kathy griffin.jpg

Kathy Griffin

John Robb

By John Robb, who lives in Mobile and frequently contributes to AL.com Opinion

In A Midsummer's Night Dream Shakespeare writes: "What fools these mortals are!" If last November's presidential election was one of his plays, we'd now be entering the fifth and final act. Playwrights call this the denouement when the minor players' actions converge with the main antagonist's final fall.

In this case comedian Kathy Griffin, who now describes herself as a minor "D list" comic, is blaming President Trump for her conscious decision to publicly commit career suicide. You've heard of death by cop. This was death by president. Griffin mimicked the ISIS ghouls by releasing a picture of herself holding up the fake bloody head of the leader of the free world. Both Dems and Republicans alike quickly condemned her vulgar taste. Griffin quickly apologized which would have been a very good first step toward saving her struggling career.

But then, with her high powered and highly paid lawyer at her side, Griffin called a news conference to blame President Trump and sob into the microphone: "He broke me. He broke me. He broke me." She called the President "a bully" and said she had crossed paths with "older white guys" like him before. What had been the President's actual response to trigger this meltdown? A lengthy threatening soliloquy?

No, Trump had tweeted a very appropriate response to such a horrific stunt: "Kathy Griffin should be ashamed of herself. My children, especially my 11-year-old son Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick!" Who could possible add or subtract one word to say it better? What parent did not share his outrage?

Then, the very same week, the main antagonist in our presidential drama, Hillary Clinton, proclaimed the two main factors for her election defeat were Russian spies and her gender! She told a women's empowerment conference: "Certainly misogyny played a role. I mean that just has to be admitted."

It was not her lack of a clear agenda for America, her failure to hear the American people's actual needs or even her puzzling decision to not campaign aggressively in the crucial swing states. Never mind that she was an ineffective Secretary of State and colluded with the Democratic National Committee to steal her party's nomination from Bernie Sanders. Never mind that the electoral college was stacked in her favor or that she had a vastly larger campaign war chest than Trump. It was the Russians and that "bully...the "older white guy" as Griffin calls the President. As Shakespeare's character Cassius exclaimed in Julius Caesar: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

This is where the Shakespearean analogy breaks down because this past week's events are fact, not fiction. The 63 million Americans who voted for Trump were the ones who "fixed" the election. About half of them are women and I wonder if even one of them is a Russian spy.

Americans my age recall a revered Democratic President John Kennedy who had the better part of his skull blown off by a Russian sympathizing sniper. We all remember a Republican president, Abe Lincoln, who was shot through the head for ending the Civil War and slavery. Always looking for a silver lining, Kathy Griffin has brought all Americans together like no one in recent memory to oppose her twisted humor.

Yet, as Shakespeare wrote in "As You Like It: "All the world's a stage" with all Americans of every political persuasion watching the curtain fall on this sad spectacle. It's a real life American tragedy ending with the self-inflicted deaths of a comedian's career and a now seemingly obsolete political machine called the Clinton Dynasty. Their unwillingness to face reality is closing down this theatre of the absurd. Life often imitates art. So now Kathy and her villainous hero Hillary have literally become "merely players" while their former leading man "No Drama Obama" watches silently in the wings. Shakespeare might have reminded us that their ridiculous comments this week are just "sound and fury" and that "all is well that ends well."