Tag: William Shakespeare

Do you know of this famous quote?

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
    — William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar”, Act 3 scene 2
      Greatest English dramatist & poet (1564 – 1616)

With the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, would it not behoove us to lay the question of a viable healthcare to bill to rest and let him take the victory of successful passage along with him as he is laid to rest? Isn’t NOW the time for all the wafflers, the Blue Dogs, the DINOs and the weasels to stop screwing around and pay one lasting, final tribute of honor to the man by ending this faux “bipartisan” compromise, putting the meat back into the bill and sending it sailing past the recalcitrant, criminally negligent GOP?

That’s the big question. What say you?

To Change or not to Change: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous Teabaggers

Or to take arms against a sea of Progressives;

And by opposing, lose them?

To fold: to Hope No more;

and by Hope to say we end

The facade and the thousand campaign promises

That won us the Presidency, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d.

To fold, to sell out;

To sellout: perchance to profit: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sellout what profits may come

When we have shuffled out of this Oval Office,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long a term;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of Rahm,

The Lobbyists’ wrong, the Blue Dogs’ contumely,

The pangs of despised wealthy donors, Tom Delay,

The insolence of Lieberman and the spurns

That patients who believe the uninsured unworthy take,

When he himself might his Honoraria make

With a co-op con?

Who would Progressives bear,

To grunt and sweat for penny ante donations,

But that the dread of something after Fold,

The undiscover’d backlash from whose blogs

No Villager returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather keep the Bills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus Change does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of corporate payola

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of sick people,

And enterprises of great greed and power

With this Public Option their shareholders turn away,

And lose their dividends.

–Soft you now! The fair Michelle!

Axelrod, in thy Polls

Be all my sins remember’d.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

— William Shakespeare

Court Jesters In societies where freedom of speech was not recognized as a right, the court jester — precisely because anything he said was by definition “a jest” and “the uttering of a fool” — could speak frankly on controversial issues in a way in which anyone else would have been severely punished for. Monarchs understood the usefulness of having such a person at their side.

“Welcome To The Machine”

— Pink Floyd

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Crossposted at Daily Kos and also at Truth & Progress

Lost in the hoopla and frenzy of the 2008 Presidential Campaign over the past couple of weeks was an overlooked (though important) anniversary in the Peoples Republic of China.  In February 1978 — a year or so after Chairman Mao Zedong’s death — the Chinese communist government lifted a ban on the writings of three of the greatest minds the world has ever seen.

This was a critical development for from their graves, three men long dead — Aristotle, William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens — were finally free to peddle their ‘subversive’ ideas about the complexity of the human condition.

Aristotle, William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens