By Dean Poling
THE VALDOSTA DAILY TIMES (VALDOSTA, Ga.)
VALDOSTA, Ga.
Mon, May 12 2008
—
The recent fall of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been compared to Greek tragedy. It has some elements.
Spitzer rose to power with promises of bringing the same rule of law which he so vigorously enforced as a prosecutor to the office of governor and to the state of New York. He promised to make a better state.
Yet, like the heroes of Greek tragedy, Spitzer suffered what is often called a tragic flaw, and that flaw wasn’t necessarily a need for prostitutes. No, the prostitution was a symptom of his flaw.
Arrogance proved the downfall of Eliot Spitzer.
He seems to have believed that the rules he applied so sternly to others as a prosecutor then as governor did not apply to him. He apparently came to believe he was not only above the law but that he was also immune to the ramifications he had so readily applied to others.
That’s an arrogance so wanton, a pride so unyielding, that it becomes hubris.
And hubris is what often brings about the destruction of tragic heroes from the Greek plays of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus to the Elizabethan era of Shakespeare to the 20th century plays of Arthur Miller.
Yet, it is not just the delusions of hubris that bring down the mighty; it is not only pride that goes before the fall. There is a Pandora’s box of causes for the fall of a tragic hero: Lust, ambition, jealousy, greed, hate, revenge, or even an ignorance of the conspiring fates, any of the common foibles that have plagued mankind in the real world as well as the theatrical worlds since the Greeks and beyond.
For the Greeks and Shakespeare, these flaws struck leaders, kings and queens, the sons and daughters of royal houses. These were leaders with the powers to benefit their kingdoms but each with a flaw that not only threatened their personal grip on power but threatened the good of the entire kingdom. Oedipus Rex, Agamemnon, Orestes and Electra, Antigone and Creon, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, who all fell prey to the hubris of their lusts, their ambitions, their vengeance, their jealousies, their delusions, their madness.
In the 20th century, playwright Arthur Miller made a tragic hero of the everyman with Willie Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” proving that tragedies of hubris, can be as democratic as a nation that is governed by “We, the People ...” So, too, can a tragic flaw be visited upon the leaders of a democratic nation in the real world.
Eliot Spitzer’s tale does have elements of Greek tragedy. A man elected by the people is felled by holding himself above the laws which apply to those same people. With his political opponents and enemies promising a long, drawn-out campaign to impeach him if he did not step aside, New York’s well-being swayed in the balance of what Spitzer would do next.
In plays, the hero’s tragic flaw often imperils the kingdom, sinking it into pestilence, plague, blood feuds, war, and death. Theatrically, the only way to restore the kingdom or avert disaster is for the tragic hero to gouge out his eyes, be exiled, be chased by the Furies, have his entrails eaten out daily by order of wrathful gods, be slain, or take his own life.
Spitzer should be glad that his political advisors were not Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, or Arthur Miller. So far, all Spitzer has had to do to restore the kingdom is resign.
Dean Poling writes for The Valdosta (Ga.) Daily Times.
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