Lies & PTSD: Reading Hamlet Through Personal & National Traumas (Part 3: Who am I to interpret Hamlet?)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is a continuation of a four-part series of blog posts, “Who am I to interpret Hamlet?”
June 16, 2019: To be or not? (Part 1: English Studies & Teaching)
June 23: How Literally Did Shakespeare Take the Bible? (Part 2: Religious Studies & Assumptions)
July 30: Reading Hamlet through personal & national traumas (Part 3: Lies & PTSD)
August 6: Hamlet, PTSD & Entitlement (Part 4)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hamlet is a play about lies. Claudius kills his brother by poison but lies to all of Denmark, claiming his brother died because he was bitten by a snake while napping in his garden. Gertrude seems to have been deceived by Claudius’ lies.
It is also a play about sexual transgressions: The marriage of Claudius to his dead brother's widow is considered incestuous by the play, as it would have been considered in Shakespeare's England, not only in light of how people interpreted relevant passages in the bible, but also in how those bible passages had been interpreted by Henry VIII in seeking to divorce his first wife. In this sense, it's about powerful people abusing their power in order to have sexual relations with people considered too close, too much family, so that sexual relations would be considered wrong.
It is interesting that Shakespeare chose in writing Hamlet (or in re-writing an existing play) to write a play about murder, incest and adultery among members of the royal family, but perhaps unsurprising as the play came at the end of the house of Tudor, and considering the deaths by execution of two of the wives of Henry VIII, and his having taken a number of lovers before his previous marriages were annulled.
A lie about the circumstances of the death of Denmark’s king is a very serious one, perhaps vaguely resembling the Warren Commission being led to tell the nation that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, when in fact there may have been a broader conspiracy, as the US House Select Committee on Assassinations later determined. Oswald may even have been a patsy, as he claimed before his own death, blamed for a killing committed by others, perhaps multiple shooters; a killing in which Oswald himself may not have been involved at all, as some have claimed. Evidence of the assassination may have been covered up during the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital as a result of pressure from the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs, as claimed by one of the military officers put in charge of examining and determining which of the JFK assassination records were safe to release to the public. [1]
Or perhaps the lie Claudius tells about the circumstances of his brother's death is like the claim that Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot by a lone gunman, James Earl Ray, who later claimed he was a patsy and was believed by the King family and other key witnesses and associates of King; a civil court later determined that the US government, not Ray, was responsible for the killing. [2]
Or perhaps Claudius' lie is like the claim that Sirhan Sirhan was the lone gunman who killed Robert F. Kennedy, when in fact Sirhan liked Kennedy, did not remember shooting him, and seems to have been involved in a CIA mind-control effort that also involved a woman with a polka dot dress seen by witnesses at the hotel where the shooting took place. In such a scenario, Sirhan may have begun shooting after hearing a phrase spoken to him by people who had hypnotized him and prepared him for his role. Sirhan stood in front of Kennedy, but Kennedy died of a close-range shot to the back of his head. The L.A. Police removed evidence at the crime scene in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, including the replacement of parts of a doorframe that bullets had penetrated, destroying evidence. [3]
Perhaps the lies of Claudius are like those of the US and UK governments about the Iranian coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power in 1953: For decades, the US and the UK claimed that it was a grass-roots coup that removed him and placed the Shah in power. Later it was revealed, and the US and UK governments had to admit, that it was not grass roots, but astroturf (artificial grass roots, made to look as if natural), a coup planned by the intelligence agencies of the US and the UK.
Did the government lie to the public about the events of 9-11? Some claim that the rubble from the buildings in Manhattan that came down on 9-11-01 was hurriedly disposed of and the metal sold to foreign buyers to be melted down, in order to remove evidence that the buildings did not collapse merely from burning jet fuel: People who speculate in these ways are demonized and labeled “crazy conspiracy theorists.” Some of them claim that thermite charges for controlled demolition may have been placed in the buildings when a new security firm took responsibility for guarding them. These people claim that 9-11-01 was an “inside job” perhaps outsourced to certain people who would hijack the planes, but planned by people with connections to certain leaders in the US. [4]
Has the government lied to congress and to the public to go to war? We now know that the US public was lied to about WMD in Iraq, and about the events in the Gulf of Tonkin before the escalation of the Vietnam war. But it's an old tradition. On May 11, 1846, President James Polk appeared before congress to ask for a declaration of war. He lied when he told Congress that "American blood has been shed on American soil." In fact, American blood had been shed in disputed territory near the border between newly-acquired Texas, and Mexico. Later a freshman representative from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln heard that the bloodshed had been in disputed territory, and he presented to congress his "Spot Resolutions," which basically accused a sitting president of lying to congress in asking for the declaration of war. Lincoln asked of Polk, "Show me the spot!" where the bloodshed took place. But by that point, the US was too deep in the war, and the country felt it more important to support the troops and defend the newly gained Texas territory, regardless of whether that land had been gained by illegal, unethical and diplomatically aggressive means. Opposition members of Congress taunted Representative Lincoln and called him "spotty."
