Join CUNY Divest this Friday, May 17th for a special screening of 350.Org’s powerful new documentary entitled “Do The Math.” The film outlines the disturbing new math that is informing the rapid heating of our planet, and follows the national movement to stop climate change at the root: the burning of fossil fuels.

After the film, we will have a teach-in with organizers from 350.Org and the Responsible Endowments Coalition (REC) to learn how students right here in NYC are activating their power to send a message to the oil, gas and coal companies whose business model threatens to alter the climate irreparably.

“If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage.” -Bill McKibben

Over 300 fossil fuel divestment campaigns have sprung up around the country in the past year. Divestment is spreading like wildfire. Come down Friday at 6 p.m. and help heat things up even more.

CUNY Divest Presents
“Do The Math” and Student Activism Teach-In
Friday, May 17th, 6-8 p.m.
Hunter College, Thomas Hunter Hall, Rm. 305b
Refreshments (including homemade pizza) will be served

For more info, contact Dan at dasselin86@gmail.com.

By Jennifer Tang

With a star-studded cast headlined by two time Academy Award winner Tom Hanks, I expected Lucky Guy, written by Nora Ephron, to be good. Still, I didn’t want to psych myself up too much for it.  After all, it had already been widely celebrated in the media. Plus, I was going to see only the fifth staging of it, so I worried that things perhaps had not yet settled into the groove. Needless to say, my expectations were not just met. They were surpassed.

Lucky Guy tells the tale of Michael McAlary, a New York City newspaperman who, having paid his dues writing about sports and local issues in Queens, lucks out with a once-in-a-lifetime story. As a result, McAlary is offered the opportunity to be a reporter at the Manhattan office of  Newsday. Through his own tenacity, diligence, and a sprinkling of luck, McAlary builds his reputation and soon becomes a columnist for the New York Daily News–one of his dream jobs. As his career takes off, however, he manages to piss off colleagues, editors and his friends with his lack of grace and graciousness, and an ego matched only by his balooning salary. At the height of his frenzied scramble up to New York newspaper industry, fueled by a bidding war for him between the Daily News and the Post and his own propensity to drink, McAlary winds up in a near fatal car accident on his way home in the wee hours of the morning. Afraid to miss a beat despite the gravity of his accident, McAlary rushes back to work and make some questionable calls in reporting which ultimately result in a libel suit. It is at this low point that he is also diagnosed with colon cancer.

And as if that isn’t enough, McAlary must confront a petition signed by a laundry listof journalists condemning his reporting mistakes. All of it is too much. McAlary begins to doubt his conviction that he’s a top-shelf New York City columnist. It is only through his loyal and supportive wife Alice, that McAlary survives.  McAlary bounces back, and during his fight with colon cancer,  writes a series of columns about the brutal rape of Abner Louima by  a gang of New York cops which earns him the Pulitzer Prize. In accepting this award, McAlary recognizes that his writing and his life as a New York journalist is indebted to the vibrant people, culture, and industry that define the New York newspaper business.

The pacing of the play did well to mirror the pace of the newspaper industry as well as the frenetic life of New York City in the decades between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. The dialogue, the movement of the actors, the cutting of the scenes move quickly from one to the other, all of it orchestrated for maximum efficiency and punch. Only in scenes of tenderness and contemplation did the action slow down appropriately. On the whole, it was a story that had a place to go, a journey it wanted to take you on, but it was at a pace where it could still look you in the eye.

The set was mobile and malleable, just like New York City tends to feel to those negotiating its dynamics. It was fitting for the production that the pieces that made up the set, the pieces those things that are key to telling the story, are almost always present on stage. The desks that made up the office of the newsroom, the bar where the journalists would all congregate around were either at the center or periphery, but never offstage. When transitioning from setting to setting, actors who were not part of the scene at that moment all help to move the set into place. What I also found interesting was that throughout the play, the floor is littered with bits of paper, adding to the slightly haphazard feel of the industry and the city. All of this said, while the props and lighting were effective they were never so prominent as to draw attention away from the actors and the action.

Truly, it would be difficult to redirect the spotlight away from the actors. Without doubt, their work and abilities were the truly spectacular aspects of the show. Tom Hanks was simply superb in affecting the range of McAlary’s personalities as he developed from an eager wannabe, to a comfortable crime writer, to a brash columnist, to a man laid low by his own fallibility but who then rises again on the strength of his own mortality. Surrounded by an impressive cast—including Peter Gerety as McAlary’s mentor John Cotter, who was always at the ready with nuggets of wisdom and a stiff drink, and Christopher McDonald as his big talking lawyer Eddie Hayes—the acting sparkles. And Maura Tierney, who plays McAlary’s wife and bedrock Alice, is never overshadowed by the star power of Tom Hanks.

But Hanks is clearly the heart of the show.  His postoperative, morphine fueled heart-to-heart with Hap Hairston (played by Courtney Vance) will leave audience members moved. We witness Hanks’ prowess as an actor through his ability to communicate the rawness of his fall from grace, but also its absurdity, his absurdity. It is brilliant to watch.

Nora Ephron, being Nora Ephron, didn’t miss the opportunity to highlight  the dearth of women journalists in the 80s throughout the play. One character, the reporter Louise Imerman (brought beautifully to life by Deidre Lovejoy), denounces the newspaper industry for so easily and readily marginalizing women, rendering them merely as supportive players. It’s true: even in the dramatization of McAlary’s life, the women played only the roles of caring wife, aggressive career commandos, and shepherding managers.  It is our luck that we had Nora Ephron to tell this story, and serves to remind us of the importance of continuously asking where the women are in the making, telling and retelling of the stories that make up our culture and our cities.

Lucky Guy was the last piece Nora Ephron completed before she succumbed to pneumonia in her battle against leukemia in 2012. She began this play after receiving her diagnosis and continued to work on it through her treatments. While she had completed writing the play before her death, it was still in production when she passed. It’s a shame. If she intended to leave a piece that expounds upon her reverie of the profession of journalism, New York City, and the resiliency of both of these amidst constant commercial, cultural, and human flux, then she accomplished it. This production of Lucky Guy stands as a fitting act of respect and homage to its creator.

By Meredith Benjamin

Paul Taylor, hailed as the “last living member of the pantheon that created America’s indigenous art of modern dance,” has been choreographing since 1954. His works, which range from playful to darkly tragic, are, at their core, distinctly American. He has made scenes from American life—from the congregational dynamics of a Southern Pentecostal church to life on the home front during World War II—suitable subjects for dance in a way that few others have managed, avoiding both bland universality and hokey literalness.

There are no pyrotechnics in Taylor’s works, no jaw-dropping leg extensions or dizzying sets of multiple turns. Rather, his basic choreographic vocabulary comes from the pedestrian movements of everyday life: walking, running, jumping, falling, and changing direction. If one of his dancers soars into the air, there’s a good chance they will finish that leap on the floor. The not-quite-pointed feet and relaxed port de bras (positions of the arms) result in an aesthetic that can seem strange at first to eyes used to more highly stylized forms of dance, but this understated style achieves a balance of athleticism and naturalness that allows emotion to come through unalloyed.

Speaking in Tongues, which premiered in 1988, is a dark work, taking as its subject “certain impulsive projection of private religious emotion into the public setting of a communal prayer service.” This is a challenging subject to tackle through movement, not in the least because none of the dancers ever actually speak. The practice of speaking in tongues is rendered instead by bodily convulsions, which interrupt the more conventional social dancing that opens the piece. By making visceral this experience of private emotion, Taylor also points to the underlying sexual dimensions of such expressions, as the projection of these emotions brings bodies into contact with one another.

As “A Man of the Cloth,” the clerical leader of this rural group, Michael Trusnovec was chilling: his stiff jerky movements in stark contrast to the convulsive abandon or impassioned unison of his congregation. His ominous appearances in the doorway of the rustic wood-paneled backdrop often signaled a shift in the groups’ dynamic, as their dancing shifted from undirected social groupings to forcefully angry unison. Taylor mixes hints of narrative and vaguely defined relationships with explicit scenes of unflinching realism, as when we witness “Her Husband” (Sean Mahoney) rape “The Daughter Grown Up” (Michelle Fleet) behind a row of chairs after her pleas for help have been rejected. This is a work about belonging and exclusion, but also about who and what is visible in a world in thrall to a sanctimonious leader.

The exuberant Esplanade is about as far as one can get from the darkness of Speaking in Tongues. First performed in 1975, it has become perhaps Taylor’s most famous work, and with good reason. Set to two Bach concertos, Esplanade is the epitome of Taylor’s revolutionary approach to dance, in which pedestrian movements become the stuff of art.

The curtain rises to reveal nine dancers, clad in cheery shades of orange, pink, and purple, easy smiles on their faces. Their movement consists almost entirely of running, walking, skipping, and jumping, yet despite the limited movement vocabulary, Esplanade is never boring or repetitive, and is frequently surprising in its inventive simplicity. More than once, the audience gasped as women flung themselves into the air and into their partners’ arms or as a dancer stepped on top of, or balanced on, her partner’s supine midsection. Taylor explores the glorious potential inherent in everyday movement, emphasized by the genuine engagement of the dancers with one another. Parisa Khobdeh in particular stood out for her daring and exuberance, as did Michelle Fleet, the piece’s frequent odd woman out, who relishes rather than laments her independence.

The final movement, to Bach’s Double Concerto for Two Violins in D Major, is an exhilarating celebration of the joy of falling and of testing the limits of balance. The pace increases as the dancers enter and exit, throwing themselves at the floor with joyous abandon. Falling, in this dance, is not merely a means of getting to the floor, or a contrast to rising, but is a valid and purposeful movement unto itself.

The company looks magnificent in the David Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center, eating up the full expanse of the stage. However, both pieces were performed to recorded music, which the theatre’s sound system did no favors. The tinny sounds of the score for “Speaking in Tongues” were particularly grating. What a treat it would be to hear the spontaneous energy of the dancers matched by that of the music as interpreted by live musicians! For now though, we’ll have to be content with the glorious opportunity the company’s three-week Lincoln Center season offers us to witness the range and depth of Taylor’s work.

