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Indira shook her head. "I fail to see the connection. Hamlet and universal marriage; where's the connection?"
"That's the point!" I said.
Indira laughed. "You've lost me already. I know Hamlet, but I can't understand what you are saying."
"OK, who was the tragic figure in Hamlet?" I asked.
"Hamlet, of course," said Indira. "Isn't it plain? A great military force is marching on Denmark. Hamlet, the beloved prince of Denmark knows this. He also knows that the nation's king, who would have dealt with the invasion, has been murdered by a traitor who then conspicuously married the widowed queen, Hamlet's mother, and put himself on the very throne that should have been lawfully succeeded by him. Hamlet knows all of this. But instead of clearing out the nest of traitors within the court, he does nothing. He is afraid. He becomes a coward, bound with fear. It's not that he is afraid to die. He has proven his valor in battle. He is a coward only in the moral domain that is unfamiliar to him, the unknown country that he knows nothing about. He knows in his heart and in his mind exactly what he ought to do, but he doesn't take action. He waffles about and becomes the pathetic fool who makes everything worse by evading the real issue. In the end he dies as a fool, as the result of his own failing, together with everybody he loved. In like manner also dies his nation that he didn't raise a finger to defend. Hamlet was the tragic figure."
I smiled and clapped my hands. "That is the perfect answer, Indira. That is how the audience is supposed to see the play when it leaves the theater. But really, that's too easy, isn't it? Shakespeare lays it on so thick and heavy that you almost don't have to think to see the real tragedy. He pulls you through it by the nose, as it were, and if you are lucky, days after you saw the play something clicks. That's Shakespeare's style, is it? He's got much taller concepts for you to consider. I think the real tragedy is supposed to unfold weeks after a person leaves the theater, because the course of education isn't over at the point the curtain falls. It just begins. For some people it is over. Some people drop out at this point, and Shakespeare allows them to do that, but the idea is that one hangs in there, that something happens in one's thinking in the days and months following, something that causes one to become more fully a human being. So let me ask you again: On whose shoulders rides the real tragedy in the play of Hamlet."
Indira didn't answer for a long time. I had two cups of tea during great silence that ensued. Darkness had set in over the city. The city once again had become a carpet of lights. "Let me ask you another question," I broke the silence. "On whose shoulders rested the tragedy of Rome?"
By the time I had poured myself a third cup of tea, she knew the answer to my last question. There was no guessing involved.
"The tragedy of Rome rested on the shoulders of society." Her face lit up as she answered. "The Roman emperors and politicians were prostitutes, really. These prostitutes built an empire around fulfilling the pleasures of the society on whose good graces the power of the emperors and politicians depended. In Rome, vox populi ruled, but the people had been corrupted. By this folly Rome was doomed."
I raised my hand and interrupted her. "You have just explained America's tragedy, why America is doomed." I said to her. "When Lord Shelburne of the British Empire faced a growing movement towards independence in the American colonies, he commissioned Adam Smith to produce two research works during a carriage ride in 1763. One of the two works that Lord Shelburne commissioned was an apologia for free trade. He commissioned a weapon that he could use to destroy a targeted country economically, in case things weren't going to well on the battlefield. He knew that it was possible to destroy a targeted nation with free trade, since free trade is designed as a process the prevents a targeted nation's economic self-development, collapsing it thereby. Shelburne knew that this could be done, and so he commissioned Adam Smith to create the 'scientific' excuse for implementing the weapon in a hidden manner as needed to eradicate any potential threat to the empire.
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