Did certain former US intelligence chiefs and the DNC lie about Russian meddling in the 2016 election? Were the DNC emails leaked by a disgruntled insider, disappointed at DNC bias against Bernie Sanders--as some have long claimed--and downloaded locally to a USB memory stick, as former UK Ambassador Craig Lee Murray contends, saying he received such a USB memory stick in Washington DC and gave to Wikileaks as a courier--as some former US intelligence senior analysts like Ray McGovern (CIA) and Bill Binney (NSA) claim?
Or were the emails hacked remotely by Russia, which Hillary, the DNC, and some US intelligence (spy) leaders claim? (Isn't US intelligence made up of groups of professional spies, who often lie? Didn't they lie in recent years about WMD in Iraq?) Robert Mueller did not even interview Murray or Julian Assange of Wikileaks, although both Murray and Assange offered to testify. The hard drive of the DNC server that was leaked, or hacked, was never subpoenaed or examined by the FBI: Instead, it was examined by a private company, paid for by the DNC, and with potential conflicts of interest. That company, Crowdstrike, later admitted that it did not have conclusive proof of a hack.
Both claims can't be true. It cannot have been a leak by a disgruntled DNC employee locally with a password, a DNC employee upset about DNC corruption and unfairness to Bernie Sanders, AND a remote hack by Guccifer2.0 from Romania, on behalf of Russia. One of them has to be a lie. The second claim, the conspiracy theory that Russia conspired and hacked, is much more popular with the DNC, Hillary, and the intelligence community, as well as with many in US mainstream corporate media.
Is the second explanation, that it was a Russian hack, perhaps a lie to distract from DNC corruption, a lie promoted by former CIA and FBI leaders who wanted a more predictable Hillary Clinton, who would follow plans for regime change wars in foreign countries like Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, rather than an unpredictable and dishonest fool, Trump?
And what about the current occupant of the White House, who has broken all records for the number of lies told in office?
With so many lies and liars, it's hard to recognize what's true.
Claudius kills his brother, King Hamlet, with poison in the ear. Is that metaphorically like gossip or speculation about conspiracies? Is the gossip or conspiracy theory true?
Or are some of those like the lies Polonius has Reynaldo plant regarding Laertes? Polonius sends his son off to France with a long list of advice, ending, “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (1.3). But soon he sends a spy after his son to plant mildly scandalous lies in order to find out if his son is really involved in any scandal (2.1).
Polonius, trusted advisor to the king, planting lies?
I suppose that, if a nation is worried about conspiracy theories revealing the truth, they might plant more ridiculous conspiracy theories in order to generally discredit ALL conspiracy theories.
It sounds like an average day at work for some spies, or political consultants working to discredit an opponent. And yet such webs of lies seem foreign and repulsive to average citizens whose parents usually encouraged them to be honest.
Liars Abound
One of many complications in the case of Hamlet is that Claudius is not the only liar.
The apparition which resembles Hamlet’s father claims that he has come from someplace like purgatory (1.5), but the apparition may be lying:
Hamlet: The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me
Perhaps most of us prefer our parents to be good models of honesty and other virtues. Hamlet doesn’t have that luxury: He suffers not only the traumatic loss of his father, but also the trauma of finding that his father (if in fact the apparition is the ghost of his father) seems to have died with some serious sins—serious enough to keep him from going directly to heaven—and that his mother may have been unfaithful to her husband.
Lies seem infectious in Denmark. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent for by Claudius and Gertrude to spy on Hamlet, and they lie to him at first, resistant to admitting they were sent for (2.2). Currying favor with the king and queen seem more important to them than honesty with their old friend, the prince.
Ophelia lies: When Hamlet asks Ophelia where her father is, she lies and claims he is at home, when she knows he is not there, but eavesdropping on their conversation. (3.1) Ophelia's statement that her father is "at home" can only be true if she were speaking figuratively and claiming that, when it comes to her father, Polonius is most at home when involved in some intrigue like eavesdropping.
Laertes lies: When Hamlet attempts to apologize to Laertes before the duel without publicly disclosing who he assumed he had stabbed behind the arras, he resorts to metaphor:
Hamlet: Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,
And hurt my brother.
Laertes responds with a lie: “I do receive your offer'd love like love, / And will not wrong it.”
In fact, he plans to wrong it. He plans to kill the prince (5.2).
Even Hamlet’s feigned madness is a lie, a false pretending that he performs with intent to mislead.
Why PTSD & Lies?
The attention readers, audience members, and scholars give to particular themes in plays like Hamlet is often an outgrowth of their own personal interests and experience. I follow someone on Twitter who recently received her Ph.D, is a mother of a young child, and did a dissertation related to pregnancies in Early Modern literature. There are Early Modern scholars who are people of color and give special attention to race, with very insightful results. Shakespeare scholars who are gay or trans may reflect especially on gender dynamics and performance, as male actors in Shakespeare’s time played women’s parts, and sometimes played females-dressed-as-males.
