Et Tu, Covfefe?

I've had my beef with Shakespeare, albeit a fake conflict which depended on a familiarity with the Bard's works and with the history which inspired them he distorted. Despite the fact that Slick Willie 1.0 did a hit job on Lady Macbeth and her husband, Good King Macbeth, I just can't stay mad at him. I have long suspected that my father (Happy Fathers' Day to all of the dads out there) was a frustrated actor- he was the sort of guy who would dart a glance at you at dinner and intone: "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look." As a treat, he took the three eldest of us to see James Earl Jones as Othello and Christopher Plummer as Iago, with one proviso... if we wanted to see 'Darth Vader' live and in person, we had to read the play. For the record, he also took us to see Derek Jacobi as Cyrano de Bergerac with the same prerequisite. In the 7th grade, my English teacher, who was big on public speaking, made us memorize and recite Marc Antony's eulogy of Caesar. Like most educated persons in the anglophone world, I have a long relationship, and a pleasurable one, with the Bard of Avon.

They key word here is 'educated', as there has been a lot of outrage, poutrage, and fauxtrage over this year's Central Park 'Shakespeare in the Park' production of Julius Caesar , in which Caesar is portrayed with a blond combover like Vulgarmort's. I'm going to pause here to indicate that Julius Caesar, while being self-promoting, power-hungry and ruthless, was hypercompetent and a fine literary stylist... much unlike Vulgarmort. There's no real comparison between the two men. Also, as numerous pundits have pointed out, the play underscores the dangers of political assassination, and the chaos which results from using violence for political ends. The play is most definitely not a glorification or endorsement of political violence... but try telling that to the dumbasses.

Last Friday, two alt-right idiots briefly disrupted the performance of Julius Caesar- a demonstration of, well, a demonstration of their ignorance, or more likely, a rube-fleecing, as these hack-tivists launched a fundraising site for the stage-stormer's legal defense... hours before the 'protest'. The crowning glory of this stunt was Posobiec'e goober garbling Goebbels response to the tresspasser's removal from the stage. By the way, nice job, jackass, for making 'the girl' take the risks. The whole sad affair was followed up by the saddest protest in the world.

The real tragedy here is the fact that the people who claim to be the defenders of Western Civilization are people who are totally unfamiliar with it. These people are proud ignoramuses, the sort of people who believe that the Western Canon refers to Fort Apache. Growing up in the Northeast, I grew up thinking that the American ideal was a population in which even the working class was educated, a nation of literate farmers, longshoremen, and factory workers. I believed in a nation which values free productions of Shakespearean plays, which sees itself as a continuation of a classical tradition which Shakespeare, a true Renaissance man, referenced in certain of his plays.

The two alt-right knuckleheads, or grifters as the case may well be, who engineered this stunt should be sentenced to actually reading Julius Caesar, and perhaps writing essays on the themes presented in the play. It really would be a shame if a bunch of idiots could truly declare "Show's over Shakespeare."





Maybe somebody could come up with a 'King Lear' themed monster truck show, maybe a 'Tempest' themed WWE storyline...

ADDENDUM: Or perhaps better called an 'addendumb'- these idiots aren't even familiar with 20th Century American literature or 17th Century colonial history.

ADDENDUM SECUNDUM: This might be my favorite right-wing tweet ever- some guy who is completely ignorant of Roman history and English literature thinks he's going to save Western Civilization.