(We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, and you can start here in the middle or with this post.)

As the curtain rises on Act II, (We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, starting with this post),  we peek in on Polonius as he is directing Reynaldo, a spy. Please feel free to substitute a Google or Facebook algorithm or Amazon Alexa, or the FBI’s tracking of cell phones to identify the protestors who took that unscheduled tour of the Capitol.

Polonius wants Reynaldo to spy on his son Laertes at his school in France, or more likely at the bars surrounding his school. We’ve pegged Laertes as a bit of a turncoat to honest life, but here we’re seeing how he was made that way. Think of a corporation that quails before the woke mob and bends its knee to BLM, hoping to be devoured last, or a Congressman who knows China has those hotel room photographs. That’s Laertes. Polonius and Reynaldo, and later Claudius, operate on Laertes in this manner (take you means pretend you have):

Pol: “Take you, as ’twere, some distant knowledge of him,
…………..Do you mark this, Reynaldo?”

Reynaldo: “Ay, very well my lord.”

Polonius: “’…you may say…he’s very wild,
Addicted so and so,’ and there put on him
What forgeries you please – marry none so rank
As may dishonor him, take heed of that,
But, sir, such wanton, wild, and usual slips
As are companions noted and most known
To you and liberty.”

If Polonius is willing to do this to his own son, what would he be willing to do to Hamlet (who stands in for all of us)? Well, that’s like asking, if China was willing to slaughter 60 million of its own Han Chinese citizens in the Great Leap Forward of the 1960’s, what would it be willing to do to the Tibetans and Uighurs (we already know), and in time, to all of us? Reynaldo, a good media or social media functionary properly lacking in imagination, is a bit dumbfounded, and asks just how far he may go in slandering Polonius’s son:

(Drabbing means whoring; incontinency here means sex outside of marriage):

Reynaldo: “As gaming, my lord.”

Polonius: “Ay, or drinking, fencing, swearing,
Quarreling, drabbing – you may go so far.”

Reynaldo: “My lord, that would dishonor him.”

Polonius: “Faith, no, as you may season it in the charge.
You must not put another scandal on him
That he is open to incontinency;
That’s not my meaning. But breathe his faults so quaintly
That they may seem the taints of liberty,
The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind,
A savageness in unreclaimed blood…”

But breathe his faults so quaintly. Biden is handsy because he’s an old-school style politician, Cuomo is the Love Gov, until he’s no longer needed, and Bill Clinton is protected for a quarter century (likely delaying the #metoo movement by that same period, during which how many women found themselves abused and unprotected…?).

Reynaldo: “But, my good lord – ”

Polonius: “Wherefore should you do this?”

Reynaldo: “Ay, my lord, I would know that.”

Polonius: “Marry, sir, here’s my drift…”

Polonius proceeds to drift for quite a while, prompting Reynaldo to the verbal equivalent of shifting in his chair in impatience:

Polonius: “And then, sir, does he this – he does –
what was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to
say something: where did I leave?”

Reynaldo: “At ‘close in the consequence,’ at ‘friend or so,’
and ‘gentleman.’”

Polonius: “…Aye, marry;…See you now
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth
And thus do we…By indirections find directions out.”

So, telling us they’re not saving our browser history, search data, shopping history, location data, that Alexa and Google Assistant are here to help and at our service, and that we are not at theirs, these baits of falsehoods do indeed by indirections find directions out. Hamlet is always and ever at our side, relevant to every century, every decade, everyone.