The things our life experiences lead us to reflect upon repeatedly or more intensively often prepare us to have insights others may lack.
Why might a person give special attention to lies and PTSD in this play, or to the hope that as its plot unfolds, truth might prevail?
A Sad Tale
When I was young, not even in kindergarten, I had a painful experience as the victim of a lie.
My brother had been playing with some stuffed animals and decided to clean them, perhaps following the example of our own bath-time ritual when we’d wash our faces. Some of the stuffed animals had colored felt eyes, noses and lips, and as it turned out, these were not color-fast, so the colors started to run. My brother wiped the faces of the stuffed animals on towels in the bathroom, and later on our bedsheets, but the color came off on the towels and sheets too. He hid the evidence.
This was in the 1960s, when childrearing expert and author Dr. Benjamin Spock still advocated spanking, and of course, the bible had that saying, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” My parents not only threatened spanking for misbehavior, but also had a wooden dowl, about a half-inch in diameter, which was referred to as “the stick.” If misbehavior was especially severe, they would threaten “the stick” or “the belt.” Some states and countries have outlawed corporal punishment, especially in schools, sometimes in the home, but many still allow it, although even in states that allow it in the home, leaving a bruise can be considered evidence of child abuse.
So it’s understandable that my older brother, the first-born, was afraid of punishment and shame that might come as a consequence for making the mess. This may have motivated him to lie.
I was the second-born, about a year and a half younger. He blamed me. So I got spanked for his lie.
I should add: When my brother and I recited the ABCs in those days (or when I tried to), tape recordings show that he had very clear pronunciation and knew his ABCs exactly, while I was a bit of a train-wreck at it, even had a hard time finding my way out. I kept looping back, losing my place.
Blaming me for making the mess makes a kind of sense: I was younger, messier. He looked more grown-up in pictures from this time, more the image of perfection, while I looked sloppier (though I think I was often a happy kid).
[At my Aunt Lucy's wedding in the early 1960s]
So I understand why my mother trusted my brother’s lie that I had made the mess.
But the issue was not merely about a mess. When my brother claimed that I had done it, she asked me if this was true, and I said no. This placed my mother in the difficult position of deciding what to do, not only about a son who seemed to be avoiding responsibility for a mess, but a son who seemed to be lying. She wanted her children to be truthful, an understandable goal for mothers.
My mother assumed I was lying and said I would be spanked if I didn’t tell the truth.
So I told the truth: I did not make the mess.
So I got spanked.
This pattern continued: Did you make the mess? Tell the truth.
I told the truth again and was spanked again. And again. Repeat. Repeat.
My brother was watching. Eventually (how long did it take?) he felt uncomfortable about the punishment I was receiving for his mess and started to hint at the possibility that I might not have caused it.
In her later accounts of the tale, my mother said she got a sinking feeling and realized she was punishing the wrong boy for lying. She had wrongly trusted her first-born, this boy who had so often seemed so good and trustworthy.
When the story was told in our family, my mother usually never divulged whether my brother got spanked for lying. But she would usually note that, after that day, she resolved not to spank any of her children again, a remarkable choice for a mom who eventually had a total of four children who sometimes misbehaved. Society at the time agreed for the most part with Dr. Spock and the Bible, that misbehaving children needed to be spanked or would become "spoiled" (or “overindulged” as the more current terminology goes).
But meanwhile, what had happened inside of that little boy who was repeatedly told to tell the truth by a mother who loved him, and was repeatedly spanked for it, repeatedly punished for doing the very thing a loved one and authority figure had requested?
Does the Suffering of Children Prove There Is No God?
Or Is the Heart of the Universe in Solidarity with the Suffering?
To some, stories of children as victims of abuse are proof that there is no God. Some ask, How could there be a just, loving, and all-powerful God, if this God allows children to suffer? If such a God is all-powerful, this God certainly would not allow innocent suffering, they assume. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Macduff asks regarding the death of his murdered wife and children, "Did heaven look on /And would not take their part?" Laertes makes a similar comment in Hamlet, asking if God is paying attention to the madness of his sister: "Do you see this, O God?" (4.5.2951)
But I realized while in college that the stories of Jesus in the gospels portrayed a good person who was also an innocent victim, like I had been, not a child but an older, wiser, generous adult, and yet a victim of far more extreme violence than I had suffered.
Perhaps there is no God like the father-figure Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and all stories of Christianity’s God are anthropomorphisms, insightful fictions gesturing toward some hoped-for relationship between humanity and the universe. Yet the Christian gospels seemed to portray this man, this one they call “Son of God,” as one who was in solidarity with innocent victims of suffering, and that the heart of the universe is on their side.
