Prompt Images
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.