“So thanks to all at once and to each one whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone,” said the under-characterized Malcolm with a flourish. Lady Macbeth rolled her eyes from behind her tree branch, as the men around her reveled in their masculinity and C-sections.
“I know it seemed like Shakespeare put me back in my properly gendered place,” she soliloquized quietly, with a surprisingly meta understanding of her unjust treatment, “but, as my more intelligent audience members guessed, I faked my guilt and insanity and suicide once I realized that my husband could not handle murder and power in moderation.”
Picking at the spots of blood still caked on her hands (that had not even been acting, women who orchestrate murders always have blood under their fingernails), she pondered possible careers and names. “Shall I go with Hillary, or will that perpetuate the misogynistic notion that all competent, powerful women are bitches?” she wondered. “This is eleventh century Scotland, but I’m definitely a Democrat. I know evil is not typically part of the party platform, but I do support gay marriage and cutting military spending. Down with the patriarchy!” she said. Lady Macbeth is also pro-choice.
Malcolm’s ears perked up having heard mention of feminism from behind an unsuspiciously womanly shaped tree branch. Lady Macbeth frowned, realizing that now and a millennium from now, you have to be quiet about gender equality or men will get offended. She also wondered if her voice was beginning to blend with the writer’s, who incidentally just started reading an autobiography of Hillary Clinton. “Unsex me here! Screw your courage to the sticking place!” Lady Macbeth whispered to stay in character.
She was still standing in the middle of a battlefield, and a particularly sparse and boring one because Shakespeare writes minimal stage directions. “Can I stand here being self-aware and voicing Madeleine’s political beliefs, or is there more to me? Do I have the potential for a meaningful plot arc, or am I limited by the abilities of a high school student who has not attempted creative writing of any sort since middle school, probably for good reason?” she asked, regaining control of the narrative. “Why do I ask so many questions?”
Lady Macbeth considered bringing her incompetently evil husband back, but then remembered that his severed head appeared on stage and could not think of a way around that one. Also, she does not need a man to complete her. “Are there any other tolerable characters in this play?”
The three witches appeared on the field which was slowly becoming more detailed and grassy and did a musical number like the one in Act IV that most don’t find as bizarre as they should. Concluding with a pas de bourree, they looked expectantly at Lady Macbeth, who after a ten day hiatus had forgotten if there was a plan for the rest of this story and was also feeling rather upset because she had just finished illegally binge-watching her favorite show about pies and murder and Lee Pace. Lady Macbeth also hopes Agent Carter gets renewed, because she understands how hard it is for women who accomplish just about everything in the male-dominated workplace without any credit.
“Double double toil and trouble, please stop daydreaming about hot British women,” said the weird sisters, whose favorite show is Dollhouse, in unison. They had given up on trochaic tetrameter because it is hard. The first witch, whose name is Maurice, realized that she had hurt Lady Macbeth’s feelings. It had been a very long day for her, and she was tired of bearded women putting other women down.
“No more slut shaming!” said Lady Macbeth, which wasn’t exactly relevant but always a phrase worthy of sharing. “My sweet malevolent nursery rhyme-y ladies, I find your anti-Semitic recipe on page 357 of Prentice Hall’s Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes rather problematic, but otherwise I think you three have a lot of potential.”
Lady Macbeth, Maurice, Helen, and Bertha sat down together in a nearby tearoom to discuss their backstories. Maurice, who finds Earl Grey with a blueberry scone especially delightful, went first.
“Shakespeare initially portrayed me as a chestnut-stealer who cuts off sailors’ thumbs, but I wasn’t always this way,” she said, her mascara running. Maurice wore heavy makeup at first because she felt the need to overcompensate for her scraggly beard, which everyone relentlessly teased her about in middle school. Over time, however, she has found her makeup to be fun and empowering. Maurice puts loving herself first, of which Helen and Bertha are very supportive. Her tale is being paraphrased to omit all of the swearing, for Maurice has quite a mouth. Helen and Bertha find this quality of Maurice endearing. The weird sisters love each other very much and enjoy the bonding experiences of dance numbers, life-ruining, and lesbian witchcraft.
