A lesson from the Bard

"who steals my purse steals trash, . . . But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him, / And makes me poor indeed." Shakespeare, Othello.

Thinking way back, most of us can probably remember Bush in his 2000 campaign, wherein he presented himself as an honest cowpoke on his way to Washington to restore honesty and decency, a kind of prep school Matt Dillon who would make short work of all this Clinton-era lying and politicking. A mere six years and two months after his inauguration, the charlatan disgracing the Oval Office is barely recognizable as that simulacrum of common decency created by Rove's PR machine. Such startling reversals ought to make us deeply distrust a couple of things.

One is that bane of the McLuhan Age, the media artifact constructed from sound bites and imagery. For many Americans (though never for me), Bush's affected pose as a no-nonsense executive with a constructive agenda, and a low tolerance for partisan bullshit, closed the sale. Even his inability to speak grammatically correct English was seen in endearingly positive terms.

The second thing to worry about is not so technology-dependent. The Shakespeare quote above is from Iago, the arch-villain of Shakespeare's great tragic meditation on the nature of duplicity and jealousy. Iago - the liar, the manipulator, the wounded narcissist, the false friend, the betrayer - goes so far as to defend his "reputation" for integrity as his most valuable personal asset. Thus, to further his evil designs, Iago dons the cloak of the righteous as part of his scheme of ingratiation and betrayal, and the vain (and vulnerable) Othello buys it hook, line and sinker.

I suppose humans are simply genetically programmed to accept, at the conscious level, the superficial portrayal of probity and noble purpose. We want to believe it, and the pathological personality relies upon this human gullibility for the success of his schemes, which depend upon the manipulations of emotion where other, normal people use the honest attachments of emotion to fulfill their own needs. Good people do not want to live their lives in a state of guarded anticipation that some new acquaintance, a man seemingly so honest, so forthright, so well-intentioned, is actually a mendacious, cold, merciless, soul-dead conniver, with an anti-human and anti-Earth agenda, who takes pleasure in the infliction of torturous pain on humiliated enemies, who loves the sulfurous stench and bloody carnage of battle. How could half the American people get this guy so wrong? How could 30% of the American people continue to do so?

Well, it really did happen, right here in the United States. There's a line from another exceptional piece of art that's brought to mind as the end of the Bush nightmare hoves into view. In "The Lives of Others," the German film about the Stasi of pre-Glasnost East Germany, the persecuted playwright Georg Dreyer can at last confront, after the fall of the Wall, a Stasi minister who ruined Dreyer's relationship with the love of his life. After the minister callously brags about the power he once enjoyed, Dreyer walks away with the line, "And to think that a man like you once ruled a country."