By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Horror in Boston, a craven vote to defeat modest gun safety measures, toxins in the mail, a factory explosion in West, Texas that rocked the Richter. Lord knows, this was a week that demanded pleasant diversions, if one could find them. I wasn’t overly picky. While watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for the umpteenth time, AMC’s version with story notes, I discovered that one of Willy’s wonky yet profound asides — “Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?” — is from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Who knew? And you’ve got to give it to Will, the Bard knew how to get to the point. Too bad we don’t.
We keep peeling the onion of our dysfunction, but never quite get to the core. Our collective fancy — our desire, our aspiration, our vision — continues to be thwarted at every turn, blocked by opposition and marked by violence. Here in the United States, the majority seems to have a decidedly liberal bias, hungry for economic fairness, reforms to immigration, gender and gun control policies, an end to war on drugs — to war in general, along with its crippling cost — and a return to the kind of government that helps rather than hinders. We worry for our environment, our retirement and our children, but evidently not enough to blast through the confusion and power mongering to establish a renewed commonwealth.
If we’ve made it through to the 21st century with most of our faculties — essentially, if the majority of our BBs are still tightly packed in their tube — then we’ve begun to question everything, aware that PR disinformation campaigns have come to drive the machinery of our times. We grind our teeth over religion gone out of the parlor and into our private lives, over provincialism masquerading as morality, over educational standards gone to hell.