Will Alberto R. Gonzales become the newest Icarus of this Administration, I mean, this ancient Greek tragedy, now?

It can be a terrible thing to love a father so much that even though you are falling fast, your father only cheerily bids you to flap harder… The young Icarus so trusted his father Daedelus, that he believed him when his father said, “Here just put on this leathern harness and these sad feathers stuck into wax on this frail wooden frame of office, I mean, wings. Now, see, you are invincible… free to soar away from any prison. There will be no constraint set against you… â€?

And the young Icarus, untested, never having flown so high, perhaps scared at first… but there was his father, wasn’t he, calling out encouragement? Inflated by his father’s words, the boy flew too low and wetted his wings, then flew too high in tricky winds, to try to dry them near the sun. Sun softened wax, feathers wafted away, everything once held together thus fell apart. And poor Icarus hit the Aegean sea, sun-burnt flesh against wave after wave of harsh reality, I mean, sea water, and there Icarus died.

And who will be the Daedelus of this act? Daedelus, the fatuous decider, who stubbornly, even as his boy was falling, thought that simply by saying ‘Up!’, he could keep his boy aloft. Father-son inflation. And who will play Icarus’ father, the Daedelus who is doomed to make the claims, I mean, the wings, that will not hold an inflated weight aloft? Some might say, ‘Send in Number Forty-Three.’

And enter Hermes who stands behind the scenes of all of men’s destinies… who shall play Hermes? Shall it be Karl Christian Rove? Or another? Hermes, the trickster, who makes things appear and disappear and is the champion especially of Logos; The Word, as well as words of documents and letters. Hermes is the trickster, because he makes ‘what it is’ seem like ‘what it is not.’ The mage of Logos, of words and the concepts behind them; making them lose shape and be conjured into nefarious shapes… whatever pleases Hermes.

And while the naive and august often praise Hermes’ craftiness, they overlook he is a trickster, his face divided in two, one each pointing in opposing directions. He serves and speaks out of both sides of his head. Hermes’ symbol is the same as that of the ancient Mercurius, also known as Mercury: Like the elemental, liquid mercury in modern thermometers… try to touch the trickster’s ‘truths’, and they shatter. Touch any shard and the mercury shatters again, endlessly. And that is what a trickster in Government, I mean, the Pantheon, does too.

And meanwhile, Perseus, surely that would be Arlen J. Specter, who has killed the Gorgon monster Medusa, the snake-headed one who can poison a man with a glance, for she is Death. And Perseus pursued his modern battle with chemotherapy swords against the many snake-headed Medusa of lymphoma, and he is wished well, for he honors Aescelapius, the great Healer, who believes that stem cells, I mean, draughts of mead, are very good medicine.

And Perseus despite all that, was the one to question Icarus most carefully today… even though Icarus it seems, has drank the water of the River Lethe, and has forgotten, forgotten, can no longer remember… Lethe is the River of Forgetfulness in the underworld of Hades, the river of oblivion… which gives the audience an idea, of what is soon to come.

And there are other roles too, and are there some actors who have already cast themselves into these roles? For instance, perhaps you dear audience, would like to choose… who will have the honor of playing… the role of Heracles, that is, he who fights and kills Lepreus after being bested by him… in a bull-eating contest? Yes, we must once in a while laugh, for in Politics, I mean, for acting in Tragedies, there must be some comedic moments too, else the audience will never be able to bear to stay all the way through to the end of the play.

And see here, at the close of each act of “The United States of Greek Tragedy Americaâ€? there are two choruses, Greek ones of course, and in one, the citizenry, that is, all of us, we are to chant something… I cannot quite read the score, perhaps you can … some of the words translated into English seem to have the cadance of a quick panicked chanting; some of the words sound like ‘cannot bear’ and some sound like ‘bring’ and some sound like ‘cease entirely.’

And there’s a counterpoint chorus too; The script says it is to be sung in a whisper, almost a hiss … Some of the phrases appear to be ‘…nothing leaves the planet; somewhere is the hidden Logos, the letters that have gone missing.’ And some of the other phrases broken up by broad strophes, seem to translate as something like, “Trickster, Logos bearer, show us what you have said to Icarus and to Daedelus, bypassing Perseus and the rest of us.â€? Those are all the phrases I can make out. Perhaps you know or can scry the rest.

Please read also the longer story of Icarus and those who cause the young and promising to fall from the sky, An Analysis of The Men Who Fall From The Sky: Icarus … the lost story.

“Alberto Gonzales, George Bush, Karl Rove, Arlen Specter, and “’The United States of Greek Tragedy America’â€? © 2007, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved, is printed here under Creative Commons License by which author grants permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under the conditions that the use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety and not altered, added to, or subtracted from, and that it be attributed with author’s name and this full copyright notice. For other uses, contact copyright holder.

Read some of our other earlier posts today written by others on the Gonzales story here and here.

Books by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes HERE.