PTSD & Moral Wounding
Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or PTSD, is a term first used in the 1970s to try to name what afflicted Vietnam veterans, something previously described with other names like “shell-shock.” Since then, it has also been used to describe how other victims of trauma are affected by their experience. It’s an inexact term because it’s used not only to describe what happens to traumatized witnesses of school shootings, and to child victims of sexual abuse, and rape victims, but also the moral wounding of soldiers who have killed civilians, soldiers wounded by their own bad choices, as in the My Lai massacre in March of 1968, or as shown in the Wikileaks video, Collateral Murder, released in 2010, showing atrocities that US soldiers committed in Iraq in July of 2007.
Was my mother in any small way morally wounded by the realization that she had been spanking the child who was telling the truth, like soldiers are morally wounded in even more devastating ways after committing acts of extreme violence they later regret? She vowed not to spank her children after that day, and for that, we might think she changed for the better, and there is probably truth in that.
But as Flannery O’Connor wrote, “the good is something under construction.” Did my mother later hesitate when faced with her sometimes misbehaving or lying children, and therefore sometimes “spoil” or overindulge them? Was a moral wound, her recognition of her own mistake, a result of this traumatic experience, and may it have made the pendulum of her parental vigilance swing too far the other way?
Maybe. Who can say? It’s a mystery, and the good is still under construction.
And what of the little boy? The oft-quoted line from 13th-century poet Rumi claims that “the wound is where the light comes in.” What would happen later in him upon hearing lies, or being in the presence of liars, or of misled authority figures or loved ones? Would it trigger a PTSD response, making him anxious, fearful of being transported back to that day when he was punished for telling the truth? Would he freeze when he needed to act? Lose his temper? Or would his experience as a victim make him sympathetic to other victims of violence and lies? An advocate against social injustices?
Or perhaps a mix, all of the above, depending on the details of the circumstances? God (or the devil) is in the details, as some say. And the good is still under construction.
One of Many Reasons
Maybe this is one of many reasons why I am drawn to Shakespeare’s Hamlet: It’s about a young prince, burdened with a dangerous truth that will cause him great pain, and with a mother who seems to have been deceived by someone lying to cover up his misdeeds. At a certain moment in my past, this was my story too.
Hamlet is certainly a character who has suffered trauma: Not only the premature loss of his father, but also the scandalous marriage of his mother to his uncle (and thereby his uncle's ascension to the throne, and Hamlet's dashed hopes to become king), and then the revelation by the ghost that Uncle Claudius, who now sits on the throne, murdered his brother, Hamlet's father. After speaking to the ghost and learning the dark truth, Hamlet is darkly transfigured. He doesn't seem at all his old self. People around him notice, certainly Gertrude, Claudius, and Ophelia especially. Today we might say Hamlet suffers from PTSD, and this seems even more appropriate to say than merely to claim that he is a student feigning a fashionable melancholy, or that he suffers from depression (as I've noted briefly in a previous post).
The Danger
There is a danger for scholars motivated by something personal at stake: As the unnamed gentleman in Hamlet says of those trying to interpret Ophelia's mad words, we may botch it up (as I mentioned near the end of my post last week): Will our biases help bring us to valid insights, or will they make us “botch the words up fit to [our] own thoughts”? As we bring our personal biases to our reading of the play, do we then botch up our understanding of the play itself, not even realizing how much we may be more unconsciously invested in working out our personal issues than we are in understanding the play?
There’s the rub. It’s hard to say. The good is still under construction.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Notes:
[1] For a good book on the background of CIA director Allen Dulles, who was forced to retire after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and who may have been involved in planning the JFK assassination, see the book by Salon.com founder and author David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government.
—For a good book on the historical context of the JFK assassination, see JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass.
—For a good treatment of the problems with the JFK autopsy by an author who was on the staff of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), see Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government's Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK (V. 1) by Douglas P. Horne
[2] For a good summary of issues related to the assassination of Martin Luther King, see a brief but excellent PDF called "The MLK Ten-Point Program," by Joseph E. Greene: http://www.joegreenjfk.com/uploads/4/0/2/4/40249619/themlk10pp-fin.pdf
[3] See The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by William W. Turner & Jonn Christian, a book that a US intelligence agency tried to suppress by purchasing and burning as many copies as it could.
—Or see A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Lisa Pease.
—For a short treatment, see this brief ABC News piece on continuing questions relation to the RFK assassination: https://abcnews.go.com/US/50-years-shots-rang-ambassador-hotel-controversy-surrounds/story?id=55504645
[4] See The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-up & the Expose by David Ray Griffin,
and also by Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press.
Senator Max Cleland, a member of the 9/11 Commission, resigned in great frustration over how it was given such a small budget, a short timeline, a too-small small staff, an executive director who had conflicts of interest, and frequently faced with unreasonable White House delays; the commission would subpoena specific records from the White House, and the White House would send boxes and boxes of records, forcing the commission to find needles in haystacks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Next week (August 6):
Hamlet, PTSD and entitlement (part 4, “Who am I to interpret Hamlet?)
