Nights of the Long Knives

Back in the day London’s weak-kneed timorous mayor Sadiq Khan pronounced his city the safest in the world. No crime here, folks. Just your mind playing tricks on you.

Last Sunday, I reported the new news, namely that London is now leading New York City in violent crime. Heck of a job, Sadiq.

Not contented to rest on its laurels, London saw a wave of stabbings this past Thursday. The reason, if we are to believe Katie Hopkins, was gang activity by black Londoners. Hopkins was reporting on Tucker Carlson’s show last night.

I mention this in passing because all of our favorite news sources are ignoring this inconvenient aspect of the problem.

Breitbart described the scene at London hospitals:

Dr. Mark Griffiths, the lead surgeon at Barts Health NHS Trust in East London, said that knife and gun wounds had moved from a “niche” part of his job to a daily chunk of his workload, and a growing number of victims were “children”.

“Some of my military colleagues have described their practice here as similar to being at [Camp] Bastion,” Mr. Griffiths told the Todayprogramme on BBC Radio 4.

“We used to look after people in their twenties. Now people are often in their mid to late teens and children in school uniforms are being admitted under our care with knife and gun wounds.”

One Labour member of parliament did note that the crime spree had been caused by rival drug traffickers warring over turf.

Now the focus is on Prime Minister Theresa May, Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Cressida Dick, Metropolitan Police Commissioner and most important law enforcement official in London.

Along with the ever-timid Sadiq, these are the people in charge. What do they have in common? Do you think that the drug traffickers notice that law enforcement in England has become women’s work? Do you think that this strikes fear into their marrow or do you think that this tells them that London has submitted?

Now that the least violent city in the world has turned violent, the police are responding. The Wall Street Journal has the story:

The Metropolitan Police, also known as Scotland Yard, on Thursday said it has established a new violent-crime task force in an effort to halt the bloodshed. An extra 120 officers have been assigned to tackling violent crime in the capital and will patrol known trouble spots, police said.

“What we are working hard to deal with is the increasing number of young people, often in groups, often armed with knives, committing violence,” Ms. Dick said.

He added: “Whereas a young boy being stabbed five or six years ago would have been a horror story, now it’s normal.

“People expect to see people being killed on a daily basis. Members of the public who are not involved in gangs or violence let this pass without comment and you get the society you deserve if you ignore violence.”

And, as if that is not enough to scare the gang members, we have charities who have found the solution: more social workers, more education and better jobs. As though you can find a better job than dealing drugs.

To be fair and balanced, a nation whose police officers looked the other way while gangs of Pakistani men "groomed" young British girls, gang raping and sex trafficking them, can hardly complain when law and order breaks down. Or better, when criminals of color come to believe that they can get away with anything.

The Journal reports:

Patrick Regan, president of London charity XLP, which helps kids on issues including gang culture, anger management and education, said young people in parts of London carry weapons because they are scared, fueling a vicious circle of knife crime. “When you get a lot of killings around the same time, people tool up,” he said. Solving the problem requires improving young people’s opportunities to improve their education and find work, he added.

Reasonably enough, Mrs. May blames Mayor Sadiq Khan:

Some in Mrs. May’s ruling Conservative Party have blamed the mayor of London, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, for the rising violence, as he oversees policing in London. Mr. Khan has blamed cuts by the Conservative government for squeezing police budgets.

A spokeswoman for the U.K. Home Office said the government is taking action to restrict young people’s access to knives and other offensive weapons, such as banning online stores from delivering knives to homes.

For his part Mayor Khan, who had been notably silent about the violence, now tells us that he is angry and heartbroken. We appreciate his willingness to share his feelings. He has not, reports the Daily Mail, visited the families of any of the victims.

Instead, he blames the Tory government for cutting funding to police departments. Way to shift the blame, Sadiq.

And Home Secretary Rudd, in a show of strength, recommended that social media companies should censor online content and remove videos of homicide.

As a sidelight, the problem of knife violence has also overtaken Angela Merkel’s Germany. As you might expect, the culprits are the Muslim migrants that Merkel happily allowed into her country in a spasm of humanitarian concern. Evidently she did not understand that these people were not just seeking refuge. They are seeking to bring their culture to Germany. And their culture allows them to carry and to use knives. Heck of a job, Angela.

The Legal Insurrection blog (via Maggie’s Farm) notes that Merkel is happy to ignore the problem. If you don’t say anything, it doesn’t exist.

