The Theater of the Absurd

There are few things more dependable than a man with power mistaking attention for admiration. History is a long parade of them - waving, saluting, grandstanding - all convinced the crowd came for the show, not the message. Perhaps they did, at first. But then someone squints, someone snickers, and before long the emperor’s fine regalia has slipped into costume territory. Spectacle, as it turns out, ages faster than sincerity.

Mussolini had his balcony; Richard Nixon had Laugh-In; Boris Johnson had a pair of dangling flags and a stuck zipline. Each man, for a brief, glittering moment, believed himself to be the main act in the theater of destiny. And then the curtain twitched, revealing what it always eventually does - that the show isn’t nearly as grand once the audience realizes the actors are improvising. The line between charisma and caricature, like most tragicomic lines, is mostly drawn in ego.

Of course, this is nothing new. We’re told Nero tuned his lyre while Rome burned, Marie Antoinette redecorated while people searched for bread, and a certain modern ruler once photo-op’d himself aboard a ship under a “Mission Accomplished” banner that refused to live up to its hype. It’s a reliable pattern: the louder the performance, the quieter the competence. The grander the gesture, the smaller the man behind it.

Which brings us to the present - a time when performance has replaced policy, and political theater has given way to reality theater. Our modern strongmen have swapped uniforms for hashtags, press conferences for digital fantasies, and speeches for spectacle. The script is old, the props are new, but the plot is the same: a man with a microphone, mistaking noise for legacy.

Kaiser Wilhelm II - The Loose Lips Interview

In 1908, Kaiser Wilhelm II granted an interview to The Daily Telegraph, a British daily newspaper with a conservative political alignment.

He wished to charm Britain, to appear candid and modern - the kind of monarch who could speak off-script and still sound regal. He did not. Among his many conversational comments, he managed to declare that “you English are mad, mad, mad as March hares,” and then assured readers that he alone had prevented Germany from joining other nations in their wars - an odd boast from a man so fond of uniforms. His words ricocheted across Europe like stray musket fire, offending allies, alarming ministers, and delighting cartoonists.

What Wilhelm saw as frankness, the world heard as vanity dressed in diplomacy’s borrowed robes. His own government had to issue public apologies, and his ministers began quietly drafting ways to keep him away from microphones. It was the first great act of media self-immolation: a man unfiltered and unedited, hoisted by the petard of his own personality. History remembers the Kaiser less for his empire than for the sound of him talking too long.

Howard Dean - The Scream

There are few sounds in politics more haunting than enthusiasm misplaced.

Howard Dean, once the great Democratic hope of the 2004 Presidential race, managed to compress all the awkward earnestness of modern ambition into a single, strangled syllable: “YEAHHH!” After an early primary loss, it was meant as battle cry to continue on, but came out as primal therapy - part joy, part short-circuit.

The media replayed it like a national exorcism. The scream was louder than the message, more human than presidential, and therefore unacceptable. What destroyed Dean wasn’t madness but the suspicion of it. He simply forgot that, in public life, volume isn’t the measure of conviction, only of distance from the microphone.

Richard Nixon - Sock It To Him?

Before the scandals, before the tapes, there was a brief and hopeful moment when Richard Nixon tried to be funny. In 1968 he appeared on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In -

a fast-paced, provocative, counterculture, comedy variety show that satirized the cultural and social upheavals of the day - and delivered the show’s catchphrase, “Sock it to me?” with the hesitant confusion of a man reading cue cards written in a foreign language. Dressed in a somber suit amid a show full of neon chaos, he looked like someone’s father who’d wandered into Woodstock by mistake and was trying, valiantly, to be cool about it.

The studio audience laughed, but there was a beat of pity in it, the sound of generational static. A kind of cultural feedback loop in which sincerity, no matter how misplaced, became comedy. The moment was meant to humanize him; it did. Just not in the way he hoped. What was intended as a wink became a tell - proof that Nixon’s notion of “relatable” was as foreign as his later tapes were familiar. It was, in hindsight, the perfect prelude to Watergate: a man trying too hard to appear ordinary, and revealing, in the attempt, just how much he wasn’t.

Nero - The Fire and the Fiddle

Long before press secretaries and spin doctors, there was the Emperor Nero - a man who understood optics, if not empathy. When Rome burned in 64 CE, he was said to have watched from his palace balcony, plucking a lyre and reciting verses about Troy’s destruction.

Whether he actually did or not hardly matters; the story stuck because it felt true. The image of an emperor, so emotionally tone deaf to the plight of his people, serenading catastrophe was simply too resonant to resist. In the Roman imagination, it became the perfect parable: when power loses its sense of proportion, even music starts to sound like mockery.

To Nero, it was theater. To everyone else, it was indictment. He rebuilt Rome with his own face on the statues, his name on the new streets and grandiose arches, his ego baked into the marble etched in gold.

It was governance as performance art, a man casting himself as both hero and God, then wondering why the audience kept booing. In the end, the fiddle became prophecy - not of fire, but of the way leaders mistake spectacle for substance. He didn’t invent the photo-op, but he may have been its first casualty.

