THE WATCHMEN AND HUMAN ANNIHILATION

Though I haven't finished it yet, I thought I should write something about Alan Moore's graphic novel, The Watchmen. Written in the 80's at the height of Cold War existential paranoia, it's the story of several washed-up masked adventurers who find themselves abandoned and ridiculed by society. To make their troubles worse, someone is killing them one by one.

What really separates the story from other more adult-themed comics is its examination of how the threat of human annihilation affects us. Though Moore envisions the possible end of the world as coming from a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, his depiction of how humanity grapples with the possibility of its own extinction (and man's inherent moral cruelty)is as relevant today in the face of nuclear jihadism as it was two decades ago. His characters take on the 'masks' one must don in order to withstand man's barbarity. Consequently the Comedian, a brutal and conscienceless thug, can only greet the horrors of Vietnam--where he cuts his super-hero teeth doing the government's 'dirty work'-- with a shrug and a laugh. How can one understand the slaughter of children, the collection of human body parts for trophies, the rape of women, and the killing of millions? What kind of ideology or philosophy can mediate and interpret that kind of horror? The Comedian, who commits many of the aforementioned crimes, wraps himself in an ironic nihilism to shield himself from the terror of the world around and in him. How else could he avoid going insane? How else to endure the unendurable? He laughs as he slays, for the great joke of man's existence is that despite all his noble accomplishments, his artistic achievements, his glorious scientific breakthroughs, his is, at bottom, an animal of uncommon savagery and bloody cunning.

More to come...

HAMLET AND WOOSTER

For anyone who doesn’t know them, the Wooster Group are an experimental theatre troupe who command a mainstream-sized audience and a comparable level of interest. Founded by Willem Defoe, Spalding Gray and Kate Valk among others, the ensemble is committed to using innovative sound and video design to enhance what are often exhilarating and challenging theater pieces. I saw their staging of Emperor Jones, a production that was re-mounted after an amazing run in ’93, in which Kate Valk dons black face and tells the story of a slave who becomes an ‘emperor’ of a small island of native Africans. The production was simply astounding. Kate Valk was thunderous, powerful, frightening, ferocious, and commanded what was easily one of the finest and most exciting productions I’ve ever seen. It was the kind of elemental theater-making that comes along a handful of times a generation, which scores itself into the brain of anyone fortunate enough to see it, and which is talked about as legend for years afterwards. The prospect of the Wooster Group tackling Hamlet, one of my favorite plays (honestly, who doesn’t like Hamlet?), intrigued me and I was ready for, if not a legendary performance, at least something memorable.

Sadly, the show was a masturbatory indulgence of theater insiderism, snarky gimmickry, and empty gesticulation signifying nothing. According to the group, “We were drawn to Richard Burton’s Hamlet, a 1964 Broadway production recorded live” which was to be shown in theaters across America for two days and then destroyed. Somehow, a copy of the play survived and the Wooster Group “attempt[ed] to reverse the process by reconstructing a hypothetical theater piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film...[to replace] our own spirit with the spirit of another”.

As is ever the danger with post-modern tinkering, the misguided director Elizabeth LeCompte decided to gut Hamlet of everything that makes it dear to us. All emotion and intention was purposefully drained from the play, lines became sarcastic, winking, aren’t-these-soliloquies-kind-of-corny commentaries on Shakespeare’s beautiful imagery and ideas. There’s no better way to alienate an audience than to remove the human core of a production. Isn’t the purpose of art to examine our emotional lives, to experience and share the human condition in all its ironies and paradoxes? The Wooster Group, in an act of cynical and theatrical violence, delivered robotic line readings that turned Shakespeare’s glorious language into leaden drivel, and which reduced the power and conflict of the story to empty plot points devoid of pathos. The audience was restless, unengaged, and bored silly. Were we supposed to sit through two and a half hours of clumsy gadgetry? While the sound effects that sometimes accompanied the play were interesting, they never amounted to any kind of meaningful insight into why we are the way we are. There's no question that video and sound can be a powerful compliment to theater. But if the technical flourishes don't enhance some principal dramatic idea, or hypothesis, or investigation, if they only exist for their own benefit and not to further some dramatic objective, they're a waste and indulgence. Could it be that LeCompte and the actors were intimidated by Shakespeare? What are they afraid of? Maybe it's just easier to slip into retrograde irony than to actually find a new way to interpret Hamlet. Or maybe the Wooster Group's just lazy.

