No wave could sweep those upper decks — unthinkable!
No storm could hurt that hull — the papers said so.
The perfect ship at last — the first unsinkable,
Proved in advance — had not the folders read so?
E.J. Pratt, The Titanic

Is hubris a crime? And, if indeed it is, what should the punishment be? Miss Stevenson, our severe and dedicated grade 11 English teacher, had, for more years than she would care to count (I’m sure), been charged with the responsibility of sparking a flame in our none too literary hearts. Plowing through Pratt’s epic poem, she’d managed to tick more than a few boxes: Can Lit content and hooking her audience — at least this member of it.

What mattered that her boats were but a third
Of full provision — caution was absurd:
Then let the ocean roll and the winds blow
While the risk at Lloyd’s remained a record low.

And more, through her efforts, she’d warned us all — ‘don’t fly too close to the sun’ — giving us a word that’s resonated long since.

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with . . . Covid

Hubris does, in fact, generally have some pretty dire consequences. The ship sinks and two-thirds of its occupants die. Icarus catches an updraft — just before he has a meltdown, finishing his days in the Mediterranean. Satan gets the consolation prize (that would be ruling in Hell in preference to the alternative). And Leroy (as in bad, bad Brown) and Jim both buy into some pretty serious battery. Swagger evidently doesn’t impress the Goddess Nemesis. BS may baffle brains — but not a bipartisan virus.

So what to do when the longed for, or so we thought, day of comeuppance finally arrives — in the most fitting of ways. The timing, the agent, the target so perfectly, so ironically delivered, selected, it had to be scripted. Life is just too random to have written this one. I’ve spent, and in very good company, four years watching, tallying each distortion, misrepresentation, prevarication, insult, breach, crime and been as appalled as any when, yet again what looked like a slam dunk for the good guys would bounce around the rim, only to fall out of bounds. I’ve read so many accounts, books detailing the abuse and disrespect for a system that should be treasured, not trashed, that, like countless others, I’ve become desensitized to the next assault — left open-mouthed, disbelieving.

Then. . . DJT tested positive.

And the villain of the piece, as often happens, becomes a teacher — potentially. Not by dint of intellect or intention or merit or even accident. He’s just sick. At risk of succumbing to a fate that, some, many would say he deserves, having fumbled, denied, mishandled, misinformed sufficient that 200,000 of his constituency have died. A fate that the courts, the rival politicians have been powerless to effect.

Karen Armstrong, a UK author and teacher has written widely and wisely on the process of compassion. Her 2010 book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, plots a course from selfishness to compassion, from alienation and divisiveness to shared humanity. In her ‘charter’, she underlines the wisdom of studying those we dislike — not to ferret out weaknesses, points of vulnerability to gain an advantage or to bring them down; but to learn about ourselves, our values. Not a new concept, but an elusive one. Compassion, extensively accepted as a ‘wired in’ part of us, is often ‘trumped’ by our older, reactive, tribal instincts — particularly in times of crisis, acute or protracted — as most of us would acknowledge, the last four years have represented. The latter entrench, divide; the former has the potential for growth, healing, unification.

Cultivating compassion requires both intention and a shift in focus, perspective. In turn, the necessary precursor to these both is awareness, paying attention to water shed moments, the forks in the road where we are presented with a choice. There’s something inherently satisfying about the moment when the ‘evil doer’ (to borrow a Bushian buzz word) is brought low — and so easy to reflexively get caught up in the emotional fist pump that we call schadenfreude, pretty graphically defined as ‘the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another.’

It remains a choice, a moment when we’re given pause. I felt it. Evidently the ‘truth tellers’ of our world (aka, the late night comics) did too. As did political rivals. Whether this remains a sustained and sustainable teaching point is the larger question. Perhaps the largest one is ‘will the teacher learn’. Trump will likely survive. Will this figural moment be ‘spun’ to political advantage; or will it foster change, growth, gratitude. . . compassion in a man who has repeatedly shown he has none.