Quote of the Day (W. H. Auden, on Propaganda)

“Propaganda is a monologue which seeks not a response but an echo.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning English-born American poet-critic W. H. Auden (1907-1973), “A Short Defense of Poetry,” originally delivered at the International PEN Conference in Budapest, October 1967, printed in The New York Review of Books, Jan. 30, 1986

Over two days in Beijing this week, two 24/7 practitioners of propaganda, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, met. These leaders of America and China, so used to employing this “monologue” on their countrymen, wielded it on their foreign counterpart.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that these efforts were aimed at establishing their countries as superpowers. Rather, in their blatant legacy-building, these septuagenarian strongmen were engaged in the final rites of their own cults of personality.

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.