If you don't have time to read actual books, you can always check out the 'Books' section at www.newyorktimes.com and pretend that you do. (It works for me.) The other day there were reviews of two new books, one about Shakespeare and his times called Will in the World, and another about the recent prisoner abuse scandals perpetrated by the Americans and Brits over in Iraq. One book is about the modern-day military and what it does and does not do, what it should and shouldn't do, while the other is set in Victorian England and concerns itself with a playwright's life and its impact on his work. (Or is Shakespeare pre-Victorian. I should probably know that, right? I saw Shakespeare and Love and everything, but I still get all these eras-named-after-queens mixed up. And who decided that they were going to name an entire time period after prominent and successful women, anyways? Nothing wrong with that, but if it were to happen today I guess we'd all be living in the Oprah era. I guess that's better than the Sally Jess Raphael era...)
Not much correlation between these two books, true, but I will find illogical connections even if none exist, damnit, because that's what I'm built to do.
Dealing with historical and literary works like Shakespeare is a guessing game, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signify --
Wait.
I'm getting carried away.
When people write about Shakespeare, there's so much that's speculation, right? His intentions, his jobs, his influences, and even if Shakespeare's plays were, in fact, written by the historical-person-known-as-Shakespeare. (Kind of like 'The Artist Formerly Known as Elmo'.) When you start going back four, five hundred years, you're in the 'pre-Welcome Back Kotter era', as I like to call it, and primary sources are rare, if not non-existent. (Is 'not non-existent' a double negative? Oh, and this reminds me of a great anecdote about this famous teacher that died a month or so ago, a real philosophical dude, I forget his name, but he was always a wise-ass with his teachers. One day in college his philosophy teacher stated that it was lexically impossible to create a negative statement from two positive ones. To which the smartass in the front row rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah, yeah."
Get it? I think that's pretty funny, personally.
Anyway...
On the other hand, you can't more contemporary than the here and the now, and the military's actions in Iraq, and the abuse scandals that really shouldn't be all that scandalous. I'm not condoning these things by any means; I'm glad that that dude last week got sent to prison, but it's a freakin' obscenity that Bush didn't penalize anyone involved at the higher level -- Rumsfeld keeps his job, Gonzalez, who authorized the tricky memos basically validating the torture, gets promoted. Sweeeeet.
But it seems a little schizophrenic to me, this view of warfare and what constitutes shameful, despicable acts. War itself is a good thing, in this particular case; torturing the prisoners is not. Okay. Got it. So if you kill as many Iraqi soldiers as possible, you get the accolades of your peers and your country; if you shove them in a cell and beat 'em around a little bit, you get ten years in the military clink. Aren't both of these acts, like, the kind of things that you don't necessarily want to talk about over your morning juice? Aren't both of these things the kind of things that give you the cold sweats well into the morning hours? Maybe this should be the definition of a fundamentally wrong act: If you have nightmares about it, and it keeps you up at night, and you wake from your dreams screaming, then that act which precipitated these symptoms is not worthy of a medal, or promotion. Period.
But I digress...
My point is (or was) that we still really don't know the full extent of what went down. That old line from the Nixon years haunts us: "What did you know, and when did you know it?"
The eternal question of this time, and all time.
What did Shakespeare know? At what point in time? What did Bush know? When?
We can pinpoint events, dates, people and places. We can create the scenarios. The great works of art, the great wars, are impervious to inspection. They emerge, exist, are. We do our best to sort all of this stuff, but when you involve organisms as fundamentally fragile as humans, well, things get lost. There are always those shadowy corners where the lost things congregate, where light doesn't penetrate, and those are the places where history is made and our lives are shaped, for better or for worse.
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