Blogomatopoeia

A PROGRESSIVE IMPERATIVE

2011-07-08T13:15:00.006-04:00

"Liberal" implies excessive, so "Progressive" has become the next best word, despite its historical baggage. Fine. I still don't know what Progressives mean when they call themselves that. I do know that "Conservatives" have no interest in conservation and religious conservatives have no interest in charity, so what the hell do any of these words really mean anymore? They seem to denote a team, not a game plan. I'm being so picky about the language today because "progressive income tax" is one of the most abused phrases in our enduring fight over taxes. And I'm willing to bet most people support or oppose it out of team loyalty only.

But who, in the name of Roosevelt, is leading the Progressive team?

Republicans cite Laffer and the ghost of Reagan to trumpet high-end tax cuts. Over the last decade you may have noticed that these tax cuts come as the cure-all to bad times … and good times, too! Just when we were starting to pay down the last big deficit in the 90s, we were told that tax cuts were morally necessary in such times of plenty. "Why should the government take in more than it needs?" Clearly the deficit wasn't a good enough reason for them then. Now it's their reason for everything. Now that we face a crisis from an even larger debt, we are told that tax cuts must, again, be the cure because they would solve the slump ... caused by the last tax cut.

Thus the "Tax Cut Imperative" fulfills the sublime goal of any ideology: it delivers its adherents from the contingency of history. Good times: cut taxes. Bad times: cut taxes. This is childish hypocrisy to any outside observer, but to the faithful ideologue, it is an a-historical constant too damn tempting to put down. And it makes sense on its own closed terms: so long as the government takes any of your money, you will always be tempted to fix your problems by taking some of that money back. This will always gain public favor so long as no one asks what caused the problem in the first place.

Where does this blinkered, one-lever philosophy get its strength? Simplicity is part of it, but how has it survived the last thirty years as a credible method to a loud plurality of Americans? It endures because it vents a deeper gripe: radical right-wingers don't just prefer tax cuts for the rich; they despise the larger system of progressive income tax altogether because it "punishes people for their success." Never mind conditions on the ground: so long as this system rules, perpetual tax cuts will remain the only persuasive policy to those who hate the larger system.

To date, self-proclaimed progressives have not made a compelling counter-argument beyond appeals to mere charity. Not to diminish the truth of the charity argument, but there is a stronger counter-argument that actually meets the very terms Republicans use to bash all income taxes. I don't know how to turn this counter-argument into campaign poetry, but Obama's got some clever guys working for him. I'm sure one of them took a lit class.

Here goes:

Like it or not, ours is a consumer-driven economy. When people stop buying shit, the economy breaks down. The poor are constant spenders by definition. When they stop spending, they dent the GDP more than a millionaire who's just lost a tax exemption for his corporate jet. Or who's just seen his top bracket go up one point. Why? Because capital behaves differently when it's pooled in large accounts than when it's being traded for a packet of Ramen. It has nothing to do with the virtue of the bearer; it has to do with the basic way all capital behaves ... in capitalism. I say let's keep our capitalism but fess up to what that word really means.

At a certain level of debt and poverty, interest causes a runaway black hole that keeps the taxpayer (dying star of this story) in a state of perpetual consumption. Similarly, at a certain level of wealth, interest compounds and accretes more wealth simply by being present in large enough magnitudes. Both rich and poor are constant consumers, but only the poor have to keep working to remain so. That is the fundamental class division in America and these classes need not be at war to enrich themselves and keep their essential quality.

For these reasons, progressive income tax places higher rates on cumulatively higher dollar amounts. Occasionally, Obama will point out that this higher rate only applies to the income above the actual bracket, not the whole income of the person who happens to make so much. If you make a million dollars, you’ve crossed the 35% tax bracket, but that doesn’t mean you're paying $350,000 of that million to the government. At the very most, you're paying $328,000 – and that’s before deductions, exemptions and loopholes lower it further.

In any case, the curve of these progressive brackets happens to be steeper at the lower end and gentle at the higher. See the chart above. The wealthy face no sudden, prohibitive rate increase as they get wealthier. But the poor and middle classes see their tax rates change much more dramatically -- just for going from "really poor" to "kind of less poor." If you want to go from making $30,000 to $50,000 one day, your rate jumps by two thirds -- from 15% to 25% -- along the way. But if you go from making $300,000 to $500,000, your rate only jumps by one-twentieth – from 33% to 35%.

So which class really lacks incentive to move up the ladder? The upward mobility of the already-rich is not subject to much friction from the IRS in this system. So what's the catchy rhetorical answer to "punishing the wealthy for their success" and "class warfare"? Calling it "progressive" fools no one and alienates others who may dislike progressivism for legitimate reasons.

A radically progressive income tax system -- all subsidies and exemptions being equal -- would a) have an accurate poverty line and b) not tax anything beneath it while c) making a steeper curve at the top end, not the lower. It would then draw two more bracket lines: one at, say, $250k and one at $1million. From zero to poverty, the rate is zero. The other three brackets would have rates that ascend more sharply in magnitude. Yes, I'm pulling those lines and rates out of my ass, but at least they line up with recognizable class barriers. Or they could ... if we took an honest look at what it means to be poor, wealthy, and everything in between.

But don't the rich and super-rich bless us all with their magnificent spending -- a glut to which we all aspire? Shouldn’t they be empowered to spend more for those reasons? They could so bless us and inspire, but they haven't. Right now, upwards of $2 trillion sits dormant in reserves that would ordinarily be lent, spent, or seeded in new enterprises. Instead, the moneyed classes have devoted their capital to the increasingly abstract and catastrophically volatile financial services sector. This money isn't being used in any real sense; it certainly isn't creating jobs. It's just being recycled among the wealthy where it mutates into the same exotic investment products that caused the whole system to collapse in 2008.

As Milton Friedman emphasized, tax cuts can stimulate because they can be implemented swiftly. But if the deficit is an emergency now, then new revenue must be obtained swiftly. This is why revenue increases need to be a part of any emergency deficit reduction package. Congressional Republicans have used the routine debt ceiling vote to heighten that emergency, but this tactic works against them because it's quicker to raise revenue than dismantle needed programs.

If that emergency must be squared with a sluggish economy, then new revenue must be obtained not just swiftly, but from sources that are least likely to feel the impact. By virtue of being dormant, that $2 trillion cited above would not feel the impact. It's just continuing to mutate like a tumor: if we add more to this mass with greater high-end tax cuts, we will threaten the health of the entire system. Again. This is not about punishing the successful; it's about categorical differences in the way money works in different discrete sums. Even in discrete sums, capital is dynamic and requires dynamic tax policy that reflects this.

We all know tax policy shapes behavior as well as balance sheets. Problem is, we can't ask the middle and lower classes to behave any better than they are right now. For a ghastly, grueling decade, they have continued to punch in more hours and productivity only to see wages stagnate, contract, disappear or emaciate in the form of lost benefits. Cutting Pell grants and clean water protection will not help anyone now, even if you believe the government has no business educating its citizens and protecting its water supply. However, such cuts are guaranteed to increase unemployment, and that likewise matters little if you think the government should not employ anyone but rich people. Why bother when the whole system can be reduced to two levers marked TAX and SPEND?

Of course, it matters still less if your real goal is to sabotage the recovery for future political gain.

At this point, I can expect my fellow progressives and liberals to sneer: "Well that's always been the difference between us and them. They see two binary levers and we are smart enough to see the larger matrix of forces at work, so naturally we should be trusted to run the government." Yeah, that'll learn 'em.

The tragedy of today's Republicans is that they've lost all sense of civic good. Liberals could counter with patriotism of their own, but right now they face a tragedy, too. If Republicans lack a sense of civic good, then Democrats lack a sense of civic leadership. Until our professor-in-chief (and I mean that cum laude) succeeds in teaching us something ... until our community-organizer-in-chief (ditto) actually organizes his national community, he will continue to let crucial battles fall to the worst impulses of a desperate, angry Movement. And he will not win re-election. He may yet luck out on the economy, but both sides now rightly scorn his lack of vision.

I have living relatives who endured far worse with nothing but a fireside chat to keep them going. For a decade now -- my whole adult life outside school -- we have been most generous to the wealthy among us. It’s hardly a slander to say to them now: you alone have the resources to cure this entirely-curable crisis. Nor is it too much to ask "the greatest orator of our generation" to passionately articulate the virtue of a progressive system. Don't just tell me why the right-wing is wrong in this instance -- I have evidence enough of that -- but why the progressive approach is a noble imperative and a worthy challenge, a good thing in itself.

More than wealth, the promise of mobility is what really animates the American Dream. President Obama embodies that promise even better than he embodies racial harmony. So make with the poetry, brother.

The Last Vanity

2011-04-20T05:18:00.005-04:00

Hips, breasts, butt, tummy, legs.

When you see a naked woman on stage, you take in a fantastically rich visual field.

When a man is naked onstage ... there's only one new piece of information.

Maybe that "rich visual field" is circumscribed by the cultural geography of censorship, but the difference between the sexes stands in any case. It stands like a proud, tall ... um.

Eyes up here, please.

Women deal with this all the time. Men ... only when they're trying to carry on a love scene in a play in front of 350 people, 8 nights a week, until May 9 -- get your tickets here!

Yes, I'm naked on stage for the third time in three years. Wish that meant I could say "by popular demand" but all three shows were in different corners of the country and all three shows were ... different.

In Sometimes a Great Notion, my character had to make a brief dash for his boxers after screwing his brother's wife. Three seconds, tops, in profile and in haste. Simple.

In Angels in America, I had to stand naked for an entire, decidedly un-sexy, scene while the nurse examines Prior's glands, lesions, and the two characters discuss the horrific side-effects of AIDS. Alienation effect, anyone? So more revealing because such a long scene, but I actually felt costumed by the fake lesions dappled on my body. Yes, all is vanity:

And now, in Itamar Moses's Completeness, my character strips following the sudden nudity of his date, the sexy, smart and beautiful Molly. The two characters stand in the blue light of night (or the blue light of some meta-god's petri dish experiment?) and then get into bed.

Someone once remarked that, like it or not, nudity on stage is a meta-theatrical moment because you suddenly realize you're looking at the actor and not the character. There's an implicit prudery to that truth, but only because sex is an unavoidably explicit action. As one essayist put it, "It is the most private thing we do and the most explicit thing we do." To the degree that we become the masks and costumes we've crafted to hide something else, nudity on stage has the power to perturb an audience.

Um, and the actor. Eyes up here, please. Oh wait. As I've already written, I'm not much for eye contact either, so ... I am literally and figuratively and symbolically exposed, yes?

I suppose -- all things being equal (ahem) -- male nudity isn't a meta-theatrical perturbation. Except in one crucial respect: it doesn't take a master Method actor to achieve the appropriate response to hot naked girl. Funny language, that: You can't "achieve" an erection because ... dude, it's not an achievement. Pretty straightforward phenomenon every other day of the week. So (all puns intended) why is it so hard for a paying audience?

This is the real reason you're looking at the actor, not the character. It's like seeing the bated sword in a choreographed stage fight. [INSERT SWORD = PHALLUS PUN HERE] One pretends past the danger to avoid killing the actor playing Claudius. And no one will enjoy a stage fight if they sincerely believe the actor is in danger (see under Taymor, Julie). Similarly, a naked dude on stage is in danger ... perhaps more so if he "surrenders to the moment" and sports a boner a propos to the scene.

What to do? Well, over-intellectualization is a kind of costume, so let's mend together, shall we?

Sex and desire didn't exist before the Fall. That only came when we started covering up. We were made to feel shame for stealing godly knowledge, but also for usurping godly powers of procreation and pleasure. Violate this compact, take off the fig leaf, do it in front of hundreds of fellow Eden exiles, and see what that does for your sense of sexual desire. Yes that's just a fancy way of saying "shrinkage happens" ... but we have language for the same reason we have clothing: to lie with style. As Dave Attel once put it, "premature ejaculation" is just a fancy way of saying "uuhh."

Another difference between naked lady and naked dude: Puritans and libertines both rail against the objectification of women, but both also take it for granted that men are routinely objectified. Perhaps further, that they should be objectified. Hell, we're eager to be objectified, to have the measure of our worth made so clear. [INSERT THESIS RE: OVER-COMPENSATION THROUGH MONEY, FAME, POWER, VOCABULARY HERE] When another Maureen Dowd asks "Are Men Necessary?" she thinks she's presenting a provocative trap for misogynists and father-worshipers everywhere. But for anyone who's had sex since age 24, this question prompts a sad laugh: of course we're not necessary. You're just now figuring that out? And necessary for what? More importantly: To what use might you put us? When we want to diminish a dude, we call him a "tool." So, I welcome the idea that we might not be so useful after all.

From it's giddy, heady, playful heart, Completeness asks a ton of heartbreaking questions about how one uses another person -- intellectually, emotionally, sexually -- to fix a prior or future problem. My character Elliot wants to be useful. He wants it so badly that he spends every conscious minute trying to craft a Master Skeleton Key to Everything [INSERT KEY = PHALLUS PUN HERE]. Meantime Molly uses one man ... to get over the last man ... to get over the man before that. Elliot the computer scientist must learn that his cybernetic skeleton key won't tell him who the right woman is. And Molly the experimental biologist must embrace the challenge of her greatest hypothesis:

What if there's a place in you that's only really touched when you get hurt? And
nothing else can touch you in that place. But certain things pretend they can.
So your choices are to believe until you can't
anymore and really hurt someone,
and I've really really hurt some people, or
to keep believing, to make yourself
believe, and then get hurt
yourself, again, in that same place?

I'm gonna wager our author Itamar already knows this, but how cool that the only italicized words in that passage are PRETEND and MAKE (BELIEVE)?

'Cause it's scary to be naked before the wrong person, never mind 350 of them, no matter how willing we both may be to pretend and make ourselves believe otherwise. So, dear audience, I love you and probably need you more than I know. I mean, I bare all, but you must bear it. I salute you. But forgive me if I don't ... um ... "salute" you during my big love scene. My need to hide in plain sight is one of the few forces stronger than my vanity. In a tragedy, those two forces would be equally matched -- they are opposite sides of the same Narcissus pool, after all. But for a romantic comedy like Completeness ... well ... anyone got any good fluffing tips out there?

It's funny because it's penis.

DARK MATTERS or THE PRIORITY OF THE SENSES

2011-03-18T04:25:00.011-04:00

I’m blind in my left eye. Not completely. I know if you’re wearing a collared shirt, for example, but I don’t know paisley from polka dots when I cover my nearsighted right. The rest is a cubist hodgepodge that I’ve never been able to describe, even with the normalizing reference of the functional other. Things don’t distort like a trippy mirror -- it’s not some greasy finger swipe on a Retina View iPhone. It’s more like: the things I see I also feel as real unto themselves … so they seem robbed from within, if that makes any sense at all.

And it’s not like having an eye patch -- though that household experiment will quickly show you how hilariously bad my depth perception is! Sit shotgun with me as I drive and you’ll sprout a phantom brake pedal pretty quick. And since I can only experience depth through motion, I come across as more manic in person than I am at heart. Perhaps it goes without saying, but between the cosmetic liabilities of a lazy eye and the physical liabilities of zero depth perception, I have an acute fear of … superficiality. Maybe the mania real after all.

I imagine stereoscopic vision to be a kind of tactile, not visual, gift. One uses two eyes to wrap around the face in front of you .. and the “image” you experience is not just a broader panorama, but a composite holographic reality forged in a cortex at the back of your head. (As if reading Zizek weren’t already a giddy conceptual roller-coaster, I have to say: his Parallax View takes on a boneheadedly literal significance for me. Maybe I should try reading it in Braille?) Someone on Radiolab once described sound as “touch from a distance.” Well, vision presumes distance so … stereoscopic vision must be the highest kind of touch from the greatest possible distance, yes?

It’s been this way since birth. I have no memory of its loss, at least, so I’ve had little to mourn, just a lot to learn. If I mourn anything, it’s this fanciful construction of “touch from a distance.” Nietzsche would pat me on the back in that gentle, sympathetic manner for which he was so famous and say:

Yes! But your good eye is therefore stronger! It has tyrannized over the weaker
eye and you are better for your suffering!

Lovely thought, Fred, but I have no way of knowing because once you get beyond the senses, you have to wonder how those senses shaped everything else within. In other words: because mysight is divorced from the tactile, does that mean I’m fundamentally divorced from the things I see? Or, perhaps worse, does it mean that I’m hopelessly flooded with the visual because I must experience it as an unalloyed sensation? Either option makes me feel like a walking heart-attack. And when it comes to exploding hearts, one shouldn’t seek Nietzsche as a physician.

Whenever I go to a new eye doctor and tell him “yeah, a pre-natal virus damaged my retina while I was in the womb” they always reply with this curious “uh-huh” … as if to say “that’s one explanation, sure.” I’m open to other explanations, I suppose, because I happen to need my eyes -- both of them -- for my job. I’m not an airline pilot; I’m an actor. So the only lives at stake are psychic lives, not corporeal ones. As I said, it’s troublesome for cosmetic reasons, but mostly it’s troublesome because I long to connect with my dear scene partner, who must navigate my swinging “window to the soul” as he or she navigates … you know … the actual scene we’re working on.

This isn’t an issue when I’m in my element. I’ve carved out a specialty for monsters and sufferers over the years, so I’ve learned to express more through evasion, the tangled language of shadows. I’m nearly impossible to film, so the distance and lyric suspension of live theatre gives me a place to work without too much distraction (for the audience, at least). But what happens when I have to stand tall and simply say I love you?

Thankfully, no one says anything simply in Itamar Moses’s romantic comedy Completeness. Certainly no one says “I love you.” I may be wrong, but I don’t think the word “love” comes up at all. This is all to Itamar’s credit as a writer, so for lack of a more complete word … the connection, the hunger, the (actor lexicon alert!) motivation to simply look and touch and touch-by-looking …

(ELLIOT touches her face. Her arms. Just touching her. He does this for a few moments. Then:)

MOLLY: What are you doing?

ELLIOT: I don’t know. I just love this moment when you’re suddenly allowed to start … touching someone? Like, you’ve wanted to, but of course you can’t just walk up to someone and touch them, but then the membrane is broken, and you can? Like, I’ve been thinking about touching you? More or less since the first time I saw you?

MOLLY: Sure. I mean, I’d … seen you too.

ELLIOT: Well, right, but for all I knew that was imaginary?

So after rehearsals I run away and try to build a physic couture that will say it for me …

Zoom out. Most of the universe is blind. Not merely dark or dark matter, but actively willfully blind.

Most of the universe has no need for sight. What light there is diffuses and becomes more blind as time and space goes on. The more we see from Earth, the more we see no need of sight. The farther and further we peer, the more we see how peerless our vantage is. Most of the universe is blind. Not simply blind, but blind to an overwhelming magnitude, such that vision itself becomes a trifle. Unless you don’t look to far.

Meantime, we are creatures of sight. Most of our cognitive input comes from sight. What do they say? It’s 70% how you look … 20% how you sound … and 10% semantics. So if, as Lacan says, the subconscious is structured like a language, then what top-heavy mountain of light must we move to say anything like I love you and mean it? How does what I’ve seen without ever touching shape the way I touch? Vision is another kind of desire -- not a vehicle for desire, but desire itself. It must issue from some primordial need we had, one that predated sight because it caused it.

And vision is only possible or necessary at the origin, not the extremity. One must sit close to the young, burning source of it all. The angry mash of mass that births a sun. To propagate anyward is to leave your eyes behind. On a long enough timeline, vision is not the pinnacle of evolution; it’s only the beginning. And on a big enough scale … dark matter does most of the heavy lifting.

I have to wonder, then: can dark matter do the heavy lifting here in sunny SoCal?

O.C. can you say?

2011-03-17T03:47:00.004-04:00

In the spring of 2008, I was hoisted from an 18-month hiatus from theatre to do Aaron Posner’s production of Sometimes A Great Notion at Portland Center Stage. This project was very dear to me for many reasons. Imagine that tingling, numb-leg feeling x1000 -- when your body gets to do what it was built to do after an interminable car ride to nowhere. Then imagine that your first steps after 1.5 years of paralysis are to the grand, gorgeous Pacific Northwest where you get to shape a story about lumberjacks for an audience of the same. It was a countryside adventure, a reprieve from fruitless whoring in NYC, and an artistic re-awakening all in one.

This blog experienced a re-awakening, too -- one sustained by subsequent adventures at my home theatre, Rorschach in DC, and the 2008 election, about which there was plenty to blog. I went to Philly after that, then back and forth between DC and NYC for a couple years, like some Q-list celebrity spokesman for the Bolt Bus. Over the years, the blog became a weird dumping ground for thoughts, essays and arguments that could not fit into Facebook or Twitter (NOTE TO READERS FROM THE FAR FUTURE: Facebook and Twitter were the appliance-grade applications for our young century). As such, this blog has become a frustrating enterprise for any readers hoping for a steady output of … me, I guess.

I’ve just started rehearsals for Completeness at South Coast Rep in crisp Costa Mesa, CA and I find myself with the time and, I think, the material to make this blog the travel journal it used to be. Only … this is not a re-awakening like the 2008 adventure to Oregon. And so far, it’s not a countryside adventure because I’m stuck, detached from my cast mates who all live in L.A.. I’ve never spent more than 48 consecutive hours in L.A., so I had to learn that “L.A.” is as distinct and far from “Orange County” as, say, “White Plains” is from “New York City.” Bummer, dude.

After rehearsals I traipse back through a field of Big Box stores to the gated squad of condos where I’m being housed. I have plenty of books and writing projects and no other distractions apart from the mouthful of lines I must learn. The digital cable TV has no channel guide and everything is on Pacific Time besides, so I can’t avoid work through channel surfing even if I want to. And since the ocean is … somewhere over there, inaccessible on foot … I can’t avoid work through real surfing, either.

My cast mates are beautiful, whip-smart and solid.

The script channels everything I’ve always dug about its author.

And my part has this challenging balance of elements I know and love (chatty left-brain verbosity) and elements I don’t often get to explore (straight-up, non-sociopath love story).

Oh, and for the third time in as many years, I get to be naked on stage, so … insert your own “head-shot” joke here.

So why am I so out of sorts?

I suppose, if I squint hard enough, my life here has a kind of Spartan dignity, but who am I kidding: what’s “Spartan” about the Left Coast? Despite my pasty Lutheran complexion, I’m a total sucker for the sun, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Traveling for work has massive interpersonal liabilities -- to put it coldly -- but the travel itself is a gift because it clears the decks, “narrows the mind” (in a good way, thank you very much), and gives me a rare chance to look back on my routine with some dispassion. So again: why am I putzing around my apartment and writing this shit?

Maybe it’s this: The Oregon project happened to be a play about Oregon. The Philly play was based on the novel My Name is Asher Lev and Chaim Potok happened to be a Philly resident. columbinus in Alaska was simply awesome because it was … in frickin’ Alaska, yo. And in each of the above, I was traveling and living with a band of fellow actors. When I work in DC, I’m usually working with a group of dear friends. Here I feel like the imported replacement part, slightly mangled from airlift with too few peanuts (styrofoam and salted).

It’s only the close of the second day and while I can’t plead jet-lag anymore, I can say that, like jet-lag, I’m getting ahead of myself … but that’s what happens when you fly west to outrun the sun, isn’t it?

Hamlet on the Couch

2011-03-11T13:13:00.020-05:00

PROVOCATION #1: I cracked open my journal while heading to work on the A-train. Been thinking about repetition in Hamlet ever since I got to do a nifty presentation on the subject at my alma mater last fall. Subsequent investigation led me to Nietzsche’s “eternal return” and to Deleuze’s Repetition and Difference, which I have yet to grasp completely. Anyway, when I journal about these things I don’t understand, I often make drawings:

And for the first time since I’ve lived here, a woman next to me asked what I was working on.

Now … I used to be a much more pretentious misanthrope, if you can believe it, so this woman’s breach of subway decorum struck me sideways. As any pretentious misanthrope can tell you, journaling in semi-public areas is a great way to keep your disgust with humanity raging, but it’s also a performance of sorts for that same semi-public. I’ll wager every p.m. secretly wants some hot chick to come up and say:

Wow, you’re deconstructing the fuck out of that text.

I actually met a college girlfriend this way, but ever since then I’ve preferred to journal in private. So when this perfectly nice non-dating prospect asked me what I was working on, I didn’t have a sexy, compact reply. I said something vaguely crazy like:

Oh, ah … You know how things tend to … I’m really fascinated with … repetition?
Like, as an epistemological phenomenon? Or something? Let me show you this
drawing …

I started to worry that my winter beard, my dark coat, my crackpot drawings and the pothed thesis statement above would frighten her away. But it turns out the woman is a psychologist! She mentioned Freud’s repetition complex and I mentioned repetition-in-Hamlet and how I believed Freud misdiagnosed Hamlet as just Oedipus-by-another-name. In a follow-up e-mail she remarked that, yes, Hamlet did have an Oedipal conflict because he was “jealous of his uncle,” the man who killed his father and married his mom.

Jealous of his uncle. Hmm.

PROVOCATION #2: Last night, I caught up with an old friend of mine over the phone. She’s a great friend because she has absolutely no patience for the ephemeral, la la la, navel-gazing nonsense common to pretentious misanthropes. Her advice for Hamlet-lovers and Hamlet himself would be: “Get the fuck over it.” Because Hamlet has an opinion on everything, he came up in our conversation somehow. We hung up and she went to a coffee shop where some local poet happened to be holding court on … Hamlet! Apparently, his take on the great Dane was similar; he said something to the effect that “Hamlet didn’t realize he was blowing things out of proportion.”

Jealous of his uncle?
Blowing things out of proportion?

Fie on that noise.

If these aren’t opinions you share, they’re definitely ones you’ve heard. The Freudian diagnosis amounts to calling Hamlet a spoiled two-year old – a loquacious man-child who somehow made it to age thirty without thinking twice about the stability of his parents’ marriage. And the coffeehouse poet opinion amounts to calling Hamlet a pussy. Both are wrong, but they’re wrong in a distressing way: they fail to account for the action of the story as it unfolds. Which means they are opinions one can have without ever experiencing the play.

The Freudian diagnosis folds up this 4,000-line 5-act story into a triptych:

Boy want mommy
Man gets mommy instead
Boy hates man

And the “get over it” camp has partisans within the play itself. As the villain Claudius says to Hamlet at the beginning:

'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool'd: (I, ii)

Or, as the long-winded Polonius says during an actor's heartbreaking monologue:

"This is too long." (II, ii)

Which, again, leads me to believe these are opinions and diagnoses most appealing to people who’ve never contended with the text or listened to an entire performance.

I call it “distressing” because we seem to have no shortages of performances. It’s been one of the most-produced plays for about four hundred years now. A major one comes through DC every couple years and no season in NYC is complete without at least three. So the problem probably isn’t access so much as how we theatre people -- my fellow pretentious misanthropes -- are producing the play.

That’s what I want to talk about here. But the best argument will be a gentle walk through the story. So strap in or check out now, folks …

Papa Hamlet dies during a nap outdoors one June afternoon. By July, his widow Gertrude has married his brother Claudius. In his first state-of-the-union speech, King Claudius addresses the awkwardness of this quick-change:

Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
The imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,--
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,--
Taken to wife: nor have we herein barr'd
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along. For all, our thanks. (I, ii)

Diplomatic way of putting it.

