic who reviewed Mystic River characterized
the story as a "tragedy".
But like Hugo's
hunchback story, Mystic River is not tragic, it
is merely grotesque. (Full disclosure: I have not had
access to the film, but read the Dennis Lehane novel
whence it is derived). Young boys murder the daughter of
a hoodlum for a lark. Within minutes, and close by, a
childhood friend of the hoodlum murders a sexual
predator whom he has encountered by pure chance,
prompted by memory of molestation suffered as a boy. The
hoodlum mistakenly concludes that his childhood friend
is the murderer of his daughter, and murders him in
turn. Distasteful and somewhat depraved, Mystic
River nonetheless is comedy, based on random events
and mistaken identities. Do not look for strategic
judgment where this sort of concoction passes
universally for tragedy.
Daniel Pipes (whose
column now appears in Asia Times Online) wrote in 1996:
"Fat'hi ash-Shiqaqi, a well-educated young Palestinian
living in Damascus, recently boasted of his familiarity
with European literature. He told an interviewer how he
had read and enjoyed Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Anton Chekhov, Jean-Paul Sartre, and T S Eliot. He spoke
of his particular passion for Sophocles' Oedipus
Rex, a work he read 10 times in English translation
"and each time wept bitterly". Such acquaintance with
world literature and such exquisite sensibility would
not be of note except for two points - that Shiqaqi was
until his assassination in Malta a few weeks ago an
Islamist (or what is frequently called a
"fundamentalist" Muslim) and that he headed Islamic
Jihad, the arch-terrorist organization that has murdered
dozens of Israelis over the last two years."
I
cited this example on September 22, 2001 (Washington's racism and the Islamist
trap, adding, "An unconventional warrior with
a passion for Sophocles is a formidable opponent indeed.
One imagines a Central Intelligence Agency analyst
slipping the Encarta CD into his computer at this point
to look up who Sophocles might have been. It's going to
be a long, long century."
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