A Play within A Play

 

The hundred scandals rocking our nation's capital remind me of the Shakespearean play within a play.  While we the people sit out here trying to survive as off cast, out cast, unfairly cast in the swelling role of the discarded poor that is so aptly represent by Falstaff, Henry V’s rejected comrade, quite another performance goes on in our midst.  One that has nothing to do with us and never has had.

The pseudo aristocrats and self promoting parasites in the political class are play to the scribbling, squawking sob-sisters in the media class.  Thus, does Darrell Issa and his flying monkeys, on both sides of the isle, play to the platoon of look-alike drones that populate the intellectual tenement that is the Fourth Estate.  Accordingly, the drones play back with quasi reporting, endless speculation, sorting, shifting and subverting the facts to their own partisan bias with, as Raymond Chandler said, “all the charm of a cop beating up a drunk.”

For every Rachel Maddow and Ed Shultz, MSNBC, or Greta Van Susteren and Mike Wallace – believe it or not Fox News – or Ezra Klein and David Frum, print media, there are a hundred Hannitys and a thousand gorgeous people with fair and balanced lip gloss or kinda-sorta-milk-and-toast Liberal leanings.  Then there are the Limbaughs and the Coulters who I suspect would cross-dress, sing the Russian National Anthem on the steps of the Capital, while avowing their commitment to atheism, the Muslim Brotherhood and sugar free drinks if it earned them $1,000,000 more a year without a single penny on their income tax.  Leave us not forget that paragon of paranoia, that poster child for untreated mental illness, Mr. Alex Jones.  He seemingly believes that President Obama is an alien from Jupiter who came to earth and became a Muslim, joined the Socialist Party and is staging mass shootings and tornados for some dastardly reason known only to him, the Socialists, the Muslims and the Intergalactic Army of Occupation.  Goddess help us all, there are people who actual agree with this cretin. 

It is a fact that many people’s relationship with these bloody politicians and faux journalists, two camps of twits and tarnished heroes, can be best summed up by paraphrasing an old canard.  We the unwilling, lead by the unknowing, are accepting the impossible from the despicable.  We have been tolerating so much for so long and so blindly, that we are now absolutely acquiescing to almost anything.

Anyone who knows me well or even a little knows that I am not a glass half-full kind of dame.  I am a proud and persistent pessimist, a committed and consistent doubter.  I believe little of what I see and none of what I hear until I have thought it all out in my rose garden.  People who have had the honor of knowing the rose long and tending her well can hear her speak.  Not in words, of course, but in a gentle, fragrant breeze of knowing that is ancient and deep.  She gently pushes the thoughts not in her direction but in the direction of the union between mind, soul and heart.  The rose has no prefabricated or shallow opinions, those things are for lesser beings that “strut and fret their hour upon the stage,” desperately grasping their assorted crutches and chains for fear of realizing that they are not the center of the living universe.  She has wisdom and a reason born of centuries of evolution from prehistoric times to now.

Once I have thought thing through with my “ladies,” I know well my own mind and generally find it is utterly opposed to what political hacks or media Muppets have asserted is the one and only truth of the matter.  It is a habit you know, thinking – one that is discouraged by our “betters” full of themselves and usually of crap.

I am thoroughly convinced that, as I have said before and will say again, the pimps have taken over the world; corporations are king.  Right is wrong and wrong is right.  Night is day and day is night.  Wall Street bloodsuckers are our benefactors because Jesus saves, but Cash is God.  Mediocrity is the new gold standard and excellence the evil of the land.  Smart is sacrilege and stupid the ultimate act of religious devotion.  It is all fucked up, Alice.  We are on the other side of the looking glass and lead to it by our willful obsession with the cult of celebrity, experts and the many other harbingers of the deceit of the day.

It is a dangerous world we live in not because it is violent, it is that, but because it is thoughtless.  It is an ugly world we live in, not because it is cruel, it is that, but because it is careless.  It is an uneasy peace that we maintain between our rights and our responsibilities.  It is a perilous course we walk when we accept money as our supreme good and refuse to understand our own fallibility.  We have paid a heavy price for admission to these hideous plays with our coin, our patronage, our unquestioning allegiances, blind following and in many cases abject refusal to accept the inevitability of change.  I fear, in my pessimism and insistence upon free thinking, that not even the Bard could stop our looming tragedies from ending catastrophically.