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In the course of his four legendary and—as they’d come to affect the later development of his life—transformative excursions beyond the walls of his family’s palatial estate, Siddhartha Gautama, known to us mononymously as the plump and tranquil “Buddha”, encountered four sights. To us, these sights by which this young, handsome, and enviably-stationed Indian elite (nearing, as he was, the thirtieth year of his age in a household over which, in the very near future, he’d soon become a king) was so violently moved, hardly earn the epithet of unremarkable. In fact, these visions were, by the measurement of any other standard, far less even than that.

As it happens, the sights by which Siddhartha was confronted were entirely commonplace. No sequence of visions, presented before even the most innocent of eyes, could be more quotidian than were they. They were happenings of daily human life at which someone to whom society is rather a familiar than a foreign land (someone, that is, like you or me) wouldn’t stop to bat an eye.

Siddhartha, however, was no such normal being—a fact readily granted and eagerly celebrated by the many millions of co-religionists to whom he’s become, over the course of nearly three thousand years, a nearly divine figure. Indeed, he’s a person, not unlike a more recent Muhammed or Joseph Smith, whose stature is quite nearly approximate to that of a god. He was, from the outset, a man quite evidently distinguished from those mere mortals by whom he was surrounded, a fact compellingly attested by the unusual circumstance of his birth.

Accepting the plausibility of the phenomenon known as parthenogenesis—or the unfertilized production of an offspring by an unpenetrated egg— we’re told on the best of authority that Siddhartha’s mother, a queen in her own right, was visited one evening by an unexpected mate. Said “visitor” happened to be not a man, as one might assume, but an amorous white elephant—the likes of which humankind had never seen. The elephant, in the Oriental imagination, was a grand and awesome figure—indeed, one still quite sacred to the Hindu culture—from which, as was made clear that particular evening, the dual streams of virility and divinity can exude.

Shocking though this may be, it wasn’t—at least in the mythological memory of our fanciful and clever race—an event without a precedent. Albino beasts, as it happens, have a tendency to appear in the annals of the best of our ancient myths. One might recall, crossing for an instant the Indus Valley to the island of Crete, that it was the ingenious, though slightly cringe-inducing copulation of Pasiphae with the white Minoan bull that led to the birth of the Minotaur—that terribly ill-formed and tempered beast to whose hungry gullet so many unfortunate Athenian youth were fed.

Bestiality, then, being nothing new in the imagination of man, we accept that it could happen twice. And so, the meeting between Siddhartha’s mother and the white elephant by whom she was visited proved a very fertile assignation, a nocturnal rendezvous against which our comparatively prudish posterity bristles. But we’re a race dispossessed of our sense of “myth”. That white elephant—upon whose face, it might be added, six erect tusks stood as serried daggers in line—proceeded to insert itself into the right side of her flank. Nine months later, without the meddlesome involvement of a human father’s messy insemination and his awkward touch, an incipient sage by the name of Siddhartha was born.

You see, then, that from the very beginning, it wasn’t Siddhartha’s destiny to live the life of an ordinary man. His was a life of which massive, perhaps, you might even say, elephantine achievements were expected. His family did all it could to pamper and coddle the boy and smooth the path at whose end this imminent glory awaited. It was devotedly solicitous toward his desires; he could hardly turn a corner in the household without bumping into a comely courtesan by whom, in more ways than one, he might be satisfied. It was fiercely censorious of his inquiries and always hesitant to allow him the freedom of his own mental jaunts. Such liberation, it concluded, would be not only an impediment to the lofty fate before which he stood, but a liability in the attainment of the future on which its own hopes rested. Thus, there wasn’t a single part of his life over which his family didn’t invigilate, nor a single want from which his gratification was withheld.

He was, to use the derisive but increasingly common term of our day, a thoroughly sheltered boy—one from whom all practical knowledge of the world, its beauty, its ugliness, and the ambiguity in between, was suspended. Thus, the four sights with which he came into contact were phenomena of which he hadn’t even the slightest prior experience, from the time of his birth, until that of his thirtieth year.

We turn now, then, to the sights. First, he witnessed an aging man—for whom no elixir of youth might prove availing against the unrelenting assaults of time. Being that Siddhartha was still comfortably housed in the luxury of his youth, a sumptuous cocoon out of which he wasn’t quite ready yet to emerge, the very notion of corporeal decay as a consequence of age must’ve been to him a striking one, indeed. Second, he saw a sickly man—a wretched figure upon whom the ravages of disease had descended without mercy and without care. In his own life, he’d never known a discomfort, much less a threatening ailment, to which his resilient frame couldn’t prove itself superior. Third, he saw a dead man—a corpse into whose collapsed and disintegrating lungs no resuscitating life might be breathed.

This was enough to send the once blithe and wide-eyed prince into a veritable state of despair, a feeling of moribundity and horror to which he very nearly succumbed.

His salvation was his final sight. That which is best, we know, must come after the exhaustion of all options by which it’s preceded. Fourth, and last of all, he witnessed an ascetic—a man, dutifully pious in his faith and resolute in his ways, of whose abstemiousness he hoped to be emulative and for the grasp of whose wisdom and tranquility he desperately yearned. Abdicating his princely duties and the eventual monarchical chair to which, in succession of his father, he was predicted to accede, Siddhartha decided to follow this nameless monk’s path, by which, like a lover of the vine, he was so strongly intoxicated. He thus made the drastic transition from a royal aristocrat, a child of wealth from whom no bodily indulgence was ever withheld, to an emaciated and impecunious monk.

To at least the first three sights, of which all are, whether we accept them or not, objectively unprepossessing to behold, I would add a fourth. Before the stage of the monk, before that summit of asceticism at which our noble Siddhartha so boldly arrived, I would add not only the sight, but—as it were in this case—the smell of the hot yoga studio. This, arguably, could’ve been the final torment of his life, the last offense of suffering after which the road to enlightenment was opened all the wider.

Older than age, more fetid than a marsh, and perhaps even more oppressive and unrelenting than the darkness of death, was the odor of the hot yoga studio in which, for ninety unforgiving minutes, I was recently immersed. Had Siddhartha encountered the stench of the studio in which my first and, at the time of this writing, only foray into the incredibly popular and addictive world of hot (or, as previously known, Bikram) yoga transpired, his spiritual enlightenment might’ve been even more fully complete.

Had he done so, and had he opened his senses not only to the entirety of their visual, but to that of their olfactory range as well, he might’ve sooner reached that level of self-possession and eternal equanimity for which he’s now so widely famous. He might’ve become, in yet a shorter duration of time, the transcendent sage at whose unclad and bulbous feet an entire sub-continent still sits and prays. Had he suffered through but one stinky session of hot yoga, a phenomenon of nature, I’ve decided, that’s far worse than the decrepitude of old age, than the feebleness of illness, and even of the finality of death, he might’ve become, for all the world to see, a veritable god among gods, a primus inter pares, a deity before whom even those once counted most powerful—Vishnu, Jehovah, or Jupiter—would bend the knee.

