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.

“Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury”
The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, 12/17/09

www.pipermckenzie.com

True to the action ethos of its kung-fu title, you’re dropped right in the middle of a staged fight and a laugh riot, its wordless cast projecting a polyglot of stage-hypnotist zoo-mime, Keystone Cop drills, interpretive jazzhands, Shaolin playbook and Vedic sex manual. But let’s back this up and tell the players apart:

After gathering several years of evidence on writer-director Jeff Lewonczyk’s unerring inappropriateness and actor-director Hope Cartelli’s method-seizures, when the two took joint credit for “Craven Monkey”’s concept I parked in the front row and girded my lap for an oversloshing keg of crazy. But the clashing elements of their creativity seem to moderate each other (and what better definition of marriage can I come up with?), achieving an equilibrium that eludes most of the characters in this Darwinian fable.

A dawn-of-time quest myth from before the continents drifted apart and any of the world’s folkloric traditions got unmashed, “Craven” concerns the first hominid to be ostracized from the tribe, thus entering the necessary ordeal to ascend to singular humanity.

Existing on the fringes of acceptable culture and having explored the pre-Biblical disaster story of the king of gods calling down a global flood to silence the racket of human rutting in 2008’s “Babylon Babylon, scriptwriter Lewonczyk has a keen sense of history pivoting on the primal faux pas, and the titular Craven Monkey’s transgression entails offending the tribe’s sense of tradition by doing it biped-style. A dirty joke slips into poetry, as Craven Monkey and Lady Monkey become “the first to look into each other’s eyes and see themselves reflected.”

Nonetheless, Craven is ejected onto a Scapegoat’s Journey that at first mainly involves a plan to scale the tallest nearby mountain and drop its teetering boulder on his hated hometown. But a more meaningful ascension becomes his destiny, shoved along by two prehistoric parent figures in a kind of archaeological out-of-town tryout of the God, Lucifer and Job story.

Cartelli (”The Vital Spirit”) is a bioengineer earth mother fashioning a worldwide menagerie of children species, setting boundaries of extinction when they don’t know what’s good for them and holding a few limited-edition behemoths in reserve to send natural-order transgressors like Craven Monkey to a permanent time-out — leave it to this show’s brain-trust to give evolution a creation myth and come up with a scientific rationale for mythic monsters (though the pre-Abrahamic pantheons Lewonczyk and Cartelli draw on did nature’s work with a much more modern grasp of basic biology than the guys who took over from them). Art Wallace (”The Sensei”) is a celestial game-warden the Spirit conjured in her image to manage creation but who becomes a Prometheus-like troublemaker, coaching Craven Monkey to walk upright, use weapons, and defy the goddess.

Left behind with the tribe who won’t try anything once, Lady Monkey runs away to rejoin her lover and they become an earthy Adam and Eve struggling to escape the garden, with the Spirit and Sensei two poles of commanding common sense and nurturing aspiration that no one can think are either fully right or wrong.

But remember, when it comes to most of the dramatis personae, they ain’t heavy — they’re monkeys! The only member of the company who gets to speak let alone lecture is Lewonczyk as the offstage narrator, delivering the profane text in deadpan nature-documentary locutions that disclaim weightiness while the nonverbal cast stomps home a timeless semaphore of love, striving, and projectile poop.

Cartelli mimes an imperious, reality-weaving dance of destruction and creation decked in a good-fairy armor that calls to mind some holiday department-store window diorama of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”; Wallace radiates all-fatherly warmth with serene arm-sweeps and a shaggy conical cloak that suggests a cross between a walking fir-tree and Silent Bob.

Adrian Jevicki and Jessi Gotta as the two lead Monkeys and the ensemble of Becky Byers, Fred Backus, Mateo Moreno and Melissa Roth as the tribe and various monsters are a whirlwind of learned frenzy, igniting the stage to a story told mostly in fight-choreographers Qui Nguyen and Adam Swiderski’s Jack Kirbyesque ballets of brutality.

That team, best known for the Vampire Cowboys troupe’s stage-combat-centered high kitsch, stretches some unaccustomed but expert muscles of delicate harmony as well as acrobatic carnage here. Craven and Lady’s most crucial heroism comes as lovers, not fighters, when a blockbuster cataclysm leaves them alone and obliged to get down to the business of repopulating the earth, this time with the new human species. We all know how that worked out, but the play ends before the, erm, honeymoon is over.

This is all part of the self-explanatory Fight Fest, a season of sports entertainment to mirror our coast-to-coast shouting match and international pastime of perpetual battle. But in the elegant interplay and affirmative physicality of “Craven Monkey”’s considered slapstick is a vision of passionate impulse bestowed with purpose, and essential conflict tamed as art.

The Wii-G: A Wii from the Dark Side

Why plan to plunk a plain `ol Wii under the tree or by the menorah when you can get a near-nefarious version for the spiritually irresponsible loved one in your life? Nintendo insiders have revealed a new version of their popular console: the Wii-G combines hip wireless video gaming with a creepy means to contact the “other side.”

I met with one mystic scientist who would agree to speak only under condition of strict anonymity.  He explained how it works: “Once the game begins, the wireless remote will seem to move your arm of its own accord, pointing to the letters and words on the on-screen game board.”

I had to ask the obvious question. “Since it’s on a screen, why point to anything at all? Why not allow the spirits to simply magically place the messages right on the television?”

“We did create a version like that,” the scientist explained, “but instead of answering our questions it kept typing up teleplays for unaired episodes of Charmed. So back to pointing it was.”

The Wii-G is only available from the following stores: Everything Under A Pentagram; Ambercrombie & Crowley; Cauldrons-a-Million; and select Wal-Marts.

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.