On the Contrary

I have written a fairly long critique of the Obama Administration’s failures in their health care reform strategy that will appear tomorrow for those of you brave enough to plow your way through it.  But it occurs to me that all they had to do was pay attention to the lesson Shakespeare gave us in his play Julius Caesar about the fickled masses.

Remember that Caesar had become too powerful and Brutus and his cohorts had decided that the only way to save the Republic was to kill Caesar. Think of Caesar as the Medical Insurance Companies and Brutus as Obama.  Now there are all kinds of lessons here in does the ends justify the means, but that is not what I am getting at.  The conspirator’s greatest fear is how to keep the Roman masses in their favor.  Brutus, a great orator, is confident that he can go out into the forum and sway the crowd with his great communication skills.  Start to see a parallel here?

After the deed is done, Brutus stands before the masses in the forum and delivers a moving speech (”Not that I love Caesar less, but I loved Rome more”).  Even more analogous, Brutus says, “Believe me for mine honor, and have respect to mine honor, that you may believe me.” Do we detect a little over confidence and arrogance?  Then he leaves the forum to Anthony, trusting Anthony’s good will and his own skills as an orator.  Not to drive home the point too hard, but Obama assumed he spoke and others would understand, and he trusted the Republicans to then debate and negotiate in good faith.  Et tu Republicans?

Anthony, in one of the great speeches (I wanted to say soliloquies, but he was not alone) in Shakespeare’s writings, turns the fickled masses away from Brutus and chaos ensues.  “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”  And from these simple and elegant words he launches an oratory that destroys Brutus’s arguments.  Anthony has filled the vacuum left by Brutus’s arrogance and it will be Brutus’s downfall.  In today’s world, that could be loosely translated to “I have sketched out an outline, now debate on noble Congress!”

So where was the Obama Administration when this was read in high school sophomore English class?   Did they just read the comic book version?  Maybe like most young students, they just thought this was some old piece of outdated and irrelevant literature that was part of the torture of high school.  Maybe now in the throes of their middle age they are starting to see the insight and wisdom of William Shakespeare.  Or maybe not.  Maybe that insight will be delayed until, like me, they are in their 60s and have time to really reflect on their life and great literature, and wish that what they know now, they had possessed in their prime.  Youth is wasted on the young.