If this isn’t a tragedy of Greek proportions, then what’s? America (US) presidential debate between an incoherent, bodily and intellectually impaired man who can not even enunciate a few of his greatest concepts and a continual liar is a theatrical coup that no one on the planet thought they might see of their lifetime.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden are in search of re-election this yr and, if neither pulls out, certainly one of them will develop into the President of the US, holding the reins of a a lot bigger international territory than the geography of the US. There’s a powerful sense of foreboding, “an impending sense of doom”, as literary critic Frank Kermode says, that’s gripping nearly each observer of US realpolitik all over the place on the planet.
Biden’s buddies and staunchest supporters have already written essays on why he ought to bow out of the presidential race within the curiosity of the Democratic Occasion and the nation at giant. It’s, in any case, a tall order to make Trump come throughout as a greater politician!
Pessimism a lot? Philosophers and literary critics, Friedrich Nietzsche being the foremost, have lengthy argued concerning the relationship between pessimism and tragedy. “Tragedy … is in its essence pessimistic. Existence is in itself one thing very horrible, man one thing very silly,” mentioned the German thinker. What’s much more fascinating, and bang for the buck within the current second, is Nietzsche’s proposition that each one tragedy emanates from time. “All of the tragedies which we are able to think about return in the long run to the one and solely tragedy: The passage of time,” thinker Simone Weil took the concept additional. The tragedy of the 2024 US elections is, paradoxically, predicated on time — the age of the president, the cut-off interval for an abortion to stay authorized and the deadline for the ceasefire in Palestine.
“Simply how far will a pacesetter go with the intention to save face and safe a navy victory within the East?” In 2004, a marketing campaign in London ran on these strains. Solely, it was for a Nationwide Theatre manufacturing of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis and the “chief” in query was the Greek king Agamemnon, the person who burnt the “topless towers of Ilium”, and never Tony Blair, in cahoots with George W Bush, burning Iraq down. That is simply to point out how every little thing we see on the stage of western politics at the moment has its roots within the Greek classical literary traditions. Therefore, the 2 males within the current occasion, vying for the presidential submit on the planet’s oldest democracy, are nothing greater than two performers within the polis — the general public area.
One of many defining options of Greek tragedy, in response to Aristotle, is terror. Solely when terror is unleashed and the dual feelings of worry and pity are heightened can there be the cleaning of the mentioned feelings. The second of catharsis.
Seeing Biden lose his grip on actuality, fairly actually, throughout the debate was each a second of terror and pathos. Equally, Trump’s astute use of the controversy platform foreshadows the times to come back. Not very confidence-inspiring, is it? One, then, begins to query the very objective of such an train. What did the viewers and voters get out of it?
In 1980, behavioural scientist Constantine G Lyketsos revealed his findings on the results of historical Greek drama on sufferers with continual psychiatric points. Taking the Aristotelian view ahead, that frenzied folks have the flexibility to empathise with tragic heroes, performances of assorted Greek tragedies had been utilized in Athens’s Dromokaition Psychological Hospital as a way of psychotherapy. The findings recommended that “drama shouldn’t be merely a leisure exercise for psychological sufferers: Quite the opposite, a singular psychotherapeutic impact is produced by the ability of plot and language”.
Is the presidential debate, then, an act of intervention for the general public at giant within the US and overseas? It could appear so, going by the general public response to the controversy.
The one catharsis supplied right here, nevertheless, is to the non-US residents who’re heaving a sigh of aid that they aren’t poor Individuals saddled with an inconceivable selection this November.
Nishtha Gautam is an writer, tutorial and journalist. She’s the co-editor of In Laborious Instances, a Bloomsbury guide on nationwide safety. The views expressed are private
