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Friday
I don’t know if the mother of the family brutalized by the Department of Homeland Security Monday night was quoting Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in her comments to the press, but she could have been. In case you haven’t heard, Marisa (not her real name) and her three daughters had just moved to an Oklahoma City neighborhood when Department of Homeland Security agents burst into their home, taking their phones, laptops, and life savings.
The agents were looking for a previous owner but refused to back off when the family failed to match their warrant. The woman reports that they didn’t allow her or her daughters to dress before sending them out in the rain. “They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” the woman said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”
The agents refused to back down even after Marisa told them, “We just moved here from Maryland” and kept repeating, “We’re citizens.” The agents, she says, “were very dismissive, very rough, very careless.”
Then came the echo of Merchant of Venice:
My initial thought was we were being robbed—that my daughters, being females, were being kidnapped. You have guns pointed in our faces. Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women? A little bit of mercy. Care a little bit about your fellow human, about your fellow citizen, fellow resident. We bleed too. We work. We bleed just like anybody else bleeds. We’re scared. You could see our faces that we were terrified. What makes you so much more worthier of your peace? What makes you so much more worthier of protecting your children? What makes you so much more worthy of your citizenship? What makes you more worthy of safety? Of being given the right that they took from me to protect my daughters?”
Shylock, explaining why he insists on collecting an agreed-upon “pound of flesh” from a delinquent debtor, talks about how his own humanity has been disregarded:
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?
Merchant of Venice is a controversial play because of its depiction of Shylock, with Harold Bloom fearing the play has done more harm to Jews than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous tract that the Nazis used to justify the Holocaust. Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, however, counters that Shakespeare so humanizes Shylock that the character threatens to run away with the play (that’s why the Bard drops him from Act V). In other words, we experience Shylock’s humanity to such a deep degree that all of our previously held prejudices are thrown into doubt.
Interestingly, in addition to echoing Shylock, Marisa also mentions mercy, another major theme of the play. Attempting to get Shylock to modify his suit, Portia delivers the following memorable passage:
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.
In the case of the Oklahoma woman, it is as if she is Shylock and Portia both, pleading for justice and mercy. Note how her words can apply to all immigrants who are being brutalized by Trump’s special agents, not just citizens. “Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women? A little bit of mercy. Care a little bit about your fellow human,” Marisa begged the intruders.
The sociopathic Trump appears to have the power to shut down empathy in many of his supporters. Fortunately, there are Americans all over the country who are stepping up and coming to the aid of victimized families. In the meantime, however, countless individuals, guiltless of any crime, are being traumatized and sometimes spirited away by Trump’s thugs–who, by the way, have yet to return the money and objects they stole from the Oklahoma family.
One can only hope that hearing such stories of Trump victims bleeding as they are pricked will galvanize the resistance.
Further thought: While one sympathizes to a degree with Shylock, he is also a monster, so obsessed with revenge that he surrenders his own humanity. In this way, he is like those MAGA folk who are willing to suffer themselves if it means sticking it to the people they hate. Shylock blames his foes for his own extreme measures:
if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.
The psychological power of resentment is such that suffering under Trump’s policies may not be enough to turn his supporters against him. Even if they lose their jobs, their businesses, their Medicare, or their Social Security, they will take pleasure in the fact that others are hurting even more.