“What about you, Lady Macbeth?” asked Bertha. Her beard was a beautiful auburn that brought out her eyes. “What made you commit murder?’
Sipping her English Breakfast with a dash of cream and no sugar, Lady Macbeth pondered how to answer. To her surprise, she did not want these conniving witches to think poorly of her murdering instincts. “You see,” she said, and hesitated. Was Lady Macbeth finally ready to reveal her mysterious character motivation? She continued to hesitate. The weird sisters looked at her expectantly. Lady Macbeth took a deep breath. Lady Macbeth exhaled and inhaled and exhaled and inhaled. Lady Macbeth cleared her throat. She paused again for dramatic effect.
“It was a means to an end. I knew that if I could murder Duncan and become queen, I could operate through my useless, weak husband to establish peace and prosperity in Scotland.” Lady Macbeth had planned to establish a democratic republic with healthcare and an abundance of welfare programs for its citizens, complete with a balanced budget and no drones.
The bearded women giggled. “Yes of course, silly,” said Helen. “That’s the whole reason we told Macbeth about his future; it was our plan to help you towards your perfect, happy, matriarchal society.”
“Unfortunately,” sighed Helen, “the men ruined our hopes and dreams.”
“Not all men,” whispered an earthworm outside that would later be reincarnated into William Shakespeare. A neighboring earthworm explained to Shakespeare the core ideals of feminism and how he might even accidentally be perpetuating misogynistic values and social norms in his daily actions.
“Well,” said Lady Macbeth, “I’m thankful for this opportunity to finally voice my side of the story through a critique of political and gender values in America. I hope we achieve peace in the Middle East soon and someday create the wonderful society that I tried to.” Lady Macbeth and the three witches laughed at the absurdity and disappeared into their spaceship to look for a less morally corrupt society, in a manner reminiscent of the excellent movie Hamlet 2, starring Steve Coogan.
Mentioning Lady Macbeth and Hilary Clinton in the same breath seems terribly unfair to the former. At least Lady Macbeth had some semblance of a conscience. Clinton is just your garden variety psychopath.
Sheesh. I don’t think Clinton’s a psychopath. She’s just a politician.
Sadly, rumor has it Agent Carter will not be renewed for a third (mini!) season.
Clinton of course doesn’t have a psychopathic atom in her body. But Suat may otherwise have a point: As Mary McCarthy pointed out, a difference between Mr. and Ms. Macbeth is that the latter is capable of hypothetical thought, hence capable of empathy (which kills her).
She sure displays a lot of the attributes of a psychopath. The inveterate lying, the flouting of laws and accepted measures of common decency, the aggressive smiling murderousness, the clear lack of remorse. The current job description is a good cover which fits in with some lists of the most attractive jobs for psychopaths – salesperson, civil servant, lawyer, CEO etc. Sociopaths/Psychopaths constitute 1% of the population (apparently) so Clinton is not some rare bird.
Sociopaths and psychopaths aren’t the same thing – except in that neither of them actually exists except as artistic metaphors that were mistaken for science by the same people who mistook psychology for a science, and survive in pop science.
Yup, they’re not the same which is why Clinton doesn’t actually fit the old description of a sociopath. And you may be entirely correct about the sad delusions of psychology but since it’s still a category of sorts in DSM V (under anti-social personality disorder I think), we’ll just have to live with it for the time being.
While we’re on the subject, I’ll confidently set my loathing for Clinton against any upper middle class person’s in the industrialized world, but I would say that your making a monster of that consummate mediocrity is exactly the wrong way to attack her.
Bernard Shaw explains (Don Juan addressing the devil): “Your weak side, my diabolic friend, is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation. Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.”
