Politics – Education is Discipleship

This was the kind of freshman English student I was…

In my Honors Composition class, we were asked to write a rhetorical analysis of Mark Twain’s essay, “The Lowest Animal,” which facetiously argued that humans were the lowest creature on earth. Being the wag I was, I wrote an equally facetious rhetorical analysis that claimed I had figured out how to assess creature-dom and that humans had just beaten out manatees for the crown of Greatest Creature on Earth. My categories? Food, Mood, and Peace Corps. Of course, humans were the only creature to come up with the Peace Corps, so that was their trump card. (BTW – I somehow managed to make an A- on that paper which still boggles my mind).

The takeaway? The standard matters. Continue reading “Political Standards”

I took my own undergrad survey of Shakespeare in the spring of 2001. George Bush Jr. had just won a highly contested presidential election, and even pre-9/11, my professors were skeptical. During the campaign, Bush had adopted the narrative of a redeemed man. His past was pretty sordid: alcoholism, shirked duties, the stereotypical foibles of a rich kid with tons of privilege and little common sense. But now? He was a highly successful Texas governor, a born again Christian, a compassionate conservative who was tough on crime but merciful to his political opponents.

George Bush, my professor Ted Brown told us, was Prince Hal: not the historical Prince Hal, but Shakespeare’s representation of him. Someone near the Shrub, as Dr. Brown was wont to call the president, had been reading his Shakespeare (Doc Brown couldn’t imagine that Bush himself had read the play). They knew that the redemptive, comedic narrative succeeded in the 1590s just as well as the 1990s. Continue reading “Politics and Performance in Henry IV Part 1”