From the Chroncile of Philanthropy article by Suzzanne Perry

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, at left, had some unflattering things to say about nonprofit workers during a recent broadcast and Robert Egger, president of D.C. Central Kitchen, has posted an amusing retort on YouTube.

While excoriating Democrats and the left for allegedly trying to kill the "private sector," Mr. Limbaugh refers to "lazy idiots" and then segues into an evaluation of the nonprofit world:

"Nonprofits siphon contributions as their salaries and so forth and think of themselves as good people, charitable people. These people are rapists in terms of finance and the economy."

Mr. Egger's video--which as of Wednesday morning had been viewed more than 40,000 times--takes Mr. Limbaugh on a mini-tour of the nonprofit world, wondering if the radio host was referring to the "lazy idiots" who organized the World War II memorial, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, run churches and other religious institutions, or are employed by the conservative Heritage Foundation (which highlights Mr. Limbaugh's membership on its Web site).

It ends with a visit to D.C. Central Kitchen, in Washington, where participants in a culinary job-training program use a universal gesture to show Mr. Limbaugh exactly what they think about his comments.

While Eggers does a good job of retorting, it is the part at the end of video where they give the "universal gesture" that made my day. 

As someone who works in the nonprofit world, it is bad enough to be called a "lazy idiot," but being called "rapists" is a whole another ball of wax. 

So to Mr. Eggers and all the folks at the D.C. Central Kitchen, I say thank you for the video and the work you do for your community.

(note: I had originally had trouble with getting this blog created, which has since been corrected, so the first comments are referring to this)

When one feels compelled to write an introduction to the introduction for a blog that will cover a number of entries, and which is itself part of a series of blogs rambling around a general topic, one may come to conclusion that one needs to maybe take some courses on succientantlcy   I am reminded of an interview I read many moons ago where Dan DeLillo responded to the interviewer's question about whether he had tried to ever write short stories that every time he tried they always turned into novels.  So maybe I can delude myself I am in the company of someone like DeLillo.

This led me back to Jacques Derrida as a means to clarify my position.  Of course, using Derrida as a means to clarify is no easy task since his style of discourse is at times (most of the time?) antithetical to clarity, even putting aside for the moment the notion that what he is saying at times is that clarity is impossible.

Although I will obviously spend a great deal more time exploring the assertions of Derrida (or at least one would assume by the subtitle of this blog), I would just posit at the moment that much of it center on one's Derrida's quotes "there is no outside the text."  While this statement describes a way of understanding political, cultural and individual terrains, it is also can be a way understanding how we can move forward as individuals and collectively.  (It may need to be added that there are those who would label the sentiment expressed in this quote as nihilist at best.)  This is say that what will be dealt with, although not necessarily obvious at first glance at the quote, is the dynamics and expression of power. 

Now, while I was pouring over some previous works by and about Derrida, I stumbled in a discount book bin Michael Frayn's play Democracy.  In one of those moments of serendipitous convergence, for not only was Democracy a play that helped illuminate the points I was I had originally intended to blog about, but also was one that demonstrated a very similar conservative-moderate-liberal dynamic in Germany during the late 60s and early 70s that I expressed as the current American political landscape in the Leary blog. 

And so was born the next installment of The Play is the Thing series.  And to make matters more unwieldy, the last comment on first blog of this series, which I did not see until much later (having been posted after it fell off the Café front page), provided a link to an article on the historian Tony  Judt, who was giving one of his last presentations before ALS took his life.

One of Judt's last books was titled simply Postwar, examining in large part how the shadow of WWII reached across European politics, for decades.  If Democracy highlights anything it this how this shadow reached into the 70s (and beyond).   In an interview with George Mason University's History Network, Judt* answers the question about how Europe handles the war's shadow with:

If you want a general answer, I would say that they handled the burden by a form of selective forgetting.  Although it varied in subject matter from country to country, it had in common the notion that the only way to put back countries which had experienced what amounted to five or six years of civil war as well as the complete destruction of civic, political, and legal institutions was to create agreeable myths about what happened and forget the rest.

As I stated in the first blog of this series, I working toward the thought-yet-unthought-until-written (and the hope that is contained in that), and maybe I am getting closer.  Not to clarity, but at least a little more sense about which way forward. 

Now, to the picture that appears at the top of the blog.  It is of Willy Brandt knelling at memorial for the victims  of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  It is known as Kniefall von Warschau (German for "Warsaw Genuflection") and refers to a gesture of humility and penance by social democratic Chancellor of Germany Willy Brandt towards the victims of the uprising.

This is one of those iconic moments in human history, modern or otherwise.  The ripple of emotions that resulted, both positive and negative, in Germany and around the world, from this (as far as we know) spontaneous act by Brandt so beautifully illustrates the dynamics the mark politics no matter what the country.  It also shows us the way forward because of those dynamics.  A dynamics that Derrida (although not him alone) can help shed a light upon

Of course, the play is the thing.  And this moment as portrayed by the British actor Roger Allam and the American James Naughton on their respective shore also helps shows us why the play is the thing. 

(*if for any reason other than transparency, I need to say that at the end of this interview, Judt was asked "who has influenced your work the most?"  His answer was Eric Hobsbawn (which he qualified as "someone that I do not agree with much, certainly not politically"), Raymond Aron (who is also mentioned by Michael Frayn in his postscript to Democracy, and who will also appear again in this blog series),  George Lichtheim, and, then, finally,

I suppose the fourth is Albert Camus, though he was neither a historian nor a scholar.  There is a quote from Camus that particularly captures my sense of what the historian has to do in order to be honest with himself.  If I can remember the quote, at one point Camus said: "If there is a party of those who are not sure whether they are right, that would be the party I would be a member of."  I admit to being an opinionated stylist, but I try to cultivate the sense that I'm not quite sure that I am right.  The historian must have a measure of intellectual humility.

So anyone who put Camus in his top four makes me a little biased toward them.  Not to mention that I believe intellectual humility is something we truly need to cultivate here at the Café and throughout the country.  At the same time, of course, to elevate intellectual aspirations as something to embrace, in opposition to the anti-intellectualism so rampant in this country.)

Some of the constant conversations around here at the Café concern the related topics of (1) Obama and whether he is liberal, moderate or Bush-lite; (2) the Democrats and whether they are no different than Republicans; and (3) whether liberals should support the Democrats in the coming 2010 elections.

A lot of the mix of this conservation contains the topic of the influence that the corporate and other big-money special-interests have on Obama and the other Democrats.  There is no doubt that there is as a result of the country's current campaign finance system.  While there might be some who believe that every single politician in D.C. embraces these special interests with gleeful enthusiasm (as in, there is perfect alignment between their two interests and priorities), the reality is that there is a spectrum from those who do so with enthusiasm to those who reluctantly allow some influence as result of the need for campaign dollars.

But for the moment I want to put aside this factor in the political equation and focus on simple representation of the people.  And for further simplicity to just look at the Senate.  What would the Senate look like if it reflected the country as a whole from political ideology perspective?

To do this I use the annual Gallup Poll that looks at whether people identify themselves as conservative, moderate, or liberal.  I understand that there is a problem using these terms to accurately predict where an individual would fall on any given issue.  In reality, people will be "conservative" on one issue or policy or piece of legislation, and "liberal" or "moderate" on the next.  Nor does it allow perfect understanding of party affiliation.   I am always curious about the 3% to 6% of self-identified liberals who affiliate themselves with the Republicans.  Moreover, there are those who hold liberal views on many issues but don't consider these views as liberal.  

With that said, the basic outcome of the poll shows that conservatives continue to lead the pack.  In the latest results for 2010, 40% of Americans interviewed describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.  This is basically consistent for the past twenty years, although in comparing it to 1992, the conservatives have lost three percentage points and the liberals have gained three.  At this rate, if the moderates hold steady, the liberals should catch up the conservative in the year 2064.

As I said earlier, I want to put the influence of big money to the side for the moment.  How would we expect the Senate to act if they were merely representing the people (and putting their own opinions aside as well)?  In other words, if they just wanted to play to their constituency and vote on matters in a way that aligned with the majority of the voters in their state.

