Opinion | When the Mad Lead the Blind
WASHINGTON — For weeks, the most popular ticket on the town has been the British director Simon Godwin’s searing “King Lear” with an outstanding Patrick Web page, placed on by the Shakespeare Theater Firm.
“It’s a critique of the gerontocracy,” Drew Lichtenberg, the theater’s dramaturg, advised me, a parable on clinging to energy “when leaders are too outdated and unwilling to step down and let others discover ways to do the job.”
Carl Hulse and Annie Karni wrote in The New York Occasions about Washington’s precise gerontocracy and the challenges of governing with “an outdated and frail group of lawmakers.” The superior age of many senators — with their illnesses and power absences — has diluted the facility of the Democratic majority. Now everybody in D.C. can be questioning how lengthy Mitch McConnell will keep as the top of the Senate Republicans.
The 81-year-old minority chief is recovering from a fall at a fund-raiser that resulted in a concussion and a damaged rib. Dianne Feinstein, 89 and affected by shingles, has barely been within the Senate this yr. The Judiciary Committee she is meant to sit down on can’t advance judicial nominations to maintain tempo with the way in which Donald Trump and McConnell reshaped the federal courts; their handiwork is seen within the horrible abortion rulings being handed down. Chuck Grassley, 89, had a fall and a hip alternative this winter and has already filed to run in 2028; on the finish of that time period, he’d be 101.
We’re ramping as much as a probable geriatric rematch between Joe Biden, who could be 86 on the finish of one other time period, and Trump, King Leer, who could be 82.
Exploring dotage in a postindustrial panorama, Godwin’s manufacturing evokes Trump, Vladimir Putin, Rupert Murdoch and his “Succession” doppelgänger, Logan Roy.
The primary scene is redolent of Trump, with Lear striding off his jet and theatrically waving official paperwork. Goneril and Regan are flashily costumed like Trump daughters.
Like Trump, Lear makes use of an ego arithmetic to measure his manhood and success. Trump would brag about (and exaggerate) rankings and crowd dimension — and even tally the journal covers Melania was on. Lear brandishes his retinue of knights, which Goneril and Regan whittle down from 100 to zero, stripping their father of his satisfaction and sanity. “I’m ashamed that thou has energy to shake my manhood thus,” Lear cries out to Goneril.
Different moments recall to mind the 70-year-old Putin, puffed out and militarized, pushed mad by a shrinking empire. Blindness is a theme of the play; and Putin suffers an ethical blindness as he pursues an evil conflict towards Ukraine, and he has tried to make his nation blind to the injustice of the invasion. As Gloucester says, “’Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.”
HBO’s “Succession” was conceived as “King Lear” for the media-industrial complicated, as the chief producer Adam McKay put it, a mix of Lear and Rupert Murdoch. Logan Roy and Lear hurl thunderbolts of sadism, pitting their youngsters towards each other for management of the empire. (In Outdated French, “king” was “roy” or “roi,” although now it’s “roi.”)
Watching potentates negotiate over their youngsters’s love, Lichtenberg stated, it’s straightforward to see how the controlling a part of ourselves can result in our undoing. “The scariest factor that you are able to do in life, if you’re staring down the tip of your life, is to ask if you’re actually beloved,” he famous on “Shakespeare Hour Dwell,” his on-line present.
Well being points felled the 84-year-old Logan Roy however authorized points could fell the 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch. The $1.6 billion Dominion Voting Techniques’ defamation case towards Fox Information goes on trial in Delaware Monday. In the end, after a shameless profession constructed on spreading toxic lies about every thing from local weather to Covid to Trump’s stolen election blather, King Rupert, as Vainness Truthful calls him, could also be dropping dominion over his dominion due to Dominion.
The Australian immigrant who ran anti-immigrant information organizations and let Fox Information thrive on the racist “birther” lie about Barack Obama reaped billions by placing People at each other’s throat.
It’s onerous for a journalist to argue {that a} information group needs to be penalized, however Fox Information isn’t a information group. It’s a grasping enterprise that freaked out when some Fox Information reporters really advised the reality about Trump’s lies, after which it proceeded to broadcast the lies.
It will be swell to see somebody held accountable for the grotesque deceptions that corroded our democracy and sparked the Jan. 6 rebellion. Simply as social media corporations torqued their algorithms to spin up battle and income, Murdoch torqued the information, giving viewers what they needed to listen to and blinding them to the reality.
Due to the despicable likes of Murdoch and Trump, America is now “this nice stage of fools,” in Lear’s phrase, howling on the storm.
