All year long, something’s been troubling me. Every time I see Hillary Clinton’s odd, empty expressions, listen to her scripted patter and mad cackling… it’s something I’ve seen before somewhere. In the 2008 presidential campaign, and during her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was there, but now the lights have gone out, and she appears more of an empty shell, like there’s just enough of her to fill a pantsuit and no more. Something of a grim echo, but of what? Now I comprehend just exactly what it was.
She said, trying to speak steadily: ‘If you proclaim yourself king, they will come from France to fight you. Then we shall have a double war instead of a single one, and it will be fought in England. The whole fellowship will be blotted out.’
He smiled in pure delight.
‘It seems unforgivable,’ she said, pinching the embroidery.
There was nothing she could do. For a moment it crossed her mind that if she humiliated herself to him, knelt down on her stiff old knees to plead for mercy, he might be soothed. But it was evidently hopeless. He was fixed in a course, like a ball in a groove. Even his conversation was, as it were, a spoken part. It would end according to the script.
‘Mordred,’ she said helplessly, ‘have pity on the country people, if you will have none on Arthur or on me.’
He pushed the pug off his lap and stood up, smiling at her with crazy satisfaction. He stretched himself, looking down on her, but not seeing her at all.
Mordred, as T.H. White described him, had become an empty vessel — "his soul stolen, overlaid, wizened," filled by this point only with the residual hatred and envy he inherited from his mother. He fomented war with France, the other major power of the day, as a ploy to get himself declared king. He raised up a faction of "Thrashers" in England, sold them the idea that they were "have nots" being kept down by the "haves," and spurred them to violence against their countrymen in the belief that they were fighting for equality.
But Mordred is a tragic figure. He appears at first glance as a sinister puppet-master, controlling the events of the realm in an utterly amoral way just to advance his own agenda. In the end, though, we see that poor Mordred is as much a victim as anyone else; he has been swept up by a current, and is merely performing his lines according to the script because there’s nothing else he knows how to do.
Mordred is urged along almost helplessly now, by numbers of people too many to count: people who believe in John Ball, hoping to gain power over their fellow men by asserting that all are equal, or people who see in any upheaval a chance to advance their own might. It seems to come from underneath.
Mordred is, like all men, possessed of the ability to act, but is inextricably tangled up in old grudges and in old feuds, and they have worn him down to a nub. He is left with his old hatreds, his scripted lines, his staged mannerisms, and his hollow laugh.
Everybody wants to fight, Tom, but nobody knows why.