Gallup has a pretty cool interactive map that allows one to look at all 50 states (and the District of Columbia).    

One of the interesting tidbits that come from this is that while conservatives are the leading ideological group, the Democrats hold the edge over the Republicans.  The quick conclusion one can draw is that conservatives and conservative-leaning moderates are part of the Democratic Party.  And if one is a Senator whose motivation is to get re-elected, to what extent should they concern themselves with the liberals.  

Take my state of Indiana.  Here those who affiliate themselves with the Democrats is 46% to only 40% Republicans.  Yet 40% see themselves as conservative, 38.5% as moderate, and 18% as liberal.  Now (if everyone voted) all the moderates and liberals together make up a good victory of 56%.  The problem is that the Republican starting off with 40%, only has to get another 11% to achieve a victory.  Those conservative-leaning moderates suddenly become very significant.  The Democrat is going to look at the moderate-leaning conservatives as potential voters.  Or in other words, the Democrat in Indiana is probably is going to see the moderates as his or her base, rather than the liberals.  If he or she can grab the moderates, then he or she can then peel off some of the conservatives and some of liberals (also hoping that the liberals will be motivated by the desire not to see the Republican win).  

The end result is a blue-dog, but not because the politician is in the pocket of big business or the military-industrial complex (although this might be the case).  The blueness of this dog has to do with the general leanings of the constituents.  When one looks at the actual outcomes of the health care reform, financial reform, the stimulus package, foreign policy votes, there is actually a pretty good alignment with the country's basic ideological perspective.  When one looks at the numbers across the country, it would seem doubtful that a Senate motivated only by the desire to be re-elected would nationalize the banks or create a socialized system of medicine.  

And if Obama, as President of the United States, and not just the President of the United States Liberals, then his policies if they are to reflect where the country is, that over-used term "the will of the people," would tend to be definitely moderate and leaning more conservative than liberal.  

And why is this Timothy Leary's fault?

Because he convinced a whole segment of a generation that the way to go was to turn on, tune in, and drop out.  With my emphasis on the last one - the dropping out.  Because even with the numbers highly tilted against the liberals in this country, the liberals seems to be under-representative in the halls of power, whether in business, media or government.  Of course, I am just jesting that it is Tim's fault, but there is definitely some dynamics going on here.

It is part of the liberal psyche or mental make-up to avoid seeking those positions where economic, information and political power in this country is centered?  Is it overstating things to say liberals are going to be the artists and the social workers and teachers?  

And if so, do we as liberals have no else to blame when the political machines and economic machines and media machines are dominated by conservatives even more so than their numbers reflect?  And now there are those who are frustrated with the outcomes of political system who talking about dropping out (either by not voting or voting for what is usually a non-viable third party).

There is twist on an old saying: if you're not part of the problem, you're not part of the solution.  We're a minority political group.  If we become frustrated with not having our agenda being implemented, is checking out even more so than we already are only going to worsen the situation by pushing Democratic politicians to look to align their positions with the moderate conservatives in hopes of getting the moderate-moderate conservative block? 

Personally, I think we want to seek a liberal-moderate caucus, keeping the conservatives in the minority.  Of course this means that the outcomes are going to skew toward the center, in hopes of keeping the conservative moderates in the caucus.  And this is frustrating.  But until there is a more ideological shift in this country, I really don't see an otherwise viable solution.  This is not about just grinning and bearing it, but getting into the mix.  Not to drop out, but to engage a system in which, given the numbers, we are generally going to be coming out with less than what is desired, if anything at all.

This was a postcard on my refrigerator for a many of moons.  Sometimes I would see it and it would make me laugh.  Other times, I would wonder why did I find this funny.  But this made me like it all the more.  I couldn't pin it down.  It was one of the great works of the post-modern era.  I mean, is there anything out there that doesn't better sum up the current political environment in the Beltway right now, or explain the malaise of our current political discourse in this country?

But, hey, who doesn't like pie?

Personally, I prefer apple, but a nice lemon meringue is mighty fine, too. 

I guess right now I'm feeling a bit frustrated by all the current political talk on both sides, all sides, that is so concrete, so assured in its own definitive definitions of things like liberty, America, freedom, justice.  But what those things mean are as slippery as what that postcard means. 

I am about as opinionated as they come.  And sometimes, I will debate one side of an issue until the cows come home because the others at the table have chosen to take the other side.  We do need to take a stand on those issues we do feel passionate about.  And when others take a stand with which we disagree we need to speak up (such as what is happening in Arizona right now).  Where do we draw the line?  At one point is about just creating the "other side," against whom we can stand above in moral certitude?

The things at stake, in the end, are precious.  Whether we are talking the fate of the earth, or impoverished nations or neighborhoods, or immigration policy, or health care for all, or...

Maybe that is why I come back to the cat.  Whatever he is telling me, he is at least telling me to keep my perspective.  Is there an answer to the problems?  Am I on the side of angels? Who knows.  But there is pie.

 

The self's voice (wherever it speaks from) goes in and out of hearing.  The genesis of a work is not where it seems.  Did I make it happen? or did it just happen? The actor wonders.  Where things come from--the roots and shadings of ideas--is, if you think it, subject to the thinking, temporal and indeterminable.  It's hard to know at which end of time, now or before, things occur in the act of reflection.  To trace the source of a body of work is to be involved in an infinite regression, as when the dreamer scans (or interprets) the body of a dream.

...

We're never quite sure how of what seems to be entering consciousness--in the displacements of history as in the distortions of dream--was already there.  Nor are we sure, as Freud points out in discussing memory, where it was when it's not in consciousness. 

--Herbert Blau from Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point

The protestor stands in rally, shouts "stop the clearcutting" or "stop socialized medicine."  Neither sees one's self as an actor in the performance, a piece of political theater.  This is the real thing.  Neither stops to listen to that voice, wonder where those words and those ideas came from, asks who is it really shouting.  Not at the moment, nor in reflection.  That was no dream.  Or so it seems.

One protestor that is getting a lot of attention is the one who is also holding a sign with an image of Obama as a witchdoctor, or is shouting the "n" word at a congressional representative.  A lot of the words on the blogosphere these days ponder and debate the extent to which racism plays a role in the protests and the level of anger, and even if there is racism there whether we should talking about it. 

And here I am adding more words to this thread of our socio-political discourse. 

Yet I think what tends to be offered in this discourse (and the same would be true if we discussing sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, classism, etc - all those barriers to authentic engagement) is a static landscape.  As if there were not a long history of geological forces acting upon this landscape, forces that will continue to act upon.  We point to the racists.  Label them.  Denounce them. And that is that.

Sometimes that is what needs to be done.  But the sedimentation of such discourse (keeping with geological metaphor) is that it tends to morph in our mind's eye the racists into racists for all time, like a fossil.  Consequently, if the racist will always be a racist, and since racists are bad and a barrier to progress for good, we are left with two options.  We can let them be, which is unacceptable, or we can do battle with them.  Of course this does generate the question: in a society such as ours, where we don't go around shooting each other for ideas and notion, how exactly do we conduct this battle? 

But there is a third option.  And it is starts with us reflecting on those performers in the (absurdist?) performance that is our contemporary culture who are shouting the "n" word, who are in frenzy over the socialist takeover, who gnash their teeth when the gays come onto the stage, who tell the women to stand at the back of the stage and be quiet, and then asking (even though we do so knowing we will never get the satisfaction of a definitive answer): where did the roots and shadings of these ideas come from?

There are probably an infinite ways into the question (all leading to a dead end?), but I will chose to turn to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (as related by Dr. Mary Klages of University of Colorado.). 

Central to the conception of the human, in Lacan, is the notion that the unconscious, which governs all factors of human existence, is structured like a language.....

