“The Vigil or The Guided Cradle”
The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
Opened April 22, runs through May 8
www.impetuoustheater.org
www.bricktheater.com

The central metaphor of Crystal Skillman’s play “The Vigil or The Guided Cradle” (a less-than-comfortable title based on an ornately cruel Medieval torture device) is the grand clock in the center of Prague’s old city, where lifelike figures of virtue and sin have played out their roles unchanging for most of a millennium. In “Vigil” it sits at the center of time, as 21st century tourists and travelers caught up in the steadily deteriorating geopolitics of our day revolve in the narrative with the torturers and captives of a supposedly darker age.

Two wanderers meet all too coincidentally at the clock in modern times as the gears of generational global conflict interlock in ways best left for the theatergoer to discover; across time, the Medieval man who tried to blow up the clock for his own blood-feud reasons locks in a battle of wills with bloody inquisitors and a more weirdly principled interrogator (the astonishingly contained and shaded Christian Rummel).

In a duel role as the contemporary American tourist and an unambiguous innocent caught up in the ancient jailers’ sweep, Susan Louise O’Connor paints an intense portrait of willed ignorance and tenacious faith. Surrounded by unquestioning functionaries of terror and torture, Rummel’s and O’Connor’s characters struggle with what they really know and, along with the rest of the frightened and victimized ensemble, alternate like the turn of a roulette wheel or locked gates’ random tumblers between determined delusions and abrupt fits of mercy, posing questions about whether the clockwork of the human heart is born broken or if we can in fact transgress against our own worst instincts.

Rummel and O’Connor each become the mechanism of a moment of redemption in which the play’s two eras converge and wheel away again in a magic-realist but refreshingly underplayed dance of humanity’s brutal legacy and still not abandoned charitable ideal. A brave and unpretentious reflection on vengeance and sacrifice, “Vigil” clarifies the current moment of hope and barbarism and speaks to the future by showing that both of these are nothing new.

It’s time for another team-up of current-events crisis and old-fashioned action-acrobatics with Issue 2 of The Plaid Avenger. The thrift-store-coutured title paladin is a part-time college lecturer and full-time self-styled secret agent, fulfilling writer and real-life Virginia Tech teacher John Boyer’s mission of geographic and geopolitical literacy.

High-minded and powered on highballs, the weird Rat Packish hipster cuts his own class to roam the globe turning knowledge into power as he confronts eco-criminals and rogue potentates like some transporter-scrambled mash-up of Dean Martin and Nick Fury.

Written with gentle mischief by Boyer and drawn by skilled cartoonist and lush colorist Klaus Shmidheiser, the comic’s edutainment goes down easy, on issues that are far from simple. All with an anarchic attitude and do-it-yourself ethic that can appeal to learners everywhere — this book has its own system of production values and a narrative logic defined as it goes along; it’s like an alt.universe do-over of underground comix by galled profs on drink rather than righteous kids on dope.

The passion — in this case, about Burma’s stunted society and the superhero-less real world’s apparent helplessness to live up to the freedom-fighters’ example — sneaks up on you powerfully through the well-deployed snark. Overall, The Plaid Avenger succeeds in its mission to make learning a pleasure and show that the truth only hurts if you’ve got it coming to you.

[www.plaidavenger.com]

This blog is housed on a site dedicated to an artform often centered on heroics. It’s a harmless fantasy, but when it’s just a fantasy in real life it can do a lot of harm. There’s been a strange turn in the Obama Administration in recent days, in which the rhetoric gets tougher the less effective the policies really are. The President called major bankers to the White House — those who managed to show up — for a woodshed photo-op *after* which he talked tough about what would be expected of these captains of an industry everyone’s tax dollars disappeared in the general direction of. He himself hit the climate-change summit toward its end and gave rousing speeches about getting meaningful work done — emerging with a completely nonbinding and open-ended compromise statement, brokered by the U.S. and our partner architect of the Iraq War “coalition,” Britain. Then there’s healthcare… or it seemed there was going to be.

