It is of crucial importance to know what our President is reading, so that we can understand the evolution (no offense) of his understanding, the furniture of his mind, the context of his extraordinary influence on our context, on the planet's context. How useful it is, then, to reread The Stranger, which was, admittedly, "two books ago" (maybe four by now), but surely gives us a better sense of that sudden, irritated, irresistible impulse to random violence against Arabs that lurks in the heart of man. What good is that? What can we do with our improved understanding? Well, some people more in a position to prevent a quick, politically-redemptive nuking of Iran, say, might take steps to prevent it.
So what about the "three Shakespeares" on the President's ekalektic summer reading list? Don't you wonder which "three Shakespeares" are providing wisdom and warning--or, perhaps, confirmation and encouragement--to the newly-galvanized Oval Office world-beater?
Maybe he read Henry IV, Part Two. If so, what did he make of the King's deathbed speech to Prince Hal? The King begins by pointing out that he got his crown by "indirect crooked ways" (he stole it from the previous king, Richard II, whom he had murdered). This illegitimacy has caused him a problem all through his troubled reign, a problem that Hal will inherit with the crown, and he gives Hal some still-fresh advice about how to deal with it:
. . . Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of former days.
Right. If you're not really the king, you can still be the Commander-in-Chief and the Decider in a war that will never end, which gives everybody something else to think about (after all, Henry IV didn't have the useful distractions of our pitiful MSM, and Natalie Holloway and JonBenet Ramsey). Incidentally, besides "wasting the memory of former days," "foreign quarrels" immediately render any opposition treason, don't they? Right, good idea.
Or maybe he read Henry V, a consummation devoutly to be wished. If he did, he surely paused to reflect a little when he got to Williams's speech. On the night before the great battle of Agincourt, the king walks through his camp in disguise, to hear the true feelings--and evaluate the morale--of his troops, and he encounters a common soldier called Michael Williams, who gives him an earful:
"But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, 'We died at such a place,' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon the wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afraid there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it. . ."
Troilus and Cressida is more difficult, but if George W. Bush really did read "three Shakespeares" I suppose anything is possible. I hope, if he read Shakespeare's most powerful antiwar play, he didn't skim but took enough time to puzzle out the meaning of Ulysses great speech about "degree" (order). Degree and order, disorder and chaos, must be particularly important subjects for the man whose solemn, heartfelt promise to the people of New Orleans, for example, appears to be only to come back next year and make the same promise. (You can hold him to it!) Here's what Ulysses says (stick with it--if you think it's hard, imagine what a challenge it was in Crawford):
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right, or rather right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too;
Then everything include itself in power
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey
And last eat up himself.
"Universal wolf . . . universal prey." Ulysses is warning Agamemnon about the wilfulness of Achilles, and Shakespeare is warning us about Achilles and Katrina and Baghdad and Teheran ("And last eat up himself") and, of course, global warming ("And last eat up himself"). I'll bet Al Gore has read two or three Shakespeares in his time.
Actually, as I try and imagine which plays George W. Bush read this summer, the whole story begins to seem increasingly unlikely. He read three of Shakespeare's plays on his own, with no assignment, no midterm, no paper due, nothing? Come on.
I certainly don't mean to accuse the President of lying, but Karl Rove, after all, is the voice in his wilderness, so the Decider and all his apostles have learned to be, at the very least, great equivocators. "Three Shakespeares," he said. We all jumped to the conclusion that he was claiming to have read three plays, but that would be real hard, wouldn't it, and would take an awful long time. There's another possibility. He might have been telling the truth and never have read a single line from even one play, right? He might have read three sonnets!
What fun! Back to the drawing board.
Which three sonnets might he have read on his R & R in Crawford, as a little break from French existentialism and his always-hectic schedule? The first that comes to my mind (I'm just not a very nice person) is Sonnet 50, the one that begins, "How heavy do I journey on the way . . ." and ends "My grief lies onward and my joy behind."
"My grief lies onward and my joy behind."
One can only hope; but I invite other more charitable suggestions.
By the way: WE'RE THE DECIDERS.