And here he follows ideas laid out by Saussure, but modifies them a bit. Where Saussure talked about the relations between signifier and signified, which form a sign, and insisted that the structure of language is the negative relation among signs (one sign is what it is because it is not another sign), Lacan focuses on relations between signifiers alone. The elements in the unconscious--wishes, desires, images--all form signifiers (and they're usually expressed in verbal terms), and these signifiers form a "signifying chain"--one signifier has meaning only because it is not some other signifier.

For Lacan, there are no signifieds; there is nothing that a signifier ultimately refers to. If there were, then the meaning of any particular signifier would be relatively stable--there would be (in Saussure's terms) a relation of signification between signifier and signified, and that relation would create or guarantee some kind of meaning. Lacan says those relations of signification don't exist (in the unconscious, at least); rather, there are only the negative relations, relations of value, where one signifier is what it is because it's not something else.

Because of this lack of signifieds, Lacan says, the chain of signifiers--x=y=z=b=q=0=%=|=s (etc.)--is constantly sliding and shifting and circulating. There is no anchor, nothing that ultimately gives meaning or stability to the whole system. The chain of signifiers is constantly in play (in Derrida's sense); there's no way to stop sliding down the chain--no way to say "oh, x means this," and have it be definitive. Rather, one signifier only leads to another signifier, and never to a signified. It's kind of like a dictionary--one word only leads you to more words, but never to the things the words supposedly represent.

Lacan says this is what the unconscious looks like--a continually circulating chain (or multiple chains) of signifiers, with no anchor--or, to use Derrida's terms, no center. This is Lacan's linguistic translation of Freud's picture of the unconscious as this chaotic realm of constantly shifting drives and desires. Freud is interested in how to bring those chaotic drives and desires into consciousness, so that they can have some order and sense and meaning, so they can be understood and made manageable. Lacan, on the other hand, says that the process of becoming an adult, a "self," is the process of trying to fix, to stabilize, to stop the chain of signifiers so that stable meaning--including the meaning of "I"--becomes possible. Though of course Lacan says that this possibility is only an illusion, an image created by a misperception of the relation between body and self.

When look down into those roots and shading of ideas of our racist protester, below the surface of the tangled thoughts in the conscious mind all we can see are protester's desires and wishes and images.  A chaotic mess, as it with all of us.  And the only thing all of that which swirling around down below surface has in common is it is about the "I."  The desires of the "I," the wishes of the "I," the images of the "I."

The racism (or sexism or homophobia or whatever else) is ultimately about the "I" of the racist, and not the object of the racist's notions, the "Other."  The "Other" existing in the chain of signifiers provides one piece to the collective "not-I," which through and by its existence provides the negative relation needed in order for the illusion of the "I" to exist.

When looked at this way, for the racist to give up their racism would entail giving up something that has evolved over time to be a basis of a stable identity.  To give it up would threatened the existence of the "I."  This is one way to differentiate the individual who has racist notions and the racist.  All of us, growing up in a culture which is permeated with racist images and ideas, have racist notions threading through our minds, some more than others.  The non-racist is the one whose identity is not threatened when confronted with idea to let such notions go. 

One critical point is from the previous paragraph is that we are all immersed in a culture that bombards us with racist images and notions.  The same goes with sexism, homophobia, etc.  Some more than others, but all of us -- before we can differentiate between cat and dog, before we know the cow goes "moo" and the sheep goes "baaa" - become part of the flow of our culture's discourse that carries with it all that is good and all that is bad about it.

The question as to where the roots and shadings of the ideas come from takes us back before the racist was born, back through time, spreading out through multitudes of discourses, until what was there has been forgotten.  Why in our contemporary culture some of us turn out racist and others not cannot be fully explained, each of us some mindboggling interplay of personal experiences and culture, nature and nurture, history and consciousness.

Yet it is in this view that the third option as to what to do with the racist lies.  For if the self is not stable, if there is no center upon which the "I" can find a definitive definition, then the
"I" is open to the potentiality of change. 

Whereas we cannot change the fact that we define ourselves through and by what we are not, we can choose, more or less, with a little bit effort (or a whole lot of effort), what is that we identify as the not-I.   The racist is not doomed to a sentence of being a racist forever, does not need fear the changing demographics of America, that wondrous extension of the "I." 

The racist does not need to be the adversary that must be vanquished.  What needs to be vanquished is those bad, bad chains of signifiers.  Yet how do we accomplish that?  How do we get those racist performers in our cultural political play to ask the question: Did I make it happen? or did it just happen? That I suppose is the topic for other blogs to come.  But I would say one answer is that the play is the thing:

...is the act of performance the path of a lie? mere subterfuge and concealment? Yes, and no. All forms have rules.  The theater's rules (like those of dream) are the rules of self-separation, and even a consenting self-delusion.  We know when we go to the theater that we will be deceived.  It's only a matter of time, time-serving....The truth of the form still depends--despite the post-Brechtian ideology of exposing the staging devises and undoing representation--on a pretense of ignorance.  We take a willful ignorance into the dark.  The self reveals itself according to the laws of its nature, reflexively, as the conscious subject of apparent meaning.  No sooner started, the process acquires a patina of deceit.  Every attempt at demystification is another illusion, adding another layer of mystery to the opaque.

--Herbert Blau from Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point

GUILDENSTERN: (fear, derision): Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! (More quietly.) You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it doesn't bring death home to anyone-it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says-"One day you are going to die." (He straightens up.) You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death?

PLAYER: On the contrary, it's the only kind they do believe. They're conditioned to it. I had an actor once who was condemned to hang for stealing a sheep-or a lamb, I forget which-so I got permission to have him hanged in the middle of a play-had to change the plot a bit but I thought it would be effective, you  know-and you wouldn't  believe  it, he just wasn't convincing! It was impossible to suspend one's, disbelief-and what with the audience jeering and throwing  peanuts, the whole thing  was  a disaster!-he did nothing but cry all the time-right out of character-just stood there and cried...Never again. (In good humour he has already turned back to the mime: the two SPIES awaiting execution at the hands of the PLAYER.) Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

Ludvík Zifčák would agree with the Player.  Who is this Ludvík Zifčák? He was a secret police agent of the Czchoslovakian StB who was impersonating a student and participating in the protest march on November 17, 1989 in Prague.  It was the brutal crackdown of this protest after the government forces had corralled the students on Národní Street so they had no exit which is credited with the start of the Velvet Revolution.  The event has been given its own memorial, the open hands of the students pleading with the government forces, chanting "we are unarmed, we are unarmed" before the violence descended upon them.

As the students started to disperse, Ludvík apparently remained on the ground, pretending to be the dead student, Martin Šmíd.  Word of this "death" quickly spread, as reflected in this diary entry the next day from someone who at the protests.  The rumor of the death of Martin Šmíd is believed to have intensified the reaction of the Czechoslovakian population outside student and artist circles.

Soon hundreds of thousands of people were gathering in protests throughout the country, and by November 27 the Communist rule of Czechoslovakia had effectively come to an end peacefully.  There were a number of factors that led to the Velvet Revolution.  But in one sense, there really wasn;t much difference between the conditions of the Czechoslovakian people between November 16 and November 20th.  And one could say that what was difference was that the people had had enough. 

Are we reaching a point when people in this country - whether on the left or right; liberal, moderate or conservative;  Democrat, Republican or Independent - have had a enough. Is there a revolution afoot?  Who knows, although I tend to believe that if the people went out into the streets it would probable look more the WTO protests in Seattle than the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

The other difference I believe would be that for too many in this country they would not know exactly for what it is that they are struggling.  It would be like the individual protesting clearcutting practices of the multination timber corporation without the knowledge of sustainable forestry practices.  It is not enough to know what it is one is against.  We need to have some idea, collectively, as where we want to go.  Otherwise we are just an angry mob, aimless and purposeless.

But what does this have to do with theater?  Is the play really the thing? 

Ludvík Zifčák gave a great performance of "political theater," or maybe it would be better to call guerilla theater.  What he employed was the fundamental strategy of theater: deception.

It is the underlying idea when Vaclav Havel, the playwright and dissident who would become President of the new democracy, wrote

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

The power structure of this country are able to maintain their control, their legitimacy in large part because they are able to manipulate this surface.  One only has to watch the MSM media to know what is meant by "what is there is not there."  And one could make the case that theater only compounds this state of illusory life, further dunking us in the escapement.  And there is some theater that does this, just as most of what we see on the television and movies does.

