Category Archives: Media

Upcoming: The Reverend Billy anoints St. Christopher (Hedges)

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Chris Hedges and the Rev. Billy Talen.

I’ve had occasion in the very recent past to write items about both Chris Hedges and the Rev. Billy — the grim journalist and explosively comic preacher have little in common when it comes to their public personae, but quite a bit in common when it comes to politics and a supple understanding of globalization, post-capitalism and the dangers inherent in both. So when the two manage to wind up on the same stage — as they will this coming Sunday at 7.30pm at Theatre 80, 80 St. Mark’s Place — I am more than gratified. This Sunday during his regular “Church of Earthalujah” service, the good reverend will “anoint” Hedges and GRITtv’s Laura Flanders new saints in the church in what will be, as usual, a raucous and entertaining ceremony. Tickets are $10.00, but nobody is turned away from a Reverend Billy service (even a beatification), regardless of what they pay.

And this is also a good place to mention that The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church of Life After Shopping, a new book covering Bill Talen’s career-to-date by Talen, Savitri D and Alisa Solomon, is now available from the University of Michigan Press. Jonathan Kalb says of the book, “The Reverend Billy Project lucidly and perceptively explains the Reverend Billy phenomenon with wry, infectious humor and remarkable intelligence. Though many political activists have used theater and performance to achieve political ends, very few have left such articulate reports on what they did, let alone detailed road maps of the treacherous theatrical, political, and psychological territory they negotiated.” You can order it online at powells.com.

The death of Osama bin Laden

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Chris Hedges.

Of course I read the newspapers (or, rather, access online sources of current events happenings), and have not much to add about yesterday’s events except to point to Chris Hedges’ speech in Los Angeles last night. A few key points:

I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin Laden was killed, Bob wanted me to say a few words about it … about al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told Jean and me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naïve about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.

But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11— and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha — is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden. …

We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese — a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation — the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.

And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind of frightening death spiral. So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know its intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become the monster that we are attempting to fight.

It comes as no surprise that, as one of the last nations on earth to continue to maintain capital punishment as an appropriate judicial response to violence large and small, so many of my fellow American citizens are cheered and even jubilant — that they believe that, as Obama put it last night, “justice has been done.” But justice is a difficult abstraction to pin down. And a world without Osama bin Laden this morning is a world in which little has changed.

Kriegsfibel

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Afghanistan, January 15, 2010: A member of a U.S. "kill team" poses behind a dead body. Photo: Der Spiegel

In his biography of Bertolt Brecht, Frederic Ewen describes one of the dramatist’s final projects, completed in 1955. Writes Ewen:

[Brecht] came into conflict with the [East German] authorities once more when toward the end of 1955 he was refused publication of his Kriegsfibel (The ABC of War), a series of short poems, illustrated with photographs, and dealing with various aspects of the Second World War. Brecht called these “photograms.” Grimly epigrammatic, filled with a mordant pacifism, and bitter against war and warmongers, these are among the best satirical quatrains Brecht ever wrote. Brecht insisted on publication and threatened to offer the book to the World Peace Council. He won out and the book appeared at the end of 1955, with the Eulenspiegel Verlag, Berlin.[1]

Few of the several photos from Afghanistan that Der Spiegel published earlier this week, an encore of the Abu Ghraib controversy of  2004, have made their way to the American media, perhaps for the same reasons that the East German authorities in 1955 found Brecht’s selection of photographs controversial. While this behavior may not be widespread, it is also not rare; and it demonstrates an ineradicable aspect of the nature of human experience and behavior in wartime (and by some estimates there have only been about 28 years of global peace since the rise of Western civilization). Of course, things are different now, and we can use the very same iPhones that we use to play Angry Birds to take photos of our fellow citizens and military comrades desecrating the corpses of the enemy dead. For all the freedom of information that the Internet apparently provides, however, the Culture Industry like the East German authorities can still determine what kind of content is comfortable for its readers and bury the rest. Propaganda resides not only in what is expressed by the Culture Industry, but also in what it suppresses.

As in, for example, the American theatre. For all its self-congratulatory rhetoric for its relevance, the American theatre also denies the behavior of its own citizens when overseas; while plays by Sarah Kane, Howard Barker and Shakespeare provide us with portraits of human nature that make this behavior explicable, if not forgivable, American theatremakers and critics provide trivia. The New York Times and its reporters are far more interested in reporting the difficulties of a comic-book musical on Broadway, and the Arena Stage New Play bloggers (at Howlround, “The Journal of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage”) spend most of their time in pointless namecalling, while the American theatre continues to descend into an irrelevant desuetude.

It is only a tragic consciousness that can contemplate these photographs as a reflection of human experience, and this human experience is absent from 99% of American drama. This is not to say that we should all run out and make documentary plays about how such behavior came to be expressed, or that we should be programming all-”In-Yer-Face” seasons, or that dramatists and artistic directors must be compelled to respond to such experience. But in so far that this exploration is considered demoralizing or uncommercial, depressing or without respite, an undermining of the progressive ameliorist perspective, American dramatists and artistic directors themselves contribute to the repressive barbarism that seeks to slip this experience under the rug and contribute to the art’s own irrelevant demise on these shores. It is only one symptom of the illness of the American theatre and American drama.

