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You Are the Dirt Under My Fingernails

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Contrary to what some haters are saying, I am not only still the President of the United States, but also the best President this country has ever had. In fact, I am a better President than most of you deserve. You think you can convict me of a bunch of crimes the haters made up just to get even with me. It won’t work. I have been a perfect President, and everything I have done has been perfect.

Just look at my so-called mug shot. If you think you can have me convicted and put away, you are sadly mistaken. I will come for you: You are just the dirt under my fingernails!

So many weaklings who have worked with me have turned against me. Even my children, my wives, my lawyers, my political appointees, and women I supposedly raped. (Why would I have to rape any of them? They were attracted to me and gave their consent.) I am guilty of having been too perfect for the job.

Mess with me, and I will come for you. See who wins in the end, you pathetic losers! I have a 100% win record, and it will continue to be perfect.

There are millions of Americans who want to Make America Great Again (MAGA all the way!), and they will rise up rather than see me treated like dirt. See if it doesn’t happen!

I will bide my time and end up winning again. That’s what I’m all about. WINNING 100%

The Revenger’s Tragedy

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Illustration from Thomas Kyd’s Play The Spanish Tragedy (1587)

I have just re-read William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in honor of the Bard’s 455th birthday. Although it has been several decades since my last approach to the play, I was surprised how familiar the language was. Apparently, over the years such expressions as “the dead vast and middle of the night” and “I am but mad north-north-west—when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw” have become part of my speech and writing.

This time, however, a new thought struck: The play is not just about Hamlet’s dilatoriness in revenging the death of his father by his uncle (who thereupon married his mother, the queen). It is also about the difficulty of straightforward revenge. And that despite the fact that revenge plays were a popular genre. Even Shakespeare, early in his career, came out with Titus Andronicus (ca 1590), in which there is rape, murder, cannibalism, and oodles of blood. Then, in 1606 came Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.

In Hamlet, however, Shakespeare shows that the road to revenge can be rocky. The last scene in Act V begins with the Prince telling his friend Horatio:

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutinies in the bilboes. Rashly,
And prais’d be rashness for it,—let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

The Graveyard Scene from Grigory Kozintsev’s Russian Film of Hamlet (1964)

This realization on Hamlet’s part after his many hesitations earlier on shows that he has learned a lesson from all his agonizing:

HORATIO.
If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither, and say you are not fit.

HAMLET.
Not a whit, we defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?

I wonder how many discoveries await me on re-reading Shakespeare’s plays. I think perhaps it’s worth the effort to make the effort.

 

Contretemps

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Aaaauuugh! I Lost My Passport!

As my Guatemala vacation approaches, I find that I have misplaced my passport. I applied for a new one to be rushed to me, but now it appears that our Ogre President is considering shutting down the government because no one likes him or his moronic policies. At this point, I am not sure that the U.S. State Department is scheduled to close its doors; and there is a chance that I will get my replacement passport before the Friday witching hour of midnight.

If that Marmalade-Headed Horror screws up my vacation, I will do my best to wreak revenge on everything he holds dear, like selling Ivanka to a notorious white-slaver or feeding Don Jr to one of his African hunting trophies.

I will attempt to be patient while visions of revenge rule my thoughts.