Yet it is this power in the "thoroughly laminated illusion" that provides the hope, if that word can still be used without too much derision.

Herbert Blau, speaking from the point of the view of the actor, reflects on a facet of the dynamic which generates this hope:

One of the uses of the theatrical act is to perform the possibility of a belief, teaching oneself to believe it, if at all, so that whatever one believes it feels enactable.  And believing it with a passion against all disenchantment, which in the poor grace of time comes easy enough...At the sticking point of conviction, the actor is likely to be a convention, back with the rest of us, somewhere between emptiness and silence, of which we have heard too much, though it is real, not knowing what to believe.  At the achieving edge of craft, the actor is unexpected, but known; exposed, but inadequate; there, but again, and always again, who cares? Sincere, another mask.  Here, too, we go back and forth along a scale of sliding desire.  Nothing compares with our passions, desire outgrows us.  We are always done in by what we can imagine, which has a fullness always denied to life.  It is only when life, imitating the elasticity of the imagined, takes on its capacities that it is really memorable.  Which is why we still favor our dreams, the deeply remembered, which is always slipping out of memory.  The purpose of the reenactment is to keep them slipping, because--whatever story they tell of repression--they seem to have some enduring relation to what we should believe.

Not to wax poetic too much here, but when we struggle for equality, freedom and justice, the dignity of all life, it is because we can dream of these things.  And because we can dream of them, we can come to believe them. 

And when one boils down the frustration and the anger out there right now, it is because what we are really after is a better tomorrow and to be better people.  To be just, compassionate, trustworthy, etc.  We believe there should be less injustice, less fear, less suffering, less hate and less ignorance.  There may be some that are trying to (re)create paradise here on earth, or some other utopia dreamt of in the wee hours of the morning, but most of us just want things to be better.  While life may not be perfect, and at times unfair, we have sense that it could be better than it is right now.  Or to put it another way, things don't have to be this way.  Or, we believe something else is possible.

Although recently some of those out there protesting and calling for change seem to filled with the stuff of bad dreams.  While they may feel that things ought to be better, they are still caught in the muck of hatred and ignorance.

This is why cultivating an appreciation for theater is so crucial.  Margo Jeffereson in the New York Times gives a little expasion to this from the audience point of view in the beginning of a review of Molly Sweeney

SIT DOWN, LOOK AND LISTEN, says the playwright, to which the playgoer replies: Make it worth my while. Reconfigure my sense of time and place. Show me something I think I already know, then make the scales fall from my eyes. Change the proportions and texture of experience. Vary the landscape, or give me a new place to view it from. Make me fit my rhythms (my attention span, the speed and nature of my responses) to yours, or let me play them against yours. You have language, movement, sound and sight -- a complete vocabulary of visual design -- to work with.

The "tea party" folks and others like them need to have the scales fall from their eyes.  But that is unlikely til they first accept that this may be a good thing. 

The Player returns and reminds us:

On the contrary, it's the only kind they do believe.  They are conditioned to it...Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

And if it is true, that "outside the theater we see as if we were inside, the world gradually seeming what it is not," then what they are prepared to believe in is what they have told to believe in, what they have been conditioned to.  And unfortunately, those outside of the theater who are doing most of the telling tend to have nefarious agendas.

And maybe the only way to counter the lies being sold as the truth is by the lie that is known to be a lie, which is the theater. 

For if we are really serious about a progressive movement, that revolution, then we have to be concerned not only with the angry ones taking to the street against "socialism," but also the one who is fine with the status quo. One more time, Herbert Blau:

A mere peaceful coexistence on the level of the polluted earth is still a task for scoundrels, at the dubious end of ideology, at the possible end of history, when our lives are still dominated (incredibly) by the prospect of an actual disappearance.  All theater comes against the inevitability of disappearance from the struggle to appear.  The only theater worth seeing--that can be seen rather than stared through--is that which struggles to appear.  The rest is all bad makeup.

It is in sense that I ask is the progressive movement (revolution) struggling to appear? 

Or are just in the audience watching the tea party performers storm their illusory Bastille?

I end, for the moment, with some quotes from Vaclav Havel:

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.

If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.

None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events.

There are no exact directions. There are probably no directions at all. The only things that I am able to recommend at this moment are: a sense of humour; an ability to see the ridiculous and the absurd dimensions of things; an ability to laugh about others as well as about ourselves; a sense of irony; and, of everything that invites parody in this world. In other words: rising above things, or looking at them from a distance; sensibility to the hidden presence of all the more dangerous types of conceit in others, as well as in ourselves; good cheer; an unostentatious certainty of the meaning of things; gratitude for the gift of life and courage to assume responsibility for it; and, a vigilant mind.

A few weeks ago the Czech team won the world ice hockey championship. Their victory was widely celebrated in the streets of our country. While following the news coverage of these celebrations, I will admit that I had - as I often have on occasions such as this - rather mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I rejoiced that Czech society of today, otherwise rather apathetic and skeptical, is capable of such an enthusiastic identification with representatives of its State and, thus, with the State as such. I was happy to see that an elementary patriotism is still present in us and that people are still capable of putting their hearts into something and going out into the streets to celebrate a piece of good news even though the success was obviously not bringing them any direct personal gain.

On the other hand, however, a number of unpleasant questions came to mind. For example: While people everywhere were chanting "We have won!" did it not mean that they were claiming credit for somebody else's accomplishment and construing that victory, without justification, as an assurance of their own exceptionality? Who actually won? "We", meaning all, and particularly those who celebrated in the streets; or, the players who represented the Czech Republic? Were we truly witnessing pure joy in the success of our fellow citizens promoting the good name of our country; or, for many people, was it merely an occasion to nurture illusions about themselves? Aren't such massive celebrations simply an expression of an unwillingness to take personal responsibility for the world, and of a need to dissolve instead in the collectivity of a pack with its collective pride and collective irresponsibility? Isn't this merely an outburst of a darkly archetypal love of our own tribe, which appears to us to be the best of all simply because this is the tribe we belong to, without having to do anything for this affiliation? Aren't the boys who asserted, as part of the nation-wide celebrations of that ice hockey victory, our national exceptionality by beating up a few people of a different colour of skin, only a more visible sprout of a less visible, but all the more dangerous, phenomenon which lies dormant in this kind of euphoria?

Perhaps the fight between Open Society and its enemies, as described by Sir Karl Popper, takes place also within a crowd celebrating an ice hockey victory and, in a way, even in the soul of every person participating in these celebrations.

It cannot be helped, but Hegel - in Popper's opinion a philosophical rogue - was probably right in one thing: reality is ambiguous. It is indeed tremendously difficult to discern the boundary between a moving, uplifting, sympathetic and thoroughly natural solidarity within a certain community, such as a nation, and a pack mentality which allows thousands, or millions, of cowardly and immature individuals to hide behind a "we" that automatically relieves them of any personal liability. Where does patriotism end and nationalism and chauvinism begin? Where is the line between civic solidarity and tribal passion? Where is the limit beyond which spontaneous rejoicing in a remarkable success of our fellow citizens and a thoroughly respectable experience of a sporting activity turn into a theft of somebody else's performance by a crowd lacking ideas of their own and shrinking from personal responsibility?

And for those in this country, where does it reinforce the notion of American Exceptionalism that allows our citizens to believe the USA doesn't have to play by the same rules as everyone else, that our security and prosperity takes precedent over all others.

There has been some discussion in the Cafe and elsewhere on the rising populism in this country, and as I read Havel's words, I began to think of the crowds of angry citizens.  Right now, on both the left and right there is anger and frustration with those in D.C., with Wall Street, and with the ruling classes.  There are definitely differences between the various strands of anger being expressed, but when the angry begin to gather there are certain dangerous dynamic always possible (but not necessarily inevitable). 

Havel as he continued his speech address a facet of this dynamic.