The Bavarian newspaper Merkur reports:

In light of repeated knife attacks, the German Police Trade Union (DPoIG) has called for the premeditated stabbing to be prosecuted as attempted murder, not merely as bodily harm.

“This move will enable an immediate pretrial detention and, in cases the act is carried out by a refugee, a deportation,” the DPoIG said in its response to a query by German news agency DPA. The newly appointed German Justice Minister Katarina Barley needs to act in this regard [the union maintained].

In DPoIG’s opinion the stabbing attacks and attacks with similar objects must result in a minimum prison sentence of one year. Currently the stabbings are “treated as bodily harm.” For [bodily harm] there is a maximum penalty, but no minimum penalty. Only when someone dies as a result: it is treated as an attempted murder or murder. “And that is wrong, because it is matter of pure chance if the stabbing ends up killing someone or not.”

The DPolG has joined hands up with the rival police trade union GdP to call for a nationwide registry of stabbing crimes in order to understand the extent of the problem. [Translation by the author]

And, of course, socialist politicians are up in arms against the police. They have hurled the worst insult they could imagine, comparing them to Donald Trump.

Legal Insurrection notes:

Last year, Ralf Stegner, deputy leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Merkel’s main coalition partner, attacked police union chief Rainer Wendt for merely stating that “criminals” too were “using open borders”. Social Democrat Stegner calling Wendt’s attempt to question the wisdom of open borders “disgusting and stupid”.

Sven Rebehn, the chairman of the German Association of Judges, called Wendt “the Donald Trump of domestic politics,” apparently the biggest insult a liberal can come up in Merkel’s Germany.

As for the statistics about violent crime committed by migrants, the blog explains:

Meanwhile, the German government burying its head in the sand hasn’t made the problem go away.

According to the annual crime report, released by the country’s Federal Crime Bureau (BKA) last year, there has been a 50 percent increase in migrant crime compared to the previous year’s figure. During that period, police booked more than 610,000 suspects of foreign origin, indicting the presence of a ‘disproportionately large’ size of criminal migrants in the country.

Newly arrived ‘refugees’, who made up for less than 2 percent of the German population, was suspected of carrying out almost 15 percent of all crimes involving serious bodily harm, rapes, and sexual assaults, BKA’s 2017 annual crime report revealed. Subsequent surveys and studies have confirmed the worrying trend. In Janaury 2017, a government-funded study carried out in the northern German state of Lower Saxony found that newly arrived ‘refugees’ were responsible for at least 90 percent of the surge in violent crimes.

Women Who Hate Beautiful Women

Once upon a time a zealous young radical, by name of Naomi Wolf, wanted to advance the feminist cause. She concocted a theory about what she called “the beauty myth,” and wrote a book explaining that society’s interest in female beauty was a vast right wing conspiracy to keep women out of the workplace.

In her words:

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us... [D]uring the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty... [P]ornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal...More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.^[1]

If one were in a cranky mood, one would remark that the rise in eating disorders and plastic surgery, coupled with the obsession with dieting might well have been the byproduct of feminism. Rather than throw knee-jerk shade on the patriarchy, we can note that feminism militated to undermine women’s happiness about being women… thus producing the negative effects that Wolf noted. 

Thanks to feminism women were no longer allowed to like being women. They were told that being a woman was a social construction designed to keep them pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen. Thus, the only life worth living was one that corresponded in all particulars to that of a man.

Even if you take the major article of feminist faith, the notion that women must postpone marriage and family until they are firmly established in their careers… consider that a woman in her mid to late thirties, competing against women in their twenties, will be at a material and biological disadvantage. She will feel a need to mask her age with all manner of beauty products and potions, with all manner of lingerie and sex tricks. True enough, it shows how superficial men are, but a minimal understanding of Darwin would have provided a more cogent explanation for the male attraction to more visibly fertile women.

Wolf is certainly correct to see that pornography is not a woman’s friend, we also understand that the national conversation about women’s issues invariably focuses, like a laser beam, on sexual matters, even on what Hamlet called “country matters.” No one forced women to put on their pussy hats and to march forward reciting The Vagina Monologues.

Unfortunately, Wolf’s analysis also reduces to the charge that women, especially those who are spending lunch hour at Sephora or browsing the racks at Nordstrom’s, are mere tools of the patriarchy. It assumes that they would never buy all of the unguents and lingerie if men had not somehow tricked them into doing so. Apparently, being strong and empowered, being financially independent, not needing a man for anything more than a sperm donation, turns women into marionettes… with men pulling their strings.

