Paul Edwards
PAUL EDWARDS
Ubu Roi was the bizarre name of a French play presented in 1896 that provoked violent protests on its opening night before its forced closure, with its absurd, insulting and obscene content.
Ubu Roi program
It broke every convention of legitimate theater, and created a raging furor, though it had influential defenders, among them poet William Butler Yeats, who saw its flamboyant, offensive lunacy as a justified attack on the falsity and sham of society.
It was an inspiration for the iconoclastic Dada movement, for the rise of Surrealism, and the Theatre of the Absurd where, refining its rude irreverence, the world renowned works of Ionesco—‘Rhinoceros’ and ‘The Bald Soprano’—and Beckett—‘Waiting for Godot’ and ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’—appeared to great acclaim.
Much of the uproar involved King Ubu, its central character, notorious for his infantile engagement with his world. “Ubu Roi inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification. He is an antihero – fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil.”
It’s not possible for an American—perhaps not for any sentient human being, anywhere—to mistake that description for anyone but the creature that befouls our sad, discredited country today.
Ubu Roi took aim at, and savaged, the limp, immoral, luxuriating, ruling elite of an empire in steep decline—which also resonates for us—but not at a single embodiment of all that was most repugnant in imperial France, as our monster is for Americans.
In imperial systems such as we have become, people are defined by their ruling beast, and Americans are seen around the world as facsimiles of the vile animalcule that runs roughshod over our Congressional bordello and putrified Supreme Court, so that his infantile pratfalls are taken as ours along with his sordid crimes.
If the damage to what is left of our decaying nation were only a matter of his infantile tantrum follies it would be derided and ridiculed by an incredulous world but might be soon forgotten.
If limited to absurdities such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, building a gilt White House ballroom, or a gigantic triumphal arch with no triumph, painting the Reflecting Pool, or renaming the Kennedy Center for himself, such jejune idiocies might be awkwardly explained as products of a diseased mind.
His real disasters, though, are likely irreversible, and perhaps fatal to the nation. While he didn’t commence the many assaults on our civil rights and political liberties—most of it done by our duopoly and former disastrous Presidents—he weaponized and brutalized implementation of it all, trashing law and precedent.
Everything he has done or tried to do domestically has been for base, vengeful, malevolent motives, with the most vulnerable always his target: immigrants—illegal and other—coloreds, muslims, women, independent minds, and all of it in service to the Billionaire ghouls and rich Zionist Jews that elected him.
Musk was his wrecking ball to eviscerate government functions— already inadequate and perverted—and eliminate agencies that had serious purposes, however badly implemented, while he did his infantile, illiterate best to obliterate historical fact in museums, universities, national parks and monuments, and to have school curricula rewritten by bigots with racist, sexist, fascist drivel.
And yet, all he has done at home cannot compare with his China Shop Bull act in international affairs. He has, single-handedly—Republicans being in abject thrall to his lunacy—created more world chaos and peril than any President ever without the least concern for, much less the consent of, the American people.
He has perpetuated the effort to break Russia with the Ukraine war after a bumbling attempt to intervene, laying most cost off on the EU, and using brainless economic sanctions to no effect.
In abject fealty to Netanyahu and Nazi Israel, he financed the genocide and razing of Gaza, creating deep, lasting hatred of America, to serve Zionist Billionaires most Americans detest.
Attacking Iran, he was defeated, tail between legs. At the UN General Assembly, he made an unhinged, stupidly threatening speech so grotesquely sandbox in delivery and moronic in content as to defy belief. His shameless, infantile rant stunned his appalled audience, and was received in silent disbelief.
Trump is our Ubu Roi, the incarnation of vice and disease, and America is the ethical cesspool that empowered him. His tenure as autocrat is a national defilement that can never be expunged.
In whatever chaotic dismemberment and dissolution he has rendered inevitable already, and in what horrors he may, with his spineless, servile acolytes, yet precipitate, one day the world will ask, in the words of Ivan Karamazov, why is such a man alive.
Decades of mind molding and soul poisoning by our Capitalist Tyranny have created, with toxic propaganda, a great mass of Americans steeped in infantile, debased, whole-hog materialist, junk values who seek and adore an Ubu Roi to rule over them.
Perhaps the question to be faced is not why America has ended in an imperial dictatorship, since Capitalism concentrates all financial power and so has to end in absolutism. Still, even the worst empires have had martyrs, bold men who gave all to resist oppressors. In ours, control is so hermetic that they are allowed to live and speak to a people no longer capable of hearing.