And, moreover: It is equally difficult to ascertain the boundaries between a number of other phenomena that are, in various ways, linked with the ideal of an Open Society.

For example, how can we recognize the moment when a set of living ideas degenerates into an ideology? How can we recognize when principles, opinions and hopes begin to petrify into a rigid mass of dogma, precepts and conceptual stereotypes? How can we recognize when interest in the truths of the world is being displaced by mere prestige and inordinate pride that do not allow a person to make even the slightest correction of a view that he, or she, has once expressed? How can we recognize the point when conceptual thinking, a sine-qua-non in any good politics, begins to turn into social engineering as an attempt of the arrogant reason of an individual to plan the life of a society?

An Open Society - that is, a society of free human beings exercising free association, a society that does not defer to the dictate of any ideology or any particular interpretation of history and supposed historical laws but solely to the imperative of human judgement and of the basic moral principles - requires an open human being with an open mind; and, by the same token, also generates and forms this kind of personality.

But, again: How can we recognize when people are still freely sorting and absorbing all that makes up their world, and when they begin to resign their freedom to simply go along with their dark passions and prejudices; to follow simplifying, but impressive, ideological paradigms; to dully yield to the seductive lures of demagogues and populists? How can we recognize when a politician ceases to reflect our natural feelings or sentiments and begins to shamelessly use or abuse them for his, or her, own gain?

It is known that somewhere in the beginning of today's round of Balkan horrors there was an aggressive enthusiasm of the Serbian and Croatian football fans.

How can we recognize when such an agreeable and natural thing as identification with a local sports club begins to change inconspicuously into a dark prelude to ethnic hatred, ethnic cleansing, ethnic wars and ethnic atrocities?

The folks who are providing the energy to the Tea Party are in a sense just one one of those things that we must deal with as an open society (yes, yes, there is the control of MSM, Fox News, etc, whereas the extent of the openness is definitely open to debate.) But Palin is definitely a demagogue in the making, manipulating the populist sentiments boiling up.  And as Tancredo showed at the very least that there is a deep river of enthnic hatred running beneath the surface of this particular strain of American populism.  Right now I would say that for most of the Tea Party folks are driven mostly by a few issues (deficit, lack of jobs, guns, etc.) and a vague sense of what they are against (socialism, liberals, elitists, etc.).  It hasn't quite yet congelled into an ideology proper.  Palin, or someone else, just might be able to lift it to this point.  At which point...things really do get scary.

I don't have to tell the readers of the Cafe that this is not something particular to America. Driving into work this morning, NPR had a story on the anti-immigrant sentiments that are gaining strength in Greece, which is going through its own economic turmoil. 

Days after immigrants filled the streets of Athens in protest, the nationalist group Golden Dawn held a rally in the same city. Militants waved flags with the Celtic cross, a fascist symbol throughout Europe. Muscular young men wielding baseball bats discouraged photographers from doing their job.

A speaker exhorted the crowd to rise up like a flame against the idea of a multiethnic Greece. As nationalist songs played in the background, demonstrator Pavlos Benakis said that immigrants should not have the same rights as Greeks.

Fascism is always just around the corner in an open society frustrated with an open society, especially a diverse one which provides too many scapegoats who threaten the "national identity."

I would just end with something Havel said a little later in his speech.

Given the global character of today's civilization, any minor hatred can easily turn into a global catastrophe.

Another crucial aspect of the theatrical is that the drama is inconsequential (no matter how meaningful the play is). You get emotionally involved by "suspending your disbelief" in the plain fact that in about 90 minutes you'll be out dining in a restaurant and feeling utterly safe, and so would be the actors.

Now, let me say that I think Evildoer is one of most articulate and thoughtful of posters, and I appreciate his participation in the Cafe.  We don't see perfectly eye to eye on every issue, but who does?  But I have to completely disagree with his statement since it contrary to the very basis on which this series began.

The Play is the Thing for what ails our political body.  If it was inconsequential, well, then it wouldn't be the thing. 

Which is not to say most of what is to be considered the theater today is inconsequential.  Of course, this would apply to night out to see Spamalot. And there is nothing wrong with such an evening.  But it also to applies to a many productions of Hamlet and Endgame.  Sometimes this has to with the production itself.  But even if what is occurying on stage is, for an audience engaged and prepared for the looking, of  consequence, the audience is unable to connect at the same intensity.

When those on both sides of the proscenium are aptly prepared, theater is of consequence, if anything.  As Herbert Blau in Take Up of the Bodies puts it: 

In theater, we look for a rupture of  the plane of being, through performance, to the plane of knowing.

It is this dynamic, if anything, that separates the theater from political theater we watch on tv, see on the web, or, on occassion participate in at election rallies and townhall meetings.  In the latter, it is more of a plane of persuasion rather than knowing that is being sought.  On the cynical side, it would be the plane of bamboozling.

And this brings me to Spaulding Gray and his one-man show Swimming to Cambodia.

So five years of bombing, a diet of bark, bugs, lizards and leaves up in the Cambodian jungles, an education in Paris environs in a strict Maoist doctrine with a touch of Rousseau, and other things that we will probably never know about in our lifetime. Including perhaps an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia, America, set the Khmer Rouge out to commit the worst auto-homeo genocide in modern history.

(to watch the whole version of Swimming to Cambodia, here is a link to part one of the film.)

(how this relates to the current Pol Pot wanna-bes in the caves somewhere in Afghan-Pakistan borderland crosses my mind.)

Reading the words cannot convey actually the power of this as it is watching the film of the performance.  And watching the film of performance cannot convey the power of this scene when seen in person (which, unfortunately, is impossible now - of which more later).

And that is, in part, what I mean, when I say the play is the thing.  Having seen Spaulding Gray perform Monster in a Box as well as see the film, I would say there is quantum difference between the two in spite of the fact that the content is, for all intents and purposes, the same. 

The reason has to do with the fact that he is there some 30 yards away telling his story as opposed to an image of the man performing the same material.  He is there, right there, confessing, relating his experience, a personal offering from him to us.  It is the difference between having an intimate conversation in person and via web cam.

It also has to do with the fact that we, collectively, were watching Spaulding Gray play Spaulding Gray.  Now, what Spaulding was doing was not a fictional play.  He once said:

I am one of those who were impressed with Obama's first go around with this staged production.  Moreover, after his not-State of the Union address, and the now infamous "you lie" outburst, this one had a bit of the anxiety previous ones did not have as one wondered what decorum would the Republicans break this time.  Which made for better theater.

Except the SOTU isn't theater.  At least not for the vast majority of us who are not there in person, but rather have to watch it on tv or the internet. It is like a youtube video of a theaterical performance, such as this example of the Belfry's The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard.  It may be about theater, but it isn't theater unless you are there, the actors on the stage right before your eyes, there words in your ears.  And to extent that the SOTU is actually theater, which it isn't, it is a good example of some of the more experimental theater since the audience is part of the performance.

This year, the SOTU was followed up by Obama with another great moment in political theater (again, not actually theater) when he met with the caucus of the minority party from the House of Representatives. 

And the word that seems to be a common theme running through these two performances, and through the frustration and anger in the body politic, is stalemate

I've said this before, but I'm a big believer not just in the value of a loyal opposition, but in its necessity. Having differences of opinion, having a real debate about matters of domestic policy and national security -- and that's not something that's only good for our country, it's absolutely essential. It's only through the process of disagreement and debate that bad ideas get tossed out and good ideas get refined and made better. And that kind of vigorous back and forth -- that imperfect but well-founded process, messy as it often is -- is at the heart of our democracy. That's what makes us the greatest nation in the world.

It is this messy imperfect back and forth process which has now come to a seemingly partisan stalemate within the Beltway.

During the Q&A, Obama elaborated (on the cuff, or as some might say improv) further on the dynamics of this stalemate:

So all I'm saying is, we've got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I'm not suggesting that we're going to agree on everything, whether it's on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America.

And I would just say that we have to think about tone. It's not just on your side, by the way -- it's on our side, as well. This is part of what's happened in our politics, where we demonize the other side so much that when it comes to actually getting things done, it becomes tough to do.