Attempts to critique/applaud candidates in terms of their perceived characters are rarely convincing and almost always biased. Line up your political agenda with the candidates’ and choose from there. The rest is performance and advertising. You can no more call a candidate a sociopath than you can a brand of mouthwash. When you watch a reality TV program, do you believe you’re getting anything like reality? The shows are scripted, directed and edited to produce whatever characters and plots are most entertaining. And there’s no more entertaining reality TV show than the primaries. Like Lady Macbeth above, it’s all metafiction, since candidates are also consciously trying to craft themselves into likeable characters. But don’t focus on those make-believe characters instead of the political issues at stake. If you disagree with Clinton’s positions, don’t vote for her. If you imagine you know something about her inner life (and, since the topic is sociopaths, the neural structure of her actual brain), then you probably shouldn’t be voting at all.
A slight digression, but recent pop culture tends to celebrate sociopathy (or psychopathy, or narcissism or whatever trendy name for anti-social personality disorder), so long as a the sociopath is: a) male, and b) good at his job. This helps explain the appeal of Trump. (By Trump, I mean Trump the character, not the person, though the person might be a sociopath, or just a dick, who knows). It also helps to explain why Hilary, (the person), who is undeniably great at her job of maintaining the neo-liberal hegemony, is hampered by the notion that she’s a sociopath.
@Chris Character critique worked pretty well for Cicero.
@Nate A. Or maybe Hillary actually kind of sucks at her job. Margaret Thatcher made ostensible ideological opponents from Cristopher Hitchens to Meryl Streep fall in love with her. Conversely, Romney’s a man and everybody hated him.
Or, more recent example, nobody likes Ted Cruz.
I always thought Hitchens was overly focused on character critique. Did American history go the way it did mostly because Kissinger, Nixon, Reagan, the Clintons, et al were bad people, or did it have more to do with institutional forces and an overall political culture? I mean, they were bad people, but Vietnam (for example) happened across the administrations of three Presidents who didn’t like each other.
Nice point, Nate. Contemporary U.S. culture can stomach and even celebrate male jerks (presumably because “jerk” and “male” don’t contradict traditional masculinity norms), but can’t stomach female jerks (presumably because traditional feminine norms include non-jerk traits like “nurturing”).
@Chris
“Attempts to critique/applaud candidates in terms of their perceived characters are rarely convincing and almost always biased.”
Clinton has no ideology other than that she should be president, which means she has no positions she won’t sacrifice, no rules she won’t flaunt, no obligations she won’t renege if she deems it politically expedient. And as for your earlier point Noah, I think it’s perfectly fair to call her some kind of monster. She changes her positions to whatever she thinks is in vogue at the time. She flaunts public oversight (via FOIA or Congress) and basic security protocols by hosting emails on a private server (the address of which was known by LinkedIn, and almost certainly foreign governments, making her the biggest security liability in America because she thought her privacy was more important than fulfilling her duties as Secretary of State). She bashes the poor and keeps pushing tough-on-crime legislation, which are known to eviscerate the poor. And, worst of all, she lauds Henry Kissinger (the architect of the firebombing of Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of innocent Cambodians and paving the way for Pol Pot’s murderous regime) as her foreign policy model…which makes sense given her role in causing the wars in Yugoslavia (killing and/or displacing hundreds of thousands of people), Libya (which is still an ongoing nightmarish bloodbath), and her personal profiteering through the work of her foundation off of the civil war in Colombia (where her organization promotes neoliberal policies that prolong and worsen the civil war there). And I almost forgot NAFTA (which she still praises) which impoverished and displaced 2 million Mexican farmers and exacerbated there troubles with the drug war, which is nearly a full blown civil war. Suffice it to say, the fact that she is a monster is just an explanation for her reprehensible policy record and positions. I apologize for droning on about it, but I think it’s always worth recapping the ways in which Hillary Clinton is horrible, in every respect.
