Why Dick Cheney should be made to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Things just continue to get worse for poor Tess, once her sanctimonious husband, Angel, takes off for Brazil leaving her with 30 pounds - possibly that's enough $, but Tess, in her self-effacing way, gives 20 lbs to her parents so that they can put a new thatch roof on the house - her parents think she's well off and have the nerve to dun her for money. Tess spirals into poverty and heads off to another remote part of the county in search of agricultural work. In aside paragraph, we see (surprise surprise) that Angel is not exactly thriving in Brazil - a bit different from the British countryside, that. Sp what to make of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"? Hard not to love Tess and wish you could step right into the book to help her (remembering Woody Allen's great story about Madame Bovary, "The Kugelmass Episode"). She seems doomed, in that Hardyesque bleak cruel way - but maybe not, maybe she will find something or someone and Angel will come back and it will be too late. Maybe it's his tragedy to live through. It ought to be. A terrific scene of Tess's despair, as she's heading off to the countryside and gets pursued by a lecherous man (the same one that Angel punched out in a pub - Thomas Hardy does suffer from that Victorian weakness for coincidence) and then she literally nestles in among some leaves, like an animal, hears horrible thumping sounds in the night, finds wounded partridges - there had been a hunting party and they'd left the wounded to suffer - and she tenderly breaks the necks of the wounded birds. Another blast at the blind cruelty not of nature but of man (take that, Dick Cheney, you horrible man).