Something there is that loves to dethrone a king, especially in America, where we enthrone and dethrone our kings every four years in something called a presidential election.
And now we dethrone kings (or queens) in all walks of life, too, and regularly, it seems.
Just look at news: Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., who was defrocked following allegations that he had molested a teenager decades ago while serving as a priest in New York; “Jussie” Smollett, star of Empire, dropped from the popular TV series for allegedly paying others to assault him; R. Kelly, award-winning R&B singer, who faces charges of aggravated sexual abuse; former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, blacklisted for “taking a knee” during the national anthem; James Levine, conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, dismissed over “credible evidence” that he “engaged in sexually abusive” conduct toward artists; Megyn Kelly, whose morning show on NBC was canceled after she tried to justify blackface as a Halloween costume; or actor Charlie Sheen, who was fired from his popular CBS sitcom Two and Half Men over substance abuse and behavior issues.
And let’s not even mention Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose, Roger Ailes or the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft, who was allegedly caught up in a Florida prostitution sting. And now a four-hour documentary, Leaving Neverland, details child sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson.
How many of us have taken secret pleasure — for one reason on another — in the fall of these personalities from their thrones?
I first learned I enjoyed watching a king eased out of the castle four decades ago.
In the summer of 1973, when I couldn’t get a job after grad school, I was house-sitting for my parents in Hamden, Conn. I watched every hour of the Watergate hearings, from May until August, sometimes six or eight hours a day.
What I learned about myself was as important as what I learned about President Richard Nixon’s cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate Hotel: I have a secret appetite for watching a powerful figure lose power, which I now call The Watergate Reflex.
Years later, as an English teacher, I would find that Aristotle explained this appetite as the desired audience ingredient needed in creating tragic literature: The audience needs to feel pity and fear when a person of high rank falls from that position due to weakness of character, and tragedy is the art form that elicits those emotions.
Pity and fear, Aristotle posited, would cleanse the human heart. Think Oedipus Rex, King Lear, Death of a Salesman, all plays in which a powerful figure is cut down due to a character weakness.
That’s what I felt about Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, the day he became the first president to resign his office and got on that helicopter at the White House to fly off — not to Neverland, but into Has-Been-Land.
I pitied him that he didn’t understand that he had brought about his own downfall, and I felt fear — for myself and for all human beings — that someday I, too, would make a similar journey.
Most of us outlive our own small legend. We grow old and wind up being “runners who renown outran / and the name died before the man,” to quote A.E. Housman’s famous refrain in To an Athlete Dying Young.
In ancient Greek drama, Aristotle thought watching the fall of a “great one” would cleanse the audience’s apprehension about the uncertainties of life itself. But that was 2,400 years before Ted Turner invented 24-hour news television.
Today, millions of Americans tune in daily to the news channel of their political preference, hoping to hear that their controversial president, Donald Trump, has at last brought about his own dethroning or, on the other hand, finally solidified his place upon the country’s throne.
One can almost hear the panting.
They forget that America solved this problem in 1776 — a solution which Aristotle never could have imagined: The throne is put up for grabs every four years.
I guess our pity and fear go now to the fallen archbishops, entertainers, athletes, billionaires and all the other citizens moving to Has-Been-Land as we American TV audiences wash our hands of them.
That’s what 24-hour news television has become, isn’t it? A watered-down Aristotle washing our culture’s dirty hands, instead of cleansing its troubled hearts.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.