The careful devil is still at hand with means,
And providently pimps for ill desires;
The good old cause, revived, a plot requires.
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.” --John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, Part I (1681)
The 17th-century poet-playwright John Dryden was such a skilled satirist that he’d probably disdain Texas Governor Rick Perry as too obvious a target for someone of his gifts. Still, it’s hard to read Absalom and Achitophel, published 430 years ago this month, and not sense the contemporary relevance of Dryden’s demonstration of how false words can sway a populace and undermine a head of state’s legitimacy.
If current American politics is a bloodsport (and it is), you should have seen the political scene in Dryden’s lifetime (1631-1700). Nowadays, involvement in politics can bankrupt you, leave you beholden to the Jack Abramoffs of the world, even make your mom wonder whether the guy every senator of a particular party is denouncing could really be the same boy she raised years ago.
In Dryden’s time, backing the wrong political horse could deprive you of position, force you into exile, land you in the Tower of London, provoke attack by thugs, even get you killed. Dryden either saw this happen to friends and relatives or, in a few cases, even experienced it himself. (He was assaulted two years before publication of Absalom and Achitophel, and lost the poet laureate position when he backed James II, the last of the Stuarts to sit atop the English throne.)
If Governor Perry knows his Bible as well as he assures evangelical voters in the GOP primaries, then he’s probably familiar with the source material for Dryden’s poem: the story in 2 Samuel of the revolt of Absalom, illegitimate son of King David, as urged on by David’s trusted counselor Achitophel.
But Dryden put that original tale in a much different context (more on that last word shortly). His readers construed his verse in the manner he had hoped: ancient Israel represented 17th-century England; King David, King Charles II; Absalom, the bastard son of England’s merry monarch, the Duke of Monmouth; and Achitophel, the Duke of Shaftesbury.
Dryden’s poem was published only days before Shaftesbury went on trial for treason. Instead of venting his own views in an editorial or blog post, as the overwhelming majority of commentators would do today, Dryden did so in verses of biting and elegant brilliance.
Restoration England was as rife as 21st century America with “Plots, true or false,” as well as with frustrated heads of state and demagogues who could disrupt the nation's stability with lies and innuendoes. A couple of years before the poem appeared, Titus Oates had sent the nation careening through a McCarthyite series of wild accusations, with Catholics the object of fear rather than Communists.
With the 2012 election growing ever nearer (less than a full year away!), the GOP candidates are coming up with their own plots and charges. Perry has become a major contributor to this campaign. President Obama, he charged in a recent TV ad, had called Americans “lazy.”
"Can you believe that?” Perry asked in the ad. “That's what our president thinks is wrong with America? That Americans are lazy? That's pathetic. It's time to clean house in Washington."
Can I believe that? Well, actually, no.
And now, we come to what I mentioned earlier: Context.
Campaign observers mystified why Perry had previously claimed Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke had committed actions “almost treasonous” were positively astonished by the governor’s pitiful debate performances, including the “Brain Freeze” spread everywhere by cable TV and YouTube. Now, they’re even more likely to ascribe his words to a case of swinging from the heels, in the desperate hope that he might strike a home run with the party’s conservative base.
But there’s a secondary meaning of “context”: President Obama’s own words. One of the wonders of the Internet and YouTube is that you can find somewhere, unfiltered, a nearly verbatim statement by a public official. On the White House homepage, you can find the news conference at the Sheraton Hotel in Honolulu last week in which Obama’s words were spoken. To wit:
“I think it’s important to remember that the United States is still the largest recipient of foreign investment in the world. And there are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity -- our stability, our openness, our innovative free market culture.
“But we’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted -- well, people will want to come here and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America. And so one of things that my administration has done is set up something called SelectUSA that organizes all the government agencies to work with state and local governments where they’re seeking assistance from us, to go out there and make it easier for foreign investors to build a plant in the United States and put outstanding U.S. workers back to work in the United States of America.”
There’s a lot more of that in a similar vein—the kind of boring professorial stuff that Obama can do in his sleep, and, judging from the dismayed tone of those who voted for him in ’08, the kind he has done that way all too much the last couple of years.
But find anything in the above where the word “lazy” specifically applies to American workers. If anything, the “lazy” parties in question are state, local and federal governments asleep at the wheel as their competitive advantage was undercut because of their refusal to promote the the USA. In fact, it’s the kind of claim that Perry, that longtime foe of government bureaucracy, has seldom been reluctant to make himself.
Perry’s refusal to back off his claim proved too much even for Bill O’Reilly, here trading his mad-dog persona for that of an unexpectedly more thoughtful truth-teller, much as he did when, at Roger Ailes' strong suggestion, he began to throw cold water on the birther controversy. The Fox News ringmaster asked this time if Perry wasn’t being misleading with this ad. Not at all, responded Perry. In fact, he said, he thought Obama was a socialist.
You have to wonder why Perry persists in such nonsense. Well, one could believe he’s a liar, as raving and rangy as the state he’s been elected to serve as its leading official three times now. Or we can accept his claim of authenticity at face value and believe he’s just really, really stupid.
Hmmm…Now we may be getting somewhere.
The three scariest words I’ve heard in awhile--the three words that most liberals might regard as the scariest in the English language--were ones I read applied several months ago, in an Irish Voice article, to Perry: “Bush without the brains.” That would account for the Great Debate Brain Freeze, as well as for this new incident.
According to two New York Times articles that dealt, at one point or another, with his grades, Perry was voted Most Popular in his high-school class, but he never made the honor roll, and his marks were as bad, if not worse, at the Texas A & M Corp of Cadets.
If, at any point, Perry wasn’t paying attention in English class, he might have missed an all-important session on antecedents. That might explain why he erred so badly in identifying the “we” in Obama’s talk quoted above.
At the start of this post, I speculated that Dryden might find Perry too obvious a target for his pen. But perhaps the poet really did grasp the nature of this fading Republican supernova. After all, how else to explain this Dryden rhyming couplet:
“Behold him setting in his western skies,
The shadows lengthening as the vapors rise.”
No comments:
Post a Comment