“This above all:…” Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3


Most of my seniors will recognize this particular passage. We spend a great deal of time discussing its relevance as counterpoint to the duplicitous themes within the play itself; more about that later. “…to thine own self be true.”

The President once again stood before a friendly audience and stumbled through a speech taken from the worn pages of all the speeches he has ever read. I’m certain there were edits and cross-outs, words inserted and deleted; it was the same speech. Most networks recognized early on that they could run sound bytes on the evening news with little loss of audience and so shunned some or all of the address itself. Why lose advertising dollars on what amounts to a syndicated repeat?

Back to Hamlet. Polonius, the character pontificating in prattles to his son Laertes about what was considered PC in 12th Century Denmark, is a pathetic character, a fool of the first order. He lives in a bubble of pretense, not knowing how absolutely foolish and witless he is. Yet even as an infinite number of chimpanzees with typewriters might write a Hamlet sequel, such might the greatest of fools randomly utter a few syllables of wickedly clear thinking. This is the moment for Polonius: “…and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst be false to any man.” Laertes should have listened.

Bush said some amazing things, most of which were tainted with dark stains of irony. Of local conflicts, he said “…someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution,” but his statement was not about al Qaeda. It was not about how Osama bin Laden, sauntering through the hills and mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, uses the occupation of Iraq as a recruiting tool, nor was it about how the Sunni are using the occupation to foment a civil war. He was speaking of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center and how he used our fears to build a rationale for violence with Iraq; yet he now blames this quagmire on everything but his inept administration.

He speaks of “…the actions of our coalition,” most of whom have left or are in the process of leaving- including the British. He forgets his previous acknowledgements that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, and that there was no vast al Qaeda network operating in Iraq, yet he declares that “…we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001,” a statement in which even Orwell would stand in dumbstruck awe.

“We’re reorganizing our government, “ he says, “to give this nation a broad and coordinated homeland defense,” while the waters drowning New Orleans are only now beginning to recede.

“We’re determined,” he says, “to deny weapons of mass destruction to outlaw regimes,” while those who, through clandestine necessity would deny such weapons, are announced to the world by political hacks within the White House inner circle.

Wars,” he pontificates, “are not won without sacrifice,” yet, he and those who have been so instrumental in creating this war, have never sacrificed in any of our other conflicts. Instead he asks that only the poor sacrifice their sons and daughters, and that the middle class sacrifice the fruits of their labor; the rich need make no sacrifice at all. Quite to the contrary, corporations like Halliburton, run by men cut from the same cookie cutter, make record profits on the backs of those sacrifices

“The essence of democracy,” he reminds all of us, is “making your case, debating with those who [sic] you disagree… building consensus by persuasion, and answering to the will of the people.” Yet this is the same President who refuses to allow dissident voices in the same room with him, forces his will upon the people with lies and distortions, and orders the vilification of his political opponents through the dissemination of state secrets by his cronies, and fabrications created by his lying media minions.

Like Polonius, however, even a fool can have a moment in which they reveal the truth in spite of themselves. “Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously- and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply.” America- its Senate, its House, its people- should listen, lest it suffer the same fate as Laertes: untimely death at the hand of a treacherous tyrant.