King Lear’s Edmund, a crafty and flawed character but one who suffers for his sins and achieves a certain degree of wisdom, could offer some useful advice to President Biden during the emerging gas crisis. The entire American Southeast is facing gasoline shortages, with North Carolina already declaring a state of emergency. The cause is a hack of the software controlling a critical pipeline. All President Biden has said is that the hackers were Russian, but that he’s not sure if the Russian government is involved, though Putin should do “something” about it.

When President Trump found our military facing Russian paramilitary forces in Syria, he asked Putin if the men were Russian soldiers. Putin said no, and Trump promptly ordered their wholesale slaughter, solving for Putin the question of whether he could get away with actions performed by non-governmental forces – such as these hackers.

But now, in Bidenworld, it’s someone’s fault, but not clearly Russia’s, so there’s little we can do. Our hands are tied. Malice and malevolence have no return address, save perhaps the stars.

Cassius: “The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves.”

Biden disagrees. It is the stars that have malignantly aligned to bring a perfect storm of inflation, supply crunches, and labor shortages, a collapse of the border, and now, a throttling of our gasoline supply. Cassius isn’t sufficient to describe this surrender to fatalism. Happily, Edmund provides a much juicier take on the simple sentiment expressed by Cassius.

Here’s Edmund, and enjoy:

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeit of our own behavior — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.”