***

A woman sits or stands in front of us and begins laughing. Or is she crying? When she sighs, ’’s unclear whether she is exhaling from exhaustion or pleasure.  Her noises slowly become more specific, the beginnings of words that are never quite formed, that can’t be understood. This scene, with minor variations, is repeated a number of times in choreographer Marjani Forté’s first evening-length work, being Here…, performed at Danspace Project last month. The struggle to be understood, to find one’s voice, and to express oneself is at the heart of this work, which purports to examine “mental illness and addiction in the face of systemic injustice.” The work was informed, in part, by the stories Forté heard from women from the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, where she spent time doing research for the piece.

The cast of six women (Rebecca Bliss, Tendayi Kuumba, Jasmine Hearn, Autumn Scoggan, Alice Sheppard, and Samatha Speis, each powerful and captivating in her own way) included performers of diverse skin color, body types, and abilities. Difference is in many ways at the heart of this piece, and yet Forté refuses to reduce any performer to being defined simply by a particular dissimilarity. I am reminded of a phrase from Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami, where she writes that “our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one difference.” As the women of being Here… come together in various groupings (if only to separate again), Forté asks us to consider the ravages of mental illness and addiction as one of many (non-defining) iterations of difference.

In one section, introduced by the tell-tale ding-dong that signals the closing of subway doors, three different women enter and alternately amuse and frighten the passengers with their antics, ranging from overly brash singing along to an imaginary iPod to brash, expletive-laden rants. Forté asks us to look more closely at these interlopers we so often ignore: at what point do we consider someone “crazy” and thus ignorable? That the two white performers are the passengers, and the interlopers all women of color, forces us to think about the racial dynamics of this question: are certain bodies, dressed in certain ways (here, mismatched oversized layers) more likely to be interpreted as disruptive, as “too much”?

Forte’s choreography makes the connection between body and speech explicit: the women’s muddled enunciations are mirrored by facial and bodily twitches and shaking: the effort to speak is made visible. The role of breath and of the tongue as integral components in speaking are foregrounded as well. At one point, the dancers draw large lateral arcs in the air with their tongues, seeming both to taste the air and to mark the space as their own. Later, another dancer, her back to the audience, voraciously sucks, licks, or kisses her own arms, exaggerating the smacking sounds of her lips.

In a duet with Bliss, Sheppard, in a wheelchair, assumed the active role, supporting and pushing her partner, driving and guiding the action with the same easy sureness she displayed in an earlier solo. Their duet, which began playfully, later turned aggressive, returning to the theme of emotional volatility that characterizes the piece. Having cast off Bliss, Sheppard puts her hand to Scoggan’s mouth, in what is at once a violent silencing and a potentially compassionate act: relieving her of the burden of explaining herself to others.

The powerful penultimate section took on a militant tone, as movements became larger and powerfully aggressive. While the group continued to fragment and re-form, the more frequent collective movement in this section added to its forceful impact. In the final moments, Sheppard and Speis came to face each other, with a mix of compassion and curiosity. Their outstretched fingers almost touched, but then slowly changed direction to point back toward their own chests, in a shared moment of self-realization. This final image illustrates the hopeful potential of living and loving together “in the house of difference.” This dance is not about making oneself intelligible to others, but about the ways that we view and respond to what we consider unintelligible.

To: Mario DiGangi, Executive Officer and Professor, English Program, The Graduate Center/CUNY

**

Dear Mario,

All of us have benefited from your tireless work as an administrator over the past three years. We know that you will bring the same level of dedication to the next three years as Executive Officer. Indeed, we are counting on it.

This is a crucial time for the English program and for public education at large. Structural changes at the Graduate Center, most notably the implementation of new Five-Year Fellowship packages, have resulted in fundamental changes in the nature of the English Ph.D. program and its students. Changes in policy and leadership throughout CUNY — including but not limited to the potential implementation of Pathways, the resignation of Chancellor Goldstein and interim appointment of William Kelly, four more years of tuition increases under the Rational Tuition Policy, the threat of Medgar Evers College losing accreditation due to administrators’ mismanagement, the return of the ROTC to York and City College, the Macaulay teaching appointment of General David Petraeus as Muslim students continue to be surveilled — will change the environment of education in our university system.

At times like this, it becomes even more important to take up–and even work towards expanding–the challenging and multi-faceted work that the Diversity Committee has undertaken.

As such, we would like to take this opportunity to have an open conversation about our understanding of what diversity means for our department. We would like an explanation of the policies that are in place in order to realize that understanding.

• What steps are currently being taken to strategize about diversity in all the program’s standing committees?

• What do you understand to be the effects on CUNY classrooms of admitting a mainly white graduate student body from whom a large percentage of CUNY adjunct teaching faculty are drawn, and who are responsible for teaching in classrooms that are predominantly populated by students of color? In what ways are such graduate student adjuncts trained to address the role of institutional racism within the classroom?

• What efforts has the Admissions Committee taken to ensure that incoming cohorts reflect the levels of racial and economic diversity found within New York City?

• A vast percentage of New Yorkers are foreign-born and often non-citizens. Many are ESL speakers. How does our program imagine itself and the discipline in relation to them and to English as a world language? How can we recruit them to our department? How can our teaching practicums approach the positive evaluation of various forms of English as well as non-English languages (as explored in the pedagogical work of former CUNY faculty like Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, bell hooks, Mina Shaughnessy, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, David Henderson, and Leonard Kriegel)?

• Our department has an international reputation in the field of Queer Studies. What attempts have been made to ensure that incoming cohorts are comprised of students of varying gender identities, sexual orientations, disabilities and ages? How can we make our department more radically queer? More trans-positive? More in tune with disability culture? More intersectionally focused along such avenues as crip queer of color critiques?

• Beyond recruitment, what measures have been taken to increase the number of black and Latino students who are admitted to the program, and what work is done to retain those students?

• Has the department considered the extent to which the program’s culture and spaces are welcoming to people with various disabilities?  Has the department considered the ways that aspects of the program’s structure–e.g. language requirements–may create unnecessary disability-related barriers to completion, and/or may unknowingly replicate abelist assumptions about academic success?  Are there ways to augment the program’s structure to make it more accessible to students with disabilities, and, in particular, “mental disabilities” (e.g. learning disabilities, mood disorders, etc.)

• Has the department considered the impact of the Five-Year Fellowship packages, as well as other means of encouraging (pressuring, incentivizing, etc.) degree completion timetables, on students whose disabilities may affect the speed with which they complete their coursework and other program requirements?  Will the department institute policies to ensure that any implementation of degree completion timetables does not exclude students with disabilities?  Has the department considered the ways that degree completion timetables may inherently reinforce ableist assumptions about academic success?

• What will the impact of the new Five-Year-Fellowship packages be on students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who must often work to supplement fellowship funds? How will the new degree completion timetables affect these students? Can you speak to their risk of stigmatization?

• How many students of color have been admitted to the program over the past 10 years? How many of them have graduated? How many of them have received significant funding? What was their average time to completion?

• The CUNY Pipeline program has been an important tool for the recruitment of underrepresented students to the Graduate Center, but it is not the only CUNY program we can rely on. How do you envision the Graduate Center English Program robustly supporting such diversity-focused academic programs as the Africana Studies Certificate, the Magnet Scholarship, the McNair Program and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship?

• What relationship, if any, do you see between low enrollment in the English PhD Program of students of color and low enrollment/course offerings in non-Eurocentric Anglophonic literatures?

• Within the GC administration’s Restructuring Plan, the English Department has been encouraged to select rising and top faculty members on a wide scope for potential hiring. How do you envision diversifying the process of English PhD program faculty hiring in coordination with CUNY’s undergraduate colleges?

• Do you think the focus on increasing diversity in the English PhD program should be connected to increasing diversity GC-wide? If so, how do you envision the ways we can work towards this shared goal?

• How does the limited number of faculty and students of color in the English PhD program affect the generation of subject matter, range of courses, invited speakers, conferences, scholarships, research projects, orals lists, dissertations, scholarship trajectories, the shape of the discipline in the future, etc.?

• To what extent should the English program engage in a form of affirmative action geared directly towards welcoming students and faculty of color?

• What efforts are being made to make conversations about our diversity initiatives transparent and open to the GC’s scholarly community? Are there any plans at this point to hold an open forum on our diversity efforts in order to gain a wider array of student and faculty input?

• Inside Higher Education reported on May 7, 2013, that “Black and Latino graduate students are more likely to borrow and more likely to borrow larger sums to earn a Ph.D. than are white or Asian graduate students” (see insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/07/study-finds-black-and-latino-grad-students-borrow-more-earn-phds). How do you envision the English program proactively securing funding for students of color to help them avoid amassing tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars in debt?

We, the undersigned members of the English department, would like to meet with you to discuss the aforementioned issues. We look forward to having a productive and respectful conversation.

Sincerely,

Anne Donlon

Balthazar Becker

Benjamin Miller

Chris Eng

Conor Tomás Reed

Elizabeth Goetz

Hank Williams

Ian Foster

Jenny LeRoy

Kristin Leigh Moriah

Livia Arndal Woods

Margaret Galvan

Megan Paslawski

Melissa Phruksachart

Mike Granger

Nick Gamso

Rebecca Fullan

Sean M. Kennedy

Stefania Heim

Simone White

Timothy Griffiths

Tonya Foster

Tracy Riley

Velina Manolova

By Michael Busch

This past March marked the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, a decade of fighting which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, destroyed an entire country, and destabilized the broader Middle East. As journalist Matt Kennard argues in his new book, Irregular Army, the war in Iraq—as well as that in Afghanistan—also had deleterious consequences for the US military itself.  Faced with declining enlistment numbers as fighting dragged on year after year with no clear end in sight, Kennard shows that the American armed forces looked for alternatives to populate its ranks.  In the process, regulations were weakened, rewritten and in some cases, not enforced.