The stench by which I was initially greeted and, in an inhumanely short period of time, overcome was a sensation for which I was very inadequately prepared. The smell was at once foreign, yet uniquely organic; alien yet innate. It was a smell, in one’s pursuit of olfactory identification, on which one’s finger can’t easily be placed, yet one knows, without being guided, its original source. Implicitly one knows, perhaps shamefacedly, if he’s to admit it to himself, that the odor by which he’s repelled is irreducibly human, and ultimately of his own excretion. It’s the type of smell from which, at its best, civilization has thrown up a tarp to protect us—what with its dulcet perfumes, colognes, deodorants, and the like.

But hot yoga isn’t quite so inclined toward civility, and this feature, of which I quickly took note, isn’t one of which its practitioners are particularly embarrassed. Hot yoga, if my early analysis leads me not astray, is a rather atavistic and primal act. In some ways, it’s advertised as such. It’s an activity that strips away the accrual of time and the pretense of age. With its combination of sweat, stench, moisture, movement, and heat, it’s not unlike that same primordial soup, that original incubator out of which our bacterial predecessors once climbed. It’s like that initial slime, an atmosphere thermally agitated and chemically unstable, in which all of our fellow, though lesser, organisms were once nourished and bathed. Indeed, a hot yoga studio might be as easily found on the continents of Asia or America, as it would be on Pangaea or Gondwona—those giant, original landmasses out of whose eruptive division, or modern world was formed.

Though it’s the lingua franca of Yoga, Sanskrit—the language in which the Buddha’s teachings were written by his followers and copied for all time—isn’t a tongue to which western ears are at all keenly accustomed. It is, on the whole, polysyllabic, heavily vocalic, and—perhaps for those reasons—utterly unintelligible. That said, it provides for its audience the feeling of an esoteric mantra to which they are, if only temporarily, privy. The instructor, awash in a dream-sequence of colorful tattoos atop whose efflorescence Lululemon stockings tightly cling, dictates to the class in a peremptory and urgent tone these undecipherable words. In turn, the class—now staggering on this side of masochism—dutifully performs the commands to which it’s willingly, and often expensively, made itself submissive.

The movements and postures, of which there are approximately twenty-six, are carefully scripted and deliberately applied. Very little waste is encouraged—much less is tolerated. It is, in this way, a very “lean” session—one unaccommodating of superfluity and nonsense. With contempt does it look upon the side conversations in which I inveterately find myself engaged (and to which, I’ve come to realize, I’m fatally susceptible). It scorns distractions of any type. As established by its now notorious founder, Mr. Bikram Choudhury himself, these are positions between whose adoption the greatest display of efficiency is to be observed. One quite literally flows from one movement into the next, from which—until the yogi declares it appropriate—his permission to unfurl himself is suspended.

The physical act of adopting and sustaining these contortions would be, in and of itself, enough of a reason to sweat. Need there be a further inducement? Yet one mustn’t perspire merely; one must, rather, melt into an indistinct and unsalvageable puddle of human salt, electrolytes, and—in most cases—tears. At this point, with the room’s temperature reaching in excess of one hundred degrees, the whole thing feels as though it’s sudation for sudation’s sake; these yogis are going to sweat because, darn it, they can.

Sweating, as a general human reflex by which, in response to the heat, we’re made to feel relatively cooler, isn’t a process to which I’m particularly opposed, but it can be taken to its extremes. Hot yoga brings you to that extreme, thrusting your body into unnatural torsions along the way. The sudoriferous glands, from which our sweat, that salty, cooling solution, so copiously flows, are excited during the hot yoga session with an intensity to which no other sport can compare. One feels, at the session’s conclusion, entirely purged of all that was once held within. Any obstinate toxin, to whose unwholesome grasp your body was made a host and then a home, has doubtless been squeezed and chased away. Every fluid ounce, of which your lumbering pre-hot yoga body was once composed, has rushed from your pores and onto that sacred carpet upon which you stand—in this case, a drenched polyethylene mat. It is, to borrow a religious term, a kind of kenosis—an unholy emptying of oneself.

In time, that man to whom we ascribe the name of the “enlightened one”—that pliable and tranquil Buddha—became a practitioner, if not an originator, of a certain yogic practice of which, until this day, his most devoted followers still partake. That school, however, of which he was purportedly the founder, taught and practiced a slightly more meditative and less physically grueling form—one at whose end a feeling of spiritual detachment was ultimately desired. In the “hot” and, yes, unavoidably stinky version to which I was exposed today, that version of which I was so ill-prepared a victim, the only sense of detachment is that by which the limbs—in reference to the torso to which they were once so happily attached—are overcome. They feel as though, at their every joint and articulation, they’ve been forcefully wrenched and tossed aside.

Appropriately, one finishes his hot yoga session in what’s referred to as “corpse pose”—a sight with which, having already witnessed an elderly and a sick man, our beloved Siddhartha would be quite familiar. That, however, with which he’d be unfamiliar, and, to a greater extent, by which he’d be deeply shaken, would be the stench and sight of Bikram in action. As would be he, so was I.

We tread ever so dangerous a path when, in the course of our frequent sojourns to the past, we ignore along the way those things which we’ve deemed rotten and foul, if only to lay our sights upon that which was, by even the most lenient of estimates, only speciously good. Such a practice, that of venturing into the dense wood of history if only to miss its trees, confounds our perception.

We see not the path from which we strayed nor the context by which we’re surrounded in the normal light of day. We see instead, within the dulling restraint of our own lens, that line which sits before us—at once diaphanous but distinct—for whose construction the apologist and the revisionist are responsible: the former offers, with an eloquence and potency toward which our vulgar conversation rarely inclines, a defense to what is, by any normal standard by which our moral compass is directed, the indefensible. The latter simply manipulates, with the dexterous fancy of his mind and the agility of his hand, a lifeless fact into a revivified “truth”. He molds the world anew with the blueprint of his breath.

It’s thus said, without even the remotest hint of pretense or jocularity, that Benito Mussolini shouldn’t be thought of as a completely vile and incorrigible man—an opinion, held by any right-thinking person, on which the tale of his villainous story ought to be closed. He did, after all, set those stubbornly unpunctual Italian trains (for which, at that time, his country was becoming embarrassingly notorious) to run on time. Prior to his unexpected and meteoric ascent to the head of the Fascist Party and thence of the Italian Empire, a rise to which the supine Italian president, Victor Emmanuel, offered only the feeblest resistance, Mussolini observed around him a crumbling Italian infrastructure. Every means of locomotion seemed to be in a state of disrepair. The vessels through which his country’s transportation system flowed were a failing and threadbare linkage of railways, highways, and withering ports. This was a network, mind you, of whose prior efficiency and grandeur—in the days of Octavius and Cicero, when the aqueducts and the arches carved the land—the entire world, from China to Britain, was so deeply envious.

