This evening after a series of minor vexations – son sick, Gamecocks clobbered, eye invaded by wayward particle – I got to thinking about Horace Walpole’s observation that “[l]ife is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” I quote Walpole when I’m teaching tragedy and ask students to offer an interpretation.
It’s a hard question, hard to put the answer into words.
Of course, to address the question, you need context. For example, let’s examine the thinking/ feeling/comedy/tragedy conundrum from the perspective of Trump’s election.
(I know some of you may have supported Trump, perhaps because you feel immigrants are overrunning the country or that massive tax cuts will defy history and fuel an economic boom or that you consider Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama Satanic spawn or some/all of the above).
However, the [tautology alert] a priori premise in this thought experiment is that Trump is a vulgarian with authoritarian tendencies whose boorish pronouncements during the campaign have eroded codes of civility and whose total lack of a sense-of-history and intellectual curiosity make his election as leader of the free world very, very unfortunate.
Not to mention his pathological avariciousness.
Democritus
Okay, let’s bring in the cynical pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, aka “the laughing philosopher.”
Seneca claimed that Democritus, whom he called “the Mocker,” laughingly held human beings in disdain, modeling a detached amusement at the foibles of the masses. In temperament think Bill Maier as opposed to Louis Black.
If human folly is laughable, this election might very well provoke Democritus to guffawing at this turn of events:
A swindler and pathological liar who pleads guilty to fraud a week after the election and who referred to his opponent as “Crooked Hillary” with the help of Fox News and Russian hackers (not to mention the New York Times) convinces a majority populace that he’s “more trustworthy” than she.
[cue laugh track]
Coal miners in Kentucky counties who have decreased their uninsured rate by almost twenty percent vote 93% to 6% for a man who wants to abolish the estate tax.
[cue laugh track]
Thinkers like Democritus take the long view. Human folly is essentially history’s major motif. Thinkers are familiar with not only Huck Finn’s the “Duke and the Dolphin” but have read Swift and Shakespeare and perhaps Horace and Juvenal.
In their view, only incredibly naïve pollyannas would expect their generation to be less prone to foolishness than their forebears. Most of humankind is purblind, always have been, always will be.
After all, anyone reading this will be literally dead in 80 years. So what if the American Experiment fails? So what if Arizona once again boasts a view of the Pacific? Letting the little people decide was a very, very bad idea.
Just desserts.
By the way, should I add that this view might be considered elitist?
Heraclitus
Heraclitus, on the other hand, aka the “weeping philosopher,” was a feeler, invested in the here and now. So what if Swift’s view of Yahoos was essentially correct? Those yahoos who voted for Trump in Kentucky lives will not get any better but actually worse: they will lose that recently acquired insurance, babies will die, and those promised coal mining jobs ain’t coming back ever. Once again, they’ve been lied to.
How horrible, Heraclitus laments, that such chicanery is so rewarded. A spoiled, 70-year-old adolescent tweets preposterous lies and pays no apparent price for his dishonesty and in the mean time transforms the Founding Fathers’ republican democracy into an authoritarian kleptocracy!
People are real, not abstractions to be mocked. Pain is real.
In fact, sorry. My eye is killing me. I got to sign off.
Ladies, gentlemen, bulldogs, and babies, I’d like to introduce you to Henry Heppleworth, a product of the brilliant comic imagination of my expat pal, Charlie Geer, author of Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston. Do yourself a favor and cop a copy 
You Do Hoodoo 