The results are disturbing. According to Kennard, the military was suddenly tolerating the open presence of white power extremists and street gang members in the rolls, and actively recruiting physically and psychologically unfit Americans to fill enlistment gaps. While evidence suggests that these lax recruitment standards have already resulted in death and murder on the battlefield, the consequences could prove equally upsetting here at home. If the Sikh temple massacre is any indication of what may be in store, Kennard’s argument that the United States faces an uncertain future as these veterans return from home from war couldn’t be more urgent.

I recently spoke with Kennard about his research into these issues, how government brass has responded to these threats to the integrity of its armed forces, and what the irregular American army might mean for Americans in the years to come.

The tenth anniversary of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq just passed this week. Give us a sense of how the American military has changed in the last decade, and what it looks like today.

What happened to the American military, and I’m not the only one to point this out, during the war on terror and up to this day constitutes in some ways the biggest change the American military has ever gone through, at least since the twentieth century. What was implemented during the war on terror was a massive restructuring of the Pentagon under the aegis of Donald Rumsfeld, who had this plan to basically eviscerate the civilian US military and replace it with private contractors.  This has come to be called “transformation” in specialist circles. He made this famous speech the day before 9/11 where he said that he wanted to modernize the military, corporate speak for corporatization of the military. We have to update our enlistment techniques, our training techniques, and the like. Under all the rhetoric was a plan to really scale down the Department of Defense, and replace it with companies like Blackwater and other groups.

There was also a strategic shift that was part of this transformation that recognized that as the cold war wound down the United States no longer needed large land armies. The new threats facing the United States were asymmetrical, they were no longer state-based in nature but came instead from non-state terrorist groups. There were significant disagreements with this new proposed posture.  Colin Powell, who had previously been the highest ranking officer in the military, argued that Washington needed to maintain a serious, large land army that could be deployed quickly in the case of emergency. In the end, Rumsfeld won out and the invasion of Iraq happened with many less troops than Powell and Eric Shinseki, chief of the army at the time, wanted.

Eventually, after Iraq failed to go as planned, Powell and Shinseki were proved right—that the American army really couldn’t just go into a place like Iraq, smash the place up, and then get out within a couple of years. They were in a quagmire there, and this was shown to be the case again in the case of Afghanistan.  As the war got worse and worse over time, and in the absence of conscription, the military found itself needing more and more personnel—precisely the opposite of what Donald Rumsfeld had wanted or foreseen. In order to do this, to pump up its numbers, the military began to change its regulations.  They did this with some groups quite openly.  For example, the raised the ceiling age for enlistment, from thirty-five to forty, and then again to forty-two, because they didn’t get the numbers they needed the first time.

The stuff that I looked into were the groups that the military was a little more embarrassed about—from white supremacists to street gang members to criminals. For some reason, I’m the only journalist, for some reason, who’s done serious work on the presence of gangs and neo-Nazis in the American military.  There’s been quite a lot of work done on criminals in the army.  Henry Waxman investigated the presence of serious criminals in the military  Over the last ten years, you’ve seen a complete realignment of who can qualify as a soldier in the United States military.

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of the military adventures of the United States, but everyone knows that the standards in the US military were always quite high. This was especially the case after Vietnam—twenty-five years were spent basically jiggering the military so that the standards were high during the war on terror, all of this was completely jettisoned.  So what we have now is a military that is not held up as an exemplar of professionalism around the world, but as an example of what happens to a military when there aren’t enough troops and the government is too scared to institute conscription.

There’re questions, of course, about how this will play out moving forward.  Take the Libya intervention by NATO, for example: the whole debate was rehashed again.  Barack Obama actually endorsed the Runsfeldian idea that the United States needed to slim down. If some state-based enemy rises again and the US military has to deal with it, you’ll probably see the exact same issues crop up again.  And in fact, if you look into it, you’ll find that many of the standards haven’t been restored to their former levels even though recruiting quality troops has gotten easier with the current economic crisis. The military is unrecognizable now from what it was when the war on terror started.  And that’s not a mistake. It’s basically become exactly how Rumsfeld envisioned it:  a hallowed out military replaced by private contracts working alongside special forces.  Jeremy Scahill’s new book, Dirty Wars, for example, documents how JSOP are now carrying out many of the tasks that were previously the responsibility of the American military. Everyone says that the war on Iraq was a massive personal failure for Rumsfeld, but in fact, in many ways, his vision has won out.

The most disturbing finding of your research is the extent to which white power extremists have penetrated the United States military, something which first came to light as far back as the mid-1970s. How do they get in? What happens when they get discovered? What have been the most immediate consequences of their presence in warzones?

It is important to note that there are a raft of regulations that govern the presence of white supremacists, both during the recruitment phase, and then afterwards if they are discovered within the ranks. But the trouble with these regulations is that they’ve always been reactive.  So you have cases where white supremacist cells have been exposed in different bases, from the 1970s.  And every time this happens, whether that is a neo-Nazi killing another soldier, or killing someone in a nearby town to a base, every time there is a short-term outpouring of anger, the military responds by saying that they have tightened regulations. The first time something like this happened, in 1976, the military said being in a white supremacist organization was inconsistent with service. That can be interpreted any way you want.  To my mind, the ambiguity related to the regulation of white supremacists is deliberate, i.e., the military doesn’t want these people in the military, but in times when they can’t afford to kick troops out, the regulations allow them enough leeway to ignore it, or have enough plausible deniability, to leave these people in.

During the war on terror, regulations were basically not adhered at all.  So, for example, you had people who were able to get into the military with swastikas tattooed on their skin.  I spoke with the head of recruitment for the United States army about this, he said, “well, there’s first amendment rights. If someone says they like the way swastikas look, or claim that they are Native American symbols which look very similar, then the commander can basically blow it off.  So, there are regulations on tattoos—which are frequently the best indicators for recruiters—that were broadly ignored.

And then you had the other side, when these people are discovered after they are already in, there are other regulations to dealt with that. So, if you are caught posting messages on websites like StormFront, or writing racist messages on places like the New Saxon, a sort of neo-Nazi Facebook, you can be disciplined, and maybe even kicked out of the military altogether.  But that didn’t happen, either.  In fact, I received reports from the Criminal Investigative Command (CID), which is the criminal investigative arm of the Army, about what happened to white supremacists when they were caught. Some of it is really shocking.  In one instance, a soldier passed a military explosives manual to the leader of a white supremacist group.  In the report I received from the CID, the military terminated the investigation because the soldier in question had been shipped off to Iraq. This is somebody who may have been planning a domestic terrorist attack!  Jaw-dropping.

There are obviously first amendment rights. But if you are training, equipping and then sending white supremacists to a country of brown people, I think that really does trump first amendment rights.  I focus on the war on terror, but I could also mention Michael Weigh Paige, who carried out the Sikh Temple Massacre last year.  He was serving in the 1990s, a period during which there was supposedly a harsh crackdown on white supremacists in the military, by the military, following the Oklahoma City bombing  Stars and Stripes interviewed friends of Michael Weigh Paige, who told the paper that he was completely open about his Neo-Nazism the

But it’s not just white power groups that are populating the military. Other gangs have also colonized the American armed forces.  Can you talk about what other gang activity exists within the military?

It’s tempting to focus on the problem of white supremacists in the military when thinking about undesirable elements in the armed forces.  It makes sense—these people often have goals which are terrorist goals.  They want to kill people to further the cause of racial holy war.  But in terms of numbers, and everyday violence, the street gangs problem in the military is much more serious. I have spoken with security experts who estimate that up to 10 percent of the American military is made up of gang-affiliated troops.

During the height of the war on terror, we saw it all along the border, where active duty soldiers carried out the murders of other soldiers, not to mention of the enemies of local drug traffickers nearby to the bases.    Gangs see the military as a good way to traffic drugs—when soldiers are on a base, they are not subject to the same rigorous law enforcement as you are when you are civilian.  Cartels look to recruit soldiers who are on bases, or recruit soldiers

We’ve seen evidence of this up to this day.  Recently, there was a case in which the DEA carried out a sting operation on a group of soldiers.  DEA officers posed as a representatives of a Mexican drug cartel, and offered the soldiers money in return for carrying out hits against rival factions.  The soldiers agreed.  The DEA knew this was a good tack to take, because they’re very aware that trafficking groups are in constant contact with active duty personnel.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged on, you show that the military increasingly focused on recruiting kids and older adults to servein the armed forces.  How did they go about doing this, and what have been the consequences?

The most serious consequences have been the number of people who have died.  I focus on older people and the young in my book.  The military has regulation on the issue of age.  It used to be that basically no one over the age of thirty-five could be recruited into the military.  That changed during the war on terror when the age was raised, first to forty and then to forty-two years of age, because they were struggling to find troops. That regulation wasn’t arbitrary.  When soldiers are older than thirty-five, they face higher risks on the battlefield related to psychology and physical fitness.  I discuss a couple of soldiers in the book who died during their service, likely as a result of their relatively advanced age.  One died of a heart attack; the other of appendicitis.  So that’s the most serious consequence—people have died as a result of these changes.

The other consequence has to do with the moral issue of colonizing the high schools of America.  It’s not well-known about, but No Child Left Behind Act—which was passed with great bipartisan fanfare in 2001—has a small caveat which mandates that schools turn over the phone numbers and addresses of all their students to military recruiters or face funding cuts if they refused. At first, this wasn’t used much because the war on terror hadn’t yet started.  But when troop deficits became a chronic issue, it began to be used all the time. Recruiters spent a decade terrorizing high school students—cod calling them, turning up at their houses, turning up at their schools—trying to persuade them to go to war.

