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Before I launch into yet another tirade about the dismal state of American politics (and theater), I’d like to take a moment for a quick plug — many of you may have already donated to aid groups working on tsunami relief, but if you haven’t, or would like to donate more, I’d like to recommend an international women’s organization called Madre. You can be assured that a donation to them will end up where it’s needed most, and MADRE is an organization that’s already trusted by many of the people in the affected countries; an abridged note from their executive director Vivian Stromberg follows:
Speaking of the tsunami, the Bush administration has, as of today, announced that they are raising their aid budget to $315 million from the pathetic $35 million they previously offered; by way of comparison, $40 million is being spent on the inauguration, Bush himself pledged $1.5 billion to “defend marriage”, and the Iraq occupation costs about $177 million per day (and has so far cost close to $148 million, a price that will probably be exceeded by the time you read this). This is, of course, not surprising; any criticism of this administration’s obviously fucked-up priorities is likely to be responded to with one tired argument or the other: this is an act of God and shouldn’t be compared to the war; America give more aid money than other countries; the same people accusing the US of being a brutal occupying power now want money from us. To this I can only respond that Bush and his cabinet, and much of the GOP establishment, has a long history of showing contempt for human life and health and prioritizing it below the profit motive, and that is is precisely America's role as a global empire that compels us to be generous in the face of such tragedy; we are, after all, profiting obscenely from globalization. I’m not one of those leftists who believes that developed-world guilt is constructive (I’ve actually been poor and hungry and think that the romanticization of it by Western activists is obscene, and besides, I like being comfortable), but the fact is that all of us, not just red-staters, are benefiting economically from the current global order, and have a responsibility to give something back (of course, we’re also getting screwed by the current global order, but that’s another story entirely). ******* By now, many of you have probably already read so many post-mortems and what-the-left-must-do-now essays that anything I have to say will be largely redundant. I do, however, believe that looking for the single key reason for the election results is something of a wild goose chase. There were a wide variety of reasons, including but not limited to election fraud, the culture war, Republican smear campaigns, the Democrats’ abandonment of the working class, John Kerry’s poor political skills, the activist left’s distaste for electoral politics, the shitty corporate media, and terrorism. In the final analysis, however, the current political situation is terrible, perhaps, but from a hearts-and-minds-of-the-electorate point of view, it’s not as bad as it looks. Red-state-blue-state analysis is (my mention of it above notwithstanding) counterproductive — the much-forwarded “United States of Canada/Jesusland” graphic might be mildly amusing, but from an organizing standpoint it’s smug bullshit. The fact is that there’s a great deal of common ground to be had between the left and various factions of the right. Much of the Christian right would likely agree with the left on many labor and human-rights issues, and many of the GOP’s traditional libertarian base would agree on civil liberties and gay rights issues. In Liza Featherstone’s recent book, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Women’s Rights at Wal-Mart, labor unions like UFCW and women’s organization like NOW might spearhead organizing drives, but the Wal-Mart employees fighting for their rights and risking their jobs are usually born-again Christians, and often identify themselves as conservatives. As Tom Frank, author of the must-read, What’s the Matter With Kansas? has put it, the right-wing has done an incredibly effective job of using wedge issues to divide labor and environmentalists (to use one example), and we have to learn to do the same thing. Polls repeatedly show that a majority of Americans identify with what are widely considered left-of-center positions, and Bush’s “compassionate conservative” narrative is, while totally Orwellian, obviously convincing to a slim but significant margin of voters. ******* As a playwright, I also find the “cultural divide” argument both galling and dangerous — I can see it as the pretense for even more (otherwise left-leaning) literary managers, artistic directors, and producers to eschew artistically or politically challenging work in favor of the more traditional. And I also think that there is a danger of our more venerated arts institutions portraying “red-staters” as two-dimensional villains or objects of ridicule. Neither