I remember the first time I saw Bill Clinton interviewed after his successor came to power. I was struck by the contrast between Clinton's energetic yet thoughtful responses and the inarticulate buffoon who currently occupies the office of president. Allegedly a prolific reader--he even read Camus' The Stranger--it's hard to think of a single instance in which an utterance or act by Bush that reflects his reading. Clinton, for all his wonkiness, is a serious student of literature. Stephen Greenblatt tells a story of meeting Bill Clinton after a poetry evening at the White House.
I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President's hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. "Mr. President," I said, sticking out my hand, "don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?" Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, "I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object."
Greenblatt is taken aback by "the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth's anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland's legitimate ruler." Forever the English professor, Greenblatt submits the president to a pop quiz, and ever the star pupil, Clinton obligingly delivers 10 lines from Macbeth.
Greenblatt goes on the explicate Shakespeare's meditations on the ethics of power, but without drawing any explicit connections back to the current administration. Greenblatt observes that "in Shakespeare no character with a clear moral vision has a will to power and, conversely, no character with a strong desire to rule over others has an ethically adequate object." All the characters who lust for power have dubious motives (think of the Macbeths, Richard III, Goneril, Regan, Fortinbras, Henry V) and generally bring misery upon themselves and others. Shakespeare himself favored the characters who tip-toed around power: Richard II, Antony, Coriolanus, Lear. They generally come to bad ends as well.
Clinton's fall from grace was Shakespearean, but Clinton himself doesn't neatly correspond to a specific character in Shakespeare. The same could be said for Bush, albeit for different reasons. Bush is too shallow and one-dimensional a political figure to be called Shakespearean at all. King Lear is perhaps the closest analogy if one regards the play as a tragedy of delusion and ineptitude. Greenblatt doesn't discuss Iago, but Iago's "motiveless malignancy," as Coleridge described it, lacks an ethical object of any kind, let alone an adequate one. This describes Dick Cheney, who I'm convinced is a sociopath. (I also think he would have made an excellent Nazi.) Cheney's role in the Bush administration--to Bush himself--is the same as Iago's role in relation to Othello. Cheney and Iago are anti-therapists; they disintegrate the personalities of those they serve, whispering outrageous falsities in the ears of those who have less power than they think they do. Through the subtlest of means, the anti-therapist reverses the self-image of the powerful man to the point of self-annihilation. Othello comes to assimilate Iago's relentless animal imagery. At the end of the play, Othello says as he plunges a knife into himself, "I took by the throat the circumcised dog,/And smote him, thus." One shudders to imagine what Cheney's ministrations will end up doing to Bush, not to mention the rest of us.
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