Escaping The Debt Trap

We are witnessing ever-increasing alarm at the increasingly imminent collapse of world financial markets. The more euphemistic language of unsustainable sovereign debt and erosion of political autonomy does little to mitigate the harrowing scenario of national economic foreclosure at the behest of apparently omnipotent financial institutions. In much the same way that the courts declare a private individual, a business or a corporation insolvent and order the appointment of receivers; the likes of the ECB (European Central Bank), IMF and World Bank can routinely foreclose on entire nation states and deliver their governments into the hands of unelected ‘technocrats’ (i.e. bankers) who can be relied upon to manage the safe liquidation of any saleable assets, while directing the flow of quantitative easing and bailouts to flush the Augean sewers of the banking system onto the heads of the hapless public. We are urged with the utmost exigency to identify a sane and healthy way to proceed. We must move out and away from the deep psychosis that has gripped the world. 

Chaos is certainly not a preferred option and because of the damaging effect it would have, the world’s leading democracies are loath to entertain the prospect of the EU (which in effect would be Germany) sending in a military police force to restore order in Greece, or any other belligerent failed State while the ‘reality’ of the situation finally sinks in: that austerity measures are the only apposite and, therefore, acceptable remedy on offer. Nevertheless, whatever the results of the end-game failure of democratic governments to stand their ground, Greece, as well as Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, France and not to exclude the US or UK, will pay. The banks will be paid. 

A convoluted and seemingly bizarre mechanism has been put in place by the ECB to facilitate Greek interest payments on their national debt. Put simply, new money is lent to Greece (through an account that the government cannot access as it might be tempted to use it to pay the salaries of civil servants, or fund health-care, social services, education or pensions), which is then immediately paid back to the lender by way of interest payment on the pre-existing outstanding debt.  So, what is the point? The point is that it is in the best interests of the global financial institutions that these countries not default. Therefore, the fact that the books show that payments are being made to service the debt allows the indebting procedure to continue unimpeded, whilst seizure and foreclosure remain on the table as a final, though far from ideal, option for the lenders. 

If world wars were fought to “make the world safe for democracy”, then the objective in today’s world is to ensure that democracy, as the sole legitimate legislative structure, is maintained in order to ensure the repayment of national debts incurred by a perpetually rotating body of political non-entities, sometimes liberal, sometimes conservative – each blaming the previous administration for whatever maladies may be afflicting the general public. Anything remotely resembling personal rule – in which accountability is inherent – has gradually disappeared from the stage and the world is now completely governed by ‘system’. In the meantime, unnoticed by the vast majority of people, there has been a coup… a coup de banque! But though it has transpired through a system, it cannot be forgotten that it has been perpetrated not by machines, but by men. An obsequious political class functions as salaried employees (albeit elected by plebiscite) that have paved the way by means of passing the requisite legislation to provide the juridical framework for the coup to take place. 

We are witness to a systemic malady that has  become a highly contagious pandemic which has circulated unabated amongst the elected tribunes of the people who are today sitting in senates around the world. It is a most democratic phenomenon, as it makes no distinctions of race, region and religion: from Paris to Pretoria, Buenos Aires to Berlin and now, from Cairo to Mumbai. ‘Located’ within computer networks with major nodes in Wall Street and the City of London and linking listed stock exchanges, a numbers based financial system has spread a virtual spider’s web over the world. It is both real and unreal, hence its psychotic effect.

The ‘leaders of the free world’, who one after the other have stepped centre stage to announce a series of multi-billion dollar, pound, euro bailouts that the general public will ultimately have to pay for, have in the inevitable aftermath, made no small amount of noise. Things may get tough, but the “Yes We Can” man has given his word that our financial system, protecting the freedoms of democracy, will prevail. It is quite extraordinary how ‘good’ it always sounds. The frantic behind-the-curtain play that intensified in 2008 as the previous US presidential administration started winding down was, of course, the Lone Ranger Show with Hank Paulson in the title role and Bush as Tonto. The ignominious British Prime Minister, not wanting to be upstaged (yet again) by the American, proved that he too was tonto. British politicians, who have to resort to cheating on their expense allowances to get a few hundred extra quid, are nowhere near the premier league of financial oligarchs who can create money, i.e. currency and credit from less than nil (a deficit) to the tune of trillions. 

Nevertheless, after so much artificial over stimulation by the massive printing of new money, the current global hangover is horrendous, with many experiencing excruciating headaches. In the world’s largest consumer economy, and the one that carries the largest debt, the hangover isn’t their only headache. Anxiety levels over not having enough are keeping pharmacy counters packed, with Prozac flying off the shelves. 

The situation in terms of credibility and continued viability of the global economy, whether looked at from the vantage point of individual countries or as one unified whole, is ostensibly one of perception. For a variety of reasons: from egregiously bloated state bureaucracies; to ill advised and imprudent borrowing (public and private); to unconscionable over-lending of unsecured home loans by banks (who in turn sold on their debt to keep it off their books), propelled by hugely inflated real estate ‘values’ that lenders imagined would keep rising; and, most significantly, driven by a stupefying degree of greed by men who simply were making too much money. As a result, certain countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and more recently Italy, have lost credibility in the eyes of bond investors, consequently driving up their cost of borrowing while ever deepening the sink-hole of their fiscal woes. As early as 2010 the Bank for International Settlements came up with a statement regarding these and other unstable economies. It stated that the financial crisis came on top of an already serious pre-existing structural problem of debt accumulation. Of course, the exact same thing can be said of the UK and US. It is simply a matter of perception!