Will the irony never cease.

Anyway, the most minimal reflection will tell you that beauty is not a cultural construction, that women in all places and at all times have been concerned with it, and that, beyond women who are oppressed by degrading dress codes—ones that force them to cover everything up—all women care about how they look, about the face they show to the public. 

This face, I daresay, does not signify social standing as clearly as does a male uniform, but it ought, at the least, to show dignity and self-respect. The dress codes are different, but women are clearly inclined to show themselves to be beautiful. A married woman will not present herself in the same way as will an unmarried available women, but all women try to look beautiful. It is their right. It is their privilege. It should not be denounced as a crime against feminism.

And yet, around the time of Wolf’s book, a beautiful young woman who was not a feminist intellectual, suffered a strange phenomenon: women hated her because she was beautiful. It’s a strange form of misogyny, a function of competitiveness over a quality that can barely be quantified, but clearly, it suggests that we should not overestimate the joys of sisterhood. Within certain circles, cattiness reigns. In an age when sisterhood was powerful, presumably liberated women laid down some serious hate against a woman they perceived to be beautiful.

New York Magazine allows this woman, now in the fifties, to tell her story. She does not reveal her name... and a good thing it is. If she did the trolls would emerge from their caves to trash her to within an inch of her now-fading beauty. Her story is harrowing and compelling.

Of course, the woman in question gained many advantages from being beautiful:

Around eighth grade people started to tell me I was pretty. I was tall and willowy. I had a great figure and I never weighed more than 120 pounds throughout my 20s. I started modeling in high school and had waist length dark brown hair and brown eyes. When I do the whole makeup, eyelashes, high heels, gown look I am very intimidating.

My looks definitely opened doors for me. I worked in PR and as a news producer, writer, reporter, and talk-show host. I did acting in daytime soaps, TV commercials, and theater. I never interviewed for a job I didn’t get. I had a good degree from a good college, sure, but I think all things

being equal I’d get the job above other candidates because of the way I look.

But then there was the downside. Other women despised her:

One of the worst things about being beautiful is that other women absolutely despise you. Women have made me cry my whole life. When I try to make friends with a woman, I feel like I’m a guy trying to woo her. Women don’t trust me. They don’t want me around their husbands. I’m often excluded from parties, with no explanation. 

At this point you are thinking that perhaps this woman had an unacknowledged personality flaw, perhaps she suffered from bad character. Perhaps this is true. By her reckoning the judgment visited on her and the opprobrium cast on her was visceral and predated any effort to get to know her. She is describing an attitude that bespeaks bigotry, as in prejudgment or prejudice.

One of the worst things about being beautiful is that other women absolutely despise you. Women have made me cry my whole life. When I try to make friends with a woman, I feel like I’m a guy trying to woo her. Women don’t trust me. They don’t want me around their husbands. I’m often excluded from parties, with no explanation…. 

Throughout my life, competitive, attractive, wealthy, entitled women really hated me. At my first job after college, my female colleagues conspired against me. They planted bottles of half-drunk booze on my desk so that it looked like I was drinking on the job. Two women were obsessed with me. They told my boss lies to get me fired. I talked to some of my superiors about it and they put it to me straight: Look, it’s pure unmitigated jealousy. They really do hate you because of the way you look.

I was once engaged to a man who ended it after his sister-in-law spread gossip about me to his family. They threatened to cut his inheritance if he stayed with me, so he left. That broke my heart. I think her feeling was: I am the princess of this family, that woman must be eliminated. Later, after I married another man, I went through hell with my sister-in-law. She still doesn’t invite me on family vacations, she’s blocked me on Facebook.

And yet, as Judge Judy famously said, beauty fades. And the woman in question has discovered that when a woman reaches a certain age she becomes invisible. At just the time when you might crave it, the dread male gaze looks elsewhere. I trust that someone will say that it’s the fault of the patriarchy, but doesn’t that sound like an overindulgence in paranoid thinking?

Today, the women is in her mid-fifties, mother of two teenage boys. She describes her current situation:

These days, since I have aged, when I don’t wear makeup and I gain a bit of weight (which happens often) I pass as normal. As far as men, and anyone under 40 is concerned, I am invisible. They do not see me. I could walk across the street naked — it’s that bad.

Here’s the really sad part. It doesn’t matter how beautiful you were in your youth; when you age you become invisible. You could still look fabulous but … who cares? Nobody is looking. Even my young-adult sons ignore me. The irony is that now that I am older I am a much better person. I went through some suffering in my 40s — raised two kids, dealt with an alcoholic husband, watched my parents get sick and pass away — and I really grew. But as far as the world is concerned? I’ve lost all my value.

Being beautiful was a curse. And yet, now that she does not have as much sex appeal, she is barely noticed in public. She regrets what she has lost. You can’t win. 

Dershowitz and DiGenova on Mueller

Just in case you missed the Sean Hannity Show last night, here's a clip of a discussion between famed, retired Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and famed U. S. Attorney Joseph diGenova. It was highly informative, well worth your attention.

What Is Gaslighting?

Today New York Magazine advice columnist Ask Polly presents a letter describing an incredibly bad relationship. The letter writer she does not know whether she should stay or go. You will see, the answer is blindingly obvious. Equally clear is Polly's description of a relationship involving gaslighting.

As usual, we know nothing about these two people beyond their relationship. We do not know what they do for a living, whether they are living together or what their families and friends think of this. The inattention to detail is a symptom of a therapy-addled mind.

The woman in question, a modern liberated woman, is being emotionally abused. Nothing can be clearer. Polly sees the issue correctly and advises the woman to leave the relationships.

It is so self-evident that you have to wonder why this woman needed to ask an advice columnist. Does she not have friends and family who can support her in her hour of need? Or has her abusive boyfriend succeeded in taking such complete control of her that he has forced her to cut ties with her entourage? We would also want to know the financial circumstances of the two of them—is he rich or poor, successful or unsuccessful? And, what are her circumstances?

Again, we do not know.

Considering that the letter writer is being beaten down, diminished and demeaned-- as a means of mind control-- we suspect that she feels threatened by her beau. And that she fears his reaction if she walks out of the relationship. She might be wise to discuss a plan of departure with others and not to try to do it alone.

We do know that the woman is in therapy. Polly does not make much of the fact, but we ought to ask whether therapy, with its penchant for teaching the art of self-criticism, has taught her that a relationship based on constant fault-finding is normal or beneficial. She says that she is highly self-critical and introspects and ruminates a lot. Did she learn these bad habits from therapy?

You will notice the highlighted text below-- where she says that she believes that she has contributed consciously and unconsciously-- and that she is in therapy. This tells me that she is doing a psychoanalytic therapy, one that attempts to help her to discover her repressed unconscious motives… which, pace Freud, never turn out to be good. If you want the worst for everyone, don’t you deserve to be punished?

Polly also suggests that the woman is trying to heal her troubled boyfriend. I do not see it in the letter, but I suspect that Polly is correct. Many women imagine that their love is some therapeutic that it can cure anything... and that if their boyfriends are not getting better the problem is that they are not loving them well enough.

Apparently,the letter writer has also read too many advice columns, and is trying to let her feelings guide her. She should know better. Sometimes her feelings tell her to stay. Sometimes they tell her to go. This tells us that feelings give mixed messages and are generally not reliable. It also tells us that, between her therapist and her beau, she is lost and afraid, alone with her feelings.

We do not know whether her therapist has an opinion about whether she should stay or go. If the therapist has no opinion and acts as though it is all normal, or is what she deserves the letter writer should fire her therapist. We suspect that the boyfriend has not experienced therapy, but we would like to know more about his relationship with it.

You will have difficulty figuring out what is good and positive about this relationship. I offer the text of the letter, for your edification.

I never know when to stay or go. But for the first time in my life I feel a deep connection in a real relationship, and I hope you can shed some light on some healthy parameters for me.

I am 30 and in the second relationship of my life, the first and only following a “starter marriage” that ended a few years ago. I love this man deeply and dearly, but damn if he doesn’t hurt me all the time.

Not physically — but certainly emotionally. My life feels bogged down by criticism, by discontent from him. I never feel good enough, I can’t even seem to breathe or speak correctly. And, of course, it’s all my fault. I’m just hypersensitive at best, and manipulative/damaged/a bitch/a drama queen/immature/blame-shifting at worst.