In time, Mussolini rehabilitated his country’s infrastructure system and restored to their previously vaunted punctuality his nation’s glorious trains. But were these refreshingly timely trains, and all the pleasant highways by which they were surrounded, worth the tyranny that he established?

The trains were, as one might contend, but one of the sundry beneficial consequences of Mussolini’s despotic reign. Should we, then, careful historians as we are, overlook so consequential a feat, simply because he was, by way of his own ambition, a bumptious, histrionic, and sanguinary Fascist of the worst kind? Should we instead applaud his public works programs, a long list of centralized measures by whose timely implementation, Italy was uniquely immune to the collapse of the international economy by the time the 1930s and the Great Depression rolled around? Should we, in our frustrating tendency to subsidize the yield of the earth, model our own farmers’ assistance programs with his own ample agricultural reforms? If we do, we venture to do so without utterance of his misdeeds.

What, then, should be said of Adolf Hitler? Indisputably, his was a government, however undemocratically conceived, under which most of the German citizenry flourished—with that solemn exception of a few million Jews. After all, as no prior administration had done, his succeeded in hastening the restoration of that bygone, Teutonic pride of which his nation had been so unjustly dispossessed —a pride at once ancient, yet so recently and badly injured by the Great War’s end.

The Nazi Party, once it was affirmatively in command, discharged the indemnity by which Germany (only recently unified, mind you) was burdened as a result of the war, and all but resuscitated itself from the dust of the earth. Like Mussolini, his southern counterpart of whom he was, at times, unabashedly imitative, Hitler instituted a robust program of public works. Rates of the German unemployed, once discouragingly high, diminished with the passage of every year. Still today his sinuous and exhilarating autobahn highway-system is utilized by both motorists and tourists alike. That, and the Hugo Boss outfits in which he and his sartorially-savvy comrades were draped, are objects, to some, of veneration from the perspective of fashion. Do these few and glimmering “bright spots”, if they’re to be so called, actually succeed in softening the ugly and quite irredeemable world that was the Nazi regime?

One rightly strains to think of any qualities or programs by which the Soviet Union’s great tyrant, the villainous Josef Stalin, might be redeemed. Doubtless, the country’s aeronautics and space programs were, under his careful guidance, enviably robust, but, when gazing upon them in the light of day and with the distance of time, one can’t simply shield his eyes from those literal black holes by which these achievements were surrounded. I speak, of course, of the gulags, or, as such intrepid writers as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Arthur Koestler make clear in their vitally important works, the bottomless pits of suffering and death from which very few of its prisoners escaped.

They were places that composed, in their ghastly entirety, a legitimate and frightening archipelago of sprawling proportions, a network of labor and death into whose dark, soundless, and insatiable mouths millions of Russians were shoveled and fed. They included academics, scientists, religious or political dissidents, free thinkers, and personae non grata to whom, for lack of any other good evidence or incriminating reason, no crime might’ve been imputed. Of the nearly eighteen million people to whom, if only briefly, the gulag was to be called a temporary “home”, approximately two million died. That, it should go without saying, is a mortality rate of which any genocidal maniac might be not only envious, but positively enamored. The likes of Hitler, Mussolini, and, eventually, Mao went so far as to replicate or to surpass Stalin’s macabre statistical feat.

Certainly, as listed, Stalin’s death rate is a statistic of whose utterance or evocation any modern-day commentator should be wary. As it turns out, it’s also a rate of death of which most proponents of so brutal a system as that toward which Socialism tends are ignorant. Recent audio of which the furtive and necessarily nosey Project Veritas came into possession revealed a supporter of Bernie Sanders, the current senator from Vermont and hopeful Democratic presidential candidate, lauding the construction of Stalin’s White Sea Canal.

This canal, whose inauguration was marked in the year 1933, connected the White and Baltic Seas—of whose frigidity, as we exit our own bristling winter, we need not here take account. By no stretch does it surpass the grandeur of other twentieth-century architectural feats, but, by most measures, it is an impressively long canal in a rather inhospitable part of the world. And, yes, it was carried out from start to finish by way of a socialist edict, but one must look at the cost—specifically as it pertains to human lives.

Its one-hundred-and-forty-one anfractuous miles were built by literal slave labor. Over one-hundred and twenty-five thousand gulag inmates were recruited for the job, of whom twenty-five thousand died. This amounted to almost two hundred casualties per mile built—another discouragingly high mortality rate for so useless an endeavor; the canal was built in so desultory and ham-fisted a manner, that, when “completed”, it was insufficiently deep. Lacking depth, no ships—excluding the smallest and least proficient of vessels—could pass through its now idle waters.

Yet, that said, the Bernie Sanders surrogate with whom Project Veritas came into contact, extolled its completion—otiose though it ultimately proved—as proof of the heights to which an autocratic and centralized government could reach, if only given the unfettered chance. His intimation seemed to be, if I misread him not, that the efforts of a centrally-planned government and economy—despite the endless downsides with which these things are associated—often produce salutary effects. Extending his defense still further, their achievements are of a kind of which a capitalist society, such as ours, is pitifully incapable.

Indeed, so reckless and historically ignorant a statement by a campaign surrogate was disquieting for the average American auditor into whose ears these recordings trickled, but one was made to wonder where exactly Sanders stood in his own thinking on so grave a matter. Would Bernie Sanders, the Democrat’s potential nominee for the presidential race in 2020 and standard-bearer, by every indication, for the party henceforth, concur with so outlandish a sentiment—one to which our own dearly-held American and liberal values are completely antithetical?

It’s true, in the course of a long public career, over which many a decade has passed, Sanders has accrued a list (indeed, one of a commensurately long length) of statements that must be judged by any standard as being inimical to traditional American values. These are values, so often repeated, though recently neglected, among which we might number such liberties as commerce, association, religion, person, and life. Much to his campaign’s merit and glee, Sanders has not yet been recorded as having overtly lauded the building of the White Sea Canal—for whose every mile, so many hundreds of Russians perished and of whose current utility, so very little is spoken.

He is, however, on the record—time and again within the span of one week—of applauding the endeavors and the achievements of the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro. Castro or, perhaps more appropriately, Castroism, is a man and a methodology to whom and to which Sanders is unabashedly sympathetic. He has been for years, but the scrutiny with which he’s been treated by the media has been somewhat lacking.

Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Sanders, in so many words, offered his defense of the Castro regime. After mildly condemning the idea of authoritarianism as a general matter, he waxed reverential of the Cuban nation’s literacy programs, for whose institution Castro is largely seen as being responsible. Enduring the unexpected outrage by which his comment was followed from both the political left and right, Sanders then doubled-down on his statement at a CNN town hall event. He did so again at a more formally-scripted Democratic primary debate, for which he ought to have been more thoroughly prepared and to which he might’ve adopted a more tactful and moderate approach.

