Policy of Truth has been around for eleven years now, and on reflection it occurs to me that I’ve frankly done a horrific job of tagging and categorizing my posts here over time. Many of them discuss the same topic, theme, or campaign, but are scattered in ways that make them hard to find.
My migrant justice posts are a perfect example: they stretch back over a decade, but are inconsistently tagged, categorized, and titled. You’d never know that a post written in 2025 bears a connection to one written five or ten years ago, but that’s often the case. It also doesn’t help that I’m so indecisive about titles, e.g., posting one and changing it five minutes (or five days) later. Henceforth, all of that will change. O brave new blog, that has such structure about it!
Yes, this is what happens when you spend your waking hours among consultants in the corporate world. Life becomes a perpetual project of re-organization. I’m not immune.
I am in fact going to start this project with my migrant justice posts, about thirty of them, going back to 2015. I will for the most part retain the original titles, but will subtitle them “Notes on Migrant Justice 1,” “Notes on Migrant Justice 2,” etc. The “Resistance in Action” series of the last few weeks will eventually get subsumed within the larger “Notes on Migrant Justice” one, and probably disappear as its own series. The hope is that this revolutionary change will give some missing structure to the blog, and enable readers to see continuities they’d otherwise miss.
The re-organization only applies to my own posts, not to other bloggers’. The Revolution begins at home.
Policy of Truth 
I like the versions in the 2010 Tempest movie:
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Me too, but AI didn’t come up with it, so it isn’t part of the zeitgeist. As a corporate consultant, I can’t afford to take chances. A female Prospero? Come on. Our private equity partners would never go for it.
I’m actually reading The Tempest nowadays, hoping to blog on it.
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Forbidden Planet, the 1956 sci-fi remagining of The Tempest, pretty strongly implied a incestuous attachment on the part of Morbius (Prospero) to Altaira (Miranda).
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Actually, incest is a minor theme in the secondary literature on The Tempest. There’s a suggestion that Prospero agrees to have Miranda married off to Ferdinand because he’s uncomfortable with his own desire for her, and wants her out of the picture. Which is fine, but not on my blog.
I used to teach The Tempest as an entree into Modern Political Theory, as foreshadowing themes in Machiavelli, Locke, Marx, and Mill. It’s one of the things I actually miss doing. It really does contrast favorably with doing the weekly Denial Management Inventory Reports for the Atlantic/Centra-State Hospital System, enthralling as that can be.
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The 1979 film had the insanely brilliant idea to include the song “Stormy Weather”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8cTeGEGvc0
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The 1991 film Prospero’s Books is another interestingly daft adaptation.
Both The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream play an important role in the Sandman comic, though to the best of my recollection only the latter figures in the tv series.
https://londongraphicnovelnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/d8630-sandman2bbefore2bthe2bhumans.jpg
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The editors of my edition suggest that The Tempest is “uniquely adaptable.” “Prospero’s enchanted island could be almost anywhere, and indeed, in modern productions and appropriations has been set in several continents and even in outer space.”
At the other end, there’s the argument that it can’t possibly be about colonialism, and here’s why:
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/27/3/acknowledging_things_of_darkness_postcolonial_criticism_of_the_tempest
It somehow sounds very familiar.
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An island with no people for people with no island!
They jump pretty quickly from “no indigenous inhabitants” to “uninhabited.”
I forget whether I’ve told you this story, but back in the early 90s I spent a week (or possibly two? or maybe it just felt like two) at the Heritage Foundation as one of their Salvatori Fellows (an honour [?] arranged for me by Leonard Liggio, who had some sort of gig with them). We got to meet and hang out with such conservative luminaries as Ed Meese, Bill Bennett, Dick Armey, etc. It was a fucking nightmare. (I remember Armey explaining to us that the basic difference between the Republicans and the Democrats in Congress was that the Repubs were decent people and the Dems weren’t.)
The other Salvatori academics were mostly dreadful too; I remember one complaining about some Gay Pride event he’d stumbled across in DC, and how seeing openly gay people made him feel like punching them. In the evenings I would escape northward to the funky lefty neighbourhood of Adams Morgan to decompress. The whole affair played a significant role in moving me farther left, so maybe Liggio did me a favour after all.
Anyway, one of the conservative luminaries who graced us with her presence was Lynne Cheney, who at that time was heading up the NEH. Of course the other Fellows fawningly gushed about how much they admired what her husband Dick was doing in the Middle East. Anyway, the subject of Shakespeare came up, and Cheney said “I did my undergraduate thesis [or some such] on The Tempest, and in those days it was all about the mystery of life. But now the left-wing academics have made it about colonialism.” Mirabile dictu, this was too much even for the other Fellows, some of whom cautiously defended the notion that an anti-colonialist reading could be a valid interpretation — whereupon, interestingly, she immediately backed down.