 Niall Ferguson in his recent book, Civilization, states: “most cases of civilizational collapse are associated with fiscal crisis as well as wars. All the examples of collapse discussed above were preceded by sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditure, as well as by difficulty with financing public debt.” Ferguson goes on to cite the rise in the cost of servicing the Ottoman debt in the nineteenth century from just under 17% to over 50% by 1877. Not mentioned by Ferguson, but showing how serious an already exacerbated situation had become, is that by the fin de siècle the cost of servicing the Ottoman debt (just the interest alone) went off the chart and swallowed the entire GDP. 

The immitigable failure of Ottoman suzerainty resulted in the disintegration of its territories from the Mediterranean to the Balkans, to Central Asia and on to a chronically unstable Middle East with its longstanding propensity towards rebellion and sedition. All of these fell easy prey to rapacious European powers, eagerly awaiting their moment to step in with generous lines of credit (secured by the enormous oil wealth of their new clients) to facilitate their development as independent nation states, and to supply the technical expertise required to build modern infrastructure.  I draw the readers attention to the following extracts from a website article by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi: ‘Islam – TheRecovery’, which reveals elucidating parallels with the infected condition of the current fiscal environment in which the earlier predators are now the ‘sick men of Europe’:

“It can now be said that the fall of the Osmanli Dawlet was never the result of a military defeat. The so called modernisation of Turkey, the Tanzimat, historically stood for the transfer from gold-based currency to paper notes for the masses and the banking system to be used by the State in all its fiduciary arrangements. The bankers in the last phase of Osmanli rule were highly honoured. The head of the Comondo bank was given a State funeral. When, precisely by their manipulation of capital, the Empire collapsed, they simply walked away to set up shop in Egypt and Europe. Not one banker proposed even a capitalist road to recovery for the State – a lesson European States are now learning. The Osmanli Dawlet, it can now be clearly stated, was destroyed by capitalism.”

Moving to the East Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir continues:

“The Mughal Empire which flourished under the brilliant system of Haraj and Zakat taxation, the Zimindar pattern, was brought down by the fiduciary contracts of the East India Company and its final transformation into Empire status. The gold and silver Mughal currency was replaced by the paper Rupee, turning its formerly wealthy people into helpless poverty.”

“Thus, we can now confirm two important facts. Neither the Osmanli Dawlet nor the Mughal Empire was ever defeated militarily. Kemalism was a coup d’état achieved in the bankruptcy following the forced exile of Sultan Abdalhamid Khan II. Britain, under the flag of Empire seized India by simple coup d’état.”

“The suffering of the Muslim world after World War II stems from our failure to see that the conquest of Muslim lands was not based on political dominance but by the imposition of the capitalist/usury system of debt based, that is loaned, paper receipts for money called bank notes. Paper money was capitalism’s true weapon of mass destruction.”

This perspicacious insight into the past clearly sheds light on the present, and stands out as sound counsel. Alas, it is the poor Arabs who are once again deluded, as their Facebook Revolution 2.0, known as the Arab Spring, has so quickly turned into the winter of their discontent. 

Postscript

It is now confirmed that Muhammad Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood has become the democratically elected President of Egypt, and I should like to extend my condolences to the courageous young men and women who braved the extreme dangers of Tahrir Square only to see their country handed over to the defeatist Brotherhood that (not so) secretly has preached revolution for decades as they occupied comfortable positions in both the governmental and financial institutions of the country they denounced. With ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s former prime minister as the other presidential candidate there was simply no choice. Reuters announced that a 51% turnout marginally brought Mursi the electoral victory the international community decreed was free and fare, and has been applauded as an unprecedented event in Egypt’s long history. A more accurate estimation is that possibly less than 30% of eligible voters turned out to cast their vote. The overwhelming majority of people, ostensibly the largest party in the country, wanted neither! With Egypt being second only to Israel as the recipient of the largest amount of US foreign aid, Mursi is quickly coming into line so as to ensure that his new government will continue to receive the same generous allowance that Mubarak received. The cabinet will surely be egalitarian, as a Copt and a woman have already been appointed. We should also expect the visually impaired to be well represented - always useful to have in high government positions!

For the benefit of those that may not necessarily be familiar with the ideological path of the Muslim Brotherhood, also known as the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (abbr. the Ikhwan), I should again like to quote from the distinguished Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi’s article: 

“The Ikhwan in Egypt after Nasser had their eyes fixed firmly on political power. Their key text was no longer the uneducated ramblings of Sayyid Qutb but rather al-Kattani’s ‘Tartib al-Idariyya’ which with strong erudition had gathered recensions from the Prophetic period and then claimed that therein lay the blueprint of Islamic politics. However, in placing the model over Western State practices he seemed to offer as true model the teetotal capitalism of Herbert Hoover.”