(Here is the full text of the performance)

One doesn't have to spend a lot of time on TPM to know that the Republicans, conservatives et al. are a demonized lot by those on the left.  There is the rub.  Because from a liberal perspective, much of that demonization is well-derserved and justified. 

And so we have another stalement, this one internal: the clash between our sense of what is just and humane and the desire to move forward in spirit of bi-partisanship.  Do we really have to compromise with those bastards?

This dilemma is possibly part of the inspiration for the concept that politics is the art of the possible.  And possibly why, confronted with the internal and external stalement, we turn to the theater.  Herbert Blau wrote in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (1964):

Poets and philosophers have always used the theater as a metaphor of reality.  As John Donne said in a sermon, "the whole frame of the world is the Theater."  This may be reality or illusion, but the idea that all the world's is a stage is written in the blood of the human race; and the multiple illusions of contemporary life, which may be its only reality, are described in the best drama as they are engaged in the Cold War.  That too is an impossible affair, or so it has seemed.  Yet if politics is the art of the possible, theater is the art of the impossible.  "Seeming, seeming" is what it is made of.

...the theater is particularly devoted to those divisions of man's nature, seeming without remedy, that lef Freud to the almost elegiac conclusions of his Civilization and Its Discontents.  Where politics--the exercise of government for livable ends--tries by means from diplomacy to wire-pulling to prevail against the stalemate, the theater--by mean ranging from fable to trompe l'oeil--takes us through the formal experience of the stalemate, the livable and the unbearable.  At its best, it is not deluded by its denouements, nor is it disillusioned, for irony is built into the form, where people pretend to be what they are not--even when, as in the "Alienation Effect" of Brecht, they're pretending they're not pretending.

Our politics of late is not doing a job, despite the wire-pulling, of prevailing against the stalemate.  If the play is the thing, it will help us deal with what is definitely unbearable in this moment of crisis and quagmire in the beltway (not to mention the state and local politics).

One of the reasons that what is referred to a political theater isn't theater is that in politics, irony is not built into form.  Although in this jaded age, it is almost there (and God help us all when it arrives).   Irony is definitely one of the top ten words misused, the most egregious example coming from Alanis Morissettee in her song Ironic.  We all know that politicians tell us what we want to hear in order to get (re)elected.  But the system can only function if we except a politician, say Obama during the SOTU address, is actually meaning what he or she says.

When W. says in his last SOTU* "Trade brings better jobs and better prices.  But for some Americans, trade can mean losing a job and the Federal Government has a responsibility to help." it is not the same as an actor in an off-off-Broadway playing W. saying the same thing.

(*Warning: reliving moments when W. was actually president and giving the SOTU address may too much for the faint of heart, although comparing W. to Obama might good for every citizen.)

It is that irony, if for any other reason than we have that moment we can see through denouement and if I can others can, that keeps us from being disillusioned. 

One can chart our country's history in moments of stalement: Taxation without Representation, Civil War, Women's Right to Vote, Civil Rights, Worker's Rights, etc. etc. Sometimes great shifts, other times increments. 

AIDS was another moment, as it brought conflicting spheres into a stalement as people suffered an epidemic.  In my opinion, nothing caught this moment in time as the play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.  I was fortunate to see the play at the Seattle Repertory Theater back in the early 90s.  It was for me personally a moment that revealed the power of the stage, a power that could not be found in a book or film, what it meant to be there yards away from the actors.

There was one particular moment during the play when Louis and Prior are having an argument at the same time that Joe and Harper are having an argument, the four of them moving around a bare stage, crisscrossing over each others' paths, two separate conflicts, yet one conflict, and by extension every conflict between people trying to maneuver through life as partners. 

Such was the acting and directing, that although I was aware of the reality of four actors playing four characters that I was able to see the extension of choreography of the scene to all of our lives.  Those stalemates we all endure, attempt to live through, hoping it won't be the unbearable one.   "Seeming, seeming."

I don't intend to provide an analysis of Angels in America, although there is plenty in this dense play that is relevant to our current political landscape, in spite of the fact that AIDS has gone to the backburner of our political discourse.  What comes to my mind, for whatever reason(s), right or wrong, is the opening of the play, when Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz delivers the eulogy at the funeral of Sarah Ironson:

The Rabbi: This good and righteous woman... she was not a person, but a whole kind of a person - the ones that crossed the ocean that brought with us to America, the villages of Russia and Lithuania. And how we struggled! And how we fought! For the family... for the Jewish home! Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America - you and your children, and their children with their goyische names. You do not live in America - no such a place exists. Your clay is the clay of some litvak shtetl, and your air is the air of the steppes, because she carried that Old World on her back, across the ocean, in a boat! And she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue... on Flatbush. You can never make that crossing that she made, for such great voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives, the miles - that voyage from that place to this one - you cross. Every day! You understand me? In you, that journey... is.

(for rendition of this, there is the scene from the HBO special  in which Meryl Streep plays the Rabbi.  The scene begins at about 2:20 into this clip.  Of course, this is a movie version of the play, and thus nothing like seeing the scene performed on stage.  I also want to say that the best monologue of the play given by Louis in the cafe with Belize was cut out for the movie, which says it all about the difference between the stage and the screen ((whether in the movie house or on the tv or internet))

To oversimplify: we are our history.  We carry our history with us.  Whether we are aware of it or not.  Although it would be better if we were. 

When the Rabbi asks "You understand me?" who is being addressed? In the audience, I couldn't help but ask myself if I did.  And then, as it follows, is the journey in me?  If not that journey, another one?  What is my history that carry with me?

On my father's side, I am Welsh, English, and Norweign, with one  Native American great grandmother (no she wasn't a Cherokee princess.  She was as far as we know Ute.)  My mother is adopted, All we know of her mother is that her last name was Brown and was from Oklahoma.  So...What journey is in me?  Does it manifest itself in me spite of the fact I cannot remember the journey?

What does this have to do with the stalemate?  Well, maybe the stalemate isn't just a matter a two forcing colliding like two rams butting heads.  Maybe it is plethora of competing views, all products of the multitude of journeys that have brought us here.  The journeys over the Bering Strait, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, across the plains during the march west, the journey from dust bowl, etc.

There is no American culture.  There is just a hodge podge of cultures.  And the same can be said more and more of just about any country. In Afghanistan or Iran, there is there is urban centers and there is the outback.  Nothing is unified.  Global Stalemates.

The play is the thing in that it will shine a light upon, hold the mirror up to this stalemate.  Do we wish to see it? 

Because to see it, to really see it, means we must act.  One way or another.  Even if the act is to do nothing.

As I thought about my experience watching Angels in America, I had rememberances of another stalemate I was involved in at roughly the same time: the struggle to save temperate rainforests of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

My participation began when I went to a presentation at my college by some activists who were attempting to save the Walbran Valley, and presented their film The Road Stops Here which chronicled their resistance on the logging roads.  Soon I was spending much of my time travelling from Washington state to British Columbia, coordinating with environmental activitsts on the other side of the border.

This all lead to working on the 1993 Summer of Action for Clayoquot Sound in northern Vancouver Island, that became (my big claim to fame, I suppose) the largest act of civil disobience in Canadian history.  That performance piece done out in the woods, taking to the barricades as real post-modern theater.  It was the definition of stalemate - the environmentalists on one side, the logging multinationals on the other (with the BC govt on their side).  Of course, there was the First Nations, who were wanted to save the environment but was also dealing with 40%+ unemployment. (But it was cool when Midnight Oil showed up for a special concert for the protesters.

Actually the protest did end up forcing the government and the logging interests to change, the First Nations gained control of timber interests.  But in 2009, the struggle still is at a stalemate, the people still being arrested on the logging roads.  The more things change the more they stay the same.  At least that is what Geddy, Alex and Neil said.

So we are back in the theater, sitting in the dark, looking up on the stage, wondering what is possible, what isn't, and how in the hell are we gonna bear the stalemate.