But there’s a kid involved. For him, “mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage” is not a calming metaphor or peaceful, zen-like balance of contradictions – it is a nightmarish perversion. Mom seems so happy to have his father dead. The world seems like “an unweeded garden” but one that still “grows to seed.” The kid, Prince Hamlet, is paralyzed by two traumas: the sudden death of his father and the sudden remarriage of his mother. The first is sad enough any day of the week, but Mom’s swift remarriage looks so fucking eager. It looks like Mom wanted Claudius before she had a chance to marry him. Either that, or she's just indifferent and will take the next man who comes along. Which is worse? These are the only options. The deeper Hamlet loved his parents before these traumas, the more he suffers after them.

The story could stop here so Hamlet could begin the long process of “getting over it,” but his parents, living and dead, keep appealing to his love for them as they make huge demands of him. Remember, the Freudian interpretation requires, as a necessary condition, that Hamlet should be obeying his father’s revenge request from the beginning. After all, he can only be accused of pathological procrastination if he has something he should be doing. But at this point, we haven’t heard from the dead dad, we don’t know about his murder or his demand for revenge.

What to do? Hamlet grasps for a metaphor of his own to capture and thereby arrest his mother’s lust. Like Carrie Bradshaw, she wore these trendy shoes to the funeral and they were still in style when she got married in the next episode? No, that‘s lame. Or: Mom’s eyes were still red with graveside tears when she stepped over the grave and onto a marriage altar? No. No image is adequate because it’s the action that haunts him. The wedding feast was made with leftovers from the wake, for fuck’s sake! And Hamlet’s the only one who finds this disgusting? Everyone keeps telling him to “get over it.” Nothing to be done.

Hamlet’s school friend Horatio appears with a couple sentinels and tells Hamlet that the Ghost of his departed father was seen at the gates, scaring the shit out of the guards. That night, Hamlet goes to see for himself and the Ghost appears again. Hamlet and the Ghost go off to another corner of the wilderness where the Ghost tells Hamlet that his father was killed by the man who now wears his crown, his brother Claudius. Hamlet had a feeling this was the case, but it was a fantasy he never admitted out loud at the time. Now the fantasy has come true: wrongful death. The Ghost tells him to focus on this wrongful death and revenge it.

But … just before the Ghost vanishes, it gives Hamlet second commandment: do not contrive against mom. “Leave her to heaven / and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge / to prick and sting her.” (I, v)

Kill Claudius and leave mom alone. In other words: get over her.

A double-trauma followed by a double-bind. After dad’s death and mom’s remarriage, mom and step-dad say “get over your dead dad!” Then, dead dad tells Hamlet to “get over your mom” and kill Claudius instead. Get over it. An impossible horror followed by an impossible mission.

Paralysis turns into mania: how can Hamlet kill Claudius without hurting his mother, the woman who so clearly desires Claudius? How can Hamlet obey his dead father without simultaneously disobeying him? Dad seems to think Mom was just stolen like a piece of furniture, which says a lot about his feelings for her. But Hamlet knows otherwise. Indeed, mom’s active lust for Claudius was the subject of his first soliloquy and the source of his melancholy. How will killing Claudius fix or change that melancholy? Sure it would be fun and satisfying to kill Claudius, but it’s not enough. And once it’s done … he won’t get to do it again. If only there was a kind of revenge that was better than death …

Hamlet tells his friends that he’s going to pretend to be insane. He doesn’t tell them why because he doesn’t yet know; but he needs their backstage secrecy since they’re the only other witnesses to the Ghost.

Happily (yes, happily), this act of insanity also frees him to tell the absolute truth to his enemies. If the jackass Polonius believes Hamlet’s crazy, then Hamlet can call him a fishmonger to his face and get away with it. Turns out telling the truth is the quickest way to get people to think you’re crazy, so the performance may not be so hard to muster. (How we cringe at actors – like me! – who overplayed the madness of Act II!).

While Hamlet refines his act of madness by telling sane truths, his meets some real actors. They perform a moment from a play he liked: a man stands frozen over his enemy and consequently perishes because he failed to strike first. Hamlet sees himself in this position. So he dismisses everyone and talks to himself. He marvels that an actor can feel so much and speak so passionately for someone they’ve never met, while he, a man beset on all sides by tears and blood, can say nothing. He imagines that the same actor would give a bigger, grander, more tearful performance of Hamlet’s story than he himself is actually giving (another warning to hams like me).

But then Hamlet overhears himself in the echo of his loud self-reproach. He realizes he can put his mom and stepdad through the same fit of self-laceration … by having their secret story performed before them in public. He begins repurposing an old revenge story to this end. He re-names it The Mousetrap.

Cats don’t just kill mice, they torture them. Torture. That’s the only action adequate to the revenge Hamlet seeks. It wouldn’t be enough for Hamlet to kill Claudius or Gertrude, he must expose them both, humiliate them, put them at odds with themselves. No death, no physical pain can compete with the agony of a soul consuming itself, turned inside-out. More than the wrongful death of his father, this is what Hamlet suffers and wants Gertrude and Claudius to suffer in return.

The Mousetrap works. Or, rather, it works to Hamlet’s satisfaction. Mom’s re-marriage and Claudius’s murder of dad are re-staged with disturbing accuracy … right down to the type of murder weapon. When Claudius makes a fearful retreat from the playhouse, Hamlet sees a flesh-and-blood confirmation of his ghost-dad’s testimony. Even better, he has succeeded in torturing Claudius into a spasm of conscience. Hamlet will never hear it, but Claudius immediately rushes to prayer, where he confesses what he’s done. Now that Claudius has been tortured and made to suffer guilt, Hamlet has confirmation and satisfaction enough to finish him off and confront his mother, too.

It’s not easy to kill a king. They usually have well-armed dudes hanging about and they’re not subject to formal legal action, you know. Even if Hamlet could take Claudius to court, he would have no proof, none, except the testimony of a ghost (inadmissible, hearsay) and then that one time he did this guilty look thing at this play that was going on. It’s not enough for any earthly court room, but it’s enough for Hamlet. At this point, we’re a little ahead of Hamlet, so it’s more than enough justification for the audience. And whaddyaknow, here’s the guilty man alone, unguarded, at prayer! Perfect opportunity!

Except …

Dad was killed before he had a chance to make the reckoning Claudius is now trying to make. Dad’s ghost is stuck in some wretched purgation for god-knows-how-long. If Claudius repents and goes to heaven, he will be better off. Hamlet wants the torture to continue in perpetuity. This situation has already exceeded any earthly legal system and now it exceeds the same for supernatural justice, too. Claudius deserves to die, but he should die when he’s in the middle of some act of villainy so “that his soul may be as damn’d and black / as hell whereto it goes.” (III, iii)

Mom summons Hamlet so she can school him on his playhouse pranks. Hamlet turns her accusations back on her:

HAMLET: Now mother what’s the matter?
GERTRUDE: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
HAMLET: Mother, you have my father much offended.
GERTRUDE: Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
HAMLET: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
GERTRUDE: Why, how now Hamlet!
HAMLET: What’s the matter now?
GERTRUDE: Have you forgot me?
HAMLET: No, by the rood, not so.
You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife.
And -- would it were not so! -- you are my mother.

Finally, the disgust Hamlet felt from the beginning can come out here. Hamlet owes nothing to Gertrude except the truth. (He was watching her reaction to The Mousetrap, too.)

His violent accusations frighten her. She shrieks for help. Another voice shouts from behind the curtain:

“What ho! Help! Help! Help!”

Who’s there?

Here’s his second chance to kill. It must be Claudius, helpless and blind, caught in an act of villainy – or, at least, not an act of redemption. Right here, with mom watching, to boot! Bonus! Hamlet can fulfill his dad’s request while fulfilling the moral terms he just offered in the previous scene. All this and he doesn’t have to face the man he’s killing. Who could resist?

Hamlet stabs the curtain and kills the unseen man.

He discovers it was his ex-girlfriend’s father, Polonius.

Hamlet “gets over it” rather quickly – the meddling eavesdropper just got a fitting death – and he resumes his verbal assault on mom, insulting Claudius all the way.

O Hamlet, speak no more:
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.

And then ... as if there weren’t too many dramatic reversals in this one act ... the motherfucking Ghost reappears.

For the first time, the whole family is in the same room again.

Mom, dad, son.

I cannot describe what follows with the same breezy abbreviation above. This is the keystone scene of the play. Everything leads up to and tumbles out from scene.

Enter Ghost

HAMLET
Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings,
You heavenly guards! What would your gracious figure?

QUEEN GERTRUDE
Alas, he's mad!

HAMLET
Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by
The important acting of your dread command? O, say!

Ghost
Do not forget: this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But, look, amazement on thy mother sits:
O, step between her and her fighting soul:
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works:
Speak to her, Hamlet.

HAMLET
How is it with you, lady?

QUEEN GERTRUDE
Alas, how is't with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy
And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?

…

Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look?

HAMLET
On him, on him! Look you, how pale he glares!
His form and cause conjoin'd, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable. Do not look upon me;
Lest with this piteous action you convert
My stern effects: then what I have to do
Will want true colour; tears perchance for blood.

QUEEN GERTRUDE
To whom do you speak this?

HAMLET
Do you see nothing there?

QUEEN GERTRUDE
Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.

HAMLET
Nor did you nothing hear?

QUEEN GERTRUDE
No, nothing but ourselves.

HAMLET
Why, look you there! look, how it steals away!
My father, in his habit as he lived!
Look, where he goes, even now, out at the portal!

Exit Ghost

QUEEN GERTRUDE
This the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.

HAMLET
Ecstasy!
My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time,
And makes as healthful music: it is not madness
That I have utter'd: bring me to the test,
And I the matter will re-word; which madness
Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that mattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass, but my madness speaks:
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven;
Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;
And do not spread the compost on the weeds,
To make them ranker. Forgive me this my virtue;
For in the fatness of these pursy times
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg,
Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good.

QUEEN GERTRUDE
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.

HAMLET
O, throw away the worser part of it,
And live the purer with the other half.
Good night: but go not to mine uncle's bed;
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either [ ] the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency. Once more, good night:
And when you are desirous to be bless'd,
I'll blessing beg of you. For this same lord,
Pointing to POLONIUS
I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So, again, good night.
I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.
One word more, good lady.

QUEEN GERTRUDE
What shall I do?

HAMLET
Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;
Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers,
Make you to ravel all this matter out,
That I essentially am not in madness,
But mad in craft. 'Twere good you let him know;
For who, that's but a queen, fair, sober, wise,
Would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib,
Such dear concernings hide? who would do so?
No, in despite of sense and secrecy,
Unpeg the basket on the house's top.
Let the birds fly, and, like the famous ape,
To try conclusions, in the basket creep,
And break your own neck down.

QUEEN GERTRUDE
Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me.

One of the reasons I find repetition so fascinating w/r/t Hamlet: this simple pattern-seeking exercise starts to integrate large portions of a long, sprawling story. In the scene above, Hamlet keeps repeating “Good night.” This should be an exit line, right? It’s an ending that fails to end. Instead, the ending line only breaks the scene open again. Between iterations of “good night,” Hamlet

1) asks his mother to repent (good night), then

2) ask her to not sleep with Claudius and even gives her some abstinence education! (good night), and finally

3) tell her that she should sleep with Claudius, but when he’s all hot and heavy, she should tell him that Hamlet is not mad, but mad in craft.

She says she will not.

Hamlet drags off and hides the corpse of Polonius.

Then he is ejected from the kingdom, possibly forever.

All repetition ceases.

At this point in the story (III, iv), Hamlet’s familial, inner-conflict has ended. I’ve completely left out the Fortinbras and Ophelia storylines -- the first because it’s an easily detachable one (and a repetition of the foreground plotline!) and the second because Ophelia deserves a huge blog post of her own. I’ve come to wonder why productions often cut Fortinbras, but still leave in the Ophelia storyline. Most productions treat her as an annoying distraction anyway, so why not be done with it and spare us another shrill madness scene or melodramatic nunnery scene? I don’t want to cut the Ophelia storyline -- I think it could be a fruitful place to center a future production. I do feel she’s kicked to the side in most versions, like another Rosencrantz but with breasts.

To end with Freud, then. If the Freudian version holds, Hamlet would exhibit a repetition formation with Claudius, no? But Hamlet only repeats when he’s dealing with dad (“Swear!”), his girlfriend (“To a nunnery, go!”) and finally mom (“Good night.”). Claudius and Hamlet only have about 20 minutes on stage together and each time Hamlet insults him to his face. Then he kills him twice over.

So where’s the jealousy, again? Where’s the pathological procrastination? Hamlet’s story may have Oedipal components, but his paralysis only lasts as long as Act One, his procrastination is done by Act Two, he’s gone overboard and tried to out-God God in Act Three, and then he’s booted from the court for killing the wrong man in a righteous way. So it’s not that Freud is incorrect; he’s only correct as far as he chooses to go.

The death of Polonius -- the blind stab at the curtain -- transfers the bulk of Hamlet’s inner-conflict … to Ophelia. The fatherless Hamlet has rejected the motherless Ophelia … and then he kills her dad, too. Hamlet the character/story/name/word has become shorthand in our culture for madness and suicide. But Ophelia is the only one who goes irreparably mad and successfully commits suicide. This is another reason she deserves her own post and her own production.

Hamlet cannot be judged in court and should not be pathologized via Freud because Hamlet is his own psychoanalyst -- just as he is his own Falstaff. If he deserves any judgment ... if one wishes to draw a tragic example from his story ... we could posit that his growth and liberation didn’t have to cause Ophelia’s degeneration and suicide. But how could it be otherwise?

HAMLET: Dead for a ducat ddddddddddddude? Whoa, wait. Polonius?
POLONIUS: Yeah?
HAMLET: Is that you?
POLONIUS: Yes, don’t hurt me, please.
HAMLET: My bad.

Or so the Family Guy version might have it.

In many revenge stories, the exiled hero teams up with an outside force to re-take the corrupted foreground and emerge triumphant. Following that formula, Hamlet would team up with Fortinbras, claim the crown, and … become the first enlightened despot or something. Go on to have some mod Scandanavian chill out club where people smoke weed, talk about the meaning of existence, and invent iPods. I don’t know. The point is that Hamlet breaks this formula and decides to return home, alone. He even writes ahead to Claudius to tell him that he’s coming back alone.

Why?

He doesn’t know Ophelia has killed herself, but he does know that Laertes will be gunning for a fight over his father, the dead Polonius. He makes as gracious a plea as possible:

Free me thus far in your most generous thoughts
That I have shot my arrow o’er the house,
And hurt my brother.

Laertes cheats in the duel and fatally wounds Hamlet, but he then asks for forgiveness from Hamlet and receives it. Laertes tells Hamlet that the king is to the blame. Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned rapier and then force-feeds him the goblet of poisoned wine. Claudius dies. Gertrude was accidentally poisoned. Laertes dies. Hamlet has moments to live. All he mourns at the end of his life is a lack of time and a wounded name.

Addressing us directly:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time--as this fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest--O, I could tell you--
But let it be.

The Freudian take on those events says Hamlet could only kill Claudius when he knew he, Hamlet, was dying as well. Because the Freudian version places its emphasis on Claudius, linking him to Hamlet as a surrogate Oedipal fantasy figure, it neglects the prior and deeper emotional conflict regarding the Gertrude’s behavior. The play gets its emotional, purposive thrust from a grand displacement between the formal revenge genre structure and the suppressed suffering for Gertrude’s behavior. Hamlet’s actions are better understood as a revolution or oscillation between his parents’ alternating demands – not as a pathological repression of Oedipal urges. Like each of us, Hamlet must somehow reconcile the space between his parents, even after they do horrible things and demand horrible things of him.

Freud remains an indispensible thinker and a joy to read. To be generous, we may say that Hamlet was merely four hundred years ahead of Freud. His dizzying epic journey of the psyche exceeds Freudian coordinates by turning them outward. Oedipus refuses to know his true condition -- and this refusal hastens its fulfillment. Oedipus blinds himself as punishment; Hamlet commits a tragic action while blind. By contrast, Hamlet knows his true condition “not poorly, but too well.” Or rather, he knows it so well that he cannot outlive his defining trauma.

This is why we sense such a strange loss when Hamlet dies. Oedipus suffers to purify himself and to provide catharsis for the audience. Hamlet dies … and after 4.5 hours with him, we’re somehow bummed we don’t get to hear him talk anymore.

Center-Where?

2011-02-21T18:48:00.007-05:00

Is there a more cowardly or pathetic talking point than the claim that America is a “center-right” country?

You’ve read it in syndicated columns and heard it from the stump and Sunday talk shows. Two trends attend each utterance. First: only right-wing spokespeople happen to say we live in a center-right nation, funny that. Second, and more telling: they only invoke the “center-right” to prove something else entirely; they never bother to establish this rather grand and contradictory stipulation up front. Through unchallenged repetition it’s become the sort of given-concept/received-truth that structures a debate before it has a chance to begin.*

Silly stuff first. Insofar as “center” means anything at all, it cannot tilt one way or the other. It’s like saying the Equator is a “center-North” line of demarcation. So when conservatives insist America is a “center-right” country, they’re really saying the right holds the center. Thus we discover that “Obamacare” (another sly coinage) is unpopular not because it’s an unholy mess with something to offend everyone, but because it’s a “liberal policy forced on a center-right country.” Arguing from this vantage is rather like conquering India with nothing but a Union Jack:

Liberals may agree that America has trended to the right over the past few decades -- but that’s an altogether different argument from this sideways assertion that America has an immutable, right-leaning identity. To say that America has trended to the right is to admit the movement and intervention of History -- which is to admit that it may trend back the other direction, too. It doesn’t matter if you view politics as a pendulum, a Punnett Square, a spectrum or Scott Sumter’s trippy hexagram. The conservative “center-right” talking point is a sad dash to flee the dialectic line of scrimmage. It provides nervous conservatives with a fixed identity that can never be lost, only momentarily challenged. And so, like the Baptist frat boy who only sucks dick when he’s really high, conservatives can convince themselves that America remains, at heart, an essentially conservative nation that lapses into liberalism from time to time. Simple as that, bro.

This is why, for conservatives, a proposition is “wrong” when it ceases to be “American.” (The argument-from-identity also goes a long way to explain the pageantry of the Tea Party.) Liberals have their own smug way of rigging the debate and, speaking as a liberal, I consider it every bit as toxic as the right’s rabid nationalism. For liberals, a proposition is “wrong” when it is “too fucking retarded to merit my consideration.” How much more fruitful (and civil) would our national debates be if we could concede, at the outset, that arguments-from-identity and arguments-from-fucking-stupidity are really just pissy admissions of defeat? If I could enforce one rule on a cable talk-show, it would be that no one gets to call anyone un-American or stupid.** Intelligence and ignorance are not fixed qualities like eye color; Red and Blue are not fixed states on an electoral map. Real America is a giant, silly precocious mutt of a country that constantly hews to a different hue. That’s why I love it.

In his brisk history primer The Death of Conservatism, Sam Tanenhaus*** charts the ascendency of liberal and conservative movements according to the ebb and flow of two basic governing strategies: consensus and orthodoxy, respectively. Liberal movements accrue power through “big tents,” accommodation and compromise (to the aggravation of the base); conservatives through appeals to purity and identity (to the enduring joy of the base). This is why the Republican response to Obama’s 2008 mandate was not cooperation or concession, but should-to-shoulder obstruction. It was really the only play left in the game.

But the larger question remains: Is America a “center-right” country, even if that’s a fucking retarded concept?

No. No, it is not.

Why would a center-right country elect a liberal president by the largest margin in twenty years? And then approve his performance by the most durable measure in thirty? For any domestic issue, when has the right-wing position been on “the right side of history” in any sense but the ordinal? The Civil War? Women’s suffrage? Prohibition? The Great Depression? Civil Rights? Health care reform? Gay marriage? The environment? Financial reform? Those last three are particularly surprising failures because conservative ideology, read straight, would make a very strong case for fiscal fair play, family stability, and environmental conservation, but whatever. Conservatives for conservation? I know, it’s crazy.

Now that we’ve carved up the “center-right” canard -- placing center at center and right where it belongs -- let’s make a wishbone wager with the hyphen: What are the odds our Republican leaders will recognize the best of their beliefs, forget their ancient failures, and find common cause with this rightward-leaning, leftward-moving nation?

I give it a zero-plus.

FOOTNOTES

* the way the phrase “political capital” changes what we mean by “democracy” and “capitalism.” Or the way “War on Terror” hides, through escalating repetition, what it nakedly declares: a psychological struggle.

**Okay, so that’s two rules. Don’t call me stupid. It’s un-American.

***Considering his title, you might suppose Tanenhaus was arguing for the necessary or inevitable collapse of conservatism and that Karl Rove’s baleful dreams of a “permanent Republican majority” were being replaced by a liberal version of the same. That’s too bad for any knee-jerk cover-judges out there because the book is really just a swift, gentle survey of broad political movements. The title merely denotes the latest tide-shift. As far as the actual "death of conservatism," his modest thesis has it that the movement that began under Goldwater, fell apart under Nixon, crystallized through Reagan, entered its decadent phase in the George W. Bush administration. It has therefore spent itself and no longer works as a credible political philosophy. Whether Obama has anything compelling to offer in its place ...?

Sleep Tight

2010-08-04T19:45:00.008-04:00

If our seasonal hysteria for global warming, sharks and wildfire isn’t giving you the Summer Craze you need this year, might I suggest you consider freaking out about bed bugs? All the cool kids are doing it.

Bed bugs are ripe subjects for paranoid obsession. They’re too small to detect and too clever to be caught. They’re courteous enough to administer an anesthetic before they go to work on your body and they’re tough enough to go without food for a year. True to the name, they prefer the bedside buffet, but they’ll happily lodge anywhere: wood floors, carpet, furniture, clothing, even the wiring in your walls. They travel with you between cities, into and out of hotel rooms, on all manner of transportation: cars, busses, subways, trains, planes and so on. Fifty percent of all bed bug bite victims never know they’re being eaten. And once you do know, there’s little you can do to stop them. In short, they’re invisible, omnipresent, clever and patient. Commence freak-out.

Bed bugs present no tangible consequence except irritation. According to my research, the main problem with bed bugs is that they’re fucking creepy. They breed through a process called “traumatic insemination,” which is exactly what it sounds like -- the title of an Eve Sedgwick book. They spread like a disease, but do not act as carriers of disease. A small number of hosts suffer shock, asthma or severe skin rashes, but most victims suffer only itching, if they suffer anything at all. Essentially, then, they’re just ... a thing to be afraid of. Since you can never be sure you don’t have them (double-negative intended), you get to be as afraid as you want to be.

Sounds like the sort of summertime thrill we expect from bullshit movies like Inception (of which more below). Scan your forearm right now. See those two or three imperfections in your skin that you never noticed before? If you are of the right temperament, this is proof positive that you’ve been eaten by bed bugs! Now stare at all the bits of white lint on your sheets and clothing. Keep staring. Don’t they kinda look like … eggs? (NB: do not perform this examination stoned)

Fortunately, there are three guaranteed solutions to a bed bug infestation:

1. Levitation. Bed bugs can’t fly. You can only get bitten if you touch things, go places, or gather with other humans, so … time to break out that Vedanta book you kept on your shelf to seduce hippy girls in college.

2. Become independently wealthy. No, you’re not safe in your posh Union Square condo or Upper East Side mansion. Bed bugs have no class consciousness. But after you become independently wealthy, you can afford to burn everything you own and buy perfect replicas! This is actually the solution proffered by New York City’s public health officials right now, which leads one to wonder if bed bugs have done more to stimulate consumer demand than unemployment benefits.

3. Find a scapegoat. If bed bugs attack first in the venue of our imagination, surely they can be defeated there, too. All paranoid obsessions can be relieved by a good scapegoat. For example, John Stossel of Fox News blames the environmentalists! Turns out the pesticide DDT was great at killing bed bugs, but because it killed a great deal more than that, we stopped using it. Stossel would like us to resume DDT use because he has an itch in his knickers. Presumably, Stossel is aware that napalm is a great decongestant and that rape improves your resting heart rate.

I’m traditional when it comes to scapegoats, so I’ll fall back on the most generic PB&J one we have: Al Qaeda.

Consider: bed bugs are far less frightening if they’ve been deployed by another human. It would be the sort of half-sinister, half-pathetic attack we’ve come to expect from the likes of Captain Firecrotch or the Hatchback Douchebag of Times Square. “One day we will mildly annoy the American Empire! Moo-ha-ha!” So the next time you stay awake at night wondering if a swarm of nano-pests will bleed you while you dream … think about all those other jerks that get under your skin. And then scratch your balls with the refreshing vigor of a new moral imperative.

Or just, you know … be irritated every once in a while.

INCEPTION

Speaking of nocturnal irritations, the movie Inception sucks your imagination the way bed bugs suck your blood. Christopher Nolan’s daisy-chain of migraines has been anointed by critics and crowds as the must-see thriller of 2010 and in these frugal times, it's easy to see why. For $11 you can watch four mediocre action movies smooshed into one ghastly palimpsest. And for another $11 you can buy four Taco Bell entrees and shake them up in your takeout bag.

The story follows Leonardo DiCaprio and an intrepid team of dream hijackers as they dig into the subconscious mind of a rich guy to traumatically inseminate him with an idea. Once dreaming, they induce sub-dreams and sub-sub-dreams and sub-sub-sub-dreams in order to bury the idea so deeply that the rich guy will take it as his own upon waking. This is an intriguing premise that calls to mind Poe’s famous lines:

All that we see or seem,
Is but a dream within a dream.

This would make a fascinating multi-dimensional flick, action or otherwise, but in Nolan’s treatment it looks like a lazy pile of noise, bullets, and blood. By the final stretch, he’s cutting between a van falling slo-mo into a river, some guys dressed in white shooting each other in the snow, and Joseph Gordon Levitt levitating in an elevator car. Oh, and there’s another storyline about Leo’s bitch ex-wife as well as some seaside confrontation with an elderly Ken Wanatanabe wherein Leo stands amidst the roar of a surf-tormented shore.

I can’t remember anything else because my date and I fell asleep halfway through. Why does willful chaos have this narcoleptic effect? Was this a brilliant gambit by Nolan? Last year, Avatar resurrected 3D. This year … Nolan offers an action movie about dream pirates that actually makes you feel like your dreams have been stolen as you doze in the theater. I guess that’s some kind of accomplishment.

The Taco Bell metaphor doesn’t quite capture the thrashing nausea of Inception. If Nolan were a chef, Inception would be a hotdog wrapped in an éclair, dipped in mayonnaise, and sprinkled with crayon shavings. Though I doubt the food critics would ape their arts-section colleagues by praising: "Look how many layers!" Yes, this ingenious combo spares critics the need to sit through several bad movies in a row, so I can understand why they might be grateful in their reviews. And cash-strapped audiences may feel like they’re getting a lot for $11, but surely we don’t need to pay full price just to watch four more previews.

Then again, if the specter of bed bugs gives you insomnia at home, Inception is a great way to stop thinking and catch some shut-eye. Strap in. Sleep tight. Bite me.

Open Letter to Ron Rosenbaum

2010-07-14T13:10:00.007-04:00

... because I doubt I'll get a response from the man himself.

First, read his Agnostic Manifesto at Slate.

Ahem:

Dear Mr. Rosenbaum,

Rarely have I been so aggravated by an essay whose merits I mostly affirm.

I welcome your provocative reversal of the prevailing debate about faith: that atheism is a weaker form of agnosticism, not the other way about. However, your “Agnostic Manifesto” tries to put the New Atheists in their place without presenting any evidence from the source to do so. To the degree that I am sympathetic to your cause, I am aggravated by your rather thuggish line of attack. It seems, at best, disingenuous from a man espousing the virtue of humility.

