Comedy = Women to the Rescue/ Tragedy = Just Men

If you're dismayed by the state of the state, I highly recommend you read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, a conservative classic from 1987 that open-minded liberals and conservatives will enjoy because of the tone, it's quaintly intellectual (and quite crotchety and moralistic) by today's inanely polarized realpolitik standards of political discourse; Bloom is not afraid to actually say something and then back it up logically . . . and even his dated attack on the raw power of rock music will ring true to those old enough to remember when rock music meant something; I'll do a full review once I finish, but I was struck by his analysis of sex roles and Shakespeare-- Bloom pragmatically discusses the costs of feminism, of making both sexes the same, of stripping them of their mysticism and their courtship contrasts-- we know the benefits of feminism, of course: more brains in the economy and higher education; more empowered women; women that don't have to depend on men; women that can pursue a career as ambitiously as they can motherhood and childbirth; women that can participate fully in politics-- not just behind the scenes-- but Bloom also describes what it lost when we blend these worlds and these sex roles, and he uses Shakespeare to help; he explains that the difference between a Shakespearean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy is that in the comedies, when the men are inadequate at restoring a civilized and peaceful order to things, the women dress as men, leave their feminine world, sort things, and then return to their feminine roles-- but with a sense of delicious irony in that these roles are simply there to make civilization operate and sometimes they need to be broken by clever women that can play the part of men better than men can (Portia from The Merchant of Venice is the perfect example) but once the sexes are mixed together and uniform, whether as soldiers or lawyers or pilots or statesmen, then there is no civilized feminine world to come to the rescue (Hillary Clinton is the perfect example-- she needed some savvy woman to edit her "basket of deplorables" speech) and this is incredibly evident in Hamlet . . . if Ophelia was a bit zanier and clever, instead of depressed and broken, she might have disguised herself as a man, befriended Hamlet and Horatio, exacted a less violent revenge on her meddling dad, and mopped the rottenness right out of Castle Elsinore . . . but woe is me (and her) as that was not to be . . . and now that I've expressed myself fully, I'll get back to cleaning the sink.