Lear, Biden, and Trump: The Perils of Old Men in Power

Vanity and cognitive decline may be serviceable qualities for special interests, but they are ruinous for the health of the Republic.

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty
According to my bond; no more nor less.
-Cordelia in King Lear

Al Pacino stars in forthcoming film “Lear Rex”

Lately I’ve been thinking about President John Kennedy, and last Saturday I spent the morning at Dealey Plaza here in Dallas, meditating on his untimely death. He had a razor sharp intellect and an independent, critical spirit that made Allen Dulles, Curtis LeMay, and other old men bristle.

It’s hard to resist the temptation to compare him to Presidents Biden and Trump. And when thinking about an old man in power, it’s hard to resist the temptation to compare Biden and Trump to King Lear.

Shakespeare plucked the story from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae, which presents Leir as a pre-Roman king who ruled for about sixty years around the 8th century BC, founded Leicester (supposedly “Kaerleir”), and divided his kingdom among his three daughters after testing their love and devotion.

Lear is the quintessence of a vain old fool who treats the professed love of his children as a public performance and his kingdom as a prize to be auctioned to his greatest flatterer.

Cordelia’s honest answer is not cold, but a refusal to make expressing affection an instrument for gain.

Lear perceives her honesty as an insult because he has grown so accustomed to flattery at court that he can no longer distinguish it from honest affection. Though an old man, he acts like a spoiled child who has a tantrum when he doesn’t hear what he wants to hear.

The play is strangely pitiless in its lack of justice. After being spurned by her idiot old father, Cordelia returns, forgives him, and dies. The famous line, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods” is not mere cynicism, but an expression of the moral of the story. Vain and demented old men in power do destructive things and “the gods”—if there are any—don’t seem to care or keep an account.

I have long suspected that whoever runs the nations of the West seems bent on destroying them. Assessing what has passed for “leaders” over the last twenty-five years leads me to believe that none of them are actually in charge. The younger set—guys like Trudeau, Macron, and Zelensky—strike me as dopey, pliable, and of questionable identity—while the “seniors” have struck me as lacking the intellectual and moral strength to recognize the reality of their situations, surrounded and manipulated by clever, sycophantic snakes.

As for the public—it it so blinded and divided by partisan sentiment that it cannot see that whatever “candidates” are presented to us are the opposite sides of the same old coin.