Parabasis

The Weekly 2008

by Rob Grace

Since last week’s Iran analogy was so well-received, I thought it might also be fruitful to examine the other popular analogy regarding Iran: The Cold War.

Like the Old Cold War with the Soviet Union, the New Cold War with Iran has deep historical roots. 

The Old Cold War resulted from the historical drive of Russian expansion.  Russia’s imperialistic urge erupted instantaneously after it broke free of the Golden Horde in 1480, as it sought to dominate the power vacuum left by the Horde’s demise, and recapture the glory of 9th Century Kievan Rus.  Invasions of Lithuania and Poland commenced, followed by intervention in modern-day Estonia and Latvia, and clashes over the Ukraine with the other great power interested in European expansion: the Ottomans.  Finally in the 1940’s, with Europe in turmoil and the Ottoman Empire a distant memory, Russia was able to push as far as Berlin.  But the glory would prove ephemeral, and the thousand-year-old dream was crushed by the fall of the Soviet Empire.  Eastern European NATO membership is a spear in the side.  And just to make sure, the US pushes for Ukrainian entrance into NATO, upon which “Russia's imperial aspirations are essentially nostalgia,” to quote Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Similarly, the New Cold War has ancient origins. 

Iran is driven by a desire for regional domination that stretches back to the 6th century BCE days of Cyrus the Great.  Once Cyrus’ empire was established, Persia stretched its arm as far west as possible, until the Greeks slapped it back at the Battle of Thermopylae.  Persia retreated to Asia, where it has remained ever since, pursuing the more humble ambitions of regional power.  Whenever possible, it acts on its urge for western expansion.  It battled the Ottomans a time or two for possession of Baghdad and overall Persian Gulf dominance, but generally the Ottomans and their successor nation-states were successful in checking the Persian expansionist urge.  Thus the genesis of the New Cold War, explained by Robin Wright in the Washington Post last year:

The roots of Cold War II lie in the Bush administration's decision to remove regimes it considered enemies after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The first two targets were the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- coincidentally, both foes of Iran that had served as important checks on Tehran's power. The United States has now taken on the role traditionally played by Iraq as the regional counterweight to Iran.

Cold War echoes can now be heard, in both rhetoric and strategy.

Iranian rhetoric toward Israel is evocative of Reagan’s rhetoric toward the Soviet Union.  Ahmadinejad’s statements that the Israeli government is a “stinking corpse” and that the “regime is on its way to annihilation,” and that the Israeli government must “vanish from the pages of time” (or whatever translation you prefer), seem rhetorically derivative of Reagan’s statement on the “decay of the Soviet experiment” and his proclamation “that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last -- last pages even now are being written,” and that “the march of freedom and democracy… will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.”

Also, as in the Old Cold War, actors pursue success via consolidation of power blocs.  As Robin Wright wrote:

The Bush administration is now adapting the tactics of the last Cold War to the new one. In the 1940s, the Soviet Union lowered its Iron Curtain to shore up communism in Eastern Europe and prevent penetration from the West. The former Kremlinologists now running U.S. foreign policy, such as Rice and Gates, are trying their own version, with a Green Curtain designed to cut off the bloc of Iranian-linked radicals and protect U.S. allies in the Middle East.

The American bloc is currently “weak,” “feckless,” and “divided,” as Thomas Friedman tells us, which presents a conundrum for our presidential candidates.

Democrats offer a relaxation of tensions as a solution to America’s relative weakness.  This alternative extends the Cold War scenario - though tensions will be relaxed, goals will still conflict.  Republicans offer regime change via propagation of the notion that the Iranian government is illegitimate.  This alternative solves the Counterbalancing Iran problem by advocating Iran’s eventual destruction.  Both proposals have problems, and neither presents a path for transforming Iran’s imperial ambitions to nostalgia. 

If we believe Iran’s leaders, a nuclear weapon will have no effect on its quest for regional dominance.  As Ali Larijani (now Iran’s parliament speaker) has said:

The root of regional power is not from the bomb. For example Pakistan: it didn't have nuclear weapons before, now it does. How much did its influence in the region change? Therefore, from a point of view of realities, there's no reason for us to pay the cost and go after it.

Thus voters should carefully examine the moral and Realpolitik realities lurking quietly beneath Iran policy campaign rhetoric.

What Interests Me?

(Note: a version of this was submitted by me this week as a personal statement for a directing program)

It starts out as an intangible feeling, powerful but vague. I’ll be reading a play and all of a sudden, I’ll feel inspired by it, in love with it, wanting to do nothing else but help bring it to life; whole sections of it will appear staged and designed in my brain and concepts and casting ideas will start firing through my synapses. For years, if I got that feeling, I knew I wanted to direct the play, end of story. Now that I’m directing more, producing, seeing work on different levels and writing about it on my blog, I’ve had to quantify for myself what aspects of a script create that feeling in me.  What I’ve discovered is that I love plays that marry real human concerns with formal and linguistic inquiry.

