A rambling post, now with 33% more history!

[felis_ultharus]

Reading Henry IV, part I by Shakespeare. I'm loving it. I'm surprised it's not more popular -- I think his use of language is at its height, there, and his characters are even more interesting and better developed than in most of the Shakespeare I've read.

Of course, I've read about that era before because the two greatest works of medieval literature in English -- The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- also belong to the era of Richard II and Henry IV (the turn of the 15th century).

Richard II was a bad king -- so bad he inspired a peasant revolt and spent the treasury in a hopeless war with France. But Henry IV really takes a beating in Shakespeare, partly because he had Richard II murdered and his heir exiled.

If Richard II was the Dubya of his age, then John of Gaunt was his Dick Cheney. Gaunt was the power behind the throne, and legend had it was descended from the devil, and Gaunt's third wife, Katherine Swynforde, had been accused of witchcraft.

Interestingly, these old stories continue to inspire good writing. J.R.R. Tolkien was an expert in this era, and it shows in his work.

And J.K. Rowling throws a House of Gaunt into her last Harry Potter. And if there's any doubt that she's hinting at John of Gaunt, the House of Gaunt has "Peverell's Ring" -- Peverell being John of Gaunt's famous ancestor.

(Sometimes I feel like a literary degree is just a license to gather trivia. But it's really fun trivia!)

Comments

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Conspiracy theories about the American government always fascinate me -- many Americans sense their government can't be trusted, but when coming up with theories, they always miss the mark.

I outlined my reasons above for not thinking this is a conspiracy. It's too clumsy for Cheney's work -- Cheney would've chosen Saddam as conspirator, not bin Laden -- and if it had been Bush, he'd have used model airplanes.

Besides, the CIA seems to have been against this whole Iraq War, and its hard to pull off anything without them.

And the alien-conspiracy theories are way out there. If the US government were hiding aliens, Clinton would've trotted them out to distract people from Monica Lewinsky.

But then, when it comes to the real, well-documented conspiracies -- especially CIA shenanigans of the 1970s and 1980s.

Plus, there's probably enough evidence of election fraud in Ohio during the last presidential election to impeach the president, if any of the lily-livered democrats would be brave enough to try.

But for some reason, the conspiracies with solid evidence backing them don't seem to capture the imagination :/

[scottevil.livejournal.com]

I recall seeing a memo by Cheney or Rumsfeld or one of those dudes written shortly after 9/11 with a hand-scrawled margin note asking how to tie it to Iraq.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Exactly -- it was an afterthought, a clumsy attempt to work the tragedy into Cheney's larger schemes.

As for Cheney's motives, they're not only well-known, they've been publicly admitted. He co-runs an organization called Project for a New American Century with Donald Rumsfeld, and this organization has been calling for an attack on Iraq since at least 1998.

Here's their letter, on their own website, addressed to Clinton (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).

They also -- by their own admissio (http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm) -- have been urging Bush to make war on Iraq since 9 days after the terrorist attacks in New York. So it's not like this is a secret.

(Project for a New American Century is scary -- they're dedicated to bringing about another century of American domination at any cost. Even scarier is that they operate in the open and no one notices them.

Cheney's name used to be everywhere on their website, but now I can only find it signed on the Statement of Principles (http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm). They must be trying to downplay their power in the White House.)