“So the Egyptians turned the Deen of Islam into a political philosophy which the West renamed as such – Islamism, along with communism and capitalism. In the new Islamist language they took a word from its historical context and set it over their programme of power aspiration.”

You end up with Prohibition era politics, usury capitalism and deeply boring political recreants in the service of foreign paymasters. At least the Americans had Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. Most tragically, the very life-breath that their religion gifts to them is choked out.

The Highway Song

I never could stand to drink that blood and call it wine.

I never did accept their wars and call them mine.

So I took to the highway never to look back.

From the Back Bay of Boston to San Francisco Bay

It was Highway 1 going south down to LA

Outside of Bakersfield I hitched a ride to Santa Fe.

I made it to Baton Rouge and met a Cajun lady with a Persian cat

We spent the night in Circe’s ingle, in a houseboat on a raft.

I hopped a freight train outside of Mobile go’n north to Cincinnati.

Rode a boxcar with some hobos who’d been shift’n since Korea

They knew to jump off our wagon-lit from the doors in back

I jump out the front on the wrong side of the track.

That railroad inspector grabbed me and landed such a whack

He dumped out all the contents of my pack:

Norman Mailer in Chicago, James Joyce and Ulysses on the run.

Said his daughter had run away with someone called a bum.

He showed me her photo; nowhere to be found

I said I didn’t know her, that I was new in town.

He stood there look’n hard at me as I hit the ground.

The big man started shak’n, said boy you best be gone.

So I grabbed my belongins, which didn’t take me long.

The only thing I knew how to do was too keep on keep’n on.

I Have What I Would Have

In William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part I, the first play of his first tetralogy of English History Plays, we are not only brought into some of the playwright’s early works that immediately caught the attention of the theatre going public of Elizabethan London, but to works that exhibit a profound level of insight and political acumen, as well as daring.  The theme of this cycle of plays is England’s Wars of The Roses that culminates with the iconographic Richard III. It also provides the link to Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII, and the opening of the Tudor Dynasty.

Based on the enormous success of this cycle of plays, Shakespeare went on to write another tetralogy, moving back further in time, that would end at the point where Henry VI begins. There is no doubt that the second series exhibits a more highly developed manner of both writing and performing, as Shakespeare pioneered what he referred to as ‘personation’, whereby the player on stage took on the role of the character, employing a more natural characterisation by means of what today we would simply understand as ‘acting’.  The first plays emphasised versification and oratory skill accompanied by established gestures for various emotions that were all well known to the audience. As Shakespeare’s skill progressed so did the talent of his leading actors. Nevertheless, going back to this early play, Henry VI Part I, admittedly more difficult to stage and dramaturgically less accommodating to the overall enjoyment of the play as a theatrical event, we have the opportunity to witness the early stages of a great genius that was directly involved in the pressing issues of his time.

It is part of the foundational premise I construct in my book The PowerTemplate – Shakespeare’s Political Plays, that the two tetralogies of History Plays were for Shakespeare a profound meditation on his current political milieu by carefully reflecting upon an earlier period of England’s history and recognising existing corollaries that were of the utmost exigency for the time he was living in.  He certainly did not construct a simplistic model whereby a stage character depicting an historical figure from the past represented a present-day figure on the Elizabethan political stage.  Elizabeth had seen Shakespeare’s Richard II precisely because of it having a relation to her, and was well aware of its second round of performances at a time when people were eager for new works, and the play was already considered a survivor from the previous season.

The timing of this second run presaged the famous, albeit failed, Essex Rebellion. Preserved in the archives containing her letters and various other correspondences, Elizabeth is recorded as having said: “I am Richard II, know ye not that”.  Of course, Richard II was based on actual historical material Shakespeare obtained by his reading of Holinshed’s Chronicles, whose work was enjoying a high degree of notoriety in Tudor England. Shakespeare was most liberal in his use of poetic licence when dealing with certain facts. He was a creative playwright, not an historian making dramatised documentaries.

 But Richard II tells the tale of an erudite and scholarly king who suffered from being seen as effeminate, as well as being considered imprudent in the choice of his ‘favourites’ who were meant to serve as his advisors. Elizabeth, obviously feminine, was thought by some to have been wrapped in a gilded cocoon by her cunning advisors, most notably Lord Burghley and his conniving son, Robert Cecil. There was a connection to be made. From the material mentioned above, Elizabeth herself apparently saw it.  And who was at the fore of this elite coterie of noblemen who saw that governance and rule was already on a slope made slippery by what is easily recognised today as the muck of a political class? It was Lord Essex, together with the Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated two of his most famous narrative poems, and other such men for whom the code of honour attributed to their role as knights was inextricably bound to loyalty, service and protection: noblesse oblige. 

In order to arrive at the precise point at which I am aiming, and for what is my hope in this short essay, it will be sufficient to state a few key events. The play begins with the funeral of the heroic Henry V, and then ‘fast-forwards’ to Henry VI, who was nine months old when his father died, as a young man. From the time that the infant king was crowned up till the present, the Duke of Gloucester, uncle to the King, has been the Lord Protector and therefore, the de facto king of England. He stands as the only bulwark of defence between a politically inert and mentally ill equipped king and a swarming pack of vicious political animals all of whom have their eye on either seizing the crown, or at least, controlling Henry and the realm by proxy. While the whole lot are opposed to one another, despite various shifting alliances that are made, broken and rearranged, what they all concur on is that for any of their designs to unfold Gloucester must go!

