My wife is also a high school language arts teacher. This semester she is teaching sophomore English. The literature text includes William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. She described to me her discussion of Brutus' soliloquy in Act II sc i of the play where Brutus, speaking his thoughts aloud, says these lines:
BRUTUS.
It must be by his death: and, for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown'd:
How that might change his nature, there's the question:
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder;
And that craves wary walking. . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg
Which hatch'd, would, as his kind grow mischievous;
And kill him in the shell.
In other words, Brutus says that he must kill Caesar, not for anything that Caesar has done, but for what Caesar may do.
"So it's like a preemptive strike?" one student asked.
"Exactly," my wife responded, "and what was the result of Caesar's assasination by Brutus' and the conspirators?"
"Civil war," another student said.
"So, Brutus kills Caesar in a preemptive strike not for what Caesar has done, but for what he could do. The result is chaos and civil war. What can we conclude from this?" my wife asked.
"George W. Bush didn't study Julius Caesar when he was in high school?"
4 comments:
The chances of W learning any facts from history or any of the pesky little life lessons such as, "Think before you act." Are pretty much nil.
The point of Julius Caesar the play is that one should be very, very careful before acting on supposition and impluse. The consequences are always unforeseen and usually dire.
As Bush has demonstrated to us once again. He acts. We are stuck with cleaning up the mess he leaves behind.
If that means think before you act, well, yes.
So that's sorta like the way the Bush administration claims that we shouldn't do anything about global warming because a handful of "scientists" don't agree that's its a problem.
The problem is that if you go to war, you will be killing thousands, maiming thousands more. If you do so because you have cherry picked intelligence, you have simply smashed a lot of innocent lives for a lie.
...and by the way, think before you shoot works well in hunting as it does in foreign policy.
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