The Crucible & Bush 18, June 2010
Posted by thegulfblog.com in American ME Relations.Tags: Arthur Miller, Bush, Open air theatre, Regent's park, rumsfeld, The Crucible, The pure in heart need no lawyers
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I went to a rather nice open-air rendition of Miller’s The Crucible earlier in the week. In the midst of Regent’s Park, with the trees swishing around, the sun gently setting and birds chirping away, it was a delightful setting. The play itself didn’t disappoint.
Written about the McCarthyist purges in America in the 50s, much of the play seemed to have distinct echoes in much of Bush’s rhetoric: the absolute notion of you’re either with us or against us; the hysteria of rooting out Al Qaeda sleeper cells based on scanty often absurd evidence and the tautological sense of logic that so often seemed to pervade. Rumsfeld’s notion that the fact that there is no proof that x is a terrorist just means that s/he has hidden it really well not that s/he might be innocent, leapt to mind time and again.
The best line in the play was, however, nothing to do with such shenanigans:
The pure in heart need no lawyers.
The Gulf blog 
One of my favourite plays of all time – I did it for GCSE and have loved it ever since. My favourite line was something about pulling down God and raising up a whore.