You imply atheists cannot mean what they say until they acknowledge your something-or-nothing question. As you suggest, this question cannot be answered by logic or reason. But I fail to see how your ability to pose this question debunks atheism as a valid approach to existence. Most atheists, even the shrill New Atheists, are more than happy to engage the question of existence; they just don’t see how this question admits or necessitates the presence of a god. Certainly it admits the possibility of a god, but that’s not the same thing. If you’re saying the New Atheists have degenerated from a reasoned rejection of faith to an active assertion of non-faith, you will get no argument from me. But you won’t yet get an affirmation of agnosticism, either.

I will offer my own answer to your something-from-nothing question in the next paragraph, but indulge me on this line of thought first. We can conceive of an infinite number of possibilities; infinity itself is a pure conception, equally un-provable as a truth or non-truth. In an aside, you say the “are you agnostic about fairies rejoinder is just dumb.” Well, if we discover one day that fairies made something come from nothing, how dumb could the question be? I don’t believe that’s the case and I sense you don’t either, but once you make skepticism your ground of being – once you make nothingness itself the irreducible question – you leave yourself open to other people’s projections. For most people on this planet, that projection is god. Today, existence, ethics and aesthetics remain the only phenomena for which we have sufficient dispute to admit the possibility of god as an answer. But while existence, ethics and aesthetics may be inexhaustible ponderables (forgive the mouthy phrase), that still does not constitute sufficient evidence to compel the atheists from their position. In my experience, it is the atheists who stand ready to ponder such things, while the faithful find the question moot since they already have an answer of their own. Certainly saying “there is no god” does not cut off the larger mystery of being alive. So your rebuke to atheism involves accusing the atheists of an answer they never needed to ask for in the first place. This is why your something-nothing challenge is not just fallacious, but cruel and a little cowardly.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Becuase Nothing was the source and subject of our first conception. You mock Thomas Aquinas for positing a Supreme Being that exists in a timeless, spaceless, causeless realm, but your very question requires a timeless, spaceless, causeless juncture outside existence at which point the option of existence was acted upon. So of course any answer will be unsatisfactory -- whether it appeals to logic, reason or emotion -- because it can only trigger questions of infinitely regressing priority: What came before that? Who did the acting upon? How and why? The question is unanswerable - not because, as Terry Eagleton suggested, we don’t know what Time is, but rather because we can never experience nothingness to validate one answer or another. We can only conceive of nothingness or project ourselves into it.

I’m guessing a Hamlet aficionado like you can see the play on “conception” and “nothing” here. Not for nothing does he punningly call death “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” (thus surpassing any oedipal coordinates for his affliction.) Hamlet’s enduring philosophical insight is that death can never guarantee a reprieve from thinking, feeling and suffering. For Hamlet, the possibility of perpetual, irreversible consciousness is a spur to re-engage with the fussy contingencies of life: to “bear those ills we have.” We can die, but we can never experience death; we can only know it. Once known, death loses its power as a guarantee of anything. Cruel as it is when it takes a loved one, death itself is nothing to fear because, as Hamlet says, the worse fate would be to experience something rather than nothing -- “the dread of something after death.” Which is to say: after thought.

Nothingness – conceptual negation – is the very source from which thinking gets its force and against which reason sharpens its cutting edge. Even if our own death turns out to be nothing more than the omnidirectional dispersal of our constituent carbon atoms, there will be no self apart from that disintegration to suffer it as such for it is that selfsame self that does the disintegrating. This disintegration happens all the time, within the psyche, well before natural death. It was the task of that polymath psychologist Hamlet to bear that disintegration honestly. As Hamlet reminds us, the most we ever know in life is that we may continue to experience consciousness after we die. Religion offers its followers the guarantee of such knowledge and goes further to describe the very content of an after-life: heaven, hell, etc.

What about any of this should make an atheist re-consider the existence of god? Atheism can reject the eager projections of religion without denying the mystery of the rest of waking life. Admittedly, many New Atheists fail to do this, but your manifesto does not yet make the case for agnosticism as a worthy antidote to their hysterical crusade. At most, it loudly announces the problem and surpasses it with a new magnitude of hysteria.

Here I wish you had cited some Neo-Atheist bombast to back up your charges against them. I say this because you are right to point out their smug, Spock-like dismissal of mystery. Dawkins, Dennet, Onfrey, Hitchens and Harris (hereinafter “DDOHH”) have quite a lot invested in the question of god, and have been discharging quite a lot of anger with their escalating reiterations of “There is no god!” Tragically, they seem to think a well-crafted syllogism can undo centuries of emotional attachment and they remain priggishly unconcerned with charting that emotional attachment to its root. Even if god is nothing more than a fictional concept to DDOHH, they still depend on it as the keystone concept for their shaky pons asinorum. At the end of the day, neither the faithful nor the rabidly anti-faithful is likely to be enlightened by the something-from-nothing paradox. Like all good paradoxes, it is a statement posing as a question. You bait your readers for a debate by challenging them to answer it. Since you know it was never a question in the first place, you get to declare victory in advance. Congratulations.

Just know that this is a victory for nihilism, not the radical skepticism to which you aspire. To take your view seriously, we would have to continue doubting the existence of god even after he breached the firmament to give Katie Couric an exclusive interview. Billions of people already have faith based on lesser spectacles than that, so why begrudge the atheists for wanting more evidence in the meantime?

I have no love for the New Atheists. They alternate between a crude materialism and a closed rationalism. My own spiritual journey owes more to the Nietzschean-Freudian strain of atheism. This camp approaches god and existence with more than reason and logic. It attempts to trace thoughts, beliefs and emotions to their root, while maintaining a position of openness and receptivity to the ecstatic mystery of life at the same time. It grants an axiomatic primacy to conflict, not mere skepticism.

As David Hart recently explained in First Things, Nietzsche was not content to reason his way out of faith. It was not enough to disprove god on rational or material grounds; he had to declare his death. (In an attempt to out-aphorize Nietzsche, Christopher Hitchens glides over this distinction: he teases Nietzsche for declaring the death of something that never existed! One then wonders why Hitchens titled his book “God is Not Great” since there was no god whose greatness needed negating, but whatever.) Like Nietzsche, Freud grounded our relationship to god in the dynamic of a larger drama so we could contend with the implications of faith and the horrors of existence in a meaningful way. Or, at least, in a way less superficial than, say, Ayn Rand’s bloodless abstractions (this seems to be the only level at which Sam Harris cares to think).

Faced with your something-nothing challenge, the neo-Atheists will simply maintain that they never believed in god, never had a crisis of faith, and that some transcendent principle of Reason backs up their present disposition. They would be wrong, of course, but your manifesto doesn’t begin to explain why. Again, I agree that the New Atheists are an obnoxious lot. They remain self-righteously mystified that so many other people could be so delusional to disagree with them. For Bill Maher, atheism is just a lazy way to smite the stupid because it spares him the trouble of wondering what, besides stupidity, accounts for their belief. Such an investigation would require more grace and introspection than Maher wants to grant; it would require a return to psychoanalytic-existential inquiry. Only then can we rise above this tired battle between the stupid and the smart.

And this is what most aggravated me about your manifesto: like Maher, you’re just calling your opponents stupid. While I was happy to see you reference Jim Holt, I was irritated to see you reference Errol Morris’s pointless ruminations on anosognosia. Like the Nothing we can never experience, the “unknown unknown” is the void into which we project what we want to be true. We are all beholden to unknown unknowns. I don’t need a five-part column to tell me that. Sometime around age two, it became painfully clear to me that I’m not omniscient and that my growth and fulfillment in this life depended on how I squared my limitations with my desires. The coinage “anosognosia” is meant to be a spur to new knowledge. But in your hands, it ends up being another way to validate what you already knew: that some people are really stupid. After all, anosognosia can only be diagnosed by people who know something (the smart) against people who can’t know something (the stupid). By definition, the stupid anosognosiac cannot be cured of his malady. So anosognosia also provides you the toxic jouissance that comes from damning the irredeemable: ye who cannot be saved from your stupidity. One may as well say that a wounded soldier deserves to die because his blasted hand prevents him from performing his own amputation. To say that stupid people are so stupid they don’t know how stupid they are (i.e., that they are “meta-stupid”) is to give stupid people a meaningless diagnosis and to give smart people a new epithet to express their contempt. This is sesquipedalianism at its finest. How humble!

I have no patience for this petty line of attack, especially when I agree with the attacker. Better to explore why we want something to be true. Why do certain falsehoods keep their grip long after they’ve been exposed? Why do so many New Atheists sound like fascistic cowards stuck in a self-induced autism? As I explain in the following link, better to explore the unknown KNOWN before we judge others from the vantage of the unknown unknown:

http://www.tundratastic.blogspot.com/2010/06/cogito-ergo-boom.html

I write because I agree with you on almost every substantive point; I’m just saddened that there are so few of them. You get to contribute a longer-than-average column once a month at Slate. Surely you have the time and patience to craft something more than a personal screed against other people’s personal screeds (your Shakespeare and Hitler pieces are fantastic). The atheism-agnosticism debate is an important one to have – and I would love to see a bout between you and fellow Slater Hitchens, if he’s up to it these days. But from one Mysterian to another, I have to say this conflict is too important to leave at the level of conceptual gainsaying and nerd bullying.

Sincerely,

Karl Miller

Cogito Ergo BOOM

2010-06-27T21:21:00.000-04:00

It started with Donald Rumsfeld's existential poetry:

There are known knowns
Things we know we know
And there are known unknowns
Things we know we don't know
But then there are unknown unknowns
Things we don't know we don't know.

I may be confessing the depth of my unknown unknown ignorance here, but I find it baffling and a little scary that so many people are taken in by Rumsfeld's poem all of the sudden. In an interview with Errol Morris at The New York Times, Cornell sociologist David Dunning credits a recent epiphany to Rummy's closing couplet:

He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.” ... If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.

After reading the above, Andrew Sullivan made it one of his Quotes of the Day. Ditto with esteemed Theatrosphere forum Parabasis. Future Pulitzer winner Dan Brooks used unknown unknowns to articulate the vapidity of Ke$sha:

Is the socialist-realist mural Ke$ha would paint if only she were much, much better at painting an unknown unknown, or is it not out there at all?

Call me cocky or stupid, but I already know there are things I don't know I don't know. Somewhere around age two, it became painfully clear to me that I'm not omniscient and that my growth and fulfillment in this life depended on how I square my limitations with my desires. Sure, I need periodic reminders of this. But to expostulate at length on a self-canceling non-thought like "unknown unknowns" strikes me as a fabulous waste of consciouness, not an enhancement thereof. Especially since, as I hope to prove here, Rumsfeld's poem has bigger things to teach us.

Now don't get me wrong: thinking about unknown unknowns is a great meditative exercise. And we can all think of people who are too cocky or stupid to know how cocky or stupid they are. (If we're at all mature, we check in with ourselves to see if that's us.) Perhaps these cocky stupid people will read The New York Times, The Daily Dish, Combat! and Parabasis and be disabused of their cocky stupidity, but I doubt it. Indeed, that rather seems to be the whole point of the Morris/Dunning dialog, the "discovery" everyone can't stop talking about:

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras ... If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

The burglar suffers from unknown unknowns, he is too stupid to know he's stupid. Ha ha! What a stupid ... guy who ... is stupid. Again, what's the insight here? That stupid people have been known to do stupid things? That ignorance begets ignorance? Certainly that's true as far as it goes (and must be very reassuring to all us smart people mocking him from the outside), but how is this different from saying a hungry man stays hungry because his hunger saps the strengh he needs to get food? Hell, we can play this game all day if you want ...

It takes intelligence to seek intelligence.

How true.

Blue skies are pleasing to the eye on account of their inherent blueness.

Quite so.

You have to spend money to make money.

Which means you have to make money to make money.

Which means oooooooommmmmmmmmm!

Andrew Sullivan is so taken with unknown unknowns he tries to use the concept to skewer Sarah Palin. The implication being: Sarah's just like the burglar, too stupid to know she's stupid, blissfully unconcerned with the unknown unknowns. And this is where I rebel. Not to defend Sarah Palin, but because we've now abandoned any serious consideration of the unknown unknown (specifically: what it meant to the man who coined the phrase.) Donald Rumsfeld was the High Priest of Corporate Holy War, for crying out loud. His ominous incantations about the unknown unknown could not find a more worthy supplicant than Sarah Palin. Rummy wasn't toking up at a poetry slam when he said those words; he said them at a NATO press conference on the Iraq War. So before we spend another working day in an epistemological tizzy, can we pause to connect Rummy's spooky koan with the historical moment that inspired it? Please? Breaks down like this:

We know Iraq has WMDs.
I know it.
Colin Powell knows it.
George Tenet knows it.
President Bush really knows it.
It is a known known.
Now, we can't seem to find these WMDs.
But at lesat we know we don't know where they are.
It is a known unknown.
And before you ask any more questions ...
Just think of all the WMDs we don't even know we don't know about!
Beware the unknown unknowns!

COGITO ERGO BOOM! DID I JUST BLOW YOUR MIND?

The Zen masters tell us to ponder a tree falling in the forest. Does it make a sound if no one is around to hear it? The Secretary of Defense for the Global War on Terror would like us to ponder all the things we can't even know to be afraid of. Both ponderings are designed to silence the mind. One increases awareness of the inescapable contradictions that animate mortal consciousness ... and the other hypnotizes a terrorized public with the specter of a perpetually unknowable enemy. Infinite Justice indeed.

You can probably see how unblinking vigilance for unknown unknown enemies secures the prime psychological condition for any willing servant to the War on Terror. We will always need bizarre, extra-legal dimensions like Guantanamo so long as the Unknown Unknown is public enemy number one. These fuckers are so fucking evil we don't even know what the fuck to call them or what the fuck to do with them so let's put them in this weird fucking place with no fucking rules where they can just ... FUCK I HATE THEM!

Suddenly pre-emptive war, warrantless wiretapping, terror alert levels, racial profiling and torture make a lot of sense, don't they? If we're as serious about unknown unknows as Rummy wants us to be, we should follow the rest of his advice and strike first, spy on everyone, index our daily fear, lock up strangers and then torture them to find that ticking time bomb I keep hearing (about). For what is the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario but our favorite example of the fearsome unknown unknown? We've never actually encountered one, but it sure is fun to think about, isn't it?

I think Rumsfeld's poem is more noteworthy for what it hides than what it reveals. In his book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Slavoj Zizek identifies a fourth category of knowledge missing from Rummy's pithy Punnett square. And I must confess here that I experienced an epiphany like Dunning's when I read about it. (I must also confess some restless anger at Errol Morris for writing a five-part column that says the same thing so many times without stopping to discuss this missing fourth category of knowledge directly.) Before you look at my diagram below, can you guess what it is and why it might be more important than any unknown unknown you can dream up?

Psychologists call it the subconscious mind, the psyche, the wild stew of forgotten thoughts and feelings that constitute the bulk of our souls ...

THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS

What don't I know that I know? What simmers beneath all my well-charted goals and stated intentions? Am I a lawyer because I love the study of logic and justice? Or am I a lawyer because my parents were lawyers and I need to be richer than they were? Am I looking for WMDs in Iraq? Or am I discharging my boundless aggression from 9/11?

How appropriate that Rumsfeld fails to include this. There's no room or time for introspection in the War on Terror -- that much has been hammered into our heads over the last decade, right? And how disappointing that Sullivan must resort to the empty construction "unknown unknown" to bash Sarah Palin's intelligence for the umpteenth time when Palin's problem isn't her lack of knowledge but rather her refusal to examine her psyche. What spooky unknown might she find within if she did so?

What has all this chin-rubbing about unknown unknowns taught us except that stupid people are so stupid they're, like, meta-stupid? Tragically, for Rummy and Sully alike, contemplation of the unknown unknown hasn't been a spur to new knowledge at all. Quite the opposite: it's just another way to confirm what they already knew. Iraq has WMDs. Palin is a moron. This is all logically sound, of course. But that's the problem: it's no better than logically sound. If it reveals anything new, it's that one can construct an airtight space of self-reinforcing thoughts, fortified by the logos, without ever having to question oneself in the process. Iraq has WMDs. Palin is a moron. How brave to think what you always thought, guys.

We're not learning a damn thing here. We're choosing to forget something else. The Global War on Terror is the largest psychological war yet declared in the history of mankind. It's right there in the title. Whenever we deny this fact, we push it deeper into the realm of the unknown known. It becomes the known we refuse to know. All repressed truths continue to govern our actions and feelings from within: witness our inhuman cruelty, our affection for toture, Guantanamo, ticking time bombs, and so on.

First we called it the War on Terrorism. Then our rage exceeded any nation, ideology or ism we could find, so we changed it to the War on Terror. That's not a lazy elision that makes our war more specific; it's an unconscious generalization that makes our war impossibly big. When intelligent people discuss the War on Terror, they love to point out that:

Terror is a tactic! It's not a country or a culprit! How can we wage war on a tactic? How stupid!

But they're not even half right. Terror is an emotion, people. At the end of the day, we are fighting a war against our own emotions and we will measure our triumph according to how we feel, not what we've done. (Small wonder, then, that our biggest recurring problem is winning the "hearts and minds" of the countries we've invaded.) We are fighting a war within the very territory of the unknown known. By calling terror a tactic without acknowledging that it's a feeling first, we confess that our feelings have already been weaponized. And by fixating on the unknown unknown instead of the unknown known, we bar the door to any investigation of why we keep failing.

Look, I know it's important to be receptive to the unknown unknowns.

GHOST: Swear!
HORATIO: Day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
HAMLET: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Hortio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

When we're not striving to know ourselves and the world, we should meditate on the infinitely unknowable. It's a healthy repose when the ravages of samsara cramp your soul. But we must remember that meditation is the only activity suited to this realm of knowledge. Sociological speculation like Dunning's and military strategy like Rumsfeld's will not benefit from focusing on the unknown unkown. Outside meditaiton, the unknown unknown quickly becomes the void into which we project what we want to be true: stupid people are stupid and evil is everywhere. Now, if only there were a realm of knowledge that let us explore what we want to be true and why ...

All great art stirs up the unknown known and brings it rushing back to the fore. Maybe one day we'll find a way to live through and beyond all this terror so we can see the completion (just not the fulfillment) of Rummy's literary masterpiece, too.

Disaster. Louisiana. Bush. Obama. Go!

2010-05-28T14:18:00.005-04:00

Why do I feel like journalism has become a Second City improv game?

Okay, there's a disaster in Louisana and everyone's looking to the President for comfort and action. Your props are the American wetlands, the Gulf of Mexico, and 456,000 barrels of oil. Go!

If this were a comedy revue, would you aim for some subversive Bill Hicks rant about greedy oil companies? Or do you go for the cheap Katrina bitch-slap?

I suppose the comparison was inevitable on account of ... you know ... water being involved. So let's ask it one more time: Is the BP oil rig disaster Obama’s Katrina?

What a fascinating motherfucking question. It brings to mind several others ...

Is an oil rig explosion a recurring natural phenomenon that happens with seasonal regularity?

Did a private corporation cause Katrina in an unregulated rush to tap its wind-power?

Did Obama appoint an unqualified crony to run the response effort?

No, no, and no.

Katrina sank Bush because hurricanes are predicable, common, and natural. The shiny new Homeland Security apparatus was supposed to help us with that kind of threat. It didn’t.

People who think BP’s disaster will sink Obama are more than mistaken or cynical; they are engaging in a grand projection of guilt. We expect all levels of government to mitigate natural disasters and we feel betrayed when they don’t. A devout Reaganite like Peggy Noonan should feel betrayed by the colossal failure of a private corporation like BP. But no, that injury must be strenuously repressed and then superimposed onto Obama. Daddy's only a bad man when he drinks, Peggy. And what makes Daddy drink? Government regulation.

If people are looking for a parallel catastrophe to process the present one, they needn’t look any further than last month’s Goldman Sachs hearings. Then, as now, profit was privatized while responsibility was socialized. The same angry voices that want government to stay out of private business now expect government to promptly wipe the ass of private business when such a business can’t control itself.

Like most liberals, I've been having a grand time watching the Tea Party twist and contort itself to explain their sudden concern for deficit spending. Or their beef with the Civil Rights Act. Or their Medicare-funded, Social Security subsidized crusade against ... federal entitlements. It's been a pleasure, seriously. But I think the bank bailouts were easier to rationalize or repress because Wall Street remains a dark abstraction to most of us. Argue all you want about public-v-private securities and the Community Reinvestment Act and the repayment of Citigroup's loan in T-bills. Nothing about the financial catastrophe has the lingering, viscous stench and stain of an oil spill. Yet they both sprout from the same source.

Pundits have been trying to chart the Tea Party's growth and locus on the political landscape, but I think it's rather obvious, isn't it?

Say you belong to the Republican Party. It's the year 2000 and things are looking great for you. You've got a war on. You've got an unimpeachable Cause blessed by the undeniable horror of 9/11. You've got a faithful conservative President who talks to god, hates private regulation, and believes he can do no wrong. And then wrong things start happening anyway. The war begets more war. No one knows how to memorialize Ground Zero. The market vomits on itself in the absence of regulation. God sends a hurricane to murder more people than 9/11 did and yet god saw fit to spare the sinful French Quarter at the same time. You lose Congress to Nancy Pelosi. Then you lose the White House to an urban, intellectual liberal.

Man, that's an embarrassing story.

I totally understand why you would want to put on a costume and pretend to be someone else for a while.

Your scene's coming up. Got your props?

Political Capital: Civil Rights in the Ownership Society

2010-05-21T17:00:00.011-04:00

Rand Paul’s interpretation of the Civil Rights Acts illustrates something about the privileged place money holds in our culture. By taking issue with the parts of the Civil Rights Act that prohibit discrimination in private businesses, Paul is at pains to repeat that he’s not a racist himself. He opposes racist laws like Jim Crow and he would never want a public institution to be racist. He just thinks it’s okay if people want to be racist when they sell things. A “No Blacks” restaurant would be allowed in Paul’s revision of the Civil Rights Act because he sees private commerce as a first amendment issue. The owner of the restaurant is only expressing something by denying a black person service, you see.

The libertarian reverence for money over public action allows Paul to attack the very inhumanity he just made possible. For partisans of Ayn Rand and Rand Paul, the ultimate punishment for such a vile establishment would not be imprisonment or civil trial. No, the ultimate punishment would be that offended white people no longer eat there. Mind you, black people don’t get to choose whether to eat at the restaurant or not – that choice has already been lawfully denied by Paul’s money exemption from the Civil Rights Act. But white people are hereby liberated to be the saviors, for it is their boycott, not the black person’s boycott, which really counts.

You may recall that boycotts played a significant role in the civil rights struggle – but only in places where such a boycott was possible. In Paul’s revision of the Civil Rights Acts, it is the racists who get to wage the boycott and it falls to liberated white people to wage a counter-boycott of any significance. Liberty remains something only white people can confer or concede, not something others can demand as a matter of human right.

By making an exemption for economic behavior, the Tea Party not only has the license to be racist in their economic behavior, they also have a self-congratulatory method for fighting racism. The only problem with this conception of Civil Rights is that it excludes the very people who suffer from the denial of civil rights. Both Paul and members of the far left will continue to invoke charges of racism in all the wrong ways to ensure that the debate remains closed. The real issue is not whether Paul is a racist, but what kinds of racism he would permit in America. Of necessity, this requires a re-examination not just of Paul’s ambitious conflation of the First Amendment, but of what we mean by public/private life and how money unavoidably connects the two.

These are terms that Paul is happy to engage. He wants desperately to contain the Civil Rights debate to the durable binary of government-versus-private individuals and avoid any accusation that he, himself, is a racist. He says the government should never be racist, but private individuals can be racist all they want. This is true insofar as one’s racism remains a thought, a belief, or a spoken/written expression. And one is free to make, buy, sell, or wear a racist T-shirt. But it is not the product or the content of the expression that matters; it is what happens when that product or expression becomes a wounding action. When racism manifests itself in behavior beyond free expression, including economic behavior, it has traversed the boundary of ego-privacy and become a public, inter-subjective action with civic and legal consequences. In other words, it has surrendered the protection of the First Amendment.

You may have noticed that other laws and prohibitions don’t care if you’re breaking the law on your own property or not. Murder used to be legal on private property, but I defy anyone to name a candidate who would advocate for such a faithful exercise of Tea Party logic now (although Arizona’s immigration hysteria gives one pause). We don’t limit the rape statute to public employees; it applies to all of us, everywhere. Paul’s Civil Rights exemption for economic activity doesn’t necessarily make him a racist. Paul just sees money as an extension of his private soul – how else could money be such a privileged medium for expression and such a sublime executor of justice? The tragedy of the Tea Party (white, upper-middle-class men approaching or enjoying retirement) is that it only knows how to spend justice – it has no idea what it takes to earn it.

MONEY = SPEECH

If you already believe that “money = speech” (or further: that what you spend and buy says more than what you say or how you vote) then it’s an easy leap to the soothing White Man’s Boycott revenge fantasy Paul builds for himself above. But just as corporations became the real beneficiaries of the 13^th Amendment, the libertarian/conservative idea that “money = speech” tries to tap the common sanctity that all Americans feel for the First. Such overlaps in ideological reverence are rare in a country as magnificently heterogeneous and dynamic as the United States. We all defend the freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Liberals err on the side of Political Correctness and conservatives err when they confuse expression with consumption. All of us should recoil when such an irreducible freedom is perverted through metaphor to license the cruelties of racist economic discrimination.

A/POLITICAL CAPITAL: IF MONEY = SPEECH, CITIZENS = MONEY

A quick social studies question: what does political capital mean in the United States?

If you just emerged from your Y2K hibernation bunker, you'd probably answer "Washington, DC” or “Juneau, Alaska.” Or “Albany, New York.” Before the 21^st century, “political capital” referred to a public place where freely elected citizens gathered to legislate and administer the defense and public welfare of civilization. Today, that phrase connotes a financial, rather than a civic, transaction: political capital is the medium of exchange for change. (This is not an editorial digression; you can probably start to see how this ties into Rand Paul’s argument for a free market approach to Civil Rights.)

I first heard this suspicious phrase in the summer of 2002. George W. Bush still had an approval rating well north of 70% and his administration was just beginning to tune the Skinner Box for eight months of “9/11 = Iraq” programming. That example aside, I found something vile about the phrase itself: the idea being that votes of approval are like a sock full of rusty nickels, to be spent on whatever the bearer pleases. During the nascent debate about Iraq, one pundit used the phrase in the context of an even more offensive piece of Beltway wisdom: "When you have political capital, spend it." But “spending,” in this sense, doesn't mean the validation of those who voted to confer it; it means the bearer can afford to spend the same approval in pursuit of something that might reduce that store of approval at the same time. In other words, when W said he was going to spend his political capital, he wasn’t saying he was about to do what you wanted him to do when you voted to give him political capital; he was saying he felt free enough to spend you.

The second time I heard the phrase was 2004. Bush had been re-elected and he took his mandate as an infusion of still more “political capital.” This time, he quite explicitly told his audience (again: the very pennies and nickels that constituted his political capital) that he intended to spend it/them. As someone who didn’t vote for him, I had no idea what he meant by that. Was he going to spend it AT me? Was he going to spend my tax contribution on something one of his voters wanted? Or was he spending his own voters on something they might not want? Such are the motivations that get hidden by the tidy abstraction of “political capital.”