In a letter to Jacques Riviere, written in 1924, Artaud describe a nervous breakdown, a "focal collapse" brought on by "a kind of essential and fugitive erosion of thought,...the impulse to think at every stratifying endpoint of thought, by way of every condition, all the branches of thought and form...." 

Which can be one way to describe an obsessive tangentialness in approaching one's understanding the world.  Or as a boss might say, an inability to focus.  It makes being concise impossible and the impulse to add qualifying statements to the main point ad nauseum.

And what is the main point?  I suppose it would have to do with something about the play being the thing. Politically.  Culturally.  The thing that will save us.  The thing at the root of our problems,  But ultimately I have no idea. Which is a point.  Some ideas, some thoughts cannot be thought until they have been written out. Discovered in the unfolding.  And at a time when conditions seem so unstable and dire in the country and around the world, when making sense and having a bit of confidence about which path to travel is hard to come by, this dynamic offers some solace. 

As progressives / liberals struggle within and amongst themselves about what to do next, as we try to internalize the horror of the tragedy of Haiti, as we ponder health care reform and Afghanistan, hope may rest within the thought-yet-unthought.  And this thought may not be thought until the performance of the play.  If we blink we might miss it.  And being theater, it cannot be repeated exactly.  Although what happens in the next performance may be what we were after.

Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go, when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.

It does seem that things at times have gotten unreasonably bad.  Such are our times. At another moment from the play within the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead:

The Player: ....and times being what are.

Rosencrantz: What are they?

The Player: Indifferent.

One of the easy criticism to throw at public in this country is one of indifference, that we are too busy with our reality tv, video games and general materialism to concern ourselves with politics, poverty, racism, oppression here and elsewhere.  But if Haiti has shown anything, there is a heart beating beneath the indifferent exterior, Rush, Robertson et al notwithstanding.  And aside from the tragedy that is Haiti, everyday there are plethora of folks who are making sacrifices for their neighbors, the environment, and anyone in need.

Back and forth, hope in the human spirit, despair over our endless capacity for ignorance and cruelty.  And any attempt to get a stable bearing seems futile.  Just like Hamlet trying to conclude whether to believe the Ghost who has confronted him and has told him that his uncle, King Claudius, has murdered his father, the previous king, and now sleeps with his mother.  Can he believe the Ghost?  Or is he being deluded?

His plan: to sneak a few telling lines into the production of The Murder of Gonzago and if Claudius visibly responds he will have his proof:

I'll have grounds
More relative than this--the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

The play will bring him his clarity.  The play - which is not true - offers the way to the truth.  As Pablo Picasso said: 

Art is the lie that tells the truth.

And in the unfolding of creating of this blog, I discovered this quote from GK Chesterson:

Art, like morality, consists in drawing a line somewhere.

Which sort of hits on where I am: Where to draw the line?  And for that matter, what I am drawing the line with?  And I come back to the unthought-thoughts-waiting-to-be-thought-until-written.  Or performed on stage.  And this somehow takes me the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

--Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing 

It seems that it is the unknown unknows that haunt us.  Or least me.  And why those who believe that they have it ALL figured out, that they possess all knowns to be known are so irritating. 

So is the play the thing that offers clarity for which there is no possible true clarity? that offers us a false hope about where to draw the line? or informs us that is a false hope? that gives us a Ghost telling us what we want to hear? or what we cannot believe?

Herbert Blau in Take Up The Bodies offers his thoughts:

Since there are stranger things in heaven and earth, what moves us [in the theater]? Think about it: even the familiar, outside, may move us more.  The slightest infraction of daily life, the barest slightest, will affect us in depth more instantly than most scenes in a play.  A small disappointment may ruin a week, and surely the death of a dog, a horse, a rat may shake us more than the death of King Lear....Then what moves us to the theater and why go there to be moved, when the routine, accidents, and psychopathology of everyday life can provide us with the emotions we are experiencing, and even more intensely?  It's not the emotion, emotion is cheap.  What we are really experiencing is something other--instinct scrupling, an afterimage, the integrity and shape of emotion, a sign, the consequent order emotion, the cost, an afterthought.  Theater is theory, or a shadow of it.  (The two words--theatron, theoros--come from the same root, the Greek word theasthai, meaning to watch, contemplate, look at; from thea, a viewing).  In the act of seeing, there is already theory.

....If there is theory, there is also conspiracy.  The lure of the theater has obviously something to do with the fact that others are gathered there, as if there is safety in numbers, and the repressed might be acknowledged.  There is no guarantee, no more than in psychoanalysis.  It is not group therapy.  We wouldn't need the theater if experience served us better. 

Or more broadly, Camus himself wrote in Absurd Creation:

"If the world were clear, art would not exist."

Although Rummy had a poem that has a different take:

Clarity
I think what you'll find,
I think what you'll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is. And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.

           --Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

Yet I tend to see things closer to Blau's perspective:

What are we are to understand is a mystery....As time goes on, the Chorus speaks, the Plots moves, and it's not at all clear that we know enough of it to remember....The knowing that is to be known is already known but not understood until the reenactment.  We see feelingly, if the event does.  The déjà vu  is important.  But there is something to be understood.  That takes a lot of thought.  We're not even sure we want to remember.

We might find ourselves like Claudius, seeing in ourselves on stage and not liking what we see.  Just as how we feel when we look back on our history, although as Blau points out we tend to avoid this feeling: 

When and if we turn back the pages of history, we usually stop at the place that confirms where we are where we'd like to be, what we have to prove.  Not only will history prove the opposite if we look further, it's perfectly logical that it should.  History is not exact dialectic (Marx never said it was), but it contains all the possibilities that have been imagined, usually in impure states and with the contradictions side by side.  We are always looking for the nuclear event, the remotest particle of memory, that happening, a dromenon, whether to root a doctrine or to authenticate the Plot. 

....History collaborates with illusion....The issue of credibility is written into history, the illusion of continuity.  What we normally call history, the assessable life we live in common and of which our records appear to speak, is always threatened with oversimplification or extinction.  We overdocument it or erase it.  In an era of information systems, we don't know where we are, as if all knowledge (as it is) is the agency of illusion, part of the conspiracy, since we don't appear to know what we know either.  Thus, the live we actually live is threatened at the extremes, as if there still at the periphery a barbarian invader.  The via media under tension becomes a virtually excluded middle, and all we appear to have left is the pathology of margin, a via negative, which is the path by which reason yields to the unreasoning for the sake of making sense of a dead end.

If nothing else, Blau describes the current political partisan environment in the country, where we turn to the Comedy Channel for our news and Glenn Beck is a bestselling author. 

But there is an adventurism at the extremity which turns to nothingness and leaves us aghast....Play Strindberg, and the walls are collapsing all around.  Who is going to stand up for the continuity of history?  A liveable life in the middle seems like a bad dream.  We are bereft of mediations when things reach their most radical pitch. The worst returns to laughter or, as Beckett revises the Bedlam, the laugh laughing at the laugh....But all the time there is a desire for some negotiable balancing act amid the unnegotiable demands.  It's as if, every coordinate buckled around us, the act of living becomes some sort of navigation over a fault of a continuous process of centering and decentering with consciousness as a warped gyroscope, history seasick, unspeakable, language hanging on by its nails.

Right now our conscience is focused on the dead bodies in Haiti, victims of a natural disaster.  We compusively try to make sense of it.  Just as we do of images of Afghan children kille

....everything theater, including history, not only power but the absence of power staging its own reality, nothing but illusion. 

....Credibility wobbles in the illusions of power.  We are almost at a lost for words.  Where the action is: Play the moment.  Make the scene.  There may soon be no one to embody it.  Certainly nobody you can trust.  Analogies fail.  The Plot is thickening and falling apart into untellable tales.  The play ends, a "nightpiece," the stage littered with dead. 

Right now our minds are focus on dead in the streets in Haiti.  And our minds try to wrap around the tragedy, just as when we see images of children killed by predator drones or bodies leaping from the Twin Towers.  And we can't.  Words fail us.  Yet we continue to talk.  And others talk.  We talk over and past each other. And more images flash over and over.  This is our history.  Our illusion.

