The Garden of History: From Shakespeare's Plays to Cable News: Portrait of the Tyrant

In his new book, "Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics," Stephen Greenblatt writes that in "Richard III," the history play about the last of England's pre-Tudor monarchs, Shakespeare develops the personality features "of the aspiring tyrant."

            Here are those features: "the limitless self-regard, the law-breaking, the pleasure in inflicting pain, the compulsive desire to dominate. He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency."

                Does this remind you of anyone?

                Greenblatt's book makes no overt reference to contemporary politics and its leading 'characters' -- not a single word. But here is his further discussion of the psychology and behavior of the tyrant Richard III, the man who would be king:

                 "He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only is scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning."

           Winning? What's that about winning? 

            Is there anything more we need to know about this 'winning' personality? Yes, there is:                 
            "He has always had wealth; he was born into it and makes ample use of it. But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince in pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power."

               This is all very convincing, very comprehensive -- and somehow strangely familiar. I wonder why that it is.Yet there is more. 

               "His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone hates him..."

                 Stephen Greenblatt's intriguing biography of Shakespeare ("Will of the World") -- the world's best known writer, and yet a man of whose personal life, habits, opinions, politics, comings and goings so little detail is known that a gang of pseudo-scholars has arisen to disprove his existence -- gave me my first living portrait of what a relatively quiet man with a very loud genius may have been like.  

                   His new book, "Tyrant," might have been called "Will of the Real World," when that adjective (as in 'real politic') has the meaning cynics and dirty fighters have always attributed to it.

                  Richard III was not the only one of his Shakespeare's characters that the word tyrant applies too. Another king who becomes a tyrant, Macbeth, begins his play as a hero. He's not a gangster don, or, like Richard, a twisted psycho with a grudge against existence. He has both depth and imagination and the physical courage that recommends him to the king he serves, poor Duncan. 

               But there is an inward twist that turns Macbeth to the way of the tyrant: "driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence."   

               This, too, has a familiar ring, doesn't it? The bullying, misogyny, and vulnerability to taunts, in particular.  
               As is this observation on Macbeth's complaining about his bad dreams and constant anxiety: "the tyrant's course of behavior is fueled by a pathological narcissism. The lives of others do not matter..."
               Macbeth's erratic behavior soon draws attention to his guilty conscience, a problem our author tells us is "recurrent and almost inescapable in tyrannies: observers, particularly those with privileged access, see clearly that the leader is mentally unstable."
               Insecurity, over-confidence and murderous rage may seem "strange bedfellows" but they coexist in the tyrant's psychology because all personal and institutional restraints are gone. In another telling observation, Greenblatt notes "The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent."
                Personally, I try to keep a rein on my crazed impulses until at least after that first cup of coffee. Some other people, apparently, find that hard to do. 
                But who would choose, or seek, to become a tyrant? In Macbeth's famous "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy, one of the most quoted passages in Shakespeare, the playwright is not describing the human condition, Greenblatt argues, but the tyrant's condition. In the tyrant's own words: "[Life] is a tale told/ by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing." 
               Didn't we hear a few of those tales in the 2016 campaign? Haven't we been hearing them ever since?
               This book finds outbreaks of tyranny in other plays, including some of the greatest. Lear's blind narcissism leads to the destruction of his realm. The temptation of absolutist power leads to Caesar's death and civil war in Rome. Coriolanus's autocratic longings destroy the career of a hero who had once saved Rome. 
                Shakespeare undoubtedly saw a lot of tyrannical tendencies in his own Elizabethan and Jacobean times. He probed "the ways that communities disintegrate," Greenblatt tells us, "and he deftly sketched the kind of person who surges up in troubled times to appeal to the basest instincts and to draw upon the deepest anxieties of his contemporaries."
                Hmmm, what would that kind of person would be like today?. Methinks I spy the like. 
               The only comfort I can find in this timely book's analysis of the kind of moral monster who 'surges up in troubled times' is the author's final summary of the career of the tyrant:  

"Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage."
                It's the scope of the potential wreckage that keeps me awake. 

The Garden of Verse: The Last Man Prophesies the End of the World, Henry David Thoreau Speaks for the Wild, and Other Thoughts on April

           

The theme for this month's issue of Verse-Virtual is "your best poem." This is like being asked to name your favorite child, so we crafty poets, knowing how to read between the lines, came up with various ways to play with this idea without ever committing to a clear answer to this question. Sort of like a witness responding to the Mueller investigation. 