He was neither prepared nor contrite. His reaction was one of pure incredulity when, in defending Castro’s ostensibly progressive and magnanimous educational program, the audience in front of whom he spoke audibly groaned at his insistence on this communist’s literacy program being a praiseworthy thing. Clearly, this is a position with which most Democrats are in disagreement (not to mention those of a more centrist disposition, who, due to the dramatis personae on stage, weren’t in attendance at this exclusively Liberal debate) but to Sanders, this matters not.

It’s a tendency, that of praising dictators in control of socialist states, by which Sanders, despite his outward good-health, is fundamentally ailed. It’s a pernicious ideology from which he hasn’t an intention to escape. In fact, it’s one on which he quite openly prides himself, as being consistent. When speaking of any brutal, illiberal communist regime—of which Castro’s is a prime and acutely close example— Sanders has no difficulty in finding a fleck of gold within an ocean of dross. In his mind, even the smallest pursuit, so long as it be putatively noble, by which a communist government is animated should be exalted to the sky and celebrated for all to hear—even if this pursuit is heavily outweighed by all the disproportionate and brutal oppression to which the people are made to succumb.

In my mind, narrow though it may be, the question arises of the value of Castro’s “literacy” program of which Sanders is apparently so staunch a proponent. For one, this type of education is nothing like that with which we Americans, universally educated (however that may be defined) in our public-school systems and blithely unaware of just how good these systems are, are in the least bit familiar. Sure, as a wretched Cuban peasant laboring under the “utopian” reign of Castro and his inner-circle of apparatchiks and thugs, you might now have the ability to read, and perhaps even to write, but that which you’re permitted to read and write is, if not severely truncated, completely censored. It’s done so, not surprisingly, by the very same government upon whose supposed benevolence and magnanimity the possession of these vaunted literary skills depends. Literacy rates might’ve expanded under Castro’s program as opposed to that of Batista, but the beneficiary’s ability to express himself surely did not.

What good, then, is a literacy program if all you’re given to read is propagandistic tripe—the material and intellectual pablum in which many Cubans still find themselves awash? What good is it to be able to read if the internet and all its turbulent non-conforming speech is censored from up above? What good is it to be able to read if the government withholds from any attractive or divergent work its imprimatur of “acceptable” and, therefore, “legible”? And, as for writing, what value is there in being possessed of that divine and distinctly human skill if the production of your pen is aborted before it can take life? What good is it to have the ability to write if your written expression, that movement by which your heart is stirred of which you endeavor to make your newly literate friends aware, could be the reason for your ending up in jail?

At once the “beneficiary” of the enlightened and ennobling gift of literacy (a gift, one might add, whose sheer irrevocability makes it so valuable an inheritance that one can’t, at least not by his own volition, divest himself of its grip), the man becomes the slave to the organ from which it was received. This darker side of Castro’s literacy program is one to which Sanders, and those ideologically akin to him, are blind. In one way or another, every apologist or revisionist ultimately is. One must be devoid of his full sense of sight if he’s to perceive in a pound of evil, an ounce of good.  The horrors perpetrated by Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Castro simply cannot be overlooked. We ought not to allow our presidential candidates to try.

The film 1917, recipient of this year’s Golden Globes award for “Best Motion Picture” and, very nearly, of that same prize for whose bestowal the Oscars are so feverishly monitored, was rather a history than a tragedy. Chronologically, the film was set in the year for which it was named—an obvious fact by which, with the mere purchase of a ticket by whose possession the doors to the local theater are opened, the movie-goer should be little surprised. As such, though perhaps insufficiently studied in all parts of the first quarter of the twentieth-century, that most consequential century through which, as of yet, man has had the opportunity to live, he needn’t stretch too tightly the cords of his mind to recognize the event to which this film refers. That event, of course, is WWI.

Drama is, quite decidedly, a secondary attribute of what is, on its whole, an historical film. This, however, isn’t a fact by which the work is to be vitiated in the opinion of the dramatically-inclined viewer—a viewer to whom, if the film is rightly to be enjoyed by her, a deep and emotional movement of the soul is considered most vital. Despite its focus on a single event in time, and, more than that, a single person upon whose weary shoulders this event’s weight has thrust itself by no doing of his own, it succeeds in being a cinematically-enthralling, aerobically-taxing, and technically-masterful work. The gravity in which its mood is set and the fluidity with which its scenes are filmed don’t have, when combined, a relevant precursor in the history of film. But 1917 is, first and foremost, a history. It is not a highly dramatic work, and it is certainly no tragedy.

Therefore, by the timeless estimation and infallible standard of the great Aristotle—the ancient philosopher upon whose everlasting artistic sensitivity our modern tastes still rely—it ought not to be more highly regarded and judged than a purely dramatic work. Thus, we ought not to be vexed by the realization that an obscure, culturally-distant, and linguistically-indecipherable film (to which, if the sentiment of the populace is to be believed, 1917 was credited with being far superior) was given priority over it. Said “inferior” film, in this case, Bong Joon-ho’s break-out hit entitled, Parasite, was triumphant if, and only if, an ounce of Aristotelian logic is to be applied to a pound of the population’s preference.

In perhaps Aristotle’s most famous work—a consequence, one might say, of its graspable length and accessible subject matter—the Poetics declares to us, with the vaunting confidence and the tranquil affirmation of a man who was, during the sixty-two years of his life, both teacher of an emperor and student of a sage, that tragedy is to be set at a higher place than history in the aesthetic valuation of man. Indeed, for that matter, tragedy was to be placed above all other genres of art—be they performative, narrative, or of any other conceivable type.

Comedy, in his opinion, was very minimally to be esteemed. With his inimitable air of authority, at once heavy and beclouding, a palpable mist into whose thickness the modern critic still immerses herself and breathes, Aristotle said of comedy that it was an “imitation of men worse than the average”. On this point, he conditioned the following statement, specifying that this “worse” man of whom he spoke would be worse not as it regarded “any and every sort of fault”, but only as it regarded “one particular kind of fault, that which is ridiculous”, which is, on its own, “a species of the ugly”.

The ugly, we well know, wasn’t long to be endured by so urbane an observer as was Aristotle—a level of sophistication peculiar to him of which we, at our best and most polished, imagine ourselves to be in pursuit, if not in full possession. Comedy, he made clear, hadn’t the salutary effect on a viewer for which, as the result of the consumption of a theatrical work, he might’ve been hoping.

And, thus, comedy was a type of dramatic perversion, a deviation from the norm, for which the aesthete Aristotle hadn’t very much tolerance. Even if, as was the case for most of the comedic “ugliness” to which he might’ve been exposed in his day, it was productive of neither pain nor harm to its viewer, it was to be judged far beneath the ethereal beauty, the hard solemnity, and the overwhelming dignity of the tragic form. As such, the puerile, obscene, and downright scatological rowdiness of, say, an Aristophanes was to be valued far below the sobriety, pathos, and decorum for which the likes of Aeschylus and Sophocles were so inexhaustibly celebrated in Aristotle’s mind.