Theatre is the most human art form. A group gathers together to view another group transforming themselves in real time. Theatre’s concerns should thus be rooted in asking questions about the human condition, investigating what it means to be a human being at this moment and in our present context, be that political, spiritual or psychological. Flowing from all of this is a play’s interest in the audience’s experience of it, which to me in part translates to a focus on compelling stories and characters. Narrative and character are vital to the theatre-watching experience. Theatre’s roots are in story telling, and people still go to the theatre craving a good story well told. 

At the same time, a focus on our real human concerns does not mean realism or an accurate portrayal of the real world or some effort at reproducing how people actually talk.  Art that excites me in all fields uses a bent lens to look at its subject.  Here is where playing with form and language is vitally important. By creating a world that operates by a different set of rules than the everyday, we ask the audience to work with us and then reward them by providing them with a singular experience.   The theatre I love invites its audience to use its imagination in a social setting. By doing this, it creates a space where we can dream together and via that dreaming activity reconnect with the world and each other. Doing this can be an uncomfortable experience, but by engaging imaginatively in a work of art as a group and as individuals simultaneously, we experience theatre's power. The power to make us feel more alive. The power to create new possibilities within our minds. The power to tell stories in different ways.

 If all of this sounds lofty, I believe that we are blessed to live in a time where work that combines all of this is increasingly common. A play like God’s Ear explores our inability to cope with tragedy and spins breathtaking linguistic set pieces out of it, while something like 1001 is an M.C. Escher print structurally but uses this to look at such age-old theatrical tropes as doomed romance, cross-cultural communication and love in an age of violence. The play I’m directing right now is a structurally rigorous and relentlessly experimental analysis of how belief is manipulated in the modern world, yet it also tells a great story and contains songs and dances and off-color humor, all of which relate back to its thematic content.  By intertwining the human and the experimental, we unlock the potential of ourselves and our audiences, and that stretching of boundaries is one of the great gifts we have to give each other. It is that gift that interests me, inspires me, and makes me want to keep directing plays.

What interests you? 

Question of the Day

So... I was down in South Carolina recently for a wedding, and I happened to wander into stall in a marketplace filled with Confederate memorabilia.  Pins, flags, bumper stickers (most with some pretty hateful slogans on them) etc. etc. and so forth. The wedding itself took place at the Citadel, and the couple was framed by an American flag on their left and a Confederate Army flag on their right.

So here's my question... What is the Confederate Nostalgia thing all about? It really makes no sense to me and I've been trying to grapple with it ever since... the Confederacy was a mass act of treason committed to support a crime against humanity. Not only that... governmentally the confederacy was a disaster and they lost the war.  This is not the sort of thing to be nostalgic about.

Of course, one of the ongoing justifications for Confederate nostalgia is a willful eliding of history with nostalgia so that one's unabashed love of the Confederacy can be draped in the cloak of honoring history. But we know from the German example that there are ways to honor and acknowledge history without reveling in it, sentimentalizing it, or being proud of it.

It's also rested on somehow divorcing the Confederacy from slavery... saying that it was about "states rights" when the Constitution of the Confederacy makes it pretty clear ("(4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed") that slavery is what it was about. I don't get it. Any insights, dear reader?

UPDATE: First off, lots of interesting stuff in the comments, so be sure to take a gander down there.  Second, just to clarify: I found the shop as part of an open-air market in Charlestown, South Carolina.  It was one stall amongst many, and I didn't gravitate to it, but once I saw the hateful sentiment proudly displayed, I did spend some time reading the bumper stickers to see what they said.  The pro-Confederate sentiments expressed in the store are not in my experience in any way uncommon in the south (and parts of the north for that matter) which is why I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Also, I should probably add that I was born and raised in Washington, D.C., my entire family is from all over the south, as is that of my girlfriend, and I am descended from (on my father's side) slave owners.  I believe that shame is a perfectly reasonable response to have to this history and legacy, in the midst of pride in other aspects of it. Honoring the past should mean having a complicated response to it, and the aforementioned shame is part of why I tend to be pretty focused on humanism in my life today.

New Column: Paying for Art

I try to make a case for expanding government funding for the arts in my weekly column for Buzzine today

Here's a teaser:

Over the past four decades, the National Endowment for the Arts has had a tumultuous existence, but despite controversy, budget raises and cuts, and a few attempts to kill it off, it has survived. In the meantime, the number of nonprofit theaters in the United States have grown from 56 to over 340, the number of symphony orchestras in the country has more than doubled (to over 1,800), there are 18 times more dance companies and roughly five times as many opera companies. Even President George W. Bush has recognized the value of the NEA, writing in 2004 that, “The rich history of our country and the creativity of the human spirit are reflected in the arts... the arts and humanities help people explore ideas, express emotions, and better appreciate cultures from around the world,” and he raised the NEA’s budget during his tenure. For many, this was a borderline extraordinary move on Bush’s part. After all, the Republicans have exploited social issues to kill at the ballot box for decades now, and one of those issues used to be the “indecent” art the National Endowment was funding.