Boris Johnson - The Zipline Patriot

It was 2012, the London Olympics, and Boris Johnson - then mayor - found himself dangling midair on a stalled zip-line, two Union Jacks in hand and a grin that hovered somewhere between triumph and mild panic.

For several long, suspended minutes, he swayed above the crowd like a particularly patriotic pinata, the embodiment of British improvisation: keep smiling, wave the flags, pretend this was all part of the plan. It was the kind of moment even Monty Python couldn’t have improved upon.

And yet, it worked - at least for a while. The image distilled Johnson’s strange magic: chaos rendered charming, incompetence reframed as character. He was the everyman in a harness, flailing through history with Etonian elan, proof that in modern politics, farce isn’t a liability; it’s a brand.

But like all slapstick, the joke curdled on repetition. What began as an endearing accident became, in time, his governing philosophy – wild motion without direction, optimism without landing gear. The zip-line, as it turned out, was less metaphor than rehearsal.

Michael Dukakis - The Man in the Tank

In 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis climbed into an M1 Abrams tank wearing a helmet that made him look less like a commander-in-chief and more like the world’s least convincing extra in a military recruitment ad.

It was meant to project strength - a rebuttal to whispers that he lacked the gravitas for the job. Instead, it projected something closer to Saturday morning cartoon valor, the kind of earnest overreach that invites its own laugh track. The image - a politician swallowed whole by machinery - became the campaign’s unintentional epitaph.

It was supposed to make him look like a leader. It made him look like a mascot. The photo aired endlessly, accompanied by mockery so bipartisan it nearly qualified as national unity.

What Dukakis saw as symbolism - competence in command - everyone else read as PR stunt gone wrong. It was a moment that reminded America that authenticity can’t be manufactured, and that nothing deflates ambition faster than a prop that looks borrowed. History has been kind enough to forget most of Dukakis’s speeches, but not that helmet.

Marie Antoinette - Let Them Eat Optics

She probably never said it - that infamous “Let them eat cake.” But the line endures because it captures the spirit, if not the syntax, of her reign as the last Queen of France: a woman floating through crisis as though poverty were simply bad theater.

In a France teetering on starvation, she built rustic cottages at Versailles so she and her courtiers could play at being peasants, milking perfumed cows and picnicking in silk. It was pastoral cosplay - a monarchy mistaking costume for compassion.

To her, it was charm; to everyone else, it was insult gilded in gold leaf and lace. The phrase became shorthand for the ruling class’s oblivion, a single crumb of dialogue that fed a revolution.

By the time the real bread ran out and the guillotine came down, the metaphor had already taken its place in history. Marie Antoinette didn’t invent political tone-deafness, but she gave it a face - powdered, smiling, and entirely unaware of the mob just offstage.

George W. Bush - Mission Not Accomplished

On May 1, 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, US President George W. Bush landed on the flight deck in a Navy jet and emerged in a crisp flight suit that fit a little too well. Behind him, a massive banner declared Mission Accomplished - the kind of phrase that looks good only if it’s true.

The Iraq War was six weeks old; the “mission,” as it turned out, had barely begun. Yet for one golden hour, America was treated to a tableau of victory – complete with wind machine, aircraft carrier, and commander-in-chief basking in the world’s most expensive photo op. The footage rolled endlessly: the handshake, the salute, the squint into destiny’s middle distance – a made-for-TV triumph that dissolved almost as soon as the credits rolled.

As the months dragged on and the war unraveled, the banner became an epitaph for hubris, a prop so confident it looped back to tragicomedy. Every generation seems to have its own “Mission Accomplished” moment – a leader standing before the cameras, declaring peace in our time, as if a thousand years of conflict might yield to the right lighting, a practiced grin, and sheer force of self-regard.

History, unimpressed by the font size on the banners, patiently waits for the applause to fade before resuming its work.

Silvio Berlusconi - The Bunga Bunga Statesman

In the long and colorful history of political theater few performers, until recently, committed to the bit quite like Silvio Berlusconi.

Media mogul, playboy, and prime minister - sometimes all in the same news cycle - he treated public office as a kind of variety show where scandal was just another ratings strategy. His bunga bunga soirées, that peculiar blend of cabaret and courtroom exhibit, blurred the line between governance and gossip. To Berlusconi, Italy wasn’t a republic so much as a studio audience: the applause mattered far more than the laws.

For a time, it worked. His charm was elastic, his shamelessness bulletproof. He joked his way through indictments, smirked through parliamentary crises, and winked at his own caricature.

But like all long-running comedies, the act began to drag. The laughter turned nervous, then tired, then went silent. By the end, Berlusconi stood not as a fallen statesman, but as the logical conclusion of politics as entertainment - a man who mistook the cameras for democracy itself.

Benito Mussolini - Il Duce of the Balcony

No one understood the power of the balcony quite like Mussolini. From his perch above the Piazza Venezia, he leaned forward into history - chin raised, chest out, hands slicing the air like the maestro of destiny.