Opposite Gloucester is the Bishop of Winchester, great uncle to the king. He is Prelate to the Pope; known for his licentiousness, covetous of the role of Lord Protector, lustful for power and exhibits a naked ambition to seize control of the realm. All of these things are exactly what he accuses Gloucester of. Early on in the play he deliberately blocks men sent by Gloucester to the armoury in the Tower to procure additional weapons and supplies urgently needed by the English troops fighting in France. This for no other reason than to spite his nemesis with a military failure in France that will reflect poorly on his stewardship of the kingdom, apparently little fazed by the fact that it is the troops who will be most adversely effected. A sordid old man is playing politics while other men are exposed to mortal danger.

The next key axis of opposition is that between Richard Plantagenet, soon to be reinstated as the Duke of York and the Duke of Somerset, self-proclaimed advocate of the House of Lancaster, in spite of the king himself who is presumably inconsequential. The Temple Garden in London provides the historic scene whereby York and his party plucked the white rose to show support for his claim traced back to the illegal usurpation of Richard II by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV), while Somerset and his allies, including the Earl of Suffolk, picked the red one. Hence, we have the Wars of The Roses.

The last piece to be put in place is that the English army is in France led by the greatest of England’s noble knights, Lord Talbot. Lionised by his countrymen, feared and held in awe by the French, Talbot epitomises the great art of chivalry and honour that stood as the hallmark of England’s greatness. York has been made Regent of France, and therefore, the highest authority in the land. He sends an urgent dispatch to Somerset who has a substantial army at his command, to proceed at once to assist Talbot who is trapped between the well garrisoned city of Bordeaux and an army of 10,000 strong led by Charles, the King of France.  To his great ignominy Somerset prevaricates and remains immobile. Just as York will blame Somerset, so Somerset will blame York. The outcome presages a future in which a recreant political class will routinely spill the blood of the flower of their country’s courage with impunity.

Here we must also remember Lord Essex, who 150 years after these events took place was executed upon the relentless persistence of Robert Cecil, who could not bear the accusation implicit in the presence of a man of such exemplary stature. When Shakespeare penned this play Essex was alive and well, but the writing was on the wall and Shakespeare was, I believe, able to read it. He would continue to refine this theme in others of his plays that dealt with legitimacy, the rule of law and the protection it was to provide, sustained by the requisite loyalty of a body of men who would stand to ensure that it was upheld.

This is something that can never be obtained from salaried politicians. Therefore, we are inevitably reminded of the craven behaviour of Tony Blair and his corruption riddled government; their willingness to be led into a war predicated on false premises by a country openly promoting its own self-interests; their perfidious behaviour being matched by that of Sarkozy and the other complicit heads of state, including one who may yet prove to be the longest running lame duck in Washington and his British hanger-on, the present leader of the Conservative controlled coalition in Britain.

One by one the despotic regimes in the Arab lands, none of which possessed a shred of honour, propped up as they were, by the same outside support structure that has worked to topple each and every one of them, is seeing what is toted as an Arab Spring of revolutions named after different flowers. One can hardly bear the bitter irony as this disgraceful sham continues to be played out on the world stage today.

Henry VI, Part I, Act IV scene vii (Another part of the battlefield where Talbot is fatally wounded),

Talbot: Where is my other life? – mine own is gone;
O! Where is young Talbot? Where is my valiant John?

Triumphant death, smear’d with captivity,

Young Talbot’s valour makes me smile at thee.

When he perceiv’d me shrink upon my knee,

His bloody sword he brandish’d over me,

And like a hungry lion did commence

Rough deeds of rage and stern impatience;

But when my angry guardant stood alone,

Tendering my ruin and assail’d of none,

Dizzy-ey’d fury and great rage of heart

Suddenly made him from my side to start

Into the clustering battle of the French;

And in that sea of blood my boy did drench

His overmounting spirit; and there died

My Icarus, my blossom, my pride.

[Soldiers enter bearing the body of young Talbot]

Come, come, and lay him in his father’s arms:

My spirit can no longer bear these harms.

Soldiers, adieu! I have what I would have,

Now my old arms are young John Talbot’s grave. [Talbot dies]

The Time Is Out Of Joint

Let us go together. Yes, for this matter is one that cannot and has never been the undertaking of one man. Every battle or campaign has its hero, in earlier times quite possibly a king or military commander. While some undertook great campaigns on the battlefield, others fought for social justice and establishing societies based on parity, care of the weak and fairness - an inextricable imperative in the (financial) market place. Invariably, these were strong men surrounded by strong men. This is one part of a prophetic ur-model extrapolated into various places and times throughout the ages, though conspicuously missing within today’s shadowy political landscape with its increasingly shady political class.