BUYING = BELIEVING

As Mike Daisey beautifully articulated in The Last Cargo Cult, buying is believing. "I don't buy it," is the phrase we use to dismiss something as unbelievable because it quickly communicates an intimate betrayal of confidence that all good capitalists can understand. Similarly, to own is to be responsible, but not just for what ideas, animals and things one owns. Ownership-as-responsibility also carries a forward imperative: to be a good citizen, you must go out and actively own things. Hence Bush's exhortation to retail therapy in the wake of 9/11, Paul’s insistence that “money is speech,” and the grander proclamations about the "ownership society."

I kid about the Skinner Box because I think the ramp-up to Iraq owes more to this idea of political capital -- a monetized polis -- than it does to media hoodwinkery. Say what you will about the horror of the aughts, but the pranks of Murdoch notwithstanding, ours is, on balance, a more informed public square, less prone to censorship and the top-down manipulation of news and history. It is rather the anti-democratic covenant of political capital that has governed our young century. More than anything, our faith in this abstraction enabled the clean conversion of rage from 9/11 to Iraq. It also explains the rapid ascent of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and the Tea Party Movement. Most importantly, “political capital” is the fulcrum for Rand Paul’s conception of public-v-private life. If buying is believing … and voters are money … and money is speech … then the free market has everything it needs to operate democracy for us and fix civil crimes like discrimination with the dispassionate, unfailing force of … supply and demand, I guess.

So what's the going rate on voting rights? Can enfranchisement be outsourced? Well, according to Rand Paul the going rate for voting rights is whatever you'll pay to advance his campaign and enfranchisement should be outsourced because it will improve the efficiency and flavor of your freedom, provided you can afford it in the first place. If money is protected from civil law, it follows that civil justice can only be achieved with money and that public authority is only a matter of political capital.

OWN YOUR FAILURE

The 2008 meltdown (“crash” doesn’t quite seem to cover it) gave us a sharp, disorienting trauma, from which we can learn a thing or two about the Ownership Society. Is there any dispute that one of 08’s crimes was the use of private ownership as an infinite revenue stream? All you had to do to cash in on the benefits of the Ownership Society … was to own something. Once owned, that magic thing would produce income for you – even before you technically owned it (as any sub-prime profiteer can now tell you). The popular editorial expression was “people using their homes as ATMs.”

The Great Recession has taught us many things about the abstract machinery of cybernetic capitalism, but it also has the potential to teach us something about America’s consumptive ethos. Not just that we’re the fattest nation on earth (one index of growth that continues upward unabated), but that we loudly pride what we consume. Indeed, we stake our civic identity on consumption. As Rand Paul reminds us, we can only fix civil crimes through consumption, not through an assertion of human rights. And so it was with the Great Recession: when it became too hard for bovine America to get off the couch, we learned how to make the couch pay us for staying on it. By signing on the dotted line, we fulfilled a civic duty, cashed in on an economic revolution, and achieved a new magnitude of sloth in one stroke.

Not a bad day’s ownership, hey?

Slavery, you will recall, was a crime of ownership. We could not free the slaves by saying they were free to express freedom, but not free enough to break the private ownership that shackled them. Left to Rand Paul, the Civil War would have been waged by having the North secede from the South. Even if you take the narrow view that the Civil War was motivated by economic concerns or that slavery only ended because people wanted to be paid for their labor, you still have to reject Paul’s conception of a clean public/private boundary enforced by expenditures of cash. Such liberation required a more just redistribution of wealth, yes, but it also required a hard-fought assertion of human rights as rights in and of themselves. We lose sight of this with our lunch-counter example because it involves a prospective black customer, not a black laborer. But the point remains: public/private boundaries cannot be waged by economic action alone and economic action is not exempt from civil law like speech and assembly. Pay someone to murder on your behalf and you're guilty even if your mercenary fails to fulfill his end of the contract. The original sin of American slavery showed us the bloody intersection of who one is and what one owns. It is my contention that Paul’s Civil Rights debate shows us another. What we mean by accepted concepts like “political capital” and “money = speech” will tell us still more.

Faced with the unmistakable failure of the free market in 2008, Conservatives continue to blame the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act for its too-generous expansion of home ownership. And they should, so long as they can square this gripe with their own baleful praise for the Ownership Society. The CRA is a necessary, but not sufficient explanation for the 2008 meltdown. Wall Street (the greatest assemblage of the greatest owners among us) is responsible for exploiting an unstable system and making it radioactive. Who can blame them? They were just riding the same speculative fantasy: that one can make money through the raw force of ownership, alone. Owning a house that only goes up in value is one way to do it. Owning a human being who does your work for free is another. Both represent the utopian promise of the Ownership Society: that one can escape the need to engage in concrete, creative production and consume one’s way to a state of perpetual consumption.

This infantile wish gets its fulfillment in American capitalism and what goes for the American Dream. Pace Ayn Rand, a dollar does not equal a dollar does not equal a dollar. Money has its own laws of gravity. A bum’s penny behaves differently when it is around other pennies. Not just in the sense that new things become affordable, but that the bum has accelerated one small measure closer to utopian escape velocity. With enough pennies, and a low-impact regimen of savings and investment strategies, the bum will no longer need to earn or search for any more pennies. Simply owning them will be enough, for now their magnetic accretion has become a purposive, generative force of its own. The bum has achieved escape velocity and exempted himself from productive employment. He is no longer moored by earthbound contingencies or demands for creative effort. With enough capital, he can glide unobstructed in a space of pure consumerism. He owns … therefore he earns … therefore he spends ... therefore he owns. At no point in this fantasy does the bum produce anything. His value as a devout capitalist American is proved not by what he does or how he votes, but what he withholds and consumes. A closed loop of emotional and libidinal reinforcement has been achieved -- a perpetual motion machine if ever there was one. And within this closed loop, the Reaganite wet dream continues to seduce the national imaginary.

The solution?

First, the ownership society must own its failure:

And second: all of us must remember that civil wrongs require civic action to correct. We are the government, not what we own. Skip to 17:20 to see what I mean:

Emphasis Yours, Charles Krauthammer

2010-03-07T23:12:00.008-05:00

Let's start with his title:

Onward with Obamacare, regardless

Of all the rhetorical gambits from our yearlong health care debate, none is more absurd than the phrase "Obamacare.” The president let Health Care Reform (HCR) sprout on Capital Hill; he didn’t torpedo it down Pennsylvania Avenue like Bill Clinton. Each committee in Congress got to shape the bill on its own while Obama announced deadlines, met with interest groups, mediated debates, held summits, and gave speeches of general advocacy. This makes him the foreman, not the architect, of the project.

By contrast, “Clintoncare” would have been a perfectly fair nickname for the disastrous 1993 HCR bill, but that doesn’t roll off the forked tongue as easily as the assonant iambs of “Obama.” Tactically, the phrase "Obamacare" accomplishes little because most people happen to like the man and most that don’t won’t go in for health care reform anyway. So “Obamacare” scares people already scared by Obama and tries to hide the history of HCR 2010 from the rest of us. Clever.

Syndicated sociopath and retired Dr. Seuss goblin Charles Krauthammer knows a good rhetorical trick when he smells one ...

... and he has a natural flair for compressing a sheaf of memes into one slick screed, so this post gives me a wonderful chance to hit a dozen lies in one shot.

His signature recipe is the Fact Casserole: he packs toxic ingredients under a slimy layer of cheese so the reader-eater never knows what caused the dysentery. If you complain that his argument tastes of cork, urine, haggis and lawn mulch, he will quickly reply, "What do you mean? It has fiber, protein, water, and leafy greens. Four essential nutrients in one dish! Shut the fuck up and eat your casserole.”

So let's plunge a rusty fork into his latest serving:

Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of his health-care bill.

Delicious! I love how those cascading clauses and nested prepositions work like a semantic laxative so his argument can glide swiftly down the page and achieve some force of persuasion through sheer inertia, if nothing else. Krauthammer does with speed what Rush Limbaugh does with volume (and VOLUME!). Both men hope you can't remember what was said or written three thoughts prior.

What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine ...?

First, let's celebrate because the "plague” of defensive medicine happens to be one disease for which the 31 million uninsured possess a natural immunity. So this epidemic has been quarantined to the shrinking ranks of people who can afford to stay in the pool.

… a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests, and medical procedures being done for no medical reason?

Let’s assume the Massachusetts Medical Society is really awesome. Let’s also assume you didn’t click through to read the actual study, which is not so much a study as it is a survey asking doctors to recall how often fear of litigation motivated them to order extra tests and procedures last year. An actual study would follow through to match specific "defensive" items with their final outcomes to see if there really was a valid medical reason after all.

about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests, and medical procedures

Yes, that comma cluster bomb ("referrals, tests, and medical procedures") includes three of the categories explored in the MMS survey. But if you take the total snapshot, including hospital visits, you get an average of 13%. So Chuck doesn't need to consult a real study to make his case; he's content to fudge the figures of the one he happens to like.

"Defensive medicine" zooms in on one aspect of our massive health care economy, but it does not explain the exponential rise in the cost of the procedures themselves. Americans haven't become exponentially litigious over the years nor have malpractice settlements raised exponentially in cost. 100,000 people die each year from preventable medical errors in the US, of which 4% ever result in litigation. If anything, Americans are less litigious than they could be. Frivolous lawsuits comprise 10% of all malpractice cases and American juries have been consistently good at rejecting them.

Finally, the combined cost of malpractice insurance, litigation, and settlement comes to about 1% of the total health care economy, so capping settlements and restricting litigation will directly affect only a tiny slice of the pie. It bears repeating that this slice isn't getting proportionately bigger. And it simply does not follow that such hairsplitting reform would rein in defensive practices because doctors happen to have a positive incentive to be overcautious that has nothing to do with fear: they get paid for each extra pill and procedure they authorize.

But now that Chucky’s tapeworm of a question has been extracted, how does he answer it? What, exactly, did Obama suggest and what is in the current bill?

A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of his health-care bill.

Again, let’s celebrate that the “ridiculously insignificant” comprises a ridiculously insignificant portion of the cost.

Man, this casserole is terrible. And such small portions.

So Chucky puts his cherry-picked 25 percent MMS figure side by side with the price of the stuff in the bill that would investigate tort reform (.005 percent) and he uses another mouthy sentence to highlight the contrast. The implication being: defensive medicine costs 25% so why does HCR devote only .005% of its budget to fixing that?

Well, you don't need Ezra Klein to tell you that tort reform is a matter of law, not resources. Which is why that reform has its place in the present legislation, just not the price tag. Comparing the two doesn't make any sense. It's like using a word count to prove that Cordelia isn't all that important to the plot of King Lear. "Well if she's so important, where are all her lines?! Clearly Oswald is the pivotal role, as evidenced by this chart." Something tells me George F. Will has already written that somewhere.

The preponderance of the bill is devoted to expanding coverage through subsidies to participate in the private market and other rules that simply outlaw inhuman health discrimination (e.g. pre-existing conditions). Funny enough, this bill resembles a roadmap to health reform outlined by Chuck last summer, but now that it’s actually here, his advocacy has vanished. Maybe it was all a brilliant trap. Or maybe Chuck is about as trustworthy on this issue as Joe Lieberman – the man who favored expanding Medicare until he found out other people were, too.

Chuck goes on to rebut an argument Obama has made several times: that people oppose the whole bill, but everyone likes the individual components, so what gives?

Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: a dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

Well ... no. But this is just a cute analogy, right? He's not really comparing insulin shots to ice cream or cancer screening to steak, is he?

However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed -- say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak is to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?

Holy fuck, it's not an analogy. He’s serious. $500 billion for ice cream and steak? Cut Medicare to buy cut flowers? You're going to tell me how to cook my free steak that's not really free and that killed my grandma because she couldn't get Medicare so she ran out of Lipitor which she needs because of all the steak you gave her for free each Monday?

I don’t feel demystified at all; I feel like my brain is going to puke.

What is he really saying except that people want things but don’t want to pay for them? Does that make people stupid or Obama stupid for reminding people why they voted for him? Again, his sprint to create a glossy metaphor burns precious calories he desperately needs to form a coherent thought. He seems happy that people are opposed to HCR, but apparently people are too stupid to know why they oppose it? People like what the bill does, just not what the bill costs?

I'm not sure either is true. But I wouldn't know because Chuck doesn't even bother to follow his own metaphorical setup to a metaphorical conclusion. He just sorta lets it collapse, saying, in effect, "Want some free steak? PSYCH! Your grandma's dead!"

So let me try. Ahem:

Imagine a system where you get to choose someone to go to Washington. This special person will write laws and distribute money to provide for the general welfare so you don't have to. If you don't like how this person behaved on your behalf, you could fire them. Would this be popular? Of course.

Now imagine a system where every flippin' jackass in the country gets to do the same thing you just did above. Turns out your special person has to work with 534 other special people who all think they're special and want different special things. They never agree. And you rarely get what you want from them. Would this be popular?

Everyone hates Congress, but Congress has an 90% incumbency rate -- please explain that with a culinary metaphor, Chuck. You can’t call a national plebiscite just because the polls gave you a flattering snapshot yesterday. Oh, hell, let’s try it anyway! If for no other reason than to hear what revolting metaphor Chuck will serve up to explain why the persistently popular public option cannot be trusted to the public.

He ends with a swipe at reconciliation:

The man who vowed to undo Washington's devious and wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of "budget reconciliation." The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Hasn't someone told him HCR already passed both chambers of Congress? I'm pretty sure Fox and the National Review covered that. But heck, that was months ago. If he doesn't remember that, he probably doesn't remember that George W. Bush used budget reconciliation to give $1 trillion to rich people in 2001. President Obama wants to use reconciliation to give $1 trillion to the rest of us now. Wherever did he get the nerve? Did Obama win some sort of contest last year? Some contest that Bush didn't exactly have under his belt when he "rammed through" his first year spending spree?

Okay, so Chuck can't remember what happened nine years ago or three months ago. Does he at least remember what happened three weeks ago -- when he defended the filibuster because it was making things difficult for the president? “The system worked,” he wrote. “Barack Obama's two signature initiatives -- cap-and-trade and health-care reform -- lie in ruins.” But now that Obama has instructed Pelosi and Reid to wrap things up using the same system that worked so well three weeks ago (and three months ago, and nine years ago), Chuck accuses him of “ram[ming] through Obamacare” using a "device” that smacks of the “devious and wicked” ways of the past.

I give up. I know politicians have to pretend they're always right, but Krauthammer is a clever man, repeatedly cited as the lone intellectual voice in the American Right. If he doesn't do better, he should at least know better. His tantrums are embarrassing, transparent abuses of language and thought. His problem with Obama exceeds any political, intellectual, or emotional coordinates I can discern. His fixation on Obama borders on the pathological. And his prose disintegrates when you try to honor him by thinking about it. Speaking of ...

"Budget reconciliation" is exactly what it sounds like -- a process of balancing the budget differences between the Senate and the House. It limits what can be changed at this late stage, but that's the point. Chucky seems to think it entitles him to obliterate the whole thing and that anything less is an affront to civilization.

"Ram it through?" No, the bill has passed. It’s just time to take it out of the oven.

Me & Orson Welles

2009-12-17T18:02:00.009-05:00

The contemporary meaning of auteur is "someone who executive produces and associate produces." Back when he was a snob for the left, Dennis Miller ranted accurately that something was wrong with a culture in which the words "Tori Spelling" and "zeitgeist" could be found in the same sentence. Orson Welles suffered the full force of everything we hate about Hollywood: the favoritism, the nepotism, the studio politics and test audiences. His name is tossed around today as journalistic shorthand for people like Sam Mendes, the young writer-director who emerged from Broadway fame and followed up with a successful film debut, American Beauty. But Welles can also be code for a charismatic flash in the pan talent that spends itself too quickly and either dies young or lives to bloat as a has-been.

I always found Welles's excesses to be splendidly Falstaffian. I also think Walter Kerr made a good point when he said that the preponderance of Welles's misfortune came from his own inability to take himself out of the picture: his acting, carried over time, began to undermine the genius of his direction and design. I didn't want to believe that, but after listening to Welles's Hamlet and flipping through the reel in my head, I find that I probably would take The Trial over his Othello. But why hold one masterpiece hostage against the other? Especially when the real-life character of Orson Welles makes for such splendid storytelling on its own?

Me & Orson Welles follows a 17-year old actor as he ambitiously insinuates himself into the Mercury Theatre's inaugural production, Julius Caesar. True or not, the story mirrors an earlier moment in Welles's own career: when he was 17, he lied about his age to get into an acting company in Dublin. From thence, Broadway, the Federal Theatre Project, and beyond. I'm inclined to believe the story since everyone else in this movie's Mercury cast -- from Eddie Marsan as John Houseman, to James Tupper as Joseph Cotton, to Ben Chaplin as George Coulouris, to Leo Bill as Norman Lloyd -- has been eerily well-cast. One senses that a swap to black and white film stock would seal the illusion completely.

And what of that master illusionist, the narcissistic polymath Welles? Well, see for yourself:

What always struck me about Welles, the icon, was the dynamism of his genius. He had, as John Frankenheimer once said, a "total intellect" for every component of the art form. What always struck me about Welles, the man, was the dynamism of his character, something his later film appearances (especially the ones "as himself") don't quite show, but this candid interview might:

Or this moment of on-camera vulnerability from 1965:

Emotions criss-cross his brow with a dexterity reminiscent of Brando -- that other gluttonous icon of Broadway and Hollywood golden ages. As played by the British actor Christian McKay, we get more of the haggard, declamatory Welles of 1948 than the fresh-faced 22-year old who had already jolted Broadway twice before his 1937 Caesar. First, with an all-black production of Macbeth, set in Haiti, and then again with his scandalous production of the Marxist opera The Cradle Will Rock. An anti-fascist, pro-Brutus version of the Roman tragedy almost sounds like a come-down, though it set the standard for every ambitious recontextualization of Shakespeare since. So whenever you see Hedda Gabbler on Mars or ... I don't know ... Timon of Akron ... you have Welles to thank.

Two stories about that Caesar production that didn't make it into the film: He wanted the flash of a real knife blade on stage and so he used one and almost killed the actor playing Caeser. The film also glides over one major reversal in the story. The reinstatement of the Cinna the Poet scene converted the whole enterprise from a failure to a masterpiece in one stroke. An earlier preview concluded to no applause, causing Welles to spit in a fellow actor's face -- another famous instance of diva rage. But what a scene and what a change is here o'erlook'd! Early in Me and Orson Welles, Sonja Jones warns young Richard that acting with Welles is a gift but also the privilege of getting sprayed with his spit. So why not show this meltdown to sweeten the breakthrough success that followed? The film never shies from showing the duplicitous and childish side of Welles, so I'm more baffled than disappointed.

After Caesar, Welles stunned the nation with his War of the Worlds broadcast and was rewarded for this creative trauma with the most generous film contract ever offered a novice director. He used his authority as the ultimate Hyphenate writer-producer-director-actor to create Citizen Kane. So, in five lightning-quick years, Welles made history in theatre, radio, and film. Hopefully a future biopic will try to draw a tragic arc over that period and beyond to give us the man in the full rush and dynamism of his life. The tragedy of his story is that each of those revolutionary masterpieces -- Cradle, Caesar, War, Kane -- may live to be more famous for the drama surrounding them than the merits of the particular art work.

Cradle is rarely produced, but the story of its production bears re-telling. Battered by HUAAC on one side and union politics on the other, Welles and his cast decided to defy both by marching to another theatre and performing the show from the audience. It is the meta-drama of Welles's bravery and innovation that resonates, more than Blitzstein's music. Similarly, to listen to the War of the Worlds broadcast is to wonder how any so many people could have been fooled into believing it was real, given all the warnings before during and after the broadcast that it was fiction. We cite that show as an incident more than an entertainment, an example of verisimilitude run amok (that puts reality tv to shame). It is Welles the illusionist at play in War. Just as it is Welles the illusionist at war with Hearst in Kane.

He did things with the earth, wind, fire, and water of the art. Half the techniques now credited as Wellesian innovations were byproducts of his novice curiosity and Gregg Toland's exploratory spirit. Here's one last clip about what it means to work an audience:

They Tortured a Man They Knew to Be Innocent

2009-10-01T15:51:00.006-04:00

I don't know how this works or if I'm allowed to claim credit, but ... in response to Andrew Sullivan's post on the case of Fouad al-Rabiah, I wrote this:

Can we now call torture what it is? It is not a tactic and it is not a post-conventional moral exception for ticking time-bombs. Torture is a punishment. When viewed as such, confessed as such, it loses the tedious layers of rationalization that have characterized both sides of the debate so far. Torture is not an anxious over-reaction to future threats that haven't materialized. It has nothing to do with the future; it comes from the past, from a wound we never constituted after 9/11. Not concern for the future, but still-born rage for a past that can never be undone.

Torture is revenge. It is the only expression we have found that goes beyond our fruitless wars, beyond cultural alienation and jingoism. For torture is an intimate punishment defined by the willful desecration of reason and subjectivity. This is why so many people cannot bring themselves to utter the word in press or public forums. Mere death cannot compete with torture for the succor of revenge we seek -- we needed to craft a living death. We needed to make an inhuman aesthetic (Abu Ghraib) to match the spectacle of impotence and vulnerability we suffered on 9/11.

Any utilitarian argument (e.g. better safe than sorry, ticking time-bomb, ends justify the means, etc.) misses the essential emotions at play. Indeed, we cling to new iterations of these arguments to hide the raw emotions beneath them.

When I working on Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play at Arena Stage in 2005, we had an elderly German woman come in to tell us what it was like to sit on Hitler's lap as a three year-old. He chose her out of a crowd for a photo-op kiss on the head. She remembers her parents beaming with pride and her grandfather, an old-school Socialist, angrily waving his cane in the air behind the admiring throng. This was a year after Abu Ghraib and some months before Cheney began the formal request for torture as a standard operating procedure. Then, as now, the Nazi comparison was shrill and distracting so I asked the elderly German woman, as politely as I could, if there was any use or merit to the comparison between the neocon nightmare and the Third Reich.

It's the sort of question you can't help feeling embarrassed for asking. Her answer?

"The fact that we're even having a debate about whether torture is okay ..."

And then she stopped speaking. We waited for the ellipses to rebound into some compact judgement or affirmation. But they didn't. The silence was its own argument. Because torture is designed to take us to the unspeakable, to a place where all argument and all rational or subjective coordinates have been bleached away, deracinated by a cruelty that knows no cause, no imperative except the will to inflict its inner death on anything that reminds it of its founding condition:

I used to laugh at that picture. Jesus perched on a mushroom cloud, blessing the death beneath him as one more route to his tender embrace. Or Jesus dealing a deck of cards, what have you. But the more I stare at it, the more it reminds me of the only other image to dominate the American consciousness since 9/11:

Falling from the clouds ... we'll cling to anything to root ourselves again. Torture is the best way to revenge Ground Zero. But like that original horror, it gives us zero ground to stand on.

Gay Porn Makes You Straight ...

2009-09-29T12:00:00.000-04:00

... or so goes the transitive operation implied in Michael Schwartz's recent comment on the psycho-sexual impact of pornography. That's not just a cheeky blog title; I intend to prove that gay porn does, indeed, make Michael Schwartz straight. Behold:

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Maybe I'm only alert to the subject because I'm buried in Angels in America rehearsals right now. After all, some closet case blurts a hilarious projection of his own cocklove onto an unsuspecting target every 32 seconds in this country ...

TOM: Hey man, can I borrow your pen?

JOE: Faggot.

So why harp on Schwartz? Well … the idea that sexuality lurks outside the self and threatens to pounce like a fabulous jaguar and then stroke us to death with its speckled mane, leaving us no choice but to grip its fuzzy junk betwixt the prone cheeks of our fragile, homo sapien asshole while thrusting helplessly against ...

Sorry. I got lost in my own metaphornication there. But you see where this is going. Homosexuality is "inflicted" on people, says Schwartz. The classic Freudian drama tracks this paranoia back to repressed desire. For the paranoiac, homosexuality floats invisible like an airborne toxin. It seeps through living room walls and leaves other cherished fortifications -- church, school, government -- porous and vulnerable. This paranoia craves a localizing Object (a pen, say) on which to vent and validate the governing hatred.

For the past five years, same-sex marriage legislation has given this psychodrama its political coordinates. But back in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic concretized the "airborne toxin" metaphor by converting private homophobia into public hypochondria. What was previously a floating, elastic concept (gay = "virus") became literal (gay = virus!). And just as the invention of Viagra allowed Jay Leno to make 14,926 dick jokes without losing his audience ... so did AIDS allow President Reagan to smirk away 20, 849 dead Americans without losing his job.

WHAT A TOOL

Let's blame the Internet, shall we? They say only three seconds elapsed between the invention of the photograph and its use as a pornographic medium. To date, only 9/11 and Barack Obama have punctured the high-water mark set by our prevailing search for sex online. Porn may not be the dominant activity in cyberspace, but it remains the dominant quest. So maybe Schwartz's homophobia fascinates me because it provides a live specimen of last century's "airborne toxin" mutating into today's Wi-Fi Trojan Horse.

Or maybe it fascinates me because Schwartz is half right. On balance, we experience the Internet as more of a convenience than a nuisance. But the medium does have an invasive nature that cannot be extracted from its benefits as a communication device. Not just the pop-up ads of yore, but also the fact that a cybernetic society cannot experience warrentless wiretapping as a violation when each of its inhabitants is already some kind of avatar or exhibitionist. I wouldn't have gone voluntarily to the Values Voters Summit where Schwartz was speaking; I needed the Internet to bring me there. To judge from the shaky-cam footage, it doesn't look like this event was being archived for distribution beyond the modest crowd in attendance. We now have a voyeuristic perspective on a man talking about the effects of a voyeuristic medium like pornography. To paraphrase the man himself, Schwartz is inflicted on people.

My artsy, leftest colleagues and I usually find it easy to dismiss people like Schwartz. When we've exhausted the Freudian formula above, we remind ourselves that pornography and art are different things (that nevertheless deserve similar protection under the First Amendment) and that anyone who doesn't know this is unworthy of consideration or sustained debate. End of discussion. But I submit that pornography is an art because it requires the suspension of disbelief to facilitate its particular ... ahem ... catharsis. A woman stares into a camera, presenting herself for undiminished reproduction as an Object. But the male viewer must pretend past his own disembodied presence in this exchange, for he secretly knows the woman was staring at an Object, too. Before the man can commodify the woman by fucking at her image, she has commodified him by fucking around his camera.

So what would Pirandellian porn look like? I don't care, really, my only point is that pornography doesn't offer sexual liberation for either party. If anything, it fulfills the capitalist ideal better than prostitution because it converts Desire into a purely abstract relation between Things: the image/woman and tool/man. Perhaps for this reason, online porn consumption is comparatively higher in the deep-red states of Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, where Schwartz might expect to find a sympathetic audience. Now, what happens when this fluid abstraction comes back into the world of bodily fluids?

MONEY SHOTS

Another recent survey of porn trends found that most kids today believe sex is supposed to end with the man ejaculating on the woman's face. Here the copulation of Image and Tool achieves its full performative expression after the solo dress rehearsal has ended. The climax is no longer an interior, inter-subjective moment shared (or at least offered) between partners. If you cum inside a woman, and there’s no camera to record it, did it really happen?! Now the orgasm is an exterior moment that allows the man to behold his own contempt as an image he quite literally inflicts on his partner from a distance. So Schwartz is half-right when he says that porn directs your sexual drive inward: not because it leads to masturbation, but because it requires you to re-cast yourself as an outside observer of yourself having sex.

