All these revolutions, treatises made and broken, frequent risings, battle and slaughter, all these threats and quarrels, what do they arise from but stupidity? And I rather think that some part of this is due to our own fault. We do not hand over the rudder of the ship to anyone but a skilled steersman, when nothing is at stake but four passengers or a small cargo; but we hand over the state, in which so many thousands of people are in peril, to the first comer.1
A pompous man Erasmus may have been, but he wasn't an idiot. When I first read this out loud, K commented that it didn't really apply to democracy, as an election didn't automatically accept "the first comer" as President. I gave him a look. He acceded the point. We now call him King George II. (Yes, I know very well there were other Georges in the Presidency. The point is that this is becoming a dynastic line, which, as my work with Shakespeare continually reminds me, is a very. bad. thing.)
A few days ago, I read a blog published posthumously by a soldier in Iraq that reminded me - contrary, I believe, to his own feelings - that there is nothing we do that is without political ramifications. He'd asked that his name not be used for political soap-boxing (a perfectly reasonable request, in my opinion), and that got me thinking. Considering what I do - i.e. read things published by people over 400 years ago about kings who (if they existed at all) died several hundred years before that - it is strangely relieving to recognize that politics haven't really changed all that much. True, it's also vaguely nauseating that we haven't managed to get any better at government and politics as a species, but it does seem to point to some intrinsic feature in human nature. We lie, we steal, we manipulate the facts and the diction of our speeches, blogs, and publications to reflect our own opinions. We use other people as pawns in our political games, whether that means we send them off to be killed or whether it simply means that we use their names and the grief of their families as a launch-pad for our own political agendas.
Is that a bad thing? Yes. And no. Should we feel that it is acceptable to use people? The moral voice in my head says no. But on the other hand, that's what we, as a culture and a species, do. Much as I hate to ever admit that Ayn Rand might be a little bit right, she was. We use other people. For our own comfort, for our own gratification, for our political, social, and/or religious ends. We use their bodies, their minds, their names, the iconographic representations published by newspapers, television, the military, even their parents. We make these things into what we want them to be, which may or may not have any connection to what they actually are.Is this bad? No. And yes. We do what we do. Does this mean that we are all fundamentally selfish beings with no sense of altruism? Sometimes. But sometimes we do what we do - we use people - for the betterment of society. (A horrible phrase, that.) Sometimes we create this propaganda because we truly believe it is for the benefit of the majority. The benefit of the future. Shakespeare did. Maybe he didn't figure it would change the world (really), but he had something to say. And he said it. A lot. In verse. And it did something. It made a difference. Even if that difference is only the continual acknowledgment that we see that he made a difference.
Shakespeare wasn't a saint. He wasn't a great bard channeling some divine muse. He was a man. A man who made mistakes both literary and social. He misspelled words, messed up his meter, and sometimes had plot-holes the size of Texas. And he said something. He said that kings are people, too. He said that no one, no matter how lowly, how base, has an influence in the world. Sometimes large, sometimes small, but has an influence.
That is why Shakespeare is, to paraphrase one of my students, "Da man."
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