Suppose it were Friday liv: Virginia Senate lurches into lechery

The Virginia Senate, in a grotesque Party-line vote for the unconscionably inhumane treatment of all pregnant captives of its jurisdiction, has moved to compel the burden and the frivolously punitive trauma of a mandatory ultra-sound invasion of the womb before any procedure to terminate a pregnancy. Gallantly, our cavaliers do not compel the patient to view the illustrations arising from this lewd prank, nakedly gutting its own pretenses. 

But there is, so tellingly and so chronically in their endless horror of female empowerment, the lechery of the lying Giacomo in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, seducing her husband to believe her unfaithful. At the core of this jest of rectitude, they need an image to project their fearful pruriency; if it isn't Cymbeline's mole, it's the shadow of an ultra-sound:

   For further satisfying, under her breast

   (Worthy her pressing) lies a mole, right proud

   Of that most delicate lodging. By my life,

   I kiss'd it, and it gave me present hunger

   To feed again, though full. You do remember

   This stain upon her? 

   Ay, and it doth confirm

   Another stain, as big as hell can hold ..

Not merely exulting in the wings, but exhorting this stark oppression forward, has been the Pat Robertson-trained zealot Governor, defending himself by asserting the duty to inform the sub-citizen gender of its incompetence. Now running for Vice-President, he is the same man who lied to gain election, by repudiating his own thesis to get an academic degree. Now he has the allies he needs. In its freshly minted profile of dis-embodied dogmatic degeneracy, the present gov-ernment of the Commonwealth of Virginia rushes to the beat of fanaticism. 

This is the face of that Party which demands this year to rule this nation. Again and again, if not more constantly, its hypocrisies are equalled in number and purity only by its tautologies. They cite a dogma for every abuse of right they inflict. The Party which con-tests the obligation to accept health insurance as unconstitutional has voted to compel a procedure and its many dimensions of cost against the inviolable exercise of a Constitutional right, as a benign act of illumination. Wherever it can, throughout the nation, this Party is imposing torturous burdens upon the right to vote, but it has not resorted yet to the ostensible practice of medicine to deter the young, the poor, and the unwhite from the polls. I wait in confidence for that brainwave.

Beneath it all, the nasty sucktooth cracker and the smirking fratboy preen to claim the auspices of sectarian chivalry. There is nothing about this intimidation, this humiliation, this worse than sordid invasion of human rights which is not directly traceable to gender chauvinism and dilettante rape. Decent people shudder to bear the name of their faith. 

William Shakespeare

Cymbeline

  II, 134-140

1609

The Arden Shakespeare

J.M. Nosworthy, editor

Methuen & Co., Ltd, 1955©

Stephen Greenblatt

Shakespeare's Freedom

op. cit.

Coriolanus and the things people say

The modern audience for Coriolanus will vividly comprehend that it is watching the playing out of events, some years later, foretold in a child's violent separation from a sled called, Rosebud. The distinctions, that he excelled in the violence and that the wrenching away had been gradual, are immaterial.

We are well advised to resist inflicting the terms and definitions of our time upon the Renaissance, but at the same time, a manifest tragedy which stands outside established models, and arrives at the moment when individual freedom is acquiring the rudiments of a freestanding conception, and which points so starkly to the performance anxiety at the core of the rise of mercantile values, has the Age of Money written all over it. And when did that expire? Coriolanus is our first occurrence, to my awareness, of the man who refused to be rich. In this he is the kind of conservative that Charley Kane was. The fortune thrust upon him is aggravatingly trivial to him.

The life force which wrenched Charley Kane from his sled was not a character trait of his; it was embodied outside of him, and was the formative, persistent, and quite self-conscious author of his character. It was his mother. Volumnia is a wonderful new thing. Ambitious, she is not Lady Macbeth; complicit in patricide, she is not Gertrude. She is the powermommy whose passions and interests, to coin the phrase of republicmakers in every age, are focused on one thing - her boy, the term of mockery precipitating the dénouement of this play. Here, the insight of WH Auden is only too clear: all he must do, is to desire to excel, and crave approval.

In Coriolanus, these are what we call, "character flaws," because he must reject any coinciding of excellence and approval; their definition is not his own. He will revile or waste the one if he is denied the other, and he will loathe popularity. He tries, in the deb party formulation, too hard. Adherents of the Myers-Briggs hypothesis would cite him as an ENTJ: inordinately driven. A triathlon-training painter friend of mine is an ENTJ, Adolf Hitler was, Charley Kane wrote the book on him. He resents.

As a practical matter, his satisfaction is always in suspense, his disappointment always haunts him. Shakespeare's affection for him is something other than what it is for Lear, or even for Shylock. He gives Coriolanus absolutely nothing beautiful to say, as how could he? He gives us the man of conspicuous parts, whose heart has been extract-ed, not broken. Tragedy had never adopted that anatomy, before, and this has led to much dispute that this is what we are seeing. In political terms, this is a Classical tragedy. In artistic terms, it is a requiem for a man never allowed to exist. It is imperishable.