So here is the 'note' I wrote introducing my two linked-poems in the April issue:

 "I'm copping out on the difficult task of offering an unambiguous selection of 'my best poem,' a voluntary theme for this issue. Long ago, writing poems before I published any, I produced a poem with a favorite title: "The Last Man." It was an image befitting my youthful central themes of solitude and estrangement, a perceived alienation from most of my fellow humans inhabiting both tiny rural hamlets and big cities. I'd sampled both. I don't have that poem any more. Instead, I've tried updating that loner stance through imagining the condition of a solitary, de-gendered survivor in a world ravaged by the climate apocalypse toward which we are stumbling, eyes wide-blinded. 
          I then attempted to rhyme these notions against a vision of "the last man" both to know from experience and to prophesy in behalf of the American wild, Henry David Thoreau."

Here's an excerpt from the first poem, titled "The Last Man":

He cleans his shoes with dusty walks,

fills his lungs with every hour's darkling spite,

hides in his bed of unwashed rags

lest anyone (but who?) observes that his

sheets have stood up and left,

giving up on him

as he has given up

            on so many things

his ineptitude

his car sobs in the night

his stars pick his pocket

he follows the eyes of yesteryear's teenagers

in imaginary streetcars

hours so late that no one notices where they go,

or where he goes,

or where shee/ goes

            without him

 



A here's an excerpt from the poem about Thoreau, titled "The Last True Man," which I should better describe as a prose-poem:

He knew railroad men and lawyers, local farmers, doctors
with their bad news
and perhaps not the last, but one of the finest exemplars of the last generation
of Penobscot hunters and fishers, the newspaper-reading Polis,
who butchered before him the carcass of the moose he had killed,
sickening Henry  
while winning the white nature-lover's respect for his native mastery of the wild.
He knew scientists, botanists, zoologists to whom he served up
a new species of fish, which they neglected to name
for him.
He corresponded with European naturalists
on the life and death of forests, pioneering the science of forest succession

You can find these poems at: http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2019-april.html

And find the issue's full contents at 
http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html  

 

The Garden of Tears: Ask Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, and now Yemen About America's 'Gifts' to the World

America needs to change the way it does business with the rest of the world.

And there’s one business in particular we should get out of: Selling arms to tyrants who wish to kill their neighbors.

In fact, to judge our intentions by our actions, the United States is no longer building weapons of war for the purpose of defending ourselves against potential enemies. We’re inventing wars in order to sell weapons.

That’s the conclusion drawn by Kathy Kelly, who has visited our war zones all over the world, founded the nonprofit Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org), and in recent weeks has been speaking to small groups meetings in Massachusetts churches.

Here is one of her conclusions:

“We in the United States have yet to realize both the futility and immense consequences of war even as we develop, store, sell, and use hideous weapons. The number of children killed is rising.”

We heard Kelly speak at a church in Walpole, Mass., where she came to put a spotlight on the current, ongoing example of America’s willingness to support a war by a rich country on a poor country — for no justifiable cause — but out of an apparent desire to keep business flowing for our prosperous armaments industry.

The victim of this war is Yemen, a poor Middle Eastern country of nearly 30 million people, often described as ‘backward,’ that has the misfortune to the be the neighbor of a large, wealthy, disastrously governed sheikdom called Saudi Arabia.

A few days after we heard Kelly, she posted this news: “At 9:30 in the morning of March 26, the entrance to a rural hospital in northwest Yemen supported by Save the Children was teeming as patients waited to be seen and employees arrived at work. Suddenly, missiles from an airstrike hit the hospital, killing seven people, four of them children.”

Those missiles and the explosives inside them were almost certainly supplied to the Saudi government by the US. We also sold the Saudis the absurdly expensive aircraft which poured death upon patients waiting at a hospital to see a doctor.

One might ask: How do we live with that?

When we heard Kelly speak in a church hall in Walpole, a Boston suburb, she also suggested this motivation for America’s continued and destructive meddling in the affairs of other countries. Since the end of the Cold War we have assumed the right to throw our weight around, both openly and covertly when and wherever we choose: If a government doesn’t run its country in a way we approve of, the United States will do what it can to take that government down.

And we don’t care what the damage is. Ask Afghanistan.

After the Taliban government of that country provided protection for Al Queda terrorists who attacked America on nine-eleven, we had cause to invade and overthrow a terrorist-protecting government. But once that goal was accomplished, we refused to go home.

We’re still there today, throwing fuel on that unhappy country’s domestic fires in the form of endless weaponry, protection money and occasional bribery, while holding out the delusional hope of crushing the Taliban opposition.

Afghanistan has paid a steep price for our continued intervention. In the eighteen years of what Afghans call ‘the American war’ more than 150,000 Afghans have been killed, an estimated 40,000 of them civilians.

