The current impeachment proceedings are both a tragedy and a farce. They are a tragedy in that the nation has been brought so low by a character who has neither the grandeur of Richard III nor the fatal flaw of character that plagued Lyndon Johnson who, despite his political sophistication, thought he could negotiate with Ho Chi Minh as if the North Vietnamese leader were the head of the United Auto Workers. They are a farce because everybody is fighting against the obvious truth of the charges and defending Trump by saying that he is, at bottom, too stupid and disorganized to carry out any conspiracy. We are in the presence of a very unusual bad guy. It would take Mel Brooks to do him justice, although Alec Baldwin does a very good job.
While both tragedy and farce still apply, it might be better to consider the current impeachment proceedings as a musical comedy, given that the speeches of the participants are more notable for their different voices than for the content of what they say, and also because the morality tale that underlies these voices, different depending on which side you are on, is the same thing that ties together so many contemporary musicals, which is a simple and self evident moral point. The theme of “South Pacific” is racial diversity: the theme of “Gypsy” is ambition; the theme of “Fiddler on the Roof” is tradition. This is so even if the American musical comedy used to be long on complex and emotionally wrought songs with little attention to the plots that strung those songs together.
Well, these impeachment proceedings are more like the aforementioned modern, tight booked version of the musical. First of all, the plot is of little interest because you know how it will turn out. Nothing happens in “Oklahoma” because nothing is supposed to happen while you contemplate the feel of hayseed country life. You know, in “West Side Story”, that there will be a gang tussle in which someone dies as well as the death, at the end, of the two lovers because this is, after all, “Romeo and Juliet”, a play every dunce became familiar with in high school. You know that the two marriages in “Showboat” will come to a bad end because the story is sad, filled with pathos rather than tragedy. And you know that Eliza will wind up with Professor Higgins rather than Freddie in “My Fair Lady” in spite of Shaw not having ended “Pygmalion” that way because, after all, this is a Broadway musical. You don’t expect Madame Butterfly to set herself up as an entrepreneur, do you?
So we know the trajectory of the impeachment plot: a bill of impeachment in the House and no conviction in the Senate, everybody going through their paces because they all feel they have to behave this way than try something fresh-- such as what? Everybody is very serious and I don’t think they can alter that, both the President’s protectors, who do not want to get out of their bargain with him because they will still be around to pick up the pieces after he is gone or the Democrats acting out of what they think of as high statesmanship and so setting their sights on how history will vindicate them.
What do musical comedies focus on if it isn’t plot? They focus on atmosphere and character and also on a bit of sadness. There is plenty of atmosphere in the committee rooms of Congress, as that scene in “The Godfather” made clear, and those politicians stuffed into their pretensions always seem a bit sad. Moreover, the chief protagonist in a musical comedy doesn’t have to be an attractive figure. There was nothing likeable about Pal Joey or Sweeney Todd or the phantom of the opera. Donald Trump could be the central figure in the musical about his impeachment, or simply be represented, Expressionist fashion, by a big orange balloon. Alec Baldwin could star in the long term version of his SNL sketches. He is an accomplished comedian and, if you remember, a rather good dramatic actor, but I don’t know whether he is able to sing and dance well enough to carry off the role. But then Rex Harrison and Yul Brynner could only sort of sing and they were just fine as Henry Higgins and the King of Siam.
But a musical is nothing without its music. I can still hear “I Could Have Danced All Night” ringing in my ears even without me calling it up. Here the just concluded impeachment hearings come up short. You have to listen very hard to find the rhythms of the various forms of pontification that go on in them. There are the solo moments when the Republican Jim Jordan goes into his full call of outrage-- glib, rapid fire, a bit strained-- or when Adam Schiff speaks in his leisurely, lower registered voice, or when all the other congresspeople enter into the cacophony so as to create patter that is larger than any one of them as they all heap shame on the other party. You get swallowed up by the high falutin talk to no purpose other than to give every voice a chance to be heard, which makes for a mightily messed up ensemble.