 You will always hear people speaking of helping the lowly and disadvantaged, but rarely does one hear of anyone who wants to help the strong become truly strong and change the course of action that governs the world. And what is it that governs the world? Of course, it is money! Money (as intrinsic value in real time and place) we have all come to realize does not actually exist. Money as credit, created ex nihilo, trading in debts, derivatives and uncertain futures that now are not even written on paper notes but move as trillions of electronic digital impulses in milliseconds around the world from computer terminal to computer terminal. Some have understood this long before the rest, the majority of whom have been very busy (trader) drones making six figure salaries, employed by impervious bosses, incubuses that move silently in and out of buildings, from the back seats of chauffeur driven cars, who easily pull seven plus. Alongside this stupendous phenomenon we can recognize its corollary; the world’s most populous cities sprouting tumorous growths of slum populations often as large as the host they cling to.

In Goethe’sFaust Mephistopheles instructs a bankrupt Emperor in the art of creating notes of credit based on ‘futures’ from un-mined gold and treasures that can, in turn, be used as bills of exchange.  When the Emperor is informed of the now rampant use of countless notes whirling about as if they were actual wealth he is incredulous and enraged that such an odious crime is being perpetrated within his realm, until his treasurer reminds him it was just last night he had himself signed such a ‘note’. The Emperor’s steward chimes in that once begun everyone under the sun was writing out chits on paper. Spending was spinning; the Exchequer’s books balanced; consumer confidence was at an all time high and the Emperor’s name praised on every tongue.  The Emperor was duly convinced and most delighted, but no more so than Mephistopheles himself, for once again he had proved a great magician!

 You’ll find the above-mentioned scene in Faust, Part Two: The Pleasure Garden, in any pre-World War II un-expurgated translation. It is interesting how after 1945, many US and UK publishers thought it apposite to omit the particular scene, apparently for the sake of clarity and expediency, and so as not to confuse people. It could be assumed that it was omitted from the syllabus of schools in Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Iceland and the rest. Must be a bit awkward for the Germans, which may help to explain why their Department of Education is removing the now “boring” and anachronistic works of Schiller and Goethe from the standard school curriculum. Judging by current events, the original text is much more likely to be found in desk drawers on Wall Street or in the City of London banking district.

Part I of Faust, primarily concerned with Faust’s soul and his selling it to the devil was completed in 1808, while Part II was not completed until 1831, a year before Goethe’s death, and focuses instead on human psychology, history, economics and politics. Obviously this is a complete waste of time in today’s modern world with a virtual economy spiralling at an incalculable speed, based upon a model of limitless growth.  Meanwhile, the Earth and everything on it (and under it), the seas and every living thing within them, are being pushed beyond the limits of what is sustainable.

And still your fingers on your lips, I pray. This is a matter that must not be too much spoken of, for it is action that is required. A king has been murdered whilst resting in his garden, a crime perpetrated by his brother who has taken both his brother’s life and his wife, and presently sits upon his throne. The most famous son of the murdered king is brooding, obsessed and frustrated by his inability to act, yet act he must!  And also feigning madness or maybe he has gone mad?

 An inward journey seeks a light that shows the way forward. But what is that way if not to action, and an action that puts right what has gone wrong. Surely, this is the cause of Hamlet’s conflicted self, an apparent paucity that seems paralyzing. Yet, is not Justice the fruit of virtu. This is not Christian virtue. This is the noble character of the warrior savant. In the early times they were said to wear a garment of coarse wool (suf), and were subsequently called sufi, while today they may conceal their poverty before the boundless Lord of Majesty in elegantly tailored rags by Armani and Boss.

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right.

And to strive to put things right is the business at hand. All other forms of trade will be done along the way, as the permitted (halal) is extricated from the quagmire of the prohibited (haram). More than forty years ago I was told by my Teacher that working was like washing. You do it. It is a natural activity of man, part of what is called fitra, and there are lots of things that need doing.  The secret is not to associate what one does with the gifts and bounties one constantly receives. What is your due will come to you. Well then, we should try to do everything. For what is regret but:

Here error is all in the not done,

all in the diffidence that faltered... (Ezra Pound Canto LXXXI)

Nay, come, let’s go together.

So we return to the point from which we started.

................Let us go together.

And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to put it right.

Nay, come, let’s go together

(Hamlet, Act I, scene V)

The role of leadership is to re-establish justice. The form of the man that is able to do so is what I attempt to reveal in my book ThePower Template: Shakespeare’s Political Plays. The final scene of Hamlet heralds the arrival of Fortinbras, who will restore order and justice, thereby completing what Prince Hamlet attempted, but was unable to achieve in his lifetime. Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be given a valiant soldier’s burial.

Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage

For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have proved most royal; and for his passage,

The soldier’s music and rite of war

Speak loudly for him.

(Hamlet, Act V, scene II)

Books and Building

It has been just over a month since I returned from my visit to the States, a trip made during summer holidays in South Africa that landed me smack in the middle of an American winter. My first stop was Boston, where I spent a few days; for it is there that I visit my father, who just turned 95 on March 2nd. Much to my delight, as it had been so far a cold but rather snowless winter, 6 inches of fine white powder fell during my first night, which remained there to greet me in the morning when I awoke to peer out of the bedroom window. It was the sound of a motor running at 7am that woke me. The machine was none other than a small tractor with a snowplough attached to it being driven by my father, who had apparently been up for some time. So much for being old!