William Shakespeare

Coriolanus

op. cit.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

  and Orson Welles, screenplay

Citizen Kane

Mercury Theatre/RKO, 1941©

W.H. Auden

Arthur Kirsch, compiler

  and editor

Lectures on Shakespeare

Princeton University Press, 2000©

Stephen Greenblatt
Shakespeare's Freedom
University of Chicago Press, 2010©

Of a trial down in Richmond

-- medio de fonte leporum

Surgit amari aliquid, quod

in ipsis floribus angat.

From middle spring of sweets some

bitter springs

Which in the very flower smartly

stings.

In the matter of the Federal District Court corruption trial of Virginia's most recent ex-Governor and his wife, the element of conspiracy has been frontally rebutted by assertions, now quite famous, of no love lost between the conspirators. Infamous as a gladiatorial net of indiscriminate suspicion, a conspiracy indictment deserves all the opprobrium it can get, for incrimina-tion without acts; and the affections, as we've tried to suggest, are the last business of the law. On the other hand, Jon Stewart, long suspected of lurking about the perimeter of this most Gordian of all of repression's knots, clove it paradoxically, with something of an idiot savant's epitaph, "You don't have to be in love to be corrupt." 

That said, you need to have acquiesced in each other's darling little stocking stuffers, to be deemed to have known they come to you from a common source. And this seems very much to define the source in question here, a quite splendidly gothic construction out of the wildest dreams of Huckleberry Finn. We are not, dear Readers, threatening the domain of taste in the transcripts before us. A white leather coat, a 5-lb Rolex, do not the Pleiades excite. But there is innocence born in all of us. I gave my mother once a sap-phire bracelet at La Côte Basque, and she kissed the captain for it. Not that he didn't deserve it.

The evidence, presented in these proceedings, supports the Southern fratboy gotcha to a T. Observing serial indelicacy of judgment as we may, we find that the laws of the Commonwealth extend a reverence toward the Office of Governor with which no petty crackpot can compete: he [sic] is insulated from avarice by law, if not by nature. He may suck all the Sazeracs he likes, and Louis Treize in the bargain, on the premise, very frankly, that he is likely to be richer'n death as it is. Jefferson, the first Governor, could turn only to Washington with envy,  but that man inherited several counties, and his wife brought him the whole Potomac watershed in dower, and still they couldn't hire a decent architect. 

In short, foundation law portrays a fine opinion of who may vote and whom he'll [sic] select. Mind you, no one anticipated this exact Governor's educator, Jerry Falwell, or had any inkling of Fox News, where nothing ever needs to be true. All the more reason to marvel, then, at least for a moment, in the spectacle of a definition of the Office, which anticipates hypocrisy in such elevated flight that the world might see only the soaring radiance of shattered principles.

 Yet this is the only story,  actually, to claim position  here, not the squalid, emetic  distractions the defendants'  attorneys conspired to thrust  before the People of the Com-  monwealth. And all of this as  free entertainment, too, given  their confidence that there is  no case. There is a greater  humiliation, as Jefferson  certainly knew, than subjecting  the People to the shameful  affront of begging them to be  excused for years and years of  indignity, at best, for lack of  conjugal felicity. Who hasn't  given that one a whirl, on an  off weekend; and 48 solid  months of neglectfulness, it  has been said, deserve a  consolation.

Now the People's little, ancient, natural principles are desecrated as pretenses of antiquity, expectations pitched too high for Falwellian contrition, Foxed fabrication. The People are blamed by these attorneys for believing, silly fools, in values uncongenial to alligator tears. And it's true. There isn't a crime inscribed in their statutes, for such loathing of the public trust; and there shouldn't be. It would be a tyranny over the mind of man, which Jefferson so presciently detested, and it would moot the prospect, as well as the living reality of trust. These attorneys, these officers of the Court, are openly soliciting a jury of Virginians to betray themselves.

Even if this tactic should succeed today - as it might, given our storied resistance to Federal embarrassment, our denying flair for splitting phantom hairs - there is, always, History. Who could want to say, this had happened? Clio only knows the virtues, she can not summon them. Can those who govern as if trust were dead, really take it with them, against the likelihood of a Virginian's being born, any moment?

iii  Dominik Sadoch

Michel de Montaigne
  Citing Lucretius
We Taste Nothing Purely
1578-1580
Shakespeare's Montaigne:
  The Florio Translation of
  the Essays, A Selection
John Florio, translation
1553-1625
Stephen Greenblatt and
  Peter Platt, editors
New York Review Books, 2014©

The estimable and complete
Donald Frame translation,
1957, is restored to brilliant
company in NYRB's recent,
self-recommending issue.