I got an email this morning from a colleague who’d organized a panel at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America on uses of Shakespeare by the military. He’d asked me to present because I’ve published and lectured on the subject of Shakespeare’s anti-militarism. Also on the panel was Mr. Kenneth Adelman, who teaches Shakespeare at Georgetown University in his spare time, but who is widely known as one of the architects of our Iraq war policy.

My colleague’s email referred me to a new article in Vanity Fair, circulated on the web, which contains an interview with Adelman repudiating Bush and the war.

This was my reply:

I thought of us in Philadelphia when I read this on the web last night. These days, I’ve been heavily addicted to Truthout, Slate and that junkfood for liberals, Huffpost.

Notice Adelman’s signature self-congratulation for being invited to Rumsfeld’s house even as he betrays his host:

“I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance.”

Part of my addiction are repeated Dantean fantasies of how these people will fare in hell.

###

This is some of what I said on the panel with Mr. Adelman last April:

In his book, Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, Kenneth Adelman reads Shakespeare’s account of the war against France as follows:

The family business has not been going well. Henry’s father, Henry IV had a woeful reign notable for rebellion ¦. His advice to his son was succinct: Go for an acquisition, even if it entails a hostile takeover. In fifteenth century England that meant finding someplace to attack”it didn’t much matter where”in order to ˜busy giddy minds’ at home ˜with foreign quarrels.’ Like any new and especially young executive, Henry longs to make his mark. War offers a great opportunity to do so”but only if he wins. (p.4)

The sinister strategy Shakespeare brings to light here is presented by Mr. Adelman as exemplary to those who benefit from war”the leaders and succeeders in charge today who regard the nation born in this city of brotherly love as their family business. The book’s co-author, Norman Augustine, is CEO of Lockheed Martin, one of the largest arms manufacturers and defense contractors in the world. And Mr. Adelman, among his many other leadership roles, sits on the Defense Policy Board, which traditionally served to strengthen ties between the private sector and the Pentagon, and which contributed significantly to our present administration’s disastrous middle-east foreign policy. Indeed, war provides “great opportunity” for these people–win or lose, and “it [doesn’t]¦ much matter where.”

Erasmus was recognized as the greatest scholar and thinker of early Renaissance Europe. He was given a seat at the tables of the Great, who were tutored by humanists and loved their culture. Erasmus tried to persuade the Movers and Shakers to give up their bellicose power games and to devote themselves to the protection and welfare of all their subjects. The policies that he championed”outlawing war, arbitrating international disputes, disbanding standing armies–never took hold. But his voice still speaks, along with Shakespeare’s, to guide and inspire those engaged in a battle of true worth.

An editorial set to appear on Monday — election eve — in four leading newspapers for the military calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

from Macbeth, Act 5 scene 2:

Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love: now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

from the editorial:

“These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority. And although that tradition, and the officers’ deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.”

To All Things Considered
Your story on the controversy about the ballot intiative on the shopping center in San Luis Obispo California (All Things Considered October 27) was sadly underresearched. The angle on the story came straight out of a feature in the L.A. Times a few weeks ago that emphasized butterfly viewing”one of the trivial trinkets promised by the developer’s public relations firm. It ignored the serious negative consequences of the proposed development that have been clearly delineated in the ballot arguments, the impartial analysis and public opposition by the Council of Local Governments, the Arroyo Grande City Council, and dozens of public officials. Shame on your reporter for not even reading the opposition website (http://nomeasurej.org) that would have made the important issues of traffic impacts and infrastructure financing obvious, and instead producing a puff piece for the developer.

LA Community Colleges go solar. Los Angeles community college officials have announced a plan to take campuses “off the grid” by having each school generate its own electricity.

Monday night, on a whim I decided to make a campfire in the backyard to burn pieces of a broken lawn chair and barbecue chicken and vegetables. We’d picked up our grandson at preschool as usual and kept him till his dad came by to take him home after a long day at work installing fire sprinklers. I invited him to stay for dinner.

We chattered while cooking the meal on hand grills in the warm light of one of the last evenings of daylight-saving time. After hearing about how he almost came to blows with a fellow worker who had punctured his 64 oz bottle of Mountain Dew, Jan asked how his aunt was doing now that she’d moved down south.

“Not too well,” he said. “She’s not getting along with her relatives.”
“She wasn’t happy here either,” said Jan.
“Life’s what you make of it,” replied my ex-son-in law.

Spoken by him, that tired old proverb took on depth. Our fractured and happily reconstituted family was testimony. It struck me that this was a more direct way of saying what seemed terminally hip during my adolescent days in Greenwich Village: “existence precedes essence.”

How Close to Catastrophe?  An upcoming piece in the New York Review by Bill McKibben. Cutting edge on Global Warming.

Who Rules America?  In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2001, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 33.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 51%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 84%, leaving only 16% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).

Google goes Solar  This project will be the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the U.S. … The amount of electricity that will be generated is equivalent to powering about 1,000 average California homes.

It’s as hard
To control your children
As your parents,
But harder yet
To control yourself.

Jan Howell Marx

One day and inches from this world
A presence greater
Than all things real
Yet tentative, unknown.
Boy or girl
Will it survive the passage?

Swelling incertitude burst
By the ringing phone
And grandmother’s cry:
“He’s here, born 8:05
Abel Henry Marx.”

Expired questions
Your life the answer
And to what new questions
Now that waiting is over?

August 23 2006