Listen to stuff happening

We've written recently about the play Stuff Happens that is currently on at the Taper in L.A. Finally, it's gotten the attention of NPR, and, of course, they've done a great presentation. Check out this link and listen to both their story and some additional audio clips from the production: NPR : 'Stuff Happens': The Iraq War as History Play

Once Around

For us the passing of a year was always measured by the cycles of the school year. The year began, not on January first, but on the Tuesday after Labor Day, and rolled by school holidays, winter vacation, spring break, and pushed over the hump of Memorial Day to the last school day in mid-June. Summer vacation was literally free time, before the year began again in the fall. For the first time since we both headed off to kindergarten back in the early 1950's, we have had an entire year off.

"How's retirement; what do you do?" friends ask. One former colleague, long retired, warned us that we would get bored, and need to go out and get jobs. So far, we haven't felt any burning desire to do anything like that. Retirement is great! And we do lots of different things.

Our weeks have found a rhythm. The structure of the week is anchored by the gym. Just like our high school students would build their schedules around particular classes, we, too, have picked out our favorite teachers and classes in the group fitness schedule. It is a balanced array of workouts--some weightlifting, lots of cardio and some yoga. Toward the end of the week we work in a mid-morning sit in the Starbucks nearest the gym. It's a little treat to talk books, plan menus and inevitably run into friends.

Our social calendar seems to be pretty full and delightfully flexible. We have long-time friends over for dinner, and we have a wide-open choice of days. And we have acquired a whole new circle of friends from the gym, people we really do have a lot in common with, whether they are our instructors or fellow students.

All in all, it's what can only be called "the good life" that is associated with that other clichéd ideal, "the golden years"--but if that metaphor is intended to imply sunsets and autumnal pursuits, it doesn't fit here yet. This is the good life that kicks in with the sun still over head, with high tide, with active appetites, and with peaches that have a little further to ripen before being picked.

So where did a whole year without academia go? What did we accomplish? It was not so much a matter of quantity or even quality, but rather timing and pacing. It was, in a word, sane. But for the record:

• We did a little traveling in the fall, covering some familiar territory but in a season that created a fresh experience. London theatre starts to get a bit more serious in the fall, and the bulk of American tourists thin out, improving the whole experience. The French countryside in October is at its best and, again, the Euro hordes have gone back to work. We helped harvest a wine grape vineyard one Saturday and enjoyed the most incredible rural déjeuner as a reward. We got into the last of the prehistoric polychrome cave painting sites open to the public with just a day's advance booking.

• In January we took ten days to show some of our favorite spots in the Southwest to our English friends who so often host us in London and the south of France.

• The garden gets near-daily attention now and is starting to show it. We've defined anew some portions of our modest backyard with rocks dug up on the property or scavenged from the neighborhood, brought plants to a once barren area in the center of things, re-engineered the irrigation system, and replaced two very aged orange trees with a couple youngsters, who we wish were as hardy as their predecessors.

• Perhaps most remarkable has been the chance to read fiction for pleasure, something previously restricted to summer and winter breaks. Just write to Englophool if you're interested in specific recommendations; we now have plenty!

• In February and March we had the pleasure of working with the cast of DP's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, helping a group of very sharp, eager, and talented students understand what can be discovered in the language of Shakespeare.

• Most days we can find an hour to do the crossword puzzle from the L.A. Times. We do it online in shifts, each lending his or her expertise, and thus try to keep both our minds limber.

• We're cooking and eating more creatively than ever, and also able to entertain friends much more frequently, even--gasp!--on weekday evenings or lunch.

• And we get up in the light.

Not on Television

Back in the 1970s the black jazz poet Gil Scott Heron was angry that the struggle for civil rights seemed to be deteriorating around the assassinations of black leaders. But his famous jazz song, "The Revolution will not be Televised" was seen by many as a metaphor for widespread disgust with government secrecy and insensitivity. It ominously predicted that those who had waited for truth and justice in America were fed up and were ready to make it happen. The soporific of television commercials and hollow politicians would not do. From Xerox to Richard Nixon, it was all going down when the people took to the streets. America was simmering with injustice and lies.

