If we listen to W.S. Gilbert, maybe we can improve our government
the world). Pay closer attention to W.S. Gilbert. You surely know
Gilbert and Sullivan, the Victorian gentlemen who wrote satirical
operettas about the topsy-turvy worlds of sailors, pirates, aesthetes,
a women’s college, Titipudlians, ghosts, and fairies. Their best-known
operettas are
H.M.S. Pinafore (1878),
The Pirates of Penzance (1879—you may have seen
Joseph Papp’s 1980 production starring Kevin Kline, Linda Ronstadt,
and Rex Smith), and
The Mikado (1885).
One of my favorite operettas is
Iolanthe (1882). It’s the plot of this operetta that reveals
the solution to our political mess in the U.S. in 2012. Gilbert’s primary
target is the extremely conservative upper house of Parliament, the House
of Lords, also called the House of Peers. The only qualification for membership
in the House of Lords was to have been born the son of a lord. If you were
a peer, you were a member. No intelligence was required. (The famous pirates
of Penzance turn out to be “young lords gone wrong.” A lot of young lords
went wrong—gambling, carousing, dueling, raising hell—though few of them
became pirates. See almost any Victorian novel.) The Lords, who probably
never read any of the legislation proposed by the Liberal Party, could
veto any bill passed by the Lower House. Are you seeing any parallels yet
between Gilbert’s dysfunctional government and our own? Like the totally
unqualified Tea Partiers who got themselves elected in 2010 and now rage
against any kind of compromise with the Democrats in Congress?
You may have read or heard the famous “
nightmare song” from Act II of
Iolanthe. It’s probably Gilbert’s most famous patter song: When you’re
lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is tabooed by anxiety, I
conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety;
For your brain is on fire….
So what’s the connection I see between
Iolanthe and the U.S. Congress in 2012? Let me try to condense the
plot. Twenty-five-years before the operetta begins, a fairy named Iolanthe
married the Lord Chancellor, who to this day is still the highest judiciary
functionary in England and ranks above all the peers except the royal family.
The Lord Chancellor acts as the Speaker of the House of Lords. Now let’s
keep in mind that a Speaker recently tried to run for the Republican nomination
for President of the U.S. (see my parody,
Eye of Newt), and Speaker John Boehner has more or less surrendered
to the Tea Party.
Because of her marriage to a mortal, Iolanthe was banished by the Fairy
Queen. But she gave birth to a son, Strephon, who is an Arcadian shepherd
(more parody—of the fabled innocence and purity of all rural folk). Strephon,
we learn, is a fairy from the waist up and human from the waist (well,
actually, just a bit lower) down. Strephon and Phyllis, a ward of the Chancery,
are going to be married, but Phyllis is also being courted members of the
House of Lords. The Fairy Queen is persuaded to bring Iolanthe back from
exile, and when mother and son sing a duet, Phyllis and the Lords spy on
them. Fairies don’t age and Iolanthe looks as young as her son, so Phyllis
thinks her boyfriend is making out with another woman and promptly gets
herself engaged to two Lords.
Meanwhile, the Lord Chancellor is plotting to marry Phyllis himself. Strephon
calls on the fairies—his aunts—for help, but when they arrive on stage,
the Lords think they’re merely students at a girls’ school. There are satirical
remarks in several of Gilbert’s librettos about the deleterious effects
of women in politics. (And what percentage of the U.S. Congress is female?)
Offended, the fairies decide to run Strephon for Parliament. He wins of
course, and soon becomes the head of both parties. One of his first acts
is to sponsor a bill opening the House of Lords to competitive examination,
which every existing Lord would certainly flunk. But Strephon already has
too much power to be voted down. End of Act I. As the curtain rises on
Act II, we meet
Private Willis of the Grenadier Guards, who sings about how every
boy and every girl is born either “a little liberal or a little conservative”
and that when Parliament meets, they leave their brains outside and vote
the way their leaders tell them to. Does this sound familiar? Think about
what the Tea Party has wrought in the House of Representatives and the
Senate. Brains have indeed been left outside the door. Strephon explains
to Phyllis that he is part fairy, which leads Phyllis to muse that if she
ever sees him with a young, attractive woman, well, it has to be one of
his aunts. Now Strephon asks his mother to persuade the Lord Chancellor
to release Phyllis, but Iolanthe says that because she was his wife (the
Lord Chancellor thinks she’s dead), she can’t. But she pleads her son’s
case, anyway, in disguise. No luck. Though the Lord Chancellor is glad
to see his fairy wife is alive, Iolanthe has broken the law again. Marriage
to a mortal is still a capital offense, even though all the other fairies
have been flirting with the Lords. Now the fairies are all “fairy duchesses,
marchionesses, countesses, vicountesses, and baronesses.” Are they all
to be put to death? Iolanthe is about to be banished again when the Lord
Chancellor—who used to be a very crafty clerk—finds a way to change the
fairy law. “The subtleties of the legal mind are equal to this emergency,”
he says. “The thing is really quite simple—the insertion of a single word.
Let it stand that every fairy shall die who
doesn’tmarry a mortal….” And every Lord promptly sprouts fairy wings.
To save her own life, the Fairy Queen marries Private Willis, and they
all fly away to fairyland. And how does all this nonsense apply to politics
in the U.S. in 2012? Four ways.
First, Private Willis sings that “I often think it’s comical…/How Nature
always does contrive…/ That every boy and every gal/ That’s born into the
world alive/ Is either a little Liberal/ Or else a little Conservative!”
This suggests to me that it would be good to have some liberal-conservative
amity. Maybe some mating, too! There’s good to be found in liberalism,
also in conservatism. If they mate, maybe they’ll produce a child with
the best points of both philosophies. We can consider this either metaphorically
or literally.Second, let’s institute that competitive examination for people
running for both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. First,
give them an I.Q. test. Then a simple multiple-choice test. First question:
The year we are living in is (a) 1929, (b) 1954, (c) 1984, (d) none of
the above.Third, as every pagan knows, the humans and animals we see walking
upon the planet today are not the only sentient beings here. There are
invisible beings. Some are fairies, or the Faery. They don’t look like
Gilbert’s fairies “tripping hither, tripping thither,” nor like Shakespeare’s
Oberon and Titania. They’re not little twinkly folks. They’ve almost been
wiped out, but some still live in hidden places, and they’re not called
the Good Neighbors for nothing. I bet they’re really pissed off by global
warming, monoculture farms, and strip mines and fracking. We need to be
nice to them. Let’s arrange some meetings between the Good Neighbors and
the Tea Partiers and see what happens to the latter. With any luck, the
Good Neighbors will find them entertaining (or tasty) and they’ll be flown
off to Faery Land and we can get back to running the country in a more
civilized, kinder way. Finally, Gilbert’s Fairy Queen is not a wispy
little Hallmark babe but a substantial contralto with a powerful voice
and presence. Women are 51 percent of the U.S. population Let’s elect more
smart, powerful women to government, local, state, and federal. We need
more Fairy Queens in charge.