is acceptable to me, artistically, or politically. To paraphrase Slavoj Zizek, we should remember Christ’s words about bringing the sword and not peace; by our very respect and even love for humanity, including whatever remains of the humanity of the Republicans themselves, we should fight them ruthlessly. Despite lots and lots of last-minute organizing by groups like MoveOn and Emily’s List, there has been a trend in recent years of abandoning electoral politics in favor of single-issue organizing — for example, the campaigns for raising the minimum wage or repealing the repressive Rockefeller Drug Laws here in New York. Both campaigns have been successful (though New York’s drug laws remain some of the most repressive in the country), and there are similar stories to be found throughout the country — the partial decriminalization of marijuana in Montana, for example. There are plenty of good reasons for the left to have abandoned electoral politics — in New York, again, many machine Democrats aren’t much better than Republicans, as the well-documented corruption of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the naked bigotry (and Bush endorsement) of former New York City mayor Ed Koch, and the vindictiveness of Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes has repeatedly demonstrated. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, both parties passed laws to ensure their duopoly of the political system would hold, so taking over the ruins of the Democratic Party seems like the best strategy. In Colorado, where the environmentalist left has become active in electoral politics, the Democrats have had their most successful state election ever. If only the actual Democratic party saw it that way. It remains to be seen whether the Democrats will finally get their shit together, but the appointment of Pro-life Mormon Harry Reid to the post of Senate Minority Leader is a bad sign. Reid has publicly expressed admiration for second-most-vile Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and a willingness to work with Bush on disastrous policies like Social Security privatization, and has said that, by attacking him, the GOP runs the risk of looking like they’re going after Mister Rogers. Of course, anyone who entertains the notion that scumbags like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove would hesitate for a second to link Fred Rogers to Osama bin Laden is a fool. We have to resign ourselves to the fact that these guys are thugs and fascists, and will play dirty every chance they get. Newt Gingrich used post-Watergate ethics rules as a weapon against prominent Democrats like House Speaker Jim Wright, and now that DeLay is guilty of violating those same rules, the GOP is going to change them. Tom Delay’s ass-monkey Dennis Hastert, is now weighing replacing the current House Ethics Chair, a Colorado Republican named Joel Hefley, for actually doing his job. All over the country, lowlifes from the Swift Boat Veterans to Ohio’s secretary of state smeared Democrats and made voting in urban, poor, and minority districts as difficult as they could — in my parents' Pennsylvania congressional district, for example, TV commercials claimed that Democratic candidate Lois Murphy was so “desperate” that she accepted money from MoveOn, a group they associated with the Taliban. I do take an odd comfort in the ample evidence of election fraud across the country — it shows that Bush’s slim margin of victory has less to do with hearts and minds than with lying and dirty tricks. A quick list, taken from Lewis Lapham’s column in the January, 2005 Harper’s:
Politics, as drooling, opportunistic right-winger David Horowitz reminds us, is war by other means. And the stakes have never been higher — the American right-wing proposes to dismantle our democracy and what remains of our civilization. Every day brings more bad news about our government’s war on dissent and democracy, honesty and ethics, women, Muslims, the environment, the poor, workers the world over, and basic human decency. The cold comfort one can take from this is that, in their sheer arrogance and incompetence, the Bush administration will run the American empire into the ground with more speed and efficiency than international Communism or Islamic fascism could ever dream of. But that isn’t good enough. Starting with the NYC Mayor’s race, we need to take the power back by whatever means we have — it is the job of any New Yorker concerned about the state of things to make sure Michael Bloomberg pays the political price for his cowardice in choosing the national GOP over his constituents. And that should just be the beginning. Jason Grote is a playwright whose work has been presented at Soho Rep, The Flea, The American Living Room @ HERE, The Ohio, The Makor, and Chashama, and is widely anthologized, including in the BACK STAGE BOOK OF NEW AMERICAN SHORT PLAYS 2004. He is co-chair of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab. Copyright © 2005 by theater2k.com. All rights reserved. |