And I have a very hard time believing that the election of Hillary Clinton would bring us any closer, at all, to a matriarchal utopia, as per the piece above. She has demonstrated she is perfectly comfortable within the confines of neoliberal imperialist patriarchy.
Ah Christ, and now I just want to vote for Hillary out of spite. Okay, off to read whatever hackwork Paul Krugman has churned out today to get my hate back in equilibrium.
@Graham
Is Ted Cruz good at his job? He’s built a lot of his political identity on being an obstructionist, which is why his party hates him, and no matter how often he tries to leverage his willful incompetence as a virtue (filibuster anyone?) the public seems unimpressed. And Romney was hobbled by the fact that one of his major successes on the job as governor was the healthcare plan on which Obamacare was based. Add that to the fact that most people really don’t know what private equity firms do and it’s no wonder he couldn’t leverage his success despite the fact that he came-off like Manchurian kill robot designed in a basement at Brigham-Young.
As to Hillary, I’m not sure I accept that her job is to make ideological opponents like her. That’s something a president or prime minister does. If you’re a Senator you play for your district, and as a Secretary of State you play for American hegemony.
Addendum: I should never write first thing in the morning after hosting a 48 hour event. Those sentences are ugly, rambling things.
@Nate My point was that Clinton is conspicuously bad at making even her own party like her, never mind the opposition, which may or may not be because she’s a jerk who is also a woman, but in any case, there are jerks who are also women who have done better, and jerks who are men who done about as badly.
Romney was quite well liked by the Republican electorate, actually. The media hated him, but that’s not really the same thing. He also did fine in his 2012 run; economy and presidential favorability were against him, and he got about as much of the vote as you’d expect a generic republican to get given those factors. Thins like the 47% comment didn’t seem to hurt him at all in the long run. Same is true of HRC, who Democrats like a lot if you look at polls (they like Sanders too.)
The idea that HRC is uniquely shape shifting for a politician…I don’t really buy it. She’s been a center left politician basically forever. She’s moved somewhat left with the party, though it’s hardly as striking as republican shifts (because that party has moved farther.) Trump is the one in the campaign who truly lies all the time and has no particular political philosophy.
This is definitely true though: “She has demonstrated she is perfectly comfortable within the confines of neoliberal imperialist patriarchy.”
Cruz is hated because of what he does and says. He’s a Congressman who runs on how his colleagues are the evil empire. As a result, his colleagues hate him. He’s kind of not competent as a campaign strategy; failed obstructionism is what many republican voters want. Suggests he’d be a terrible president though (see Bruce Rauner.)
In general, if you pay attention to politics at all, you’re probably in a bad place to assess the likability of candidates. Vast majority of people don’t tend to follow these things closely, and impressions are very different.
The guy who really is not liked this time around seems to be Bush, and I suspect that has more to do with his name than with anything he’s done or said.
Huh,
Okay, that’s weird, I tried posting the same comment twice and it didn’t work. Then I accidentally hit “add comment” in the middle of a test comment, and that works. Okay, let’s try one more time.
re popularity (relevant links and commentary under section “The Unfavorable Favorite”): https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/karp-bernie-sanders-electability-clinton-republicans-trump-election/
re the economy and presidential favorability, both were worse in 2012 than in 2000, when the Democrat lost.
Yes, but incumbents have a huge advantage, whereas 3rd terms are very tough. (Gore also seems to have run a particularly crappy campaign, in part because he distanced himself from Clinton.)
I didn’t say anything about electability. (I think Sanders is slightly less electable, but that’s because perceived radicalism loses you a point or two, not because of likability.) Polls always show Clinton quite popular with Dems though (Sanders is popular with Dems too.) In fact, the Jacobin article you linked says exactly what I did; that Clinton is popular with Democrats.