There was one famous case where a high school student recorded a recruiter telling him that his life would be finished if he exited the Delayed Enlistment Program. Under the DEP, students can sign up for the military while still in high school—basically promising to join the military upon graduation.  But it is not binding. But many students aren’t told it isn’t binding.  In this case, the student recorded the recruiter telling him that if he failed to honor the DEP, he wouldn’t be able to get loans for college, wouldn’t ever be able to find a job, and the like. It didn’t work on this one kid, because he was smart and decided to record his conversations with the recruiter. But you can imagine how often these sorts of tactics, and this kind of manipulation, do work on young people. And you can imagine how many of these young people were sent to Afghanistan and Iraq, and in all likelihood some of them have died.  In combination, then, these two sides of the age issue highlight an overriding moral issue, and that is the fact that tons of people who should have never been sent to war, were.

You suggest that the full consequences of the irregular army cobbled together by the United States haven’t yet been fully realized.  Are we in for an irregular future?  If so, how?

In my opinion, the war on terror—which was fought mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in other places as well—is now coming home.  All of the extremists that the Pentagon allowed into the military during the war on terror are coming back to the United States, and not to become priests. These people have their own goals, and they will spend the next decade or two attempting to bring these goals forward.  We see this in smaller scale following the first Gulf War.  Take the Oklahoma City bombing, which took place a few years after the United States withdrew from Iraq the first time.  These things have a fairly long incubation period.  My sense is that because the military has trained so many crazy people in advanced weaponry and tactics over the past ten years, there will be cases—hopefully not as serious as the Oklahoma City bombing—like the Sikh Temple Massacre, cases where the violence of disgruntled veterans with a racial bone to pick, or any other really, will be taken out on random civilians.

We are seeing that slowly.  Recently, there was a case in which a group of soldiers at a base   were planning to assassinate President Obama and poison the water supply in Washington.  Thankfully, this plan was busted, but we have to ask ourselves: how many similar cells like this are in the United States, and how long will it take for us to see them act out their fantasies? I’m not particularly optimistic about the future on this front.  There’s another point that must be made, as well. It is sometimes said that a country’s military is a reflection of the population from which it is drawn.

Many problems we witnessed in military during the war on terror were reflections of a society that was changing under the stress of fear that was inflicted on the American population. We can point to the rising numbers of convicted felons allowed into the military, but that was merely a reflection of the increasing number of people being locked up across the country. We can point to the increasing numbers of overweight soldiers allowed to serve in the military, but again, this is just a reflection of an increasingly obese American society.  So in a sense, many of the troubles experienced by the US military right now are a reflection of a society which is going backwards in key respects, not forwards. Hopefully this will change.  But there are very few indicators right now to suggest this is likely going to happen.

By Anne Donlon

Commonly, we hear of figures in the 1930s and early 1940s who may have been involved in John Reed Clubs, radical newspapers, writers congresses, and communist-affiliated organizations, but later in the forties and fifties, broke with the Communism, denounced its politics, or took efforts to publicly distance themselves from the Party. Versions of this narrative attend the biographies of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. The cartoonist Ollie Harrington was different. Indeed, as Brian Dolinar observes in Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation, “Different from the experiences of other black writers and artists who broke with the Communist Party, Harrington moved closer to the Left in the postwar years.”

Ollie Harrington began drawing cartoons for newspapers as an art student in the 1930s, and after World War II became politically active working on public relations for the NAACP in its various campaigns. He went on to be much more involved on the Left, however, traveling to the Soviet Union, and living in East Berlin from 1961 until his death in 1995. In the 1930s, before going to the Yale School of Fine Arts, Harrington published cartoons in the National News and the Amsterdam News. He was working for the latter when the paper fired several writers, and workers went on strike for eleven weeks and organized a boycott. When the strike was settled, Harrington returned with the “Dark Laughter” cartoon series that featured the character “Bootsie” that he continued to draw over the next several decades. “Bootsie” became a popular culture touchstone.

Within a few years, his cartoons were picked up by the Pittsburgh Courier, a black weekly newspaper with a sizeable circulation. Harrington syndicated his cartoons to many publications, and he joined Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s newspaper The People’s Voice in 1942. During World War II, he traveled to Europe to cover the war, among the first African American journalists the United States War Department allowed to cover a war. Harrington’s political commitment markedly increased after World War II, when he worked for the NAACP on a campaign for justice in the face of racialized violence in Columbia, Tennessee and Monroe, Georgia in 1946. In the same year, he worked for justice for Isaac Woodward, a black veteran who was beaten and made blind while traveling through South Carolina in uniform.

It was during this that Harrington’s Bootsie cartoons became more politicized. Soon after, Harrington split with the NAACP and became more active on the Left. He was involved in Labor Party campaigns, did public relations for the Communist candidate Ben Davis’s bid for a seat on the City Council in New York, and chaired a committee to elect W. E. B. Du Bois to the Senate. He worked for Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom in the late 1950s, and contributed to many campaigns to defend people against anticommunist persecution. Harrington eventually moved to Europe to escape the political climate in the United States., living out the remainder of his life in East Berlin.

Brian Dolinar’s book devotes one of its chapters to Harrington, and argues that though Harrington was a prominent popular artist of the time, his association with communism led to his subsequent obscurity. Dolinar is interested in recovering such figures and histories. Focusing on the impact of the National Negro Congresses and the work of Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, and Ollie Harrington, Dolinar points out the many ways that politics fostered in the 1930s continued to inform the politics and art throughout later decades. In his chapter on the National Negro Congress, for example, Dolinar describes the interconnected organizing networks that brought artists and writers together, and introduces a cast of characters that recur throughout the remainder of the book. The section on Hughes links his newspaper reporting in the Spanish Civil War to the “Simple” stories he published in the Chicago Defender in the following decades. Jesse B. Semple’s observations in the later stories often present political views continuous with his views in the 1930s, including critiques of the anti-communist efforts of the state. The chapter on Chester Himes points out the connections between his experience and writing during the Works Project Administration era, and the detective fiction Himes wrote in the following decades.

Langston Hughes scholarship is somewhat haunted by his testimony at the House of Un-American Activities Committee, where he infamously denied affiliation with the Communist Party. Dolinar provides a more complex picture than the public testimony presents. Looking at transcripts from the private questioning conducted by Roy Cohn two days previous to the public hearing, Dolinar points out the contrast between the charged private testimony—in which Hughes stated there was a time he desired a Soviet form of government and coyly responded to Cohn’s queries about other Party members that he’d never seen anyone’s party cards—and the more subdued tone of the public hearing. Dolinar argues that Hughes’s performance in the public hearing shouldn’t be seen as a “retreat from politics,” but rather a strategy of survival. Hughes continued to be outspoken and critical after the hearing. Dolinar also notes that the literary works that concerned the committee were not only the radical poems of the 1930s, but also recently published Simple stories including “Something to Lean On,” and “When A Man Sees Red,” in which Simple stands up to his boss and says, “In my opinion, a man can be black or red—or any color except yellow. And I would be yellow if I did not stand up for my rights.”

Dolinar also sets out to rescue novelist Chester Himes’s engagement on the Left and reinsert it into scholarly conversations on Himes. Himes first published prison stories in Abbott’s Monthly and Esquire as an inmate in the 1930s, and, after he was released in 1936, he eventually found work with the WPA. Working at the Cleveland Public Library, he met Jo Sinclair, the pen name of the lesbian Jewish writer Ruth Seid, who based a character on Himes in her unpublished work of fiction, “They Gave Us a Job.” Himes went on to write for the Ohio Writer’s Project, and connected with the Karamu House in Cleveland. At Karamu House he met Langston Hughes, and made connections that eventually led him to Hollywood. The geography of this chapter shifts the hubs of black literary activity from Harlem and Howard to Cleveland and California. Himes, like Harrington, Richard Wright, and others, eventually emigrated to Europe to escape the racism and political suppression of the United States.

Dolinar’s work is strongest in his narration of the detailed histories surrounding these figures. His account of Hughes in the Spanish Civil War is well-researched, providing a meticulous account of Hughes’s activity in Spain, his activism on behalf of Spain in the UnitedStates, and the cast of characters Hughes interacted with during that period of his life. Dolinar provides thorough accounts of the National Negro Congresses and the efforts that grew out of them, including performances, rallies, and the George Washington Carver School in Harlem, a “people’s institute” where the artist Elizabeth Catlett taught a class on “How to Make a Dress” and Gwendolyn Bennett taught a class on black history. The book’s storytelling is gripping, and Dolinar makes a particular effort to point out the crossings of his main players: Hughes meets Himes at Karamu; Himes and Harrington attended an “international party” hosted by Hughes in 1944; Hughes compares his Simple character to Harrington’s Bootsie when proposing Harrington as an illustrator for a book project (though the collaboration didn’t come to fruition).

Black Cultural Front’s organizational strategy emphasizes individual figures, though certain networks and infrastructures clearly emerge as crucial. The chapter on the National Negro Congress underlines one key organizing hub that brought a wide range of artists, activists, and writers into contact. In the chapters on Hughes, Himes, and Harrington that follow, although individuals take the forefront, infrastructures like the black press, especially its weekly newspapers, institutions like Karamu House, and the Works Project Administration play key roles in creating threads that run through these individuals’ lives. Dolinar’s overall project might have benefited from the addition of a few explanatory remarks on the logic of the book’s organizing framework, and on the importance of certain trends that appear within the latter chapters without structural highlighting. For instance, while the presence and contributions of women like Gwendolyn Bennett, Marvel Cooke, Jo Sinclair, and Esther Cooper Jackson emerge, and the international aspects of these networks are noted, the book’s organization doesn’t particularly highlight them. Even the role of black newspapers, whose centrality is clear, is not particularly announced. The history Dolinar presents is rich and textured, and one can imagine future projects that take up some of the themes that go unremarked, or are mentioned in passing, such as the importance of children’s book projects in this period.

