On Greatness and Its Futility
and why is goodness its superior
Musk reminding his millions of followers on X that the president partied with Epstein just months after boyishly celebrating his election. Trump punitively cancelling SpaceX contracts because his ‘big beautiful bill’ received some legitimate criticism proving he’d cut off his nose one thousand times if it would only spite his face.
This is what the great men of our times have to offer. Sex scandals, fatherless children, and egotistic effigies fashioned from carbon, glass, and billions and billions of wasted dollars.
The great men of history have shaped the world in which we live. Caesar, Napoleon, Churchill, etc. The types of men we obsess over; the types of men we cobble ourselves together, hoping we’d reach their great heights suffering delusions of a Nietzschean will to power and an Alexandrian will.
These are the men who exist as much as myth as they do in reality. The great negotiator, Donald Trump, who is meeting his Waterloo in the second iteration of Vladimir Putin, or the brave iconoclast Elon Musk, who has the temerity to push back on his fellow megalomaniac, but nothing to say on the plight of the Uyghur. Ah, the whip hand of the Chinese supply chain.
Centuries of dust and faded memories allow us to construct the least contradictory visions of our heroes — or maybe it’s because Thomas Jefferson wasn’t ever teased with the endorphin release of the smartphone. Forget the Declaration of Independence, we’d be studying sweet memes of King George and moody pictures of Monticello with cryptic French captions. Mon dieu n’est pas ton jouet.
As time wears on, all the blood, bigotry, misogyny, lust, and violence are chalked up to their minor peccadillos. Ah, yes, Khan’s penchant for rape and murder was rather idiosyncratic for the time period — but boy, what an empire! As Ezra Koenig wrote, “how the cruel, with time, becomes classical.”
I could argue that neither Trump nor Musk is great (or Obama or Gates, etc.), but only the arbiter of time and the arc of history can make that determination. What I can assert, however, with some level of certitude, is that being great and being good are entirely divergent aims.
I used to fantasize about being great. I wanted fame and status. To be heard, to be deferred to, to be quoted. Still, in quiet stretches of the afternoon when my mind begins to wander, the notion will wind its way back into that familiar cradle. But tradeoffs don’t cease to exist because we find them inconvenient. The pursuit of greatness comes at a detriment to the pursuit of goodness.
I’d love to take credit for this flight path towards monumental self-sacrifice, but that reads like ‘my belly’s full from all the pride that I swallow.’ No, conscience is a hell of a drug. It’s what my parents taught me; the voice Elijah heard, the thing that won’t let me take the last of my wife’s favorite snack after she’s gone to bed.
It’s not that I’ve ever had one hand on greatness. I’ve never grappled with a Faustian bargain in blue midnight at a delta crossroads or denied public accolades, so maybe all this ‘good’ talk is just accommodations for middling mediocrity. That’s a real possibility.
But this morning, for breakfast, my wife, my daughter, and I ate cheesecake I made while we had our coffee on our patio and listened to John Prine. Outside of a house we’ve labored to make a home, in a yard we garden, in the town where we’ve grown.
It won’t shape history. It won’t be studied or contradicted by acolytes or rivals. It wouldn’t exist anywhere except if not for the fact that my own pride persuaded me to break its sacred silence now. It won’t be called great, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel like something approaching good.
to a better next week,
cheers,
~fda