American casualties are almost 2,400 military deaths, plus another 1,700 civilian and contractor deaths. The financial cost is measured in the trillions. Last year the Congressional Budget Office put the cost at $2.4 trillion.

Ask the Venezuelans.

Because Washington disapproved of their popularly elected Socialist government that raised the standard of living for the country’s poor and even provided low-cost heating oil for American fuel assistance programs in the 1990s, the Bush administration took part in a failed coup attempt to remove President Hugo Chavez, back in 2002. Under Obama, American sanctions exacerbated Venezuela’s economic problems (initially caused by falling oil prices and its government’s mismanagement of currency exchange rates), even though current President Maduro was popularly elected in 2013 to continue Chavez’s policies. Now, of course, we have a bombastic blowhard-in-chief who has basically called for a military coup by Maduro’s opponents.

Meanwhile civilians line up for food. Many seek to flee the county and become refugees.

Or, ask the Iraqis. Because some Islamic country (other than Afghanistan) had to pay for the nine-eleven attack by an terror organization founded and headed by Saudi leaders, and mounted by Saudi nationals, GW Bush invented a pretext to invade Iraq.

That country is still trying to recover from the war’s disastrous consequences. Estimates of Iraq’s death toll range from half million dead to a catastrophic 2.4 million. ISIS, which arose after the US war threw the country into chaos, contributed some of these.

On the American side, the casualty toll is 4,425 deaths and near 32, 000 wounded in action. The financial cost to the US taxpayers is again estimated in the trillions of dollars.

Now it’s Yemen’s turn.

What did Yemen do to us? (you may ask). Absolutely nothing.

Why then do we support with airplanes, armaments, active involvement in combat missions, and huge war machinery and armament transfers to the blatant aggressor state, Saudi Arabia, in its wholly unjustified war knowingly waged on Yemen’s civilian population.

International organizations with worldwide credibility such as Save the Children estimate that 85,000 children under age 5 alone have been killed by Saudi attacks and disruptions of Yemen’s economic and social system. Thousands of children have starved to death.

According to UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, and other international organizations, a cholera epidemic has killed more than 2,000 people and infected almost a million.

The famine caused by Saudi attacks on Yemen’s food supply system has put millions of people, including 400,000 children, on the edge of starvation.

Only recently, after three years of this war on children and other living things, has the obscene slaughter moved the American Congress to express its disapproval of our role in enabling these daily war crimes.

Reporting on her decades of visiting overseas war zones, protesting wars and weapons of mass destruction, and backing humanitarian measures, Kathy Kelly came to Massachusetts with a local message. The conflagration in Yemen may appear far way, she told us, but its fires are lighted “right in our backyard. Massachusetts-based Raytheon Company is a key player in the war crimes being committed in this epic human disaster.”

Raytheon has headquarters in Waltham, and weapon-making labs and factories in Cambridge, Burlington, Woburn and five other Eastern Massachusetts communities. It’s as American as apple pie. Only the pies blow up in people’s faces, and kill them.

After a laser-guided 500-pound bomb stuck a water-drilling site in Yemen, killing 31 civilians, the debris included a piece of the bomb’s wing assembly, with a stock number and date of date of manufacture that showed it was built by nobody but Raytheon.

Proud supplier of this murderous moment, we ask: What do you say when history calls you to account for the use made of your fine products?

As ‘host’ to this hub of America’s military industrial complex, Massachusetts is the technology hive for preparing the deadly bombs, missiles, planes and targeting systems for Saudi Arabia’s war crimes against people who pose no threat to America. Nor, for that matter, have they done any harm to the Saudis — except to refuse to knuckle under.

In this last respect, Saudi Arabia has done nothing more than model its egregious might-makes-right policies on those of other powerful countries — a leading example being the USA.

American ‘foreign policy’ needs a complete top-to-bottom shake-out. It didn’t happen during the eight years of the Obama administration. In mitigation of the former President’s backing of Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, Kelly said that Obama had reduced American support for Saudi aggression before the end of his term. The arrival of the current bellicose Pretender, however, signaled a green light for war-makers of all description:

Saudis, Israel, CIA contractors and clients: Take what you want, kill all you need to.

Even better if you’re willing to buy our latest, high-priced, deadly swag.

A final thought from Kathy Kelly:‘Every War Is a War Against Children.’

    

          

The Garden of Verse: Poets Bring Their 'Bests' to March Issue of Verse-Virtual

For the March issue of Verse-Virtual editor Firestone Feinberg chose "my best poem" as a voluntary theme. He reports receiving "some terrific responses."      

