J. B. Thompson

“Bufflehead!” said the Doe I Know (Dee) to the Authorial Rabbit.

“That’s a bit harsh,” I replied.

“Duck!”

“Oh, oh.”

“A bird, dummy bunny.” She is pointing. “I’m talking about a bufflehead, a duck-like waterfowl. So interesting to see one.”

Dee and the AR were on one of their long bounding walks during their corona virus isolation, and they had come to the shoreline near an old cemetery for Chinese people. Chinese people were not allowed to be buried in local cemeteries in past days, so the Chinese community had to buy their own plot of ground. This one houses bones in mass graves. Not being able to bury their ancestors, Chinese people in this country gathered bones from across the country, hoping to send them to China for proper rites. However, wars intervened, they could not ship the bones, and so the bones were buried here. It is a sublimely spiritual place.

The DIK and the AR walk on. The AR is musing. “Whatever happened with Elsinore after Hamlet’s death?”

The night before, the AR and Dee had been watching Russian director Kozintzev’s 1964 Hamlet with the great actor Smoktunovsky in the title role and music by Shostakovich. In this black and white, hard-stone and rough sea, bleak Potemkin-like version, Hamlet says less than the full play — “words, words, words” — those unreliable signifiers — nothing in his dying moments about the future of Elsinore and Denmark. Nor were flights of angels bade to sing him to his rest.

In the original play the Bard has Hamlet designate Fortinbras of Norway as king of Denmark, that Norwegian Crown prince having been able to avenge the death of his father as Hamlet could not his.

“Yes,” says Dee. “The after the aftermath.”

The AR imagines another kingdom with an interloper leading badly, and rebellion erupting. AR remembers a Dylan lyric — ‘if you live outside the law/you must be honest’ —  and shakes his head.

By the end of Hamlet’s rebellion and by his actions, his girlfriend, her father and brother, Hamlet’s mother, his former friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as well as his uncle are all dead, and the kingdom is without succession.

Rebellion is the natural consequence of problems not being fixed in good time. But rebellion is not a clean surgical process. It can become its own terror and leave victims. And the kingdom may die.

The slide into tyranny is slow at first, then accelerates. The saga of Argentina’s slide is well told by Uki Goñi in Silence is Health: How Totalitarianism Arrives in the New York Review of Books.

The AR remembers reading the Buenos Aires Herald between sessions of tango, the brave newspaper for which Goni was a reporter in the dark times. It survived the terror but was no longer itself. The tango, too, survived. It had been banned during the dictatorship and many of its musicians jailed. Now it fights the virus, as we all do together.

Mad bad kings cannot ascend the throne or survive without collaborators. Anne Applebaum’s History will Judge the Complicit in The Atlantic tells that story well, referencing the Nazis and East Germany. It is heartening to see a general today who chooses to not be a collaborator.

The Doe I Know has walked ahead. I leap forward. We are enjoying the birds.