No Greek Tragedy Here

To describe Eliot Spitzer’s recent fall from grace as a "Greek tragedy" (as several pundits have done) does a disservice to the Greeks. It is yet another example of the pervasive dumbing down of our public discourse.

Spitzer was self-righteous and arrogant. He somehow got it in his head that electoral success entitled him to certain perks that he himself had vehemently denied to others.

For Spitzer’s fall from power to qualify as "Greek," it would have to be truly "tragic" as Aristotle defined it. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, "The change to bad fortune which [the tragic hero] undergoes is not due to any moral defect or flaw, but a mistake of some kind." Oedipus, for example, murdered his father and slept with his mother by mistake, i.e., the circumstances of his life were such that he did not know the true identity of his parents. Had he known his parents’ true identity, he would not have committed the acts which caused his downfall.

Spitzer, on the other hand, knew exactly what he was doing. He just felt that the rules no longer applied to him. Garden variety arrogance is NOT tragic hubris.

Oedipus was a tragic hero. Eliot Spitzer, a self-important weasel.

There is a difference.

I-D-I-O-T

Yet Another Iraq War Casualty

While those of us in Chapel Hill are keeping our eyes open for the "person of interest" whose image was captured by a surveillance camera at the ATM where he attempted to use Eve Carson's bankcard after her killing, all of us should note that a suspect has been apprehended in the nearly contemporaneous murder of another college co-ed, Lauren Burk, of Auburn University. The mother of the suspect in the Burk case was quoted in a March 10, 2008 Associated Press story as describing her son as an Iraq war veteran who "was changed" after his service. If this is true, he is one of many--changed not for the better but for the worse. And this would make Lauren Burk, like the other victims of violence perpetrated both at home and in Iraq by current and former U.S. military personnel, a casualty of the Iraq war and of the culture of violence that both spawned and perpetuates it. Of course, she will not be listed in the government's official tallies of the dead and wounded. The Plutocratic War Party never takes responsibility for its actions or for the consequences of its actions. Let us not "re-litigate" the reasons for going to war, say its advocates. Re-litigate? How can you re-litigate something that has yet to be properly litigated in the first place? Lies, lies, lies, lies, mass murder, and now the blow-back of mass murder upon more innocents. When will we wake up to the carnage we have brought upon others and upon ourselves? How much blood is enough? The PWP's vampires are insatiable. Their self-righteousness impenetrable. Their dishonesty unfathomable. Their greed inexhaustible. And their patsies in the general public, at least those who write in to their local papers about the recent crimes at Auburn and UNC, want more blood: Arm the professors! Warm-up the electric chair! What we want are orgies of blood, not an end to its shedding--all protests to the contrary. When will we say, "Let it end here. Let it end now"? When? I grieve for the victims. I grieve for the perps. I grieve that we have all come to this most tragic of places: where lives are cheap and hearts are hard and minds insensible to the savagery that we have come to accept as the "cost of doing business" in the world today.

Bi-Partisanship

In the Newspeak Dictionary for these Orwellian times, "Bi-partisanship" is the name that members of the Plutocratic War Party give to what they are doing when they publicly act in concert.

So Much for the Political Imagination...

Way to go Ohio and Texas. Shrillery is not the candidate from Hope but the candidate from Fear. And, as she well knows, fear-mongering trumps hope every time.

The New Meme: Shrillery

When the going gets tough, Hillary Clinton turns shrill. Ohio and Texas: Who would you want to answer that 3 a.m. emergency phone call in the Oval Office? Barack Obama, with his measured cadences, or Shrillery, the Commander-in-Shriek? She thought this race was supposed to lead to her coronation; when it looks threatened, we see how she fares in desperation mode. Ohio and Texas can spare us all the prospect of Queen Shrillery. Let's pretend this country is still a republic and deny her the position to which she presumes entitlement.