The idea of resurrecting a play from the sixties is interesting, but what is Wooster trying to say to us by projecting the film behind the exact same scenes re-enacted on stage and then clearly mocking them? The sixties were melodramatic? There’s nothing new under the sun? Richard Burton talks funny? And what to make of Hamlet’s interruptions from the text to tell the technician manning the video to ‘fast-forward’ through Opehlia's scenes because they're boring? And what to make of the actors moving their body in synchronicity with the glitches, hops and gyrations of the fragmented film? In what way does this contribute to our understanding of, well, anything?

In the end, the Wooster Group failed to create any dramatic reason for their experiment other than the artistically toxic and otherwise noxious ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’ justification to which immature artists (particularly in college) frequently succumb. It’s a shame, because Shakespeare could use a good take-down; Bardolotry is ripe for ridicule and nothing is sacrosanct in art. It’s too bad the best the Wooster Group could manage was to roll their eyes, rock their Fischerspooner soundtrack (Laertes sounds like that guy from Postal Service!) and fill the stage with the sound of static. Nihilism thy name is…yawn. Shakespeare demands a wittier and more compelling excoriation than that.

SAD NUMBER CRUNCHING

I understand why the Edwards family wants to put their best face forward, but it seems like Elisabeth's cancer is incredibly serious. Not even a day off? Quotes from an article on Slate at

http://www.slate.com/id/2162548/


"When she was initially diagnosed, Edwards' breast cancer was treated with a combination of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, to which she seemed to respond well. The details of her cancer have not been made public, but we might expect roughly 90 percent of women with this diagnosis and with an apparently good response to treatment to be disease-free five years after treatment. Unfortunately, Edwards is among the roughly 5 percent of women in whom the disease reappeared more rapidly.

The recurrence was discovered almost by chance. She cracked a rib, and when she was X-rayed to evaluate that injury, the radiologist who read her film detected a "spot" on another rib, on the other side of her chest. The development of the new lesion in a location distant from the original tumor—a "metastasis"—dramatically worsened her prognosis. Edwards' likelihood of survival for five more years dropped from perhaps more than 85 percent to about 20 percent. And her illness went from one that might have been cured to one that might be, at best, controlled."

"In spite of the generally gloomy statistics for metastatic breast cancer, it is hard to predict how things will go for Elizabeth Edwards. Some patients, though never fully cured, still have a relatively good outcome, with their disease reasonably well-controlled, a high quality of life, and a good long time of survival. This group is a minority, to be sure. But let's hope Edwards is in it."

MORE ON EDWARDS AND CANCER

In respone to Alex's posting:

Mac offers us some serious and excellent questions to ponder. Who can tell another how much or whether or how to grieve? I think, to boil down Mac's comments, the question becomes, we aren't priveleged members of the Edwards household, we have no idea how they are dealing with this news, and shouldn't we give the family the benefit of the doubt? This was my initial reaction as well. Let's grant them their privacy and let them deal with the issue on their own. But my girlfriend made the excellent point that the Edwards's decision is so characteristic of the American psyche in that it doesn't acknowledge any feelings that may not be optimistic or cheery, that it refuses to acknowledge the gravity of death, and that it believes the best way to deal with psychological hardship is to channel one's pain into one's work. That's what Americans do best isn't it? Work away the hurt! I don't know whether John Edwards should cancel the campaign or not, but how bout a day off! I think the fact that Edwards hasn't even paused speaks to how much time they've really spent talking and thinking about this. And it's perfectly reasonable from an outside perspective to say, no, talking about this issue for a few hours is not enough, that focusing on the campaign is a way of avoiding the serious questions they need to face, and that a presidential candidate who values his own ambitions more than the quality of his wife's final days is repugnant. How can working on a campaign bring them together? What kind of emotional support can they offer one another when they're giving speeches on the environment or Iraq? How can they attend to one another's feelings between TV appearances, luncheons, fund raisers, speeches,shaking hands, and kissing babies, when they barely get a moment alone together? It's just not possible, no matter how we try to rationalize it for them.

