What's Going On...

Things I'm reading, watching, listening to, and thinking about: Macbeth, Lily, Marc & Bari, and Steve Skojec, the Grinch who saved my Christmas.

We are hurtling along through Advent and only a few days left before we break for Christmas here at school. The students have been pretty focused and have not YET let the Christmas tunes distract them from our work. I love Christmas (for obvious reasons) and unlike Thanksgiving break, I do not have to scramble to get grading and comment writing done.

What I’m Reading

But that means I’ve been busy reading and preparing Macbeth with my fourth formers. I’ve read this play with my students during Advent for the past 18 years. Today we worked through the banquet scene immediately following the half-botched assassination attempt upon Banquo and his son Fleance. Macbeth needs to kill Banquo because the Weird Sisters have announced that while Banquo will not be king, his children will.

This time through, I’ve been mediating upon how Macbeth must spend all of his post-usurpation energies upon consolidating his power, which is really a consolidation of a narrative. I have found that there are certain times in which specific words reveal themselves at particular moments. This go around, that word just struck me. To consolidate means to combine and make firm, to make solid with. It just struck me. Leaders must make firm. All leaders from the very heights of the social hierarchies to the very rudimentary levels are either consolidating or losing.

All persons in positions of authority must do daily manicuring, a nearly constant cultivation of their constituents for “buy in”. The power they hold in reserve must be carefully wielded and attended to. Too much flex or too little flex can cause dissension in the ranks. A dissolving. A “non-solidating.” If a king (or a teacher or a manager or a parent) is too heavy with his hand the people can “quiet quit” in collective passive resistance. A too light exercise of authority can inspire rebellion and a loss of faith. What struck me today as we were going through the botched banquet scene in which the ghost of the just-murdered Banquo comes to haunt this new king just in his moment of triumph. A leader throws a party—here a state dinner—both as a significant event that his loyal big wigs can participate in (and thus be implicated by) and as a spectacle of royal power and might. This moment will not only showcase the solidification of his crown, but also provide him with a perfect alibi. If you are a Godfather fan, it works very much like the consolidation of Michael’s power during his child’s baptism. You may recall just the cut scenes of his rivals getting systematically whacked as the priest intones “do you renounce Satan and all his pomp.” It is effective consolidation. He has no rivals and he has a perfect respectible alibi: he was at church, at his own son’s baptism! But alas, Macbeth is not able to pull it off. The official story that he promotes in order to make his claims to the throne real, is unraveling.

Not to be too much of a nerd, but this is important aspect of authority and how it is practiced. Even as you run something as local and pre-political as a family you spend your time consolidating that authority. We have all seen insolvent families, and we all know how difficult it is to do it right, but even a parent must exercise that authority in such a way that builds trust. The authoritarian parent will necessarily chase their children away, sooner and later. The parent who refuses to parent will similarly chase children away because they have failed to consolidate—that is, to build—a coherent family narrative in which children are properly raised and by which they will create their own. The family must be constantly con-solidated. It must be gathered up, made firm, made real…the forces of entropy are all too real and powerful.

I love teaching old books because despite having read this particular play over 20 times I am still seeing latent patterns that are helpful making sense of the world.