Like most spectacularly offensive moral pronouncements, Schwartz’s comment accidentally taps into a genuine psychological phenomenon. But here the tragic reversal doesn't turn on the tidy binary of gender preference, as exemplified by Schwartz's "friend with a homosexual lifestyle." When we get lost in porn, we sacrifice the subjective self to the super-ego -- that component of the psyche that has always been watching you have sex. (Since before you knew you were alive, in fact, but Schwartz’s admiring nod to eleven-year-old boys makes the point just as well.) Our attempts to transgress the super-ego through porn are doomed to failure and repetition because they only ever place us at the foot of the bed, perched side by side with the voice and vantage of that same super-ego as it continues to judge or command a mutual desire unfolding spontaneously outside its grip.

So what offense could possibly match Schwartz’s prepubescent hatred of gay men? How to account for naked homophobia that wants to cover itself with half-baked psychology?

Simple: Schwartz fears porn because it threatens to replace the same-sex union he’s already forged … with his father. To paraphrase Ron Jeremy, Who’s your daddy, Schwartz?

Combat!

2009-09-28T15:48:00.003-04:00

Check out Dan Brooks at Combat!

We want Bill Sparkman’s death to be proof that right-wing, anti-federal populism has gotten out of control. We want, on some sad level that transcends any conscious decency, for people like Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann to be real and dangerous demagogues, not just anything-for-a-buck blowhards chattering inconsequentially into space. This desire is, of course, completely wrong, and a world in which it is fulfilled is undeniably a worse one. Cross your fingers that nobody takes Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly seriously, and all our fretting over their supposedly pernicious influence is overwrought and misplaced. Ask yourself, though, if you really hope that’s true.

He can also dish out quotable snark with the best of them. For example, Michele Bachmann is "God's answer to a prayer Pat Robertson accidentally said backwards." But even when he's on a tear, he makes the effort to research his targets. What might ordinarily be a subjective screed with some angry coinages becomes, in his treatment, something informative and useful at the same time.

Bachmann is a product of the Minnesota public school system, so she probably remembers the meteoric rise to prominence of Joseph McCarthy, and the chain of unbroken successes that comprised his political career until he died peacefully in his sleep. Then again, maybe she just remembers God creating animals and light, plus a couple of things from Leviticus. In 1993, she helped found the New Heights Charter School, the first institution of its kind in Minnesota. Later that year, she resigned amid accusations that her proposals to teach creationism and introduce the “12 Christian Principles”—which sounds exactly 20% better than the Ten Commandments—amounted to the use of public funds for a religious school. Bachmann is a devout Christian, who recently called for a national day of prayer and fasting to stop health care reform. I think we can all agree that Jesus wants sick people to feel better and all, but ultimately his fiscal conservatism and commitment to free markets is going to win out.

Anywho. Add it to your RSS reader and you'll get a solid essay with nice mix of humor and conscience five days a week.

Brief Thought: Jerry's Subs

2009-09-24T17:23:00.002-04:00

The only place where "sub sandwich" feels like "sub-sandwich." As in, something unworthy of the name sandwich. You have to be sub-human to subsist on Jerry's sub-sandwiches.

Eat Me or What You Will

2009-09-08T00:44:00.010-04:00

I can be a real jerk to new playwrights.

Whenever the development hell meme comes round the wheel of Theatre Blogger Topics, I usually side against the playwright. A couple years ago, I watched a panel of speakers at Theatre Row discuss play development and how hellish it is. The panel included a New York critic, a Yale professor, and two theatre administrators and they all agreed that the limp ritual of the staged reading was cruel and pointless and only generated invasive comments that were harmful to the playwright's self-esteem.

And all I could think was,"Yeah, but ... most new plays really do suck."

To be sure, some plays are born sucky, some achieve suckiness, and some have suck thrust upon them. But the panel's lament only covers to the last of those three. It occurred to me too late to ask at the time: how can a critic and a professor claim that development was bad when their professions require an endless stream of ball-busting commentary? A critic applies standards to a play when he reviews it and a professor applies standards to a play when he grades it. But when individual theatres want to hear something out loud and then provide a list of things that do or don't work ... well, that's just unfair.

I'm an actor, so I know about rejection and criticism and the living death that is the audition process. I experience development hell from the other side of the music stand. After Bacchus-knows-how-many staged readings, I'm starting to think all bad plays were written by the same two playwrights. With that possibility in mind, I offer this list of things that make it hard to respect the writer and his or her self-esteem during a development reading ...

Ping pong dialog. Conflict is the essence of drama, yes, but some young writers are stuck on a binary dialog rhythm that sounds something like this:

A: Stop chewing your food that way.

B: This is how I always chew my food.

A: Not since you started eating meat again.

B: I thought you loved meat.

A: You and I both know I'm a vegetarian.

B: It's news to me.

A: Everything's news to you.

And so on. So two characters are fighting about everything and nothing and all we learn is that one character will oppose what the other character just said. It's astonishing how long some people try to sustain this rhythm ... like a really boring version of the Question Game, or a really pointless improv activity. It's undeniably dramatic, but it bars any possibility of dramatic development since no statement can escape the self-canceling pull of the succeeding statement. And it's definitely emotional, but anger is the only emotion that can sustain this stuff for a whole scene.

The Vocative Tense. A glitch that occurs most often in book adaptations. The vocative should be used sparingly:

A: How's it going, John?

B: Oh, great, Sally, great.

A: John, is something wrong?

B: Sally, stop asking me that!

A: I can't help it, John, I love you!

B: We're not going to discuss that, Sally.

Most people don't use the vocative in real life. We know the person to whom we are speaking; there's no need to whip out the proper name, except for emphasis. Book adaptations sometimes import the vocative as a replacement for "he said" and "she said." But I think the over-reliance on the vocative comes from a failure to touch the character, or to distance oneself from the character. Some intimacy or chemistry is missing and the writer makes up for it by clutching to the names. It's an easy enough diagnostic to run: go through the script and find them all. Ask yourself if they're really necessary or natural-sounding, and then find the connection the character really wants to make.

A brief note. "This play benefits from an accelerated pace. The characters are fast-talking, the action is hyperkinetic, the emotions are volatile. A ponderous interpretation is anathema to the spirit of the play." I've seen some version of that caveat in front of so many scripts that I now deliberately force myself to read at half-pace just to see what the author wants to cover up. This forced gloss on the composition means the writer has failed in two ways. First, a fast, hyper-kinetic, volatile play shouldn't need a note to be understood as such. Playwrights can suffer from mangled tone, genre-tweaking, or bad design, but the rhythm of a play should be self-evident. How many Mamet imitators do we have today? This is not to say that a director or actor can't betray the rhythm of a script; many do. But if this betrayal is so chronic as to merit a note in the script, the playwright should seriously ask themselves why they keep falling in love with the same asshole. Second, the desire for speed usually means there are other weaknesses in the story that the writer would not like to confront. The dialog is chaffy and impersonal. There is no theme or thrust to the story, so one must be imposed after the fact.

Split Scenes. Tony Kushner has inspired more imitators than David Mamet and Tom Stoppard combined and just as Mamet's disciples have their brief notes and ping-pong dialog, Kushner's fans have gone wild with split scenes. Act Two, Scene Nine of Millennium Approaches shows a man dumping his AIDS-ravaged lover in a hospital room while a Mormon confesses his homosexuality to his horrified, drug-addled housewife. The scene is only "split" because it takes place in two rooms. The larger actions of abandonment, confession, judgment, and revelation all blend in a heartbreaking simulcast fight between four very different people facing two equally agon-izing dilemmas.

In admiring reflection of that feat, a generation of playwrights have copied the structure and written backwards from an echo without first generating any sound of their own:

A: We need to talk.

1: Talk to me, Tom.

B: About what?

2: What do you want me to say?

A: This can't go on any longer.

1: I want you to look me in the face.

B: Face it, Susan, it's your fault.

2: The fault-lines of our marriage are emerging.

It's hard on the eyes. But it's written to be easy on the ears so that nothing can emerge except a shiny peal of raw Confluence.

Intermission Anxiety. Intermissions should be more than an opportunity to sell Kendall Jackson Merlot at $5 a cup. They should challenge the playwright to trust the audience to come back. They also allow the playwright to experiment with elliptical structures (and traditional ones, for that matter). If I had to boil down the art of dramaturgy to one catchall maxim, it would be: "People change. Then they change again." Some plays have interesting people that don't change. Some plays have interesting people that change. But we should be offering compound fractures of the heart for the ticket prices we demand. An intermission is a great way to test if this has happened.

As Sara Cormeny pointed out at Parabasis a few weeks ago, many new playwrights like to place bewildering flights of zaniness right before or right after intermission. In her reading, this feels like a lack of confidence in the original premise. The inciting incident has spent itself. The play sports a saggy mid-section. It reclines in a hammock, propped up by an Act One Novelty and an Act Three Twist. And like a hammock-dweller, the writer swings lazily in the middle, looking for distractions (dream sequences, usually) to kill time before it's over. Suddenly, intermission looks more dramatic than anything happening on stage.

The other cure for Intermission Anxiety is, of course, the 90-minute one-act play. No exits.

Stage direction: She cries. There's a scene in the movie Juno where the talented Ellen Page is seen crying in a car. Her pain is presented as an extant moment, asserted by the script and captured by the camera. There is a scene in the movie Truly Madly Deeply in which Juliette Stevenson loses her shit in front of her therapist. She bawls so heavily her breathing does that little-kid undertow inhale thing. Between spasms of distress, she shouts out everything that still torments her about her husband's death. When she's done, her sinus is filled with snot and the therapist hands her Kleenex with a disgustingly proud look on her face, as if to say "Well done, my client. I have helped you achieve something emotional today." The therapist is impressed. We are impressed. Stevenson's depth of feeling for the story would be betrayed by a hard cut to wordless, unmotivated tears.

So whenever I see a stage direction that says "she cries" I think ... No she doesn't. If she does, it's because the action or the dialog demands tears, not you. Male playwrights, in particular, often assert a moment of emotion for their female characters instead of building one from the inside out. I did a reading a month ago and was surprised to discover, after a week developing the script, that there was an entire emotional event hidden in a paragraph of stage direction. It went something like "she stands, she waits, she thinks, she cries, she gathers herself." None of us caught it or talked about at the table and no wonder. It's a scene built entirely in tech rehearsal: five cues from the light booth et voila!

Altered consciousness. Some people can only communicate when they're drunk or high. These people have a problem. Some playwrights think eloquence and insight can only emerge from a drunk or high character. This is a problem, too, because it condescends to that character. No one could be as naturally clever or verbose as the playwright, so a convention must be introduced to make the line/moment/insight more believable. This isn't always a bad thing -- Dionysus was the god of wine, after all -- but a good writer shouldn't need a circumstantial excuse to be poetic. Theatre is a Dionysian event because it produces altered consciousness, not because it represents altered consciousness. Like the brief note above, the drunk scene can be used to glide over lines that wouldn't sound meaningful or poetic in the first place. And if anything falls flat in a drunk scene ... well ... that's what drunks do. So now even the bad lines can be excused as altered consciousness. Unless that consciousness is itself and invention (i.e. some new form of inebriation) there needs to be a really good reason to send your characters on a bender. Drunk scenes can be great exploratory scenes, as long as the writer cleans his characters up for the real event.

Empty Spaces. The modern American theatre is an expensive Rube Goldberg machine for powering a ghost light. So much effort, exploitation, and charity just to light an empty room for 21-hours a day. Schrodinger is laughing in his coffin.*

We all knowingly rag on Kitchen Sink Plays, but at least Kitchen Sink Plays have a reason for being set in a room for a couple hours. Now playwrights throw everything but the kitchen sink at the audience in a flurry of agitated, orally-fixated dialog that rarely connects with the physical, the corporeal, the actual space inherent in this space-bound medium. That's just a crabby broad-swipe, I know. But for me, it's the ultimate test.

EAT ME or WHAT YOU WILL

So I just finished doing a reading at the Kennedy Center's annual Page to Stage festival. The play was called Eat Me or What You Will and it featured, among other crimes, a very long drunk scene, a zany flight into guided meditation fantasy, some ping-pong dialog, a crying old woman, and a jarring rhythm that I'm sure could be fixed with a brief note in the script. I don't think the play suffers from Intermission Anxiety, but we only did the first act, so who knows? The complete play is over 160 pages, so some split scenes might be necessary.

Problem is ... I wrote it.

I'd like to think the drunk scene goes hand in hand with the bachelor party that contains it. And the drunk character misses out on important information while drunk -- he doesn't reveal important information this way. The guided meditation moment happens halfway through the act, not as some bizarre closer to bring people back. But I fear the moment is really just my feeble way into a female character I don't completely understand yet. It was gratifying to hear people catch the jokes and sit up for the tension build near the end of the act. But I was a sweating, toe-tapping mess the rest of the time and had to hold myself back from screaming TALK FASTER! LET'S GO!!

I stick to my list above. Writers are lucky because a good play will ultimately survive an under-rehearsed performance. Writers may not be as essential to the act of theatre as actors, but they have a harder job because they are not allowed to lie. Actors can lie all they want -- the effort to conceal emotion reads just as authentically as the emotion itself. But Jose Rivera was right when he said writer's block comes from an inhibiting lie in the composition.

Right now, I don't feel blocked, just over-stimulated. This is my first jump into a reading of my own words since college. In the intervening eight years, I've devoted my creative energy to acting, blog essays, and film editing. Each of those crafts lets the craft-maker repeat and behold his work again and again, making changes directly to the art-piece. I can play with different voices for my character, I can polish a sentence in an old essay, I can re-edit an effect or cut or that doesn't work. But I don't know when I'll get to hear my play out loud again. All I know is: the performance was the real site of discovery for me. I've learned enough from the other side of the music stand to know that the actors are a gift to that process. I pity the idealistic playwright who hates actors yet masochistically signs himself up for a very painful game of Telephone every time his work is performed.

So what have I learned from all this? Well, in the words of one of my characters: you have to aim past the board. The play isn't in the words or in my head, it's in the playing. The real story sits somewhere inside a thicket of exploratory scenes, surrogate interrogatory characters, lies, evasions, distractions, dream sequences and rewrites. I didn't go to grad school for this, so I'm happy to pick up any hellish development readings no one wants. Before I get furious at an actor for making a hammy choice I have to ask what it is about the story that permits it. And before I shoot my mouth off to new playwrights -- demanding to know why their assertions don't match their stories -- I will remember what a gift it can be to hear the words at all.

*or IS he?!

Season 9 Tracking Shot

2009-07-01T14:38:00.002-04:00

I just finished putting this together. Enjoy!

Red Eyes, Pure Soul

2009-04-18T00:26:00.005-04:00

TAKE YOUR HAND FROM OFF MY SKULL, LESSER MORTAL!

THIS RITUAL IS POINTLESS. I WILL EAT YOU ALL!

Charles Alexanderovich Sokolowski, April 5, 2009 -- now a Christian child.

Inishmore Tangent

2008-11-24T01:42:00.007-05:00

For some reason, I keep thinking of a Christian comedian named Ken Davis.

My mom used to be a youth minister in suburban Maryland. This job forced her to sprout antennae tuned to that narrow wavelength of culture that was somehow both Christian and Cool. Anything to keep the kids attention. For instance, when M.C. Hammer released his single "Pray" in the early 90s, my mom bought the cassette and displayed it in her office. I do not know if she has graduated to Kanye West, but I doubt it.

What makes self-identified Christian rock so awful is the clumsy studio grafting of scripture over the devil's music. The resulting mash-up somehow manages to blaspheme both Jesus and satan. Christians know they're stooping to contemporary motif and the rest of us resent (nay damn) the co-opted genre. And yet, as bad as Christian Rap, Christian Ska, and Christian House music may be, you can always redeem yourself by listening to something else. Wash your heart in the blood of Hendrix, Dylan, or Talib Kweli and be born anew -- the grace of good music is indeed infinite.

But Christian Comedy ... that coats the soul with a permanent residue of liquid cringe. There are many ways to get a bad song out of your head. So how does one un-learn the Antijoke?

Ken Davis comes back to my memory as I try to parse the experience of playing Padraic in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. But I can't quite articulate why; I just know this thread would be distracting in the longer term paper blog post I'm putting together. Was it the pasty Lutheran complexion? The floppy glut beneath the jawbone? He reminded me of every chaperone we ever had for church group trips -- trying to be the cool one by making a covert detour from the caravan to buy a sheaf of donuts. Ours would be the deliciously deviant mini-van! There was something sickly about his humor (and his humour) that made each laugh sound like an penance, or each joke an occasion for pity.

Not that the jokes were especially bad, just that they were told with a kind of strangled mirth. I'm not a good enough writer to describe this sensation, but I can try to transcribe what it says to me.

It's okay. It's finally okay. We're allowed to laugh! This show has been approved before the fact and you will encounter nothing in your laugh to challenge what is most sacred. We confess up front that what follows is not only TV-G, but in direct service to the humorless authority of our jealous god. How wonderful that even He allows us to laugh under certain circumstances. We will bat down other smirking curiosities with redoubled force because tonight we see that it's physically possible to genuflect and guffaw at the same time. And if you feel guilty, just think ahead to tomorrow's work -- repurposing laughter to mock the damned.

Well, that's as much as I can remember without consulting YouTube. Here's Ken in his own words now. Okay, they're not all his Words. He's borrowing a few from Cosby, I think. Maybe they came with the sweater ...

But seriously, folks.

What does Ken Davis have in common with Martin McDonagh? If I had to wager a mean mini-thesis, I'd say that they both ask us to make a sick moral concession which permits not just laughter, but a creepy righteous laughter on top of it. For both men, laughter is not really a source of liberation or intuition or existential discovery (the way it is with St. Bill Hicks, for example). No, the Catholic Laugh can only liberate those who are already saved. It can only intuit a Law that was already imposed from the outside. And it can only discover new ways to weaponize this singular joy of living for deployment against the unenlightened.

THE WORD IS "CELEBRATE"

If I recall, there isn't a single joke in the Bible. God is only funny if you take him at his Word. Or if you accept that the joke is always on us.

Inishmore Journal

2008-11-18T10:13:00.006-05:00

Hey kids. We closed The Lieutenant of Inishmore this past Sunday. For the past month, I've been borrowing a book of essays on Martin McDonagh from co-star John Lescault ...

... and I promised I'd return it soon. So this is a hold-over post while I finish a longer one about the play and our production.

Doesn't Marty look bad-ass on the cover? Here's a playwright who has the BALLS to depict Aran Islanders as the shoe-polish-eating bumblefucks they are. You see, it takes great courage to mock rednecks onstage for theater audiences paying $70+ a ticket. That'll show 'em. Also, did you know that terrorists are assholes? Well, McDonagh is brave enough to say it. Terrorists are dumb-ass jerk-face dick-heads!

I have no affection for backwater zealotry or the god that provokes it, but I'm still pretty sure McDonagh's first goal here was to make people laugh. Nothing more. That's my bold thesis on L of I anyway. He uses blood as the base material for farce the way The Underpants uses lust. If you care to dig any deeper, you're only going to be disappointed.

So why am I taking forever to compose my own line-by-line analysis? Because there's something suspicious about the canonization of McDonagh and I confess it's interfered with my ability to approach this play as either jolly farce or serious character study. It's neither. Contrary to every synopsis written about the play, the title character Padraic is not a psychopath. And contrary to Catherine Rees, this play does not force the audience to "confront their own approaches to the sentimentality of the Irish political movement and to interrogate the causes of Padraic's dislocation and isolation in a world which no longer remembers the history it is fighting for."

I have a feeling some critics and thinkers are working overtime to justify their own violent laughter. And that's what I'm trying to unpack at the moment. In the meantime, here's our chart for the number of walk-outs per week:

That doesn't include the last two weeks. Two Fridays ago, we had a record-high one-night walkout tally of 17 -- of which 10 left during my nipple-slicing moment in the second scene. I guess they were just closeted terrorists who couldn't bear to see their own dark urges exposed onstage, right? Well, that's the prevailing logic for Rees and a whole slew of critics who think McDonagh's doing something radical with this play. Here are some of the reactions we could hear from the stage:

I don't know if you can read that last one, but it says "Well, if you put the Irish together, that's what you get." And here's a picture of "a complex metaphor for violent sectarianism" ...

Now, I know you can't spell "Catholic" or "fanatic" without "c-a-t." But does that really count as post-Syngian intertextuality?

More soon ...

For Jason Stiles

2008-11-05T15:20:00.008-05:00

THIS IS WHAT A MANDATE LOOKS LIKE

Four years ago, I was working on a production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist with Rorschach Theatre. We retrofitted Fo's farce for the War on Terror, pouring years of frantic discontent into the play. We didn't really rehearse the play, as I remember. Instead, we spent our evenings doing freestyle op-ed monologues, hoping to shoehorn every last outrage into the script. I can't remember what I was hoping the night Bush won 62 million votes over John Kerry's record-high 59 million. But I remember sharing the anger and despair with my most lovably cynical friends Jason Stiles, Marybeth Fritzsky, Melissa Schwartz, Grady Weatherford, Daniel Ladmerault and others. Last night we gathered again, in person and by phone, to watch, shout, cry ... and sleep easy for the first time in years.

Bush's 2004 victory looked conclusive, but only against the flat gestalt of the 2000 fustercluck. I remember W braying the next day that he'd "earned political capital" and that he intended to spend it. First stop? A privatization of Social Security that never materialized. Next? Diagnosing Terry Shiavo from the Senate chamber. Third: Hurricane Katrina, in which 1800 Americans perished. The glossy, shrink-wrapped Homeland Security apparatus revealed itself as a haven for despicable cronyism better suited for spreading insecurity abroad than security on the homeland. And suddenly people realized that without some oppositional reflecting surface, W had no identity whatsoever. He needed homophobia to keep his own people inspired in 2004. He needed a political opponent to denounce or destroy. The Apophatic Presidency.

Who's the one to blame for this strain in my vocal chords?
Who can pen a hateful threat but can't hold a sword?
It's the same who complain about the global war
But can't overthrow the local joker that they voted for.

Through no effort of ours, Bush will be gone. President Barack Obama (say it out loud one more time) will face a similar challenge in defining himself. Will he lead a party of protest or a party of governance? Like most of my election-night party chums, I retain a pessimistic reflex in the midst of this unmistakably liberal mandate. I can already see the 2012 challenger standing at a podium, slowly unfolding an old, then-forgotten sign ...

For me, Obama's triumph is a rebuke to cronyism, anti-intellectualism, the culture wars, and disaster capitalism. What will he put in its place? I still think he's The Virgin President, but will his (INSERT MANLY EUPHEMISM) advance American hegemony or heal the planet? Will he lead us away form an Ownership Society and towards ... I don't know what to call it ... a Creative Nation that rewards productivity over paperwork? Will the Bill of Rights be, at least, 25% stronger now? I seem to remember that being part of the oath ...

I'm not being cynical, I promise. Let's not forget that Obama's triumph also includes the repudiation of Clintonite triangulation -- the very cynicism that assumed, as a matter of fact, that Obama was "not fundamentally American in his thinking and his values." These morning-after questions are really just bullets on my Obama.com wish-list. But for the first time I feel free to wish. President Barack Obama ... say it again, people ... has either delivered hope or capitalized on hope. That's enough gas to drive to January 21. Here's hoping for new energy past that.

Open Source Obama

2008-09-25T01:06:00.015-04:00

Has any candidate inspired more armchair quarterbacks (speechwriters/debaters/asskickers) than Barack Obama?

Watching the first Presidential debate, I felt much like Maureen Dowd (or Christophers Hitchens and Matthews): where was the knock-out punch? Why won't Obama finish him Mortal Kombat style? In a column titled "Barack Obama Doesn't Need Your Two Cents," Christopher Beam explains how all the sideline shouting cancels itself out. He should attack Palin! He should ignore Palin! He should warm up! He should cool down! And so on. I'm starting to think this slow-boil frustration is actually part of the Obama strategy. Call it DIY Rhetoric. And then pause to watch the following video again. Because now that McCain has conceded Michigan and publicly vowed to do nothing but throw poop for the remaining month, it's worth remembering which candidate actually has an affirming vision for the country:

Back in the primaries, Hillary Clinton actually tried to turn the screeching downhill skid of her own candidacy into a point against Obama. Why can't he close the deal? True, he's winning, but would you trust a guy who takes this long to beat me? It's a cotton candy assault. Say it once and it's tasty. Say it twice out loud and it evaporates in your mouth. She's essentially right, of course, since John McCain would be beating her much more thoroughly right about now. But only in the Clintonian crazy-straw of triangulation* and capitulation does this ploy make sense.

At the time, my shower-stall speech on the subject went something like this ... ahem:

I find it incredibly inspiring that we've taken our time to pick a nominee. Yes, many people have had their minds made up from the beginning. But this election is too important to resign to knee-jerk primary race trend-setting. Think about it. For the first time in ages, the national attention span has paused to consider the needs of each state in the country. How often does the mainstream media sit down to hear from the people of Montana? How often do national news networks stop to look at voters as diverse as Hoosiers and Tarheels? And within the same week, at that? Hillary may find this race tedious, but I think we're healthier as a nation when we give each corner of the country a chance to be heard. I think we have an invigorated, battle-tested candidate when they've been called to make the case to Americans everywhere, not just Iowa and New Hampshire. Call me crazy, but I think democracy is stronger when everyone gets a chance to participate.

And so watching the first presidential debate felt like watching the Act Two anticlimax of a sloppy kung-fu movie. "Man, if McCain tried that shit with me, I'd be all like suck THIS motherfucker! WOO-HA NEEEEEEEEEEYAAAH!"

As it happens, I'm living in the battleground state of Virginia for the next couple months -- so I have a place to take this frustration. For the past two Saturdays, I've been canvassing in the DC suburb of Shirlington ("commie country" according to McCain's brother). One of the Obama operatives there pointed out that Arlington county is overwhelmingly Democratic, but they only got 55% turnout in 2004. Their goal is to reach 80% this year and the voter registration deadline is today. If anyone else out there feels like a helpless fantasy football player, I can tell you that nothing sublimates spectator spin better than knocking on doors to spread the word.

On my first day, I confessed to the Obama reps on hand that half my motivation for helping came from this armchair quarterback impulse. I believe in Obama, yes. But I also believe he's in danger. And then it struck me: Barack Obama is the CSS Zen Garden of political candidates. I don't know if this is ingenious, cybernetic open source democracy or the Borg Collective, but the man needs people to complete him. In that spirit, I humbly offer the following post-debate dream sound bites. I hope to have fewer of them after tomorrow's town hall bout in Tennessee.

"Thank you for joining us, John."

Simple. Casual. Innocuous. It only sounds cheeky if you honestly think McCain's campaign "suspension" and debate postponement were serious maneuvers to abate the Wall Street meltdown. Obama made much the same point in his opening remarks when he said "I believe now is the time we should be speaking to the American people." But he could have politely reminded John that he'd already won a round just by showing up. And he could have "owned" the occasion up front.

"You can't treat international negotiations like a junior high school lunch room. No new clubs, no pretending the other person isn't there."

