Culture | The Gad About Town

My Thinking Makes It So

Posted on December 3, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

In Act 2, Scene 2, of Hamlet, the doomed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are chatting with the prince. They are old college buddies of Hamlet’s, and King Claudius (Hamlet’s step-father) and Queen Gertrude (his mother) have sent for them to learn what is bothering the young man, who has been acting with an “antic disposition” and saying strange things, half to himself and half to no one can tell who.

Hamlet greets them and speaks in the same riddling manner that he has been using with the rest:

HAMLET: Let me question more in particular, my good friends, what you have done to deserve such fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord?
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then the world is one.
HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ: We don’t think so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

Hamlet quickly determines that they are not merely dropping in to talk about sports and the weather but are spies. Ultimately, he manages to have them both killed.

Shakespeare’s quip about how one’s thinking determines a thing’s relative goodness or badness has lived on through the centuries, but in most peoples’ recitations it carries about the same weight now as a Twittering teenager’s hashtagging of “YOLO.” Perhaps this is because it is delivered by a character who is speaking in riddles and jests and pretending to be mad. (“What are you reading?” “Words, words, words.”)

Four hundred years after Hamlet was first performed, “Nothing (is) either good or bad but thinking makes it so” is spoken as a longer, more profound-sounding, version of, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” “The rain is uncomfortable for you but it’s good news for the farmers,” says the profound thinker who apparently wants me to punch him. (I once replied to this with a “Do you know any farmers? We live in the suburbs. If you do, see if they’re carrying umbrellas, too.” The person walked away, which of course was the only proper reply to my being a jerk.) (We are still friends. I have my good points.)

Many people resist strongly and vocally when it is suggested that, taken existentially, Shakespeare and/or Hamlet is right. Our perception is all that defines good from bad. A happy event, in and of itself, is not inherently a good thing. A tragic happening is not by definition evil. There is a deep commitment to the idea that there is evil in the universe as well as good; that good inheres in things we like and love and that evil is a containable reality. This is because most of us combine and conflate the notions of sad with bad and happy with good.

Some of the saddest things that I have seen have had positive things follow them, possibly as a result of reactions to the sad thing. (I am disabled and that sucks, and I would not wish the experience on people I dislike, but being disabled gives me an income, a teeny-tiny one, which gives me time to write; a small example, that, but reality resides on a spectrum and not in an either-or zero-sum playhouse.) And some of the best things that I think I have done may turn out to have terrible consequences. Sadness exists. Tragedy is a reality. So is happiness.

Are there people who do wrong in this world? People who introduce sadness into peoples’ lives or who work for their own personal gain to the detriment of others around them? Of course. Hamlet was no murderer but he had Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed. (Fictional characters, of course.) Hitler existed. If evil is inexplicable, well, then, so is good. We want all matters to be explicable, however, so we deploy terms like “good” and “evil” as if they are tools that explicate.

Further, our minds want there to be someone to credit or something to blame behind the good or the evil thing. There must be an explanation, goes the thinking. Thus, there must be a find-able motivation animating even the explicably good thing or evil person. The great journalist Ron Rosenbaum explores this in his famous book, “Explaining Hitler,” which confronts the book buyer from the start, the front cover. Hitler’s baby picture sits there. Historians have searched for decades for the clues to pinpoint the moment baby Adolf became Hitler. What was the cause? The explanation? It seems that it is not okay if there is not one. But “here there is no why,” as Martin Amis writes of Auschwitz.

Rosenbaum interviewed Alan Bullock, one of Hitler’s biographers. “‘Some days, I ask God,’ Bullock told me, his voice dropping to an impassioned whisper, ‘If You were there, why didn’t You stop it?’ And then he added the sad lesson of a lifetime spent attempting to explain Hitler: ‘Never believe God is omnipotent.'”

Boom! Is the Holocaust, or a holocaust, a man-made political rampage, something so far outside human imagination when it is always and only the product of human imagination?