            Here's one: "Deer Crossing," by Penny Harter, relates the disturbingly frequent daytime appearances of a local deer population, including carcasses on the highway, to the hidden processes of human consciousness. After reporting sightings of a a dead buck and doe on the highway, the poem takes a strong psychological leap:

"I only know the boundaries are blurring:
that buck whose antlers flowered on his head
like found money,
slept in your bed last night,
that doe in mine,
while we stumbled in our nakedness,
running on all fours..." 

            I love the image of the flowering of the antlers "like found money," and the feeling the whole poem give me that, yes, this is how dreams work.
 

            Donna Hilbert's offering of 'a best' is the short poem "Gravity" that serves "as a sort of foreword" to her book of the same name. This poem has me on its first line "What binds me to this earth..." Its four appearances by the word "mother" anchor the poem to a spiritual gravity and the culminating "miracle" that is its message. If you haven't read the poem, please do.

            I'm not sure if the poem "To the Mother of a Dead Marine" by Marilyn Taylor is offered as a 'best poem,' but it certainly belongs to that discussion. A sonnet, the poet tells us, is the suitable form for distancing the self in order to "write genuinely difficult poems."

            And its context of confronting the mother of "a dead marine" surely meets that threshold. In its packed 14 lines we find such images as

"Could I have been the beast he rode to war?
The battle mounted in his sleep, the rounds
of ammunition draped like unblown blossoms
round his neck?"

            These 'unblown blossom' are not found money, or anything beautiful, but something closer to 'fleurs du mal.' Amazingly strong writing in one of those poems that, as the poet tells us, "scare" us to write.

            It can't be a complete accident, can it, that so many of these strong poems speak of death? When Scott Waters' poem "capitulation" begins with mention of soldiers, we are prepared to cross the border to that final country again, but this poem takes us elsewhere. Its formal elements -- the repetition of the line "these soldiers on the hill," and the delayed rhyme that concludes each stanza -- are highly satisfying. The poem feels like a prayer -- of thanks, or appeal.

            Poet Alan Walowitz presents what he describes as "my best recent poem about getting old. " Sometimes a good poem is a really good story told really well. Here's the money shot in the poem titled "Road Kill":

"Like when you finally--and against your better judgment--say, I love you
to one so dear you’d even be willing to bear the silence
such a proclamation might inspire.
Then the voice of the lady from Waze, seductive as a Siren,
wakes you soft and sweet, and without the heavy breathing
you’d counted on any time you used to be lashed to the mast,
and finds a new way to make you listen:
Roadkill on road ahead, she sings,
and there you are, looking for the corpse,..."

            The poem makes very good use of this magic technological moment in exploring the complexities of the aging human condition. I'm beginning to think the "lady from Waze" deserves to be acknowledged as a player in many of our stories. Her three-word title sounds like something out of a contemporary "Idylls of the King."

             Among the many other fine poems in the issues, Joan Mazza's ekphrastic poem "Blown Away" speaks eloquently to the power of a female figure:

"assembled of gears and sinuous metal scrap, windswept yet holding firm to form."

        You have to see the photo of the sculpture by Penny Hardy and read the rest of the poem to appreciate its evocation of the figure's "self-made light."

            Steve Klepetar's poems continue to put to rest any questions I may have had about the impact of winter in Berkshire County, or I suspect, in any other piece of country in the northern states outside the big cities. The answer is intense, sometimes spooky, and always metaphysical. In a poem titled "Halfway Through the Month" we encounter these aspects of the wintry mix and more.

"Night has fallen, and you have
returned through the yard,
your face pressed cold against
window glass.
In the streetlight you look
so pale and old, shrunk
to a child’s body, and then,
when I look again, no body at all..."

            Nor do I ask who the "you" is in these lines, or why "you look so pale and old," and "shrunk to a child’s body," or why that body is almost immediately transformed to "no body at all." The reference is to everything 'out there' -- and probably everything 'in here' as well.   

            Robert Wexelblatt's poem "Naming and Dividing" belongs to a discussion of anybody's best poems. It's an encyclopedia of finely wrought lines and provocative lists, from the first stanza's "Newborns need milk, love, and names"

...to its demonstration of why classification is a purely, and essentially human task:

"The droning plains and rhyming
hills, the singular salt ocean and the
immeasurable eons, these care nothing
for our dividing and naming, no more than
a pack of wolves padding across some line drawn
to fix Wyoming south of Montana..."

...to the poem's tangy lists of places and names -- "Baltimore, Bamako, Bryn Athyn, the Bronx" -- to pick just a very few.

           And its culminating sense of completion through rhyme:   

"Give us latitudes and longitudes
and we’ll make a map and scribe a border,
we’ll christen streets, name neighborhoods
to limn a reassuring order."

            More good verses surely lay ahead. Editor FF has roped the April issue into the best poem rodeo