Footnotes
  1. Frederic Ewen, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art and His Times. New York: Citadel Press, 1967, p. 485. [↩]

Chris Hedges

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I’ve written about Chris Hedges’ darker perspective on 21st-century America before; in the below recent interview with Media Roots News, Hedges discusses the decline of journalism in the image-driven digital era, and admits that he is not optimistic: “I’m not a believer in inevitable human progress,” he notes at one point, which may render him truly a figure of abjection.

Interestingly, when Hedges moves from speaking about journalism to speaking about the arts, he particularly references theatre, especially what he calls “classical theatre.” Food for thought. For more about Hedges’ distinguished career, click here.

Where privacy ends

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UPDATE: Other responses from Matthew Freeman and J. Holtham. Holtham appears to believe that I’m missing the point somewhat; but I don’t believe I am. As I wrote in the comments section there:

I don’t think whether or not the anonymous blogger should have held back for fear of “hurting ‘the community’s’ feelings” has anything to do with it, nor does it have anything to do with critique or review or the Voice‘s status as a newspaper “which positions itself as one of the last bastions of support for off and off-off-broadway theatre,” as Melanie Joseph says. It’s irresponsible sensation- and scandal-mongering, pure and simple, and the Voice‘s motives in posting the email were questionable at the very least, unethical at most.

If we’re going to judge every one of these issues and approve of these miscarriages according to their publicity or amusement value … well, it’s up to you. But that’s not a community — a theatre community or a broader community — to which I would care to belong. “Suck it up and deal” is not an adequate response — it’s your own privacy, too, that’s at issue. If you don’t want it, fine. But that gives no one any right to take it from somebody else.

There is a minor to-do currently blowing through the blogosphere regarding a Village Voice blog post on an email written by an actor in a current PS122 production to his friends and acquaintances, savaging the show and expressing considerable vitriol towards some of its personnel. Because I do not know well the actor who sent the email, and haven’t seen the show, I am not in a position to comment on either the actor’s intentions in sending this e-mail (or his wisdom in doing so) nor to say whether his criticisms were justified. Both Helen Shaw at Time Out New York and Isaac Butler at Parabasis have offered some comments.

Blogosphere controversies have all the longevity of mayflies and I do try to stay away from the trivial, although the Village Voice post in particular, added to the Voice blog by a “Village Voice contributor” (it has apparently been posted, then de-posted, then re-posted again), has engendered some discussion about the privacy of written communication in the Internet age. Given that the post seems to remain live and will possibly continue to do so, it’s worth questioning the broader distribution of this email attributed to Karl Allen through a blog maintained by a mainstream-media editor.

Privacy in the Internet age is a vexed question, but a few notes should be made. First, whatever may become of an email once it’s sent by an individual, it remains a private communication and should be granted that right of respect. If the actor wished to make his thoughts public, he could have done so in a variety of places: at a Web site, on a blog, in a letter to the editor composed with public consumption in mind. Admittedly, this right to privacy is often abused on the Internet, but it does not for that reason make its publication by a third party justified, whether the author’s name is attached or not. If the Voice contributor wished to post the email on the blog, a simple request to the author of the email asking for permission would suffice. This is called simple common courtesy and decency, especially when the email could be controversial or critical to others.

Neither the anonymous “Village Voice contributor” nor Shaw suggests that this was a mass e-mail to everyone on the author’s mailing list. Isaac assumes that it was “sent out to a wide address book and forwarded to an even wider set of people,” but we have no way of knowing just how many were sent the message; the assumption must be, because it was an email as I mentioned in the paragraph above, that it was meant for a rather smaller circle than the entire downtown New York theatre community. Even so, what’s a mass e-mail? One that goes to 1,000 people? 500? Ten? And if it is forwarded to others, wisely or unwisely, the privacy that attaches to the original email remains appropriate. There is no reason to think that a written communication sent through the U.S. mail would not be entitled to that same privacy. Though the Internet obviates the need for stamps and envelopes these days, and makes it much easier to thoughtlessly and without deliberation forward on other people’s words, that does not mean it’s right to do so.

Especially to publish these words in a public arena such as the Village Voice blog, which seems to me a gross violation of journalistic and personal ethics, whatever the editor’s intent (to stir up controversy, perhaps, and to do so in the shoddiest method imaginable).

I am with Vallejo Gantner, Maria Goyanes and Melanie Joseph on this one. Perhaps the actor who wrote the email will think twice about sending anything similar, but he was entitled to the privacy that surrounds any personal communication. It’s not as if his email dealt with a threat to national security or a stream of government corruption — there was no public necessity attached to its publication.

It is a blow to the actor; a blow to The Octoroon, which has now attracted attention which in no way has anything to do with the production itself; and especially a blow to standards of privacy on the Internet. While those who decide to belong to Facebook or publish blogs like this one give up some of their privacy, it is a voluntary decision; that does not give others the right to take it away in the interests of some vague transparency.