Fourth Saturday's Loneliest Liberal

Shakespeare says

By James Knudsen

Another semester has ended. The lightest of teaching loads, one class, one night a week. Drama 1, an overview of theatre, was all the public system of higher education could find for me this spring. I filled in at the local community college I attended decades earlier, but had never been employed at. The syllabus I taught from was the same one used department wide and different from what I normally teach at my usual gig at Fresno City College. And I’ll confess that I prefer to spend a bit more time on Shakespeare than we did in my recently ended section at the College of the Sequoias, Tulare Campus.
    It’s my belief that, for any subject in the human condition, a passage may be found in Shakespeare’s canon that deals with it more eloquently than anything else to be found in the English language. Legalization of marijuana? Covered, Romeo and Juliet, Act V, scene i: Romeo meets with the apothecary. Sin and redemption? I refer you to Claudius’s soliloquy in Hamlet, Act III, scene iii. There are plenty more examples that a scholar of Shakespeare could refer you to; I am a mere meat puppet. Recent history has found me looking to King Henry V. It tells us, if we are willing to listen, of the dangers, horrors, and costs of war:

...The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh fair virgins and your flowering infants.

Such scenes as are likely being played out in places like Syria and the Ukraine were far from the minds of people recently as a record-setting week in the world of fine art played out in the auction houses of Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The big news was Picasso’s, Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), which sold for a whopping $179,365,000, including Christie’s 12% commission.

People who follow these events are saying that the art world has changed. The buyers, newly-minted billionaires from the worlds of technology and finance, bid with abandon. One onlooker described them as “having no brakes.” Whereas the old money of days gone by, having a sense of where the ceiling is, would say simply, “that’s too much.” Perhaps they’re too young, too “new money” to remember the conspicuous spending of the 1980’s. I’m not...too young. But even then, there were the elegant blue-bloods still populating the headlines to remind us what decorum and taste looked like. We still had true royalty.

Last week, in environs decidedly less tony than Manhattan, what may one day be known as a record-setting, biker brawl took place between two rival motorcycle gangs at the Twin Peaks sports restaurant in Waco, Texas. At this writing, the details are still being sifted through, but thus far; 9 dead, 170 arrested, and over 1,000 weapons seized. These are not what polite society considers the crème de la crème of the human race. Law enforcement now considers these “one-percenters” organized crime, more akin to Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas than to Marlon Brando’s The Wild One. And it is a mafioso tone that I detected when I read Act I, scene ii of King Henry V:

King: What treasure, uncle?
Exeter: Tennis balls, my liege.

No course in history or political science has ever shown me the true nature of autocracies the way that simple exchange, between king and lord, over a just opened “gift” from a rival kingdom, does. The tone, the sense of backroom dealing and disregard for those not invited to the scene is all too clear. And until people are made a part of the government with some form of representation, their rulers are nothing more than common thugs, criminals taking from whomever, whatever they please, because they can. This is royalty. This is what every fairy tale, set in an enchanted land is based upon. Not rule of law, but law of the moment, capricious and vindictive, enforced through fear, the threat of violence, and terror.
    Shakespeare’s Henry V is as noble a monarch as you will find in literature, but he is the ancestor of Tony Soprano, not Prince William.

Copyright © 2015 by James Knudsen