That said, Aristophanes—though a scandalously ribald and brilliantly subversive playwright by the standards not only of his, but of those of every age—wouldn’t be the only Grecian writer upon whom Aristotle’s disparagement and, more importantly, his artistic contempt was heaped. Indeed, some criticism, albeit of a gentler type, was left in reserve when he dealt in his Poetics with the author of the epic poem. Admittedly, the epic, as a genre, was a variety of drama that marked a noble improvement over the baseness of the comedy—that form of which Aristotle was so unyieldingly contemptuous. Perhaps this was because the comedy, much to his voluble detestation, was the art form of which the hoi polloi—a class of people quite innocent of proper taste—was so inexplicably enamored. Ever the aristocrat (at least, etymologically, in the original sense of the term as it referred to the leadership, in matters both cultural and political, of the best), it’s no surprise to see Aristotle bristle against the base and vulgar preferences of the mass.

Yet the epic poem, in contrast to the comedic, was not to be so forcefully discountenanced—neither were those to whom it held so unspeakable an attraction to be excoriated for what might’ve been, in the case of the comedic-patron, a horribly illicit pleasure. Epic poetry was laudable, not so much on the basis of its own merit—on which, by any normal standard, one might expect a work to be judged—but on the fact that it “resembles tragedy” and that, like tragedy, it is “an imitation of serious subjects in meter”.

In other words, epic pieces of work, or those volumes that constitute the genre for which the likes of such distinguished authors as Homer, Virgil, and Milton are renowned, are only commendable insofar as they approximate, in both their theme and their style, those aspects by which a tragedy is defined. An epic is only good and worthy of our attention because, of all the other dramatic types among which it’s to be counted, it comes closest to that paragon of drama, to that quintessential work of tragedy.

That said, the distance between the two can, and oftentimes is, insurmountably vast. While just about every tragedy can be made into an epic, not every epic can make the tragic leap. To use an analogy by which schoolchildren, wanting in their geometry and abstract sense, are enlightened, a tragedy is to an epic what a square is to a rectangle. The former places upon its applicants demands by which the latter is unencumbered. The one can, if wisely manipulated, become the other, but certain immutable conditions must first be met. More than by anything else, an epic differs from a tragedy by its length. The epic’s action, while gripping and compelling from its start till its conclusion, has no established fixation of time. This is not a formality by which it must constrain itself, as is evidenced by Homer’s two great works. The Trojan War, for example, on whose waning days his sanguinary Iliad is based, surpassed a decade in time. Many winters had come and gone as those inchoate Europeans and Asians fought at the gate of the Dardanelles. That same bard’s circuitous Odyssey lasted, much to the exasperation of its eponymous hero, a similarly long duration of time.

In the opinion of a tragic purist such as Aristotle, these allotments of time must be determined to be excessively long, for tragedy “endeavors to keep as far as possible within a single circuit of the sun”. Twenty-four hours, and not a minute longer, is the properly tragic allowance of time. Outside of the Greek masters, to whom we defer as the best exemplars at constraining themselves to twelve hours of day and to twelve of night, we look to the French. Racine and Corneille, tragedians by whom the artistic explosion of the seventeenth-century was lit, are especially adept at regulating their plotlines to nothing beyond the ascent, the fall, and the matutinal re-emergence of the sun—at which point the story has settled and the dénouement has arrived.

The Odyssey, while the more enthralling of the two Homeric works by whose preservation the literacy and tradition of the West has been elevated and improved, is purely myth. Though epic in construct from head to foot, it’s ahistorical and not in the least tragic. The Iliad, on the other hand, is at the very least historic. Excluding the constant interpolations of divine beings, by whose incorrigible whimsicality and bloodlust a salacious marital dispute was extended across two continents and ten long years, the events as described, more or less, likely happened (though it’s debated, within halls vastly more prestigious than those along which I pace, whether the Trojan horse wasn’t actually a natural disaster, a kind of force majeure to which, in the absence of a sufficiently resilient redoubt or defense, the ancient city succumbed). We know, informed by the work of such sweat-laden archaeologists as Heinrich Schliemann and those by whom he was followed, that the city of Troy existed in the thirteenth-century BC and was besieged by an overwhelming force.

If we are to continue to follow the standards by which Aristotle judges a dramatic work, we must—at his urging—rank the Odyssey above the Iliad. The reason for so definitive a judgment is that, as previously stated, the latter is, at least in part, a history, while the former is not. In the eyes of Aristotle, this alone is cause for the devaluation of its dramatic merit. A distinction here between the author whose chief concern is history, and he whose concern is poetry and drama, must be made. In his Poetics, Aristotle states that the stylistic preference of the former is prose, while that of the latter is verse. That doesn’t mean, however, that an artistically-inclined historical author couldn’t easily adapt and versify his work. The Histories of Herodotus and those, though perhaps less mellifluously, of Thucydides, could be put to the lyre and sung as songs.

The fundamental distinction, above all, is that the historical writer “describes the thing that has been” and the tragic writer “a kind of thing that might be”.

Hence, he concludes, “poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history”, a statement by which, considering the empirical and somewhat artistically-etiolated age in which we live, we moderns are all quite taken aback. Can it be that poetry, produced by the hand of a Whitman or a Byron, is really of graver import than the lessons of history—lessons of which, admittedly, we’re so often negligent? We endlessly commit the same follies from which we ought to have learned, but this is no reason for marginalizing the importance of history and preferring, in its place, the poetic craft. In light of this, how can the superiority of poetry over history be established and confirmed in the thought of man?

The reason, Aristotle assures us, is that poetry’s “statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars”. That which is particular and circumscribed by setting, place, or time is necessarily weaker than that which encompasses all things at once in the girth of its embrace. This is the ultimate strength of poetry, of which tragedy is but the highest form. Tragedy, not unlike the God to whom we pray, or the Nature of which we’re assured he’s the author, is like a circle with neither center nor circumference. It is, at one and the same time, everywhere, in everything, and a part of everyone who has lived or, in the future, is yet to come. Universality, or the concept of an ideal and imperishable “Form”, a superior entity of which all lesser beings partake but, over which, they’ll never be ranked, was a notion conceived of by Plato and inherited by Aristotle. The Platonic voice reverberates through him and, having done so, emanates in us.

Having said all that, be it too little or too much, the film 1917 won’t soon be forgotten. In all likelihood, it’ll long surpass Parasite­—that film standing astride both “Best Picture” awards—one domestic, and one foreign—and that by which 1917 and all its worthy competitors were defeated. This might not be the result by which the normal movie-goer will be contented; she might’ve hoped 1917 would take home this most venerated of awards. But the logic and the poetics of Aristotle fail us not. Poetry trumps history, and Parasite—based on that calculation alone—is justified in having won. The universal and the foreign triumphed over the singular and the known.  

In the brief but richly enlightening prolegomenon by which John Milton’s final masterpiece, his Samson Agonistes, is preceded, the great English author—ever attentive to his readers’ edification—takes the moment to describe for us that “sort of dramatic poem called tragedy”, that genre to which we, as human beings, have always and inescapably been drawn.

