The Gist of It: February 8th, 2013
Fuck Hamlet.
"I love the broken crown
The one you stole from the King and held for ransom
Love the broken crown
Love the broken crown
I love it"
--T. Rex, "The Motivator"
It was "without any royal solemnity" that Richard III "was buried at the entrance to a village church," the former Greyfriars Priory in Leicester, England, shortly after his gruesome death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, 1485. Now the site of the City Council's parking lot, where the good people of Leicester come to sign for the dole and report broken streetlights, the ruined Priory was where "hell's black intelligencer" himself would've remained forever - were it not for the archaeological dig which this week positively identified his bones as those of a king.
Ignore all the very tedious thought experiments in the coming week over the legacy of Shakespeare's "murderous falchion," over whether or not the historical Richard's going to finally get that "rehabilitation" it seems everybody thinks he's due. What infuriating bilge. Apparently it's down to me, a "poisonous bunch back'd toad" in my own right, to pick up Bad Dick's gauntlet, "whip these stragglers o'er the seas," and initiate the truly important and as-yet non-existent rehabilitation: that of the dramatic Richard III, Duke of Gloucester, Shakespeare's greatest, most courageous, and most brutally slandered hero. Fuck Hamlet, we don't have the luxury of time. We Americans are in desperate need of a scabrous, scouring genius, the kind who, for once in human history, made the smuggest, safest bastards pay. If I can't resurrect the bones of "The Boar" into an immortal zombie archon in time for the 2016 Iowa Caucus, I may just move to Canada.
Our degraded culture cannot, for a start, distinguish Richard III's divine vengeance from true villainy. Middlebrow mountebanks like New York Times columnist Roger Cohen only dare defend the Shakespearean Richard with bland platitudes like, "we need our villains in all their ugly, scheming iniquity." Thoroughgoing libel, as Shakespeare's audiences would've understood; Richard III was an avenging angel who only massacred the House of York, a crime family waist-deep in blood from the War of the Roses, at the moment they finally felt they could relax. The real "scheming iniquity" happens in broad daylight, against those untainted with such crimes, with no fear of such retribution. Just ask John Brennan.
Brennan, "a discontented gentleman/Whose humble means match not his haughty mind," has devoted his worthless life to proving the French reactionary Joseph De Maistre correct, that "all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner." An easy tool, a little man, Brennan parlayed a career as CIA station chief in our repugnant Saudi proxy into that of a trusted blue-chip waterboarder - one who, the moment the backlash against Bush began, professed a Damescene conversion and began making straight cash money before finally rigging himself to the Obama zeppelin. Now, he is subject to a rigorous trial of confirmation , from that august branch of government Americans despise more than Genghis Khan and lice. Yes, he is the man for the job - won't finger the hired propagandists , looks like Spencer Tracy, speaks Arabic. Oh, and he's capable of lies so stark, they'd slap the colic out of a newborn: that Bin Laden threw up his wife as a human shield, that *no* civilians had been harmed by his drone strikes, that there was nothing untoward in his dealings with mercenaries.
Yes, we are in a democratic age that has left behind the strictures of absolute monarchy; now, in this enlightened era, lawyers draft elaborate justifications for executing their countrymen without due process, to say nothing of the faceless wogs we wage a shadow war against. This unfixed murder gaze even has a certain hip cachet now. Touré, the MSNBC panelist you might know from such hard-hitting documentaries as " Paramore: On the Record with Fuse," boldly came out in support of President Obama's right to kill anyone he wants for joining a terror organization that may not exist, in abrogation of any rights to due process the decedent may have once had. Nobody has blood on their hands for Abdulrahman al-Awlaki , or the thousands of other anonymous chattel we executed in a rain of fire, for some reason, because the blame is widely dispersed. Like buckshot, or the resultant waves of an earthquake .
Just ask Atlantic scribbler Jeffrey Goldberg, subject of an adoring backrub this week in The Washingtonian, where a star-eyed buddy described him variously as "hilarious" and "a good laugh." This is true enough; my favorite patented Goldberg gag was when he relied on a sweaty drug courier paraded by the Kurdish peshmerga to report that Saddam Hussein had transferred biological weapons to Al Qaeda inside several "refrigerator motors," a fantasy exposed when the courier could not even describe what Kabul looked like. Yes, just as Richard III needed slick operators like his Buckingham to procure the throne, so Jeffy proved useful to Dick Cheney on the 2002 talk show circuit - but only the former shill paid for it.
Our hero who would deliver us from this decrepitude remains dead in Leicester. Jean Molinet, the 15th century court historian of the Duchy of Burgundy, tells us that though "the king bore himself valiantly and wore the crown on his head," even the final flower of the Plantagenet kings, Richard III, died, as even those less kingly like you and I must, alone. The last of the House of York expired trussed upon a packhorse, "hair hanging as one would bear a sheep." It is the final reckoning of another time, and a brand of justice we will never see realized.
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