Joe Biden’s Grief and Paul Ryan’s Soliloquy

Published with permission of FairandUNbalanced.com

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

– Here is a recitation by the unknown actor
going by the pseudonym of “Tom O’Bedlam”

I have never been one for Shakespeare. I have a theoretical appreciation, kind of like I have for calculus. I love it at a distance.

One exception is Julius Caesar. I saw a film version as a kid. It was sponsored by my school. James Mason starred and the Elizabethan dialogue came alive. The inner turmoil of Brutus became real as he was drawn into deadly conspiracy against his old friend, Julius Caesar.

I was never that engaged while reading Hamlet. Perhaps a Mason equivalent would have made it real, but I doubt it. It is not entirely Elizabethan English. I love the poetry of the King James Bible. The valley of the shadow of death survives into other translations. Hamlet’s Soliloquy suffers from 400 years of linguistic evolution. The flow gets choppy by the need for a study guide between commas.

I do get the gist, after a fashion. Hamlet thinks about suicide as the ultimate answer. Life and death is the ultimate decision, death the big event. He wavers and wavers as he oscillates between the two.

“To be or not to be…” goes to the slings and arrows, recitation of life’s disappointments and pain.

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
and by opposing end them?

Hamlet goes back to the alternative, “the undiscovered country” from which there is no return.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn
no traveller returns

The lonely solution to every earthly torment is “the bare bodkin.”

When he himself might his quietus make
with a bare bodkin?

The bare bodkin? A little research tells us that with “the bare bodkin” Shakespeare’s Hamlet is thinking about an unsheathed knife.

And that’s the problem for me. A little research here, an obscure phrase there, it all combines to transform the gentle arc of a well told story into the stop and slam of an untrained driver’s first try at a manual transmission. Hamlet gives me whiplash.

Henry Winkler performed a sort of Fonzie type stage rendition of Hamlet in one episode of television’s Happy Days. He gave a protesting, life affirming sort of context to the contemplation of suicide.

In a later TV special about Shakespeare Winkler reportedly vetoed Hamlet’s hand fluttering melodrama. The presentation of suicide as a worthy alternative was said to be unacceptable without context.

That back-of-hand-to-forehead vacillating was applied a generation ago to New York’s Governor Mario Cuomo.

In 1984 he made one of the most eloquent rebuttals against prevailing Republican ideology I had ever heard. He talked of the image President Reagan had often used of America as a shining city on a hill.

And the President is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.

But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city’s splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining the city.

He took some of the old west values represented by the President and showed another side to the mythology.

The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. “The strong — The strong,” they tell us, “will inherit the land.”

We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once.

Cuomo did more than charge up the 1984 Democratic Convention. He electrified much of the nation.

In 1988, a small boomlet for Cuomo as President went pretty much nowhere. He wasn’t interested. But 1992 was a new possibility. The boomlet went sonic. It was the shot heard around the universe.

But Mario wasn’t sure. He loved the idea of government as a tool of progress and social justice. He loved the process, the clash of ideas. He even loved putting ideas into words. He contrasted the poetry of politics with the prose of governance.

But as he wavered between seeking the Presidency and staying in New York, the chance began to fade. He became known as New York’s Hamlet-on-the-Hudson. The sonic boom for Mario echoed, then echoed again and again, then went silent as echoes must. Instead, candidates sought his endorsement. He dithered even in that and he followed the dusty path from President-in-Waiting to Vacillator-in-Chief.

I was thinking of Governor Cuomo as I thought about today’s potential contenders for office. Vice President Joe Biden is genuinely wounded. His indecision is honorably earned, born as it is of pain. The death of a child, even an adult child, has to be heavier for being so nearly unnatural.

The dream lives, sort of as erstwhile Biden supporters share a joyful partisan memory of Joe’s debate performance in 2012.

Those of us who have been confronted with some idiosyncratic crank know the frustration. Obscure claims are hard to refute on the spot. I remember a long ago visit from a well known creationist. It ended up focused on the lack of fossil remains in the pre-Cambrian geological layer. Imagine that.

Biden, in debate, seemed to have an encyclopedia in his brain. His opponent, Paul Ryan pointed to a potential nuclear Iran, and Biden educated him on the details of Iran’s nuclear program and the obstacles they were trying to overcome. Ryan brought up unemployment in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Biden had the statistics on hand. As the evening wore on Ryan seemed to shrink inside his one-size-too-large suit, as Biden laughed in soft derision.

Democrats, including me, pray that Hillary Clinton develops that spot-and-fire debate capability by November 2016.

Paul Ryan maintains a wonkish sort of respectability among Republicans in Congress. His debate performance in 2012 didn’t help him at the time. He was seen by most as a wiseacre teen embarrassed as he was gently disciplined by his patiently amused uncle Joe. But partisan conservatives saw him as victimized by a sneeringly rude opponent and unsympathetic media.

The debate is remembered fondly by some partisan Democrats and unrepentant liberals, me for example. It is dismissed by a few committed Republicans. For the rest of America, the confrontation has faded into forgotten history. It is joined in the book of life by the once stunning eloquence of Mario Cuomo at his most inspiring.

Life is often sad beyond sad, and fate can be cruelty itself.

Governor Mario Cuomo died earlier this year, never having decided whether to run for the most powerful office in the world.

Vice President Joe Biden cannot bring himself to compete for that office, that possibility having been foreclosed by personal grief.

Congressman Paul Ryan may yet surrender and walk into the Congressional death chamber known as the Office of Republican Speaker.

In the end, all three will live on in scholarly footnotes, mentioned in occasional articles about those who might have changed the course of the nation, had they gone on to higher office.

From FairandUNbalanced.com.

In collaboration with MadMikesAmerica.com.

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