To thine own self be true

good taste and sensibility. Two features sorely lacking in today’s crass, crazy, irrational, violent world.

complete with champagne bottle popping sound effect and glasses of vino offered between maestro and key orchestra members. In a Western world gone dumb and dumbed-down, very clever and eminently civilized.

flitting along like some uninhibited butterfly until the maestro turns to the audience and says, laconically “Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…”

than watching one of the recorded fabulous New Year’s concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic while sipping coffee and munching on Dad’s Classic oatmeal cookies as the sun comes gradually up on the nearby trees and houses through a large patio window.

One set of parents lets a child die rather than provide necessary medical attention and help.
Another allows a child to roam freely unsupervised in a rural area.
Both children die needlessly and tragically alone.
Maybe it’s time for a basic mandatory course for parents on how to parent with respect to the healthy and safety of children. Maybe we’ve reached the point in the Western world where we cannot necessarily assume that all parents automatically know best or do their best to raise and protect their kids. Maybe kids’ rights ought to supercede those of negligent or ignorant parents.

before we fall.
Tell it all brothers and sisters.
Tell it all.”
–Alex Harvey (for Kenny Rogers and The First Edition)

(Conrad in 1904; photo by Beresford, Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)

“What makes mankind tragic is not that they are victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well–but as soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife–the tragedy begins.”

“The fact of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about….If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men.”

And when the European economy and Europe collapse, how many Albertans will still be queued up in big-ass monster trucks for cheap coffee at Tim’s?

Frank Shuster’s great recurring line in “Rinse the Blood off My Toga”, Wayne and Shuster’s classic spoof of Julius Caesar and private detective tv shows of their day. They knew what the core of this tragedy was really about.

To be sure, Shakespeare’s play is all about trust and its recurring common failure in public life. Caesar not trusting his senators and various warnings as well as his own intuitions. Cassius, the brightest man in the play, not sure if Anthony can be trusted, and caving in to Brutus twice against Cassius’s intuitions and better judgement twice in the play. The ignorant mob being swayed first one way by Brutus, then Mark Anthony, Brutus trusting (wrongly) that Anthony will not speak against him and the other conspirators. After Caesar’s murder, Anthony making plans with Octavius to turf their triumvirate partner against the rebels, Lepidus, Brutus falling out with Cassius over bribes and lack of financial support, not knowing whether he can trust his old friend. On and on.

Shakespeare repeatedly challenges the audience to find instances of abiding or lasting trust instead of non-stop betrayals and ongoing, widespread suspicion. When authority (Caesar) is unjustly and murderously removed (note Pompey suffered the same fate in the play’s antecedent action), fantastic doomsday-like horrors are unleashed upon the world, as in the unnatural chaos that foreshadows all the violence and tragedies in this play. And, thus, with the betrayal of trust ,”The evil men do lives after them”, and those who have been disloyal and selfish all end up dead. Much as in Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, the destruction of loyalty, order, love, trust, and friendship inevitably leads to comeuppances, chaos, and mass deaths.

Have the times changed much since Shakespeare’s day? Who can you trust today?

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ps/ (pictured above–recommended MGM DVD–The best film adaptation of this classic play is the 1953 movie with Marlon Brando as Anthony, James Mason as Brutus, and John Gielgud as Cassius.

“There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.”
–Joseph Bronowski