The Zeitgeist of Hamlet

Hamlet has made his way back into the limelight, the front page of the New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure, thanks to actor Jude Law and a new production. There seems to be a newfound respect for the role, the deeply personal ups and downs, ‘the readiness’ for teetering on the brink of going mad. And today, like a gravedigger or clown from the bard’s frame of a scene, the Times front page gives us a good look at a master carpenter who cannot find work and has given up trying.

The AMC series Madmen punctuates the upheaval to the personal and professional lives of those who work in an ad agency with President Kennedy sitting down with the nation to discuss clearly, calmly, straightforwardly and soberly in understandable terms the events as they were unfolding in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was one of his great moments before he left us, a rational thinker looking into the face of moral insanity. And certainly the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy reminds us of the politics of the generosity of the New Deal in the face of the disaster caused by financial market speculations. Such efforts represent an effort to find a moral guide to do the right thing in the face of the irrational. As such they do not exist so spiritually faraway from the efforts of Hamlet, just as Madmen lets us in on people dealing with issues of family and marriage and moral choices.



Indeed, people are scared, terrified, hanging on, disheartened, waiting for the next shoe to fall. Living ‘morally’ is all we can do. Of course, these days the word is a troubled term in need of redefinition from being pulled selfishly and opportunistically in so many ways, patriotically and otherwise.

Jesus Christ pointed out to the poor, the meek, the suffering, the sick and the mournful, highlighting them as a factor in the world as if they were the reason the world exists in the first place. His enemies called him, more or less, a moralizing little bastard with no credentials. When in fact he was quite the opposite of a bastard, his moral stuff was in fact on good solid grounds and that his work, amongst publicans and sinners, was in fact a fine credential. Happy are the meek, etc., because they may be associated with the very light that shines into the world and lends it its daily existence.

(Lincoln himself expressed the same ideas at the end of his career in the Second Inaugural in his phrases of binding up the nation's wounds, caring for the battle-scared and the widow, charity for all and a call to cherish a just and a lasting peace, all of which I have spontaneously remembered and rendered without the necessary quotation marks, the words being his, and his alone and not mine. Lincoln was, maybe, a pretty good pre-New Dealer.)

J.C. performed miracles. He had, in other words, read the old scriptures correctly, grasped their points and formed some good policy decisions.



The banking practices that got us into the sub-prime lending situation and all the attendant messes contain a proof of the Buddhist laws of illusion of selfishly minded investing, the morally questionably nature of exploiting the weakness of people’s sensual desires to have a roof, or at least the temporary illusion of one, over their heads. (A peculiar thing, the banks peddled, almost a kind of pornography.)

Reagan had already come along and wiped out the social safety net, the practical worldly attempt to do good works for the homeless, the mentally deranged, social security, etc., all with a libertarian smirk of holier than thou justness. Did he expect God himself to come down and wipe away such problematic types and cast them into a fire thus ridding us of the problem and letting us go on our way of making as much money and being as rich as we felt like personally entitled to. Reagan took away the money to pay for things, destroying a lot of perfectly healthy partner programs between private charity and public effort. He called the effort, and the illusions of wealth and promise detached from the basic troubles of human nature, godly names that sounded good and strong, words invoking trust, security, enterprise, decency, fairness, good politics, etc. He cast the efforts based on simple Christian morality to ease the pain of real people as the problem, and let wealth accumulate where ‘it belongs.’

Trickle down, was his further prophecy. People should be as rich as they wanted to be, and after having used the structure of society to get where they were, give nothing back in return, except, oh yeah, piddling service sector jobs that don’t pay the rent when times get tough. The same mentality sent jobs and opportunity for skilled labor’s development overseas so quickly that it never had a chance. Leaving the wealth of Walmarts in the hands of the few.



The national crisis is a unique opportunity, one that obviously doesn't come often here, one that potentially may lay some important issues clearly before us. We have a chance now to remember the compass of basic morality, the gold of the laws that pertain to our existence on the planet, hidden in plain sight amidst the greedy alchemic schemes of charlatans of illusion. We are left with, or rather given as a democratic tool, the Internet, to blog away in our poor obscurity, but to at least stand for some basic good things. We are left with the chance to say that now is not the time to be a Center-seeking party wanting to please the old Reaganites, but rather the time to be a wild New Dealer, finding a way to put people back to work, a charity that is the face of dignity itself, both in accepting it as well as tendering it.