5.02: Article: ‘What Goes Around Comes Around,’ or What Greek Mythology Says About Donald Trump
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Below are sentences from the article you are about to read. Guess the meaning of the words in parentheses ().
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President Trump (contracted) the novel coronavirus...
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Greek mythology provides (insight) to help us understand today’s chaos.
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There was also a lot of emphasis, as we discussed plots, on a term I then found harder to understand: pride. Pride: (arrogance); an exaggerated sense of self-worth.
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I tended to confuse pride with (vanity), with narcissistic self-admiration; the tragic penalty of vanity seemed overly severe.
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What wasn’t emphasized is that the play was written during and is set (in the midst of) a plague.
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The citizens of Thebes, in the tragedy’s opening scene, implore their wise and resourceful ruler Oedipus to save them from this (disastrous) illness.
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The citizens of Thebes, in the tragedy’s opening scene, implore their wise and resourceful ruler Oedipus to save them from this disastrous illness. Oedipus, moved by their (plight) and confident in his own capability, promises to do exactly that.
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The simultaneity of Oedipus’s (enlightenment) and his catastrophe is one of the factors that made Aristotle so admire this elegantly plotted play.
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“Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it (dominate) your life!” He also said “Maybe I’m (immune)” and took off his mask when returning to the White House.
‘What Goes Around Comes Around,’ or What Greek Mythology Says About Donald Trump
Written by Rachel Hadas, Professor of English, Rutgers University for The Conversation, October 7, 2020. CC-BY-ND (Minimally adapted for readability)
It's hard to process the news of the president's positive COVID-19 diagnosis without using some kind of mythological system, some larger frame of reference.
Karma, wrote one journalist, and then criticized himself for the ungenerous thought. Or perhaps it was simple irony on display when, Washington Post reporters wrote, "President Trump contracted the novel coronavirus after months in which he and people around him…avoided taking basic steps to prevent the virus's spread."
All these reactions make sense. If there's one thing we know about a virus that's still mysterious in many ways, it's that this coronavirus is expert at going around.
And as a classics scholar, I can assure you: What goes around comes around. Greek mythology provides insight to help us understand today's chaos.
Failure to see until too late
Many years ago, my high school English teachers put a lot of stress on terms like foreshadowing, climax and denouement. All these words marked points along a steep curve of the development of a story: rising action, turning point, falling action.
There was also a lot of emphasis, as we discussed plots, on a term I then found harder to understand: pride. Pride: arrogance; an overly large sense of self-worth. Pride tended to be followed by catastrophe – that falling action again.
As a high school student, I tended to confuse pride with vanity, with narcissistic self-admiration; the tragic penalty of vanity seemed overly severe.
What does "pride" really mean? The Greek word it translates is hubris, and pride doesn't quite cover the range of the meaning of hubris. Vanity may well be part of hubris, but a more crucial sense of the word is terrible judgment, gross overconfidence, blindness, stupidity, a failure to see what is staring you in the face – a failure to see it until it's too late.
Retribution and rashness
I don't recall my teachers mentioning nemesis or até, forces or principles that are closely associated with hubris in Greek mythology.
Nemesis is more often personified, and hence capitalized, than até. She's a goddess of retribution, and she can follow acts of hubris with the certainty of a law of gravity – except that there may be a considerable time lag, as if one dropped a plate and it took a generation for it to break. That concept likewise appears in the Bible's book of Ezekiel, which says "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children shall be set on edge."
Até is a more unpredictable figure, not necessarily personified – classics scholar E.R. Dodds in "The Greeks and the Irrational" cautiously defines até as "a sort of guilty rashness."
On the other hand, até can be unforgettably personified, as when Mark Antony addresses the body of Caesar and predicts civil war in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar:"
"And Caesar's spirit ranging for revenge,
With Até by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines, with a monarch's voice,
Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war…"
Goddess or not, até, like nemesis, can be thought of as a kind of mechanism in which one evil is followed by another. There's a chain reaction, a cause and result. Nemesis seems cooler, more targeted and precise; até lets all hell break loose, and also is the hell that breaks loose. Categories blur in the chaos.
