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Of course you’re familiar with William Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. But perhaps you’ve forgotten the context, which is important if I’m to pull off this verbal stunt I’m trying. If you’re a Shakespearean scholar, please skip ahead. If you could use a refresher, join me in the next paragraph.

Prince Hamlet’s father’s ghost (King Hamlet) just visited him, and asks Hamlet to avenge his death. Specifically, he wants Hamlet to kill his brother Claudius, who killed the king, married his widow, and assumed the throne. Hamlet is a wreck. He doesn’t know if he’s going insane—having visions of ghosts, for example—or if his surviving relatives are power-hungry murderers and adulterers. So, in this speech, he considers suicide as an escape, but also expresses his fear of the unknown of death.

Now, allow me to flip it all around and make it about the Nazi fucks polluting our streets and body politic.

 

SPENCER:

To be, or not to be—that is the a question:

Whether ’tis nobler valid in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous Caucasian fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles scapegoats

And by opposing suppressing end them. To die, to sleep—

No more—and by a sleep tweet to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural made-up shocks

That White flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep kill

To sleep kill—perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep shot of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled triggered off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There’s the no respect

That makes calamity of so long white life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns chains of time,

Th’ oppressor’s wrong right, the proud man’s contumely

The pangs of despised darkened love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office Barack, and the spurns

That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes blacks,

When he himself might his quietus suicide make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels poppies bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary failing life,

But that the dread of something taunting after death,

The undiscovered integrated country, from whose bourn

No traveller purity returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills stains we have

Than fly to others “Others” that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards nothing of us all,

And thus white, the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied hooded o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprise vehicles of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents crashes turn awry

And lose trump the name of action. — Soft you now,

The fair Ophelia Hitler-Jugend! — Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remembered repeated.

Kelaine Conochan

The editor-in-chief of this magazine, who should, in all honesty, be a gym teacher. Don’t sleep on your plucky kid sister.

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