To quiet right-leaning members of their own party (or essential defectors like Joe Lieberman), Senate Democrats flensed their own bill of anything that would cause expense or effort from the insurance companies (and that goes for the proscription on pre-existing-condition exclusions too, since there’s nothing to keep them from jacking up our price for this protection). This was with the full encouragement of the White House, to which all 60 nominal Democrats in the Senate were called for another of these sleeve-rolling seminars, which make a show of tough choices and tenacious principle but from which everyone emerges with sweeping unilateral compromises.

The president gave a contentious speech after that one, and the automatic emails I get from the White House have since talked about the urgent need to get this “historic” legislation passed. Unspecific mention is made of compromises that had to be made, as in all legislation. The “compromise” in this case, however, was an abandonment of the president’s own stated principles — including a public option to provide real competition for unrestrained insurers — with all his administration’s energy directed toward moderating allies of this plan in Congress rather than pressuring those breaking ranks and siding with big-business Republicans. Not getting all you want and not fighting for any of it are two very different things. Sadly, the “reality” we’re being asked to accept is one broader and more discouraging than the president intends.

It has to do with accepting business-as-usual from even the most rhetorically idealistic of politicians. To an extent, rhetoric alone can be revolutionary. Obama had been uncommon, almost unprecedented, in the level to which he would confront critics’ claims and counter-arguments head-on. The very passing acknowledgment of “compromises made” in current White House spam is a disappointing step back to the mere deletion of opposing viewpoints and recently reneged positions we’re more accustomed to.

The decade now ending was uncommonly overt in its affirmations that popular will doesn’t matter. Millions of people taking to the streets — many of whom never had before — against the Iraq fiasco months before it started was just the most vivid example. There is a feeling of foregone conclusions and timetable-driven policy at work in both that misadventure and the president’s and Senate’s rallying around a bad healthcare bill. The Bush Administration was explicit about the ability to wage war in a time of year with favorable weather constituting the deadline by which weapons-inspectors must find a reason for going to war at all or go home; Obama has become fixated on the face-saving grail of getting a healthcare bill done within the year, whether or not it meaningfully addresses the issues he raised in introducing it.

The majority of Americans who still favor a public option — and the majority of Democratic voters who say they’ll stay home in 2010 if the current version of the bill becomes law — have waited several lifetimes for truly affordable, fully available healthcare, and could wait a little longer for the right fight to be fought. If it’s already lost, though, they shouldn’t stay home — and next time a lot of them should try being on the ballot themselves.

Obama understands well the power of symbols — his oratory remains stirring, even when there is no accomplishment behind or proceeding from the words (and he’s calling us to fervor about positions opposite to the ones being promoted before; a worrisome Clintonian definition of unity and victory without even Bill Clinton’s honest high-handedness toward his base). Symbols drive us — the sacrifice of Martin Luther King, the vision of Thom Paine, etc. — but it would be nice if some leaders would be more than symbols while they’re alive (as the guys I’ve listed were). It’s still early in the administration, but some major ground is being ceded already, no matter how rousing the rhetoric and disciplined the stagecraft.

We may just have to settle for what Obama represented — determination, principle, and a connection to common experience. Most of us need no schooling to understand the growing privation and powerlessness of the many, and increasingly have no choice in trying to do something about it. The 2008 campaign — and the movements since — released a spirit of participation and persistence that no one should — unilaterally — seal back up. He started it, and we have to finish it; even he never said anything different (though there was no expecting how soon he might not go there with us). Obama was a great idea, and a valid one. Maybe he’s not “The One” after all. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t Another One somewhere. Or another 300 million.

Good causes are an elusive concept. They’re often the opposite of good feeling. They imply a lack of good times now, and sacrifices on the way to achieving a worthy goal and a lasting relief.

President Obama’s Afghan War escalation rationale last night was a good speech. What the cause is, though, is a shifting target. The goals, as articulated, are a cordon against terrorist staging-grounds and nuclear takeover, a model of principled global policing and sound humanitarian and civil support that makes all sides feel safer in partnership with each other, not secure in each other’s demise.

The purpose, as understood by all and stated by everyone but the president, is to underwrite his image of leadership so that he and his party can remain in power long enough to advance an agenda of relief and uplift for our own precarious country — affordable and available healthcare, nominal checks on corporate grand theft, steps toward reversing our industrial decline with new jobs and technologies which might reverse ecological collapse.