I am more critical of myself than anyone, and spend a ton of time in my own head, so I know unequivocally that I can be a consummate fuck-up, and that I definitely contribute to our issues quite a bit in ways both conscious and unconscious (and yes, I have a therapist who is helping me work on this). I see so much of myself in every one of your readers. But, still, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that the bulk of our fights, our Groundhog Day replays of issues, and the hostility in this comes from him. We have moments of profound connection and joy, where I think we’ve made a breakthrough, only for him to switch right back to a short fuse and impatience and old habits the very next day — heartbreakingly, often after a fantastic day or outing.

He can’t see any of this. I don’t know what trauma could have caused this for him, but his brain is so, so deeply wired to avoid fault that he is incapable of even seeing the things I am talking about — he is literally blind to them. So naturally, in his mind, any problems or complaints or issues that arise are truly all me, and he means no conscious damage by it.

I sometimes feel like the only way to make this work is to live in a world where the sky is red — where I let him believe that I am the only one with issues, and that everything truly is my fault. Honestly, I kind of don’t mind that — at least it means maybe I can fix it. But things always spiral out of control again no matter what I do. For God’s sake, he tells me I am a drama queen for limping when I have a broken toe. I tell him I left my coffee on the train in a self-deprecating, annoyed-but-laughing-it-off kind of way, and he comes unglued at me for “just trying to make him feel bad” and for always having a problem or making things a big deal. He often lashes out severely even when blame wasn’t on anyone’s mind — apparently, even blinking or having a headache or feeling giddy about the sunshine is emotional terrorism to him.

I don’t need to be told that this relationship is unhealthy, if not emotionally abusive — I know it because I’ve experienced it. I thought I was beyond it, but I guess I was wrong. And I feel frustrated that I even need to ask this, but I just don’t have any truly healthy relationships in my life to model the answer — but how do you know whether to stay or go, when you know he is not vindictive or pathological, just profoundly messed up in similar ways you are?

I was trained when I was young to think of everything as black and white — people are good or bad, they love you or they hate you (and often at the flip of a dime). So I feel like the answer should be simple: You leave if you don’t feel accepted, if you feel like you are being made to feel guilty and crazy and unlovable, and that you do not love yourself and deserve whatever misery you feel if you stay. But it doesn’t feel simple or obvious at all to me. Ending it seems right, but it just doesn’t feel right. And since we are both fucked up and at fault, it seems even less cut and dry.

He has agreed to couple’s therapy, but nothing ever materializes. I know he loves me — I believe him in that completely. But he does not accept me, and I feel like his emotional punching bag. Are deep love and high highs ever enough to make a stressful relationship worth staying in and fixing, even at the risk of never having acceptance or flexibility from the other person?

Where Is the Goddamn Line Here

As Polly will point out, if she thinks that she is describing a man who loves her, she has some very serious problems. As I said, she has done too much therapy.

We might suggest that the boyfriend is paranoid, that he is suffering from a delusion to interpret everything as a function of her effort to manipulate him.

This tells me that his emotional problems are worse than we all think. A lot worse than we think.

In any event Polly describes it accurately:

But your boyfriend experiences your emotions — and your experiences, and all of your words and your insights and your challenges — as a manipulation. Breaking your toe is just a way of sucking up his attention. Making a joke about leaving your coffee on the train is just a way of making him feel guilty. Every time you interrupt his carefully calibrated world, it’s like you’re setting his house on fire for no reason.

When someone tries to destroy your sense of reality, to substitute an alternative sense of reality—as in forcing you to believe that a boy who thinks he’s a girl is really a girl—he is, as Polly says, gaslighting you. It’s a new modern term. It resembles brainwashing, but it also feels an awful lot like therapy.

Allow Polly her definition:

This is pretty much the definition of gaslighting, but I understand why you’re confused. Gaslighting sounds so INTENTIONAL. Even though, yes, your relationship is unhealthy and also qualifies as emotionally abusive, the abuse almost feels like a puzzle to solve. Because there he is, a nice-enough guy with good intentions who is roughly as dysfunctional as you are. You match. Won’t you run into the same or worse conflicts with anyone who has the same volume of troubles and issues that you have? If his intentions are good, shouldn’t you stick it out and figure out a way forward together? If he’s basically a good human being, why can’t you make it work? Can’t you fix this?

To answer the question, he is not a good human being. He is profoundly troubled and cannot engage a relationship without constant drama. He finds fault with everything she does or says, he interprets everything she does or says within the context of her relationship with him. If he isn't beating her up he is certainly beating her down.

For my part he is performing what some psychoanalysts would call transference analysis. In it analysts interpret everything the patient says or does as a function of his relationship with his analyst.

