This is a strange time... a time out of joint. The candidates on the American political stage are very much like characters in a Shakespearean play.  I can’t decide if the play should be classified as history or comedy... or perhaps tragedy.  I keep trying but am not able to empathize with Governor Romney (who we know is Governor now only in name, not in fact... like a person playing a part in a play) as he brings his great wealth and his noble heritage to his tremendous effort to depose the man in the President’s office... not to usurp but to win the office by getting the vote of a majority of citizens.  The Romney character plays at times the humble missionary servant insisting he knows how ordinary citizens live and what they want and need, and at other times his hubris swells to classic proportions beyond any of his actual accomplishments.    

The other players are all too familiar.  We could describe the man playing the vice president role.  A colorful character indeed, but let's look instead at another exceptional player... the intellectual, long-suffering Secretary of State who was once humiliated by her husband in front of a whole nation... the woman who stayed faithful to her husband and constant beside him as she worked to help him restore his reputation. She went on to national prominence in her own right by striving to be the candidate to represent her political party for the office of president only to be beaten back in that attempt by the man who now, if there were one, would wear the crown.  She humbly accepted the job as his Secretary of State and has served him and the nation brilliantly.  

No character in this political play is more Shakespearean than the President.  The son of a black African intellectual and a white university student, he wasn’t bred to nobility but gained it by the strength of his intelligence and will.  His parents wouldn’t have been able to marry in several states because of anti-miscegenation laws. As recently as 1967 the Supreme Court ruled against the Commonwealth of Virginia for condemning a black woman and white man to five years in prison for cohabiting in that state after they were married in the District of Columbia where their marriage was legal.  It wasn’t until 2000 that Alabama, the last state with an anti-miscegenation law, complied with the Supreme Court ruling and removed it’s statute. His parents marriage failed when he was a small child; his mother remarried to another non-white man and moved to Indonesia. Several characters, buffoons all...one with a laughable bouffant hair style... have provided what in a real play would be considered comedy relief by insisting, for instance, that the President is actually an illegal immigrant who in not eligible for election to his high office. 

Other cast members of this incredible play have often played more like made-up characters than real members of America’s nobility.  Boehner can be relied on to cry on cue. Cantor is the Laertes to McConnell’s Polonius.  Ryan can be anything you want him to be, and we can decide for ourselves who is the fool.  My vote goes to Rush Limbaugh.  These characters would be laughable if they were not real... But enough... Enough indeed!

The high drama will end on Tuesday night after the votes are counted.  I wish we could say as Hamlet does with his last words in the famous play, “The rest is silence.”  But, of course, there will be no silence and, alas, probably no reconciliation.  At least we will experience what may seem like silence when the obscene television and radio advertisements stop.   

p.