Sophocles on Fox News: Polls, Pundits and Peripeteia

I was so affected by the right-wing reaction to the re-election of the President of the United States that I was moved to blog again for the first time in almost a year. The loss of the Republican candidate was, in the truest sense of the word, tragic: both for him and for his supporters (including Fox News).

It was tragic because they had truly deluded themselves that they were going to win. Every election, both sides bluster about their impending victory in order to project confidence and keep their voters optimistic (if not complacent). So, conservative pundits convinced their listeners - and, it would appear, themselves - that the "scientific gobbledegook" of the aggregated poll information, compiled by analysts like Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight and Real Clear Politics, was corrupted by liberal bias and distracting from an inevitable Romney landslide victory. Here's a taste of one of the worst offenders, Dick Morris:



Like so many tragic characters before them, throughout literature and world history, their delusions would not outlast reality - let alone change it. When the state of Ohio, and by extension the election, was called as an Obama win (indeed, a landslide), the Romney supporters, so confident of their own victory, underwent their peripeteia.

Peripeteia is the Greek word, associated most often with Oedipus Tyrannus, that describes the reversal, the complete inversion, of a character's world. Every misapprehension under which s/he laboured is shown to be false, every action taken on the basis of that misprision shown to be misguided.

It is the climax of dramatic irony - where the audience knows the truth of the situation (Oedipus is Laius' killer and is married to his mother/Obama will overwhelmingly win the electoral college) but the character refuses to accept it, even in the face of suggestion and evidence. This culminates in the inescapable revelation to the character of what the audience knew all along.

So when Romney is said to be "shell-shocked" by his loss, or Fox News and Romney campaign contributor (zeugma?) Karl Rove holds out in his delusion until reality, the ineluctable fate of his own demise, engulfs him, we should see the silhouette of Oedipus, of Aegisthus, of Creon, caught in the headlights of their peripeteia. Megyn Kelly even performs her own pilgrimage to Delphi:


But the tragic irony doesn't end there. We had already seen, through the primaries and for most of the Presidential race, Romney forced to abandon his moderate nature in order to keep his radicalised party on side, especially on women's issues: that moderation was what would have allowed him to beat a very vulnerable President; that very extremism would prove to be his downfall.

It is moreover (deliciously?) ironic that the anti-scientific stance adopted by the extreme Republican campaign, which led right-wing pundits and aides to pooh-pooh the polls, was the very source of the self-imposed ignorance of reality which would ultimately make the peripeteia so devastating, as well as being a large part of the reason that they lost (which, as pointed out above, was otherwise perfectly avoidable).  Could Sophocles have done better?

Those in America should check out The Daily Show's masterful dissection of this (in which Jon Stewart correctly describes the Republican reaction as "tragic") here. More succinctly and accessibly, xkcd:

Pop Classics 1: Noah and the Whale, Jocasta

First in a new series, in which I post modern songs based on Classical mythology or history. This is one of my favourites, and is quite well acquainted with the source material. Noah and the Whale's first stanza is sung in the first person by Jocasta, Oedipus' mother, seemingly justifying to herself her decision to expose the baby:

Oh, its flesh keeps them alive,
Oh, as death helps life survive,
Oh, the world can be kind in its own way.

Of course, the real reason is the fear of Laius' death, which has been prophesied to occur at the hands of the baby. It is his life that will survive as a result of the death; but Jocasta couches it in terms of helping the wolves survive, giving them their food. That way, her atrocity is spun as being natural, in keeping with the natural order.  In Oedipus Tyrannos (720-722), Jocasta does a similar thing, disavowing the act by saying that Apollo did it:

Κἀνταῦθ' Ἀπόλλων οὔτ' ἐκεῖνον ἤνυσεν

φονέα γενέσθαι πατρός, οὔτε Λάϊον,

τὸ δεινὸν οὑφοβεῖτο, πρὸς παιδὸς θανεῖν.

And then Apollo did not let that
Murder of his father happen, nor Laius -
The terror which he feared - be killed by his son.

The second verse seems to be by someone talking to Jocasta (the Chorus, perhaps), explaining the futility of her attempts to subvert the strictures of fate.  When it refers to "her husband" for whom she has grieved, there is a wonderful (Sophoclean?) ambiguity as to whether this refers to the murdered Laius, whose murder she sought to prevent by her exposure of her son, or in fact her eventual husband, Oedipus, who wasn't dead but whose death she was prepared to cause.  In seeking to save her husband, she killed (as far as she knew) her child - in fact, the child survived and the husband died, but the child (for whom she grieved) became her husband.

All in all, quite a sensitive song, with lyrics that seem to understand the subject matter and shed light on a previously under-explored area of the myth, namely Jocasta's feelings about the exposure of her son, and the irony of which of her husbands dies and how.