Black Cultural Front aims to make a historiographic intervention. Black Cultural Front’s title alludes to Michael Denning’s groundbreaking Cultural Front: The Laboring of Twentieth-Century American Literature (1996), a book that describes various and interconnected artistic projects on the Left. For Denning, the “cultural front” is largely mapped onto the Popular Front, and the book focuses almost exclusively on the culture of the 1930s and early 1940s. For Denning, despite the fact that “the Popular Front was defeated,” the work of the cultural front lived on to have a “profound impact on American culture, informing the life-work of two generations of artists and intellectuals.” In distinction, for Dolinar, the cultural front itself existed into the McCarthy era. He speaks of “those who were still a part of the black cultural front” in the late 1950s. And, Dolinar writes, “it was the atmosphere of McCarthyism that put a strain on relationships and eventually led to the break-up of the black cultural front.” Thus, he states in the introduction, “I will avoid referring to black cultural radicalism in terms of the Popular Front, the period of 1935-1939 that Denning says best characterizes the coalitional politics that attracted artists and writers to the Left. Such a framework, I would argue, is too narrow to understand this phenomenon.”

Dolinar’s intervention, then, is to describe a cultural front concerned with antiracist activity, enlivened by African American players, that was not defeated with the Popular Front, and that did not give up the fight against fascism at home. The black cultural front Dolinar describes survived into the late 1950s and 1960s. In the Cultural Front’s focus on the age of the C.I.O., May 1or International Workers’ Day is a touchstone date. In the Black Cultural Front, February 14 is the commemorative date that comes up again and again. Frederick Douglass’s birthday was the day of the 1936 National Negro Congress, the second day of the first Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1937, and the day that the first issue of the People’s Voice came out in 1942. February 14 was also Ollie Harrington’s birthday, which informed the date of the February 10, 2007 “sketch in” of black cartoonists, discussed in Dolinar’s conclusion. In the final pages of the book, Dolinar gestures towards connections between the black cultural front and the contemporary moment, citing Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series of detective novels, set during the Cold War, and his “Tempest Tales,” modeled on Hughes’s Simple stories, and Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks cartoon series, “one of only a small handful of black cartoons in syndication since the days of Ollie Harrington and the black press.”

In taking a holistic view of the middle decades of the twentieth-century, Dolinar’s text joins several scholarly works that link Popular Front and post-war literary culture. Recent literary studies like Alan Wald’s Trinity of Passion: Anti-Fascism and the Literary Left; James Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s; Lawrence Jackson’s The Indignant Generation:A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960; and articles like Smethurst’s “‘Don’t Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat:’ Langston Hughes, the Left, and the Black Arts Movement”; and Frederick Griffiths’s “Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Angelo Herndon” have highlighted the impact of 1930s left culture on literature in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Similarly, historians speak of a long civil rights movement, linking struggles in the 1930s directly with the period more commonly referred to as the civil rights era. Dolinar contributes a level of historical detail in the accounts of these lives and cultural networks, in particular in the recovery of Ollie Harrington. Black Cultural Front fills in some of the interpersonal and intertextual genealogies of black cultural work in the United States, and attempts to shift the narration of these lives from before and after Communism to an understanding of a continuous movement that had a dynamic relationship to a variety of political climates.

by Dan Venning

**

Isaac’s Eye. By Lucas Hnath. Directed by Linsay Firman. At the Ensemble Studio Theatre. 6 March 2013.

The Flick. By Annie Baker. Directed by Sam Gold. At Playwrights Horizons. 27 March 2013.

**

I have recently seen two plays at venues devoted to presenting new work by emerging playwrights. At The Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST), a member company founded in 1968 and, according to its mission statement, “committed to the discovery and nurturing of new voices,” I saw Isaac’s Eye, written by Lucas Hnath and directed by Linsay Firman about conflicts between Isaac Newton and the scientist Robert Hooke. At Playwrights Horizons I attended Annie Baker’s The Flick, a new play directed by Sam Gold about employees of a small movie theater in current-day Massachusetts. Playwrights Horizons was founded around the same time as EST, in 1971, and according to its mission statement is dedicated to a similar goal—“the support and development of contemporary American playwrights, composers and lyricists, and to the production of their new work.”

Although differing in subject matter, the two plays had some striking similarities. Both were plays for small casts of four actors—three men and one woman—and both featured love triangles between the central male roles and the female character. Despite the historical plot of Hnath’s play, each was staged in contemporary dress. Also, both Isaac’s Eye and The Flick focus on essentially the same topic: interrelations between people of differing ages in the same field, who engage in a relationship that involves both mentoring and antagonism. The plays conveyed their messages with varying degrees of success, but ultimately both were fascinating to watch and valuable examples of new American plays by young authors.

**

At the opening of Hnath’s Isaac’s Eye, which was coproduced by EST and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (a foundation devoted to the development of science in society), an actor (Jeff Biehl) appears to let the audience know that many of the facts depicted in the play are true. The actor sets up the rules of the game: whenever something historically accurate is said, it will be written in chalk on a blackboard upstage. For example, Isaac Newton (Haskell King) indeed believed that light was made of particles, rewrote parts of the bible, and had a friendship with Catherine Storer (Kristen Bush), the daughter of an apothecary in his hometown of Woolsthorpe. Robert Hooke (Michael Louis Serafin-Wells), the curator of experiments in the British scientific Royal Society believed light was made of waves, explained combustion, designed an artificial respirator, and explained elasticity (now called Hooke’s Law). After setting up these rules, the actor, in Brechtian fashion, announces the first scene of the play and Newton, in a black sweater looking very much like an Emo-kid in his twenties, appears.

Just as they are costumed expertly by Suzanne Chesney in contemporary clothes—Hooke, like a modern-day narcissistic professor, is dressed in a blazer, button-up shirt, and wears stylish glasses—Hnath’s characters speak in a witty, biting modern style. The crux of the play is that Newton wants to get into the Royal Society, and needs Hooke’s recommendation. Hooke, having read Newton’s papers, realizes that Newton’s ideas conflict with his own and wants to stifle this potential challenger to his research. Catharine becomes involved with both men, realizing that as she gets older her prospects for marrying and having children are steadily decreasing. Biehl also reappears as Sam, a man dying of the plague, whom Hooke and Newton subject to experiments. Newton purloins Hooke’s sex diary, a real document in which the elder scientist kept a log of all his ejaculations, as well as descriptions of an affair with his niece, Grace Hooke. Using this diary, Newton blackmails Hooke, demanding a recommendation for the Royal Society. Hooke deftly reverses the blackmail and demands that Newton conduct a proposed experiment on himself, putting a needle into his tear duct in order to bend his eye to see if colors change (demonstrating that light is indeed composed of particles). At the end of the play, the two men reach a sort of détente as Newton heads to Trinity College, Cambridge, to begin his studies.

As the actor reveals in the conclusion of the show, while many of the events depicted are “true” (recorded historical facts), others were invented. Hooke probably never really met Catharine Storer, and Newton and Hooke didn’t meet until later in Newton’s career, although they indeed had a noted rivalry. The narrator describes how these invented stories were “just a little lie to help you see something that’s difficult to see.” What that is, precisely, is a bit unclear. Perhaps it has something to do with the personal problems that can accompany genius: the human price Newton must pay in order to become a triumph as a scientist. Still, Hnath’s play, for all its crackling wit and moving interpersonal conflicts seems to lack a significant purpose. Isaac’s Eye feels somewhat unfinished. The play’s greatest success is engaging concept that allows the audience to see the past as very much like the present. Newton, as played by King, seems like he might be somewhere on the autism spectrum due to some his inability to emotionally connect with others (particularly effective is King’s way of delivering Newton’s repeated line “yaaaaaay,” a passive-aggressive, tentative line of semi-celebration). The acting was excellent all around and each scene was meticulously directed to wonderful effect by Firman, but the show, while thoroughly entertaining, ultimately felt a bit precious and left me wondering what, exactly, Hnath wanted me to see through Isaac’s Eye.

**

In The Flick, Annie Baker tells the story of Sam (Matthew Maher), Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), and Rose (Louisa Krause), three employees of a single-screen, second-run movie theater in Massachusetts, “The Flick,” which houses one of the last non-digital, 35 millimeter projectors in the state. The thirty-something Sam and twenty-year-old Avery clean the movie theatre auditorium after each showing, while Rose runs the projector. The (real) audience watches the show as if from behind the invisible screen—we look out into a stunningly detailed set created by David Zinn (who also designed the costumes) of movie-theater seats. Scenes are separated by the flickering lights from the projector. Because the action takes place among rows of seats, director Sam Gold (a frequent collaborator of Baker’s, they worked together on Baker’s Obie award-winning Circle Mirror Transformation, Aliens, and her recent adaptation of Uncle Vanya at Soho Rep) has created blocking that is meticulously detailed as Sam and Avery sweep, have discussions about life and love, joke, and learn about one another between showings.

Maher, who plays Sam, has a harelip and slight lisp that he uses to build a character pushed to the margins of society. Sam carries a torch for Rose, an alienated and angry young woman who has poorly-dyed green hair and wears boots and shapeless black shirts that obscure her femininity. Sam mentors Avery, who is working in the movie theater during some time off from college following a failed suicide attempt. Sam quickly learns that Avery is profoundly in love with cinema, and has chosen this job specifically because of the 35 mm projector. Early in the show, Sam and Rose reveal to Avery that they embezzle 10 percent of each day’s receipts, because the unseen owner of the theater is a “total dick” and an idiot who will never notice. Avery is reluctant to participate since as a young African American he feels he may be more subject to suspicion from the (possibly racist) boss. But Sam and Rose convince Avery to participate in the “dinner money” scheme out of solidarity.

