Well, ’tis no matter. Honor pricks me on.
Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come
on?
How
then? Can honor set to a leg? no. Or an arm? no.
Or take away the grief of a wound?
No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No.
What is honor? A word. What is in that word
“honor”?
— Falstaff, before the Battle of Shrewsbury, 1 Henry IV 5.1.129-33
In
"The
Pretty Complete Shakespeare Guide to Donald Trump,"
I list among the parallels to Trump Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff. I don't
quote the line, but the primary parallel was summed up in Falstaff's reflection
"Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!" (ˆ2 Henry IV 3.2.301-2)
and how in both cases the "lies are like their father that begets them;
gross as a mountain, open, palpable" (1 Henry IV 2.4.212-14).
A
more subtle parallel came up around 4 and 5 May of 2017: dates I remember since
the 4th of May is the anniversary of the shootings
at Kent State University in 1970, and 5 May is Cinco
de Mayo, with a capital "C": a holiday in my part
of the US as well as Battle of Puebla Day in Mexico. When asked about meeting
with Kim Jong Un, dictator of North Korea, Mr. Trump responded, CNN
reported, "If it would be appropriate
for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it."
I have
no complaints with the idea of the President of the United States calling the
long-standing bluff of the North Koreans and arranging a full-scale peace
conference to end the Korean War, with some of the groundwork laid in a quick,
properly chaperoned, private meeting between the US President and the supreme
leader of the PRK. My interest here is Mr. Trump saying he'd be honored.
I
quote as a headnote Falstaff's self-"catechism" asking himself if he
should risk life and limb in battle for "honor." He does fight, sort
of, but not for honor; and some people might not like the conclusion that
"honor" is just a word: air, breath, a symbol like a scutcheon — a
coat of arms ("escutcheon") displayed at a funeral. Honor, at least
for Falstaff, at least of the military variety, is what makes living men dead
soldiers.
Note,
though, that in the Henry plays and
elsewhere people, especially men-type people, act for honor, but only Falstaff
asks what the word means. It's a good question. "Honor" can imply
mere reputation or even more crassly the sort of "honor" one gets on
the Monarch's "Honour's
List" as it was back in the day of, say,
Macbeth, when an "honor" could imply a title, plus land, money, and
power. That's behind the exchange when Macbeth before the murder of King Duncan
so very carefully sounds out Banquo's willingness to support … something, at
some time. Neither Macbeth nor Shakespeare had the phrase "plausible
deniability," but they understood the concept.
MACBETHIf you shall cleave to my consent, when 'tis,It shall make honour for you.
BANQUO So I lose noneIn seeking to augment it, but still keepMy bosom franchised and allegiance clear,I shall be counsell'd. (Macbeth 2.1.25-29)
Macbeth suggests there'll be "honour" as in
profit for Banquo if he goes along with some action by Macbeth in the future.
Banquo responds with a reference to a more refined honor when he puts a
condition on his cooperation. He'll cooperate so long as doing so would be
honorable, with "honorable" as in ethical
and patriotic.
Falstaff
is the philosopher of 1 Henry IV, and
a great comedian, a master of words.
"Honor,"
Falstaff says, pricks him on — as in pricking with a goad for cattle (cf. to
"goad someone [on]). But what if honor figuratively pricks him off —
checks him off the list of the living — when he "comes on," i.e.,
presses forward into battle. There's a joke here, and it's a tribute to
Falstaff's verbal brilliance that it's on us, his audience. Nowadays, to
dirty-minded adolescent boys and some girls, "prick me off" and
"come on" sound … suggestive. Same suggestions back in Shakespeare's
day, with "prick," which has and had the slang meaning of
"penis" and "come,"
which has possibilities. The joke is that this isn't dirty, and a good actor
could look at the audience and get across, "Oh, you nasty-minded
people!"
*
Like
Falstaff, the theoretically Honorable Donald J. Trump bends reality — as he
perceives it — to his will with words; unlike Sir John, Trump is careless with
words and possibly often ignorant.
Since
Kim Jong Un commands a military with several thousand artillery tubes that can
be brought to bear on Seoul, South Korea, it is well for American presidents to
avoid insulting him. Such prudence, however, does not require sucking up, which
would be the case if Mr. Trump really expressed his feelings in indicated he'd
feel honored to meet with Kim.
Significant
here, for me anyway, is that Mr. Trump doesn't much care what the word
"honored" means and that most of his supporters apparently don't care
that he doesn't care.
We
are seeing I think a temporary culmination of a long-running trend.