These urgent needs — and the consequent importance of limiting our overseas commitments in relation to them — were addressed toward the end of the president’s speech; those goals, and the abstract ideas of a world stable enough that they can be pursued by all, were the only lines that got applause from what was otherwise the most solemn audience of teenagers and very young twentysomethings I’ve ever seen.

In articulating those ideals, the speech was positively Gerson-esque. George W. Bush’s original speechwriter produced some of the best progressive oratory this country has heard in a long time. It was entirely unconnected to its speaker’s intentions, whereas the Obama speech last night was merely disconnected from reality. Afghanistan has no duly elected leader, and no government to speak of. The badguys strolled out the backdoor at Tora Bora eight years ago — the ones who attacked us, I mean; the ones who used to control the country are strolling back to fill the vast void around Karzai. As even early war supporter Thomas Friedman points out, the Afghan people need no “training” to become a fighting force; we’re not stuck there because we’re needed, we’re failing there because we’re not wanted. Afghanistan’s been kicking out superpowers for thousands of years. Alexander the Great gave up on this place, but then, he didn’t have to worry about being re-elected.

What *could* make us wanted? If anything, taking this project out of the Defense Department and putting it in the State Department. Many of our soldiers on the ground have pacified what areas in Iraq and Afghanistan they have not with bullets but with micro-diplomacy and door-to-door economic aid. We’ve given militias jobs and turned them to our side, we’ve brokered local disputes with warlords and their populations. It shouldn’t be a soldier’s duty, but most of them do it with dedication and sincerity. They also do it with pragmatism and emotional common sense: they realize it’s what will most help keep them and the ordinary people around them alive. They don’t do it with professional training, a master plan or any overall resources and authority. A Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan (the latter of which the president is at least attempting to some degree), including economic development for the Afghans (who have world-class marble reserves they can’t excavate as easily as heroin poppies), would show what America can do for them (which fosters cooperation), not who can subdue them (which triggers resistance — and has resulted in an eight-year, daily defeat for the strongest country in the world).

Americans thought of Afghanistan as the good war of our two current ones. That’s evaporated along with all the stated objectives that sent us in. And with dwindling memories; Obama now has to contend with the belated pacifism of a Democratic Congress cynically second-guessing the action they gave a blank check to to begin with. Deliberating only after deciding is of no more use than, say, planning an occupation only after executing an invasion. That’s Congress’ problem, and Obama’s is trying to fight the war of 2002 in 2009. What could work — and yes, what might even have worked in the rush to retaliate and revert to old rules after 9/11 — is to fight on terms our enemies can’t comprehend but every ordinary person does: to present the better alternative. Our soldiers and citizens, on every side, are those ordinary people. Our leaders and commanders never are.

The president read off a list of the ways he has confronted the costs of war when his predecessor concealed them — visiting wounded troops and bereaved families; honestly accounting for the tax moneys being drained from a bankrupt country for the nation-building abroad to continue; traveling to the flag-draped coffins at Dover. This was his way of emphasizing that he’s ready to accept the consequences of his decisions. But each time the camera swept over the look of utter terror on the faces of most of these kids, it was a reminder that he, like every president, and we, like every civilian citizenry, are really only ready to accept *their* consequences.

No leader wants to be the one who backed down; no everyday person wants to be the one to abandon fellow human beings to a deadly fate they feel they should have tried to stop. But everyone learns by making mistakes, and learns to make less of them by admitting they happened. Obama faces a restless electorate and a loud lunatic fringe. What he wants to do for all of them could be in danger if any overseas conflict becomes “his” lost war. But he’s done very well so far by calling our country to face reality and to escape bad times by going through them, not thinking there’s a way around. We have lost Afghanistan. We can still win America, and serve as an example that does people everywhere good. It’s not the best news. But it’s the fight worth facing.

My blog of 11/8/09 praised the steadfastness of our current president and the attitude this fosters among an activated citizenry. Congress, as has regularly been threatened since he took office, could be another matter.

At the moment, the Democratic Congress, so familiar as a rubber stamp for wars of choice and surrender of civil liberties in the recent Bush years, is, in the immortal words of John Glenn (though he used it in reference to Senator Lautenberg voting against Bill Clinton’s tax-hike on the wealthy), “leaning straight up” — the vote this past Saturday to pass Obama’s healthcare reform was an admirable, and these days rare, victory for constituents over corporations. But as has come closer to the surface of media attention since anything has made it far enough to scrutinize, the bill comes booby-trapped with an effective ban on abortion coverage for anyone using the “exchange” that lets citizens shop around and get the most affordable healthcare.

This erosion of an established right was passed because of Democratic votes. Undeniably, its an established right that’s been embattled since the moment it was won, but the Democrats are supposed to be the party that does the battling to keep it secure. In general, anyway — no few Republicans who remember the classic conservatism of personal rights and responsibilities prefer Big Brother out of our bedrooms too (at least when it comes to procreation if not same-sex rights to the unions and parenthood that straights are un-affirming in droves, but that’s another blog). Nonetheless, the Democrats’ typical instinct to preserve their elected position ahead of their people’s rights, health and safety may be re-emerging in the abortion vote.

In the referenda on gay marriage we’ve seen a reversal of the basic logic of freedom — that, even in a democracy, rights are the one thing that’s not subject to a vote. Rights can only be expanded; that’s the true trajectory of nature as the Founders conceived (if not thoroughly practiced) it. Specific rights are not to be vetoed by those who don’t happen to need them (talk about the “tyranny of the majority” that some GOP lawmakers are, cynically and with short memory, invoking in the close votes for Obama’s programs). Rights are also not to be traded off — though, as the first woman Speaker of the House has reminded us in bargaining a basic women’s healthcare right for a “general” healthcare bill, rights *can* be traded away.

This is not to say that the pro-life movement shouldn’t be admired, or at least emulated. Supreme Court rulings are second in weight only to the Constitution itself, and the fact that a movement has worked tirelessly against Roe v. Wade for its entire lifetime, and with material progress all along the way, shows commitment to a seemingly lost cause that all Americans could stand to take a lesson from. Capitulation earns you nothing when an example of tenaciousness like this shows such results — but a major reason Pelosi had to bow to the anti-abortion lobby was that it is now one-and-the-same with a broad swath of her party.

There has been a sweep of pro-life Democrats brought to office in recent years, and now Pelosi — and unfortunately, American women in particular and citizens overall — are seeing the consequences of conceding the opposition’s values in the name of “electability.” It’s nothing new to note that the revised and updated Democratic Party is often not very democratic at all. With luck and effort, the final tally of the Senate’s and the conference committee’s version of the healthcare bill will not include the abortion ban in its equation. And, given that the party is led by a president who achieved phenomenal success and enjoys still-high popularity having run as the least compromised Democrat in living memory, hopefully the party will calculate that, too.

It’s what effective storytellers and successful politicians alike depend on for us to go along with their ideas. In the politicians’ case, this is usually a matter of claims, not visions; it’s not often that we’re asked to believe that things as we’ve gotten used to them could ever be different. But last night’s weekend vote by the House of Representatives to stand up against industry interests and for the majority of Americans at risk by passing the president’s healthcare-reform plan was not the same-old anything, and what’s hard to imagine is this happening under any previous president.

During the primary campaign, Hilary Clinton infamously minimized the contribution of citizen activists like Martin Luther King Jr. by noting that it took actual officeholders like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to seal the deal. That they never would’ve moved without King’s and other’s urgings, and that Barack Obama, the clear target of her remarks, was a community activist seeking to be president anyway, is old news and a settled argument. But there has been a perhaps-unprecedented power in Obama’s taking that activist spirit into high office.

For well over a hundred years, most of the greatest Americans have been outside of government — King, X, Nader, Steinem, many more — or at least, as in Nader’s case, done their best work outside of electoral politics. But the achilles’ heel of figures who take on messianic proportions like King is that people come to feel that he or she is there to do things for them (a status not sought by the leader and crippling to the followers if he or she is gone). Obama is an elected figure who has always put the greatest emphasis on his success being his supporters’ doing.

The sense of citizens’ investment in their own fortunes has not been this strong in several generations. In that context, a victory like the House’s (nonetheless very close) vote in favor of Obama’s health plan is best understood not as a reassurance of the good that can still happen to us but a demonstration of the good we can keep making happen.

What seemed like Obama’s curse — to be a tenaciously optimistic public servant elected in the most discouraging times — may be his advantage. We all know that power concedes nothing without a struggle; the scarier truth for our time is that comfort concedes nothing without a struggle either. But in the Great Recession we can’t count on our comfort anyway, so people are ready to pull together.

Participation is built into every step of Obama’s strategy and instinct in the tone he has set. Bill Clinton would typically signal that he was in complete agreement with his base, and then concede — even exceed — his opponents’ demands without notice. Obama regularly leaks that he’s about to cave — on the public option, on Olympia Snowe’s “trigger” to stall reform — which spurs his still very active citizen network to speak loudly, and he comes back stronger than before.

I don’t remember Democratic lawmakers holding nationwide town meetings on the PATRIOT Act or the Iraq War when the Dems were the minority party, even though PATRIOT was a sudden sea-change from everything the country had stood for and the Iraq invasion was opposed by a slim majority of the public. We have Republican legislators, as much as Democrats, to thank for affirming the idea that healthcare is an issue to consult the people on face-to-face, and we have President Obama to thank for setting this as the national example again.

So far under Obama all the reliable disappointments — business as usual, government by special interest — have been put on hold. He has suspended cynicism. And just maybe shown a new kind of leadership that calls us to believe in ourselves.

The lessons of history are funny things — when we compare notes, most of us seem to have been sitting in different classrooms. It’s axiomatic that the Democrats in Congress are wary of “the lesson of ‘94,” by which they mean the backlash that supplanted Bill Clinton as president with Newt Gingrich as prime minister for four off-season years in the middle of Clinton’s ostensible two terms. Many Dems see this as a parable of going father than the American people are prepared to, with consequences for one party’s political supremacy. To most ordinary people, though, it never seems that the powers that be go far enough beyond the Beltway bubble to change ordinary lives for the better. Bill Clinton was elected decisively, and it was his own appearance of indecisiveness that made most voters try their luck with opponents who seemed to have a clearer sense of purpose. He didn’t fail, he flailed, and thus his agenda was swept away — until, tellingly, he stood up to the same opponents during the government shutdown and, despite the personal scandal and, yes, impeachable gestures toward obstruction of justice that also came out of that period, found himself reinstated and Gingrich routed by the same voters.

A little conviction goes a long way — especially since we see so little of it. By many accounts, President Obama will be dropping his promotion of a public option in healthcare reform when he addresses Congress tonight — the only element that makes reform more than rhetorical. This is in the name of “consensus” that seems like unilateral capitulation, and will cost him the commitment of an entire generation that entered political activity because of him to begin with (and others who saw him as the first chance for the system to work in a very long time). People need to know that the 77 percent of possible voters who still support a public option carry at least as much weight as a handful of industry lobbyists’ and town hall bullies’ volume. It would also be nice to think that if the stimulus/recovery bill, which seems to have worked though it chiefly did so by putting much more of our money in bankers’ pockets, was important enough to pass without one Republican vote, then maybe everyone’s life and death is equally urgent.

Scores of House members have vowed to vote against any bill without a public option, and even Senator Baucus, who has been footdragging in deference to Republicans on his committee who insist on a compromise they show no interest in making, is now saying he will schedule a vote no matter what (though he too is “warning” that a public option “will never pass”). It’s uncertain, therefore, which members of his historic majority President Obama is making ready to bring in line tonight — the ones who’ve been acting like an opposition party in their own self-interest, or the ones who are siding with the public option — and thus the public — regardless of what it means to their electoral fortunes. Since the president’s address is widely seen as a reassertion of executive control over the health-reform process from an unproductive legislature, maybe members of Congress will belatedly solidify around something resembling the president’s original ambitious plan, in the name of retaining their authority — which would make his timing masterful, as long as he intends to abide by its results.

But it’s not looking good. A recent post on Politico quotes an unnamed White House aide as stating “We have been saying *all along* [my emphasis] that the most important part of this debate is not the public option” — a revision of the immediate past that is one of several signs that there hasn’t been quite the course-change from the previous imperial administration that everyone wants to believe there’s been. Later in the same post, an anonymous “top Senate Democratic leadership aide” says that it will be good that Obama is “rolling up his sleeves and entering the fray,” though “the [lack of a] public option [Politico's interjection] certainly makes it a harder sell.” — whether that’s a huge leak of a fait-accompli on the aide’s part, or an unveiled threat to Obama to un-accompli it, is the six-hundred-billion-dollar question (and in any case, Politico watches the lead rush past without comment).

Either way, we’re at a turning point. Not in healthcare as such — the status quo of the world’s richest country enjoying fiftieth place in life expectancy has apparently been acceptable for years and, barring steadfastness by Obama, will persist that way for another decade or two until, mark my words, some strong-willed Republican president rams through complete nationalization to dislodge us from the crisis. It’s a turning point in whether the citizenry will matter, or even show up. If business-as-usual must go on after all, even when you have a solid mandate from the electorate and an unbeatable majority in government, why be involved at all? This can take more people out of the process than even an assassin’s bullet — Lyndon Johnson got John Kennedy’s civil rights laws passed with a sense of intensified purpose, but what might have happened if Kennedy had already turned a deaf ear to Martin Luther King’s movement and forfeited the hope that had been placed in him? Of course, and in fairness to the current president, this is more than an abstract question. The guys showing up heavily armed to town halls are making an open assassination threat. Fair or not, though, it falls to Obama to demonstrate that this intimidation can’t work.

It should be helpful to remember that that isn’t the only way in which history could repeat itself. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson also faced many defiant Democrats in getting civil rights legislation passed, but they pressed on and it’s one reason Obama could even run or be elected. But then, Obama is a tenacious intellect and indomitable optimist who “owes” no one. And that may be part of the problem. Kennedy and Johnson were each deeply flawed people, and on some level they must have known this (because on some levels I think they were proud of it). Their public service was a shot at redemption and posterity. As a person, Obama seems to suffer from none of their flaws, or the many others we’ve grown used to in our leaders. And a paradox may apply. Richard Nixon, to name just one, was surely the worst man to ever be president, but in the full sweep of history seems far from the worst president. Obama is possibly the best man to ever be president — but whether his presidency itself ends up making any significant difference is something I’ll be wondering about, for at least one more night.

I found the inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial (televised by HBO even for those of us who aren’t HBO subscribers) entertaining, and even deep at times, but I wasn’t truly moved until it was just about over. That’s when Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger (along with Pete’s grandson Tao) took the stage to lead the crowd in “This Land is Your Land.” Undoubtedly the significance of Pete’s presence was lost on most of the 750,000 concert attendees, but for me his appearance provided the gravity for what was otherwise largely light and entertaining fare. Pete, now in his 90s, has been my personal hero for as long as I can remember (which is getting to be pretty long now, as it happens), and I’ve had the pleasure to see him in concert a few times. At the height of his prowess he was a powerful performer, a Pied Piper who alone with his instrument was able to lead crowds of thousands in songs they might not otherwise sing. The songs were simple but the ideas were enormous: let’s have peace without war; let’s not judge based on skin color or belief. But more often then not, the songs were filled with biting commentary as much as hopeful wishes. My brother and I used to play (and still do, sometimes) a Leadbelly song we learned from one of Pete’s songbooks. The song was called “Bourgeois Blues” and the opening verse sings, “White folk in Washington / They know how / to throw a colored man a nickel / just to see him bow / I got the bourgeois blues.” Wow.

What does it say when the consummate protest singer is a featured voice at a demonstration so clearly Establishment? I can’t decide if we’ve come full circle or if it’s the passing of an age. Pete has been the Greek chorus to the United States’ social and societal dramas of the last 50 years, and his presence on stage was as much a symbol of having surmounted a major obstacle as were the tears streaming down Jesse Jackson’s face on the night Mr. Obama won the presidency.

There are clearly still songs to sing about wrongs that need righting, but Pete has done a more than admirable job making the statement written on his banjo ring true. On the drum of Pete’s banjo a decades-old phrase might still be readable around the drum’s circumference: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

