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4-22-05, 8:27 am
With the Bush administration, I must admit: I don’t worry so much about the lies, as much as I worry about the truth – particularly when it gets “weird.”
Let me explain:
From behind the backstage curtains, I watch the three “weird sisters” gliding about on the desolate heath, arms waving rhythmically through the fog, voices chanting dark hymns to dark intentions.
I nervously wait for my cue, adjusting my kilt and sword, checking the bandage around my head, whispering my lines.
Like Macbeth, George W. Bush claims for himself an absolute faith in weird truth. (Consider how often he speaks in absolutes of “faith” and “fate.”) It was his unshakeable, uncritical faith in weird truth that created the immoral Iraq War – and justified the murder of thousands of Iraqis.
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It’s become something of a tradition at my school for teachers to play bit parts in the yearly Shakespeare production. So this year, I am playing the wounded sergeant, giving news of Macbeth and battles won to
King Duncan.
As the weird sisters finish their lines – wailing and shrieking – the lights come down. They slip off stage, brushing by me as they move into the wings.
For a fleeting moment, as the fog clears from the stage, I consider the word “weird,” an ancient Anglo-Saxon word, dating back more than a thousand years, first written down in the great work of Anglo-Saxon literature, Beowulf: “Gaeo a wyrd swa hio scel” (“Fate goes as ever as fate must” – as translated by Seamus Heaney).
For the Anglo-Saxons, “weird” meant fate, that deep-rooted belief in the power of nature, of gods, of darkness – a deeply ingrained belief in forces beyond the control of man. Even in Shakespeare’s day, some 500 hundred years later, “weird” invoked that deeper, darker sense of the word.
The Age of Reason would domesticate “weird,” as it domesticated “faith,” changing its meaning to the modern sense – a curious, though innocuous, “strangeness.” That is, until the age of George W. Bush.
But the yellow and red lights come up now, and that’s my cue. I stagger onto the stage, collapse by a painted, wooden rock, and wait. From the opposite side, King Duncan enters with his courtiers. The King asks what knowledge I have of Macbeth and – as the weird sisters put it – “the battle lost and won.”
So I report the truth – or “sooth” as my character puts it – to the King, praising Macbeth, while thrusting and swinging my bloodied sword in imitation of Macbeth’s evisceration and decapitation of his battlefield enemy, Macdonwald.
I finish my lines and head off stage, where I quietly slip down the back way and into the theatre to watch the players. In the back of my mind, I am still thinking of Macbeth, and of the weird sisters, and of George W. Bush.
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As I sit and look up at the stage, Banquo and Macbeth are confronting the weird sisters for the first time. The two Scottish lords are at once repulsed by, and attracted to, the three dark figures on the desolate heath – and so too are they entranced by their words.
When Banquo asks them who they are, they respond with seductive sooth. They greet Macbeth with a title of
lordship he does not have, and then as King. They then address Banquo as the father to a long line of kings.
Both Macbeth and Banquo are incredulous. The suggestions of a kingship and of being father to kings are too far-fetched – until messengers from King Duncan arrive and, as though fulfilling prophecy, award Macbeth the weird sisters’ mentioned lordship. And thus, Macbeth is smitten with ambition.
Were the weird sisters’ prophetic truths beyond the control of Macbeth or Banquo? Macbeth and Banquo would answer differently. And in the 400-year-old play, the different answers meant life and death.
In the age of George W. Bush, they do again.
Banquo understood that weird truth has many faces, that personal action and fate are inextricably intertwined, one playing off the other, neither laying full claim to sooth. “Sometimes to win us to our harm,” he tells Macbeth, “the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles to betray us in deepest consequence.”
But Macbeth sees it differently. Macbeth accepts the “honest trifle” as absolute weird truth and changes his ambition accordingly. His faith in weird truth justifies his murdering a king, murdering his friend Banquo, and murdering the family of Macduff. Meantime, in the relentless pursuit of his weird truth, Macbeth wreaks havoc on the Scottish nation. “Some say the earth was feverous, and did shake.”
The argument here is more than literary playfulness. It is an argument that cuts to the heart of what informs America’s political leadership. Like Macbeth, George W. Bush claims for himself an absolute faith in weird truth. (Consider how often he speaks in absolutes of “faith” and “fate.”) It was his unshakeable, uncritical faith in weird truth that created the immoral Iraq War – and justified the murder of thousands of Iraqis.
Like Banquo, there are many who point out the “honest trifles” (remember the belief in WMDs?) and the dangers of letting them “betray us in deepest consequence.” But like Macbeth, George W. Bush is blindly committed to his faith, to his weird truth. And now he has blood on his hands, with more murders lying before him.
We can only wonder: what exactly did the weird sisters say to George W. Bush on that desolate heath prior to the Iraq War? Because I don’t worry so much about his lies, as much as I worry about his absolute faith in weird truth.
--Steven Laffoley is an American writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. You may e-mail him at
stevenlaffoley@yahoo.caor steven_laffoley@yahoo.com.
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