'He himself is the polluter'
When I studied and taught Sophocles' tragedy "Oedipus the King," the stress was on hubris, irony, blindness. What wasn't emphasized is that the play was written during and is set in the midst of a plague.
The citizens of Thebes, in the tragedy's opening scene, beg their wise and resourceful ruler Oedipus to save them from this disastrous illness. Oedipus, moved by their suffering and confident in his own capability, promises to do exactly that. His effort to hunt down the criminal whose unpunished sin is polluting the city and causing the plague leads to Oedipus's own exposure as the source of that pollution.
But he continues in his hunt for the truth – even though the truth, as every student learns, turns out to be that he himself is the polluter whom he seeks. Trump, like Oedipus, is the source of the pollution - or at the very least, a carrier, a spreader, an enabler. Unlike Oedipus, the president has actively discouraged the hunt for the truth.
The final words of the tragedy are addressed by the chorus to the citizens of Thebes. It seems likely the plague will be defeated; the city has indeed been cleansed. In contrast, the citizens of our country keep on dying. The president removes his mask and declares his triumph.
Aristotle recommends in his "Poetics" that in the best tragedies, the pivot or reversal – called "peripeteia" – from the height of success to disaster is accompanied by some kind of knowledge –anagnorisis, or recognition. "Pathei mathos," sings the chorus in Aeschylus's tragedy "Agamemnon": wisdom comes through suffering.
The simultaneity of Oedipus's enlightenment and his catastrophe is one of the factors that made Aristotle so admire this elegantly plotted play.
The untranslatable, chaotic force of até plays out in the cycle of reversal followed by recognition; arrogance followed by retribution. What are we supposed to think?
Whether we rejoice or mourn, whether we're joyful or fearful, and whatever happens in the weeks and months to come, this news – that the president has COVID-19 – arrives with a load of predictability: This particular infection seems, in retrospect, if not inevitable then at least overwhelmingly likely.
Hubris: not seeing what's in front of your nose. Even as lawsuits and tell-all books have piled up, Trump has always seemed victoriously immune. Not any more.
Tragedy's lesson
What happens next? Unlike Oedipus, Trump has denied that there was ever a dangerous illness in the city – although Bob Woodward's book, "Rage" makes clear that he knew there was. Unlike Oedipus, he has refused his people's pleas for help.
What does Oedipus learn in the course of the drama? Quite a lot. He may blame the gods or fate for his situation, but he also takes responsibility for what has happened.
What will Covid – his own personal, undeniable experience of COVID-19 – teach Trump? Humility? Compassion? Respect for expert advice? The existence of Nemesis? His own diagnosis of hubris, with a measure of até thrown in?
The answer is all too clear. Released from the hospital, Trump tweeted: "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life!" He also said "Maybe I'm immune" and took off his mask when returning to the White House.
Tragedy, I tell my students, doesn't teach a lesson or preach a moral. It offers a vision. Not: don't be arrogant, prideful, hubristic. Rather: Men of Thebes, look upon Oedipus.
CEFR Level: Low C1
Answer the questions according to the article. Paraphrase your answer.
- Explain what it means in the title that "what goes around, comes around" according to the article.
- According to the article, what is the difference between the common understanding of "pride" and the Greek concept of "hubris"? Explain using examples from the text.
- How does the author describe the relationship between hubris, nemesis, and até? What role does each concept play in Greek mythology?
- What parallels does the author draw between Oedipus and President Trump in relation to the plague/COVID-19? Describe two similarities and two differences.
- According to Aristotle's "Poetics," what elements make the "best tragedies"?
Discuss these questions with a partner.
- What does the author mean when she wrote, "Unlike Oedipus, the president has actively discouraged the hunt for the truth"?
- The author mentions a play that says "wisdom comes through suffering." What does this mean, and can you give an example from your experience of a time when "wisdom came through suffering"?
- The article describes hubris as "not seeing what's in front of your nose" and "a failure to see until it's too late." Can you think of other examples from history, literature, or current events where hubris led to catastrophe? How might the concepts of nemesis and até apply?
- At the end of the article, the author writes "Men of Thebes, look upon Oedipus" as the lesson of tragedy. What do you think we are supposed to learn by "looking upon" tragic figures? How might this apply to how we view leaders or public figures today?