Why is cruelty not a disadvantage, but an allure?

In the 7 stories to know post from last week Mark Sumner of Daily Kos included a video by a historian (I didn’t catch the name). The video posed and answered a question: If the Romans in Britain had such sophisticated culture, why was Britain after Rome departed so unsophisticated? Why did this Britain have huts and not villas, chamber pots instead of good sanitation? The time period of this discussion is about 410 CE to about 1066 CE. Before then many residents did live in huts. Only the rich lived in villas. Huts tend not to last a thousand years. Consider what happened when the Romans withdrew. Lots of groups then competed to be the ruling class, so the locals experienced almost constant war. That meant most effort in the society went towards basics like farming and pottery. There was little need for poets. Most documents were in Latin and those who could read and teach Latin were either only in the church or were gone. Trade links were severed. Craftsmen who relied on exports now only had local sales, so they became scarce and their knowledge lost. With such a large need for farming London was mostly deserted for a few hundred years. There was no need to build big monumental buildings. I finished episodes 5 and 6, which is the last of Absolute Beginners. This is the story of Lena and Niko and their parents at a resort on the Polish coast. Lena and Niko are making a movie to get into film school. The rest of my discussion should be seen as spoilers of earlier episodes. So if you haven’t and want to see them, jump to the next section of this post. The end of episode 4 was filming the sex scene Lena thought was vital to their movie. It got rather steamy between Igor and Niko. Now Igor doesn’t want the scene to be used. So Lena and Niko have to figure out how to convince him to let them use it or figure out how to recut the film without it. In the meantime Igor, who was there for a basketball camp, is preparing for the big game. His coach takes him to meet a scout – who starts by saying the many ways life on even a low level pro team will be hard. No sleeping in, up every day at 5! As Niko’s parents’ marriage continues to fall apart Niko realizes this is the end of their time in the cottage jointly owned by them and by Lena’s parents. Niko is saying goodbye to childhood. Episode 6 includes Igor’s big game and whether Lena gets into film school. Alas, there is little room to explore the new relationship between Igor and Niko. There isn’t much beyond big smiles. Overall, I enjoyed the six episodes. It is more unusual than the typical coming of age, first love, and discovering your orientation movie. I finished the book Tyrant, Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt. Several years ago I read his book The Swerve, How the World Became Modern about the shift in thinking that brought about the Enlightenment. I wrote about it back in 2012. This book looks at several of Shakespeare’s plays to understand the nature of a tyrant. He finished writing it in 2018 while the nasty guy was in the Oval Office. Back then I wrote about hearing the book described on NPR. It took a while to buy the book and a few years to get around to reading it. Greenblatt begins his discussion with:

“A king rules over willing subjects,” wrote the influential sixteenth-century Scottish scholar George Buchanan, “a tyrant over the unwilling.” The institutions of a free society are designed to ward off those who would govern, as Buchanan put it, “not for their country but for themselves, who take account not of the public interest but of their own pleasure.” Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself, do such cherished institutions, seemingly deep-rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne? Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying anything he likes, his spectacular indecency? Shakespeare repeatedly depicted the tragic cost of this submission – the moral corruption, the massive waste of treasure, the loss of life – and the desperate, painful, heroic measures required to return a damaged nation to some modicum of health. Is there, the plays ask, any way to stop the slide towards lawless and arbitrary rule before it is too late, any effective means to prevent the civil catastrophe that tyranny invariably provokes?

