Peeking through the curtain (to view your audience)

I asked, who is your audience? In the theatre you do your best, you do your part, whether the house is full or pitiful. In that spirit I give you an old, five centuries, and popular, i.e. anthologized, poem about a changing relationship. I mean to relate it to America's changing relationship to the world.

After WWII, came the Marshall Plan, basic foodstuffs to a war torn and wintry Europe. We asked the respective countries to match our dollars: the audacity of hope. It was a success.

Fast forward to Iraq, just after the decade of sanctions. We offered to take out the despot we put in, install democracy, make people get along. It was a failure. What do we do now?


They Flee from Me
Thomas Wyatt

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

It was no dream, I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindely am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.


I mean no one-to-one reading, no simple reduction. I simply detect disillusion and wonder what to do.