A reader might say that it is amusing but a stretch to compare the impeachment process to a musical comedy. Encapsulating political events as aesthetic ones has its uses in that it helps capture the feel of the moment and that many different and unexpected emotions can cast light on and refocus a political event, and so it was indeed fair to say of the Nixon Impeachment that this was a tragic tale of a person brought down by his tragic flaw of resentment combined with a belief that he could not win fair and square. But musical comedy or any other literary form or genre has its aesthetic coherence and so can be said to respond to rules of its own, while politics is not bound by those rules. Things can happen in politics which do not seem sufficiently motivated by what has gone before or by the spirit of this kind of rendering of reality. For example, Rudolph Guiliani was recently on a trip to Ukraine to meet a discredited prosecutor. Does that mean he will try to concoct some story that “reveals” what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to? The story doesn’t have to be true. Released as a news flash on Fox News, it can serve to sufficiently muddy the waters so that people are left wondering whether there is something to the President having gone after the Bidens in the Zelensky phone call, and that will weaken Biden enough that his party will be leary of nominating him and so it will be mission accomplished for Trump. Democrats don’t want to face up to some October Surprise in January, and don’t think that Mike Bloomberg hasn’t considered it, and that is part of what made him decide that it was worth getting into the race. So politics doesn’t have to follow the rules of coherence provided by one or another literary genre-- though, then again, it sometimes does.
There is a theatrical genre other than the musical comedy that might even serve better as a model for the current impeachment proceedings. That is the Theatre of the Absurd as that was practiced in the Fifties by playwrights out to use farcical comedy to point out some grave metaphysical situation that encompassed humanity. Ionesco had rhinoceroses running rampant through the streets and that could be taken as the dislocation caused by politics or simply the existential uncertainty about what cataclysm could befall all of us next. Well, the impeachment follies certainly have enough blowhards to qualify as an Ionesco crowd. And the blowhards do raise a metaphysical question, which is whether there is anything such as truth that commands universal respect.
The Democrats have convincingly demonstrated that there was a well established preparation throughout the government for that phone call between Trump and Zelensky. In that phone call, Zelensky says that he is willing to buy arms, as if that were an act of generosity rather than despair on his part, it indicating he had been well schooled on how to talk to Trump, which means to be obsequious. Immediately upon that offer, Trump delivers the now famous remark “But I have to ask you a favor, though” and then asks him to announce an investigation into the Bidens-- without, by the way, citing any other examples of corruption to be looked into or even citing the word “corruption”. Republican counsel on the Judiciary Committee say there is no quid pro quo, no bribe, because Trump doesn’t mention arm purchases and doesn’t say “or else”. Yet there is no way to read this exchange in the phone call as constituting anything other than what in common parlance is called “a bribe”.
So the Republicans who insist that this was a perfect phone call are not saying it was an unfortunate phone call that does not happen to rise to the level of an impeachable offense. They are simply violating the facts and therefore it leads an outside observer to question why they would do so, to look into their motives, such as whether they have political reasons to side with Trump or are just cowardly or are so deficient in logical ability themselves that they do not see the fallacies in their reasoning. In all three of these cases, an observer is left to wonder how it could be, what is the additional motivation, that would lead people to neglect what is clearly the logic and the assertions made in the statement. That is not what usually happens. Ideologues, whether Communists or medieval Catholic theologians, may select their facts or have ways of countering their opponents with patented phrases such as “you have to break eggs to make an omelet”, but rarely do people simply refuse to acknowledge that statements say what they say. When Hitler said in September, 1939 that Poland had invaded Germany, he was simply lying. Nothing complicated about that. But here the Republicans are saying that what is patently obvious is not so and they go on for hours and hours to do so. Certainly a Theatre of the Absurd situation, one that leads to frustration and anger and, more than that, a sense of bewilderment that you have to defend logical inference itself as a process. If we can’t be logical together, then what can we be together?
That is a deep philosophical question, fully worthy of the Theatre of the Absurd. Social philosophers, in fact, offer a number of alternatives. They posit a sense of community that could substitute for the unity which rational discourse could bring us to. Or they posit a sense that shared common economic interests or a shared situation as an exploited group can bring people together as a class or as a gender or as a political party, the Republican politicians not having sought out Trump but stuck with him until he leaves the scene. And all of this engendered by a person who would be incapable of appreciating the depths of the dilemmas he imposes on people to sort out. It is a puzzlement, as Yul Bryner might say, and certainly something fresh if also terrible for our imaginations to contemplate.