What Tangled Webs They Weave

Ay, me! I see the ruin of my house.

The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind.

Insulting tyranny begins to jut

Upon the innocent and aweless throne.

Welcome, destruction, blood, and massacre.

I see, as in a map, the end of all. (Richard III, Act II, Scene iv)

 

When Ian McKellen did his rendering of Richard, he turned the hunchback into a limping, crookbacked, slimeball who nearly swallowed everyone he thought was in his way. The film ended with Richard falling through the floors of a burning building into oblivion instead of being killed by Henry’s soldiers on the battlefield after his horse had been killed right under him. The Yorkist met his end on the orders of his Lancastrian (distant) cousin Henry VII at Bosworth Field, and that ended the long civil war known as the Wars of the Roses.

When I saw Harris’s smarmy suck-up to Biden during her speech, that purely evil Richard raised his head out of the miasma of chitchat speechifying, and I began to wonder if there is a parallel here.  Considering the state we’re in now — well, the whole world is in it, right along with us — and the riots, looting, pillaging, and destruction of both public and private properties for no reason, and the braindead refusal to accept anything but politically correct language which must please all, but in reality pleases no one, it’s almost like waiting for Obi-Wan Kenobi to say “There’s a disturbance in the force.”

No one anywhere is looking ahead any further than the next 24 hours, as if the sun is going to suddenly disappear.  (N.B.: If that does happen, the planet will quickly become an ice ball and hey, presto! End of civilization!)  The backlash and angry reaction in Chicago to the rioting on Sunday PM through Monday AM has not stopped. It is, in fact, increasing because those in real charge do not like being embarrassed by this kind of thing.  The younger crowd is still punking it out at the pohlease people, whereas those whose brains aren’t soaked in Spoiled Brat Consomme regularly show up and say firmly “That is not who we are.”  And nothing is worse than stereotyping people based on an oddball specified grouping cooked up by people whose aim at the end is certainly less than civilized, and decidedly not wholesome.

Why is this going on? It’s mostly the timing. It almost happened in the 1960s, with the civil rights and the draft and war protests, but there was less destruction than there is now. Reporters with no real sense of what happened back then have tried to draw comparisons, but when held up to the Antifas/BLMs/Whateverists, that part of the past looks tame by comparison.

But that doesn’t tell us why it’s happening. The constant drawing of parallels to 1930s Germany and before that, the civil wars between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in Russia along with Trotsky’s and Lenin’s destruction of the Romanov government bogged down in its own past, may mirror the attempt to destroy France’s government in the 18th century, but no one expected an imperialist like Napoleon to take over the entire country and go to war with Spain and Russia.  Nor did anyone in Britain really expect a rebellion by the local peasantry against a ridiculous tyrant like the Regent George IV, never mind that it was followed by England’s second attack on its former colonies, and England lost again.

Perhaps the real lesson to take away from what ails us now is not “look at how destructive All Of Them are”, but rather that perhaps we got complacent because no one has really threatened us in a long, long time – not since the  Cuban missile crisis and Jack Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba, and our most recent horror, the events of September 2001. Every time we think it’s all going to be fine, everything will be just fine, nothing more will happen – well, someone somewhere decides to build a truck bomb, use an airplane (or four) as a flying bomb, or store fertilizer improperly and we’re right back in those tribal wars again.

I’d take what Shakespeare gave Richard III to speak as a warning: never take anything for granted, whether it’s the Sun coming up tomorrow or the shelves at the local store being full of household stuff to buy.

I also cook.

 

Category: 2020 Election, ANTIFA