My Mind, My Morality

These four presidential words echoed yesterday morning as I passed a huge white sign staked in front of a ramshackle house on the Maryland & Virginia border. The resident, obviously, was a diehard supporter of our president.

Ironically on the radio, I’d just heard a recap of the Agricultural Secretary’s $3.00 dinner: piece of chicken, piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and something else.  The radio commentator said, “a peppermint.”  I imagined the first item on the menu as a wing of chicken, given it’s such a meaty piece.

I don’t know how your mind works. Mine thrives on images and flashbacks. Lately I’ve had a scene from a movie in my head. And it returned to me yesterday. It’s of Alec Ghinness as Colonel Nicholson in Bridge Over the River Kwai.

I still vividly picture that moment when the colonel realizes what his ego has wrought…which has been to construct a British engineered bridge for the Japanese during WW2. Then Nicholsen has his Macbeth moment and at last he asks, “What have I done?” This occurs as he trips a wire and the bridge blows up. If you’ve not seen this David Lean movie from 1957, I will have lost you. And if you haven’t read Macbeth, that’s a double tunnel of darkness. -😊

In act two, Macbeth says, “I am afraid to think what I have done.” I know this because I just took my Shakespeare text from a shelf in my study. The thick blue book of 1090 thin pages is copiously marked. I will add that my professor for Shakespeare was a prig. I will go so far as to say Dr. A. was a pervert. He relished pointing out to a class of female English majors, every sexual reference in Willy the Shake. He also offered to change my final grade from a C+ to a B, if I were willing to do him a favor. I looked at this portly ex-actor with his dyed black hair and walked out of his office. Those were the days of sexual silence in 1964.

I will add that Dr. A. left my head with remnants of what had to be memorized for exams. These two lines are fitting for now: Fair is foul, and foul is fair/ Hover through the fog and filthy air. A note in my text says these lines from the first scene (witches) in the first act, could be considered the theme of Macbeth. 

A pithy thematic statement for our times, too, dependent as we are on the president’s mind and morality (and his enablers). On another page in my thick text I wrote that blood, water and darkness characterize Macbeth. That, too, is relevant. Will we forget the Venezuelan boat exploding at night in a dark sea?

This morning, I could not sleep past 4  and finished reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. It’s a perfect novel for thinking about Christian nationalism, circa 2026.  What hovers in my head now is that tiny cross at the neck of Ms. AG. So much for separation of church and state.

Coincidentally, O’Connor’s first novel was published in 1957. She wrote only one other, The Violent Bear It Away, mistakenly translated by a foreign press as…: The Bear That Ran Away With It. 

To be continued…