McCain wants to form a League of Democracies. But what happens when free-thinking societies freely think such a club is ridiculous? France, Germany and Britain are out. McCain booted Spain before the fact. So who's left? The League of Democracies is to international negotiations what Earmark Cuts are to budget policy -- a feeble cosmetic idea that doesn't begin to confront the challenges at hand. Combine this with McCain's blithe ignorance about the nation of Iran and you get a foreign policy that goes over very well with fourteen-year-old girls: la la la I can't hear you this is the cool kids table.

Every other democracy has open negotiations with Iran. And why? Because Iran happens to have a large, vibrant, young, pro-Western population. They see the elder theocracy dying off very shortly and their main beef with America isn't our freedom (gasp!) but the simple fact that we've already invaded two of their neighboring countries. McCain and his neocon boosters should be proud because we've already overthrown Iran's democratically-elected government once in living memory. But we can't just keep invading the same country every half-century. American regimes now have worse mileage than American cars. This won't stop McCain from inflating the tires with talk of a "second holocaust," but please.

Many sober minds on both sides of the aisle have pointed out the ironic temperament swap between the young black man and the white elder statesman. I wish Obama had inverted the age disparity by connecting the League of Democracies and Iranian diplomacy with McCain's adolescent world view, too. Which brings me to my last fantasy play ...

"You have to be able to look your opponent in the eye."

Is there a better way to connect the debate about international relations with McCain's bizarre behavior during that very debate? Obama made the same point in his Denver speech by pointing out how "McCain likes to say he'd follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell. But he won't even follow him to the cave where he lives." So why not take the same moral high ground w/r/t diplomacy and fuse that with McCain's cowardly shuffling during the debate? McCain has now repeated two disastrous gambits from Carter's failed 1980 campaign. First he tried to skip the debate altogether. After Obama called the bluff, he tried to pretend Obama wasn't on the same stage with him. Both were attempts to minimize his opponent as a spoiler. It only takes a brief rhetorical judo kick to turn this nonsense back on itself. McCain likes to say he won't blink, but he can't even face the man he's running against.

I don't have anything to add to the Biden-Palin smackdown. It was more declamation than debate anyway. But even within that tightly-girdled pageant, Biden burnt away everything but Palin's eyelashes. Who would have thought his most forceful answer (and Palin's most excruciating fumble) would be on the basic Constitutional definition of the Vice Presidency?! It's worth watching again because, in many ways, the whole debate boils down to this.

I mean, for fuck's sake, they even had the Constitution written in large letters behind them. I knew Palin would be consulting her notecards the whole time, but she can't even answer the question when the crib sheet is hanging in a tapestry right behind her opponent? Never mind the Bush Doctrine. I have the horrid feeling that Palin couldn't have recited the preamble with Joe blocking her view.

I don't expect Biden to point this out, but I thought maybe SNL might.

FOOTNOTE

*Clintonian triangulation Remember when she offered Obama the VP slot before she had the lead to do so? No one expected her to follow through on the promise, of course. The offer was made to float the mere idea of an inverted ticket and thereby deflate Obama's steady triumph in that race. As Obama was quick to point out, you can't offer a second-place spot when you're the one in second place. But no matter. Both Clintons are extremely generous when the gift isn't theirs to give. As Jon Stewart once put it, their "integrity is at its highest when the situation is at its most hypothetical."

While You Were Blinking

2008-09-16T04:04:00.003-04:00

DOCTOR: Have you noticed any adverse side effects in your son since he began taking Ritalin?
HOMER: Well, he's stopped blinking. He says that's when they get ya.

--Simpsons episode, c. 1999

PALIN: I -- I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink.

So I didn't blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.

--September 11, 2008 interview with Charlie Gibson of ABC

I can see what Palin was talking about now! After drinking two pots of coffee and chomping a sheaf of nicotine gum wads, I am now sufficiently "wired" for every new threat to rational discourse. While I was blinking, I missed the whole Lipstick on a Pig story. Now, we've been told by McCain's folk that this election isn't going to be about issues. It may be about personalities or campaign money. But as Palin demonstrates with her manic fealty to "the mission," it's really about the collective attention span.

I won't bother embedding the YouTube video that documents every last blink, wink, stammer, and groping locution of Sarah Palin's first press interview. Nor will I re-play the Bush Doctrine sound bite because I hear Charles Krauthammer has the copyright on that term and has fully absolved her of any misunderstanding. More on the Chucky Lexicon soon.

Like just about everyone, I assumed that if Sarah Palin were going to fumble, she would do so on some arcane policy quiz or left-field factoid. Who is the U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia? Did you agree with the telecom immunity bill? She could easily, nay proudly, botch these questions or quickly tease out right answer. But if I had to ask the softest of softball questions for a guns-and-god Republican candidate, it would be "Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?"

This is an important distinction because her next interview is going to be with Sean "Why doesn't mom love me?" Hannity. I think we can expect him to be gently deferential as he drills her on, say, the three branches of government or the state flower of North Dakota. Because if you can't ask her about the biggest initiatives within your own party, then it's time to skip to the swimsuit competition.

Forget the pregnant pause that followed Gibson's question and the charitable wide-shot that covered it. Forget her annoyed tone as she answered this question with a question, "In what respect, Charlie?" Forget that Charlie followed up with the generously open-ended "What do you interpret that to be?" We're now playing the Game of Questions from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead.

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?
PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?
GIBSON: What do you interpret that to be?
PALIN: His world view?
GIBSON: No, the Bush Doctrine enunciated September 2002 before the Iraq War?
PALIN: What does it all add up to?
GIBSON: Can't you guess?
PALIN: Are you addressing me?
GIBSON: Is there anyone else?
PALIN: Who?
GIBSON: How would I know?
PALIN: Why do you ask?
GIBSON: Are you serious?
PALIN: Was that rhetoric?
GIBSON: No.

Everybody with us? We've gone from a yes/no softball, to an open-ended invite, to a specific query. Palin could have blathered any affirmation she wanted for the first question. She could have interpreted her heart out for the second. And she simply should have known the third. But she fumbled all three. So far, the most effective defense for Palin's ignorance and lack of curiosity has been to make explicit what most of us have assumed since she was announced: that McCain has treated his first executive choice like a scratch-and-win sweepstakes. And just as McDonald's employees can't participate in their own contests, the winner of McCain's long-shot lotto should not have any insider knowledge. So not knowing the Bush Doctrine actually makes her more qualified. You have nothing to worry about because she's just another coupon-clipper like you.

If only they could explain why everyone has to clip coupons these days. Or how a $25 billion dollar coupon (earmark cuts) can pay for $200 billion in tax cuts and the $500 billion we already owe this year. But I shouldn't lecture. If you have sight of Russia, you must perforce have insight into Russia. And if you play Sodoku, you know a thing or two about numbers, so all that insider elitist Washington hoo-ha about the economy needn't scare you, either.

Dammit, I did it again. Sigh.

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Have you ever wondered what a nagging, trivial story like Lipstick on a Pig looks like after you extract it from the globulous maw of hypernews? Well, Glenn Greenwald yanks that festering tapeworm from out the anus of mainstream media in a magnificent essay over at Salon.com. I don't think I've ever seen someone trace every meme and mutation like this. He follows the phrase from its first utterance to its latest iteration as a major news story. But even if you blame Obama for the lion's share of that distraction, Greenwald's piece still reads well as a case study in media watchdogging. In an election where every blink counts, it's refreshing to find someone with the brute patience to tell a complete story.

While you're over there, check out his latest column, too. He explains how the real tragedy about Palin and the Bush Doctrine isn't her ignorance of the subject; it's that this ignorance disqualifies her from a debate we desperately need to have. Sadly, many of us on the left relish the spectacle of that ignorance too much to engage or change it. It struck me watching Tina Fey's pitch-perfect impersonation on SNL: this mimicry reveals nothing about Palin's character (the way Colbert's funhouse mirror actually brings O'Reilley and Hannity into sharper focus). No, Tina Fey actually beautifies Sarah Palin and offers the temptation of years of bankable laughs if we let her achieve higher office.

I know I sound like a humorless jerk right now, but it took me five years to realize that W was chosen by Dick Cheney to placate more than the wacky right. He was chosen to make liberals so delirious with indignant mockery that we failed to fight him. In times like this, I switch from John Stewart to Sage Francis:

But some of y'all still haven’t grown into your face,
And your face doesn't quite match your head.
And I'm waiting for a brain to fill the dead space that's left,
You're all, "Give me ethnicity or give me dreads."
Trustafundian rebel without a cause for alarm,
Cause when push turns to shove
You jump into your forefathers arms.
He's a banker, you're part of the system,
Off go the dreadlocks in comes the income.
The briefcase (the freebase)
The sickness (the symptom)
When the cameras start rollin' stay the fuck outta the picture pilgrim.

Mr. Save The World, spare us the details,
Save the females from losing interest.
And Miss Save The Universe,
You're a damsel in distress,
Tied down to a track of isolated incidents.
Generalize my disease,
I need a taste of what it's like.
Living off the fat of kings,
I play the scab at your hunger strike.
Slow down Gandhi, you're killin'em.

Who's the one to blame for this strain in my vocal chords?
Who can pen a hateful threat but can't hold a sword?
It's the same who complain about the global war,
But can't overthrow the local joker that they voted for.

--"Slow Down Gandhi" from A Healthy Distrust

I smell similar bait with Palin and simply wish we had better candidates before better comedy. When every blink counts, the only political capital worth measuring is attention deficit dollars. Authentic wit is the shortest distance between two ideas. As Ted Widmer recently pointed out in Slate, Obama is losing that fund-raising drive:

The last politician to zing a convention as effectively as Palin did was Ann Richards, the formidable, beehived governor of Texas—a Democrat. Her 1988 oration was a work of genius, not only for its classic line that George H.W. Bush was born with "a silver foot in his mouth"—a much more complex and interesting joke than anything Palin said—but also for its New Deal earthiness and brassy feminism.

Rousing as it was, Biden's recent speech has nothing on this. His joke that McCain should be called "Bush44" takes too long to set up and isn't worth the effort to repeat. If Rudy Guiliani = noun + verb + 9/11, then McCain = ?! We need something more than petty ad hominem gestures to complete that equation.

TRIMMING the HEGEMONY: DOCTRINES and DOGMA

Jesus said to turn the other cheek. The Bush Doctrine says you can strike both of the other guy's cheeks before he's hit either of yours. It takes spectacular effort to maintain the agonizing contradictions at the heart of right-wing morality. True, the apocalyptic death-wish of Revelations has a free-market match in disaster capitalism -- Christian doctrine blessing the Shock Doctrine. But overall, the American right is still losing energy and credibility on laughable concessions to its evangelical base. Like it or not, a solid majority of Americans are pro-choice. They know that Intelligent Design is a joke and climate change is real. Stem-cell research hurts no one and has the potential to help everyone. But because 25% of the country believes that Adam and Eve rode a dinosaur to church,* men like McCain still bend over backwards to appease them.

Remember, the Democratic primary may have taken a long time and ended on a 50-50 split, but the Republican primary crumbled in whole chunks along deep ideological fissures, leaving only one candidate who didn't look or sound totally ridiculous to a general election audience. John Kerry's 2004 primary victory owed to a similar succession of Lesser Evil choices. That quick contest yielded a candidate whose chief appeal was that he wasn't George W. Bush. Or Al Sharpton or Howard Dean or Joe Lieberman.

A similar dilution characterizes the emergence of John McCain. Imagine a Democrat snagged by three Nader-sized factions. Until a few weeks ago, McCain represented the American Right sans libertarianism (Ron Paul), religiosity (Mike Huckabee), or sadism (Mitt Romney). He called out the religious right for the "agents of intolerance" that they were. He dismissed Rush Limbaugh as "a clown" and suffered mightily for that slight. He told W to his face that he should be ashamed of himself during the 2000 campaign. Which is why it's so sad that he chose to debase himself by aligning with Bush so many times and then disowning or reversing his few noble departures: tax cuts, torture, global warming. His choice of Sarah Palin completes this degeneration because she steers the campaign back into Karl Rove's Culture Wars. At the end of the primary race, I wondered what was left of the Republican Party. Now I wonder what's left of John McCain.

Don't blink or you'll miss him, too.

FOOTNOTES

*Adam and Eve rode a dinosaur to church Credit where it's due. This is a Tina Fey joke from a few years ago. Can we get more of this, please?

David Foster Wallace: 1962 - 2008

2008-09-14T09:28:00.005-04:00

He was found in his home this past Friday. He hanged himself.

Mere Triumph

2008-09-03T17:49:00.000-04:00

For the past week, I've indulged in a Spurlockian diet of news and blogs. And like the sad, paunchy Morgan gulping his umpteenth fillet-o-fish, I've watched my metabolism and mental health plummet as I wolf down another Hitchens column or Sullivan post. So I'm writing this to purge myself of all the angry speculation blogging my arteries. Call it Denver Detox. Or angryoplasty.

God, I wish I had a sport to follow instead. But who needs that when you've got CNN's Ballot Bowl '08 traveling to Mile High Stadium, followed by a Hail Mary pass from McCain? I suppose we should expect Chief Justice Roberts to douse the winner with Gatorade on inauguration day.

CHANGE to SPARE

Let me begin with a funny piece of right-wing bitchery that followed Obama's acceptance speech:

We were thrilled by his speech in front of the Greek columns, which were conscientiously recycled from the concert, “Yanni, Live at the Acropolis.” We were honored by his pledge, that if elected president, he will serve at least four months before running for higher office.

Ha ha! The rest of that David Brooks column is a hilarious sample of white resentment. He tries to make many jokes but can only pound his fist against the logo. Like most angry crapitalists, he thinks the best way to attack someone is to mock the brand name they're wearing. Brooks hates pretty much everything, from Frappuchinos to Coke Zero to the Acela train to beauty, achievement, M&Ms, etc. That little sample above was the only shard of genuine wit I could find. Because let's face it: it is pretty funny to imagine Obama leaving office in 2010 to serve as Secretary General of the U.N. At the rate he's going, he could be High Prefect of Alpha Centauri before his IRA matures.

But if Obama's rise follows a scary singularity curve, then my calculations show that Sarah Palin is only a heartbeat away from becoming Lord Protector* of the Milky Way. Of course, one quick way to embiggen your constituency is to count the unborn children spawned by rape and incest. Palin's own family census has rapidly expanded between drafts of this very post!

Mayor of 6,000 for 6 years.
Governor of 600,000 for 2 years.
VP of 300,000,000 for 1 year -- at which point McCain will croak but not before making abortion illegal so she can be ...
President of 500,000,000 for one trimester -- at which point the planet will explode from one catastrophe or another.

For all the tactical questions flying around, we should add the following reverse-hypothetical and then be done with the whole mess: Would McCain have picked Sarah if Hillary were Obama's VP? Everything about the Palin choice smacks of demographic calculation, stagecraft and mere reaction to the Obama camp. McCain met Palin once six months ago. He reached out to her and began vetting only after Obama tapped Biden as his VP. If McCain wanted a young, dynamic governor who appeases the Limbaugh-Coulter set, he could have chosen Bobby Jindal -- an effective "identity politician" with experience both national and local, legislative and executive. And since Palin was only on the radar about as long as Hurricane Gustav, why not pick the guy who's been on TV saving the poor masses of New Orleans?

I know there are a lot of cynical answers to that question -- or answers that try to make McCain look cynical. But with all the resumes on McCain's desk, Palin basically shakes out as Romney without Romney's debate baggage. Unfortunately, she is also Romney without Romney's economic experience -- the other gaping hole in McCain's platform and the issue Obama rightfully owns.

The general election may be the biggest game show on television, but let's remember that the Vice Presidency is not a runner-up prize. It is not White House! The Board Game! The job has two important components and a trillion trivial ones, none of which suit Hillary's gifts or Palin's qualifications. So what's the real game here? Barack Obama lent some of his change (and Change) by selecting Joe Biden. John McCain has lent all of his experience by selecting Sarah Palin. Obama countered McCain's Experience Charge with Joe Biden, and now McCain is countering Obama's Change Charge with Sarah Palin. And back and forth and back and forth. Like two lone kings inching into the stalemate corner of a chess-board, both men have succeeded in canceling out or deadening the potency of each other's catchphrases and criticism. All that remains is the tenacity of the players. In American politics, that means the dollar and decibel count of their supporters.

TOP or BOTTOM?

Bush-Cheney revolutionized this relationship in a couple of ways. Instead being a back-up copy of Bush, Cheney was Bush's back. Rove was the brain, Cheney the spine, and dad had the keys to the house. Cheney wasn't a "force-multiplier" -- to borrow a now-popular army surplus term -- he was the only purposive force in the Bush Administration. Biden may add heft and horsepower to Obama, but there's no doubting that Obama's vision governs the whole enterprise. This odd compact worked well with Bush-Cheney because we were in a state of permanent emergency anyway. It will work for Obama-Biden because the two men complement each other's talents without inverting the chain of command.

Palin, meanwhile, cannot fulfill the first and simplest VP duty: to manage the executive branch during an emergency and become President at a moment's notice. This might not matter if McCain didn't happen to be a 72-year-old cancer survivor. Of course his age and health don't disqualify him from the most stressful public service job in the universe, but they do require some responsible backup in the VP slot.

This might matter even less if McCain and Palin were correct about the major economic, international, and social issues of the day. But because she hews to the Jesusland shock doctrine -- and because McCain still proudly apes the Bush-Rove-Cheney legacy -- a McCain-Palin ticket brings nothing new to the game except a desperate descent into identity politics where, at best, they may collect some stay PUMAs. So be it.

*Lord Protector Her anti-abortion, anti-envrionmental, anti-gay, pro-Intelligent Design platform certainly has a Cromwellian feel to it, don't you think? But hey: he was a reformer!

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If you've read this far, maybe you'll indulge me on a little craft project for the rest. Blogging makes me anxious because I feel like I'm writing on water. And yet, that's not slippery enough. I'll go back to the digestive metaphor from above by comparing blogging to toilet paper: an infinite cyber-spool of single-column commentary, made to be ripped off and disposed. The content, more often than not, has an emetic quality to it. It is scatology perfected. We go to Facebook for connection, we go to blogs to throw poop. We gorge at YouTube. We pray at Google. We forage through eBay and Amazon. If Obama seems like the oracle of our times, it's because he's mastered this medium while his opponent has yet to learn e-mail. Like Moses, he can cause whole memes to part and make passage for his people.

So here's my project.

Print this post.
Tear at the dotted line above.
If you disagree with the preceding analysis, I invite you to burn it or wipe your ass with it. No hard feelings.
If you agree with the preceeding analysis, I invite you to recycle it or better, eat it and forget about it.

Either way, the whole McCain-Palin VP-stakes armchair tactics thing should be forgotten so we can move back to the mere triumph of ideas.

You see, I'm tired of being a prisoner of my own indignation. I'm tired of last-minute Republican lightning rods. We knew that the 2004 Gay Marriage Amendment was never going to pass. We know Palin is manifestly unqualified to be McCain's VP. So why do we waste our energy and breath on them when we know that their only purpose is to stoke the cockles of fundamentalist Christians? Because McCain's own campaign chair has declared that this election is about personalities, not issues. Because they know Obama wins on both counts and it's easier to smear and pander than pave over the horrors of the last eight years. Because they're counting on us to cave to our anger, forget the past and forswear the future. Because it's worked before.

So let's not give into our own smug detachment -- Palin will guarantee that Tina Fey never goes hungry. But I say it's worth sparing a few hours of farce for a generation of goodwill and prosperity.

OWN THIS

It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it. For over two decades -- for over two decades, he's subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy: Give more and more to those with the most, and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the ownership society, but what it really means is that you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck; you're on your own? No health care? The market will fix it; you're on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don't have boots. You are on your own.
Well, it's time for them to own their failure.

There is a radical idea buried within that piece of classic Obama rhetoric. The Ownership Society gives its members one moral imperative: thou shalt consume. As Bush was quick to say before the ashes of 9/11 had settled: the consumption must continue, even and especially in times of crisis. Get fat, get debt, get angry. Eat, gorge, buy. Fuck, burn, kill. We can buy the troops we don't have and do retail therapy when they die.

The ownership imperative frees us of the need to create anything but zygotes and receipts. It makes the mouth the dominant erogenous zone of the body and the body politic. It makes an erection something you buy and an orgasm something you eat. It means there is no reward for a nation that works harder and harder to produce more and more. Because even though the productive force of America's working poor has increased year after year, they have lost wage value, union rights, health care, retirement, and Pell grants for college.

The Ownership Society has been given a long and scenic test drive. It's time to take this lemon back to the dealership. I won't buy it from a war hero and I won't buy it from a sharp babe with a machine gun. This jalopy simply has shitty mileage -- even after you inflate the tires.

Did You Think I Meant County Matters?

2008-09-02T23:13:00.007-04:00

So apparently no one in the RNC has seen Citizen Kane.

I mention it because that campaign didn't end too well. Take heed, ye owners of the ownership society -- Rosebud was many things, but at the end of the day, she was just another product. Yes, my elitist friends, that's two obnoxious high-brow references in one small post. I've got a longer one I've been polishing -- should be up tomorrow afternoon.

In the meantime, I must offer a humble shout-out to fellow Rorschach company member Jason Linkins over at The Huffington Post. Jason quoted some of my last post last week. So in exchange for sending hundreds of readers this way, I can only return the favor by directing my vast cohort of 18 daily readers to his column at HuffPo. In the age of the "money graf" Jason is the Tantric multi-orgasmic master. Do enjoy! He can also be found at his inaugural blog, DCeiver.

Barack's Attack Dog

2008-08-25T12:43:00.006-04:00

As I read the McCain camp rebuttal to the recent number-of-houses barb from Obama, a dark shroud of implacable fear surrounded me. I realized later that it was actually some kind of crypto-partisan guilt because this was exactly what I would have said if the tables were turned:

Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses?

Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people 'cling' to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a debate about who’s in touch with regular Americans?

Now, brothers and sisters, before you dismiss this counter-slam for its superficiality, please pause to admire the streamlined execution. By calling out one McCain flaw, Obama gets plastered for a handful before the sentence is half-over. It's a tight little cluster bomb of a rebuttal, lacquered with a stealthy dismissal of the whole attack -- it ends with a purely rhetorical question mark as if to say, "Let's not even go there." Compact, piercing, and inflammatory, it hits its target while giving the impression that it was launched from the high ground. Of course, it wasn't launched from the high ground; it was launched by a Rove protege using a Clinton crib-sheet. But no member of the Obama team has been able to deploy fighting words with such force and precision.

Enter Joe Biden. I remember feeling instant admiration for the man when, channel-surfing four years ago, I saw him in a C-SPAN clip (is there any better way to catch C-SPAN?). It was during one of his Judiciary Committee hearings and he was smacking around John Ashcroft for defending Abu Ghraib. At the time, there wasn't much of a formal debate about torture. This was well before Cheney attempted publicly to codify torture and toss out the Geneva Conventions. The theatrical sadists of Abu Ghraib were defended and dismissed as bad-apple frat house kids. And unlike Cheney's subsequent row with Congress, there was no specific policy at stake and therefore no focal point for sustained discussion. We swallowed the shame and re-elected Bush. But for a brief moment, our cruelty and hypocrisy were held in lyric suspension by the most powerful image to cross the national Imaginary since the panoramic hellscape of 9/11:

If you want a thousand-word capsule for this -- and an incisive review of a certain Mel Gibson movie -- click here.

Joe Biden was one of a few people to correctly intuit and loudly decry the basic moral failure of Abu Ghraib. Instead of making it another pissy bullet point for Bush's managerial incompetence, he made it a deeply personal issue of right and wrong. As the father of a soldier, he knew that the horrors of Abu Ghraib now gave the enemy license to practice the same indignity on his son. Held to this fatherly imperative, the Bushies didn't look tough or confident anymore -- they looked like pube-less bullies playing dress-up with dad's clothing.

Even if you believe, like Sally Quinn, that the President should be a manly winged centaur who protects his children (and presumably shits cocoa puffs for breakfast), you have to admit that Biden fulfills the emotional need at the center of that father-worship fantasy better than Cheney. His aggression and his wit are inseparable. And unlike Hillary Clinton, he won't be gunning for his boss's job in 2012 or beyond. Best of all, he is a value-added veep, not the naked gesture of electoral or geographic conciliation that Obama-Clinton or Obama-Kaine would have been.

In other words, there is no appeasing strategy behind the choice of Biden. He's simply better for the job than Hillary. His qualification derives not from yesterday's primary contest, but from tomorrow's challenges. Obama didn't pick him just to win one contest in November, he picked him to help govern for years beyond it. And let's not pretend Hillary actually wanted the number two slot to begin with. She's an all-or-nothing executive, not a supporting figure or attack dog. If she's not going to run the whole show, her talents are better employed back in Senate committees, not Observatory Circle.

(I understand the frustration felt by Hillary's supporters because I supported her too for a while. See the end of this post for my own personal Clinton postmortem.)

PICKING A FIGHT

The torture debate is as good a place as any to segue from Biden to McCain. Like most of my lefty brethren, I do hope he picks Mitt Romney. I relish this prospect about as much as Kristol and McCain wish they had Hillary to rip apart right now. The electoral temptations of a Romney VP are obvious enough: He has roots in the indispensable Democratic territories of Michigan and Massachusetts. He was the (distant) runner-up in the delegate count. And unlike the Hillary Clinton, Romney actually represents a stubborn ideological faction within the Republican Party. He is also favored by the hard-right chattering class (Limbaugh, Coulter, et al) that would rather lose this race than see McCain become President. Finally, Romney's clumsy flip-flops and embarrassments are the sort that can be swept up and blunted while he marinates for four years as President-in-waiting.

Like two people in an elephant costume, McCain-Romney might each believe that they're the one who's really running the show. And the fractured American Right would happily join in that delusion and redouble its energy this fall.

But because of this, the primary fight between McCain and Romney was more pronounced and substantive than the superficial squabbles of Clinton, Biden, and Obama. If the McCain camp thinks they're having fun re-purposing Democratic primary jabs, just wait until they have to explain away McCain contra Romney smack-downs like this:

Or, better yet, this:

Or my personal favorite, this:

Clinton chided Obama on vague, subjective grounds: the length of a resume, the "readiness" to lead. By contrast, McCain beat the shit out of Romney for insoluble political and moral issues that can't be reconciled in a tart convention speech. Plus -- and it's a HUGE plus -- I'll bet dollars for donuts that Biden has the balls to confront Romney at the debates and ask him point-blank why he continued to work for an officially racist organization well into his adult life. Good luck carrying that bullshit rationalization into a general election against the first African American nominee in American history. But please, do try!

This is assuming McCain doesn't nominate Bobby Jindal, who satisfies the hard-right just as well as Romney and handcuffs the Dem's identity politics almost as well as Biden handcuffs the Republican's foreign experience charge. At 36, Jindal really makes you wonder about the life-expectancy rate in the late eighteenth century, when the Constitution set the minimum Presidential age requirement at 35. He's exactly one half of McCain's age. This would out-Quayle Quayle except Jindal is also the dynamic, articulate governor of Louisiana and Rush Limbaugh has dubbed him "the next Ronald Reagan." Did I mention he's the son of Indian immigrants?

Regardless, McCain still has one rather large tactical advantage over Obama at this stage in the game. For all his doddering low-blows, he's not dumb enough to ignore it. Because McCain isn't announcing his VP pick until August 29, Obama-Biden can only criticize half of the McCain ticket during the biggest campaign event of the season. For this same reason, McCain can use the Dem pageant to inform his VP choice, making that nomination a broad counter punch before his own pageant even begins. And when it does begin, McCain-Romney or McCain-Jindal will have the double-barrel blast of a surprise VP who enters the convention completely undiminished by the preceding DNC love/attack festival. Given this, I can understand why Obama would wish to close the gap between the VP announcement and the convention. After Labor Day, it's four big TV stops for the debates and then we're done. But right now, the election calendar favors the reactionary attack position that McCain has already exploited so well.