"You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out...
Because the revolution will not be televised."

There was a keen sense in the nation that our society was out of whack, and something must done.

Heron was right. The revolution was live in the streets. Poor Black neighborhoods went up in flames at some final indignity. Anti-war protesters took to the streets, in Chicago and on campuses across the nation, including Kent State Ohio where the National Guard shot into the crowd killing four students. And then the Nixon presidency collapsed in the wake of a clumsy break-in of the Democratic party offices in the Watergate office building. There was a revolution all across America in the streets, on the campuses and down the halls of power.

But Heron got it wrong, too; the revolution WAS televised. We saw all that and more on the nightly news. We sat stunned as the LAPD shot up and torched the house where members of the Symbionese Liberation Army were holed up. We watched the footage come back from Vietnam and took in weekly body counts on the network news. We sat glued to the TV hour after hour as the Watergate hearings unfolded daily in congress.

We were shocked by the carnage, heartened that we were learning the truth and galvanized to turn things around. The on-the-ground reporters in Vietnam brought the truth home, and we were reminded of the toll in human life every Thursday when the networks reported the casualties. The corrupt and insidious Nixon White House was exposed because journalists, notably Bernstein and Woodward at the Washington Post, got the story.

The media, both print and television, aggressively dug out the stories, and exposed the lies, corruption and downright ineptness of our leaders and policies.

"The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live."

We lived it, but we also read it and saw it. It gave us faith that the truth will out.

But what about nowadays? Now our reporters are "embedded" with invading troops in Iraq, and they don't go looking for the real story, but stay close to their unit, rooting them on. And when they do get a whiff of the truth, they are discredited by the Bush administration because a minor detail is "uncorroborated." Additionally, news stories are often supplied ready-packaged to stations with administration spokesmen delivering the story as if they were legitimate newscasters. The journalistic estate is widely dismissed as unreliable; I think they are running scared. And indeed reporters are not out digging up stories, but rather waiting for Washington to tell them what is news. They are learning to keep their heads down.

But worse yet, is the public apathy. No one is taking it to the streets. Or shouting in outrage. I don't know what it will take. But it is not the conniving and secrecy of planning a nation's energy policy behind closed doors, or passing a Patriot Act that makes checking out a library book suspect. Nor is it the arcane sham of a prescription drug plan that doesn't really save folks money, or the mean-spirited attack on Social Security. And the snake pit of Abu Ghraib, the humiliation of prisoners at Guantanamo, and the ingenious scheme of flying prisoners to third-party torture nations have not been enough to rouse the American public. Have we been lulled by the Soma of the Brave New World of reality-tv, special effects movies, outrageous crime stories and rapid-fire connections across cyberspace, so that real-life injustice and iniquity does not touch us?

Like Bruce, who nightly asks his audience the crucial question, I, too, want to know, "Is there anybody alive out there?"

Stuff is still happening, but who cares?

Very strange that the L.A. Times and the national media in general should give so little attention to the American premiere of David Hare's play Stuff Happens. It opened about a week ago at the Taper in L.A. and the Times gave it a very positive review, but minimal space at the bottom of the page in Calendar that devoted most of its real estate to some trendy designers of ridiculously decadent women's clothes. The reviewer was not even a Times staffer, but merely a stringer who had seen the play, as we have, in its original London production and could make knowledgeable comparisons about set design and performances, but was entirely disinclined to write about the play's themes, social significance, or central political debate.

This is a piece of high impact theatre that takes its audience directly to the heart of the issues most pressing on our national consciousness, and the Times, local television, CNN, NPR are giving it less coverage than they would a touring production of the Music Man. Admittedly, the play hasn't made an appearance in New York, so it naturally wouldn't pick up any of the Tony awards' media spotlight, which, of course, was so generously focused on Monty Python's latest silliness called Spamalot. But then serious theatre, not surprisingly, often skips Broadway. It's a definite honor that Hare's play should come first to Los Angeles, but logical and well-deserved for director Gordon Davidson's final project at the Center Theatre Group.