As for their ability to deal with death because of the loss of their son, I'm not so sure that qualifies them to deal with the slow painful death of another family member. In fact, what was Elisabeth's response to the loss of her son? She chose to have two more children at ages 49 and 50 respectively. We all know how dangerous it is for a woman to have children that late in life, and it's also quite dangerous to the unborn. The risk of having learning disabilities, pyschological disorders, physical complications, and other health problems are multiplied dramatically when an older woman decides to have a child. But the Edwards needed more kids to get over the loss of the last one. Doesn't that seem kind of, well, selfish? Doesn't that mesh with how they're acting now? Instead of grieving and accepting the loss of their son they decide to have more children regardless of the health consequences in order to make themselves feel better. But it's just another mechanism of avoidance. The belief that you can turn to outside sources of comfort in the face of loss for relief is dangerous. As any grief counselor will tell you, the work of accepting something as hurtful and frightening as death needs to be done internally. Getting a new job, having more children, making more money, gaining more power, are all illusions that promise closure and acceptance, but in reality they distract from the hard reflective work that needs to be done by the individual. If you don't metabolize and digest what's happened to you, you'll never process and internalize the loss, and it'll eat at you for the rest of your life in profoundly destructive ways. The Edwards's emotional delusion is flat out unhealthy, and really speaks to the state of America's overall emotional dysfunction.

THE EDWARDS CAMPAIGN AND AMERICAN EMOTIONAL DENIAL

While I’m sure many blogs and columnists will talk about the political ramifications of John Edwards’s decision to keep his campaign running in the midst of his wife’s new battle with cancer, I’m more interested in the emotional cost. The NYT’s article covering the announcement that Elizabeth Edwards’s breast cancer has metastasized states that patients with stage four cancers have only a 25% chance that they will be alive in five years. In other words, it’s highly unlikely that Elizabeth Edwards would even make it through the first term of John Edwards’s presidency should he actually win. It sounds like Elizabeth Edwards received her death sentence today, but by refusing to even pause his campaign her husband’s acting like she got the flu. Why?

We all know what kind of breakneck pace a presidential candidate needs to maintain in order to fund raise, strategize, build net roots, and cultivate relationships with early primary states. When exactly are John and Elizabeth going to sit down and talk about the very real and serious fact that she will most likely be dead by 2015? It seems to me there needs to be some grieving, some confrontation with naked reality, some serious decision making, some emotions that need to be shared and experienced. How can this couple adequately address these emotionally daunting issues on the campaign trail? Don’t they want to spend their remaining years together focusing on one another and not press releases and political picnics and attack ads? Doesn’t Elizabeth deserve her husband’s support and attention now more than ever? Instead it’s a ‘sign of strength’ that the campaign continues, it’s somehow ‘cowering in the corner’ to admit that one might have some, I don’t know, serious feelings about, you know, dying. John and Elizabeth equate taking time off, even a suspension of the campaign, as an acknowledgement of defeat, as if to take a step back from politics in order to breathe and reflect and feel and love was some kind of weakness. There is something depressingly American about denying ones feelings and seeing that as a sign of victory and strength. The desire to keep the campaign upbeat and optimistic and free of doubt, or depressing news, or sadness is a hollow attempt to deny the very real fact that Elizabeth doesn’t have long to live. What’s going to happen to all that bottled up grief, and rage, and fear? How is it going to affect John and Elizabeth’s children to pretend like nothing’s changed? John, your wife is going to die. It’s okay to take a day off. If anything, acting like Elizabeth has a ‘manageable’ sickness like high blood pressure is emotionally disingenuous not just to the public but also to Edwards’s family, and might turn voters off in the end. If he’s such a good husband, if he’s of such sterling character that he deserves to be president, why isn’t he spending time with his wife right now? Maybe she’s insisting that he keep up the good fight and carry on with the campaign. Maybe so. But it’s his job to tell her no, that she’s more important than being president. As an old boss of mine once said, ‘you’re either working hard or hardly working’. American identity is so wrapped up with one’s commitment to work that sometimes our basic humanity gets punched away in the time clock. Spinning a gaffe on Meet the Press is one thing, but spinning death is downright cowardly. There is plenty of work to be done for John Edwards, but it’s not on the campaign trail.