Below him, the crowds roared on cue, transfixed by the theater of strength. To them, he was going to make Rome great again; to himself, he was its architect and savior. It was fascism as performance art - the uniforms, the banners, the shouts - all carefully staged for a man who mistook spectacle for substance.

But the performance couldn’t survive its own script. The wars he promised would restore Italy’s glory instead left it bleeding and humiliated. Rations replaced rapture, and the cheers that once filled the piazza thinned into muttering disillusion. The balcony remained, but the audience had gone home,

the strongman of Rome reduced to an actor at the end of his run. When Mussolini finally fell, he discovered what every showman eventually learns: applause is only rented.

Rudy Giuliani - The Press Conference at the End of the World

Once, Rudy Giuliani was the face of steadiness – “America’s Mayor” who walked New York’s rubble with a bullhorn and a promise, his name synonymous with leadership under fire.

Time, however, has a peculiar sense of irony. Years later, he found himself behind a different podium, in a nondescript parking lot between a crematorium and an adult bookstore, declaring victory where none existed. The setting felt accidental, but history rarely misplaces its props.

There was no joy in the moment, only Shakesperean exhaustion.

A man who had mistaken devotion for destiny, still performing long after the stage lights had gone dim. The dye that streaked his face was almost beside the point; it was merely the physical echo of something more human: a reputation collapsing under the weight of loyalty unreturned. It wasn’t disgrace so much as entropy, a slow unwinding of belief. And in that, perhaps, he was more like his predecessors than anyone cared to admit – another actor who stayed one scene too long.

Kim Jong-un - The Auteur of the Eternal Sunrise

In Pyongyang, the sun doesn’t rise; it takes direction. Every scene is framed, every cheer rehearsed. And at the center of it all stands Kim Jong-un - ruler, producer, and star - perpetually reshooting the same moment until the world delivers its standing ovation.

The missiles arc like camera cranes, the parades glide in perfect formation, and the people applaud as if the nation itself were a film set in perpetual daylight.

His genius, if one can call it that, lies in perfecting the oldest trick of power - not merely silencing dissent, but scripting reality. Facts are edited, history rewritten, and even the weather occasionally obliged to cooperate. It’s governance as illusion, Orwell rewritten as farce: the lie told often enough to become a campaign slogan.

And though his stage may be sealed off from the world, its logic is not. The temptation to trade truth for spectacle, to choreograph belief, is hardly confined to Pyongyang. It’s simply that elsewhere, the cameras are better hidden.

Caligula - The Horse and the Empire

Of all Rome’s emperors, none blurred the line between theater and throne quite like Caligula. History remembers him for many things, not least appointing his horse, Incitatus, as consul - or nearly so - a gesture so absurd it has endured for two thousand years.

Whether it happened exactly that way hardly matters; it felt true, and that was enough. The act, real or apocryphal, said what words could not: that power, untethered from sense, will eventually mistake obedience for respect.

Caligula’s reign became a kind of grotesque rehearsal for every ruler who followed - the empire reduced to a stage, the audience forbidden to stop clapping. His madness wasn’t unique; only his honesty was. By elevating his horse, he simply made visible what others preferred to hide: that the machinery of power will always find a way to applaud itself.

And if the scene feels familiar, that’s only because the Theater of the Absurd never really closed - it just keeps restaging itself, one balcony, one podium, one press conference at a time.

The Theater Never Closes

History has never lacked for spectacle. At its core, it’s a long-running show with poor lighting and no intermission. In the Theater of the Absurd, in which we all live, the sets change, the actors rotate, the scripts get new adjectives - but the story, the hunger for spectacle never really ends. Once, the crowd gathered in forums; now they scroll through feeds. The emperors and mayors, strongmen and wannabes still make their entrances, waving from balconies or screens, certain the noise means devotion. It doesn’t. It never did.

The strongman needs adulation the way an actor needs applause. What was once a balcony in Rome is now a timeline in pixels - a feed refreshed instead of a crowd dispersed. The choreography of ego has simply gone digital.

Truth is negotiable, facts are stage props, and entire wars can be fought and ended in the span of a well-edited clip. The image no longer reflects power; it is power. And the only qualification left for command is one’s ability to hold the camera’s gaze.

And so, when a man imagines himself soaring above the world in a digital fighter jet, raining retribution on those below him, it isn’t even scandalous anymore. It’s just… expected. Another entry in the long ledger of men who believed that power meant performance, that admiration could be algorithmic. The technology changed; the delusion didn’t. To be adored, to be the story rather than its subject – that’s always been the dream.

Still, there’s something almost touching about it - the small, human need beneath the gold leaf and the filters. To be seen. To be remembered. To be more than a pixelated man on a screen pretending to fly. History, indulgent as ever, lets them play the part for a while. Eventually, the lights dim, the stage gets swept, and we wait -mercifully - for the next act.

We’ll let Adenoid Hynkel, Chaplin’s tragic clown-king from The Great Dictator, have the final word - one last reminder that the world, for all its vanity and bravado, was never meant to be held aloft by one man.

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