In case you don't know what the work is about, it is a history play that presents in brilliant detail the story of how the U.S. and Britain became bound together in the enterprise of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq for its own good and our own glory. The title comes from an early post-invasion press conference of Donald Rumsfeld's where he writes off the looting and chaos that followed "liberation" with his famously nonchalant "Hey, stuff happens..."

Hare depicts Rummy and all the other public figures--George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Hans Blix, the whole array of French diplomats, and more--as characters in this huge tragedy of hubris and arrogance. Their lines are a blend of words on the public record and, when no record exists, those imagined by the author for meetings that actually took place.

It is an extremely provocative piece of theatre--especially for Americans seeing it in Britain a month before the U.S. presidential election--but not as slanted or one-sided as the summary above might lead us to assume. Hare's meticulous research and even-handed approach creates a very objective record of how it all unfolded in the period between the opening days of the Bush administration, when cabinet meetings focused on maps of Iraq and very little on issues of terrorism, through to the declared finish of "major combat." All sides of the issues are given voice and we are taken to the inside of the diplomacy and decision making process that got us where we are today.

It is a powerful story that seemed to affect the two audiences we've been a part of very differently. In London, at the National Theatre, the audience was thoroughly engrossed and clearly moved, but they allowed the whole work to be presented before taking the discussion onward to the lobby and beyond, but in the L.A. the audience was from the start prone to taking sides and expressing their disapproval or support for the figures on stage--through hissing, booing, whistling, applauding, talking back aloud to the actors--as if they were unaware of the difference between art and life. It was an experience we'd never had before in a professional commercial production and at one point brought an actress delivering a monologue as an anonymous Palestinian commentator to an abrupt halt while audience members alternately shouted, shushed, and wrangled over first what she was saying and then over how to behave in the theatre.

After nearly 40 years of active theatre going both here and in the UK, we have our opinions about what accounts for the difference in audience reaction, but the bigger issue is that this is a play that is timely and so well-crafted that it really wakes people up. So why is this being ignored? The Taper advertising seems rather minimal, and we got our tickets on a special discount deal that seemed to indicate little confidence in the play's power to attract audiences for its 6-week run.

The unfortunate fact is that what's going on in Iraq has dropped off this country's radar screen. Somehow we've realized the situation is a hopeless morass, but as opposed to the previous hopeless morass of Vietnam, we have lost the stomach for confronting the problem and lack the energy for protest. To have a nation actually discussing the facts that Hare brings back to our attention would be deeply disturbing, but would eventually ignite political reaction. We instead seem content to keep our heads buried in "reality" television and leave the dying and suffering to the relatively few who have volunteered for it.

But those are just the people who can't be expected to discontinue their investment in this failing enterprise. Once you've lost a son or daughter, an arm or a leg, you aren't likely to turn back and admit you've been sacrificed for someone else's folly. It's the rest of us, though, who can still be somewhat objective, who still have the luxury of reading discomforting analysis and not blinking, or of going to live theatre without blinding pre-judgments who must at least make enough commotion to get back into the headlines.

Stuff is still happening, and we're being told that if we just are patient and believe in the wisdom of our current policy makers, that eventually it will stop happening and we can go home again secure in the belief that democracy is rooted, nurtured and blossoming in the heart of the world's least reasonable, least cooperative territories.

The big problem is that our main purpose in "doing Iraq," as the neocons put it, was to showcase American power and efficiency--"shock and awe" they call it--as a shortcut to the hard work of international diplomacy. We figured that the real trouble spots in the Middle East and Asia were too chancy to engage with, but that we could slap around a petty brute like Saddam much more easily and effectively whether there was any real threat or not. Now that that approach has been exposed as a ruse and proven untenable anyway, we are left with a simple choice: either we leave the mess we've created to deteriorate without further provocation or justification to our enemy or we plod on, losing more soldiers and fueling the opposition for another six to ten years before we leave the mess we've created to deteriorate.

It's a rotten choice, but it appears to be all that we've got. We didn't want to face it in 1975 and we'd rather not face it now, but unless something counteracts the administration's ability to deny and deflect attention, the decision will be made by default and we'll just have to accept the defense that "Stuff happens."