Exeunt To The Cave

It is done. The wheel turned full circle. Case closed. The End.

Adam Giambrone announced last night that he is not running for re-election as councillor in Ward 18. His meteoric rise followed the course that most meteors take, finishing up with a crash and burn, leaving behind little evidence of their final impact. Certainly at 33 years of age, he is still a mere babe in the political sense with a long road ahead of him to start over again after enduring a period of time, wandering about the wilderness purgatory as many a great figure has done before him. (Wasn’t Jesus Christ of similar vintage when he battled the demon in the desert?)

Young Giambrone sounded resilient during his interview with CBC this morning. He ruled nothing out including another go at municipal politics once he’d done his time. (My words not his.) So perhaps there is little to mourn or to note in his passing. Rather than the final act of a great modern tragedy, it may only signify the curtain coming down for intermission, the ending of a first movie in a franchise of sequels.

Scoff as you might at my invocation of a tragic story but it does have all the makings of such. A brash young hero quickly rises through the ranks, impervious to the established limitations expected of one so green and inexperienced. He is arrogant, the old folk say, haughty. Just who exactly does he think he is?

Taken under wing by the king, he is given immense power which only increases resentment toward him. Clearly ambitious, a trait which normally elicits admiration, on young Adam it comes across as unseemly. The boy’s too ambitious, to the point of hubris.

Hubris. Pride. That which goes before the Fall. A fall that comes just as he nears the peak of powers, shortly after announcing his intention to become mayor of the city.

What trips our tragic hero up? That singular flaw which his pride blinds him to?

Errrrr…. he likes the ladies? Unseemly, maybe. Sordid even but tragic?

How about being a terrible judge of character? It wasn’t so much who he chose to practice his infidelity with but rather who he chose to text all about it with that ultimately undid him. Didn’t he see that an aspiring model with a need for publicity was not the best kind of character with whom to commit his unfaithfulness in bytes that could be easily broadcast far and wide? In that way, Giambrone was the author of his own demise. He was just plain stupid.

Hardly Shakespearean or Sophoclean. Barely movie of the week.

In reading an article by the National Post’s Jonathan Goldsbie earlier this week about another matter, I came across this little tidbit: … the dirty (non-sex-related) secret was that very few people actually liked him [Giambrone], as a person or as a councillor.

In other words, Adam Giambrone, once a rising start in the progressive political skies, was felled by the fact that nobody liked him.

Where’s the catharsis in that? All great tragedies provide catharsis. There’s no catharsis here. So this is no great tragedy. Sad and tawdry with a healthy dose of titillation, maybe, but certainly not a tragedy.

Or maybe it is. Only it isn’t a tragedy about Adam Giambrone. It is a tragedy about us. So obsessed have we become with the trivial, mundane and all that is monumentally inconsequential that we have lost our ability to focus on the essential. We reject complexity in favour of simplicity and can no longer collectively conduct our lives and society in any sort of rational, vigorous, mature manner. Those who think and act in such childish terms can only ultimately be treated as children.

— sadly (but not tragically) submitted by Acaphlegmic