Jim Lobe writes:
With US President George W Bush on his first tour of major world capitals since the war in Iraq, his handlers are predictably depicting his stature as something akin to William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar “bestrid[ing] the world like a Colossus”.
- from: "A Threadbare Emperor Tours The World".
Good god! I can work with that.
Our exalted crotch swollen Colossus traipsing about the planet like some Shakespearean sovereign. But without all that fancy talk and all them funny soundin' big sentences and without, as far as I know, the wife with all the crazy bad dreams. In any case, it's all too much to ask for. What with summer stock season nearly in bloom. Thank you Jim Lobe.
There's much more too...you can read Lobe's entire report here And/or....here
That given. I am now pleased to present my own mini production depicting the seven stages in the life our Colossus mountebank, George W. Bush. 7 Scenes in a Final Act.
I call it:
As I See It; an unjoyous tragicomedy bastardization.
With profound apologies to William Shakespeare. Who I seriously doubt gives a hot-god damn at this point, about apologies or lack of apologies, profound or not, or bastardizations, or any of this one way or another. And who can blame him.
Ok...places everyone, lights down, curtains up, on with the show, break a leg, or whatever it is they say. Ssssshhhh. Listen.
And all the pundits and pol-ops merely players:
They have their exit strategies and their entrance requirements;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the child.
Mewling fluke of privileged charms.
And then the winsome schoolboy, with his skull and bones.
And vacant wellborn face, sleeping at Yale
Oblivious to intellect. And then the rover
Lies to burnish, stuporous, doleful, pallid
Clade to the listless eyebrow. Then a soldier
Full of warrior tropes, and played like a card.
Missing from duty, yet suddenly wreathed in laurels.
Seeking the bubble reputation
Levin for the canon's grouse. And then the injustice.
In sound and folly with crafted shapen lines
With guise and smear and suits of formal cut,
Fond of slantwise maws and tortured nuances
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts.
Into the lean and codpieced brigadier dragoon,
With spectaculars on cue and press on board
His boastful pose well played, a world too tried
For his cranks crunk; and his slow tangled tongue
Turning again toward churlish quibbles, quips
And siren songs resound. Last scene of all,
That ends this shortchange retrogress misery
Is no second curtain, and mere oblivion for a fool.
***
"Unchecked excess is the condition of the tyrant; it has been the cause of the premature fall of prosperous thrones and the lives of many kings." - William Shakespeare, "Macbeth"
[NOTE: show closes November 2004]