In Mother-Country MOMCOM: "Text Acts You!"

Globe Theatre - Shakespeare's Theatre

In previous posts, as regular readers know, I have linked or equated some of the machinations of U.S.eh? politics to the ways of characters in a play.

The linkage heretofore has not necessarily involved Shakespearean plays.

If you haven't yet, you might want to take a look at one or more of these Dredd Blog posts that deal with the issue: The Elections of Pontius Pilots - 3 , The State of The Onion Script, or Epigovernment: The New Model for three examples out of many.

In today's post let's take another serious look into the reality of that hypothesis.

I use the word "serious" in the sense that in general we are being played by government officials instead of being represented by government officials.

But let's look at it from a bit of a different angle, let's look at it in the sense of a specific aspect of Shakespearean Theatre.

Let's get a sense of my drift by reading a blog that specializes in this kind of thing, a dynamic that the title brings out:

Have you ever heard anyone say that when acting Shakespeare, the text acts you, the text does the work for you, or something along those lines? I’m willing to bet you have. But what does it mean that the text acts you? How does it do that? Doesn’t one normally act the text? If the text does the work for you, does that mean Shakespeare is easy?

Batteries Included

By the text acts you, most people mean that Shakespeare’s text is so rich in meaning and tells the story so clearly that it’s unnecessary to work to hard at showing the audience how you feel or telling the story. In other words, don’t color the picture that’s already colored-in.

If the text acts you, how come some actors sound great speaking the text and others give abysmal performances? It’s good advice to talented actors who tend to try too hard and over-act; it’s clearly an over-simplification that’s not meant for everyone. So when you hear it: Caveat Actor.

(In Mother Country Text Acts You!). The false sense of U.S.eh? history that exceptionalists promote is specifically designed to do just that.

Cow Farts Cause Climate Change

The Nobel-Peace Prize-Fighter

The presupposition is that the actors we call politicians or government officials are those from the greatest nation that has ever, ever existed.

The richest nation that has ever, ever existed.

The most exceptional nation that has ever, ever existed, because we have the genes of the best human beings to ever walk the planet.

Voting for them, then, is a choice of the best of two variations on the best possible themes in the best possible cultural environment in the best possible universe.

Thus, "the text acts you" Shakespearean thingy applies because it presents a subconscious play something like "who would want not to be part of the best of all worlds" by not accepting such a great script?

That propaganda covers up reality with a false history that we have been, and are still constantly being taught.

That historical play pretend constantly glorifies an image, an ideology, a story, yes, a fairy tale called "our history" that is very false:

Now comes “The Barbarous Years,” the next installment. It circles back to a period that most Americans don’t hear much about in school: the chaotic decades from the establishment of Jamestown (England’s first permanent colony in the Americas) in 1607 up to King Philip’s War (the vicious conflict that effectively expelled Indians from New England) in 1675-76. Bailyn’s goal is to show how a jumble of migrants, “low and high born,” sought “to recreate, if not to improve, in this remote and, to them, barbarous environment, the life they had known before.” As the title indicates, the story is as grim as it is fascinating: a group portrait in tones of greed, desperation and brutality. In recent years conservative writers dismayed by historical revisionism have flooded stores with books extolling the character and sagacity of America’s founders. “The Barbarous Years” is not one of them.

“Death was everywhere,” Bailyn writes of Jamestown. The colony was a commercial enterprise, started by the Virginia Company with the sort of careful financial evaluation that in the more recent past was the hallmark of the dot-com boom.

English people kept coming anyway, lured by a discovery that the Crown and company hated: tobacco. Hip, fun, disdained by stuffy authorities and wildly addictive, the smoking weed was an ideal consumer product. Thousands of migrants were willing to risk death for the chance to cash in on England’s squadrons of new nicotine junkies. The Chesapeake Bay became a barely governed swarm of semi-independent tobacco fiefs, owned by families, operated by squads of indentured servants, all squabbling with one another, Protestants against Catholics, English against other Europeans, everyone against Indians.

(A History of Oil Addiction - 4). The Washington Play "Alien Obama vs Agent Orange Boehner" seems to be getting sillier and sillier even as it waxes more and more dangerous:

Mr. Boehner ... Throughout our hourlong conversation, as is his custom ... takes long drags on one cigarette after another ...
...
... the president became irritated and said: "I'm getting tired of hearing you say that."
...
With the two sides so far from agreeing even on the nature of the country's fiscal challenge, making progress on how to address it was difficult. Mr. Boehner became so agitated with the lack of progress that he cursed at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "Those days after Christmas," he explains, "I was in Ohio, and Harry's on the Senate floor calling me a dictator and all kinds of nasty things. You know, I don't lose my temper. I never do. But I was shocked at what Harry was saying about me. I came back to town. Saw Harry at the White House. And that was when that was said," he says, referring to a pointed "go fuck yourself" addressed to Mr. Reid.

(Education of John Boehner?). It narrows the American world view down into a scripted "us vs them" mentality that conceives the world in terms of Republicans and Democrats, glued together by a phony plot that offers glory through both capitulating compromise as well as going over the edge of the flat Earth.

---

---