What Shakespeare Taught Me About World Politics

William Shakespeare was one smart dude when it came to understanding people, particularly nasty people who abuse others.

When I was taking courses about his plays during my undergrad days, I didn't know at the time I would live in Panama while a dictator (Omar Torrijos) and a master torturer (Manuel Noriega) were in control.

But the characters who showed up in plays such as Macbeth and Julius Caesar taught me a lot about people in power and control. (Relax; this is not an English teacher's lecture on Shakespeare's plays, with a test on Friday.)

I learned that the people who watched Shakespeare's plays had a world-view (now called a "chain of being") that put God on the top, rocks on the bottom, with Man in the middle. They saw the king as God's representative on earth. Therefore, anybody who messes with the king (like the not-nice act of killing him) is going to be dead on the floor before Shakespeare's play ends.

I noticed in these dramas that the mean guys seemed to be on top for three acts or so. They accomplished all the nastiness they wanted to achieve. But somewhere in Act IV or Act V, BOOM! They got what was coming to them.

Macbeth, egged on by his wife, was responsible for some murders, on his way to be king himself. He did in Duncan, who was officially in charge of the place when the play opened. By the end of the play, Macbeth was a goner. He got what he deserved.

The crowd of conspirators who didn't like Julius Caesar (and this is not to say that Julie was a saint) turned out Caesar's lights on the Ides of March. But they were goners, too, in later action.

Even Hamlet (the guy who couldn't make up his mind), who planned and accomplished his step-dad's death, got his ticket punched before the last lines of the play.

As a college student, I noticed that the bad guys in Shakespeare's plays were up for a while and then they went down. And then, when I read the newspaper headlines, I noticed that in world politics, dictators had similar biographies. (Fidel Castro is an exception.) Adolph Hitler, Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, and on and on.

As an admitted amateur in political analysis---but assisted by Shakespeare's observations--I surmised that dictators, who often claim to take power so they can "help the poor people", eventually become so drunk with power that they think they are invulnerable. Then from somewhere out of nowhere, comes a challenger who kills the dictator or chases him out of town.

In my own life story, Torrijos (whose son later went on to become the elected president of the Republic of Panama), was fully in charge of the country, using the Guardia Nacional (combination army and police force) to suppress opposition. Noriega was in charge of the G-2, a lovable group of guys who were quite creative in torture techniques for people they identified as "enemies of the state".

Torrijos was a dictator who stayed to himself a lot but he did enjoy visiting little villages in remote areas. He flew there in a state helicopter. But one day, the helicopter crashed, killing the dictator. Guess who took over the government? Manuel Noriega.

And then one day, a day I never thought would come, Noriega was captured by American troops and put in jail.

Granted, Torrijos and Noriega are just two small stories in the world history of power people. But now, when I read of this man or that man (female dictators don't seem to show up as much) taking over power, I remember that Shakespeare taught me that such power has its limits---and that some of those power-nuts people, through their own actions, will end up dead on the floor at the end of their biographies.