We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

— T.S. Eliot

Once upon a time, when I worked for a university theater department, I wrote a couple of courtroom dramas based on actual trials, to be staged in the mock trial room of the law school where my father worked. The first play was based on Aaron Burr’s trial for treason in 1807. The second play was based on the 1987 congressional testimony around the Iran-Contra scandal. One play was ancient history to me; the other was about events that had taken place a year before I was writing.

Those Iran-Contra hearings went on forever, with many witnesses, but the star of the show had been Colonel Oliver North, who had shown up in full military regalia, ramrod straight—unrepentant and contemptuous of the whole proceeding. The news media, objective as always, loved taking pictures of him from below to make him look large and imposing. Heroic. He wasn’t some crazed zealot who was caught breaking the law. No, no—he was a patriot doing his duty for his country. Obviously, any play I wrote would have to be about him.

However. Because I had so recently been immersed in early American history and was fascinated with the figure of Aaron Burr (long before he became a cultural icon), I came up with a strange and twisty idea. I would use Oliver North’s testimony, but I would put him on trial in a mythical court of the pantheon of American Heroes, to see if he qualified to be counted among their members. It would be a play about us, not him.

I had Young Thomas Jefferson, circa the writing of the Declaration of Independence, as the prosecuting attorney, there to protect the honor of the Mount Rushmore pantheon against this upstart. His argument was that we loved our leaders and heroes because they adhered to the highest ideals of the country’s founding. They certainly wouldn’t do something like selling arms to a hostile country in order to finance the clandestine work of rebels to whom Congress had already cut off funding.

And Aaron Burr, in disgrace after the Hamilton shooting and his treason trial, was there to defend Oliver North and claim for him his rightful place in the pantheon. He was sly, cynical, with a wry sense of humor about himself, his opponent, and the whole concept of “highest ideals.”

As Jefferson called on mythic figures like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, each witness testified about their love of American values and ideals, speaking only in words they had actually spoken or written in life. During cross-examination under Burr, they continued to say only the things they had said in life—but this time, Burr pushed them to talk about the primacy of protecting and extending American strength and power, regardless of cost or moral queasiness. As in any good cross-examination, our heroes’ testimony to Burr often undermined or impeached what they had just said to Jefferson.

That was the first act.

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In Act Two, Burr brought his case. First came Oliver North, represented by a literal straw man, with the court clerk reading the greatest hits from his congressional testimony. Most of the audience knew the basics of the story, and many of them had watched the testimony just a year before, so I didn’t have to dwell on it too much. We all knew what he had done and why he felt it was justified.

Then Burr called his only other witness: Thomas Jefferson. But it wasn’t young Jefferson, the man who sat across the courtroom from Burr. It was old Tom: ex-President Jefferson. Burr got him to talk about all the things he had done to increase and extend American Power, whether moral, idealistic, legal, or not. And then, in the climax of the play, young Jefferson got to cross-examine old Jefferson, with the ideals of youth crashing against the realpolitik of age and experience.

And then the jury had to vote.

It was a university audience—a mix of students, faculty and staff—predisposed to be liberal. But they didn’t always vote against North. There were nights when they grudgingly (and one night tearfully) accepted that, within the arguments that had been presented to them, what North did was no worse, and perhaps not that much different, from what any of the Great Men would have done or endorsed.

It was a nasty piece of manipulation on my part, but, on the other hand, real juries never get to vote on how they feel about something; they are always constrained by the evidence brought before them. And that evidence is never the whole story.

But it felt like a fair argument to grapple with. Did we really believe in the things we cheered for and voted for? Because I did—even after doing research for that play, which, believe me, was damned depressing. I was a firm believer in that thing Bill Clinton used to say, that there was nothing wrong with America that couldn’t be fixed by what was right with America.

But was I fooling myself? Were we all lying to ourselves—hiding from what we actually, deep down, wanted from our leaders? Were the ideals just pretty words to hide the brute force that we really wanted from our leaders? America uber alles, ideals be damned?