And the mind moves in and out space, keeping its eye on those dead bodies, back to determinism of the cosmos as it is written in the inflammations of history.  The trouble with history is that it gets us all wrong.  We are born to its double bind.  Whatever it is that determined, we are what makes the momentum, the madness, for the momentum is blooded, too.  We are suicidal and genocidal.  We are randomly destructive.  We violate our space by the mere living of it.  We are the ruins of time.  Is all the determined? Could we have changed it? Absurd question; there is no other course, as we see in the theater.  This is a place to be ashamed.  We are what happened.  Who can imagine some turning point in the affairs of men when we might have chosen otherwise?  History may occur once or more than once, but it is not exactly replayable, not even plays are.  Do we really think the world be in a more satisfactory, less politically corrupt, environmentally hygienic condition if Golgotha had never occurred or Aristotle never lived or no gun went off in Sarajevo? or if nobody discovered E=mc2 ?...Sometimes, as the mind looks out of the theater at certain interpretations of history, the simplifications are stupendous.

 And this brings things to Miep Gies, who passed away a few days ago at the age of 100. Miep was the individual who not only helped Anne Frank's family hide from the Nazis, but also gathered the papers of Anne Frank together and returned them to Otto Frank.  As one might suspect, she was a humble soul:

...."I don't want to be considered a hero," she said in a 1997 online chat with schoolchildren.

"Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary."

The Holocaust is our history.  But so is Miep Gies.  We sit in the dark and look on the stage.  All those dead bodies.  What are to make of it?  What needs to be acknowledged? Are we making sense of a dead end?  At least we can try and not be indifferent in the struggle for the impossible clarity.

Nothing to end but with another poem from Rummy:

The Situation
Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.

         --Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

 (next up: are there really angels in America?)

I saw no sign, but was preparing, with some confusion, the right climate of mind.  I wasn't ready to do theater again, so stayed away from it, watching, however, out of the corner of my eye.  While the theater was moving into the streets, it occurred to me offer my services to some political action group.  But after years of running the show I was used to being in charge, and it would have been hard for me to serve, participatorily, in the lower echelons.  Field work and stamp licking were out, and I didn't think I could break immediately into the civil rights leadership.  So I wrote letters and read much and dreamed up equivocations, with some remorse of conscience, as the Vietnam War dragged on.  The war on certain days seemed less senseless than other natural disasters in the deranged ecological cycle.

To wit--March 1967--the RAF was bombing a tanker which spilled out near the coast of Cornwall, jeopardizing more than a hundred miles of beach, oyster breeding and bird refuges, as well as the coast of France, where the oil was drifting.  It was one of those catastrophes of floating technology almost more disturbing than the experimental technology of a napalmed village, because there seemed no one to blame.  Of course there were soon rumors that the government had hesitated to order the bombing because of insurance loss.  There were pictures of soiled beaches and asphyxiated birds, guillemets, gannets, and ospreys, which were being bathed one by one to remove the oil slick, those which survived.  It was going to take months of convalescence to restore lubricity for flight.  I thought, looking at the picture of the burning oil, is there an albatross or an actor signalling through the flames?

Of course, I tend to be ambivalent by nature.  As a therapists once told me: "you take ambivalence to an art form."  The downside of being a Libra I suppose.  Whatever direction the sign seems to point to, the I can see the benefit of going in the other direction.  Which means I tend to end up going nowhere - while the polar bears and those without health care continue to suffer,

Someone last night wondered whether the blogs at TPM Cafe make a difference.  Maybe, Maybe not.  I tend to think they do.  But regardless, there is an intrinsic value to each person engaged in writing blogs, and responding to the blogs.  My namesake pointed out that there was no particular piece of art that was in of itself necessary for society to have achieved.  We can become a humane and civil society with or without The Mona Lisa or Hamlet.  What society cannot do without is the artist engaged in creating such works as the Mona Lisa or Hamlet.  Or the blogs that appear here at TPM Cafe.

What we need is each citizen to be engaged creatively (and thus courageously) with the world, both inside and outside of themselves. 

One evening I was able to attend a reading by the poet Jane Hirshfield.  During the Q&A afterwards, she talked about a period of time in which she couldn't write any poems.  "I was a poet who didn't write poetry."  What she meant I believe was that she still engaged the world as a poet, understood and responded to the world and herself as a poet, regardless of whether there were actual poems being created for publication.  Being an artist has less to do with production and more to do with a sensibility. 

Elaborating on this, she talked about the influence her poetry had on the world around her.  She commented that "I have to believe that even a monk praying on a rock in the wilderness has an positive influence."  Maybe being just a poet that doesn't write poetry is enough, although immediately there is a voice that says one needs to do more. 

So with the New Year coming, with its reflections on the past and hopes for the future, with me at least still looking for a sign, is a poem, The Weighing, by Jane Hirshfield 

The heart's reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

There was a period after I left Lincoln Center (1967) when -- as it comes to all -- nothing much, but especially politics, seemed to make sense.  A friend bawled me out for being "smart-ass," in a letter, about the California political situation and the New Left.  She didn't see it going anywhere either, but asked what else?  I'd always been partial to the what else?, but among my current anxieties was political apathy.

With Afghanistan, Gitmo, global warming, and few other things, the current state of progressive politics has a lot of us feeling like Blau's friend, a lot feeling like Blau, and others like myself bouncing back and forth between the two. 

Later in the preface, Blau writes:

 ...I wasn't long at Lincoln Center before I felt rather like Captain Ahab on the third day of the hunt--log, chart, and compass gone--throwing his hot heart against the whale and ending up wrapped around it, caught in his own line, sounding.  Or maybe it was a hubris less heroic, even foolish, like the Yippies trying to levitate the Pentagon.  There's nothing like failure to trip the images out of people.

At the end of that beautiful book Out of Africa,  when she had lost her farm and her lover had been killed in a plane crash, Karen Blixen found herself looking for a sign.  One has to prepare the looking, the right climate of mind around the eye....

I would say right now, as we approach this new year, that we (progressives) need to take a deep breath and prepare our looking.  No small task. There are so many emotions, not the least of which is a sense of falling short of high expectations created in 2008. We still lack the right climate of mind around eye to recognize the signs showing us where to go from here.  And what "there" actually is.

One of Herbert Blau claims to fame was directing a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot for 1,400 inmate at San Quentin prison back back in 1957.  (It was well received and led  a year later to the inspired a group of prisoners to start the still-active San Quentin Drama Workshop.) 

Right now it seems to a many progressives that there is a performance of Waiting for Healthcare, and w'e're just prisoners watching the show.  But if we look closely, we are also the guards, the stage crew, the actors on stage looking back at us, the prisoners (incarcerated in what Neitzsche called the prison-house of language). 

Such is a democracy.  It's too much for one man.

Today at work, some of us were talking fondly of our childhood experience with Where the Wild Things Are.  I made the comment that it probably no small influence on why I am the diehard liberal that I am today.  

And seeing Cleese, Gilliman and Jones reminded me of my teen encounters with Python and how it shaped my view of adults and their world of politics. I mean where else would I encounter something that would make me ponder ust what an anarcho-syndicalist commune was?

And it was the first election night special that I watched.  (Maybe the Silly Party could get us real health care reform.)

And speaking of silly, it made me think for the first time that there might be a place in goverment for me.

On the economic front, moreover, they were the first to truly show what twits the rich elite really are (and why the recent meltdown should come as no surprise).

They showed me that I should have the right to have babies even though I can actually have babies.  And that there was a difference between the People's Front of Judea and the Judea's People's Front.

And they showed me the historical connection between the Catholic Church and the rise of Gitmo.

In the end they showed me that we all should just look on the bright side of life.  And when we can't do that, to just remember how amazingly unlikely your birth in this amazing universe.

And if all else fails, just hit 'em with a bigger fish.

Here's a big thanks of OY! to all the guys of Monty.

testing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXQhspVJKxY&NR=1

Peace to all.