The Enigma of Hamlet

Columbia University Shakespeare professor James Shapiro takes on Princeton University Shakespeare professor Rhodri Lewis’s new reading of Hamlet in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books.

Shapiro presents the Lewis reading fairly. He is not persuaded of it, but he does not dismiss it.

For background, Shapiro lists some of history’s more compelling answers to the question: why does Hamlet not avenge his father’s murder… meaning, why does it not avenge it until he himself is dying?  

Hamlet himself asked the question: why does he delay? You might think that this is a salient question. You might think that this is a rationalization offered by a coward. You might even follow Freud and think that Hamlet cannot act because he cannot accept that he had wanted to kill his father, the better to copulate with his mother. And thus, that he could not kill Claudius because Claudius had acted on Hamlet’s unconscious desire. And Hamlet, having failed to complete his own psychoanalysis could not accept the desire as his.

Freud argued thusly:

His conscience is his unconscious sense of guilt. And is not his sexual alienation in his conversation with Ophelia typically hysterical?… And does he not in the end, in the same marvelous way as my hysterical patients, bring down punishment on himself?

Previously, Romantic poets saw themselves in Hamlet. They saw the brooding, melancholic prince frozen before his appointed task. And they concluded that he was too good for the world, too cerebral to take consequential action or too much of a poet to deal with political realities. After all, he only kills Claudius when he is certain that he will not need to succeed him as king.

For your edification, Freud’s interpretation is purely self-serving. It serves to sell psychoanalysis. In no way does it really illuminate anything about Hamlet. The Romantic poets did see that Hamlet, in many ways, was one of them. He was a thirty-year old student, at Wittenberg University, he rarely missed an opportunity to wax poetical, and he would rather be the king of his dreamscape than to be do what needs to be done and to become a king. 

One might say, that his becoming king was anything but self-evident, but the Romantic poets were not wrong to see Hamlet as one of them. A corpulent version, but nonetheless one of their own, a man who is temperamentally unsuited for the task at hand and who utters some highly memorable poetry while he is procrastinating.

Now, Lewis examines Hamlet the thinker and pronounces him a bullshitter. To say least, this is a stretch, but it is not implausible. Shapiro sums up the Lewis position:

Lewis’s Hamlet is “a thinker of unrelenting superficiality, confusion, and pious self-deceit. He feints at profundity but is unwilling and unable to journey beyond his own fears, blind spots, and preoccupations.” At least Claudius knows what sort of game he is playing; Hamlet, “unlike his uncle, is unable or unwilling to register in himself the corruption that he diagnoses in others.” “For all Claudius’s dishonesty,” and “for all Polonius’s self-serving lucubration,” Lewis concludes, “the young Prince Hamlet is the inhabitant of Elsinore most thoroughly mired in bullshit, about himself and about the world around him.” And Hamlet’s thoughts on the workings of providence are the “summa of his bullshit.”

I am not certain what would have been added if Hamlet had been a great thinker, a true philosopher. If Hamlet had been a true philosopher, his failure to act would have been more plausible. He would have been seriously miscast. If he does not know how to think, then perhaps he was more suited to action. Or, at least, he would have fewer excuses.

According to Shapiro Lewis sees Hamlet as a symptom of cultural collapse… though, I trust that the book offers more detail about how the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I were defined by cultural collapse. 

Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in 1601. Elizabeth I died in 1603… without a natural heir. Yet, Elizabeth was hardly an unsuccessful ruler… she had defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. She ruled effectively and well. Surely, the question of Elizabeth’s successor weighed on her subjects. Especially since the wars over religion, incited by her father Henry VIII, risked through the progeny of her elder sister, Mary, return with a vengeance.

If we are looking for historical parallels, the question of succession loomed over late Elizabethan England. Shapiro sums up Lewis’s reading:

Lewis’s Hamlet turns out to be “a victim, a symptom, and an agent” of a world built on hollow and self-serving humanist truisms and a “confused, self-indulgent, and frequently heedless” one at that. He doesn’t so much delay in taking revenge as discover that he isn’t all that motivated to act on behalf of a father who failed to secure his succession

The last point offers a faint echo of my own interpretation, which you can find outlined in more detail in my book The Last Psychoanalyst. Instead of seeing the issue in terms of desire, I see it in terms of filiation. 