At times the pace of the three-hour-long show is unbearably slow. Sam and Avery clean for what seems like minutes without speaking, or play games of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” that take ages as Avery demonstrates his knowledge by connecting stars from different genres and time periods. (Along similar lines, one striking crossover between The Flick and Isaac’s Eyes, coincidental I’m sure, is that at one point Avery reveals that his middle name is Newton!) Sam, Avery, and Rose chat about work, astrology, and movies, creating a vivid and realistic depiction of coworkers in a dead-end job. Yet Sam and Avery develop a real connection: Sam tells Avery about his mentally disabled brother, while Avery shares the story of his suicide attempt. They become friends. Then two heartbreaking betrayals take place: while Sam is away at his brother’s wedding, Rose makes a play for Avery that is only stymied because Avery is more enraptured by the movie they are watching than by the woman at his side. And after The Flick is sold, the new owner figures out “dinner money” and blames Avery alone. Rose and Sam let him take the fall, saying that while they need their salaries for rent and, in Rose’s case, student loans, Avery can just return to college on his parents’ dime. His time at The Flick has just been a detour.

The final scene is one of the most painful examinations of betrayal and failed friendship to come out of the contemporary theatre scene. The old projector has been replaced by a digital one, and Sam, who now works with a new partner (Alex Hanna) invites Avery back to the theater to give Avery the old projector and some 35 mm reels that the previous owner never returned to the distributor. It is a sensitive and thoughtful peace offering, if one that cannot fully make up for Sam’s betrayal of his solidarity with Avery. Avery responds with vitriol in a vicious speech in which he says that he and Sam were never really friends, just coworkers, and that he will go on to accomplish great things after college while Sam will always remain a meaningless worker in a low-end movie theater. Sam responds to this attack with grace in a marvelously written speech about human dignity, describing the fulfillment that any person can find in daily life, or in love. It is unclear whether Sam and Rose have gotten together, but Sam finds satisfaction with his lot in life. As Avery storms off, Sam attempts to mend fences by posing one last, very difficult “Six Degrees” question. The audience waits for minutes, in silence, to see if Avery will return to solve it, or if he will leave Sam in silence. Avery comes back. While the two may no longer have a place in one another’s lives, in this final, extraordinarily moving moment, Baker allows the two to find mutual respect and a glimmer of the friendship they once had.

The Flick has received significant acclaim from critics: it was designated a Critic’s Pick by the New York Times and given glowing reviews in a variety of other publications. Baker’s play, under Gold’s expert direction and with these extraordinary actors and Zinn’s astounding set, absolutely deserves it. (I will be very surprised if Zinn does not win several awards for his design). But The Flick is not perfect, nor is it for everyone. Sam’s speech on human dignity at the end is absolutely crucial, since during the first act I frequently felt that I was watching something like facile “class tourism,” as a mostly upper-middle-class audience was given a window into the vagaries of blue-collar work. Clearly, this was intentional: we are meant to see the world of The Flick through Avery’s eyes until Sam reveals, so eloquently, a very different perspective on the world. On another note, several times I wondered if scenes could have been moved along faster, at least slightly. Baker and Gold aim for naturalistic detail, but the drawn-out pacing sometimes seemed positively sluggish and allowed dramatic tension to dissipate. Some audience members could not handle this: the middle-aged couple sitting next to me left at intermission, after joking periodically about the pace as the first act was running. While The Flick is a marvelous piece of writing, it simply would not work on Broadway, with a larger audience frequently less tolerant of plays that challenge them. In fact, Playwrights Horizons received enough feedback from some of its core audience that Artistic Director Tim Sanford sent a letter to the company’s subscribers alerting them to the length and silences. But in the end I found the challenges presented by Baker’s style led to a genuine breath of fresh air in a new play that is touching, heartfelt, and an important examination of human connection across lines of gender, education, race, and class.

**

While I ultimately felt that Baker’s The Flick was more  satisfying than Hnath’s Isaac’s Eye, it is worth noting that Playwrights Horizons, on Theatre Row on 42nd Street, clearly has far more financial resources than EST, which is located in a tiny space on the second floor far west on 52nd Street. The two plays fit their individual theatres well, though: The Flick required the production values available with the resources of Playwrights Horizons, and the moving, enlightening, and slightly unfinished-seeming Isaac’s Eye seemed entirely at home in a stereotypical off-off Broadway space. EST can take bigger risks because it is a smaller, scrappier company that presents shows that are earlier in their development by playwrights earlier in their careers. Playwrights Horizons frequently produces works whose creators hope to transfer them to Broadway. Nevertheless, the two plays demonstrate that young authors and directors, even when approaching similar topics, can engage audiences by doing so in radically different ways. I expect that The Flick and perhaps also Isaac’s Eye, new plays by American voices who deserve to be heard, will soon be seen at regional theatres around the country, and I look forward to seeing Hnath’s and Baker’s next plays. (In fact, I’ve already got tickets to see Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney at Soho Rep in May.)

**

As a final note, it has been a delight to review theatre for the Advocate this academic year. From the Fringe and Into the Woods and Prelude to these new plays, from avant-garde shows at HERE and Brecht at LaMama to Einstein on the Beach to competing adaptations of Shakespeare and the Metropolitan Opera, the variety of theatrical offerings in New York remains one of the city’s greatest attractions. My favorite from this season remains Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, which is returning May 1 at “Kazino,” a replica of a Russian supper club constructed especially for the show in the Meatpacking district. I’ve already got my tickets. I would not be surprised if Natasha, Pierre… becomes a fixture of the New York theatrical scene, much like Sleep No More. While that was my top pick, most of the other shows I reviewed did not fail to entertain and frequently challenge their audiences. Of course, I missed a great deal too, since it is pretty much impossible to see everything available each season. I eagerly await next season’s offerings, and wish a productive and enjoying summer to all my readers.

Just off the Washington Monument, there’s a mass of people in front of a soon to be lively stage. They’re protecting themselves from the whipping wind chill with fleece jackets and knit hats. Individuals from over thirty states and innumerable environmental organizations are in attendance. Direct action contingents on the frontlines of the Keystone XL pipeline, college students from nascent fossil fuel divestment campaigns, and a cornucopia of other groups populate the now muddy lawn. Perhaps the most interesting sight is one on the edge of the crowd, though. A few people are arrayed in a standing circle, beating drums. Their pulsing chants, borrowed from the Spanish Indignados and popularized Occupiers in Zucotti Park are unmistakable: “Ah, Anti, Anticapitalista!”

This amalgam of activists, organizers, environmentalists, and otherwise concerned individuals, gathered in Washington, D.C. on February 17 for the Forward on Climate Rally, offered a kind of microcosm of the environmental movement in its current form. 40,000 rallied on this frigid day and while they specifically targeted the Keystone XL pipeline, these people sent a message that was seemingly bigger than one piece (albeit a big piece) of infrastructure. What organizers of the event deemed “the largest climate rally in history” showed, if nothing else, was a reinvigorated environmental movement resuscitating some old ideas, exposing  innovative new tactics, and maybe even a projecting a novel ideology.

This resurgence is long overdue. For decades, scientists, activists, and even a few politicians have iterated and reiterated the potentially fatal consequences of unchecked human-induced climate change. For decades these voices of reason have fallen on deaf ears. In 2012, though, US citizens began to see and feel the effects of this largely abstract and vaguely understood problem. Droughts in the country’s breadbasket, unusually aggressive wildfires out West, sweltering summer temperatures, and of course Hurricane Sandy, seem to have awoken many Americans to the dire status of our climate, not to mention the social, economic, and political catastrophes that accompany it. As the Daily Beast bluntly put it, “Climate Change Is Here.” The only doubt that remains is how we’ll respond to it, and how bad things will get before we do. 

In August of this past year, 350.org founder Bill McKibben published an article in Rolling Stone entitled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” In it, the writer-turned environmental activist made the imminence of catastrophic climate change glaringly clear with three simple numbers:

• 2°C – The scientifically established limit for a global temperature increase.  Consensus was achieved on this figure at the 2009 conference at Copenhagen. 167 countries responsible for 87 percent of global emissions have signed onto the Copenhagen Accord, including the United States and China. So far, we’ve raised the temperature about .8°C.

• 565 gigatons: The amount of carbon that scientists estimate we can burn and stay under that 2° limit. This wouldn’t be as worrying if global emissions were falling or even leveling off – but they’re rising. 2011 saw the highest jump yet – 31.6 gigatons worldwide. At this rate, we’ll burn through that 565 gigaton limit in just sixteen years.

• 2795 gigatons: The amount of carbon the fossil fuel industry already possesses in its known reserves (including state owned companies), as calculated by the Carbon Tracker Initiative.

That last number merits another glance. Fossil fuel companies already have five times as much carbon that scientists say we can afford to burn without careening off the climate cliff. In no time at all, the article exploded onto the social media scene and sparked a twenty-one city “Do The Math Tour.” Out of a biodiesel bus and sold out concert halls, McKibben publicized that ominous equation he had developed and then offered a solution: divestment. The call, issued by 350.org, called on to students across the country to ask, convince, and demand that higher education administrations divest university holdings in companies that profit from the burning of fossil fuels. In just over six months, more than 300 campaigns are underway and four colleges have already divested.

The movement is even spreading to city and state funds. As Jay Carmona of 350.org writes, “In San Francisco, organizers are preparing for a hearing at City Hall on a resolution to divest around $1 billion from the 200 fossil fuel companies on our list. In Maine and Vermont, 350 activists are working on state-level divestment legislation. Divestment resolutions are also moving forward in religious communities, from the United Church of Christ to Methodist congregations.” Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn has already called on the city’s pension fund managers to divest from fossil fuels.

The movement is not without its skeptics though. Christian Parenti, contributing editor at The Nation, though supportive of the tactic, doubts its economic implications. In the New York Times, Parenti emphasized the fact that “three-quarters of the world’s oil is owned by governments and government companies” and that “some of the worst carbon polluters,” like the climate change denying brothers of the privately-owned Koch Industries, “do not even sell stock.”

Parenti is right to question the impact of divestment on the shift to renewable energy. But as McKibben recently made note of on Democracy Now!, when Nelson Mandela visited the United States for the first time after the end of apartheid, he made sure to stop at the University of California at Berkeley. Berkeley was a hot bed of divestment activity during the South Africa divestment movement of the 1980’s (the fossil fuel campaign is modeled off of it). After protests across campuses, sit-ins at presidents’ offices, and even make shift shanty-towns on quads, the California university system eventually divested its $3 billion in holdings. As Desmond Tutu said “The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure,” especially from “the divestment movement of the 1980s.”

