His Dimwitted Pretense Gone, He Shrewdly Rules the Place

The next time someone tells you that Shakespeare is irrelevant, tell him that the Bard wrote his greatest play about George W. Bush 350 years before our incumbent president was even born.

Oh yeah, you’re thinking. Which one? “Much Ado About Nothing”? “The Comedy of Errors”? Nah. Actually, it’s “Hamlet.”

I know. I know. Sacrilege, right? Maybe. But, then again, we might just all be in for a big surprise when it comes to the man we’ve got in the White House. He might not be quite the fool that many of us take him for, and that could be dangerous.

We tend to think of Hamlet as one of the wisest, most intellectually prodigious characters in all of literature. Which he is, but there’s a little more to it than that. The name Hamlet is an anglicization of Amleth. This was the notorious prince of Denmark’s name in both of the two original sources from which Shakespeare is thought to have taken the story of his play. And the name Amleth comes from the Old Norse Amlooi, which refers to a person who is either dimwitted or, more probably, pretending to be dimwitted in order to outsmart his enemies.

This, in fact, is exactly what Hamlet does when he first learns that his uncle, Claudius, the usurping king, has murdered his father. He pretends to be crazy because he understands that if Claudius suspects him of knowing anything about the murder or of having any plans for revenge, he’ll have him killed or exiled. So Hamlet decides to put “an antic disposition on” and talk nonsense to throw his uncle’s spies off the scent. But in truth, as he admits, “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Not a bad stratagem, when you think about it, for you can do a lot more dirty work and damage when nobody takes you seriously. And indeed Hamlet does. He stabs Polonius, cunningly brings about the deaths of his former schoolmates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, slices his rival Laertes with a toxic rapier and poisons the king with the tainted cup intended for himself. Though Shakespeare changed the story, in the original version, Amleth not only kills the king but all his attendants as well, and he lives to reclaim his birthright, the Danish throne.

Now think of it in modern terms. George H.W. Bush is king for a term. Then, he’s killed at the polls by Bill Clinton, a lecherous, intemperate Claudian pretender to the throne who proves to be utterly corrupt. Meanwhile, the former King George’s son, who appears to be nothing more than a bumbling prince, is stewing in the wings, planning to snatch back the crown his father so untimely lost. He bides his time, spewing nonsense, seemingly incapable of decisive action. Then, when the time is right, he pounces, seizes power and at last succeeds his father to the throne.

What’s more, he waltzes in, strong as that tell-tale southerly wind. And while the man may not seem to know an ox from an oxide, he’s proving to be one of the most decisive presidents we’ve had since Ronald Reagan, another wildly successful leader who pretended to be dumber than he was.

Whether it’s been by resurrecting the specter of Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense; unceremoniously shooing Russian diplomats out of the country in the wake of the Robert Philip Hanssen spy case; sticking to environmentally unpopular stands on the electricity crisis and our reliance on foreign oil, or jettisoning the politically biased American Bar Assn. from its advisory role in selecting federal judges, this young Bush is looking pretty brash. Even the happy resolution of the spy plane standoff with China is being praised as shrewdly diplomatic, yet firm.

Although all the wisenheimers in the spin rooms thought this simp would never make it to Washington, much less rule the place like a czar, they were dead wrong. Or so it seems.

Maybe the great poet was right after all when he wrote: “A fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”