Yehuda Bauer, a Holocaust Studies scholar, replies to Rosenbaum’s question, “Will there ever be a why?” “Bauer told me that he believes it is theoretically possible. ‘But the fact that something is explicable doesn’t say that we have explained it.'”

Terrible acts and tragedies are the horrible outliers of most human experiences. The beautiful thing is that love, great love and small love, is not. And it is just as inexplicable … until I gaze in my beloved’s eyes.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 3 asks, “What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received that you wouldn’t give to anyone else? Why don’t you think it would apply to others?”

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Guilty of White

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The lottery that I won at 6:37 p.m. on November 18, 1968, was not the product of any hard work on my part. It was not a reward for playing fairly or for especially clean living, nor was it awarded to me for playing by the rules and earning my way.

It was a scratch-off ticket, generated at random, and someone else could have gotten it just as easily as I did. Like the service at a lottery counter in a gas station, life is a first-come, first-served proposition. It was a scratch-off, and, my gosh, did I win a nice jackpot.

If reincarnation existed, one could say that someone else may have deserved this life more than I did or do, and one could certainly argue that someone else might have done a better job with it than I have so far, but it is mine. It is the golden ticket.

The lottery that I won paid off immediately: I am white in a country that treats this minor genetic condition like it is something one diligently worked for and earned. And I am male. I am heterosexual. This world and this country rewards the bearers of those accidental tickets pretty generously, too. When I was a child, my family was middle class in income if not status in a country and at a time when being in the middle of middle-class life in America meant one was living more comfortably than three-fifths of the residents of the rest of the world. And citizens in this country treat that privilege like a victory over immediate enemies rather than the several-generation accumulation of incidents that it is.

Education? Paid for through high school by virtue of being born where I was. By which I do not mean the Spackenkill school district. Nor Poughkeepsie. Not even New York State. Being born in America in 1968 meant an education. (The states were not yet privatizing education or dictating their own local test-versions of education, so I benefited from learning when the dinosaurs existed and the one main reason for the Civil War.) Thanks to my parents, my mom especially, I do not remember the experience of learning how to read or count, because I was taught before my earliest memory (age two and a half) is time-stamped.

Perhaps it is a bit of speculative science fiction to offer the idea that none of these matters are in and of themselves good, righteous, holy, or even earned things. I could have been born in a country that does not privilege the pink pigment of white skin. Or I could have been born in this country but not white. We could have lived in a country where money did not provide some piece of status and “our type” might have been punished at random moments. My mother was born and raised in America, but she had cousins in “the old country” (near Minsk) who were exterminated. They had money.

So I know that I am racist, sexist, whatever-ist. By virtue of being born white, male, and middle class in America in the late 1960s, how could I not be? The day that I walk through (every damn day) is a different day than any woman, black person, gay person—any member of a minority group randomly pre-selected according to these criteria by society—walks through. And the sad, simple fact is that it is a luxury for me to even type that sentence or play with that thought. I do not need to consider what life is like for me, what my day is like, because no power group makes me aware of it.

Oh, sure, it’s society’s rules and some people seem to know how to play by them. “If you don’t commit any crimes, what do you have to worry about?” And that is the thing: I don’t. Simply because I am guilty of white, guilty as charged of male. I am a born member of the power elite, me with my $11,000 annual disability income.

Why does anyone march? Or protest? Or agitate? Or riot, finally? Because if you told me that I had “earned” the genetic anomaly that is taking my legs away, which I did not, not any more than I earned being white or heterosexual, I would attack you with my cane, with every fiber of my being.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 7 asks us to reflect on the word “Protest.”

The WordPress Daily Prompt for March 2, 2016, asks us to reflect on the word “divide.”

The WordPress Daily Prompt for April 4, 2015, asks, “Link to an item in the news you’ve been thinking about lately, and write the op-ed you’d like to see published on the topic.” Today is the 47th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 2, 2014, asks, “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. When was the last time that sentence accurately described your life?”

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