Et tu, Brute?
No three words in English literature sum up treachery and betrayal like the final words of Julius Caesar as he is being stabbed to death in Shakespeare's tragedy. Recognizing his friend and confidant Brutus among the assassins, the Roman emperor says in Latin "and you, Brutus?"
One of the many reasons Shakespeare's work still resonates to modern audiences is the individual struggle with loyalty, particularly with how we expect it freely from others but too often dispose of it at precisely the moment it is needed most.
The B.C. Liberal caucus, including Prince George MLAs Shirley Bond and Mike Morris, are angry after Abbotsford South MLA Darryl Plecas let his name stand for Speaker in the Legislative Assembly on Friday. They kicked him out of the Liberal caucus and on Saturday, his riding association revoked his party membership.
"O, where is loyalty?" asks King Henry VI. "If it be banished from the frosty head,
Where shall it find a harbor in the earth?"
The powerful betrayed always cry the loudest about the abandonment of loyalty, even as they respond to the betrayal with disloyalty of their own. Plecas delivered Abbotsford South to the B.C. Liberals in 2013 and again in 2017 but for the crime of letting his name stand to be Speaker, bolstering John Horgan's numerically fragile NDP government, he is banished as a traitor.
Plecas made a personal decision, he told The Province's Mike Smyth. While he's disappointed his Liberal colleagues refused to tolerate his conscientious decision for government stability and fair governance, the longtime criminology professor at the University of the Fraser Valley understands the "you're either with us or against us" mentality. In other words, his loyalty to his party and his caucus was neither unconditional nor blind.
Shakespeare, of course, had plenty to say about that kind of loyalty, too. Hamlet is an allegory about the destructive nature of blind loyalty. For the Prince of Denmark, remaining loyal to his dead father eventually causes him to commit horrible, unforgivable crimes against his family, friends and country, blind to the fact his acts are themselves a betrayal to everything and everyone he professes to love.
Yet what of that boundless loyalty so highly praised? What about Romeo and Juliet's loyalty to one another, even unto death? Loyalty to king and country and all that rot? If the emperor has no clothes, isn't the loyalty undeserved?
"The loyalty, well held to fools, does make Our faith mere folly," remarks Antony's friend Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, questioning his loyalty to his foolish friend. He sees how foolish it is to follow a fool and how faith in that fool is a mistake.
No doubt many Republicans in the United States are wrestling with the faith they placed in the fool they elected president and wondering when their loyalty will run out.
Loyalty dries up all the time in our daily lives. The smallest of grievances drives us away from restaurants and stores we've frequented for years. We switch support of political parties and candidates for the flimsiest of reasons or none at all ("it's time for a change"). We "unfriend" on Facebook.
The most pivotal decisions in our personal lives are often questions of loyalty. Staying with a spouse in a toxic relationship? Keeping abusive, entitled adult children in the will or raising their children when they may be taken away and placed in foster care? Sticking with a longtime employer? Staying true to a friend, despite the horrible crime they've committed?
For Plecas, his choice to let his name stand for Speaker was probably one of those moments, as it likely was for his friends and colleagues in his riding.
He may have done the right thing, both personally and for those who seek government stability in the wake of the May provincial election. History may judge him kindly. Even B.C. Liberals may one day thank him for his willingness to break from the herd. Or he may have done something he will live to regret, by betraying his friends and enabling whatever may come from Horgan's NDP.
Shakespeare's works are littered with characters who regret their disloyalty (Enobarbus) and ones who don't (Brutus). The Bard knew that the complications of loyalty and betrayal, not only the actions but the aftermath, were fertile ground for considering the human condition.
Regardless, the more comfortable majority the NDP-Green partnership now hold makes it increasingly unlikely that the government will fall because of some obscure procedural wrangling that would have allowed the Liberals to exploit a confidence vote with missing NDP and Green members from the Legislature, likely forcing an election.
Now the only loyalty left in question in Victoria may be that of Andrew Weaver and his two Green MLAs to propping up Horgan's government during those inevitable confidence votes. Horgan and his caucus should not be too quick to cheer Plecas's defection, as there may yet be another betrayal brought on by a matter of conscience in the not-too-distant future.
And like Plecas's choice, it will likely hit Horgan and his government when they least expect it.
-- Editor-in-Chief Neil Godbout