She’s *not* popular with others…but that’s partisanship for you. Jacobin seems to assume Sanders’ popularity with non-Dems would hold up in a general election campaign, but I’m extremely skeptical of that.
The best election scenario for Dems remains a Trump third party run. Otherwise, it’s going to be very close, no matter whether it’s HRC or Sanders. Running for a third term is always hard, and the economy is still sluggish. Obama’s approval rating has ticked up, though, which is a slightly hopeful sign. People assuring themselves it’s going to be a cakewalk for Dems because the GOP sucks are fooling themselves though, imo. (If GOP nominates Trump, it’s a different story…but they’re not going to do that.)
She’s popular with self identified Democrats, which is of course not the same thing as everybody who votes Democratic.
Yes, running for the third Obama term could very easily end in defeat. (And if it doesn’t, same goes more so for running for the fifth term in 2024.) So, better nominate the Democrat who isn’t. (Not that we will. Of course, everybody who claims they’d be totally okay with him except, gosh, they just can’t see him winning the general election, is lying.)
First off, I apologize for the obvious vitriol in my last comment. There wasn’t a good reason for it. Hillary just….really rubs me the wrong way.
Anyway, @Noah
“She’s been a center left politician basically forever.”
Except when she worked for Barry Goldwater. And she is center-left by American standards, but to be honest with ourselves, that means right-wing, and not center-right, but solidly in the right wing. She’s more war-hawkish than McCain, for a start. She may be perceived as center-left, but she acts like a neocon. And the reason for that is that there really isn’t a left wing in American politics. There are fascists (Trump, Carson, kinda the Tea Party), almost fascists (most of the GOP, especially McCain), right-wingers (anybody labeled a “moderate” in America, like Clinton) and then moderates (like Sanders, Warren, Russ Feingold, Jesse Ventura, etc). The left wing is a non-presence in American politics, until you granulate down to the local level.
“Trump is the one in the campaign who truly lies all the time and has no particular political philosophy.”
This statement is true, but the only difference between Trump and Clinton is that Clinton is better at faking having a philosophy. Clinton’s only real philosophy is that she is entitled to the presidency now. She only takes positions as a political tactic, exhibit A being her support of gay marriage…in 2012, well after it was already supported by a majority of Americans. Granted, Obama was the same way, but that’s a knock on Obama rather than a boon to Clinton.
“Hillary just….really rubs me the wrong way.” That proves you’re sexist, and therefore worse than Hitler.
Also racist, for implications of which see previous.
Graham, nobody’s accused Petar of any of those things. It’s you who’s escalating. Please don’t.
fwiw, I think Sanders would do slightly worse than Clinton in the general election; people perceived as radical or out of the mainstream tend to lose a point or two. It’s hard to tell whether that would swing the election or not; I think it’s going to be close whoever runs. I’m personally hoping Trump runs third party, which I think is the best bet for a Dem landslide.(I think Sanders could definitely win if Trump ran third party, which isn’t at all an outlandish scenario.)
Sure, nobody’s accusing Petar of any of those things. You have to do it with more words or it looks bad.
If Trump runs as a third party, I predict the same result as Ross Perot in 1992 – takes about an equal amount of votes from the other two candidates with net no effect. Heck, if people get bored of him talking about immigration, he can even make his signature issue the imminent free trade deal that a candidate named Clinton totally promises they won’t sign and everybody knows they will.
@Noah
To be fair to Graham, I’m (fairly…) sure the statement was facetious. If not…oh well.
I don’t think it’ll work like Ross Perot. Perot ran to the center. Trump’s running as a racist nativist. That’s going to take way more votes from the almost entirely white GOP than from the Dems, whose coalition is much more ethnically mixed. (The makeup of the two parties has changed substantially in the last 20 years.)
I mean, there is polling on this. Trump isn’t even very popular with GOP voters, but he’s loathed by non-GOP voters. Unless something changes radically, a third party run by him is going to take almost entirely from the Republicans.