ON GIRLS AND TRAINS IN QUEENS

A week or so ago during that balmy spell we had I was heading to work on the train when I noticed something peculiar. My fellow 7-train riders had come prepared for another typical February chill but were instead met with a late-May blast of sunlight and warmth. Naturally, it was hotter even in the car than outside and a few of the heavier dressed riders were understandably uncomfortable. I saw a young woman out of the corner of my eye and thought little of her. When she took off her coat though the response in the rest of the train surprised me. She removed her jacket to reveal a t-shirt and, as you would expect, her arms and neck were bare. She was neither particularly attractive nor was she repulsive but nonetheless a good number of the train’s occupants turned to look at her as soon as she began taking off her jacket. And while you would expect this of any man on the subway, it never occurred to me that she would attract so much attention from the female riders. But heads turned mechanically, as if conditioned, all up and down the subway car. Why?

For one thing, I think we’ve been taught, women and men alike, to immediately need to determine a woman's physical (and thus true) value. For women it’s a matter of comparison, of judging, of seeing how you stack up against the sexual competition, but also a way of measuring your own worth. Some of this is biologically induced; it would make sense for natural selection to make women, well, competitive, and their physical appearance is the easiest and most natural way to establish sexual primacy. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering if all those magazines and TV shows and movies didn’t make us turn the female form into a commodity, something to be assessed and appraised like a house or a sports car. If it were a man taking off his jacket no one, women included, would be as likely to turn their heads. But a woman’s body is somehow different and considered an object for consumption by both men and women alike. For men a woman’s body is simply a source of sexual gratification and titillation. No surprises there. I don’t, however, think the women on the train were carnally interested in this particular girl. They had other concerns: What was her complexion like, how toned were her biceps, how much hair did she have on her arms, how did her fingers wrap around the steel pole, did she paint her nails, how many freckles did she have? A never-ending process of evaluation swept over the contours of the girl's arms and neck. We’ve seen women as instruments of commercialism for so long it’s no wonder every detail of her body was consumed by the 7-train riders. A woman is thus 'kidnapped' to allay or exacerbate another woman's insecurities. My hair’s thicker, my waist thinner, my legs fatter, my face rounder, my arms less muscled and on and on until she's just another glossy magazine cover. That appropriation was probably what I thought the most interesting and disturbing. For many women on the train the girl in the t-shirt was taken and used to reassure some, to reprimand and threaten others. What must it be like to be a woman and evaluated by other women in such a relentless way? What kind of stress do women put on one another and themselves as a result of their cold appropriations? Do their eyes ever leave one another alone or are they forever locked in this inhuman appraisal of the flesh? The young woman wasn’t so much a mirror as a scale built and stolen to praise or punish oneself.

Or maybe they just liked her t-shirt.

THE GIANT VACUUM ON THE RIGHT AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR DEMOCRATS

Reading the newspapers, weeklies, blogs and the rest of the media, it's become clear that no one is too excited one way or the other about the GOP field of ’08 presidential candidates. It’s true that the NYT has had a few charitable features on Mit Romney and Rudolph Giuilani, and of course there’s the seemingly perennial piece on John McCain’s inability to lock up the nomination, but otherwise the papers are relatively quiet. Think of the amount of ink spilled over Obama’s announcement to run, the question of his essential blackness or lack thereof, of Hilary’s refusal to renounce her vote on the Iraq war, or the possibility that Gore may enter the race.

Where’s the comparable media frenzy over a possible late entry by Newt Gingrich? Compared to the hushed, fingers-crossed intensity of coverage surrounding Gore’s possible entrance into the Democratic field, Newt’s waiting in the wings seems especially ho-hum. And even though McCain can command a large audience as he did recently on his Iowa bus tour (he provided free breakfasts) there’s no media electricity surrounding his campaign the way there is around say, the possibility of the first woman president, or the first African-American president. As a magazine editor what would make for a more compelling cover story, Hilary’s historic bid for the presidency or John McCain’s age? When McCain speaks after a speech or at a press conference the first question out of every reporter’s mouth is, “Are you too old to run?” Exactly.