Shakespeare could not answer these questions through discussing his current monarch, Elizabeth I, though there were troubling aspects of her reign. So he had to look at tyrants from a few to many hundred years before: Henry VI (a trilogy), Richard III, Macbeth, Leontes of The Winter’s Tale, daughters Goneril and Regan of King Lear, Saturninus of Titus Andronicus, Julius Cesar, and Coriolanus. I’m not going to discuss all of these plays – the book is worth reading and the plays themselves are worth watching or reading. Instead, I’ll mention a few things that caught my attention. The Henry VI plays are about the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of York and the struggle that became the War of the Roses. Henry is a youth who doesn’t know how to rule and the dukes step into the vacuum. These dukes are wrangling over a point of law – which law is not mentioned and doesn’t matter. The dispute needlessly escalates into war. Three plays later many are dead, much has been ruined, and another tyrant – Richard – is waiting. Greenblatt notes a few conclusions about this series of plays: + Rising chaos makes the struggle for power unpredictable. York appears to fan the chaos, yet he and his heirs die because of it. + The dream of absolute rule isn’t one person’s goal. The dream is of a dynasty. + When wanting to seize power at any cost enemies can become friends. + A legitimate, moderate leader cannot count on popular gratitude or support. The people are no longer outraged by treachery, nor do they praise virtue. + At the end of the struggle the restoration of order may be an illusion as another tyrant watches a monarch whose power has been reduced. That Richard is Richard III. He has contempt for the law, because it implies public good, and he delights in breaking it. In discussing this tyrant Greenblatt lists those who respond to him: + Those who believe Richard at face value, yet have too little power to do anything. They are merely victims. + Those who feel frightened or impotent by the bullying and violence. + Those who forget how awful the tyrant is and try to normalize his actions. + Those who believe the tyrant can’t get too out of control, that there will be enough adults in the room to keep the tyrant confined to the way things normally work. + Those who believe they can take advantage of the tyrant’s rise to power, that they can profit from his evil. They’re likely to be among the first to die. + Those who help the tyrant. Some help so that spoils come their way. Some help because they enjoy the downfall of those high in the social hierarchy. The genius of Shakespeare is these ideas are embodied into real characters. This play shows that many times a tyrant who knows how to connive to reach the top of power doesn’t know how to actually make the country run. The tragedy of Macbeth is that Macbeth is content to be loyal to the king until his wife prods him into wanting to be king. She does it by insulting his manhood. Soon he can trust no one and the outcome is madness and death. In The Winter’s Tale Leontes appears to be a legitimate and good ruler of Sicilia. He then gets into his head that the child his wife is carrying is not his. The more this notion is challenged, the more he descends into paranoia. With the powers of a king, and with no one to check him, he easily turns into a tyrant. The plot of Julius Caesar is about preventing a tyrant, Caesar, from arising. Yet the act of preventing one brings another, Antony, to power. And he is worse. Coriolanus was raised by his mother to be a warrior. Against the Volsces he does quite well. That’s enough to recommend him for a position of power, but what makes him a good warrior does not make him a good ruler. He doesn’t know how to be a politician and his attempt is a disaster. He is banished. He tries to lead the Volscians against Rome and is rebuffed. Then Volscians accuse him of treason. In this story the leaders of Rome are able to rouse the people into action and prevent a tyrant from taking over. A couple quotes from the Coda:

It was Sir Thomas More, from whom Shakespeare borrowed so much of his portrait of Richard III, who put the matter most clearly almost a hundred years earlier, “When I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world,” More wrote in Utopia, “I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich.”

And...

The playwright repeatedly depicted the chaos that ensues when tyrants, who generally have no administrative competence and no vision for constructive change, actually get possession of power. Even relatively healthy and stable societies, he thought, have few resources that enable them to ward off damage from someone sufficiently ruthless and unscrupulous; nor are they well-equipped to deal effectively with legitimate rulers who begin to show signs of unstable and irrational behavior.

This is a good book. The author explains his ideas quite well. The nasty guy isn’t mentioned, but is always in the background. I don’t think I’ve ever discussed two books in the same post. I’m doing it now because I happened to finish the book I keep in my car (above) about the same time I finished the book I read in the house. This book is Alabama Grandson, A Black, Gay Minister’s Passage Out of Hiding by Cedrick Bridgeforth. I had heard Bishop Bridgeforth speak at the Reconciling Ministries Convo last October and was impressed by his message. That prompted me to buy the book. I was a bit confused towards the end because he is offered a chance to be bishop in 2016 and turned it down. Some online looking showed he was offered it again in 2022 and accepted. This was less than a year after the book was published. Yes, he’s a United Methodist bishop. And he’s gay and married. Which, until this year, was something that could result in a trial and removal from being a pastor. But by 2022 much of the American denomination was ignoring the prohibitions against gay clergy and there was already a married lesbian bishop. One reason why he turned down the offer of being bishop in 2016 is a complaint was filed against him, accusing him of being in a same-sex marriage, which was against denomination rules. He felt he couldn’t both fight the charge and be elevated to bishop. He also felt the time was not right. The book begins with the first part of what happened in 2016. Then it goes back to his childhood to tell his life story. The title is because he starts and ends the book with letters to his deceased grandmother. He tells her how much he loved her and that he knew how much she loved him. But he never trusted her enough to show her all of himself, to say he is gay. When young he describes some of the risky and legally dubious things he got into. He later realizes he did them because he was so conflicted about being gay and about who his father is – he had long noted he looked distinctly different than his siblings. He served in the Air Force while Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was still in effect. He didn’t fly planes, but did help monitor the nuclear arsenal near Cheyenne. It was his supervisor who guided him to the local gay hangouts. He had a long relationship with another airman, then another with the pastor of the church he attended, which stopped when the pastor announced he would soon marry a woman. Before and after the Air Force he mentions some of his boyfriends, though by first name only. He does not mention the guy he eventually married, which I thought odd, though he likely wants to protect his privacy. He mentions the various jobs he had, from high school onward, to show how he got involved in church work and eventually into being a pastor. His story is a good one and I enjoyed reading it. However, I felt he left important things out. His marriage is one of those. Another is whether he grew up in the United Methodist Church and if not, what prompted him to join it. Also, I sometimes got lost in his timeline. He sometimes jumps ahead to show the consequence of an event and doesn’t always say that’s what he’s doing. An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos includes:

The median pay package for CEOs rose to $16.3 million, up 12.6%, according to data analyzed for The Associated Press by Equilar. Meanwhile, wages and benefits netted by private-sector workers rose 4.1% through 2023. At half the companies in this year’s pay survey, it would take the worker at the middle of the company’s pay scale almost 200 years to make what their CEO did. ... The gap between the person in the corner office and everyone else keeps getting wider. Half the CEOs in this year’s pay survey made at least 196 times what their median employee earned. That’s up from 185 times in last year’s survey. ... The disparity between what the chief executive makes and the workers earn wasn't always so wide. After World War II and up until the 1980s, CEOs of large publicly traded companies made about 40 to 50 times the average worker’s pay, said Brandon Rees, deputy director of corporations and capital markets for the AFL-CIO, which runs an Executive Paywatch website that tracks CEO pay. “The (current) pay ratio signals a sort of a winner-take-all culture, that companies are treating their CEOs as, you know, as superstars as opposed to, team players,” Rees said.

What happened in the 1980s that prompted the big rise is CEO pay? The Reagan tax cuts for the rich. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that this year Republicans are tending to run congressional candidates with immense personal wealth. In one sense that’s good because the Republican National Committee won’t be giving them much money because so much is funneled to the nasty guy. In contrast Democrats believe self-funded candidates aren’t good because it prevents them from raising money, also known as actually meeting constituents. Self-funded Republican candidates can meet the real Republican base just fine – the billionaires are hanging out with Elon Musk or at Mar-a-Lago. These are people who don’t like democracy. They also don’t like Biden’s proposed wealth tax and want a continuation of the nasty guy’s tax cuts and efforts to cut consumer protections. So this will be an election between the billionaires and everyone else. Marcus Baram, in a post for Capital & Main posted on Kos, reported the Kansas legislature is considering a bill to give rich people a tax cut. This is after the “Brownback experiment” of 2012-2013 in which Gov. Sam Brownback cut taxes for the rich, decimating the state budget and leading to massive cuts in education and vital services, such as road repair and Medicaid. It also hurt the economy. The same people, led by Charles Koch, who pushed for the tax cut in 2012 are behind this effort. Trickle-down economics is back. Thankfully, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly has said she would veto the effort. In response Republicans said she is “being a bit of a dictator.” They’re also describing the tax bill as tax relief for 3 million people, when it is a tax cut only for those at the top. I checked – the population of Kansas is about 3 million. In Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves has already pushed two big income tax cuts. He’s now pushing to eliminate the personal income tax and replace it with a regressive consumption tax. Alas, residents aren’t good at connecting tax cuts that benefit them a bit but mostly benefit the rich with the decline of public education. Also in Kansas... Another AP article reported the Kansas Supreme Court found that voting is not a fundamental right in the state Constitution’s Bill of Rights. The lawsuit was over a ballot signature verification measure in the 2021 election law. The decision could embolden state lawmakers to enact more restrictions on such things as advance voting, mail-in ballots, and drop boxes. Voters are already confused because of the rules around elections keep changing. Southern Sister Resister posted a photo of what looks like a church sign. It says:

The Church of the Latter-Day Dude Evangelicals, God here. The voice calling DJT ‘The Chosen one’ isn’t Me. Take your meds.