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News from All Over the Place
 The mind reels. Mine is
reeling, anyway. Too much is happening. I can’t take it all in.
Let’s start with politics.  Not much good news for the Bush regime:
North Korea keeps threatening to join the nuclear club, and Kim As
this year’s elections approach, a new sex scandal in Congress has
further demoralized the Republicans, and it doesn’t matter how many
times Rush Limbaugh reminds us that the Democrats have — well, you
know: Monica Lewinsky and Barney Frank and Gerry Studds and Wayne Hays
and of course we’ll always have Chappaquiddick. Let’s not
forget Chappaquiddick. The Republicans still talk about Chappaquiddick in
their sleep.
But all this doesn’t mean the Democrats will recapture
Congress. By now our form of government practically guarantees Republican
dominance, and the GOP has developed the arts of fundraising,
gerrymandering, and propagandizing to a degree that makes election
virtually synonymous with reelection. The defeat of an incumbent is no
longer just an upset; it’s now a near miracle.
Turning to sports, the Detroit Tigers, who lost 119 games just two
years ago, have whipped the New York Yankees in the playoffs. I take this as
a sign of divine wrath, not against the Yankees, or even George Steinbrenner,
but against the Yankee fans, whom Jonathan Swift described as “the
most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to
crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
All
season long these folks have demanded a pennant as their birthright, while
mercilessly booing poor Alex Rodriguez — if you can call a guy who
makes $25 million a year poor — for failing to be another Mickey
Mantle, whom they booed just as mercilessly a generation ago for failing to
be another Joe DiMaggio. By the way, it was exactly 50 years ago that Don
Larsen pitched a perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World
Series, with Mantle blasting a home run and making a superb running catch in
center field.
![[Breaker quote for News from All Over the Place: Mostly bad]](2006breakers/061010.gif) Ah
yes, I remember it well. I was a
little brat of a Yankee fan myself, and I taunted my best pal, Terry Larson
(no kin to Don), a Dodgers fan, until, to my astonishment, he burst into tears
and took a swing at me. I’d never seen Terry cry before, but the
humiliation of his Dodgers was more than flesh could bear. I just sent him an
e-mail taunting him again. Ha ha! Nothing like a little salt in the old wounds, I
always say.
Now for some literary news. Last week, I regret to say, I repeated an
outdated cliché about the first, allegedly “bad,” quarto of
Hamlet, published in 1603. I have since done some research and learned that
some sober recent scholars think this was not a “bad” (or
“pirated”) copy of the play, but a workmanlike, if inelegant,
acting abridgment. What I wrote falls under the dubious heading of what
Everyone Knows. Once again, Everyone was wrong.
An
Italian scholar named Giorgio Melchiori argues that the longer and more
familiar text of the play, the “good” quarto published in 1604,
had been circulating in manuscript. It was written “for the
study,” not chiefly for the stage — a
“revolutionary” change of genre at the time, Melchiori contends.
In
1598 or so, Gabriel Harvey observed that Hamlet was highly
esteemed by “the wiser sort” of readers. To me this confirms
that the author was not the actor from Stratford, but, as I have long
suspected (though Melchiori might disagree), Edward de Vere, the highly
literary Earl of Oxford, who was too genteel to write for money.
Needless to say, all this is a challenge to what Everyone Knows about
“Shakespeare,” the supposedly commercial playwright who
dashed off plays for profit. Surprise! The real author knew he was writing
great literature, whether or not it wound up on the stage (as several of his
plays, in his own time, apparently didn’t).
Finally, in the animal kingdom, traditionally peaceable elephants from
Africa to Asia have been not only attacking humans, but also, by one report,
“raping and killing rhinoceroses.” But as Rush Limbaugh points
out, the Democrats have done even worse things.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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