The results are in: for the first time in a decade, a bipartisan consensus exists that the arts are a valuable part of our national heritage, culture and existence, and that the government has a place in funding them. In the 1990s, the question was: should the government be funding the arts? The question today is: is the government doing a good enough job?

The answer is no. The NEA is under-funded and almost comically hobbled by regulations put in place during prior controversies.

Brief Note About My Own Taste

I realized the following at a dance concert this weekend:

I like abstract, non-narrative dance, and I like narrative-driven theatre.  Odd that what I don't like in theatre, I love in dance, and vice-versa. Maybe there's a longer, more thought-provoking post in there somewhere... but right now, I am swamped!

Quick Bill Henson Question

So.. I've been looking into the Bill Henson controversy some more (I figure if you feel conflicted about something, you owe it to yourself to investigate) and so far it seems to me like a pretty clear case of government overreaction to something that (to be fair) sits in several uncomfortable grey areas that hopefully i'll be talking more about later. It should be noted, however, that one of those grey areas is NOT as far as I can tell, a legal one. By Australian law, Henson must have INTENDED to produce/create pornography, something he quite obviously wasn't doing.

 

This is the thing that I'm having trouble getting behind tho... many of the bloggers who are talking about the Henson thing are raising a stink that the photos as reproduced online are censored. They have black bars over the genitals of their subjects.  I have trouble getting particularly upset about this. The government is alleging that this work is child pornography. The newspapers have to balance their interest in informing their readers (by showing the work so that readers can make judgements) with not, you know breaking the law by distributing child pornography. I'm just not sure that, beyond not showing images of the photos at all, which would've had the end result of having people be forced to take either Henson or the government's word for what the photos were, the newspapers really could have done anything different.

I understand the impulse to say that news sites should have displayed the photos out of solidarity with artists, the way we might argue that the NYTimes should've displayed the anti-Mohammed Danish cartoons, and that by not doing so they are tacitly agreeing with the government's POV but frankly I don't really buy it.  A naked photo of a 13 year old girl framed and in a gallery is different from that same photo on the internet, and I understand news organizations caution... and I think caution, rather than cowardice is the appropriate way to describe it. 

This is also, I should say, just about the most minor of points about this controversy. How the photos are displayed on a website owned by a news organization is totally unimportant when one considers the magnitude of a democratic government raiding an art gallery and arresting an artist for their work.

Another Great Blogger You Should Know About

Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Case Against Jim Webb

For Obama's veep, that is. Let Kathy G. explain the case again.

Completeness

What does it mean to talk about Completeness in theatre?

For me two different things...

First, there is the sense that theatre is a super-complete art form, one of if not the most complete there is. This is owing to the fact that it incorporates aspects of other art forms.  You have sculpture and architecture (set design) fashion and textile arts (costume design), performance, poetry/literature (The script), music etc.  And there's a great satisfaction to combining all of these different elements to head towards a shared vision.  It's not just text or just performance or just architecture, it's all of these things and more, combined. In theatre, the work of art expresses itself in multiple different ways simultaneously, and those simultaneous expressions play off of each other and create depth and nuance.  What does it mean to have this textual moment performed in this way in this environment? Change any of those things, and the moment changes. 

This is true even in stripped down, low-tech theatre (or what Peter Brook would call ROUGH THEATRE).  You've still made a choice to perform in that style, in that way. It may not feel like a choice because the rough theatre decision was made based on resources, but still a low-tech production of a show will be completed in a different way than one with more technical resources.  A black box theatre with no set in it is still a distinct environment.  You could've always chosen to do it not in a theatre, for example. 

What this leads us to is a second way of considering completeness.  If the complete theatrical event involves all of these component parts than it follows that no one part is complete all on its own. After all, if the script were complete on its own, or the performance, or the set or whatever, than they wouldn't need each other, and i like to consider my job through the lens of what a show needs.  This is not say we can't split the component parts up and appreciate each on their own. Of course we can (we do this most often with scripts, by reading them). And each are, in their own way, works of art.  But the combination of these little interrelated works of art is a locus of theatre's power.

Indiana Jones

I just wasn't into it, folks. Sorry. It just didn't feel like an Indiana Jones movie to me, except for about 30 minutes from when Karen Allen shows up till they get to the Temple and the cast of Apocalypto shows up.