Profiles in Cowardice
Someone once said that neurotics build castles in the air and that mad people live in them. Sir John Falstaff was a drunk, a liar, a coward, a thief, a womanizer, and a bully. He is by far the most popular character of Shakespeare. He had his own virtual world. The actor who knew him best said that Falstaff was ‘frankly vicious’.
His patron – Prince Hal, later Henry V – was if anything even worse – in cold blood. He set about deceiving and then betraying London low life for his own purpose and elevation, and as king, he ordered the death of one of them in an act of shocking duplicity and blood curdling hypocrisy. He also ordered the death of prisoners – an act that at least one of his army said was against the rules of war.
How then do we account for the popularity of two such nasty people? The answer does in large part turn on a quality that John Keats most admired in this mighty playwright – ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Spinoza said much the same thing. You can match that with the remark of Kant that ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.’
A definitive instance of crippled thought came with the recent U S election. Did the Democrats win or did the Republicans lose? One follows the other as night follows the day, but partisans feel the need to fly their own flag, and see the world through their own prism. Somehow, the Americans look prone to credulity, and their preference for Mammon makes them more susceptible to corruption than the English or us.
Public discourse now is marred by a determination to see things as black and white. We get uncomfortable with grey and nervous with doubt. So, some directors of Henry V leave out of their version of the play the order to kill the prisoners. But they forget that this whole sequence of Falstaff and Hal is meant to expose all our vain posturing about honor and chivalry – and it came at about the same as Cervantes did the same with the equally immortal Don Quixote.
How then do we explain the rise of Donald Trump – a stupid and illiterate spoiled child, coward, and thief who lives in his own world with no friends and a world full of enemies? He is a man utterly unfit for any form of public office.
Jacob Weisberg has sought to answer that kind of question in Profiles in Cowardice, a book that I regard as a triumph – and it is what is called a page-turner.
The book is modelled on the Kennedy book Profiles in Courage. The author first considers five factors that have led his eight people to enable, against their better judgment, the worst president the U S has seen – peer pressure, fear of ostracism, fear of violence, money, and institutional responsibility.
The eight people are Brad Karp (Paul Weiss), Stephen Schwarzman (Wall Street), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Megyn Kelly (Fox News), Mitch McConnell (Senate), George Bush (ex-President), Sian Beilock (Tertiary), and John Roberts (Chief Justice).
The weakness of the big law firms now looks pathetic.
The paradox was clear. The richer a firm became, the more brittle it grew. In chasing the market logic of its clients, Big Law ceased to be a profession. It became a market of mercenaries in which betrayal and the fear of betrayal drove decision-making.
Spot on. Judgmental? Of course – but warranted.
Wall St gets it too. ‘Wall Street embodied a particular form of groupthink, which is to over-value short-term gain over long-term self interest.’
In talking of Megyn Kelly, the author says of Fox that ‘At its core was …bottomless rage and insecurity.’ And mountainous greed and abuse of power from degenerate male predators.
McConnell is a tragic figure – now more than ever, a wheel-chair ghost. The author focuses on the stacking of the judiciary. Obama had another charge. McConnell put a spoke in government that would rub off on the President – and it worked. But the damage he did to the judiciary was incalculable. And his response was always the same – that of a child behind the shelter shed at primary school playing marbles – ‘They started it.’ The result: ‘Mitch McConnell didn’t sell his soul all at once. He traded pieces of it incrementally for future judges.’ This cornball mediocrity did more than enable Trump – he struck blindly at one of the pillars of the nation. He cheated his way out of convention and decency as part of some weird Faustian bargain within himself.
Bush and Beilock are not painted so bleakly, although it chills the blood to read that one reason that Bush stayed so quiet may have been fear of a threat to his family. Under Trump, there has been a breakdown of community and civil discussion and courtesy – but also manifest threats of physical violence. And we now get echoes of it here.
Where does that leave the Chief Justice? He and his judges must know that Trump corrodes everything he touches. My father taught me that if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. As I read the press, the judiciary at the coal face in dealing with all this outlawry command general respect – but the Supreme Court does not. That is a national disaster for a body that has so much power. They are far worse off than members of Congress who have just been too scared to do their job.
People pf my age will not be able to read this book without reflecting on events in Germany and Italy last century. This is from a biography of a German dictator.
The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’. This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial…. At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown…. The Kammergericht [superior court] toed the line. No Frederick the Great was needed, not even Hitler had to intervene. All that was required was a few Amtsgerichtsrats [judges] with a deficient knowledge of the law.
This is from a biography of an Italian dictator.
Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead. He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution: fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.
The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation. Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship. Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered…. Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism. And of course, the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate.
In the book from which those quotes are taken, I said:
Does that not seem to be word for word a correct rendition of how decent Germans probably reacted to Hitler? Still today you will find Christian apologists for Franco, and not just in Spain, who say that his fascism was preferable to republican socialism. Mussolini had the other advantage that for reasons we now regard as obvious, no one outside Italy could take Mussolini seriously. As his biographer reminds us, Mussolini was, rather like Berlusconi, seen as an ‘absurd little man’, a ‘second-rate cinema actor and someone who could not continue in power for long’, a ‘César de carnaval’, a ‘braggart and an actor’, and possibly ‘slightly off his head.’ Churchill always took Hitler seriously; he could never do that with that Italian buffoon. The Fuhrer would betray his nation and kill himself and his mistress; the Italians would revolt from and then murder their Duce and his mistress, and hang them upside down in public …. For whatever reason, the middle classes and those above them in Germany, Italy or Spain, and the popes, did not realise that they had a tiger by the tail with Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco until it was far, far too late.
All that shows just how threatening has been the failure of the U S to deal with Trump, and why books like Profiles in Courage are essential to our beginning to understand what is at stake.
In my eyes, the U S has been in decline since the assassination of Kennedy – but the saving grace has always been that they, through a strong press, tell us all about it – from Watergate and Vietnam to Trump. And in years to come children will ask their parents: ‘What did you do during the Inferno and those ghastly gold idols that defaced and defamed our Capitol?’
Well, we know the observation of Churchill that democracy is a lousy form of government, until you look at the alternatives. But at some time, we the people are responsible for the governance we get, and that turns on little more than our having the right state of mind.
I commend Profiles in Courage for that purpose. Mr Weisberg has chosen writing for his vocation. Had he chosen my profession, he could have been a formidable advocate and very good judge. He understands the role of composition in writing and advocacy. They used to teach it in schools.
Falstaff was frankly vicious. He and his rough mates were deplorable. Prince Hal was not overtly vicious. He acted in cold blood. He repudiated personal loyalty, the bedrock of any community, and broke with convention, the glue of any polity, when it suited him. His wooing of Kate was frankly revolting.
Outside Shrewsbury, Hal heard his father say ‘noting can seem foul to those who win.’ Between them, they destroyed trust and devalued the currency. (Courtesy of Tony Tanner.) Falstaff asked ‘What is honour?’ Whatever else it may be, it is not cowardice. And in the end, even the camaraderie of Falstaff was fake. His ego left no room for friends. Each of the menageries of Falstaff and Trump resembles little more than a house of cards.