My next stop was northern California, which was not only a complete departure from winter in New England, but most of all it was the time and place I would visit with my own children and grandchildren. Nevertheless, I never venture to those American shores without a list of books I hope to buy while there. Books in general are expensive in South Africa, and many titles are hard to find unless shipped in from Amazon. So, list in hand, I set out on my search.

The first book on my list, already rapaciously devoured with exhilarating delight, was The Artist, ThePhilosopher and the Warrior (Da Vinci, Machiavelli and Borgia) by Paul Strathern. The lives of all three men crossed paths, with both Da Vinci and Machiavelli being Florentines, one actually employed by Cesare Borgia as a military engineer, while the other was assigned diplomatic missions by the government of Florence to liaise with (and spy on where possible) the young yet unrelentingly ruthless, famously handsome and intrepid Borgia. Borgia’s father was Pope Alexander VI (so much for vows of celibacy - something I personally find contra naturam) and together they were calculatingly and assiduously working towards unifying the feudal kingdoms of Italy under Borgia leadership, with a view to expelling both the French and the Spanish (the Borgia family were, in fact, Catalans), while simultaneously making secret strategic agreements with both sides.

Leonardo Da Vinci spent most of his life designing extraordinary machines, many of which were not built in his lifetime. His famous notebooks, some containing several hundred sketches that included ingenious war machines, seem to reveal that he observed in man a darkness that was equal to the use of such things. Nevertheless, he was himself unable to resist an ineluctable fascination with inventing them. A most egregious anomaly – but then again, he did paint the Mona Lisa in his spare time. Machiavelli, on the other hand, based his most famous work, The Prince, on Cesare Borgia and to a certain extent on Pope Julius II, who was elected to the papacy upon the death of Alexander. Strathern’s book is riveting, fascinating beyond words!

The next book was TheRoman Revolution by Sir Ronald Syme, enticingly placed upon a bookshelf, waiting to be started. Also on my list was The Muqaddimah (An Introduction to History) by Ibn Khaldun. This I am currently reading with great relish for in it I foresee the possibility of a new book, although I am a congenitally lazy writer, and no small effort will be required to move this idea into action. The premise of the book would proceed from my previous one, The Power Template, and undertake to examine Shakespeare’s handling of The Wars of the Roses from Ibn Khaldun’s understanding of leadership, royal authority and the prerequisites necessary to establish and maintain dynastic power: the prior social conditions; the essential character traits (most notably nobility of character, futuwwa in Arabic, often resorting in translation to the anachronistic term chivalry); and an innate quality of ‘group feeling’ (translated from asabiyya in the Arabic, while esprit de corps is also used in other translations). The purpose of such an ambitious undertaking would be in order to hold up this model before that of the modern political class, found in every country around the world:  insipid, corrupt and obsequious before their paymasters who have put them in office, but, of course, elected ‘by the people’.

I have a very long way to go in fully grasping Ibn Khaldun’s masterwork before attempting to embark on an endeavour that is as compelling to me as it is daunting. At any rate, let me plant the seed of my intention in the hope that it may germinate. My only thoughts so far are that Ibn Khaldun, who is clearly recognised as the most important Arab Historian (although he certainly had European blood from his Spanish side), is also recognised for his role as a philosopher, his astute understanding of political rule and his ability to extrapolate from the eye-witness accounts that he gained as he travelled the world, as well as building upon the great scholars (ulama) he was privileged to sit with and learn from. According to his English translator and biographer Franz Rosenthal, Ibn Khaldun is as important for his ‘sociological insights’ as he is for his fascinating accounts of world altering events, such as those he experienced while being held as a highly honoured captive guest of the fierce Timur-the-Lame (Tamerlane).

 Shakespeare, on the other hand, was certainly not a historian and took generous advantage of Hollinshed’s Chronicles and Hall’s Union of Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York, that provided the historical basis for his first tetralogy that focuses on the Wars of the Roses, and moreover, were among some of his earliest plays. What Shakespeare does do that is similar to Ibn Khaldun, although the English bard took much more poetic licence in doing it, was to extrapolate dramaturgically an understanding of power, leadership and the conditions that precipitate the founding or floundering of a royal dynasty, from the historical material available to him. That is as far as I’ve gotten.

What other book on my list did I find? I came across a perfect second-hand copy of The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri. Camilleri is heralded as the Italian Simenon. I know at least one person who may disagree with that, while there is no doubt that he is a marvellously entertaining and profoundly insightful writer, whose main character, Inspector Montalbano, is to be found somewhere between the indefatigably persistent Inspector Morse of Oxford and the seemingly absent minded and sartorially sloppy American Detective Colombo - who never misses a stitch. The novels are all immensely enjoyable. I was told by an Italian friend that there is a popular TV series in Italy based upon them.

Now the last book on my shopping list: Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own. This book is referred to by its author in his preface as “a biography of a building”. Preceding the preface is a line from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden that makes reference to the hut Thoreau built on a tiny island situated in Walden Pond. It was recommended by a young fellow, now married to my niece, who I first met two years ago just after they were formally engaged. He came across then as a very dapper 20-something Sinatra, although he insists he doesn’t sing but rather reads. This year, having undergone a makeover, he resembled a poet from the post-Beat Generation, with long hair and full beard.

