First They Came for Shakespeare...

American Thinker ^ | 11/6/2021 | J. B. Shurk

[markomalley]

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” That’s Shakespeare. (And an accurate description of the United Nations today!) Before the Great Bard of Avon was “cancelled” for being a white Englishman, most high school graduates would have known that. Quite a few would have even remembered the line comes from Act I of The Tempest.

Now they have scant knowledge of Shakespeare’s works, no idea what a “tempest” is, and most likely think “hell” and “devils” are as “cool” and “misunderstood” as Hollywood portrays them in Lucifer. But, woo-hoo, they know all about “privilege,” “social justice,” “gender pronouns,” and scary “global warming,” so they’re all set for the lives of servile mediocrity the Democrat party molds. What’s the point of seeking out the truth when your truth is all that matters? Who needs the arts or religion when there are social media “likes” to be won and “shares” to be had? Hey, it works for Linda and Julia!

Kind of sums up the whole collapse of Western civilization in a nutshell, doesn’t it? Death by haughty dimwittedness. Had the education-deprived youth of today ever read King Lear, they might understand that when socialists promise gifts for “free,” they’re really planning on taxing you for the rest of your life. After all, “Nothing will come of nothing.” Had they ever been introduced to The Merchant of Venice, not only would they remember, “All that glisters is not gold,” but also they might be cognitively armed to see through build back better promises as nothing more than shiny lies.

Is it any wonder why more and more government-run schools are ditching Shakespeare from curriculums entirely?

[LittleBillyInfidel]

... and most likely think “hell” and “devils” are as “cool” and “misunderstood” as Hollywood portrays them in Lucifer.

Yeah, that would be LUCIFER as in the network TV series that they abandoned to the much more remote Netflix. They painted themselves into a corner when they made the devil into a promiscuous bisexual/homosexual. Being that the leftists are slow learners, it probably hit them in the face a full season later.

[MtnClimber]

[libstripper]

FTA:

It doesn’t take much for the whole thing to come crashing down, does it? You start with purging a little Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Twelfth Night to make room for The Handmaid’s Tale and privilege charts, and the next thing you know you end up with a generation of uneducated adults who couldn’t build a simple bridge if their lives depended upon it.

The quoted remark precisely describes a horrible situation that arose at my old fraternity in the last few years. When I was there (1961-1965) we did a good job of keeping the house clean and doing necessary minor repairs to keep it running. Indeed, each year we had two major clean up and fix up weeks, one in the early fall and one just around semester break. Alas, no more. In the last few years the house has become a near slum because the current brothers lack even the most basic cleaning and mechanical skills to keep it up and running.

[vetvetdoug]

I almost got fired as a substitute teacher for explaining to a Freshman English class some definitions of Shakespeare's words. The teacher had been teaching for 18 years and didn't know that "beast with two backs" was Shakespeare's term in Othello for copulation and "firk" was the nidus for the word, F_ck. 18 years and not aware of the origin nor definition of the terms...SMH...

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks markomalley.