Once the queen is exposed as an adulteress… as the ghost of King Hamlet tells his son… then Hamlet can no longer be certain that his father was his father. He does not know how long the adultery was taking place and thus whether or not Claudius was his real father. 

Fatherhood is always fraught with some level of uncertainty. But, in Hamlet’s case, if he doubts who his father is, why should he avenge King Hamlet. As for whether or not King Hamlet secured his son’s succession, apparently he did not. Whether he did not do so because he doubted that Hamlet was his son, or whether he saw that Hamlet, made of less stern stuff than he, might have the son of a licentious fool like Claudius, remains open. At the least, we know that King Claudius, in the first scene in court, named Hamlet his successor.

In any event, Lewis opens a line of inquiry that parallels my own. For which he deserves considerable credit.

Lewis believes, Shapiro tells us, that Hamlet shows the Elizabethan moral order collapsing of its own contradictions. Surely, a monarchy that is based on blood lines would have a difficult time finding a successor to a female monarch who left no children, especially when blood descendants of the Tudor line were alive in the person of the children of a natural-born child whose mother had been repudiated and divorced. 

We note, in passing that Hamlet was studying at Wittenberg University, where Martin Luther had taught.

Considering how much the succession issue was folded into the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in England, clearly, there was cause for anxiety and for dread of the future.

Lewis wants us to understand Hamlet as a rejection of humanism and an affirmation of the brutality of the world. This would make Hamlet a precursor of Thomas Hobbes. For the record, Hobbes was born in 1588, the year that the Spanish Armada was defeated, and thus would have been a teenager when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.

Shapiro sums up Lewis:

If I understand Lewis correctly, we have paid a steep political price for failing to heed Shakespeare’s warning in Hamlet that the world has always been amoral and predatory.

We are happy to see that Lewis is reconsidering the question of Hamlet. And yet, it does not makes sense to denounce Hamlet as a bad philosopher and then to say that Shakespeare is presenting a cogent philosophical argument about a cultural collapse.

I think it better to see the play dramatizing a moral dilemma, the dilemma that befalls a man who is called upon to act to restore his father’s good name while being given good reason to doubt that the man he had always believed to be his father was really his father. The fact that he was not quickly named the successor tended to show that he had reason to doubt. Thus, if we take Lewis’s point, that Hamlet was a pitiable philosophical mind, then perhaps the play dramatizes the internal conflict in his own mind, not over what he wants but over who he is … or is not.

It’s not so much about “to be or not to be” in the metaphysical sense of the question, but about whether he is or is not his father’s son… and what his moral responsibility really is.

For our edification, Shapiro closes his reading with a note on the situation of Shakespearean scholars in today’s American university. For those who love Shakespeare and who love literature, the decline and fall of this once noble discipline, murdered by the armies of political correctness, is sad indeed:

I wondered what it revealed about the disillusionment of scholars like Rhodri Lewis, who, Hamlet-like, expected, when their turn came, to inherit an academic kingdom. With funding for higher education slashed, literature departments downsized, full-time faculty replaced by adjuncts, and illustrious universities like my own choosing to hire only at the entry level to replace those of us who will be retiring, the prospects facing the next generation of academics are dismal. Depressingly, there is only a single position advertised this year in all of North America for a senior Shakespeare scholar. The need to make a splash, even to overstate claims, is understandable.

The You Tube Shooter: The Perils of Toxic White Masculinity

38 year old Nasim Aghdam walked into the YouTube campus armed with a weapon. She had developed a serious grievance against the company and had chosen this way to express her feelings.

She described herself as a:

… Persian Azeri female vegan athlete and animal rights activist promoting VEGANISM, the healthy and humane way of living

She entertained some highly sophisticated political opinions:

Be aware! Dictatorship exists in all countries but with different tactics!

They only care for personal and short-term profits and do anything to reach their goals even by fooling simple-minded people, hiding the truth, manipulating science and everything.

For my part I blame it on her toxic white masculinity.

You will be happy to know that her father, concerned about her propensity to commit acts of violence, had reported her to the FBI. The FBI was on the case.

Her father informed the FBI… it was on the case.

Mohammed bin Salman Speaks about Israel and Obama

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s extended tour of the United States reminds me of a trip that China’s Deng Xiaoping made to America in 1979. In Deng’s case the trip signaled a turn away from Communism and toward free enterprise. In the case of MBS, the trip signals a major geopolitical realignment. It also shows MBS's seriousness about economic reform and social liberalization.

