Richard II's Federalist Tea Party

(Part of a series in which I make up for not updating my blog recently.)

As in previous years, I attended the annual "Shakespeare & The Law" panel co-sponsored by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and a local chapter of the Federalist Society, an association of politically conservative and libertarian judges and attorneys.

One of the featured panelists, David G. Tuereck, a Suffolk University economics professor with connections to the Tea Party movement, chose to read Richard II as an allegory of the current political situation and only days before Inauguration Day, stopped just short of advocating an armed coup d'etat against President Obama.

And then things got weird, as I recount at The Clyde Fitch Report:

Tuerck missed the most obvious reason why Thomas Jefferson never read Karl Marx or John Manyard Keynes: they hadn’t published anything of significance yet.

Of course, this little problem of chronology was the least of Tuerck’s problems. Like a great many associated with the Tea Party (and, for that matter, other cults), Tuerck is drunk on symbols. Without delving into his scholarly writings in economics, his public rhetoric indicates someone more interested in iconography and allegory than in evidence and hypotheses; free-association rather than reason and causality.

This is, of course, how lawyers seek to sway a jury if they think they can get away with it.

I previously wrote about the Federalist Society's and Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's takes on Henry V and The Merchant of Venice.