May the Comeuppance Be Cosmic

 

Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood

 

DJT. I'm not using the name any more. Just the initials. Like he's achieved some plus-sized historical significance equal to other sets belonging to celebrated Americans -- LBJ, FDR, JFK, MLK -- all known immediately. Yeah, he's probably already that plus-sized, and he still has a couple years to go. Maybe he'll inflate like a parade balloon and float away.

Did you ever see There Will Be Blood? Daniel Day Lewis starred as the obsessively acquisitive silver miner-turned oil man Daniel Plainview. For Plainview, money becomes a means of winning, controlling, humiliating, and separating himself from people. By the end, he's enormously wealthy but almost completely isolated. His son H.W. has left him; his business empire has become largely irrelevant to his emotional life; and he spends his final scenes in his mansion, drinking, alone.

Let's start a parlor game! Pick the fictional (or historical) character who most resembles DJT for greed and cruelty, and enjoy imagining that every famous ending might also be DJT's.  

Okay, here's another, purely historical destructive ego: King John, who was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. He died in 2016 while fleeing his enemies. John, the youngest surviving son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, was a particularly ugly historical personality. His appetites, suspicion, financial exploitation, and abuse of power stand out in the historical record, along with boneheadedness. He repeatedly undermined his own political position -- hence, that signature at Runnymede. He's a good example of a man who is so determined to gratify himself that he destroys the system that sustains him. 

Just a little computer assistance turns up quite a roster of other historical and fictional characters who understood acquisition as a means of making themselves invulnerable, because they were profoundly incapable of genuine human reciprocity: Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Richard III, Thomas Wolsey -- the list is almost endless. Which teaches its own lesson. Given power and opportunity, every man can become a selfish jerk.

Then there's France's Louis XIV, the ultimate royal ego: L'État, c'est moi, he famously said -- "The State, it is me." Not a good candidate for our parlor game because he died of old age, still sitting the throne. Sometimes comeuppance doesn't arrive on time.