This is a continuation of a four-part series of blog posts, “Who am I to interpret Hamlet?”
June 16, 2019: To be or not? (Part 1: English Studies & Teaching)
June 23: How Literally Did Shakespeare Take the Bible? (Part 2: Religious Studies & Assumptions)
July 30: Reading Hamlet through personal & national traumas (Part 3: Lies & PTSD)
August 6: Hamlet, PTSD & Entitlement (Part 4)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hamlet is a play about lies. Claudius kills his brother by poison but lies to all of Denmark, claiming his brother died because he was bitten by a snake while napping in his garden. Gertrude seems to have been deceived by Claudius’ lies.
It is also a play about sexual transgressions: The marriage of Claudius to his dead brother's widow is considered incestuous by the play, as it would have been considered in Shakespeare's England, not only in light of how people interpreted relevant passages in the bible, but also in how those bible passages had been interpreted by Henry VIII in seeking to divorce his first wife. In this sense, it's about powerful people abusing their power in order to have sexual relations with people considered too close, too much family, so that sexual relations would be considered wrong.
It is interesting that Shakespeare chose in writing Hamlet (or in re-writing an existing play) to write a play about murder, incest and adultery among members of the royal family, but perhaps unsurprising as the play came at the end of the house of Tudor, and considering the deaths by execution of two of the wives of Henry VIII, and his having taken a number of lovers before his previous marriages were annulled.
A lie about the circumstances of the death of Denmark’s king is a very serious one, perhaps vaguely resembling the Warren Commission being led to tell the nation that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, when in fact there may have been a broader conspiracy, as the US House Select Committee on Assassinations later determined. Oswald may even have been a patsy, as he claimed before his own death, blamed for a killing committed by others, perhaps multiple shooters; a killing in which Oswald himself may not have been involved at all, as some have claimed. Evidence of the assassination may have been covered up during the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital as a result of pressure from the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs, as claimed by one of the military officers put in charge of examining and determining which of the JFK assassination records were safe to release to the public. [1]
Or perhaps the lie Claudius tells about the circumstances of his brother's death is like the claim that Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot by a lone gunman, James Earl Ray, who later claimed he was a patsy and was believed by the King family and other key witnesses and associates of King; a civil court later determined that the US government, not Ray, was responsible for the killing. [2]
Or perhaps Claudius' lie is like the claim that Sirhan Sirhan was the lone gunman who killed Robert F. Kennedy, when in fact Sirhan liked Kennedy, did not remember shooting him, and seems to have been involved in a CIA mind-control effort that also involved a woman with a polka dot dress seen by witnesses at the hotel where the shooting took place. In such a scenario, Sirhan may have begun shooting after hearing a phrase spoken to him by people who had hypnotized him and prepared him for his role. Sirhan stood in front of Kennedy, but Kennedy died of a close-range shot to the back of his head. The L.A. Police removed evidence at the crime scene in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, including the replacement of parts of a doorframe that bullets had penetrated, destroying evidence. [3]
Perhaps the lies of Claudius are like those of the US and UK governments about the Iranian coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power in 1953: For decades, the US and the UK claimed that it was a grass-roots coup that removed him and placed the Shah in power. Later it was revealed, and the US and UK governments had to admit, that it was not grass roots, but astroturf (artificial grass roots, made to look as if natural), a coup planned by the intelligence agencies of the US and the UK.
Did the government lie to the public about the events of 9-11? Some claim that the rubble from the buildings in Manhattan that came down on 9-11-01 was hurriedly disposed of and the metal sold to foreign buyers to be melted down, in order to remove evidence that the buildings did not collapse merely from burning jet fuel: People who speculate in these ways are demonized and labeled “crazy conspiracy theorists.” Some of them claim that thermite charges for controlled demolition may have been placed in the buildings when a new security firm took responsibility for guarding them. These people claim that 9-11-01 was an “inside job” perhaps outsourced to certain people who would hijack the planes, but planned by people with connections to certain leaders in the US. [4]
Has the government lied to congress and to the public to go to war? We now know that the US public was lied to about WMD in Iraq, and about the events in the Gulf of Tonkin before the escalation of the Vietnam war. But it's an old tradition. On May 11, 1846, President James Polk appeared before congress to ask for a declaration of war. He lied when he told Congress that "American blood has been shed on American soil." In fact, American blood had been shed in disputed territory near the border between newly-acquired Texas, and Mexico. Later a freshman representative from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln heard that the bloodshed had been in disputed territory, and he presented to congress his "Spot Resolutions," which basically accused a sitting president of lying to congress in asking for the declaration of war. Lincoln asked of Polk, "Show me the spot!" where the bloodshed took place. But by that point, the US was too deep in the war, and the country felt it more important to support the troops and defend the newly gained Texas territory, regardless of whether that land had been gained by illegal, unethical and diplomatically aggressive means. Opposition members of Congress taunted Representative Lincoln and called him "spotty."