So I'm happy about Biden. I'm hopeful for Romney. But I fear the terrain gives McCain a generous handicap either way.

HILLARY CODA

Because I'm a wonky geek with no real mommy damage to speak of, I admired Hillary's ability to answer debate questions with clear and specific bullet-lists. So for any frustrated Hillary supporters out there, let me present my departure from your camp in a similar fashion.

Her resume isn't that much thicker than Obama's.
To ascertain their policy differences would be an agonizing exercise in the bifurcation of hairs. McCain is not going to satisfy Hillary's view on abortion, Iraq, health care, or the economy at large.
Which leaves the question of executive/managerial competence. I humbly offer the recent primary-source profile of her primary campaign from the September issue of The Atlantic Monthly. You see, Obama won the primaries without stooping to innuendo and slurs-by-association and he did it with grass-roots organization that eschewed defense/pharma lobby money. He ended the whole marathon with class and cash to spare. Clinton took huge sums from the military-industrial complex and drug/insurance companies, added a huge personal debt of her own, and then squandered every penny slinging dirty ads. As the e-mails released in the above article show, she also failed to manage a civil war within her own campaign team. These are not the marks of a good or effective executive. There's plenty to admire in the woman, but she's also a low-blowing spendthrift who can't uniter her own team, never mind the party or the country.
As someone who endured baseless charges during the Whitewater scandal, she should know better than to use the same smear tactics against Obama w/r/t Rezko. But she doesn't and she didn't. Even the Wall Street Journal picked up on this hypocritical ploy against Obama.

Race and Gender cut to the quick because they both directly engage our sexuality. At the end of the day, racial and gender divisions aren't policy problems because they require a more intimate act of "transcendence." In this sense, they are one and the same issue (as in, "to issue" or give birth). I happen to believe -- to the irritation of my colleagues -- that sexism is a far graver issue than racism in this world. But that's precisely why the world deserves a better "identity politician" than Hillary Clinton.

Duh Profundis

2008-08-05T16:16:00.005-04:00

They say that the average person's vocabulary contains more negative words and phrases than positive. This might explain why free-form snark rules the day, I suppose. On the whole, it's easier to spit invective than construct a compliment. And if you don't believe me, go fuck a rusty exhaust pipe you unrepentant joytard.

They also say that 90% of the neurotransmitter traffic in your brain is devoted to inhibition. Consciousness emerges through a plastic cascade of retreats -- an "inwardness" that characterizes the mind at its physiological building block. This is why I often find the asceticism of Schopenhauer and Beckett so irritating and redundant. Yes, we are born astride a grave (at least for now) but must we eat astride a toilet? Is the recipe complete without acknowledging the poop that will ultimately issue from it?

My sister got married this past weekend! Right now I feel as happy as I do old -- which isn't a bad tandem if you think about it. Somewhere between my third and fourth glass at the reception, my sister told me I was scheduled to make a toast. And I started to choke because for the life of me I couldn't summon one appropriately embarrassing story about her or her new husband Dave. Inhibition won over invective, I guess. What can I say? They're good people who deserve each other. And I can't wait to play the goofy uncle part that was written for me so long ago. They're also a smart, loving bipartisan couple whose very existence makes it easy to forget the wasted lump of carbon twitching under the breastbone of Ann Coulter or Frank Rich. They even made t-shirts that said "RACHEL-DAVE 2008: Peace. Hope. Matrimony."

Photos coming soon ...

I was watching MSNBC yesterday after my run. They sampled Obama's recent charge that McCain's off-shore drilling proposal has netted him a cool $1million from the oil lobby. Then some anchorface let a RNC wonk ramble through a feeble retort for two minutes. I waited for the conversation to begin, for some back and forth, for a confrontation or at least for an equally feeble response from a DNC wonk. But instead she excitedly rushed to her next story ... Tyra Banks posing as Michele Obama in the New York Post!! OMG!!! Apparently, this was such an imminent development that the network didn't have time to pull up some b-roll or slap together a title graphic. So the giddy anchorface had to hold up a copy of the Post so the camera could zoom in and catch the story. This was followed by thorough coverage of David Letterman's top ten list re: Barack's recent birthday.

Many, many chunks of uninhibited invective rushed to my throat. In no particular order:

Like everyone else in the comedy business, Letterman has stopped writing jokes. What the fuck happened to jokes? By jokes I don't mean Mike Meyers mugging or Colbert hyperbole. And I don't mean SNL's mean-spirited parodies or Sarah Silverman's reflexive turds of self-hatred. I mean that quaint modernist chestnut that doesn't need an attitude or posture to make you laugh: a set-up, a punchline, and some spark of wit to unite the two.
It seems Paul Shaffer has been instructed to slobber over every other word that comes out of Letterman's mouth so that the lameness of the material can be deflected to the lameness of Paul Shaffer -- thereby converting stillborn non-jokes into their Splenda equivalent: ad hominem mockery.
And speaking of SNL -- isn't it amazing how they've managed to get progressively, but imperceptibly, worse from year to year? I think it's part of a strategy to generate perpetual nostalgia for last year's not-quite-as-lame "Best Of" DVD. They really ARE cooking astride a toilet: the material only becomes compelling on the way out.
Family Guy and Robot Chicken are two orders of magnitude less creative than the above, but at least they leave a small carbon footprint. They're made of 96% post-consumer material, after all. They don't even recycle actual jokes -- they just recycle the mere memory of, say, having watched an obscure movie like The Empire Strikes Back. The "joke" is supposed to be the little memory neuron that fires with recognition of something you've already seen.
So just to sum up. Jokes are out. Mockery, nostalgia, and pop-referencing are in.
A man leaves Harvard Law School where he served as editor of the Law Review. He turns down clerkships and oxford-cloth lawyering gigs to camp out on the South Side of Chicago and help people. Clearly he is an arrogant bastard out of touch with regular American families.
What the hell is going on? McCain released an ad placing Obama next to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. I guess to show that Obama's popular. Britney*, you recall, advocates unblinking fealty to "whatever our President says." And Paris Hilton** -- that paragon of dynastic decadence -- is supposed to have common cause with the son of a goat herder. What the hell is going on?
Now, I'm guessing that the anchorface dug up the Tyra Banks story on her own because they had to zoom into a hand-held copy of the Post to explain it. But who arranges these things? Did the Obama campaign really think it could counter a RNC spokesperson with two pop-culture nuggets, Tyra and Letterman? Is it working? Or is this just how cable news works? Either way, I'm depressed.
Amazing how W managed to erase his blue-blooded pedigree with a few charming gaffes every other word or so. Bush never had to apply for a job or feed his family. But it's all in the twang, you see. And we don't like no uppity boy speakin' with fancy elitist subject-verb agreement and all that. So just to be clear: W comes from a regular American family and Obama is the authoritarian jerk with an outsized sense of entitlement, right?
Amazing how W managed to keep the rest of us so thrilled with our indignation and superiority that we forgave his petty catastrophes as the only real jokes worth telling in postmodern liberal America. Knock knock. Who's there? Katrina. Katrina who? Katrina Lewinsky. (REDEEM PUNCHLINE VOUCHER HERE)
What's worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm? The Holocaust.
How do Helen Keller's parents punish her? They beat the shit out of her.
How many women with PMS does it take to screw in a light bulb? Three. (long pause) It just DOES, okay?!

*Britney Isn't it amazing how her downfall and rehab and downfall was built into that first hit single? We knew back in 1998 that this was going to end in disaster. We were banking on it. Consequently, there was nothing remotely scandalous or newsworthy about her drug problem or custody battles or weight gain -- it was all part of the plan. We invested in her disgrace the day she first menstruated and now she's finally paying us back. It was like a college fund -- but instead of knowledge we got to masturbate over the image of a 15-year old girl and then punish her for it when she reached womanhood.

**Paris Hilton Has anyone done a parody character called Helena Travelodge? To complete the irony, she should be a Fulbright Scholar. And beautiful.

The Borrowed Kettle

2008-07-16T15:31:00.000-04:00

I think it's possible to absorb the first third of Slavoj Zizek's book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004) without a working fluency in Lacananian psychoanalysis or Hegelese. Here's a fun passage that samples Zizek's freewheeling cold fusions and metaphorical mashups:

According to Jewish tradition, Lilith is the woman a man makes love to while he masturbates alone in his bed during the night -- so, far from standing for feminine identity liberated from the grip of patriarchy, as some feminists claim, her status is purely phallic: she is what Lacan calls La femme, the Woman, the phantasmatic supplement of male masturbatory phallic jouissance. Significantly, while there is only one man (Adam), femininity is from the very beginning split between Eve and Lilith, between the ordinary hysterical barred subject ($) and the phantastmatic spectre of Woman: when a man is having sex with a 'real' woman, he is using her as a masturbatory prop to support his fantasies about the nonexistent Woman ... The catastrophe occurs when the two women collapse into one, when the 'ordinary' partner is elevated to the dignity of Lilith -- which is structurally perfectly homologous to the Zionist elevation of the 'ordinary' Jerusalem into the Jerusalem the Jews had been dreaming about for thousands of years ...

At one point in the '07 workshop, Jason pointed out that for all its digressions and blind alleys, the emotional currents of This Storm Is What We Call Progress still follow a basic love triangle. Lily and The Woman With the Silver Skin have some kind of erotic tie apart from the tutor-mentor relationship they exhibit when we meet them. Adam enters the scene and falls for Lily, but falls harder for the world of the Silver Skinned Woman because her knowledge of Kabbalah offers clues to his Gentile father's madness and suicide.

There is another female character who we never see. God is repeatedly referred to with a feminine pronoun, but I'm speaking of a character who's never even mentioned. Her existence and identity fuels the power dynamic that binds the three on-stage characters as they grind through the necessary convulsions of the love triangle. She is the Jewish half of Adam's hyphenated soul* and for all the fallen-father drama on display, it's a little odd (but maybe appropriately spooky) that we never hear about her -- I didn't even think about her until a couple weeks into rehearsal. I'm speaking, of course, of Adam's nameless mother.

I can only imagine how Adam would tell the story of his parents courtship! "Starving, Gentile, artist father" meets Jewish woman. Father falls deep into the spell of Kabbalah and starts talking to walls, seeing faces and speaking in tongues when Adam is 7 or 8 and continues his descent through Adam's adolescent years, then dies trying to fly off the Golden Gate Bridge when Adam reaches manhood. Bracketed by two powerful women in the foreground drama, Adam eagerly hurls himself into the same thicket of gender/power dynamics that seduced and killed his father.

Not surprisingly, Adam has an op-ed in his pocket about the State of Israel and its spooky overlap with the fascist persecution that catalyzed its creation. Zizek points out a literal overlap in his book, too:

Anyone who is interested in the history of anti-Semitism should remember 26 September 1937: on that day, Adolf Eichmann and his assistant boarded a train in Berlin in order to visit Palestine: Heydrich himself gave Eichmann permission to accept the invitation of Feivel Polkes, a senior high member of Hagannah (the Zionist secret organization), to visit Tel Aviv and discuss the co-ordination of German and Jewish organizations in order to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine. Both the Germans and the Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to move to Palestine. The Germans preferred to have them out of Western Europe, and the Zionists themselves wanted the Jews in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible.

He goes on to state that both groups, therefore, were pursuing a kind of "ethnic cleansing." I'm sure there's a great Kosher joke to be had here, but damn if I can summon one. It reminds me of another passage from Storm, where Adam compares an aliyah to membership in the IRA. He's half-Jewish and half-Irish, so both branches of the family tree are marked by terroristic religious warfare.

Because, you know, because, before recently I was no more likely to do an aliyah than I was to join the IRA. But, but, but Zion is descending into this fanaticism and mediocrity. Jews are finally white people, but all that being a white person gets you is the right to be as brutal and vicious and banal as you like without having to say you're, uh, sorry. To build these ugly-ass suburban tract houses on someone else's land because God told you you could have holy sod lawns and holy, holy, holy, aluminum siding.

Like any good artist, Adam holds banality and ugly-ass suburbanity as morally equivalent to brutality and viciousness. Hannah Arendt makes an appearance later to paraphrase her own insight about the "banality of evil" by dismissing the whole Third Reich as "an old and oft-recurring story and not particularly original."

Now, it's fun to snipe at the Philistines (what Zizek might call "the jouissance of the theatre geek"), but the unoriginal thesis that "evil is unoriginal" is only one part of the dialectic engaged in Storm. The preponderance of the play is about how the mundane and the ecstatic converge everywhere. Records descend from the sky. Tupperwear and metro cards become holy totems. Oddly specific prophecies abound ("the next person you see will die in an elevator accident"). Hasidim Jews wear baseball caps and bomber jackets. And "all the bullshit writing that's around us everywhere is some kind of prayer" -- this includes Chinese take-out menus and junk mail. So while Adam can get a lot of reinforcement from Arendt, and a lot of righteous glee by savaging the ugly-ass suburban aesthetic, he also has to contend with the "banality of god" glowing at him from every Manhattan sewer.

On the surface of it, this Kabbalistic code-breaking resembles John Nash's schizophrenic scribbling in A Beautiful Mind or Catherine's madness in Proof.** Any collection of symbols -- random junk mail, magazine articles, Chinese takeout menus -- can be thrown into the cipher-mill and "divined" for paranoid Communist infiltration or, in the case of Adam's father, the emergent life-force of God herself.*** But the question of madness isn't nearly as interesting as the question of power, even when the two seem inseparable. Sex, art, politics, religious ritual -- these are different wormholes into the same ecstatic flush and Jason finds a potent scene for each of them. In Storm, the Kabbalah isn't offered as a subject unto itself; it's mostly another wormhole. Or rather, Kabbalah is the skeleton key that opens innumerable over-the-counter wormholes everywhere.

Near the end, Arendt goes on to explain that the real drama isn't about the banal gray concrete of Nazi power, but the brilliant man who loved her slightly less than that power. How do you separate Heidegger's ideas from his ideology? How does Hannah (or Lily or Adam's mom) separate love of the former from revulsion for the latter? How does any man find common cause between his heart and his solar plexus? And between both and his dick?

For me, these are the questions raised and the dramas activated by Grote's Storm. Also there are great jokes! We're extending through July 27, so do join us at Camp Rorschach in cushy Georgetown where you'll find a veritable multiplex of crazy-fun shit. We just opened Skin of Our Teeth to critical acclaim and the Randy Baker's episodic project Dream Sailors launches tomorrow. You can read a profile of that one in today's Post as well.

FOOTNOTES

*hyphenated soul Adam is trying to write a Sam-Shepard-meets-Tony-Kushner solo show called "American Shylock." We joke backstage that once he fails at this, he turns to the Irish half of his checkered lineage and writes a show called "American Shamrock."

**a treat for veteran readers I've complained about A Beautiful Mind and Proof before and it's precisely because they can't find any space between madness and insight, preferring instead to ape the same Promethean morality tale while fetishizing intellect along the way.

***to divine Interesting how that verb can simultaneously reflexive and active. You can divine odor from a gym sock, or you can divine the fuck out of a gym sock and worship the thing. Transubstantiation is in the hand of the beholder?

Against a National Theatre

2008-07-14T14:22:00.004-04:00

Like just about any theatre professional who's lingered in an unpaid Manhattan sabbatical, I've had tons of free time to blog and bitch about The System. I keep waiting to catch the crest of the perennial Why We're Screwed debates, but I always get to the beach at low tide. I also think I'm one of maybe three bloggers who hasn't seen or read Mike Daisey's How Theatre Failed America. But now that Isaac is dedicating four forthcoming posts to the subject, I figure this is as good a time as any to pull out that dusty screed I've been saving on my desktop for the last year and half.

A passage from Parabasis:

... better work results from a system in which more people are making a living from their art. I witness this every time I hold auditions or go into a rehearsal room. Many people who want to work in theatre and also not starve find one of several different options for subsidizing employment. They either (a) work a full-time day job that they do not care about, (b) work a full-time job that they do care about, (c) work a part-time or sporatic job (like temping) that they do not care about or (d) work a part-time or sporatic job that they do care about. I know very few people who belong in category b, who are capable of having two simultaneous work passions that take up fourteen hours of their day. I know a lot of people in Category A, and it is largely those people that I’m talking about here.

For the five years I worked in DC, I was happily lodged in the manic rush of category B. I was a screenwriter/film editor by day and an actor the rest of the time. The living wage came from the former and the latter received all the passion and commitment. My familial, fraternal, and romantic relationships suffered, no question. But I loved my work and felt too much gratitude for the opportunities in front of me to pause and critique the larger system. During this time, many extremely talented friends would call to report on the bleak prospects for meritorious advancement in the LA-NYC theatre scene. I never felt the need to leave the District and I would stump for DC each time they called, but no one ever believed me. Or, if they did, it was no matter because the nominal distinction had become more important that the qualitative distinction (Much has been written about this superficial bias, and it's not my real concern here).

The artist's life comes with an implicit poverty vow that gains extra charm because most of us are already some flavor of socialist. I'd like to take that view seriously for a moment to see if a simple inventory of our "means of production" would reinforce the general anywhere-but-new-york meme that's been gaining traction for the last few years.

PRAXIS of EVIL

We forge theatre in time, space, and people. The production of theatre, the actual live event, requires actors and real estate before it requires anything else. The presence of the playwright -- the very reality of the playwright -- is the first thing the audience pretends away when they suspend disbelief. Contra Albee (Mamet, et al) good writing cannot redeem bad acting the way great acting can redeem mediocre writing. A quick perusal of any New York theatre review will tell the same basic story: competent, even compelling acting put in the service of bad directing or playwriting. This critical distinction persists because it is not the actor's job to imagine the intentions or inner conflicts of the playwright. However, it is the job of the playwright to imagine the intentions and inner conflicts of genuine characters. To sustain the illusion central to live theatre, actors employ the (intensely creative) art of forgetting. We must unlearn the plot, the ending, the secret appraisals of other characters, previous productions in history and previous performances within the current production. In a sense, we must also unlearn the identity/pathology of the playwright.

Not surprisingly, the Mamet/Albee school loudly insists that actors are not creative artists, but interpretative artists. More compelling theorizers like George Hunka will simply say that the playwright is the Origin of the theatrical experience, but this amounts to the same judgment. Forgetting for a moment that the very phrase "creative artist" is about as redundant as "smart genius" or "strong bodybuilder," what possible distinction remains for the "interpretive artist"? True, we judge some actors against a literary Ideal when it comes to Shakespeare. But Shakespeare endures and earns this standard because interpretation remains an inexhaustible task. Any "definitive" production of Shakespeare -- satisfying and refreshing as it is when it emerges -- will always gather some friendly mockery in succeeding generations because we discover that Hamlet has as much to tell us about post-modernism and the War on Terror as he does about Freud and existentialism, etc.* As Walter A. Davis put it in Get the Guests (his wonderful analysis of Albee and others), "representation exceeds intention." Or, to paraphrase Marx, what we create is always ahead of where we are. If we accept and internalize this, we see that the quest for airtight interpretation has no place in live theatre. It is therefore foolish and insulting to relegate the actor to the status of "watchable" meat-puppet when a true understanding of their primacy only expands what is possible in dramatic literature and dramatic performance.

That's a much bigger subject, of course, but indulge me on this point for a moment because I think the mistaken primacy of the playwright comes to bear on Isaac's econ questions.

MAD COMPOSITION! (TICKLING COMMODITY)

A quick hand count. The word "commodity" is still anathema to authentic theatre folk, right? We despise the corporate model that exports mass-produced, tangible widgets through a franchise system with some alienating bureaucracy at the top. Well, without veering too much into the debate about intellectual property or royalties, consider first that the script (primary or not) is the only thing can be mass-produced and disseminated with perfect fidelity. We hamper ourselves enormously and abandon all pretensions for a "National Theatre" or "American Theatre" when we treat actors as commodities instead.

The publishing industry requires a centralized-product-producing model to function. The Internet may be gradually undermining this model the way it's started to undermine the monolithic status of the New York Times, but that's only made things easier for the playwright. Actors, unlike scripts, are still living things that cost a lot of money to shuffle and relocate, never mind the interpersonal costs of migrant worker life (see, again, Isaac). This bizarre, inverted model -- where the lifeblood is commodified and the commodity is sacrosanct -- owes its continued hegemony to the New York Centrism that dominates our present conception of "American Theatre."

An example of the surcharges built into the NY-centric system. I was playing a supporting part as a local actor at Arena's Kreeger Theatre in DC and got $850/week gross. A good friend of mine was playing one of the leads and came to the project by way of NYC, where her agent had talked up her contract to $1000/week – but 10% of that new figure went right back to the person who secured it, leaving her with $900 gross. One of the other leads came to the table with an established history of DC theatre and Arena work and consequently, didn't feel the need to engage his NYC representation to get a fair deal. So an agency can help you get a part and pay for itself along the way, but the whole process of negotiation and commission is completely redundant for the community surrounding the venue.

For someone in their position, the real profit (and the second NY-centric surcharge) comes from the free housing and transportation provided by the theatre. Deft subletees can maximize regional work to live rent free for months at a time – which is great, as long as you don’t mind not having a permanent home. The Round House columbinus production had two out-of-town actors: one ensemble member from Alaska and one lead from NYC (Will Rogers, who had been with the project since he was a student at NCSA). Round House put them up at the Hilton down the street for three months. By contrast: when I was called to re-join the same project at New York Theatre Workshop as one of the leads, such amenities were not forthcoming. In fact, I was told I needed to have an NYC address, and my own housing in the city – in essence, to fund my own semi-permanent relocation and become a “local” NYC actor overnight if I wanted to keep my job.

So the NYC system doesn't just trade on expensive exports that have to be reinforced and mediated by an extra layer of bureaucracy in the form of agents and managers. The system is also hostile to imports. The exchange of talent is a rigidly one-way transaction. Some artists relocate to New York because their school plants them there; others move at their own peril and at great expense. At this time, it's worth introducing some figures from the closest thing I have to a control sample: the regional and NYC productions of columbinus.

The world premiere happened at Round House Theatre's Silver Spring, Maryland stage. This 150-seat venue charged $30 a ticket and paid $400/week -- I was non-Equity at the time. NYTW is a 199-seat venue that charges $60 a ticket and pays an Equity Off-Broadway contract at $500/week. As it happens, the NYTW salary falls just underneath the commission-able threshold for agents and managers. So an actor can work there without sacrificing 10-20% of their gross pay to their “people.” But even then, taxes and union dues leave you with, perhaps, $400-450/week. Depending on how farsighted you are with taxes, this money can go a long way, but $1600-$1800 net pay per month doesn’t leave much room for savings or Equity's new health care premiums, to say nothing of the disproportionate cost of living in NYC. By way of comparison, New York unemployment insurance caps at $405/week before taxes. And that number is purposely designed to be unlivable as a motivation for finding employment.

Try swapping any of the variables in those two examples. To find an Arena salary in a NYC theatre project, you’d have to be on Broadway, simple as that. All the mid-sized and larger venues in DC routinely cast the majority of their parts with local actors and pay a wage that has no NYC correlate outside Broadway. At any rate, if a 150-seat house in suburban Maryland can pay non-Equity actors a wage that keeps pace with an esteemed 199-seat Off-Broadway house we might want to ask where the 100% ticket price increase comes from and where it goes if its not being used to accommodate visiting talent or provide a more livable wage.

EMPTY SPACES

The answer is the second of the two main ingredients I identified as our means of production earlier. Real estate. Now I'm sure we all reserve some extra admiration for the ice sculptor who manages to carve a perfect Venus on the surface of Venus ... but surely this basic environmental liability isn't what makes it a masterpiece. The top-down orientation that informs Albee's script-bound view of theatre has a structural match in the NY-centric model surrounding it. If we dare to reverse this, we open ourselves to a founding recognition: The Theatre is a dynamic place bound in time before it is a piece of "timeless," easily-reproduced literature.

At present, New York is the only place where bad art constitutes a territorial affront** and good art remains undersold and oversupplied. In any supersaturated market, marketing itself becomes as prohibitive as real estate costs. So in addition to agency, casting and real estate, theatres must spend still more energy and money playing with reductive "brands" and vying for the fractured attention of audiences who already have a couple dozen masterpieces to chose from in any given season.

If we wish to exempt ourselves from the vagaries of the late capitalist system that keeps us beholden to markets and real estate, we have two significant internal revolutions available to us.

1. Theatre, as a medium, must recover its roots in dance and improvisation to escape from a script-bound conception of the aesthetic. As long as we insist on reducing the theatrical event to that which can be symbolically codified -- and as long as we appropriate musical, verbal or televisual standards to enforce it -- we will kill what remains of the medium's vitality and immediacy. We will make architecture, not art. I know actors can be annoying as fuck, but that's why the biggest challenge here falls to them. It would be nice if theatres returned to the company system, yes, but a truly radical theatre would build itself from the ground up, with performance, not text, as the ground. So rather than call for another lame moratorium on Shakespeare, I suggest that fellow actors become the proprietors first. Sadly, too many actors remain content to treat themselves as commodities, as sexy objects of fascination.

2. The Theatre, as a place, must find a place for itself that doesn't require submission to avoidable bureaucracy and scarcity. I have no doubt that there are more than enough amazing actors, directors, and designers to fully populate a dozen regional circuits, but that the overwhelming majority of them are sitting idle in New York. The same things that make New York an invigorating cauldron also make it an insulating womb. If one wishes to divine a sexy "American" imperative from all this, consider this next revolution our Manifest Destiny of the Bodied Soul or something. Artistic cognition can be contemplative, critical, cathartic, kinesthetic, and polysensual ... but it is also the site of something much simpler. It is sui generis and it is pure exploration. I've said this before -- we feel a kindred calling with priests, doctors, musicians, judges, social servants, and gym teachers. It's about time we recognized our kinship with explorers and left mom's basement. Because I'd like to think New York is the Heart, Brain, Soul, Womb, Tomb or Towering Cock of American Theatre, but more and more it looks like the Liver. Now before any of my colleagues bristle at that metaphor, recall: the liver is still the BIGGEST internal organ, and every drop of life blood must pass through it. So I freely validate any claims to size or universality. I only ask that we remember in turn the Liver's true function: to digest and detoxify.

But to back up that parting metaphor, I need to dust off another essay about the nature of criticism in New York and how all of the above fits with what thinkers as diverse as Christopher Lasch and Herbert Marcuse call "alienated labor." Suffice it to say that The Culture of Narcissism and Eros & Civilization both have a lot to teach us about what's wrong with "American Theatre." Far from being exempt from the workaday grind of professional drudgery, New York theatre professionals have crafted a masochistic system that outdoes its secular-corporate counterpart by a magnitude of 10. We work for $1/hour. We log 60-hours a week easily. We forgo relationships and families, health insurance and retirement and all voluntarily. And then we scoff when someone choses to work at Wal-Mart. It's time to take our critique of late capitalism and turn it back on ourselves.

More later ...