Divestment is not a silver bullet, but it can be part of a buckshot offensive that bolsters public support, engages students in the climate justice movement, and stigmitizes the use of fossil fuels. As was done in South Africa, it can reframe the debate as a moral issue rather than an economic (or in this case scientific) one. To do so, it’ll need to be executed and integrated with a number of other tactics, many of which are already underway.

Just a few days before the Forward on Climate Rally, the Sierra Club decided to break its ban on civil disobedience as President Michael Brune was arrested for zip-tying himself to the White House gates. “For 120 years, we have remained committed to using every ‘lawful means’ to achieve our objectives,” Brune wrote in the Huffington Post in January. “Now, for the first time in our history, we are prepared to go further.” “Traditional tactics of lobbying, electoral work, litigation, grassroots organizing, and public education” are apparently proving insufficient in containing the market induced destruction of the climate.

That said, non-violent civil disobedience is nothing new for the environmental movement. Groups like Tar Sands Blockade, “a coalition of affected Texas and Oklahoma residents and organizers using nonviolent direct action to physically stop the Keystone XL [pipeline],” are merely carrying the torch once wielded by Edward Abbey, Julia Hill, and innumerable others. The group recently coordinated a week of protest against the pipeline that saw fifty grassroots organizations stage fifty-five actions across the continent. Groups like Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Greenpeace USA, and numerous Occupy contingents stopped traffic, sat down in corporate offices, and rallied against institutional enablers of the pipeline, like TD Bank. Even the progressive petition hub CREDO has jumped into the mix by facilitating a “Pledge of Resistance.” Over 50,000 individuals have signed on to commit “peaceful, dignified civil disobedience” should President Barack Obama approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

These increasingly frequent direct actions against those profiting from the burning of fossil fuels and the growing movement for divestment are inspiring. They have, if nothing else, injected a much-needed shot of adrenaline into the nationwide struggles for environmental justice. What’s still unclear, though, is exactly what these individuals and organizations are fighting for. While the unlikely partnerships and diverse coalitions have empowered the movement, they have also made it harder to project a common ideology. Previous incarnations of environmental activism have typically had specific targets, such as preserving a natural area or phasing out a specific source of pollution, or maybe even ending a power source capability like nuclear energy. Necessity demands, however,  that the movement embrace a more holistic perspective in the current struggle against climate change. It’s not a singular coal plant that needs to be shut down or an isolated area that needs to be conserved, but the entire system that powers our societies that needs phasing out. If the equilibrium of our global climate is to be reestablished, a truly transformative change is needed. That much seems to be agreed upon. How to affect this transformation is still up for debate.

One trend that does seem to be gaining traction is the increasingly anti-corporate nature of the dialogue, a testament to the tacit but powerful influence of Occupy Wall Street. For decades now, activists have been calling for the systemic changes necessary to ensure a sustainable planet—changes that involve regulation, oversight, and even dissolution of certain industries. This newly focused aim at the profit motive in the extractive capitalist economy appears to be striking a chord with an indignant population.

Contrasting this call for a check on corporate power are President Obama’s repeated calls for a “market-based” solution. His language coincides with the reality of his administration’s policies (which consistently applauds the record levels of oil and gas production as part of an “all of the above” energy strategy). The subscript for this jargon? That renewable energy and a sustainable planet will not come at the expense of the fossil fuel industry’s profit. This is not to simply vilify Obama. Without congressional and state legislative support, Washington could not provide billions of dollars in subsidies, allow unregulated companies to spew huge amounts of noxious carbon, and even fill the executive cabinet with ex-industry executives, like recently appointed Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. The lobbying efforts and campaign donations of these corporations, thoroughly unleashed by the 2010 Citizens United ruling, are of course invaluable in this royal treatment.

This contradiction of sustainability and regulation against growth and profit is stark. The question recently posed by Noam Chomsky on Truthout.org: “Will Capitalism Destroy Civilization?” is not an unfounded one. “The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species,” writes the world-renowned writer and activist.

If this sounds dystopian, recall McKibben’s thesis: if humans hope to limit the temperature increase to 2°C, then we can afford to burn no more than 565 gigatons of carbon. Yet the fossil fuel industry already possesses 2795 gigatons. This math is frightening enough as is, but even more worrying are the market forces that surround them. These fossil fuel reserves are those that are already known, that corporations and nation-states have already laid claim to. As McKibben notes, these assets are “economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony.”

McKibben continues: “John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won’t necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both.” Something has to give. And unless we humans want to resign our societies to the annals of history textbooks, it’ll have to be the wealth and power of those within the industry. If there was ever a more urgent call to fundamentally restructure our economy, and our societies as a whole, this is it.

Exactly which aspects of modern capitalism will need to be phased out and just how quickly are intricate questions that merit serious thought and reflection. What is irrefutable though is the notion that if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change within the short time we have left, the capitalism we know and live today will have to change drastically. It may, as Chomsky suggests, have to dissolve altogether. 

Anti-corporate crusader Naomi Klein, who’s currently writing a book on climate change, has also taken note of the fundamental contradiction of market capitalism and a livable planet. As she wrote in The Nation in 2011, “Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.”

“We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them…Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process.” Achieving these transformations will be a monumental struggle in and of itself. The fact that we only have sixteen years left makes it seem implausible. So how do we get there from here? As Klein writes, “the only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future.” Finally, after a quarter century, that movement is emerging.

Divestment and direct action will be vital tools in this struggle for justice, as will traditional tactics like delivering letters, pressuring elected officials, and yes, altering individual behavior so as to be more sustainable. But these efforts will be in vain if they are not guided by an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to the current political-economic structure. The climate crisis is truly, as the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change called it, “the greatest market failure the world has seen.” But this failure may also be the greatest opportunity for a transformation. The climate crisis might just open up enough space to affect truly transformative change – to generate alternate theories based not on profit and growth, but sustainability and above all, continued existence.

By James Hoff

Tenth of December is George Saunders’ fourth collection of short stories, and it is perhaps his darkest. It is certainly his most trenchant. Like In Persuasion Nation, published in 2006, Tenth of December offers an always sharp-witted but deeply emotional critique of twenty-first century America. However, while Saunders’ previous collections have tended to focus on the perils of consumerism and technology, frequently examining the unnervingly and increasingly fine line between self and product, the stories in this collection are much more concerned with the emotionally and psychologically destructive social concepts of money, class, and status.

Like a Steinbeck novel on Mescaline, the stories in Tenth of December craft, with deep pathos and psychological depth, the debilitating effects of inequality and precarity, offering a stark and characteristically grotesque portrait of the human casualties of an economy gone wild. Towards this end Tenth of December offers up a menagerie of misfits, failures, and working class losers all trying just to make it through another miserable day. Harried mothers, desperate fathers, shell-shocked vets, failing business owners, dementia-riddled old men, and narco-rehabilitated bad-luck murderers populate the cluttered interiors and suburban and sub-rural landscapes of Saunder’s America, where ghoulish “hobos” stand around with signs that read “PLEASE HELP HOMLESS”—“hey sorry you lost your hom!”—and young boys named Bo are chained like dogs to backyard trees because their medication makes them grind their teeth. Again and again Saunders gets us inside the heads of these characters, often moving back and forth between members of different classes, and in the most pedestrian language possible, lets us eavesdrop on their wants and worries.

And Tenth of December is pervaded with worry! Characters fret about how to pay their bills, they obsess about their children’s futures, they sweat their ill-health and old-age, they mourn their deteriorating beauty, and they struggle with their own deep resentments and their barely contained desires to do violence to those whom they believe have harmed them in some real or imagined way. But mostly these characters just end up hurting themselves. Unable to articulate or name the real source of their unhappiness, and unable, anyways, to do anything about it, they trudge along, dreaming of fitter, happier, brighter lives, adoring spouses, European vacations, healthy, grateful children, and well-deserved promotions up the ladder of success. As one character puts it, trying to rationalize the sense of inferiority he feels in the face of other people’s wealth and happiness: I “am not tired of work. It is a privilege to work. I do not hate the rich. I aspire to be rich myself.” Such declarations feel like they could have been drawn straight from the mouths of some right wing Fox pundit, and indeed, many of the characters of these stories resemble your typical Fox viewer. In language as simple as an eighth grade book report, Saunders artfully renders the mental detritus of his characters’ conservative thoughts, but without a trace of condescension. Saunders’ characters are without a doubt deeply flawed, profoundly credulous, and wholly interpolated into capitalist consumer culture, yet time and again we feel a close kinship with them, a kinship of shared helplessness and suffering.

Nowhere is this sense of kinship and mutual suffering more deeply manifest, perhaps, than in the main character of “Home.” Mike is a US soldier who has just come back from the Middle East to find his wife and children living with another, much wealthier, and seemingly psychologically healthier, man. Raised poor, and freshly returned from a war most Americans have already forgotten about, Mike’s resentment finds outlet in his continual criticisms of his former wife and family. Not surprisingly, these criticisms have much to do with the incredible inequality he sees around him upon his return. While his mother is evicted from her home, his former wife seems to be doing just fine, living in a big home with three cars in the driveway.

“Three cars for two grown-ups, I thought. What a country. What a couple of selfish dicks my wife and her new husband were. I could see that, over the years, my babies would slowly transform into selfish-dick babies, then selfish-dick toddlers, kids, teenagers, and adults, with me all that time, skulking around like some unclean suspect uncle.”

As Charles Bukowski eloquently put it in Barfly, “nobody suffers like the poor,” and Saunders seems keenly aware of that dictum in this collection. In fact, “Home” offers a startling metaphor (a kind of objective correlative for the entire collection) of the ways in which the poor themselves are manipulated to bring suffering upon others. As Mike plans his revenge against his wife and her new husband he thinks back upon a time in high school “when this guy paid me to clean some gunk out of his pond.”