Did certain former US intelligence chiefs and the DNC lie about Russian meddling in the 2016 election? Were the DNC emails leaked by a disgruntled insider, disappointed at DNC bias against Bernie Sanders--as some have long claimed--and downloaded locally to a USB memory stick, as former UK Ambassador Craig Lee Murray contends, saying he received such a USB memory stick in Washington DC and gave to Wikileaks as a courier--as some former US intelligence senior analysts like Ray McGovern (CIA) and Bill Binney (NSA) claim?
Or were the emails hacked remotely by Russia, which Hillary, the DNC, and some US intelligence (spy) leaders claim? (Isn't US intelligence made up of groups of professional spies, who often lie? Didn't they lie in recent years about WMD in Iraq?) Robert Mueller did not even interview Murray or Julian Assange of Wikileaks, although both Murray and Assange offered to testify. The hard drive of the DNC server that was leaked, or hacked, was never subpoenaed or examined by the FBI: Instead, it was examined by a private company, paid for by the DNC, and with potential conflicts of interest. That company, Crowdstrike, later admitted that it did not have conclusive proof of a hack.
Both claims can't be true. It cannot have been a leak by a disgruntled DNC employee locally with a password, a DNC employee upset about DNC corruption and unfairness to Bernie Sanders, AND a remote hack by Guccifer2.0 from Romania, on behalf of Russia. One of them has to be a lie. The second claim, the conspiracy theory that Russia conspired and hacked, is much more popular with the DNC, Hillary, and the intelligence community, as well as with many in US mainstream corporate media.
Is the second explanation, that it was a Russian hack, perhaps a lie to distract from DNC corruption, a lie promoted by former CIA and FBI leaders who wanted a more predictable Hillary Clinton, who would follow plans for regime change wars in foreign countries like Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, rather than an unpredictable and dishonest fool, Trump?
And what about the current occupant of the White House, who has broken all records for the number of lies told in office?
With so many lies and liars, it's hard to recognize what's true.
Claudius kills his brother, King Hamlet, with poison in the ear. Is that metaphorically like gossip or speculation about conspiracies? Is the gossip or conspiracy theory true?
Or are some of those like the lies Polonius has Reynaldo plant regarding Laertes? Polonius sends his son off to France with a long list of advice, ending, “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (1.3). But soon he sends a spy after his son to plant mildly scandalous lies in order to find out if his son is really involved in any scandal (2.1).
Polonius, trusted advisor to the king, planting lies?
I suppose that, if a nation is worried about conspiracy theories revealing the truth, they might plant more ridiculous conspiracy theories in order to generally discredit ALL conspiracy theories.
It sounds like an average day at work for some spies, or political consultants working to discredit an opponent. And yet such webs of lies seem foreign and repulsive to average citizens whose parents usually encouraged them to be honest.
Liars Abound
One of many complications in the case of Hamlet is that Claudius is not the only liar.
The apparition which resembles Hamlet’s father claims that he has come from someplace like purgatory (1.5), but the apparition may be lying:
Hamlet: The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me
Perhaps most of us prefer our parents to be good models of honesty and other virtues. Hamlet doesn’t have that luxury: He suffers not only the traumatic loss of his father, but also the trauma of finding that his father (if in fact the apparition is the ghost of his father) seems to have died with some serious sins—serious enough to keep him from going directly to heaven—and that his mother may have been unfaithful to her husband.
Lies seem infectious in Denmark. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent for by Claudius and Gertrude to spy on Hamlet, and they lie to him at first, resistant to admitting they were sent for (2.2). Currying favor with the king and queen seem more important to them than honesty with their old friend, the prince.
Ophelia lies: When Hamlet asks Ophelia where her father is, she lies and claims he is at home, when she knows he is not there, but eavesdropping on their conversation. (3.1) Ophelia's statement that her father is "at home" can only be true if she were speaking figuratively and claiming that, when it comes to her father, Polonius is most at home when involved in some intrigue like eavesdropping.
Laertes lies: When Hamlet attempts to apologize to Laertes before the duel without publicly disclosing who he assumed he had stabbed behind the arras, he resorts to metaphor:
Hamlet: Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,
And hurt my brother.
Laertes responds with a lie: “I do receive your offer'd love like love, / And will not wrong it.”
In fact, he plans to wrong it. He plans to kill the prince (5.2).
Even Hamlet’s feigned madness is a lie, a false pretending that he performs with intent to mislead.
Why PTSD & Lies?
The attention readers, audience members, and scholars give to particular themes in plays like Hamlet is often an outgrowth of their own personal interests and experience. I follow someone on Twitter who recently received her Ph.D, is a mother of a young child, and did a dissertation related to pregnancies in Early Modern literature. There are Early Modern scholars who are people of color and give special attention to race, with very insightful results. Shakespeare scholars who are gay or trans may reflect especially on gender dynamics and performance, as male actors in Shakespeare’s time played women’s parts, and sometimes played females-dressed-as-males.
