This past week I’ve been consumed by two endeavors, volunteering in the Write-in Biden (WIB) campaign and reviewing my KDP editor’s notes on the Henry V chapter of my forthcoming book, Will to Live:  Learning from Shakespeare How to Be—and NOT to Be.  Doing both in such proximity reminds me of the curious elision of disparate activities that would predictably take place in my earlier years whenever I was rehearsing a play and opening night approached.  No matter my role as actor or director, everything in life that was not the play suddenly began to reflect the play; real life became less real than make believe.  And right on schedule after first dress rehearsal, I would start misplacing my keys; keeping track of them was not, after all, part of the script I was laboring to bring to life, and the script superseded reality.

And so it’s been the past week, with parts of my Henry V chapter leaping off the page into my psyche to explain my lived experience.  That’s not uncommon with Shakespearean texts; after all, Ben Jonson nailed it when he dubbed Will “not of an age, but for all time.”  Still, the immediate relevance of a 425-year-old script caught my attention when one small moment in Act 3 Scene 6 struck me in a way it never had before.  Here’s the setup:  the feisty Fluellen is a doughty Welsh captain under Henry’s command.  Fluellen, well-versed in military history but somewhat limited in perception, has just been reporting to the wiser Captain Gower the brave words that the braggart soldier Pistol proclaimed at the bridge over the Ternoise the English so bravely defended from French forces.  Gower, however, knows Pistol, “an arrant counterfeit rascal,” and his aggrandizing lies.  He warns Fluellen about the dangers of believing anything such a man says:  “You must learn to know the slanders of the age, or else you may be marvelously mistook” (3.6.79-81).

Last Sunday I stood for a blustery 15^o hour plus with my friends the Richmans on the heavily trafficked northeast corner of Weeks Crossing in Dover, New Hampshire, participants in a “visibility” for the Write-In Biden campaign.  The New York Times had dubbed us NH Democrats “ornery” because unlike the “nice” Iowan citizens who politely accepted President Biden’s decision to push them back on the presidential nominating calendar, we refused to accept the decision to cede “first primary” status to South Carolina, judging the attention traditionally given the NH Primary too important to ignore.  And so there we stood, waving our signs, and enduring “the slanders of the age” shouted at us.  A sampling:

“F*** Biden!”

“Biden sucks!”

“Trump in 2024!”

“You’ve GOT to be kidding!”  (This from a well-dressed woman in a huge black SUV.)

And my favorite:  “Biden’s a Pedophile!”

A few passersby honked in support and gave us a thumbs up, but the MAGA types certainly outnumbered them.

Discouraged, I faced Tuesday’s Primary morning with alarm, thinking I was in for a long day of abuse as the sole sign waver in front of the Madbury Town Hall.  I was, however, pleasantly surprised that my relentlessly cheerful greeting, “Good morning!  Thank you for voting!” was generally returned in kind.  A few fellow citizens simply avoided my gaze, but most smiled and waved, and some even thanked me for showing up.  Encouraged, in the afternoon I returned to my post ten feet away from the Town Hall entrance as election protocol dictates, and was later joined by two fellow Madburians.  We stayed until dusk, hearing nary a rude remark.  Shortly after the polls closed at 7 pm, both Biden and Nikki Haley were declared winners in Madbury and Durham, my local turf.  Then on Thursday, we volunteers got a thank you message from President Biden for handing him a landslide 64% primary win—even without his name appearing on the ballot.  And there was praise from the New York Times for our volunteer-driven campaign “infused with the sort of joy found in spirited [ornery!] underdogs.”  We’ll have a de-briefing Zoom this Sunday to consider Next Steps.

Since Tuesday, as the blowhard Trump continues to spout his lies and insults and his benighted acolytes proclaim him the messiah (to wax Shakespearean, “Is’t possible?”), my thoughts have often returned to Captain’s Gowers’s warning Fluellen:  learn to know the slanders of the age, or be marvelously mistook.

So many now are marvelously mistook, and there’s plenty of bad news one must try to rise above, from global horrors in the Red Sea, Gaza, and Ukraine to dispiriting downsizing at the University of New Hampshire that will soon close the University Art Museum, the only art museum on the Seacoast, and this week made 75 employees redundant.  While surveying the broccoli at our local Market Basket yesterday afternoon, I was haled by my former English department colleague Monica, who lamented that she’s one of the few tenured professors remaining in a department that when my late husband arrived at UNH in 1976 was the U’s mightiest.  Hopes that higher education would rise phoenix-like after COVID are dashed, and I realize daily how lucky I was to be among the last generation to find respectable employment in academia.

What’s to come is still unsure.  This NH winter alternates between very cold and creepily warm.  My friend Jennifer reports her daffodils have broken ground (in NH in January!), and as I drove home from Durham toward Hick’s Hill yesterday, I spied some willow trees already turned chartreuse.

Too soon for spring.  Too late for democracy?  I wonder.  Yesterday a jury of nine Americans deliberated for less than three hours before it ordered former president Trump to pay writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her after she accused him in 2019 of raping her in the 1990s.  And come 12 February, Jon Stewart, who so successfully weaponized political comedy when he took over The Daily Show in 1999, will return to the show he left in 2015 to appear each Monday through the 2024 election.

Can a comedian help save democracy by inspiring his audience?  A certain Ukrainian comedian continues to do just that.

So. Here’s to recognizing the slanders of the age, defeating the liars who spread them, and saving our republic.