Another Tempest-related anecdote:
When I was a little kid my mother bought me an album of Maurice Evans reading various speeches from Shakespeare; the specific ones included were speeches from Julius Caesar and The Tempest. I didn’t know the context, but I was fascinated. So The Tempest entered into my consciousness very early.
https://i.discogs.com/GAOM0ZcBCiIHSEPnxLeQnQP5FaKpXIrl2WTcjdH-9nI/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:540/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTIyNDU1/NDgtMTU2MjM3MjUz/NC02MzcyLmpwZWc.jpeg
(Later on when I was older, she would rent records from the library that were complete performances of various Shakespeare plays, including The Tempest.)
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Note that the album cover seems to promise (falsely) Midsummer Night’s Dream. The pixie figure could be either Ariel or Puck, but the ass-headed guy is clearly Bottom.
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That’s funny (sort of). I think you had told me that story, but I like this version of it better than any previous one. I may have told you that I was both Editor in Chief of The Princeton Tory and (though that) an intern for the National Association of Scholars. I went to any number of conclaves just like the one you described, and hated them all just as thoroughly. I think my best story is dinner with Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb a few days after I had attacked Kristol in the Wall Street Journal, but let me bank that one, because I have a Lynne Cheney story contemporaneous with yours.
As a staffer for the Tory, I was given the opportunity (?) to interview Lynne Cheney, and as in your case, she blathered to us about her thesis on The Tempest. She got on my nerves within minutes, so I decided to get into an argument with her right in the middle of the interview. It was a mess, and the editors had trouble figuring out what to do with it. A sanitized version did get published. I couldn’t find it online (this was the late 80s), but I did find this:
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2001/11/30/cheney-calls-improved-instruction-american-history
Painful that she received a standing ovation. Because yes, the Ivy League is just a big pit of leftists. I guess we’ve gone from “free speech is a very important thing” to “if you seek its monument, look around” in about two decades.
We should do a mini reading group on The Tempest. I started a lot later with it than you. I just liked the idea of starting (or ending) all of my upper division classes with a work of literature, and The Tempest was a natural.
I’m reading it now, improbably, for a re-scheduled seder. My housemate is Jewish, and her family and I traditionally used to celebrate Passover together, but recently her father (who typically led the seder) has expressed a deep alienation from (aversion to) traditional Judaism. So what we’ve done instead is to pick a literary text and read it alongside some text from the Hebrew Bible over a Passover-ish meal, minus the Haggadah. (Her father is a retired professor of literature.) Reading The Tempest alongside Exodus was my idea.
We were going to do it last spring, but medical issues intervened, so we’ve postponed until now.
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Funny how she has to at least *sound* like she’s open to critical viewpoints on American history. Makes her sound reasonable compared to Trump.
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She paved the way to Trump. Put it this way: Before last year, the last time that Cannon Green was off limits to protest was 1776, when the British Army occupied Princeton. Princeton was supposedly liberated by George Washington after the Battle of Princeton that Cheney mentions. Cannon Green was then open to protest until May 2024, when it was closed in response to Gaza Solidarity Encampment. It’s as though one occupation was resurrected in defense of another.
Unlike Lynne Cheney, I went to Princeton, taught at Princeton, and have interviewed applicants for Princeton. I have never once met the Princeton student–or any student anywhere–who thought that the American Revolution was “inevitable.” I don’t know how people like Lynne Cheney manage to make shit up like that.
What I’ve repeatedly encountered are students who lack any sense that the evils of the past might exist in the present, or that the revolutionary moments of the past might have counterparts today. How many students would see a parallel between George III and Christopher Eisgruber, or Parliament and the Board of Trustees–or themselves and the Revolutionary Army? The problem that needs solving is not “How do we valorize the heroes of the past?” but “How do we make the study of the past relevant to action in the present?” Both the NEH and the American Enterprise Institute exist to ensure that the first question drowns out the second.
I wish I’d known that more clearly when I was 20. Now that I know it, I wish I knew what to do about it.
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The problem that needs solving is not “How do we valorize the heroes of the past?” but “How do we make the study of the past relevant to action in the present?”
Amen.
Reminds me of Voltairine de Cleyre:
“It was the intention of the Revolutionists to establish a system of common education, which should make the teaching of history one of its principal branches; not with the intent of burdening the memories of our youth with the dates of battles or the speeches of generals, nor to make the Boston Tea Party Indians the one sacrosanct mob in all history, to be revered but never on any account to be imitated, but with the intent that every American should know to what conditions the masses of people had been brought by the operation of certain institutions, by what means they had wrung out their liberties, and how those liberties had again and again been filched from them by the use of governmental force, fraud, and privilege. Not to breed security, laudation, complacent indolence, passive acquiescence in the acts of a government protected by the label ‘home-made,’ but to beget a wakeful jealousy, a never-ending watchfulness of rulers, a determination to squelch every attempt of those entrusted with power to encroach upon the sphere of individual action – this was the prime motive of the revolutionists in endeavoring to provide for common education.”
https://praxeology.net/VC-AAT.htm
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