The things our life experiences lead us to reflect upon repeatedly or more intensively often prepare us to have insights others may lack.
Why might a person give special attention to lies and PTSD in this play, or to the hope that as its plot unfolds, truth might prevail?
A Sad Tale
When I was young, not even in kindergarten, I had a painful experience as the victim of a lie.
My brother had been playing with some stuffed animals and decided to clean them, perhaps following the example of our own bath-time ritual when we’d wash our faces. Some of the stuffed animals had colored felt eyes, noses and lips, and as it turned out, these were not color-fast, so the colors started to run. My brother wiped the faces of the stuffed animals on towels in the bathroom, and later on our bedsheets, but the color came off on the towels and sheets too. He hid the evidence.
This was in the 1960s, when childrearing expert and author Dr. Benjamin Spock still advocated spanking, and of course, the bible had that saying, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” My parents not only threatened spanking for misbehavior, but also had a wooden dowl, about a half-inch in diameter, which was referred to as “the stick.” If misbehavior was especially severe, they would threaten “the stick” or “the belt.” Some states and countries have outlawed corporal punishment, especially in schools, sometimes in the home, but many still allow it, although even in states that allow it in the home, leaving a bruise can be considered evidence of child abuse.
So it’s understandable that my older brother, the first-born, was afraid of punishment and shame that might come as a consequence for making the mess. This may have motivated him to lie.
I was the second-born, about a year and a half younger. He blamed me. So I got spanked for his lie.
I should add: When my brother and I recited the ABCs in those days (or when I tried to), tape recordings show that he had very clear pronunciation and knew his ABCs exactly, while I was a bit of a train-wreck at it, even had a hard time finding my way out. I kept looping back, losing my place.
Blaming me for making the mess makes a kind of sense: I was younger, messier. He looked more grown-up in pictures from this time, more the image of perfection, while I looked sloppier (though I think I was often a happy kid).
[At my Aunt Lucy's wedding in the early 1960s]
So I understand why my mother trusted my brother’s lie that I had made the mess.
But the issue was not merely about a mess. When my brother claimed that I had done it, she asked me if this was true, and I said no. This placed my mother in the difficult position of deciding what to do, not only about a son who seemed to be avoiding responsibility for a mess, but a son who seemed to be lying. She wanted her children to be truthful, an understandable goal for mothers.
My mother assumed I was lying and said I would be spanked if I didn’t tell the truth.
So I told the truth: I did not make the mess.
So I got spanked.
This pattern continued: Did you make the mess? Tell the truth.
I told the truth again and was spanked again. And again. Repeat. Repeat.
My brother was watching. Eventually (how long did it take?) he felt uncomfortable about the punishment I was receiving for his mess and started to hint at the possibility that I might not have caused it.
In her later accounts of the tale, my mother said she got a sinking feeling and realized she was punishing the wrong boy for lying. She had wrongly trusted her first-born, this boy who had so often seemed so good and trustworthy.
When the story was told in our family, my mother usually never divulged whether my brother got spanked for lying. But she would usually note that, after that day, she resolved not to spank any of her children again, a remarkable choice for a mom who eventually had a total of four children who sometimes misbehaved. Society at the time agreed for the most part with Dr. Spock and the Bible, that misbehaving children needed to be spanked or would become "spoiled" (or “overindulged” as the more current terminology goes).
But meanwhile, what had happened inside of that little boy who was repeatedly told to tell the truth by a mother who loved him, and was repeatedly spanked for it, repeatedly punished for doing the very thing a loved one and authority figure had requested?
Does the Suffering of Children Prove There Is No God?
Or Is the Heart of the Universe in Solidarity with the Suffering?
To some, stories of children as victims of abuse are proof that there is no God. Some ask, How could there be a just, loving, and all-powerful God, if this God allows children to suffer? If such a God is all-powerful, this God certainly would not allow innocent suffering, they assume. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Macduff asks regarding the death of his murdered wife and children, "Did heaven look on /And would not take their part?" Laertes makes a similar comment in Hamlet, asking if God is paying attention to the madness of his sister: "Do you see this, O God?" (4.5.2951)
But I realized while in college that the stories of Jesus in the gospels portrayed a good person who was also an innocent victim, like I had been, not a child but an older, wiser, generous adult, and yet a victim of far more extreme violence than I had suffered.
Perhaps there is no God like the father-figure Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and all stories of Christianity’s God are anthropomorphisms, insightful fictions gesturing toward some hoped-for relationship between humanity and the universe. Yet the Christian gospels seemed to portray this man, this one they call “Son of God,” as one who was in solidarity with innocent victims of suffering, and that the heart of the universe is on their side.
