Occasionally I’ll blog or post about the Shakespeare Authorship Question, a topic I have been somewhat obsessed with for many years. Most of my friends don’t seem to be terribly interested in this topic, but I find the whole subject quite fascinating. The forces behind the Shakespeare myth reveal many intriguing facets of culture and psychology.

In researching the Shakespeare authorship question I have discovered many interesting, intelligent, and entertaining actors, theater people, and scholars, such as Ros Barber, Kier Cutler, and Mark Rylance.

One of those scholars was a lawyer and a prominent member of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Tom Regnier. I never got to meet Regnier, but I did exchange a few emails with him. I was hoping to someday see him speak, or even get a chance to meet him in person during one of the authorship conferences that he attended quite regularly.

Sadly, that will never happen. I found out only a few days ago that Regnier had passed on.

Regnier is one of the more than fifty thousand Americans who have died from Covid-19. As of right now, the death toll from this pandemic is just over fifty thousand in the United states, accounting for roughly one quarter of all Coronavirus deaths across the entire globe.

I heard about Tom Regnier’s passing from an email from the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. My reactions were quick: Shock, sadness, and then quickly to anger.

The Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was beyond sluggish. He ignored warnings from many top officials earlier this year and in late February was telling his supporters that the Coronavirus problem was a hoax designed by Democrats to slam him. Even to this day he is constantly and perpetually obsessed with himself, as Americans die everyday from a pandemic he still cannot bring himself to competently address. He has even stated out loud that he doesn’t want more widespread testing, because that would mean a rise in the number of cases, and that bothers him for only one reason: It would make him look bad.

Would Regnier still be alive right now if the Federal Government and many of the states had reacted more quickly, with greater urgency? Who can say. I do know there are tens of thousands of Americans who would be alive today if many states and especially the Trump administration had acted more quickly, and had done a lot more a lot earlier on.

Trump wants to assign blame, he wants people to praise him, he wants to keep the numbers low, all for his own benefit. Even I wondered if a real crisis would turn Trump around, that a true national emergency would make him see that he should snap to and really do his job. It is clear that nothing, not even a worldwide pandemic, will turn Trump around from being self obsessed. Nothing will make him actually care for anyone out there. His narcissism is simply too overwhelming.

I tried to write this out shortly after Regnier’s passing, but all that I could manage was vitriol. My feelings were still too raw. I had to wait a bit to be able to write this. My overriding emotion is anger. It always has been: When John Prine passed on from Covid-19, when the Fountains of Wayne singer Adam Schlesinger passed on from the disease, I have to wonder if they would still be around if this country had done better, if the Trump administration had done the right things.

There are many Americans who have passed on, and many more who will also leave this world, who did not have to die. They died because of the incompetence and greed of the Trump administration and his allies. They continue to ignore and denigrate the plight of the American people, even to the point of expressing complete disdain for ordinary citizens dying from the pandemic, as was emphasized by Texas’ lieutenant Dan Patrick when he said “There are more important things than living.”

I wish it had been different. I wish there was an actual national leader and an administration with competence, compassion, and clarity. If there were, we wouldn’t have lost so many, and we wouldn’t have to lose so many more.

I will try and rein in my anger and frustration for the moment. The best thing to do right now is remember those people who brought us joy and introspection. Too many people have never heard of Regnier. Here he is, doing what he does best.

If you want to know more about the Shakespeare authorship question and other things Shakespeare, check out my post Ten Best Books about Shakespeare:

http://needlepictures.com/tbd/2017/07/27/the-ten-best-books-about-shakespeare/