According to
Winston Peters' blog, he recently delivered a speech to a youth audience in which he quoted lyrics from "Suicide is Painless", the theme song to MASH.
There was a song attached to MASH and while I don’t agree with the chorus – I like some of the verses.
This was one of them:
“A brave man once requested me,
to answer questions that are key,
Is it to be or not be be
And I replied oh why ask me.”
I'm not convinced Peters had thought this one through. He's talking to a youth audience in a country with a high youth suicide rate. He's quoting a song called Suicide is Painless. He says he doesn't agree with the chorus, but that he does like a verse where Hamlet's big question - whether to kill himself or not -is dismissed with the reaction "Oh why ask me."
Does Peters really think that a positive response to the question of whether life is worth living is to shrug it off? Does he really not have an opinion he's willing to share with a youth audience on the question of whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?
Or did Peters perhaps miss the point of that rather famous allusion? Was he not familiar with Hamlet's view that it is cowardice and fear of the uinknown only that prevents us from committing suicide, when reason dictates that we ought to?
Whichever way I look at it, I can't see the logic behind choosing that particular song, or putting forth that verse as something he likes. The man is truly a mystery.
1 comment:
Hey there were way stranger parts of that speech like saying how bad it is that you can graduate with a law degree without having read a novel Dickens. Telling people to not read the untrustworthy media or blogs because they're so unreliable but old people are great because they read lots of books seemed to be the gist and I don't think that will capture the youth vote somehow.
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