One notes that a leader who can spend weeks away from his country feels confident of his hold on power. He is not worrying that someone might try to replace him in his absence.

We have watched with great interest the Saudi turn away from terrorism and fundamentalist Islam toward liberalization and a better alliance with America. We lauded the Saudi-American détente and the declaration of a joint war against Islamist terrorism in Riyadh last May. The media downplayed it because it was a Trump diplomatic success.

We are no longer sufficiently naïve to believe that one summit meeting will change the course of history. Yet, the work being done by MBS has been moving his nation in the right direction.

I was intrigued by his mention of the fact that some of the princes who were arrested during his recent crackdown were supporting terrorism. We had all suspected as much and are interested to hear his confirmation:

Yes, there are people from Saudi Arabia who financed terrorist groups. This is against Saudi law. We have a lot of people in jail now, not only for financing terrorist groups, but even for supporting them. One of the reasons we have a problem with Qatar is that we are not allowing them to use the financial system between us to collect money from Saudis and give it to extremist organizations.

Happily, we can read the transcript of Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with MBS in the Atlantic. Via Zero Hedge and Maggie’s Farm.

The Crown Prince made news by the way he presented himself, knowledgeable, well informed, in control.  He made news by declaring that the Jewish people have a right to their own state.

Goldberg writes:

Another key—though sub rosa—member of Prince Mohammed’s alliance is Israel, a country about which Prince Mohammed did not have a bad word to say. In fact, when I asked him whether he believed the Jewish people have a right to a nation-state in at least part of their ancestral homeland, he said: “I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation. I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land.” According to the former U.S. peace negotiator Dennis Ross, moderate Arab leaders have spoken of the reality of Israel’s existence, but acknowledgement of any sort of “right” to Jewish ancestral land has been a red line no leader has crossed until now. 

He continued to renounce any anti-Semitism that has emanated from Saudi Arabia:

Our country doesn’t have a problem with Jews. Our Prophet Muhammad married a Jewish woman. Not just a friend—he married her. Our prophet, his neighbors were Jewish. You will find a lot of Jews in Saudi Arabia coming from America, coming from Europe. There are no problems between Christian and Muslims and Jews. We have problems like you would find anywhere in the world, among some people. But the normal sort of problems.

Israel is a big economy compared to their size and it’s a growing economy, and of course there are a lot of interests we share with Israel and if there is peace, there would be a lot of interest between Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and countries like Egypt and Jordan.

Evidently, he is reaching out to Israel and to Jews around the world. He sees clearly the advantages of having Israel as a strategic ally.

George Bush had an axis of evil. MBS has a triangle of evil:

First in the triangle we have the Iranian regime that wants to spread their extremist ideology, their extremist Shiite ideology. They believe that if they spread it, the hidden Imam will come back again and he will rule the whole world from Iran and spread Islam even to America. They’ve said this every day since the Iranian revolution in 1979. It’s in their law and they’re proving it by their own actions.

The second part of the triangle is the Muslim Brotherhood, which is another extremist organization. They want to use the democratic system to rule countries and build shadow caliphates everywhere. Then they would transform into a real Muslim empire. And the other part is the terrorists—al-Qaeda, ISIS—that want to do everything with force. Al-Qaeda leaders, ISIS leaders, they were all Muslim Brotherhood first. Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of ISIS. This is very clear.

As it happened, President Obama offered his moral support to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and entered a deal that relieved sanctions on Iran, provided it with planeloads full of cash to promote terrorism, and offered it a glide path to the possession of nuclear weapons.

MBS offered his analysis of Obama’s naiveté. Need I mention that this aspect of his conversation has largely been ignored:

President Obama believed that if he gave Iran opportunities to open up, it would change. But with a regime based on this ideology, it will not open up soon. Sixty percent of the Iranian economy is controlled by the Revolutionary Guard. The economic benefits of the Iran nuclear deal are not going to the people. They took $150 billion after the deal—can you please name one housing project they built with this money? One park? One industrial zone? Can you name for me the highway that they built? I advise them—please show us something that you’re building a highway with $150 billion. For Saudi Arabia, there is a 0.1 percent chance that this deal would work to change the country. For President Obama it was 50 percent. But even if there’s a 50 percent chance that it would work, we can’t risk it. The other 50 percent is war. We have to go to a scenario where there is no war.

Evidently, the Iran nuclear deal was produced by ignorance and extreme misjudgment.