Back
when I was teaching, every few semesters I'd return essays and write on the
chalkboard in large letters, Words mean. And
one semester I got some pushback on that assertion. A moderately cute couple of
my students branded me a Literalist and one or other of the pair wrote and
submitted a satiric attack on The Literalist as a type. This was in a course in
expository writing (i.e., essays), and I'm pretty sure it was during the period
I was starting out our work with examining "Sayings and Such":
sayings, proverbs, coachly clichés — that sort of stuff. The first one was,
"A stich in time saves nine," and I asked the students to explain
what that meant and what you had to do to figure it out (finish the thought for
one thing: "A stich in time saves nine stiches"). And then we'd move
on to meatier matters like "No Pain, / No Gain." Is that true for
weight training"? (I was taught "No"; my students were taught
"Yes"; and a lot depends on what one means by "pain.") And
for coached team sports, Pain for whom? Gain for whom? (I received a hell of an
essay on that one from a student who finished a high school football game with
his knees shot up with a cortisone and Xylocaine cocktail. At the end of the
term, I confirmed with the student that the "I" of the essay was he
and asked how he was doing. He replied, "I can walk, but I'm not playing
football." His father punched out the coach, but the coach and trainer
were otherwise unpunished.)
Or
what does it mean when a coach or principal or boss asks you to devote
"110%" to the team or school or job? Obviously, the statement is
figurative since s/he can't demand 110%, not with percentages only going up to
100. What percent are we talking about here — and why don't players and
students or teachers or workers ask just what percentage is being demanded? My last
question is mostly rhetorical. Part of the answer, though, is that they'd get
in trouble for pointing out that an authority figure was bullshitting and/or
demanding a blank check; and another part is that people don't even notice the
bullshit or care much. People could say,
"Okay, I realize that "110%" is a figure of speech, but what do
you literally have in mind? Personally, I have other demands on me — legitimate
demands — so I can give the team (school, job) maybe 20%."
Few
people say such things 'cause they want to avoid trouble, and over hundreds and
thousands of unresisted utterances of such bullshit, it gets normalized and
becomes unremarkable.
More
innocent is the sort of carelessness encapsulated in one of my oldest school
memories. The pedantic old woman who taught my fourth grade class — fourth
grade or thereabouts — complained about people's saying they "love ice cream." They wouldn't run
back into a burning building to save Ice Cream, and they don't have a personal
relationship with it, so she wondered why we couldn't just say we like ice cream. She was pedantic, overly
fastidious, and right.
Over
hundreds and thousands of casual sloppy utterances, an important word like
"love" gets a little trivialized and moves toward a heart-shape on
Facebook.
*
Other
aspects of the hyperbole subset of bullshit were a problem for me writing
recommendations. The Director of Film Studies told me I was screwing over
students in saying that they were "competent, diligent, reliable, and
bright." That was damning with faint praise. The graduate programs and
grants and transfers our students applied for demanded brilliance and unique
qualifications. I noted to the Director that if the applicants were as good as
the screening committees apparently demanded, what the hell were they doing in
our program much less why would they go to programs little better than ours?
Applicants as good as the programs seemed to be demanding would do better than
those programs.
What
I ended up doing was using my old terms but explaining them and, on occasion,
giving where I was coming from.
Item 1: In response to something I
said, the Chair of my department looked at me and replied, "Oh, come on,
Rich; you've got a second-rate mind." To which I replied, "Yes, but I'm
at a third-rate school." He didn't argue the point. If Cambridge and
Chicago in their glory days, and Harvard and Stanford were or are first-rate;
if the Big Ten school my boss and I attended was second-rate — then a school
like Miami University at Oxford (Ohio) was third-rate.
Item 2: Probably in response to a
self-deprecating remark I'd made, and quite likely after a couple or more
gin-and-tonics, the great scholar of Medieval literature, Robert Kaske said to
me, "No Rich; you're bright. (beat) Not brilliant, but bright." Kaske
was brilliant; I was and generally still am, bright. I was and am also
competent, professional, diligent, and dependable, and when I call an applicant
those things it's significant praise. Brilliant is nice, but brilliant people
aren't always diligent and dependable — or loyal to the people who gave them a
break or their first job. Brilliant people can do better.
With
one candidate I really wanted to praise, I wrote that the person "is
one of the most intelligent people I've met. He is not as bright as, say, Susan
Sontag, Octavia Butler, Michael Harrington, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Senator Paul
Douglas, but [s/he] is in their league and is among the brightest of the people
who were my instructors, students, colleagues, and/or superiors in the
hierarchies at the University of Illinois, Michael Reese Medical Center,
Cornell University, and Miami University."
* *
We can be more careful with language,
and one good thing Mr. Trump may accomplish is showing how important such care
can be. Now that lesson may be taught if he makes some horrible verbal error and
Kim Jong Un orders the bombardment of Seoul — but short of that, he can teach
some valuable lessons on what not to do.
"What
is honor?" Well, it's not a meeting with a two-bit dictator.
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