Indeed, the vitality of the tragic drama—of which, it hardly need be stated, Milton was himself an indisputable master—has been forever and indissolubly mixed in our species’ blood. This was a fundamental truth of which Milton was not only aware, but quite proud. Tragedy has, from time unknowable to that before us of which we take no knowledge, formed us in its image. It has, with or without our knowing or feeling it, mingled among our sinew, delved into the marrow of our bone, tautened and loosened our muscles, dilated our fields of vision, and inspired the most vivifying and deepest of our breaths. It forms the part of our constitution upon which the intricacy and the variety of our life is built. It has succeeded in giving, throughout the passage of all ages and without hesitancy in the long and daunting shadow of time, a certain solemnity of soul by which our species is so admirably distinguished from all others.

From the earliest age of our story-telling past, when mere movements of the hand and grunts of the tongue conveyed, however crudely and however wanting in articulation, the dramatic, fireside pronouncements by which we wished to have our sentiments and our narratives received, to the modern era in which we presently exist, in whose technological splendor and sybaritic wealth the dulcet waters of eloquence and refinement overflow our still thirsty cups, tragedy has been with us the entirety of the way. More than that, it might be said that tragedy, more than comedy, history, mythology, or any other art form with which we have, through the course of the millennia, come into contact, has sustained and nourished us as no other work or pursuit of leisure could.

Milton—poet, scholar, statesman, yet, above all things else, lofty tragedian to whose eminence few contemporaries could ever hope to ascend—knew only too well this fundamental and abiding truth. We might picture him as he lived at the time of its articulation and inclusion into his rightly famous prologue of which I made earlier mention: a sightless, yet still prescient Cromwellian government official of the old and thoroughly vanquished cloth over whom, in the coming years of his premature dotage, a second literary deluge had begun to flow and, upon whom, for having allowed himself to bathe in its revitalizing waters, we gaze in thanks for setting before our eyes an endless and immortal joy. He was assured of the supremacy of tragedy, as he was assured of his own unparalleled skill. The former, we now know, was elevated to the towering heights of a literary summit for whose transport the latter was needed.

But Milton, however much a tragic partisan he might’ve been, was an exacting and specific man, and not at all inclined to include in his embrace every self-identifying tragedian with whom he might, on occasion, come into contact. As an aside, those so-called tragedians into whose acquaintance he might’ve come would’ve been, as a result of his own doing, meagerly few; at this point in his life, he was not only as pious, but nearly as solitary as an eremite to whose cloistered taste the charms of society could offer no enticement. The only people by whom he wanted himself surrounded, and the only people in whom he would confide, were his dedicated amanuenses—who seconded as his daughters. No, a tragedy—if we’re to take the erudition of Milton as our preceptor and guide—was only properly a tragedy if, before inheriting that solemn title, a very specific set of criteria, upon whose vaunted legitimacy all scholars could agree, would be met. Failing to meet these criteria, most men of letters, of whose existence our literary history barely takes note, excluded themselves from Milton’s constrictive domain.

Classically defined and anciently employed, tragedy was, at least so far as Milton’s unblemished opinion was concerned, the “gravest, moralest, and most profitable” of all the other poems to which, at times, a discouragingly blithe audience might have access and by which, on the back of his efforts, the serious author might edify his viewers and make his talent known. Therefore, quoting Milton quoting Aristotle—the voluble Stagirite by whom the former was so deeply inspired—he said in his famous work entitled, Poetics that tragedy came to its literary and psychological power by “raising pity, fear, and terror” in the heart of man—if only ultimately to purge from his mind “those and such-like passions”. This, and this alone, is and was the final goal toward which all tragedy ought to have tended. This was the aim, properly understood, toward which the tragic work, if rightly constructed, ought to have aspired.

This final kenosis of the emotions (to borrow, from the Christological handbook, an originally Greek term), this ultimate purgation of the soul, was, as Aristotle called it, a display of catharsis. This, when impressed upon the viewer, was responsible for the drama’s salutary effect and that component by which we, as viewers, would be most improved. The term, usually misapplied today, referred to something that was productive of a purgative effect, by whose administration the viewer would be cleansed and made to feel all the better.

The tragedy would, if our doctor Aristotle is to be taken at his word, and if his prescriptions are to be considered seriously, arouse pity and fear “wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions”—a prognostication and an assessment echoed by Milton. The goal, then, was not the retention of so many potentially noxious feelings, to which, if left untreated and permitted to grow in force and in number, the increasingly septic patient might succumb, but their swift and dramatic release.

We’re faced, then, with such “incidents arousing pity and fear”—two uncomfortable yet unavoidable feelings of which, in any other circumstance, we’d rather shutter to take note. But, if tragedy is to succeeded in effectuating its salubrious effect, arouse them we must. Without this essential arousal of the dual emotions of pity and fear, of distress and terror, of fellow-feeling and of pain, the tragic work falls apart into a state of disrepair—and no longer persists in being one to which the ascription of “tragedy” can defensibly apply. Continuing the thought of Aristotle and, through him, the position of Milton, such incidents by which pity and fear are aroused “have the very greatest effect on the mind”, especially when they “occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another”.

Of the plot, we fear, and for the character, our sense of pity is excited. Of the former, there are namely two parts out of which a few components emerge—all three serving as important factors in the tragic mosaic upon which we must remark: Anagnorisis (the recognition or discovery of one’s identity) being the first, Peripeteia (the reversal of one’s fortune) being the second, and suffering, the final and third. In consideration of the first two, they need not occur sequentially in that particular order, but, when best implemented in a tragic work, they often do. Such is the occasion in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, when the titular character and, as it happens, maltreated daughter of Agamemnon—now a court functionary dropped, thanks to the helping hand of a deus ex machina from a similarly-named play, into the speciously safe harbor of Tauris across the Black Sea—recognizes the identities of the young men of whose executions she’s been given oversight.

Having navigated the sandy beaches of the eponymous character’s adopted city’s shores, Orestes and Pylades find themselves in the presence of Iphigenia—to whom, as it so happens, the former has an uncanny familial resemblance. So uncanny and, in fact, incontrovertible is this resemblance that Iphigenia is filled almost immediately with a sense of unease and a desire more satisfactorily to know his true identity. Such is the sororal, perhaps even preternatural wavelength to which only big sisters have a sensitivity. A sister, in my opinion, is the most perceptive and solicitous of all beings.

Once a princess, now something of a prisoner and an executioner bundled up into one (with the former role, lamentably, being the motivation for the latter), the task by which Iphigenia is now burdened is to kill these two Hellenistic interlopers. At the highest pitch of emotional distress by which this wonderful play is remembered, Anagnorisis takes place. The recognition of Iphigenia by her venturesome brother, Orestes, occurs at long last and siblings, enjoying this shared moment of reunion, turn on their heels and escape. This marks the play’s example of Peripeteia, or its happy reversal of fortune.

