WOULD SHAKESPEARE VOTE FOR TRUMP & VANCE?

WOULD SHAKESPEARE VOTE FOR TRUMP & VANCE? 

In a scene from Shakespeare’s first smash hit, Richard III, two professional killers are sent to murder Richard’s brother George, the Duke of Clarence. One of them says to the other that he is starting to have pangs of conscience about his work, while the other says that is a very bad idea if you are in the assasination line of work. They kill the Duke of Clarence anyhow. 

It’s not an important scene, but it does illustrate that Shakespeare can’t pass up the chance to illustrate the messiness and self-division of human life. We must make a living, but we also have a conscience. Both make demands of us, and there are no easy solutions. 

Trump and. Vance furiously beg to differ. There are problems, and long ago Trump said he alone could fix them. There are too many immigrants, and it will be simple to round them up and deport them. Problem solved.  Haitians

may not be eating cats in Ohio now, but they will eventually, or they’d like to do so now, and the only way to save the cats, and human decency, is to get rid of them. They are not really human beings. Even cats are more worthy. There is no mention of conscience or difficulty; no reference to the messines and self-division of being alive as a human person.. 

Shakespeare wrote in a Christian era, where it was understood that human flesh was imperfect. This was the basis of all his great dramas, though he eschewed Christianity too as “the answer.”  Trump and Vance think “the answer” is simply to ignore the dilemmas of human flesh, blended as it is with morality and reason. Vance’s great sponsor, Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel, likewise thinks the whole point right now is to get rid of the chaos of the divided flesh and replace it with AI and orderly digits. There is a certainty here, and a ruthlessness, that Shakespeare might have found very strange indeed.  –Tom McBride