 Pollan’s book is the story of a writer who needs a place to work. With his and his wife’s first child on the way working from the house will be next to impossible. What he does, with absolutely no previous skill or even the slightest aptitude, is to venture to build himself a small writer’s hut some few hundred feet behind their New England home. It is a curiously interesting biographical account of a writer’s quest not just to find but actually make that special place to write, and, according to Pollan, “daydream”, and create something of substance - made out of words. The further along I read the more I became drawn into Pollan’s skill and craftsmanship as a writer. I think that what my niece’s husband had in mind when he recommended the book was that while he knew I had written a couple books and a bunch of essays, he had been told that I had built a considerable number of houses. There is an intriguing connection somewhere between the author of A Place of My Own and myself in the inverse correlation between our opposing trajectories.

That being said, it was some four years after I had sat on the stoop of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop on Plymton Street off Harvard Square, trying to understand The Cantos of Ezra Pound, that I crossed the big pond and managed to be taken on as an apprentice by a furniture maker in the north London borough of Islington. My employer, a master craftsman of the pre-world war era, said I was at 21 or 22 actually too old to start. After some persuasion he agreed to take me on, as I impressed upon him that I was interested in learning and not in how little he would be able to pay me. He first taught me how to sharpen a chisel (which I have not forgotten) and then something of how to properly use it. After some time I gradually moved from furniture to building houses. The pay was, quite frankly, a lot better and most of all it was suited to my peripatetic way of life.

Shakespeare Within The Spheres of Politics and Law

The title is enough to enable the general reader to identify the subject as one firmly ensconced within an academic field of critical enquiry. The impetus for embarking upon this particular consideration of Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre has arisen from my having recently completed Anselm Haverkamp’s Shakespearean Genealogies of Power.  Haverkamp’s work is inextricably grounded in just such a specialist technical language.  The title of my own latest book, The Power Template – Shakespeare’s Political Plays, a recognisable parallelism appears in the subject matter that is indicated in both works. One significant difference (apart from my not writing in the technical and complex specificity of language that is employed by Haverkamp) is his stronger emphasis on the legal implications that are latent within Shakespeare’s plays.  Nevertheless, within The Power Template the legal dimensions of both royal prerogative, as explored in the History Plays, and constitutional law, as explored in the Roman Plays, are by no means absent. Haverkamp, on the other hand, develops this aspect even further by his indicating that verdicts in nearly all cases within the context of the plays remain “unresolved”, and subsequently requires the litigants to return to the stage. Clearly, this goes some way towards explaining the longevity of the plays and how they continue to contemporise both Shakespeare and his dramatic works.

In Richard II, the very first play that is explored in The Power Template, the sequestration of John of Gaunt’s wealth by the King is presented as just much as a matter of law as it is as a manifestation of naked power. Gaunt’s famous deathbed rebuke to his nephew and sovereign, begins with a reference to, “this royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle” and how Richard has failed to uphold the law, a duty which belongs indivisibly to the role of kingship. As a dying man Sir John freely speaks his mind, and moreover, that which he is duty bound by code of honour as a royal knight in service to his sovereign liege, to extend as sound council, regardless of Richard wanting to hear it or not. 

In Henry V, the law once again takes an important role, this time in Henry’s surprising transformation (especially so to the two incredulous prelates in his service who were previously only aware of the “wastrel prince” as depicted in Henry IV, parts I and II) into a king with an astute political acumen and a keen interest in the legality of a move he was intending to make in regards to recovering lost English territories within the borders of France that had been conquered by his great-grandfather, Edward III, whose wife was of French royalty. France’s Salic law forbade succession through the female line, and would, therefore, pose a legal impediment to Harry’s claim. 

The two learned bishops were quick to confirm that the law Salique pertained only to a very specific region of Germany that had previously been annexed by France. The purpose of the law was to ensure that in subsequent generations the French crown would not, or could not, devolve into German hands through the maternal line. The bishops, far more concerned with their purses than their prayers, were eager to divert Harry from a previous intention to impose more stringent taxes on an excessively rich Roman Church. They were most convincing in their legal argument, closing with a summation that if the law was applicable across the board then the reigning French Monarch’s own claim would likewise be invalid.  The English King, whose father had illegally usurped the throne from Richard II, is as concerned about acting within the law as he is about England’s military capacity to execute his plan to invade France. Interestingly, Haverkamp’s immensely scholarly work skips over this particular instance and its far-reaching legal implications, which point towards the manoeuvrings we have come to expect from modern democratically elected heads of state, whose ready recourse to ‘the rule of exception’ has enabled them to step adroitly around the law without liability by declaring a state of emergency, as the historical evidence shows.

Nevertheless, there are numerous other examples cited by Haverkamp, all in extremely precise detail, that are found in Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale, all of which fall outside of scope of The Power Template, that limits itself to the History Plays, Roman Plays and the political dimensions of Hamlet. Furthermore, whereas I have opted for an accessible, narrative style of writing, Haverkamp (as already indicated) has set his exposition within a highly technical register of specialist academic discourse. Nonetheless, both works present a similar aspect of Shakespeare’s plays in which clear corollaries persist.  Haverkamp’s exploration of “Shakespeare’s involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law” is exemplary and moreover goes more deeply into the law per se, as a fundament of power that is expressed within the zone of politics, than does my work, which emphasises the legal imperatives that presage political action.

