We're all familiar with Oscar Wilde's quip about life imitating art. It's a good line, although circular, as the art derives from life initially.
However, we have in the Fake President of the United States, an incumbent who's pathetically playing out a role already well established in one of theatre's great tragedies -- King Lear. (Readers will know from a previous, very persuasive series of mine that this work is often wrongly attributed to an illiterate Stratford-on-Avon grain merchant and property speculator, popularly known as William Shakespeare.)
Despite that, Lear is a classic of the canon. For those unfamiliar with the opus, it basically tracks the descent into madness of an old git of a king who divides his estate between his daughters according to their respective self-professed degrees of filial love.
It's called a tragedy for good reasons. Things turn so pear-shaped, it makes Outrageous Fortune look like a vicar's tea party.
At one point, old Lear -- his wits rapidly unravelling -- roams a storm-swept heath accompanied only by a fool (court jester), while ranting and railing about the various betrayals he's suffered.
For Lear, read Trump.
Like a lot of Sir Henry Neville's -- oops, I mean Shakespeare's -- work, King Lear has attracted much psychoanalytic and psychosocial interpretation. One commentator refers to, at the start of the play, Lear's "near-fairytale narcissism". Hmm . . . rings a bell.
Another critic, Coppelia Kahn, avers that Lear's old age causes him to regress into infantilism, in which -- in the absence of a mother figure -- he invests his daughters with the maternal role.
Hmm . . . wife Melania looks a real tough nut -- have you seen the way she contemptuously swats away the grasping little Trump hand? And, hmmm . . . daughter Ivanka's been doing an awful lot around the White House lately, and doesn't she also accompany him on state trips and even sit in for him at top level meetings, even though she's a political tyro?
Kahn suggests that with Lear, in reversing the traditional parent-child roles, his madness is really a childlike rage derived from perceived lack of maternal care. Double hmm ...
Trump is on the Washington heath, and there's a tempest raging. Like Lear, he feels betrayed -- enemies lurk behind every pillar and post in the White House.
Most of his initial appointees he's already fired into oblivion, even though many were cronies. And now he's running out of cronies.
His new appointees are not quite so beholden. They're whispering behind his back, and even tactically by-passing their boss altogether in order to get nuts-and-bolts stuff done in a seemly manner.
Lear at least had a fool with him out there on the heath. But Trump has even fired the fool. Anthony Scaramucci lasted only 10 days as White House communications director, and now he's found his natural calling doing late-night television comedy.
All the isolated Donald has for solace now is toxic late-night Twittering.
Meanwhile, his fellow man-brat soul mate, Kim Jong-un, is doing a bit of infant regression of his own -- tossing missiles out of his cot really floats his boat. He probably lacks maternal nurturing too.
Now Donald wants to toss some missiles out of his own cot. If it's good enough for the walking doughnut from la-la-land, why not him? It's all just so unfair.
This is why the Donald has promised "fire and fury". The word "fire" is now just part of his DNA; "fury" was what old Lear was getting plenty of out on the heath. It was the metaphor for all the inner turmoil ... and "fury" twangs nicely with "fire".
Hopefully, Trump doesn't project his own self-induced pathetic fury on the wider world. The real scary thing is that if he suddenly feels the urge to hit the nuclear button, no one else's permission is required. Let us pray.
