Just Do It

Concerning the Senate debate yesterday on the immigration bill, the New York Times writes:

Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the No. 2 Republican, urged his colleagues to stiffen their spines and try to resolve one of the nation’s most pressing problems.

“Are we men and women or mice?” Mr. Lott asked. “Are we going to slither away from this issue and hope for some epiphany to happen? No. Let’s legislate. Let’s vote.”

Lott’s message: It doesn’t matter what’s in the bill. It doesn’t matter how terrible, false, destructive, and ruinous the bill may be. To vote for the bill is to do, and thus to be a man. To stop the bill is to fail to do, and thus to be less than a man.

It reminds me of the scene in King Lear (Act IV Scene 2), when Goneril’s husband Albany opposes her unnatural evil deeds against her father and she retorts by saying that he’s not a man:

ALBANY

O Goneril!
You are not worth the dust which the rude wind
Blows in your face. I fear your disposition:
That nature, which contemns its origin,
Cannot be border’d certain in itself;
She that herself will sliver and disbranch
From her material sap, perforce must wither
And come to deadly use.

GONERIL

No more; the text is foolish.

ALBANY

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile:
Filths savour but themselves. What have you done?
Tigers, not daughters, what have you perform’d?
A father, and a gracious aged man,
Whose reverence even the head-lugg’d bear would lick,
Most barbarous, most degenerate! have you madded.
Could my good brother suffer you to do it?
A man, a prince, by him so benefited!
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

GONERIL

Milk-liver’d man!
That bear’st a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs;
Who hast not in thy brows an eye discerning
Thine honour from thy suffering; that not know’st
Fools do those villains pity who are punish’d
Ere they have done their mischief. Where’s thy drum?
France spreads his banners in our noiseless land;
With plumed helm thy slayer begins threats;
Whiles thou, a moral fool, sit’st still, and criest
‘Alack, why does he so?’

ALBANY

See thyself, devil!
Proper deformity seems not in the fiend
So horrid as in woman.

GONERIL

O vain fool!

ALBANY

Thou changed and self-cover’d thing, for shame,
Be-monster not thy feature. Were’t my fitness
To let these hands obey my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
Thy flesh and bones: howe’er thou art a fiend,
A woman’s shape doth shield thee.

GONERIL

Marry, your manhood—mew!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 08, 2007 05:29 PM | Send