And yet, more commonly, Peripeteia augurs ill rather than good. Such was the case in the Sophoclean masterpiece, Oedipus Rex—the singular and inviolable work to which, if in search for the fount of tragic genius, we must inevitably turn. Without recounting all of the sinuosity of its plotline and the brilliance of its celebrated text, Oedipus Rex exemplifies just how powerful Peripeteia can be, especially when joined, for a compound and simultaneous impact, with Anagnorisis.

Oedipus, entering upon the decrescendo of his incestuous reign, discovers his true identity, as revealed to him by the weary messanger with whom he’s now engaged in a desperate and painful conversation. As the members of the audience already know, and as Oedipus is soon to learn, it was in fact he who was responsible for the murder of his own father—a parricidal act of whose gravity the perpetrator was, at the time it was committed, entirely, if not forgivably, ignorant. Then, having exorcised the city of the enigmatic sphinx (to whose sophomoric riddle no man, excepting Oedipus, had a satisfactory answer), our tragic hero took to bed his own mother who, despite being inseminated by her own fruit, proved abundantly fertile. Oedipus’ children would inherit their own bevy of problems, but subsequent works would tell of their tales.

Their father, having undergone Anagnorisis, experiences with a cruel simultaneity against which no man can stand and, certainly, to which no one can offer a defense, the overwhelming force of Peripeteia. With the revelation of his identity (his Anagnorisis), like a linked chain, his Peripeteia is bound. There is no space between the two, and they arrive with a singular force. The Delphic exhortation to “know thyself” here applies, and—as soon as Oedipus comes into familiarity with himself—his reversal is complete. No longer king of Thebes and conqueror of the Sphinx, he’s become a reproachful and sullied animal—a beast more than a man, on whose sanguinary and incestuous instincts no refinement of civilization could have an effect.  

Euripides’ Iphigenia at Tauris and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex—neither is a work, we must concede, to which Milton’s Samson Agonistes is superior. That’s not to say, however, that it’s not still a venerable and, by the standards of a more modern era, a nearly unsurpassed tragic masterpiece. In the Englishman’s work, the pathos is set at a slightly higher pitch. It’s tuned to so tight a degree, that we fear—in the midst of its careful reading—it might snap before us and puncture our eye. Need we, though, another inducement to tears when we experience that third quality of the tragic work of which Aristotle makes mention—namely, suffering?

Again, as mentioned, the tragic plot and, within its bounds, the tragic character, comprise three things: Anagnorisis, Peripeteia, and suffering. In those great Attic works to which I made previous reference, the first two of the three are strikingly evident: in Iphigenia at Tauris, Anagnorisis is the most powerful, and in Oedipus Rex, Peripeteia with its conjoined Anagnorisis is. Less readily to be found in Milton’s Samson Agonistes are Anagnorisis and Peripeteia, but filling in their void is the suffering by which the protagonist is consumed.

Samson, the burly, biblical character from whose trove of hair a divine strength is derived, spends this drama not in the puissance of his youth. He isn’t, as we find him, cudgeling lions with his bare hands or vanquishing armies of Philistines with mandibular bones of donkeys. These were the feats, tenuously reminiscent of those of the Heracles upon which he was based, for which he was so notably famous in the pantheon of Jewish lore. We find him in Milton’s work in the decrepitude of his early age. Enticed by the femme fatale, Delilah, whose Philistine sympathies ran deeper than her love, Samson made himself vulnerable in the lap of a woman and the hands of an enemy tribe.

Promptly, thanks to the infidelity of Delilah, said tribe discovered the source of Samson’s indomitable strength. To address it, the Philistines took swift, carnal, and tonsorial action. While resting his head upon Delilah’s inviting and capacious thighs, between whose Levantine pillars our Hebraic hero one day hoped to go, his great mass of hair was cut clean off his head. For good measure, when he awoke, his eyes were gouged out of his face. Deprived of strength and absent of sight, he was ordered, forevermore, to mill grain as if a pack animal in the tortuous heat of Gaza—home of the inveterate enemy against whom he so admirably fought.

Samson Agonistes is, as you can imagine, a work of incredible suffering. And, as it turns out, there’s only one alleviation and remedy for this woeful plight from which our hero can’t flee—a brutal and crushing death. The end of Samson’s story, and of that of the thousands of innocent Philistines by whom he was surrounded, is so well known, that it need not be cheapened with my retelling of it here. Above all, we must acknowledge that Milton, through his dialogue though perhaps less so through his action, advances and cultivates a feeling of suffering by which the reader is overwhelmed. Neither Iphigenia at Tauris nor Oedipus Rex has the same effect in this particular way—neither suffers so profoundly and exclusively.

Having covered Anagnorisis of Iphigenia, the Peripeteia of Oedipus, and the suffering of Samson, there is one other component of tragedy, rightly understood, upon which Milton expounds in his prologue. That last, and perhaps most important facet is unity. Encompassing all the criteria heretofore mentioned is the concept of unity. Unity, in the estimation of Aristotle and every student of his since, is the fundamental bedrock, the nourishing soil out of which the tree of tragedy grows. The tragic work’s action, time, character, setting, and scene—all should be subservient to that grand deity of unity, to that grand master of oneness in whose comprehensive shadow we all genuflect and pray. “The circumscription of time”, therefore, according to Milton, “wherein the whole drama begins and ends, is, according to ancient rule and best example, within the space of twenty-four hours”.

Aristotle, as expected, agreed. The plot of the tragedy should be, in his infallible opinion, “based on a single action, one that is a complete whole in itself”. There ought not to be anything on which it should be dependent for its fulfilment. It should have, among its other attributes, “a beginning, middle, and end, so as to enable the work to produce its own proper pleasure with all the organic unity of a living creature”. The imitation of the living creature—be it through the media of sculpture, architecture, or, for our purposes, drama—was, as you’ll know, paramount to the aesthetic taste of Attic Greece. The colonnades of the buildings in which its people gathered, the lithe contortions of the statues by which their ideals of anatomy were shaped—each was informed by distinctly and beautifully human proportions. The same could be said for its drama. Above all, drama was imitation, and what better to imitate than ourselves?

Apropos of this sentiment, Milton—in the construction of his character of Samson—seems very adroitly to have imitated himself. Both he and the Hebraic brute to whom he lent his pen were blind men living in a seeing world, a vivacious realm of whose colorful splendor they had, in times since passed, intimate knowledge. Both endured discordant and inhospitable relationships with their wives, with Milton going so far as to beg the Parliament to legalize the institution of divorce (his efforts failed, but the zeal and eloquence with which he pursued them remain a triumph in English thought). Both were devoutly religious men, living in times of theological upheaval and change. Though, in small ways, their deities may have differed, the imitation between the two couldn’t be more direct.

