Marcellus tells Horatio at the beginning of Hamlet that
you can almost smell the weakness permeating Denmark, it’s Shakespeare’s way of
telling us to pay attention to what sticks out as abnormal and to ask what else it may portend.
.....Germany’s Ethics Council
recently called for the abolition of legal constraints
upon incest [saying] “The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual
self-determination has more weight in such cases than the abstract protection
of the family.”………
Europe is in an
advanced state of unraveling. All the
symptoms noted above—ethicists describing incest as a fundamental right, the
unwillingness to acknowledge that certain strains of Islamic theology are
feeding today’s terrorism, the reluctance to engage in serious economic reform,
the resurgent anti-Semitism laced with paranoid conspiracy theories, the
absence of any real leadership anywhere—suggest that many Europeans, like
Hamlet, are fleeing the truth, dimly aware that something’s wrong but trapped
in a funk of navel-gazing inaction.
In the end, of course,
Hamlet did something about his situation: but not before he danced around the
problem, fled into introspection, and helped ruin the lives (not to mention
sanity) of many of his nearest and dearest. It was all too little too late.
That’s precisely the prospect facing Europe today. And it’s nothing for
anyone—least of all Americans—to celebrate. After all, we’re hardly that far
behind in the denial stakes.
Instead, our
lament should be that of Hamlet himself: “That it should come to this!”….To Read More…..
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