It sure feels that way, these days—which is why, I guess, I’ve been thinking about that old play.

What is it about the play that’s been nagging at me? I think it has something to do with those immigrants we’ve been terrorizing and dragging off American streets and those fishermen we’ve been blowing up in the Caribbean and those reporters and congressmen and university presidents our government has been threatening and strongarming into obedience. The political discourse seems to have boiled itself down to nothing but STRENGTH versus WEAKNESS, with the former being so essential as to be worth paying any price and the latter being a horrifying thing that must be avoided at any cost. We cannot afford to think about lofty ideas. We must bring down the hammer. Everywhere. We must be strong.

But what do we even mean by that?

Start at the bottom and work your way up. We hear a lot these days about “toxic masculinity,” but what I actually see around me is more like “blow-up doll masculinity.” Serious, sober adulthood and protecting the vulnerable don’t seem to be the ideal anymore; being swole is—oversized in body, oversized in ego, oversized in aggression. Real men aren’t careful or cautious or prudent or protective; they are simply big. Big-dick energy. Leading with the chest, looking for a fight. Come at me, bro.

Fitness isn’t about health anymore; it’s about muscles erupting out of your clothes. Not comfort, but swagger. Not what you need for yourself, but what you need to show off to others.

Wealth isn’t about security anymore; it’s about being able to buy baby yachts to keep your big yachts company. Not comfort, but swagger. Not what you need for yourself, but what you need to show off to others.

Is that strength at an individual level? “Strong” doesn’t seem to have anything to do with a sense of calm that comes from confident competence, or a sense of quiet resolve based on character. It’s not inner anything; it’s just an outward show of dominance and aggression.

Roll that up to the national level and look at what it’s done. National strength ought to mean something like stability, prosperity, and health—the ability of a people to lead happy, safe lives. Strong leaders do what is necessary to secure those things for their people.

So, what kind of strength do we need from our leaders these days?

We live in a place and a time blessed by abundant wealth, health, and resources, both intellectual and natural—maybe more so than in any other place or time in history. That’s true, even when the stock market is taking a dip or grocery prices seem to be rising. We may be feeling a little wobbly right now, but compared to other countries and certainly compared to past eras of history, we should be able to feel magnanimous and gracious to our neighbors and to the rest of the world.

But you wouldn’t think that to look at us today. Within our secure borders and warm homes, we’re animated by suspicion, selfishness, and fear.

And beyond those borders? Shouldn’t the idea of “projecting strength abroad” involve things like USAID, the Peace Corps, and support for democratic institutions and human rights? Isn’t that how a confident, secure, and strong country relates to its neighbors?

Well, that’s not us. We’ve slashed funding for aid programs at home and abroad. We’ve sent gunboats to threaten foreign leaders we don’t like, and our president uses social media to threaten citizens who oppose him. We’ve blown up fishing boats, claiming that we’re under invasion. We’ve sent masked, armed thugs into American cities to terrorize immigrants who have lived among us for years, convinced somehow that they are threatening our way of life.

I don’t know. It feels to me like that’s just not how strong people behave.

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that we’re being ruled by braying, swaggering bullies. Men all over the country seem to be idealizing a cartoon-character version of masculinity, no more real than a giant balloon at the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Centuries of philosophy and ethical writing about leading a grounded, virtuous, and meaningful life—almost exclusively written by men, for men, and about men—and in our own time, manhood comes down to, “Do you even lift, bro?”

If that’s the case, it’s not surprising that we elected a man who projects masculinity in such ludicrously ersatz and inflated ways—the big hair, the shoulder pads, the giant ties, the shoe lifts, the baggy suits, the inflated ego, the boastful sex talk, and the refusal ever to apologize or admit error about anything?

I don’t even blame him. He is who he is. We’ve known him for a long time. He’s been in our faces for decades. If his voters were blindsided or fooled by him, that’s on them. But I don’t think many of them were. I think they liked what they saw. They held it up for admiration and emulation. They wanted it, and they wanted to be just like it. He claimed to be strong, and they wanted what they saw as strength.