PTSD & Moral Wounding
Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or PTSD, is a term first used in the 1970s to try to name what afflicted Vietnam veterans, something previously described with other names like “shell-shock.” Since then, it has also been used to describe how other victims of trauma are affected by their experience. It’s an inexact term because it’s used not only to describe what happens to traumatized witnesses of school shootings, and to child victims of sexual abuse, and rape victims, but also the moral wounding of soldiers who have killed civilians, soldiers wounded by their own bad choices, as in the My Lai massacre in March of 1968, or as shown in the Wikileaks video, Collateral Murder, released in 2010, showing atrocities that US soldiers committed in Iraq in July of 2007.
Was my mother in any small way morally wounded by the realization that she had been spanking the child who was telling the truth, like soldiers are morally wounded in even more devastating ways after committing acts of extreme violence they later regret? She vowed not to spank her children after that day, and for that, we might think she changed for the better, and there is probably truth in that.
But as Flannery O’Connor wrote, “the good is something under construction.” Did my mother later hesitate when faced with her sometimes misbehaving or lying children, and therefore sometimes “spoil” or overindulge them? Was a moral wound, her recognition of her own mistake, a result of this traumatic experience, and may it have made the pendulum of her parental vigilance swing too far the other way?
Maybe. Who can say? It’s a mystery, and the good is still under construction.
And what of the little boy? The oft-quoted line from 13th-century poet Rumi claims that “the wound is where the light comes in.” What would happen later in him upon hearing lies, or being in the presence of liars, or of misled authority figures or loved ones? Would it trigger a PTSD response, making him anxious, fearful of being transported back to that day when he was punished for telling the truth? Would he freeze when he needed to act? Lose his temper? Or would his experience as a victim make him sympathetic to other victims of violence and lies? An advocate against social injustices?
Or perhaps a mix, all of the above, depending on the details of the circumstances? God (or the devil) is in the details, as some say. And the good is still under construction.
One of Many Reasons
Maybe this is one of many reasons why I am drawn to Shakespeare’s Hamlet: It’s about a young prince, burdened with a dangerous truth that will cause him great pain, and with a mother who seems to have been deceived by someone lying to cover up his misdeeds. At a certain moment in my past, this was my story too.
Hamlet is certainly a character who has suffered trauma: Not only the premature loss of his father, but also the scandalous marriage of his mother to his uncle (and thereby his uncle's ascension to the throne, and Hamlet's dashed hopes to become king), and then the revelation by the ghost that Uncle Claudius, who now sits on the throne, murdered his brother, Hamlet's father. After speaking to the ghost and learning the dark truth, Hamlet is darkly transfigured. He doesn't seem at all his old self. People around him notice, certainly Gertrude, Claudius, and Ophelia especially. Today we might say Hamlet suffers from PTSD, and this seems even more appropriate to say than merely to claim that he is a student feigning a fashionable melancholy, or that he suffers from depression (as I've noted briefly in a previous post).
The Danger
There is a danger for scholars motivated by something personal at stake: As the unnamed gentleman in Hamlet says of those trying to interpret Ophelia's mad words, we may botch it up (as I mentioned near the end of my post last week): Will our biases help bring us to valid insights, or will they make us “botch the words up fit to [our] own thoughts”? As we bring our personal biases to our reading of the play, do we then botch up our understanding of the play itself, not even realizing how much we may be more unconsciously invested in working out our personal issues than we are in understanding the play?
There’s the rub. It’s hard to say. The good is still under construction.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Notes:
[1] For a good book on the background of CIA director Allen Dulles, who was forced to retire after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and who may have been involved in planning the JFK assassination, see the book by Salon.com founder and author David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government.
—For a good book on the historical context of the JFK assassination, see JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass.
—For a good treatment of the problems with the JFK autopsy by an author who was on the staff of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), see Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government's Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK (V. 1) by Douglas P. Horne
[2] For a good summary of issues related to the assassination of Martin Luther King, see a brief but excellent PDF called "The MLK Ten-Point Program," by Joseph E. Greene: http://www.joegreenjfk.com/uploads/4/0/2/4/40249619/themlk10pp-fin.pdf
[3] See The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by William W. Turner & Jonn Christian, a book that a US intelligence agency tried to suppress by purchasing and burning as many copies as it could.
—Or see A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Lisa Pease.
—For a short treatment, see this brief ABC News piece on continuing questions relation to the RFK assassination: https://abcnews.go.com/US/50-years-shots-rang-ambassador-hotel-controversy-surrounds/story?id=55504645
[4] See The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-up & the Expose by David Ray Griffin,
and also by Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press.
Senator Max Cleland, a member of the 9/11 Commission, resigned in great frustration over how it was given such a small budget, a short timeline, a too-small small staff, an executive director who had conflicts of interest, and frequently faced with unreasonable White House delays; the commission would subpoena specific records from the White House, and the White House would send boxes and boxes of records, forcing the commission to find needles in haystacks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Next week (August 6):
Hamlet, PTSD and entitlement (part 4, “Who am I to interpret Hamlet?)
Comments
Post a Comment