Milton, it’s clear to see, was much more than merely an expositor of that “sort of dramatic poem called tragedy”; he was a master, as well. Perhaps slightly inferior in achievement to those Athenian greats, we must acknowledge his mastery and thank him for the wisdom to which, through his prologue and the totality of his work, we have an enduring access.

In what’s come to be regarded, by both auditors and critics alike, as a singularly curious annunciation of a political preference, as an unprecedented declaration of commitment to a candidate, or, as it were, a pair of candidates for whom, separately, hardly a flicker of excitement exists and between whom, jointly, there’s nothing—beyond the generative organs with which they were born—remarkably stimulating or discernably common, the New York Times has announced its two preferred candidates for the upcoming Democratic primary election. In order of the paper’s most desired candidate, to that to whom it’ll resort if all else fails, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar have been named the paper’s two candidates of choice. These, as evidenced by the glowing affirmations and frenzied scribblings of the editors by whom they were selected, are the women about whom they’ll be—over the course of the next few months—most unabashedly sanguine. More than that, they’ll be the ladies behind whom the New York Times, America’s most influential (if no longer reliable) newspaper will now build and grow its weighty support.

An endorsement of not one but of two possible candidates—between whom, you’ll rightly notice, there’s to be, by the very nature of the competitive venture in which they’re jointly engaged, a phenomenon of “victor and loser” and of mutual exclusion—surely seems not only an indecisive and unhelpful act on the part of the Times’s editorial staff, but a rather lazy, feeble-hearted, and long-winded one as well. Perhaps, in relaying to you this, the New York Times’s unusualbipartite message in favor of Warren and Klobuchar for the election of 2020, you might attribute to me, humble messenger of this bewildering announcement though I admittedly am, an insensitivity to the Times’s actual point. Perhaps it was the paper’s intention to promulgate a novel idea, an interesting subtlety in the politics of this land of which, in the hands of an unrefined and sloppy reader like me, I couldn’t possibly be conscious.

I don’t think I flatter myself in thinking this not to be the case. That, coming from my own mouth, is quite a recommendation for me. And as for you, dear reader, I hasten to add, for your benefit as well as for mine, that this is no case of diplopia—however weary of eye and blunted of sense you may feel yourself to be. So far as I can tell, you aren’t seeing double. From the pains of the political exhaustion by which you’ve been rendered breathless over the course of the past four years, you may very well be suffering from one or many disease, but the infirmity of double-vision isn’t one by which you’ve yet been infected. You haven’t yet succumbed to that giddy state of optical illusion and of visual disrepair, to that world of hallucinatory wonder and duplicate ideas where one sight is expected and two are received.

No, you aren’t seeing double, nor, as I can assure you, is this is an illusion of the Times’s contrivance into which you’ve once again susceptibly fallen. Nor is this an act of the legerdemain-mainstream media’s work in whose deceptive and constant trickery you’ve been, yet again, caught. In a most unusual way, in a maneuver—open and explicit for all to see—that’s demonstrative both of the paper’s dithering and of the bifurcation that yet exists between its moderate head and its radical heart, the New York Times has announced its endorsement of both Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren.

You might think, and rightly so, that so indecisive a “decision” does you—the wayward and harried voter, the average Joe and workaday Jane in search of clarity to whom this whole impeachment and primary season has been nothing short of a ball of confusion—very little good. You’d be not at all wrong, certainly not in the least blamable, for thinking such thoughts. You’d even be excused if it were resentment that burst forth from your soul as a visceral response to this whole unhelpful farce. If the New York Times was the chief and primary source upon which you relied for any consistency in your political guidance, erudition, and help (god help you, should you find yourself in so benighted a state), you’d be very little availed by the paper’s noncommittal approach to these presidential candidates between whom you’ll soon have to choose. The time for dithering will soon be done, and, when finally it is, one must be prepared to act on the ballot by which she’s confronted.  

Certainly, the Times’s inability to choose just one candidate from a field of a dozen or more should inspire little optimism in what’s become a wavering, schismatic, and unmoored Democratic party (and, not to mention, a strengthening and confident President Trump). Thus far, in successive weeks, nearly every major candidate of whom that party is a sponsor seems to have held a small advantage in the polls—however transitory a bump it might’ve been. Variously, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Bernie Sanders have all held, however marginally and tenuously, statistical leads in the earliest of the two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire—only to watch these fugacious numbers change, and, with them, the prospects of their future success by which they were so justly enthused.  

The New York Times, wanting not a reversion to the status quo ante Obama, a time during which, in the haut opinion of the bien pensant, such unfortunate things as oppression, misogyny, the patriarchy, and unmitigated white privilege were rife, is grasping for a candidate (in this case, for two candidates) of whose diversity—be it sexual or racial—we can all finally take note and be proud. It’ll be a diversity by which we can rectify ancient wrongs and soften modern shortcomings. Alas, the possibility of a racially distinctive candidate, with the expiry of Cory Booker’s political ascent, the floundering of Kamala Harris’ once auspicious campaign, the insensitivity to Andrew Yang’s very existence, and the general disdain for Tulsi Gabbard, renders only a sexually unique candidate as desirable.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is, therefore, a candidate of manifest undesirability. In the opinion of the New York Times and in that of the Democrat intelligentsia to whom its columns are devoted, he would be an insufferable choice. The reasons are clear: he’s an inescapably old, stubbornly moderate, and morbidly white man. Sadly, only one of those three characteristics (namely, his moderation) lends itself to any degree of mutability. It’s the only sliver of his portfolio to which an amendment might be made. All else, much to his chagrin, is ossified in its current, increasingly decrepit, state. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, also intolerable to the Times’s quite distinctly feminine taste, share two-thirds of those unprepossessing characteristics by which Biden is so obviously hampered: Sanders, elderly and white, is the first and third; Buttigieg, white and moderate, the third and second. They possess, however, qualities of redemption to which Biden, to his great frustration, has no claim: Sanders, if scratched just beneath the dander of his skin, is an avowed Marxist; Buttigieg is sexually inverted, to use an antiquated term, and—while on the topic of years—charmingly young, having not yet reached his fourth decade. Most importantly, though (or, in this case, most damningly) all three of them are men.

We’re left, then, in a situation to which the French might, with every ounce of their inveterate eloquence and tact, apply the phrase, Querelle de femmes. The New York Times, with its endorsement of Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, the two remaining and viable female candidates, of whom only one possibly will vie for the presidency in ten months to come, has presented before us its own iteration of this phrase, which we now translate in the tongue of our birth to mean the “Woman Question”. It’s a problem, much more than ever it was a question, by which a bevy of statesman, suffragists, philosophers, and kings were animated throughout so many years of our past, and for which we still seek an answer today. But, in the case of the New York Times, the woman or, better yet, the women question is not solved, and we’re led no closer to its resolution. Indeed, it’s only exacerbated, and toward the endeavor of its conclusion and of our choice for the presidential election of 2020 (perhaps, as we’re told by that same paper, the most consequential of our life), we’re given no help.