We used to hold up movie characters like Atticus Finch for emulation. Now we seem to celebrate Biff Tannen. But Biff was the bad guy. I thought we all understood that.

This isn’t only a male problem. Not when you can search for “Mar-a-Lago Face” and “tradwives” online. We’re all becoming blow-up-doll versions of people, with every bit of nuance and complication Botox-ed out of existence, and the most extremely and stereotypically male and female traits inflated into comic proportions. And across the board, boasting, braying, and bullying are celebrated as qualities to admire.

Like balloons, we expand and puff ourselves out, but we’re full of nothing but air. And that air won’t lift us or let us fly. We’ll just pump ourselves up until we explode.

The men who founded our country and crafted a political structure that gave ordinary people power and agency to direct their lives—they spent a lot of their youth reading deeply in Greek and Roman history and philosophy. The way those men thought and lived was rooted in what they studied as young men (as Thomas Ricks details in this fascinating book).

They weren’t perfect, God knows—not as people and not as leaders. They often fell miserably short of their ideals. But at least they had some. They tried to live by words like, “When someone is properly grounded in life, they shouldn’t have to look outside themselves for approval” (Epictetus), and “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury” (Marcus Aurelius), and “Man conquers the world by conquering himself” (Zeno). They set a standard for the rest of us—one they fell short of; one we all fall short of. But a standard is a good thing to have, to measure yourself by.

What happened to the idea that self-control was the sign of strength, not vindictive lashing out at everyone and everything around you?

How did we come to equate strength with drunk-guy-at-the-bar aggressiveness and strutting, self-congratulatory boastfulness, when for so much of our history, we identified those behaviors as signs of weakness?

One of my favorite plays, which is too big and weird to be done much, is Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. It’s an epic play about a family’s survival though eons of disasters and catastrophes—ice ages, floods, and wars. They are the eternal human family—they are all of us.

In the final act, in the ruins of a terrible war, the teenaged son returns from the front, eager to keep fighting and tear down everything he found oppressive in the old world. His father reaches out to him and says, “Let’s try again.” And this is what happens:

HENRY:
Try what? Living here? Speaking polite to old men like you? Standing
like a sheep at the corner until the red light turns green? Being a good
boy and a good sheep, like all the stinking ideas you get out of your
books? Oh, no. I’ll make a world, and I’ll show you.

MR. ANTROBUS:
How can you make a world for people to live in, unless you’ve
put yourself in order first? Mark my words: I shall continue
fighting you until my last breath, as long as you mix up your idea
of liberty with your idea of hogging everything for yourself….

HENRY:
I don’t belong here. I have nothing to do here. I have no home.

MR. ANTROBUS:
When your mother comes in you must behave yourself. Do you hear me?

HENRY:
What is this? Must behave yourself? Don’t you say must to me. Nobody can say must to me. All my life everybody’s been crossing me—everybody, everything, all of you. I’m going to be free, even if I have to kill half the world for it.

“I’m going to be free, even if I have to kill half the world for it.”

Is that strength, or is Mr. Antrobus right, that you can’t make a world for people to live in unless you’ve “put yourself in order first?”

When you are calm in yourself—when you know yourself and can accept yourself with a quiet, humble confidence—you don’t end up reacting to other people from a position of fear or envy or suspicion. You don’t care about what they have, because you are satisfied with what you have—whatever you have. You don’t care how they live their lives, because you are content in the way you live yours. You don’t have to spend every moment worried about how immigrants or Jews or Muslims or gay people or trans people are undermining or weakening or challenging your world, because you are secure in your own world—and, therefore, you can let them have their piece and their peace without feeling threatened. You know that there is world enough and time for all of us. It’s not all being taken away from us. It’s not all about to end—not with a bang or with a whimper. The world is not pie; it’s sky—open and limitless and everyone’s.

As Joni Mitchell might have said, it’s strength’s illusions we recall. We really don’t know strength at all.

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