There is no Cordelia

Biden on the heath

KING LEAR

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!

Yesterday’s presidential presser has proved once again that President Biden is not fit to be president; but, he is mostly puppeted, often partially successfully, by his staff and former Democrat presidents, power-minions all. Like King Lear, under raging storm, half-naked on the heath, bellowing into the silencing wind, Biden makes himself vulnerable to a fool’s bidding, to fate and its merciless determination to reveal.

I would cast Obama as Goneril (who kills Regan) and the Clintons as Regan, poisoned by the sociopathic “progressive” politics the Obamas so earnestly positioned for the well of power that now leaks from the cracks in its funnel. Power is like water, rushing mindlessly from one vessel to another, filling thy cup until it overfloweth, spilling out to degrade anything else it reaches. And we are in a state of degradation, so very sadly.

(There is always hope.)

But I reel metaphoric. To the business: there is no Cordelia. She, the ever-loving and true daughter, cannot be seen for pride, not hers, but the pride of her jailers, Goneril and Regan.

Who would play her? Not Harris, who is more like a dumb Cleopatra in her excesses of gibberish speech. Newsome is a King Richard, a bit of an Iago too. The Democrat voting base? Those who care about the old man are senile themselves, remembering a handsomer, if similarly foolish man. The Young Dems either loathe his white maleness, or they cringe at his verbal incontinence. They might whisper: “That he is mad, ‘tis true: ‘tis true ‘tis pity, And pity ‘tis ‘tis true—a foolish figure. But farewell it, for I will use no art,” (Polonius, Hamlet). Unfortunately for us middle-aged folks, the Gen-Xers et al who have no cultural power (at the moment) and stupidly pine for a hero, the youth have nothing but their foolish figuring and the inexperience of a boy-king, demanding but imprecise.

Who could love this man other than a doting daughter, pure of heart, anguished by the torments he faces by a press gnashing its teeth for embarrassment and the pressures of their art to report truth? Lear is the most tormented by Cordelia’s efforts to protect him. Ah, so it is the press, dutiful loyalists that they’ve become.

But they are not loyal to the king, just the power of the kingdom, as it shifts. And right now, its shifts—like torrents in a storm—smack against their soured, squinted faces.

Was Cordelia playing a game she simply lost? Hoping to use goodness and loyalty to eventually reclaim the kingdom for herself and her heirs? She marches back from France, regnant and with army, so it’s possible.

If it weren’t a tragedy, it could be a farce; but too much is at stake: a country, a populace on the brink of serious conflict, however much we hope not.

I worry. You worry. There is much, worry to woe.

Coriolanus stands knocking his fists at Kingdom’s edge.