What is inherent within my study is the identification of the legal expedient required to precipitate an executive action that would otherwise be deemed ultra vires. This is most clearly recognised in the importance given to Cicero’s adjudicating in the matter of the necessity to remove (assassinate) Caesar. If Brutus, the high minded defender of the principles of the Roman Republic, provides an ideological justification (exemplified in his famous: “it’s not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more”) it is Cicero’s in-back juridical ruling that allows the plan to make the transition from the sphere of law into the arena of politics as a pre-emptive strike. 

Haverkamp’s book, Shakespearean Genealogies of Power, is an accomplished dissertation that may not necessarily be easy reading, but unequivocally stands as a serious contribution to Shakespearean studies.

To The Place Where I Come From

How strange it is that here in mid January I find myself in the southern tip of Africa on a warm summer afternoon that would almost be too hot except for a gentle breeze that moves in from where two oceans meet, yet never cross. I had been asked by a magazine editor in Germany about a poem I may possibly know of, something by Robert Frost. Off hand the theme that the poem was meant to express was not something I recognised as being within Frost’s domain, but it did cause me to pull from my book case a volume of his complete works, The Poetry of Robert Frost, and scan through the long list of titles.

In less than a week’s time I will be taking a flight from Cape Town to Boston, via Paris. When I land in Boston Logan it will be winter, proper winter, cold with snow defied by heated homes with fireplaces burning. Like Robert Frost, I was born and raised in New England. I recall he lived in New Hampshire, the state that borders Massachusetts to the north. The cluster of states known as New England, shares not only a common climate but also a similar history, as they were the early English colonies. Apart from the city of Boston, there are the well-known towns of Arlington, Lexington, Concord and Braintree. There is Walden Pond, which is surprisingly small, that provided Henry David Thoreau’s setting for his famous On Walden Pond and also where he worked on his treatise Civil Disobedience. Back then Thoreau was a young man and devoted to his intellectual hero and self chosen teacher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It seems only natural that in my youth the generation I was part of identified with Thoreau, while like him, I too looked up to the universal intellect of Emerson, whose library included works from the great poet Goethe, that Emerson read in their original German, to the Persian poet Hafiz.

While I have not been able to locate the poem purported to be by Robert Frost that the magazine editor asked about, I did start to read through several of Frost’s poems that I remember reading when still at school. Frost became a cultural icon after the Second World War, and every English class across America studied his poems. Furthermore, he was specifically connected to rural New England, its woodlands and small farms that so acutely expressed an intimate understanding of a stoic yet unpretentious ethic. If Emerson was the foremost poet and thinker of the early American Transcendentalists, who were born into the Unitarianism of New England in the early decades of the nineteenth century, then Frost was a voice of an outwardly more simple folk who possessed a depth of homely wisdom that barely managed to survive the tumult of two world wars only to then dissipate before the rise of an unmitigated hubris that took hold of the American psyche and would land it in the Bay of Pigs, then Vietnam; both of which went terribly wrong. There was the proto model of Indonesia, a massive victory for unrestrained capitalism while plunging America into a moral quagmire as it sequestered a whole region’s vast wealth of natural resources in the name of halting the spread of Communism. Then on to Chile and El Salvador, for which the writing of Joan Didion is essential to see the true face of a two faced foreign policy, and so many other places around the world where the claim was always the same: America was going to put things right. They would halt Communism and the spreading of its evil empire. Later, with the Cold War over it became the miasma of global terrorism that provided yet another carte blanche to secure needed energy resources for a rapacious society with a most heterodox anomaly: being somehow so incredibly naive and outrageously arrogant at the same time.

Today, the claim of putting things right around the world seems less and less palatable as its home situation has been exposed as far from exemplary. The unmitigated avariciousness of its financial institutions has shocked a people who had been lulled into consumerist complacency.  The impotency of their political leaders in the face of supra-banking fuelled by a debt-based economy has left a country wondering who is actually running the show. But, as they say on Broadway: ‘The show must go on’, so its proving hard for a country that has been so enamoured by its own myth to face the bare facts of what is happening. 

At least there is the build up to the American presidential elections, which is always its own form of Roman circus, so if nothing else it should provide some degree of distraction from an otherwise tenuous at best, or otherwise immitigably perilous fiscal landscape. Again you can see that efflorescent innocence of hope coupled with the largest fucking military machine in the world. It has worked before, so it may work yet again – or maybe not. For too long not only the general public but also Congress and its sacred House of (elected) Representatives have been far too willing not to ask how the country was kept safe and prosperous. Maybe better not to know. But now it seems far less safe, and also nowhere  near as prosperous.

Well, I am soon to be travelling to America. It is there more than any place else in the world that I feel most a stranger, upon the familiar soil from which I grew. It is late now, just past midnight on a warm summer night in January, and I have arrived at a poem by Robert Frost that most seems to take me back to the place where I come from:

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.