Sorry to have taken so long! Othello

The Bard Says No to Obama


Is that Shakespeare I hear calling to us as our election day draws near? Solomon thinks so.

Last week, Solomon reread Othello, that sinister tragedy of jealousy—and of evil manipulation. And, after a week’s worth of solitary absorption (no one should ever discuss Shakespeare immediately upon reading him), he came to the conclusion, with a familiar nod to George Santayana’s dictum about history, that those who don’t know their Shakespeare are doomed to blindly become players in his tragedies.

You see, it dawned on Solomon that Othello bears an uncanny relationship and relevance to our own political situation at the moment. We have Obama, whose name starts with the same letter and has the same syllable pattern as the doomed protagonist. Coincidence! We think not! Shakespearean prescience!

Of course, Iago, the sadistic “ancient” to Othello, malevolently manipulates him. Well, doesn’t Iago’s name just look ever so much like “Chicago,” the malevolent and manipulative socialist political machine that so controls Obama?

And why does Othello so trust Iago when we know that Iago spews lies and is following a wicked agenda of hatred? Is not our Iago also our debased mainstream media, which conceals truths, tenders deceptions, and perpetrates out-and-out lies?

Who is Othello? Why, he is the Moor, possibly a Muslim, but of indeterminate ethnicity, perhaps dusky, perhaps black. He is one of Shakespeare’s mysteries, the first and only non-white major character in the whole canon.

And then there is Desdemona, the lovely woman who falls in love with Othello—or rather falls in love with his voice and his stories. She leaves her family to follow this blustering Moor, forsaking her father for thrilling possibilities—possibilities that go dreadfully wrong.

So who is she in our national drama? Why, the other character with four syllables to her name. America, of course. A country enamored of a cultured voice after eight years of inarticulate babbling. Willing to trust without verifying. Ablaze with a yearning for change. Full of hope.

Iago, not Othello, remember, is the one who wants to destroy things. Like a viper from hell, Iago plays upon Othello’s goodness to first distrust Desdemona, and then to hate her, and ultimately to destroy her.

Her fate is sealed by, of all things, a handkerchief. Never has a simple piece of cloth been made to be such an instrument of suspicion and then death. Planted by Iago in Cassio’s chamber, Desdemona’s handkerchief is a gift from Othello, which he comes to believe she values too lightly and has given away; it becomes his “proof” of her infidelity. Never has such tragedy been perpetrated for something so inconsequential.

Nevertheless, Othello is beyond reason and he smothers her on the marriage bed, as she with her last breath says, “O, falsely, falsely murder’d!” When asked who has murdered her, she gasps, “Nobody. I myself.”

Is this not the saddest thing of all? She actually believes she has brought on her own death by loving Othello! And you know what?

She’s right!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is just what’s going to happen to America. She is going to elect the Moor, but the Moor trusts his Iago, not his Desdemona. As Critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells us in his analysis of the play, “Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but rather in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago, such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed Iago’s honesty as Othello did.”

Othello/Obama will just as surely destroy this country by suffocating our freedoms, all the while taking marching orders from the evil media. As in the play, sadly, we will repent too late. America will be just “one, whose subdued eyes albeit unused to the melting mood, drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinable gum.”

Alas, each drop that falls “will prove a crocodile.”

So Solomon urges you to brush up your Shakespeare. See what our Bard predicts for those who love “not wisely, but too well.”