But it’s not just the press that’s down on the Republicans lackluster stable of candidates. When Republicans themselves are polled about their options they to seem less than impressed with their choices. Much has been written about the Evangelical right being frustrated by the lack of a clear values-oriented and avowedly Christian candidate. Romney doesn’t count apparently as there is a longstanding animosity between Protestant Evangelicals and Mormons and there don’t appear to be any serious Evangelical stalwarts waiting out the early campaign skirmishes either. There is a colossal sense of loss and opportunities missed on the right, of having once had the reins firmly in hand only to have them slip away amidst scandal, war, and political hubris. There is no Reaganesque political savior poised to return the Republican party to power and prominence. Instead, there’s Sam Brownback.

Aside from Giuliani still coasting off his 9/11 performance and his general good nature, where are the Republican superstars? Say what you will about W’s incompetence, he was generally likable and straight-forward on the campaign trail and a lot of voters warmed to him. He had name recognition and a certain conservative pedigree vouchsafed by his running mate Dick Cheney. Bush galvanized the Republican base in ’04, at least in part, by opposing gay marriage and continuing to push for the repeal of Roe v. Wade. With Giuliani decidedly moderate on the aforementioned issues and with his long list of marital problems can even he be taken as a serious threat to Hilary or Obama? Indeed, the entire Republican field is vulnerable on a number of ‘values’ issues, particularly the sanctity of marriage (almost all of them have had messy divorces). Can any of them be serious contenders? As of now, no.

Whoever can mobilize their base and appeal to the center (not two mutually exclusive goals) will win the next election, but the Republicans, shattered by miscalculation in Iraq, will have trouble getting their base excited by McCain’s clumsy triangulation, Gingrich’s moral hypocrisy, Romney’s fringe faith, or Giuliani’s liberal attitude toward gays and divorce. Even a mediocre political operative working in Clinton or Edwards’ war room would have a field day with the Republican candidates ethical and personal vulnerabilities.

Are the GOP hopes of holding onto the executive naïve? Much can change over the next two years, and if one thing is constant in the political landscape, it’s the Democrats inability to identify and exploit their opponent’s weaknesses. If anyone can lose the ’08 election with the outgoing Republican president one of the least liked presidents in history, an election preceded by a Democratic sweep of the House and Senate, it’s the same Democrats who nominated Dukakis and Kerry. Still, the Republican field has rarely been this thin while the Democrats have never looked so strong. In the face of Hilary’s prodigious fund raising apparatus, Obama’s singular charisma, Edwards’ commitment to the working poor and Gore’s passion for the environment and his own reinvention, the Republicans are in trouble. As Chuck Schumer said of the Democrats on Charlie Rose’s program in February, “We want to win this time. We really want to win.”

The generally weak Republican candidates pose a problem for the conventional wisdom regarding both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, candidates who have been handicapped because of their gender and race respectively. The wisdom goes something like this: because Democrats desperately want to win this election, voters will choose the candidate with that all important ‘air of electability’, even if they have to vote for someone they don’t ideologically support. Whomever Democratic voters think can beat the Republican nominee will get the most support in Iowa and New Hampshire. Consequently, Hilary and Obama shouldn’t get the nomination the wisdom goes, because their ‘handicaps’ will pose a major obstacle to capturing independents or stealing a Red State or two in the general election, both of which are required to win the electoral college. They can’t win because their ‘handicaps’ compromise that ‘air of electability’. But with the Republican campaigns exhibiting so little vigor and excitement among the conservative base, real progressives have their best chance in years and perhaps for years to come, to capture the White House. Whether one thinks Hilary is a good choice for president or not, it’s clear that her being a woman isn’t nearly the liability the conventional wisdom argues it is. The same goes for Obama and his being black. The election is up for grabs, and the belief held among some ‘realist’ Democrats that Clinton and Obama should be immediately disqualified ignores the fact that, as yet, there’s no tactical reason to jump to another insipid and ostensibly ‘safe’ candidate like John Kerry. Maybe progressives should roll the dice. With their enemies hobbled by mediocrity, there’s no better strategic time than now.