* Hamlets In the past five years, I've played Hamlet, and seen the Silent Hamlet, the Digitally Reconstituted Binary Iamb Wooster Group Hamlet, Jeffrey Carlson's directed by Michael Kahn, Wallace Acton's directed by Gail Edwards, Sean McNall's at the Pearl (by far the best of them all), and most recently Michael Stuhlberg's in Central Park. I find it hard, even painful, to imagine a similar string of Georges and Marthas. I don't want to spend all night arguing with my friends about whether or not the latest George effectively conveyed Albee's arcane dialog instructions -- but I can spend hours contemplating the subclauses paused into existence by a new reading of 2B or not 2B. Nobler-in-the-mind? Nobler, in-the-mind-to-suffer?

** territorial affront Could there be any doubt that Manhattan's island-economy scarcity creates the thuggish, gang-like enforcement of theatrical ghettos? Broadway, off-Broadway, Fringe, downtown, Brooklyn, showcase and Indie theatre? NYC is by far the most democratically mobile populace in the country. But you wouldn't know it from the bitching that ensues when someone suggests seeing a show in far-flung enclaves like Brooklyn or (gasp!) Jersey City. In the meantime, bloggers keep complaining about the commercialism of Broadway, but they still feel reverence enough for that 20-square-block chunk of Midtown to defend it from unwashed Midwesterners. I'm guessing most still regard Broadway as the pinnacle of any theatre career, too. I've been reading a book of Albee's essays and if I've learned anything from the dude it's that this gripe goes back as far as 1962, probably earlier. I don't get it. Either we move on or we add the Reformation of Broadway to our list of crusades.

Stormy Teaser

2008-07-10T14:22:00.003-04:00

Only the Angel of History

2008-07-03T01:57:00.002-04:00

Peter Marks of the Washington Post wrote a very nice review. I love how Rorschach has carved out this brand for itself -- a standard that carries over into mainstream criticism of the company. If there's a psycho/history play with lots of blood and sex that bites off way more than it can chew, we will pounce on it. As the oft-referenced Tony Kushner explains it, excess and pretension are not liabilities; they are essential ingredients!

It's a rich vein of robust, omnidirectional narrative style that has marked American literature since Melville (who happens to be Kushner's favorite). Another review, from the Washington Times, found the play more scattershot and disorienting. But even that vantage allows for some dizzy pleasure.

For the most effusive review to date, check out Tim Treanor at DC Theatre Scene.

As if the opening night wasn't fun enough, I got to wake the next morning and hang out with Callaghan and Co. over at Woolly Mammoth. Her Fever/Dream will be there next year and I had just seen Crumble: Lay Me Down Justin Timberlake (at this theatre, directed by this gal), so I was excited to be in the same room while she, Howard, and Woolly's literary staff threw noodles against the wall. Now that I think about it, that workshop was one of the more constructive and invigorating I've seen in a while. I hope it felt that way for Sheila because she's got an exciting, ripe monster of a story with this adaptation of Calderon's "Life is a Dream."

In the meantime, Grote's own "Maria/Stuart" will be at Woolly this coming September. We at Rorschach Theatre take great pride in introducing him to DC at least six weeks before that. Ha HA! Nous sommes plus avant-garde que toi!

Chinatown Bus Live Blogging

2008-06-26T13:37:00.006-04:00

I've already decided that my memoir will have a chapter called The Blond Years: 2005-2007. It will cover that fruitful, exciting stretch of work from columbinus to Passion Play and back to columbinus (there was a brunette Hamlet with red highlights in the middle there, but ... more on him later). Three productions in four theatres across the country in which I was contractually obligated to be blond -- my boring Aryan name now had a flashy phenotype to match. And I had a 600% increase in romantic advances from both sexes.

If I had to write a broader section heading for this memoir, it would be The Chinatown Bus Years. Anyone in my income bracket who has to skirt between DC and NYC several times a year has heard of the Chinatown Bus. It's this delightfully skeezy cartel of second-hand charter buses that run every hour down the BosWash corridor. $35 won't even fill your car's gas tank, but it will get you round-trip service from New York City to Washington, DC any day, any time. Which begs the question: what the hell does the Chinatown Bus combustion engine run on anyway? Attitude? Inertia? Compacted body odor?

The bus I'm riding RIGHT NOW doesn't have a toilet seat -- any frequent Chinatown-er knows it's better to bring your own. But this same bus happens to have a Wi-Fi connection for my laptop, which makes it two steps better than Amtrak. Sure, we were supposed to leave a half-hour ago, and there's always the outside chance this bus will be the one-in-twelve that explodes en route, but damn. If you added a rest-stop break and sold cheap wine on board, there would be no reason left to take our beloved nationalized train service. The cheapest Amtrak ticket costs five times as much and only shaves an hour off your travel time each way. Plus (and I don't have the patience to research this) I'd be willing to bet the Chinatown bus has a better safety record than Amtrak, too.

A couple years ago, I was sitting at home when a friend called to tell me that I was on the news. Apparently, some local channel was doing an expose on the perils of the Chinatown Bus and I was standing in the background of some b-roll. "Don't make the mistake these dumb-asses did! The Chinatown Bus could kill you!" I'd like to think this memoir chapter won't end with fame and fortune. If I ever strike it big, I'll happily grant my first endorsement to the Chinatown Bus. I can safely say I wouldn't be here without them.

Pilgrimage for a Merry Prankster

2008-06-18T00:14:00.020-04:00

Sometime after I threw a softball five miles to the horizon and chased it down with Jackson the dog ... after he and I fought dragons in the tall grass and swam through the brave o'erhanging firmament ... Babbs announced that he was going to "fetch a pond." This was not an auditory hallucination, I told myself, he really did say "fetch a pond." So I assumed it was some Northwestern euphemism for "take a leak."

Until he started building an actual pond:

We all started using the word "ranch" to describe the modest plot of Eugene countryside where Ken Babbs lives. There are no livestock, but Babbs does seem to be harvesting* psychedelic mirth. Every corner of the place has some gonzo twist to it:

He even had tie-dyed toilet paper, god bless him.

Toward the end of our run in Portland, we noticed a cruel trend in the weather: we had two-show days when it was bright and sunny and gray drizzle for our free time. That last Monday off with Kenny Babbs redeemed them all:

His house is a hand-made collection of rooms that seem to sprout from its center hearth with an improvisational, range-of-the-moment floorplan. Every room feels like a three-sided protrusion from the main. And every room is a story.

Don't stare at those lawn chairs for too long. They don't anchor the magic dream balloon as well as the strawberry army. Wait ... what was I supposed to be worried about today?

PJ Sosko just realized something: the word "sisyphus" sounds as silly as his quest. For a good two hours, this was the funniest thought in the universe.

That's my girl!

That's ... my girl?

Babbs and Jenna collaborated on the spaghetti sauce as we waited for his wife, Eileen, to come home. She teaches Sometimes a Great Notion every year in her A.P. English classes -- like Aaron Posner, she can recite chapter and verse. We were extremely gratified to hear that she liked everything about our show except the ticket price.

What do you bring back from a prankster pilgrimage? Not too much, or you'll spoil the joke, I think.

FOOTNOTE:

*harvest Please don't read too much into that. I mean, of course, his thoughts.

This Storm Is What We Call Progress

2008-06-16T00:08:00.005-04:00

Just finished a suspiciously smooth 10 out of 12 hour tech rehearsal for This Storm Is What We Call Progress by this guy at this theatre.

We don't have any other production stills right now, but the set and lights and sound are shaping up nicely. I play Adam, a hapless third-rate actor who tumbles into a recording studio run by two mysterious Jewish women. And from thence ... a hilarious, chilling, magical journey into the heart of Kabbalistic darkness.

Remember that fad-ish collective of playwrights calling themselves Monsterists? Remember how I thought they were awesome? Well, Grote's play has that invigorating mix of spectacle the Monsterists were after. There's a little of everything here: dance, soliloquy, magic, sex on stage, knife fights, mask work ... even shadow play before it's all over. We're working double-time to get it ready for next Sunday's opening and there's a lot to tidy up before then. But I'm incredibly excited to be working on this play with Rorschach Theatre right now. In many ways, they're the best match for this story.

I remember workshopping Storm at this theatre with these folk back in March 2007. What struck me then -- and what survives now as my big pitch to y'all -- is the way Grote sets aside the boring non-dramatic dilemma of insanity-vs-reason and dares to build atop his magical world as an original drama in its own right. True, my character is an atheist hipster trying to mine his Jewish-Irish lineage for some kind of catchy pastiche bullshit called "American Shylock." And true, his father went mad and killed himself some years ago. But Grote quickly shakes off these concerns (which would ordinarily dominate other plays) and dares deeper into the terrain of religious and artistic ecstasy.

Eish. I don't know how to put it. Come see the show! We're out at Georgetown University's brand new theatre space this summer. So if nothing else, join us for AIR CONDITIONING and FINE DINING ... two things we didn't have at the beloved Casa del Pueblo.

Tickets here!

George F. Will = 4,721

2008-06-13T00:15:00.011-04:00

That boy sure does like to count things. I can't find that old stock photo of him that used to run with his magazine columns -- the one where he's counting off pithy bullet-points with both hands. It would have made such a perfect intro image for this post. Alas.

As a columnist, he should be using more words than numbers, right? I'd count all his words and numbers just to be sure, but that would only stoke and waft the stench of arid, left-brain prose that makes up the average George F. Will column. In his latest, "November's Magic Numbers," he breaks down the 2008 election into safe, office pool numerology:

Obama might capture the 2004 red states New Mexico (5 electoral votes), Nevada (5) and Colorado (9) -- George W. Bush won them by a combined 127,011 votes -- giving him 270. McCain, who in his 10-year campaign for the presidency has lingered in New Hampshire long enough to vote as a resident, might turn it red, gaining 4 votes. Obama, however, has reasonable hopes of winning Iowa (7), which Al Gore won by 4,144 votes out of 1,315,563 cast in 2000. Bush won it in 2004 by 10,059 out of 1,506,908 cast. And Obama's estimated 90,000 caucus votes this year almost equaled the combined118,167 won by Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, McCain, Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani, who finished in that order.

If you could combine the rigid tedium of a Rubick's Cube with the self-fulfilling theatrics of a Ouji Board, you'd have something resembling our Electoral College system. Now pause and re-read the above passage. Will shuffles around candidates, votes, mutually exclusive primaries and caucuses, election years and whole states like so many pennies and nickels. If you took 13 of the top 15 cities in 4 of the top 7 states in which Romney beat McCain's share of single black college educated military vets, then you could reasonably bet that Obama would win 51% of Missouri, assuming there will be low humidity on election day. If you think I'm exaggerating, consider this crowning factoid in which George runs out of things to count and just starts counting the punctuation within his earlier counting:

4.That is the number of commas in the total number of possible combinations of jurisdictions that can give a candidate 270 or more electoral votes. The votes disposed by the jurisdictions range from 1 (the Maine and Nebraska congressional districts) to 3 (seven states and the District of Columbia) to California's 55, with 17 different numbers between three and 55.

So if I read that right, it looks like a Nader landslide.

Judging from his sterile, mathematical world-view, I can only assume George Will is an ardent Ron Paul supporter. Like other functioning autistics, libertarians can engage and enjoy life -- but only when it is safely quantified. All human interaction must be rendered in airtight Newtonian equations. None of that messy, irreversible heat exchange, thank you very much. That wouldn't add up on the libertarian ledger. Your right brain is just more vestigial overgrowth like the appendix or male nipples.

So when it comes time to tell the story of your life, stick to the numbers like George did when he met 107-year-old veteran Frank Buckles. This man fought in the Great War and no doubt has a rare perspective on life, death, warfare and America. But we needn't go into that subjective dickering because did you know that:

He was born in February 1901, seven months before President William McKinley was assassinated. If Buckles had been born 14 months earlier, he would have lived in three centuries. He has lived through 46% of the nation's life ...

But god-dammit, he just couldn't birth himself any sooner. Sorry kids! I was an inch away from an even greater feat of numerical novelty, but may parents didn't think to fuck like it was 1899. Imagine the possibilities!

I can't imagine what Will will write in his own memoir, apart from a repeated incremental tally of the words he has written as he is writing them. His father was a philosophy professor (who taught with David Foster Wallace's father) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So how does a man of such cultural pedigree believe that the high water mark for playwriting begins with Henry V and proceeds without interruption to the musical Damn Yankees? I won't bother to fight for due recognition of Sam Beckett, Sarah Kane, or Tony Kushner -- but surely he's heard of Hamlet and a Streetcar Named Desire, right? How in the world did little George escape home with such vapid, incurious taste? Why does his range of inquiry rarely venture outside that which can be counted, killed, eaten, or bludgeoned with a bat?

ACCORDING TO MY FIGURES, YOU CANNOT BE OFFENDED BY THE FOLLOWING

The average American penis measures 5 to 7 inches in length, when erect. I sincerely hope that George performed a thorough vaginal excavation before he got married. Because if I've done my math right ... math is all there is to it. This compulsion to reduce everything (a life story, elections, erections) to that which can be arithmetically validated has a credible etiology. The harsh, punishing superego is the source of all rigid moral judgments. It flourishes and dominates at the simplest level of abstract thought: binary opposition. Either-Or. Good-Evil. Man-Woman. Democrat-Republican. When everything can be reduced to the binary (and through this binary code, an infinity of opportunities for self-validation), you only need to trouble your brain with the accounting and accumulation of whatever phenomena crosses your senses.

It's all in the numbers: Barack Obama will win, Frank Buckles is really old, size matters most, money equals speech. That is the founding psychosis of capitalism and therefore it should be no surprise that this unrepentant Reaganite has little else to offer his readers on any given subject. So how long before the Washington Post editorial staff takes up the George Will Method and does the cost-benefit analysis of paying a columnist salary for something any 99-cent calculator can accomplish?

Playwright and blogger Matthew Freeman probably didn't intend to satirize Mr. Will when he wrote the Cop character in When Is A Clock. But read the following monologue out loud and see if you don't hear the same dour fixation elevated -- as only an artist can -- to the realm of hilarity and insight:

COP: Crime statistics. The average person is married twice, and the average marriage contains seven steps, and the average marriage has around two children and the average child of those marriages spends an average of four hours watching two to four television programs on five nights a week. More than half of that time is spent watching violent crime, and of the twelve courtroom dramas currently dominating the networks prime time slots, they watch 276 variations of criminal actions, based on a 23 episode season. That is only counting the central act of criminality within the drama, not counting ethical lapses or more minor crimes in support of, or to dispel, the central crime in question.

(Pause)

When, when, when you expose one half of one half of all Americans to four hours of around three hundred murders, rapes, kidnappings and assaults over the course of a season of television, you’re going to create precisely, and we have this figure available on our website, around 500,000 potential major felons a night, of which exactly 45,678 will commit crimes within ten years of right now. That is the crime that is directly pulled from national data on the citizenry that watches television regularly.

(Pause)

How should we find your wife? With all this happening just because of television?

(Pause)

What about red tape and just overall numbers? Every second, 200 babies die in this county alone. 200 babies. Die. In this county alone. Three hundred people lose watches every ten minutes in 38 states. There are 20 different versions of the law that protects three different ethnicities from twelve kinds of discriminatory lending practices. Food poisoning, from nearly 600 controlled substances, just hit the digestive system of two women. As we spoke. Their names are Janet and Janet. Both of them named Janet. What are the odds? Actually, very, very good, if you consider how improbable a life-sustaining atmosphere even is. 89 times, in the course of just walking in this door, I envisioned a crime committed against me by a person that worked in an orphanage when I was only nine. Why did I see that in my mind so often? Biological signals sent from my brain, sense-memory. 91 times now. It just keeps happening. That person was never arrested, but was killed. You can’t prove how. How could you? There’s just too much to keep track of.

(Pause)

Over the course of the last month, it was discovered that people’s names were being spelled in a wantonly confusing way but a large number of ethnic minorities in order to confound governmental databases. You think it’s easy to track people by way of their social security number? Of course you’d think so? That’s because you don’t know that there are two million people in this country whose social security number is precisely the same as two million other people. How do you think that affects their records when they die? It’s not pretty. Of course it’s not pretty. In fact, despite what you may believe, according to Federal Databases, because of this Social Security glitch, more than half of those four million people are deceased. 14 million Mexicans just entered this country. 15 million. 16 million. All without social security numbers, most of them less than 5 feet 5 inches tall. How are we going to find them and bury them? Do we just toss them in the Pacific Ocean? No, no we don’t. That’s how we hope to fuel agriculture. But there are so, so many. So many.

(Pause)

Where is your wife? Tennessee?

GORDON: Pennsylvania.

COP: How, for fuck’s sake, can you be so sure?

NEXT WEEK: How to write your own Charles Krauthammer column! Get your finger paint ready!

The Virgin President

2008-06-09T03:43:00.005-04:00

When my grandchildren ask me how George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 (and I have to believe it will be an historical query for some time), they won't hear any grudging rehash of the Florida recount, the Supreme Court decision, Ralph Nader's existence, or Al Gore's failure to win his home state. Taken together, these enduring narratives still only explain half of it -- the half that Gore lost. They do nothing to explain how a talentless dry-drunk ambled his way into a reign of perpetual catastrophe. For that answer, we need a wider-reaching (but not deeper-digging) line of inquiry.

It was the year 2000 and people were primed for change. Fundamentalist Christians yearned for an apocalypse that came too late. The Son of Man didn't appear on cue. For secular folk, the Y2K virus provided a techno-eschatology to match the techno-utopian spirit of the 90s. Like Jesus and the Four Horsemen, this fantastrophy failed to materialize. Absent the bliss of some cathartic rapture -- religious or technological -- the year 2000 lurched uphill to the next odometer crossing and the decade-long Millennial countdown party gave way to an excruciating Millennial hangover.

That hangover found its quick-fix black coffee cure in "W" -- the born-again alcoholic Son of Bush sent as stand-in for the Son of Man.

His opponent, Albert Gore, Jr. was a decent, hardworking intellectual who brought the centrist policy of Bill Clinton without Clintonian narcissism. On numerous occasions before and after the Millennium, W demonstrated that he was an indecent, lazy, stupid and belligerent spendthrift. But the Bushian electorate had deeper emotional needs to fulfill, so they turned to the man who embodied and completed the Millennial narrative of resentment, global destruction, and rebirth.

As Freud said, "in any conflict the stronger emotion wins." And since any objective calculus of mere policy agreement routinely forecasts a Kucinich landslide, we have to "dig shallower" to find out why we get the candidates and leaders we do. We can no longer claim that their ascension owes to stated intentions.

So if W came to power to fulfill an apocalyptic Imaginary, what narrative best characterizes the rise of Barack Obama?

I submit that he's the Virgin President. Much the way Elizabeth I was the Virgin Queen: a pure icon of religious extraction selected to bleach away profound divisions in the country. At present, the radical right is quite content to throw away the election (and presumably, the country) to quickly dispose of John McCain and better position the malleable Mormon figurehead Mitt Romney for a 2012 triumph. For the sins of this young century, the born-again Bush will need to be reborn a thousand times over in a repetition complex where the only succor is the sinusoidal roller-coast between two partisan epochs. Obama, like Elizabeth, presents himself as a fusion of these binary opposites. But everything about his limited record shows compromise instead of courage. Virginity not virility.

Despite his sex appeal, Obama represents purity of identity above all else. He is both prior to and beyond the tragic core that defines our country. His record is not an active reversal of Bush-Cheney, but a crooked circumvention of it. He didn't stop warrentless wiretapping, he postponed its expiration. He derives moral authority on the Iraq War only because he wasn't around to authorize it. His long-time spiritual leader and confidante sullies with clownish bombast the very promise of transcendence that Obama nevertheless embodies. But these contradictions don't matter because we only ask that he embody it. Nothing more. Concrete action in the face of an insoluble dilemma like the present world war would immediately taint the impregnable orb we desperately need him to be.

So where could he start? He could confront the homophobia in the very constituency that validates his triumph as an historic Identity Politician. He could keep his campaign finance promise to John McCain and actually risk a triumph of ideas over money. He could vow to remove that flag pin when he's ended the Iraq War -- thus condensing the entire bloated pageant of Mission Accomplished to a simple gesture he must acknowledge every morning he adjusts his lapel as Commander in Chief.

In short, he could start leading people instead of congratulating them for existing. Until he does, he will remain a hollow O, buffed so mirror-bight we'll almost be able to see the poor ghosts howling in our wake for change.

Altar Egos

2008-06-02T02:16:00.007-04:00

Lewis Black doesn't retain an audience because he tells jokes. We just want to be there if his next phlegmatic contortion finally causes his neck to explode. Likewise, Christopher Hitchens' on-camera appeal derives in equal measure from rhetorical acrobatics as well as the prospect of seeing Bill Maher showered with vomit or Sean Hannity dick-slapped into a concussion. He has the natural gravity to accomplish both without shedding a scrap of dignity. Flush with drink, he's perfectly camouflaged any hint of shame when he says, for example ...

The Trotskyist in him knows that you can't win an argument with an ideologue. The only way to actually confront someone like Sean Hannity is to engage the frightened altar boy inside who's still trying to win mom's love. What better occasion than a biting eulogy of Jerry Falwell?

I have a longer essay on God Is Not Great, but for now I'll just say that I admire Hitchens for being the only pundit to divine an unimpeachably left-wing argument for the War in Iraq. More on that later, too. Of the many play ideas I've abandoned over the past few years, there's one I no longer feel the temptation to resuscitate. It was going to be called The Glutton and it's titular hero was a chubby man with anglo affectations (was this a money-maker or what!) whose superpower was the ability to win any argument from any side on any subject. He was a free-lance philosopher who worked on hire for thousand-word mini-commissions on truth. It was a fun part to write, but the wood-spring gag at its center couldn't sustain a whole play. It would have been, as Feingold once said of some young wit's debut comedy, "a sketch with elephantiasis." Well, Christopher Hitchens essays are rarely more than bon mots with elephantiases, but I enjoy him all the same.

Of all the supermarket aisle atheists out there, he's easily the most battle-ready for televised debate. And unlike Richard Dawkins, he understands that the problem of god isn't just a glitch in the program. He also knows that no matter how many times affectless meat-puppets like Sam Harris rock back and forth in the corner muttering "A=A," Ayn Rand will not come back to life to marshal the objectivist apocalypse. Hitchens may misread Nietzsche in his book, but he has the balls to go on the offensive as an "anti-theist," which leads me to believe he's somehow, accidentally, on the same page as the lovably combative Friedrich after all.

And while I'm on the subject of atheist theatrics, check out this theatre piece about an atheist. I'm back and forth a bunch these days so I don't know if I'll get to see it. But mention the super secret code phrase "I don't give a shibboleth" at the box office to get a ticket for only $18!!

No Animals Were Harmed in the Composition of this Post

2008-05-27T14:16:00.006-04:00

Before I get to parceling out memories and photos this spring's Oregon Adventure, I want to post my own knee-jerk reaction to the Bill Henson controversy before it vanishes from the blogcycle.

Australian photographer Bill Henson faces a handful of criminal charges under that country's Child Protection Act. He photographed naked girls under the age of 16. Enter the censorship debate, the pornography debate, and the child abuse debate. The last of those three is the only one that concerns me at the moment. But because public hysteria has been satisfyingly reactivated after years of Britney Spears whoring, the artistic blogosphere has taken the occasion to swat down the misplaced puritan reflexes running rampant. I think people are right to object, and George Hunka and Alison Croggon are right to match the objections with substantive defense and praise of Mr. Henson, but I also think the central question of abuse has been stolen in the shutter along with some young women's souls.

That's my reaction at the moment, but I post it here in the hopes of learning something beyond my own reflexes. And while my reflexes aren't exactly Puritan, they do have a tendency to escape into formal/conceptual debates about the medium. So here goes ...

If Henson were a painter, would we be having the same debate? In other words, if the medium allowed for some pretending past the direct action of the craft on its subject would we not still have access to all the thorny questions of sex, innocence, maturity, expression, etc.?

If the young women had chosen to photograph themselves without the mediating eye of Bill Henson ... if, in other words, they were expressing themselves instead of offering themselves for expression by an adult man, would the question of consent and exploitation vanish or change?

The photograph -- as an art-form and a journalistic tool -- doesn't just invite such debate, it directly binds the viewer, artist, and subject because the medium itself mediates very little. Unlike, say, a painting of the same: Henson would have to imagine his way through the same subject instead of seeking that subject out and capturing it concretely, photorealistically.

I'm sure the "dividing line," as George puts it, would be much more clear-cut if Henson were a musician giving poetic expression through lyrics, or a film-maker or theatre director using the suspension of disbelief to explore the same phenomena.

I happen to think that these kinds of artistic mediation can be more exacting (if less concrete) than direct photo-representation. And we've had no shortage of censorship spats over music lyrics, film content, paintings, and theatre pieces. But when the execution of the craft eclipses the subject in our contemplation of the art-piece ... something has gone wrong -- perhaps not legally, but aesthetically.

The pornography charge is, as always, a deflection. People don't want to be complicit in the abuse of a child by looking through the same view-finder as Henson. On George's blog, a commenter posting under the name "JFK" shares his/her experience as a subject of such art-work:

I was photographed in revealing poses when I was twelve years old. To this day I cannot adequately explain how unprepared I was to understand what was happening to me. My photographs, though not as skillfully executed as those of Mr. Henson, do have one eerie similarity: I recognize their blank, often downcast facial expressions that can be so easily interpreted as placid or even insouciant.

Being turned into a sexualized photographic subject before I could give any meaningful consent caused me indescribable pain and shame and led to years of misery and danger, in which I sacrificed my education and personal safety because of who I came to believe I was because of those photographs.

To draw from JFK's testimony, the meaningful consent of the child must be re-examined a million times over because that consent is being offered every time a new person sees the picture.

But just because people don't want to look through Henson's viewfinder doesn't mean they aren't capable of contemplating child sexuality in a meaningful and non-pornographic way. George's own Organum explores the contemplation of the "bodied soul" in live theatre and while I can't isolate the specific passage that mentions this, I recall his choice (if not his aesthetic prescription) to eschew nudity in Theatre Minima. I'm not sure why a live adult body has no place in his theatre while a photographed child's body remains worthy of defense. If, as we say, art should not be commodified or used, then surely we must explore how the essence of our particular craft turns subjects into objects. It's not just "Oedipus ... brought to you by Coke!" ... it's also the blunt fact that photography turns the subject into a static object fit for undiminished reproduction while the ephemeral theatre resists precisely that.

But perhaps even that formal distinction is merely my way of avoiding the real conflict here. Henson should be passionately defended from censorship and slippery charges of pornography. In a way, these claims are incidental. Censorship acts on ideas and expressions, not concrete actions. It's not that a young woman's body is unfit or forbidden from expression and contemplation or that a child's sexuality is off-limits in any way. It's the action of capturing that on film that triggers such reactions (including my own).

For whatever it's worth, I don't find Henson's work to be pornographic. But then I don't think pornography should be against the law, either. The bloggers seem to be defending him on both fronts. The real subjectivist divide here isn't over the Eye of the Beholder -- i.e. whether some jackass will masturbate to his images or whether some cultured person will find them sublimely beautiful. We can have that debate until the end of time, just as we can continue to debate Lolita and whether it should be taught in middle-schools. But since Henson's personal liberty is at stake here, we need a different binary to determine if he's exploited the liberty of others. The debate is whether Henson represents and reveals sexuality or whether he creates or imposes it. Two different fronts emerge since Henson's medium is photography instead of literature, music, or theatre. It's not the artist vs. the audience vs. the state. It's the subject vs. the artist vs. the audience. This is why comparisons to Lolita and the Bratz girls only get half of it. No young women were exploited in the creation of either -- but two different audiences are offended by what each asks of us.