“I hold my peace, sir? no; No, I will speak as liberal as the north; Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, all, cry out in shame against me, yet I’ll speak.” – Othello, William Shakespeare.

Once more, from the unnecessary story that will not die, the controversy that wasn’t, the crisis that isn’t:

Mayor Bill deBlasio of New York City told reporters yesterday that he would try again to curb or restrict the New York Carriage trade and that he still believed the horses should be prohibited from working and living in New York City.

it is easy enough to insult the mayor and call him names, social media is full of that, and the people in the carriage trade are foaming at the mouth,  but it is more challenging to try to understand him.

I am drawn to tragic public figures and their stories – and quite mesmerized at the parallels between people like Richard Nixon and  Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton and the mayor, all powerful and intelligent men who set out with the most noble of intentions and ended up setting themselves on fire for the most personal and inexplicable – and unnecessary –  of reasons.

I did not expect to ever see a man who calls himself progressive behave in so oppressive a way.

Aren’t we supposed to at least pretend to listen to the people? ( I confess to having  daydreams about Teddy Roosevelt, a former New York City Police Commissioner, who rode his horse right up a dusty and unpaved Broadway to attend meetings with the city’s civic leaders. What would he have said to the idea that horses were too fragile to be in New York?)

We never know about these people in power, it is really a great roll of the dice, for all our devices, we can never really see behind the curtain.

Sometimes events overcome and destroy them, sometimes they are simply broken in some way we can’t see, and sometimes they just destroy themselves.  When this happens, they leave the temporal realm and enter the world of mythic imagination, we have to leave them to the historians to pick over, they are beyond us.

We can never understand the people we hate and insult, we have to step back and let others take a deeper and more detached look.

“One may smile and smile, and be a villain.” – Hamlet.

Trying to figure this out, I reached back into cultural history for some explanation, I found a clue in Shakespeare. The mayor, in his now-historic pursuit of the much-loved and healthy horses, has stepped out of the realm of conventional politics and into the world of Shakespearean tragedy.

Shakespearean tragedy is the classification of drama written by William Shakespeare. In his most famous plays, he created a protagonist who has lofty, even noble ambitions but who is flawed in some way. The hero is placed in a stressful, perhaps controversial and complex situation, the story ends poorly for him, often in a fatal conclusion.

The hero is powerful, but blinded by hubris and poor decisions.

The plots of Shakespearean tragedy focus on the loss of power and reason of the central character, once feared, but broken or disturbed. Their rigidity and arrogance leads to their ruin. (King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth).

“Madness in great ones, must not unwatched, go.” – Hamlet.

Here, we have the powerful mayor of great city, swept into office on a great wave of support and hope, defeated resoundingly twice and nearly done in by the descendants of immigrants and some rescued work horses from the farms and slaughterhouses of Pennsylvania. I wish I had written a book like that. It may yet be a movie.

The main characters in a Shakespearean tragedy obsessively pursue a central conflict to the point that their social and political structures are destroyed. They inevitably fall and fail, blinded by ambition and loss of reason. Something about power corrupts their instincts for self-preservation, you can see their inevitable ruin coming a long way off, and it’s very inevitability makes the story so compelling.

All Bill deBlasio had to do was forget about the carriage horses, and move on. Few people in New York thought about them or cared about them, at least at first, while so many larger and more pressing issues cried out for attention. The mayor who ran on the promise to help the poor and forgotten declared instead that his number one priority was to ban the carriage horses from the city. It was an awful note on which to start, it echoes still.

Bill deBlasio has brushed aside his many advisers and friends who were pleading with him to drop the carriage horse issue and move on to things people cared about, and were much more pressing.  It is understandable that the carriage drivers hate and fear the mayor, his campaign against them has been cruel and unjust.

Just ask their families who are not sure from one month to the next if they can feed their children or send them to college.

Imagine being pursued so relentlessly by someone as powerful and unwilling to talk, negotiate or reason. What more Shakespearean image could there be than the King Of The Progressives, suddenly bent on the destruction of good and honest working men and women who have broken no laws and done no wrong? Most of these people are classic figures in the Great American Dream, the poor and the children of the poor to came to America to keep their way of lives and escape government oppression.

But wait, the story gets even better.

Seemingly drunk on power, awash in money from millionaire real estate developers and animal rights activists who hate the horses – they all seem as flawed as he is –  the mayor turns these once obscure horse tradespeople into powerful heroes who gather support from everywhere and, against all odds, thwart him at every turn and grow ever more powerful and entrenched, even as he grows more isolated and disliked.

Imagine the poor in their cramped and outrageously expensive apartments – those are the lucky ones – looking over their shoulders at the gentrifiers, saving pennies for heat and rent – while the mayor they elected spends vast amounts of time and energy and good will to drive some horses who are bothering no one out of Central Park? Shakespeare would have had a few of them confront their King, challenge him with angry words.

And then there are the gentle and beloved horses put in peril. What rational hero would want to be on the wrong side of that story?

Wow, the other Bill would have loved to write a play about it.

“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” – King Lear, William Shakespeare

The more the mayor pressed on, the more corrupt and disingenuous he appeared, the more he insisted he was acting out of principle, the more people believed he wasn’t.

Now, after two humiliating, almost catastrophic defeats, some of the most powerful labor unions in the city are calling for state and federal investigations into the mayor and his connections to the people who gave him so much money, after which he vowed to ban the carriage horses on his very first day in office.

These are people attorney generals listen to. The labor unions and some media organizations are demanding to know what the money was for. I am not one of those who insists the mayor is corrupt, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But he is now under a cloud of mistrust and seeming impropriety.

And the appearance of impropriety is what prosecutors investigate.

It is difficult to sympathize with the mayor,  I can’t recall a once popular politician so hell-bent on ruin, and I feel for the suffering of the carriage trade. But it is possible to feel for him. Flawed kings go hard, but they always go. That is the very essence of tragedy.

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” –  Hamlet.