“You snagged the gunk with a rake, then rake-hurled it. At one point, the top of my rake flew into the gunk pile. When I went to retrieve it, there were like a million tadpoles, dead and dying…their tender white underbellies had been torn open by the gunk suddenly crashing down on them from on high…I tried to save a few, but they were so tender all I did by handling them was torture them worse….

It was like, either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.”

In his typical fashion, Saunders takes a seemingly mundane recollection or observation, and draws deep wisdom from it. Indeed, this story of senseless destruction and learned indifference haunts the collection and provides a potent image of the connections between the military war in Iraq and the economic war at home, which grinds up and tosses away the budding tadpoles of human potential.

In this respect Saunders’ characters in Tenth of December resemble those of the great Nathaniel West or Raymond Carver: these are ordinary folks whose lives have come undone for reasons seemingly beyond their control. Whether it’s the inferiority-fueled violence of the inept but ruthless rapist in “Victory Lap,”—continually hampered and hectored by the abusive words of his dead step-father—or the shame and status-driven mistakes of Saunders’ latest everyman in “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” who bungles away his lottery winnings on an ill-conceived—and grotesquely inhumane—birthday present for his young daughter, Saunders’ captures the continual folly, disappointment, and banal brutality of contemporary capitalism. And although the depressing world that Saunders paints for us can sometimes feel an awful lot like the last scene of Day of the Locust, in which a crowd of celebrity hounds bursts into self-destructive riot, it is also, contra West, a place of redemption and grace.

Indeed, rather than West or Carver, it is perhaps to Flannery O’Connor that Saunders owes the greatest debt, for, as with the best of O’Connor’s short stories, misfortune and sorrow are always a step away from salvation, and many of the stories in Tenth of December, though morbidly, sometimes hilariously, fixated upon the humiliations of and alienations of life under capitalism, end with a kind of unexpected flash of realization or triumph. In “Victory Lap,” for instance, the “bean-pole kid,” Kyle Boot, whose every action and every thought is tightly controlled by his domineering, but seemingly well-intentioned, parents, manages to transcend that rigid adherence to rule and authority only by beating to near death the man who tries to abduct, and who plans to brutally rape, his high school crush and neighbor. Saunders describes young Kyle, Perhaps the only traditional “hero” of the collection, sprinting across the forbidden yard, barefoot and shirtless, in the throes of a kind of epiphany—“oh God, suddenly he saw what this giddy part of himself intended, which was to violate a directive so Major and absolute that it wasn’t even a directive.” Likewise, the mother of the mawkishly titled story “Puppy,” who seems to be living on the edge of subsistence, has a kind of visionary realization at the end of her long day’s suffering, that “love was liking someone how he was and doing things to help him get even better.” What would be considered pablum from any other writer, rings as true here as any more eloquent observation on human nature by Emma Bovary or Isabel Archer.

Unlike O’Connor, however, who one feels is driven by a deep—perhaps deeply Catholic—disappointment in humanity, Saunders is guided more by the Buddhist call to deeply feel and understand the suffering of others. Whereas O’Connor’s temporary moments of grace are almost inevitably the result of an engagement with evil, Saunders’ characters experience redemption mostly through their suffering.  Take for example, Jeff, the protagonist of “Escape from Spiderhead.” Like the eponymous Jon, from Saunders’ earlier story of the same name, whose sole experience of life is as a kind of captive product tester for young teens, Jeff also lives a life of altered reality and confinement. Forced by court order to live in a laboratory in order to avoid prison, Jeff is subjected to a series of experiments involving mood altering drugs with trademarked names such as Verbaluce^TM (which allows one to speak as eloquently as a young Will Shakespeare), Vivistif^TM (which, you guessed it, allows men to experience rock-hard erections indefinitely), and Darkenfloxx^TM (which sends the subjects into a deep state of despair and inevitable suicide—the only way out of Spiderhead). Jeff’s escape comes only after he refuses to administer Darkenfloxx^TM to one of the other inmates at spiderhead, and decides to take it himself instead. After smashing his head against the corner of the desk to escape the immense suffering caused by the drug, Jeff’ spirit slowly rises above the lab.

“From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew among them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.”

This romantic sense of unity, this nirvana-like state of connection and its subsequent absence from ordinary life, is a recurring theme of much of the collection and therefore this moment, which might otherwise feel schmaltzy or over-wrought, becomes truly profound. How, Saunders seems to ask, might such a sense of connection and meaning be achieved in real life?

“Tenth of December,” the eponymous, final, and easily most successful story of the collection, offers a tentative response to this question as well as a much needed and intensely moving antidote to the relentless hopelessness of stories like “The Semplica Girl Diaries” and “Home.” Here, finally, we find a story of connection, cooperation, and acceptance. The story traces the paths of two protagonists: a pale young boy, “with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs” out for a day of battle against the imaginary forces of evil he’s contrived to destroy, and Don Eber, a middle aged man with a “brown spot” on his brain who is intent on ending his life before things get worse by simply laying down in the bitter cold and drifting off. These plans are cut short however, when the young boy tries to return Eber’s discarded jacket, and in the process falls through the ice on the frozen pond. Forced to respond to the needs of another, Eber is drawn out of his own misery and back into the world. Safe in the young boy’s house, Eber looks around and reflects upon his earlier decision.

“What a thing! To go from dying in your underwear in the snow to this! Warmth, colors, antlers on the walls, an old-time crank phone like you saw in silent movies. It was something. Every second was something. He hadn’t died in his shorts by a pond in the snow. The kid wasn’t dead. He’d killed no one. Ha! Somehow he’d got it all back”

Once again, to have not killed, to have lived and not caused suffering, to have put aside one’s own desires or needs for another, is to achieve at least some kind of peace, however temporary it might be.

Although the characters of Tenth of December may not understand their alienation—though too often they think of their suffering as something natural and inevitable—we do understand. We, the readers, get it, and end up feeling a strong sense of camaraderie and empathy with these characters, whom we wish to reach out and help. It is the construction of this deep sense of compassion that is, and always has been, Saunders’ real genius.  The difference this time around, perhaps is that we are much more like these characters than we might ourselves be willing to admit.

Cross-posted from MattBruenig.com.

Jesse Myerson has an interesting piece about apartment rent out today. The piece is mainly about about how such rents are unearned income for landlords, who are thus like lords in the feudal sense of the word. Myerson then goes on to propose ways to deal with that. I wont talk too much about the specifics of his piece, but I am interested in his distinction between landlords and capitalists. Myerson writes:

Capitalism, which is supposed to have permanently replaced feudalism, allegedly favors profits as the basis for the incomes of owners—an enterprise invests in plant, equipment and labor to produce goods and services consumers purchase with their wages, and the surplus is captured by the owners. Notice how different profit is from rent: income that requires no ongoing cost of production, revenue that is simply a recurring toll on some property that already exists—income that is “unearned.” We lump rent-collection in with profits, but only the latter is capitalistic, liberal, and productive.

For those who talk about these things, this is not a fringe view. Michael Lind’s recent push for an anti-rentier movement relied upon similar distinctions. Capitalist profits are productive and legitimate while earnings people get from intellectual property and land rent are not: a line exists between them. I don’t see it.

To start, we need to be clear about what we are talking about when we discuss rent, especially when talking about the actual rent people pay for their housing. The sum people pay to rent space in housing is not purely land rent. After all, there is a building on that land, and you are paying for space in that as well. So we can distinguish between land-rent on the one hand and building-rent on the other. The rent you pay for an apartment goes to pay both, among other things. This distinction is important because, although people do not generally produce land, they do generally produce buildings.

Producing buildings is, well, productive. As Myerson points out, charging building rent is the business model for financing that production. On the most basic level, the subsequent collection of rents is supposed to “pay back” the money spent on the building, not unlike when a capitalist sells the goods it has produced, those revenues are supposed to “pay back” the money spent bringing the goods to market.

But neither the landlord nor the capitalist stops collecting money at the break-even point. It is that increment above the break-even point, in both cases, that is effectively unearned. It is easy to conceptualize how passive a landlord’s income is because you can think of them as simply owning something on paper, having their minions collect the money and maintain the building, and then receive a check in the mail each month or quarter. But a capitalist’s income is no less passive: buy a stock, receive a dividend.

The argument is that the capitalists need to make money above the break-even point. If not, why would they ever build out capital to begin with? Sitting on the cash would be just as valuable to them. So it is supposed to be what gets them to be productive. But the ability to collect building-rent beyond the break-even point is supposed to serve the same function. If they can’t score excess income from producing buildings on these lands, then why will they dedicate their resources to doing it?

So building-rents and profits are both, in a sense, derivative of production: in the building-rent case, the production of buildings, and in the profit case, the production of goods and services. But they are also both, in a sense, generators of passive, unearned income. If you are going to call one productive, then just go ahead and call them both productive. If you are going to call one lecherous, then just go ahead and call them both lecherous.

I bracketed land-rent at the top because I wanted to distinguish it from rent that comes from owning the building, which is a different matter. If your goal is merely to strip out land-rent, then land-value taxes seem entirely adequate to the task. We have a solution for clawing back the land-rent part of the apartment rent already worked out and conceptualized. Building-rent is different and will have to be tackled in a different way.

My own view aligns with the understanding that the passive incomes of both capitalists and landlords are basically the same. I do not find anything especially endearing about surplus that is captured by owners of firms over the surplus captured by owners of land and buildings. How you go about getting that surplus back is a huge task especially given that investment and ownership are largely private. Myerson’s plans include municipal ownership of all the land and use of community land trusts. Without going into the merits of those ideas, I will just say that socializing finance seems like an easier way to go here. If you want to publicly capture private streams of unearned income, then just have the state buy up the assets that deliver them, e.g. stock equity. Or to put it another way, just socialize finance.

Matt Bruenig writes about politics and a range of other issues at MattBruenig.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @MattBruenig.