More a tragedy than a comedy

It comes as no surprise that the country that invented reality television would get hooked on its unreality.

Americans have taken to heart the top line of a monologue by William Shakespeare’s “idle nobleman” from As You Like It — without, due to short attention spans, reading further.

“All the world’s a stage,” says Jaques in one of the playwright’s best monologues, “and all the men and women merely players ...”

Hence such regrettable brain-curdling fare as Keeping up with the Kardashians, The Real Housewives of Orange County ... and The Apprentice.

Also, presidential TV debates.

The most chilling thing about the latest debate, in which Democrat hopeful Kamala Harris wiped the floor with Republican impresario Donald Trump, is not that the 45th president got to wander off the plot with a deranged riff on Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio,  but that it seemed to do nothing but launch a thousand memes.

Memes of Harris cupping her chin in studied mockery. Songs using Trump’s “pet lyrics” as the chorus. All of it consumable, ephemeral and, like the rest of the sludge that passes for content, forgettable.

That’s a problem. The debate, as disastrous as it was for Trump, is hardly going to move the needle on Harris’s chance of widening the gap. It’s already fading fast as Trump and his dead-eyed gopher, JD Vance, continue to ramble on about The Scoffed Pets of Springfield.

Trump is a carnival barker. He gets that this is all just a show, like episodes of the worst of Dr Phil, only doused in hate, racism, misogyny and loathing.

Meanwhile, the Dems keep pretending they can turn the “we the people” focus back on the actual reality of what comes if Trump and Vance get the keys to the White House.

(As one of the enforcers sent to threaten the life of a woman who’s stalking Tony Soprano in The Sopranos says, “it won’t be cinematic”. Or maybe it will be, if horror movies are your thing.)

Back to Shakespeare’s Jaques, because he actually nails the artifice propping up the Republican candidates as he muses on the seven stages of man.

“They have their exits and their entrances,” he says, “and one man in his time plays many parts ...”

First, a baby, “mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like snail, unwillingly to school.”

Then the lover, “sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad, made to his mistress’s eyebrow ...”

We have to skip the next parts — the soldier and wise old man — at least for Major Bonespurs (Vance did his time) and move on to the seventh age as his voice falters and he stares at approaching oblivion, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.

The Dems need to understand that they’re in the play, and act accordingly. Right now they’re behaving like they think they’re Laurence Olivier ... with a walk-on part. And it isn’t cinematic.