The Brutal Truth About Women - Kamala Harris Explained

Everyone knows that Kamala Harris pushed Joe Biden under the bus - that much is obvious - but few saw the remarkable similarity to Goneril and Regan, King Lear's daughters, two of Shakespeare's most evil, heartless villainesses, who were accountable for the same heartless act.   

 

The two sisters did not quickly and painlessly depose their aging father, but took their time decommissioning him, first his guard, then his horses, then his castle until he was but a remnant of his former self, a bare forked animal raging on a stormy heath, mad as a hatter, wondering how Fate could have been so unkind.  It was the worst kind of cruelty, shoving an old, senile man aside, and letting him wander, cold, shoeless, and alone in the wild. 

While to the casual observer Joe Biden's dismissal may have seemed a bloodless palace coup - plotters calculating behind the scenes until in a decisive moment  they upended the poor old man's Lincoln chair and carried him to a windowless office - but there was more to it than that.  Kamala Harris prepared the  way from the moment the election was won, 

 

She knew from the beginning what was what.  One way or another - resignation, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution allowing for removal of a president deemed to be mentally incompetent, or deft political maneuvering to move him aside - she would be President. 

'The President is a perfect example of mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body; and just as Caesar Augustus ruled the Roman Empire for years, Joe Biden will be your President for now and for the next four years', Harris said, all the while plotting his removal.  She toadied up to him like never before, cajoled, comforted, and reassured him until he was as happy as could be that he had chosen her as his Vice President. 

 

He had hesitated during the selection process.  An uppity black woman with a Genghis Khan prosecutorial mentality might not take easily to second place, but she would look good on the ticket, and getting into office was what was on his mind - all the rest would be dealt with later. 

'Oh, Mr. President, what a fine deal you struck with the states on EVs, what a step forward in the environmental harmony you have worked so hard to achieve'; or, 'Keep on truckin', Mr. President.  You da man'.  Joe found it charming and cute when she talked to him this way, black talk, bringing him into the inner city culture he so longed for but never quite managed to embrace. 

She coddled him, nurtured him, and above all convinced him that he was in fine fettle, as sharp as a newly honed blade, superior in intelligence and insight than a room full of Franklin Pierces and Millard Fillmores and maybe even a Grant. 

 

Despite her devilishly Shakespearean intent, she opened the top button of her blouse in Oval Office meetings, mascaraed her eyes like Angel Reese, black and sexy, and left a trail of Arpege, the perfume of his youthful days, always a head-turner.  She even played to his imagined self of Southern grandee, master of Belle Reve, the Delta plantation of ten thousand acres of cotton and a thousand slaves - an image he only hinted at, but she, savvy black woman that she was, knew a closeted slave master when she saw one. 

It all worked like a dream.  The old man didn't know what hit him, and there he was on the curb, an old man as demented, cast off, and abandoned as King Lear. 

 

Now, it is wrong to condemn Kamala for what she did.  Shakespeare knew exactly what he was doing when he created characters like the Lear sisters, Lady Macbeth, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, Dionyza wife of the Governor of Thebes, or Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, next in line for Emperor of Rome. Frills and fancy, sweet smiles and adoring eyes were never expressions of dainty, submissive femininity, but wiles - poisoned arrows in the quiver of ambitious women. 

Lady Macbeth stopped at nothing to assure that her spineless husband kill King Duncan and take the Scottish throne.  She intimidated him, questioned his manhood and aristocratic resolve, pushed and prodded him to murder.  She was a woman of absolute, indomitable will - a vixenish harridan whose ambition was insurmountable. 

Dionyza, left with the daughter of Pericles to watch over while he was attending to other business, sees that she is far more beautiful, charming, and intelligent than her own daughter; and without hesitation arranges for her murder.  Her daughter can have not competition for the best and brightest of Theban men.  

Volumnia, doting mother of Coriolanus sees, despite his battlefield prowess and heroism, a certain political tone deafness; and knows that his presumed ascendancy to the throne will never come about.  She arranges his death, curries favor with the Roman powers that be, and will become the eminence grise of empire. 

Tamora, so incensed with Titus Andronicus for slighting her and her family, engineers a brutal rape and dismemberment of Titus's daughter at the hands of her sons.

Shakespeare simply carried on the tradition of the ancient Greeks. Aeschylus' Clytemnestra is the role model for Shakespeare.  She never hesitates in her plot to murder her husband, King Agamemnon and with her lover take over the kingdom.  She like Tamora not only kills him but dismembers him so that there is no chance that he will haunt her from the Underworld.  She has not one scintilla of remorse for what she has done, and faces her own death with equanimity.

 

Shakespeare's heirs, Ibsen and Strindberg, have created women cut from the same cloth.  Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, Hilde Wangel, and Laura are all murder-minded, ambitious, destructive women. 

'Now what?', Kamala asked her aides once the deed had been done, the king deposed, and the way clear to the presidency.  Like all of Shakespeare's and Ibsen's women, there was no second act.  All had their comeuppance, and even if they had lived would probably have made a mess of things.  They were born to wreak havoc, not to assemble the pieces into any coherent whole. 

Shakespeare was of two minds when it came to women - he had to admire their pluck.  It wasn't easy for women in the Elizabethan era to assert themselves and those that did had to be admired.  Yet these soulless, cruel, and amoral women were a bit of a scourge; and the misogynistic diatribes spoken by Posthumus and Othello to name just two might easily have been the Bard's own sentiments. 

Be that as it may such shrewish, ambitious women pop up every generation and in every culture.  Whether a predictable outcome of oppressive patriarchy, or a canny gender-universal understanding of femaleness and its inherent power over men, these women are to be dealt with. 

So Kamala is no different from any of history's or fiction's strong women.  She is an amoral, willful predator, canny enough to rid the palace of an old man, determined enough to replace him, and certainly capable of any chicanery, wiles, and trickery to get into office. 

Unfortunately for her, she is a dunce - a woman of boundless ambition, but without the intellectual density to carry her to the next level.  Her foundering, blundering campaign belies the malicious intent of her coup.  We will all be better off without her, just as Goneril and Regan like justly mouldering in their graves.