The Three Witches

Reading the following description from Wikipedia of The Three Witches, I just couldn’t help but be reminded of the three crones depicted above.*

The Three Witches represent darkness, chaos, and conflict, while their role is as agents and witnesses. Their presence communicates treason and impending doom. During Shakespeare’s day, witches were seen as worse than rebels, “the most notorious traytor and rebell that can be.”

While Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin are certainly doing their part to undermine the Commander in Chief as part of a broader Rethuglican political strategy to regain control of the US government, Liz Cheney has made attacking President Obama on national security matters her very purpose in life.  Her newly founded attack group, Keep Dick Cheney From Jail America Safe, has put out a video called 100 Hours that uses the incident of the failed Christmas Day airplane bomber to picture Obama as weak and indifferent to terrorism. Confronted by George Stephanopoulos Sunday on This Week to explain why Bush took twice as long as to respond to the identical situation of Shoe Bomber Richard Reid, and then only in passing, she completely ducked the question.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

They were not only political traitors, but spiritual traitors as well. Much of the confusion that springs from them comes from their ability to straddle the play’s borders between reality and the supernatural. They are so deeply entrenched in both worlds that it is unclear whether they control fate, or whether they are merely its agents. They defy logic, not being subject to the rules of the real world…

Substitute the term “the alternate reality of winger media” for the “supernatural” and the bit about defying logic provides a good description of the Bizzaro media world that these people occupy and manipulate. And “not being subject to the rules of the real world”  is precisely what a former Bush White House insider was referring to when he derisively referred to  “the reality based community.”

The witches’ lines in the first act: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air” are often said to set the tone for the remainder of the play by establishing a sense of confusion. Indeed, the play is filled with situations in which evil is depicted as good, while good is rendered evil. The line “Double, double toil and trouble,” (often sensationalized to a point that it loses meaning), communicates the witches’ intent clearly: they seek to only trouble for the mortals around them.

No comment needed there.

Though the witches do not deliberately tell Macbeth to kill King Duncan, they use a subtle form of temptation when they inform Macbeth that he is destined to be king. By placing this thought in his mind, they effectively guide him on the path to his own destruction…

According to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service, Obama has received as many as 30 threats a day, a 400% increase over what President George W. Bush received.  And while proximity to the president largely prevents attacks on his person, that doesn’t stop the kind of hateful winger rhetoric these three women indulge in from inspiring violence and murder. Take the case of Jim D. Adkisson, the man who walked into a progressive church in Tennessee and randomly killed two members of the congregation with a shotgun while they were watching a musical performance of Annie by the community’s children. In an interview with  Investigator Steve Still, Adkisson:

“..stated that he had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of the major media outlets.“

Found in Adkisson’s home were books by Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity.

Finally, 130 years after Shakespeare wrote his play,

…Horace Walpole created a parody of Macbeth in 1742 entitled The Dear Witches in response to political problems of his time. The witches in his play are played by three everyday women who manipulate political events in England through marriage and patronage, and manipulate elections in order to have Macbeth made Treasurer and Earl of Bath. In the final scene, the witches gather around a cauldron and chant “Double, double, Toil and Trouble / parties burn and Nonsense bubble.” In their concoction they throw such things as “Judgment of a Beardless Youth” and “Liver of a Renegade.” The entire play is a commentary on the political corruption and insanity surrounding the period.

If only old Horace Walpole were alive today…

*No diss meant to contemporary wiccans;  some of my most memorable psychedelic experiences include what I interpreted as interactions with what The Urantia Book calls, The Universe Mother Spirit.