Quote of the Day (James Shirley, on ‘The Glories of Our Blood and State’)

“The glories of our blood and state
     Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against Fate;
     Death lays his icy hand on kings:
               Sceptre and Crown
               Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.” — English poet-playwright James Shirley (1596–1666), The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses (1659)

The theme of these verses by Shirley—destined to see in his lifetime the death of the Tudor dynasty, the coming, going and revival of the Stuart dynasty, and the short-lived dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell—was encapsulated more succinctly nearly a century later in the great line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

These days, as they attempt to bully smaller nearby nations, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping seem destined to learn this lesson all over again. But, even before the meet the same fate as any of their poor, powerless countrymen, they may well have to cope with another indignity: laughter at their expense.

Putin has already been satirized by Saturday Night Live’s Beck Bennett. To my knowledge, SNL hasn’t yet turned its hand towards dealing with Xi.

But I think the best manner of dealing with Putin and Xi is to put them together and dispatch them at the same time, much like when Charlie Chaplin and Jack Oakie (both pictured) played an earlier dictatorial duo, “Adenoid Hynke” and “Benzino Napolon,” in the 1940 film, The Great Dictator.