Thread by @jeffblack945

RevThread #162
Macbeth’s Descent

1/ "Macbeth" and "Lear" make an interesting pair. "Lear" is a sprawling affair, Shakespeare’s longest play and most imaginative tragedy, dealing with an ancient, ahistorical figure the artist could shape anyway he chose.

2/ “Macbeth”, written just after “Lear”, is Shakespeare’s shortest Tragedy, the most compressed, set in nearby Scotland. Both plays explore abuse of power, violation of hospitality, and suffering imposed by terrible governance.

3/ For Lear, the whole journey leads to a chastened humanity: “I am a very foolish, fond, old man, and sometimes I fear I am not in my right mind.” Just given Trump’s age, (my own) I was hoping for a Lear journey for our country.

4/ But we’re watching the Macbeths. For Macbeth, the journey is bleaker, leading to the utter nihilism of: “Life’s but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

5/ Something Macbeth says helps us understand what appears to be the pointless destruction Trump is now exhibiting....

6/...At the banquet where the ghost of the murdered Banquo had appeared, and had so rattled Macbeth that the guests had been ordered to leave, Macbeth swears to plunge on....

7/...Hear his terrible words:
“By the worse means [I shall do] the worst.
For mine own good
All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” (Act 3, scene 4)

8/ There comes a point, in the process of corruption by power and wealth, when motive is irrelevant.

9/ “For my own good, all causes shall give way.” That is a statement of someone who is simultaneously devoid of purpose or outer motivation, and someone who is utterly self-absorbed. It is the motto of our current president. How does a person arrive there?

10/ Macbeth tells us. Listen once more:
“I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

11/ As a teen, I was swimming with several of my friends who were on the swim team. I wasn’t. They decided to swim across a lake so I said I’d go with them. One guy was smart enough to know this was folly on my part, so he stayed with me...

12/.. After a long time, I said I was getting too tired and should go back. He said, “Jeff, you can’t. It’s farther to go back than to get to the island.”

Obviously, with his help, I made it. But I never forgot that moment.

13/ Macbeth is telling us what it’s like once you’ve spent some time in Mafia life. Now the lies of today have to be carefully matched with the lies of yesterday...

14/...The cruel dismissal of another’s humanity becomes a practiced skill, made easier by the stored memories of effective insults. The flicker of fear in another’s eye more familiar and more easily pounced on...

15/...The once-forbidden touch now is practiced, casual, confident. The assaults on another’s liberty become my own assertions of my special liberty...

15/..The deaths of soldiers a consequence of less and less importance. Can’t go back. Too “stepp’d in blood.” For my own good, all causes must give way.

16/ He’s an old type, Trump. Caligula, Henry V, Idi Amin, Macbeth. They never actually win. Trump won’t either. He’ll be in the gallery of villains along with the other monsters of the past 100 years.

17/ Many of his followers and all of his abettors are now, like him, “In blood so stepp’d that, should he wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

18/ Macbeth blamed the witches, Trump blames the media and us agitators, but the audience eventually knows. The courage of the Strong Man Who Rules by Fiat is a pose. They never can face or deal with the junk that lies inside.