Parabasis

Mixed Blood To Stop Charging for TIckets

By Isaac Butler

If you happen to read Adam's interviews with playwrights, you're probably struck by two things: (1) some of the people are almost certainly made up and (2) most playwrights think that ticket prices are too damn high. And I agree! Ticket prices are too damn high.

Well, it looks like here in Minneapolis, Mixed Blood is about to call a lot of people's bluff on this front, as they've announced they will stop charging admission for Mainstage shows for the next three seasons.

I personally am very curious to see what happens as a result of this.  I do not believe that lowering ticket prices in a panacea (although I think in conjunction with some things, it'd be a boon).  I also am concerned that people don't tend to value things that they don't pay for, and wonder if perhaps reducing tickets to a nominal $5 might have been a stronger choice from a behavioral economics perspective.  Be that as it may, this is a bold experiment that hopefully will provide the American Theater with an object lesson in... something. We don't know yet, but we have three years to find out.  

Netanyahu and the Crisis in Liberal Zionism

By Isaac Butler

Simply put, the tenants of liberalism and the tenants of Zionism are not compatible. You can't believe simultaneously in fairness and equality ensured by Government institutions and also support the idea that Government institutions should be set up for the primary or sole benefit of one group of people defined by religion, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference. 

Or at least, you can't do it for long without a huge amount of cognitive dissonance needing to be resolved through some mixture of blaming the victims and willful ignorance. Luckily for liberal Zionists, the absolute shittiness of the PLO and the ways the Palestinians have prosecuted their cause have made this pretty easy to do, historically.

This is no longer the case. We are now at a point where we have our best chance for a serious partner for peace on the Palestinian side, a tenuous Hamas-Fatah alliance that could help eventually move Hamas in the direction the IRA went into during the 90s and an American President willing (it seems) to broker some sort of fair deal. And the response from the Israelis and the American Right has been the embrace of the very guy who helped fuck everything up after Rabin was assassinated. And so we now have the strange situation of a foreign leader dressing down our President and being applauded for it with 20 standing ovations in the halls of Congress. 

It seems that this is forcing some scales to come down from people's eyes.  Witness Kevin Drum, for example, whose previous expert opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is that everything is always the Palestinians fault but now feels that he needs to reexamine what's going on. Or Josh Marshall-- hardly an enemy of Israel-- telling everyone at least fifteen years after it was obvious to anyone paying attention that Netanyahu has absolutely no desire to work out a lasting peace. 

This seems to be the diplomatic equivalent of the assault on Gaza a few years back, a kind of insane overreach on Israel's part that seriously damages the (at least emotional and rhetorical) support it gets from historic allies. Only this time, there was no provocation to be used as a justificatory fig leaf.

Rob Weinert-Kendt In Rare Form

By Isaac Butler

My Stagegrade partner Rob Weinert-Kendt has a truly excellent takedown of The Weekly Standard's new piece on David Mamet's conversion to movement conservatism.  It can be found here. Enjoy.

At this point. having engaged with David Mamet's public pronouncements about his politics several times over the years this blog has been running... I just can't do it anymore. The guy is as lazy in his political thinking as he is in his post-The Cryptogram writing, and writing his political "ideas" in provocative prose doesn't make them actually thought provoking, because they're missing the thought part. 

But Rob really does yeoman's work over there at The Wicked Stage. And he does it with aplomb. Check it out. 

Light Posting Ahead

By Isaac Butler

So obviously, this blog hasn't been either 99 or my number one priority the last week or so.  Unfortunately, that will probably continue for awhile.  J. has a new play being produced in the EST Marathon and this week I am both directing a workshop of a new play by Gregory S. Moss and beginning teaching a May Intensive course here at the University of Minnesota. Said course is at night for four hours, four days a week.  

My point is that things are likely to remain light-ish around here for at least this week, maybe for the next two. There's a lot of things I want to discuss with you, like this bullshit Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment here in Minnesota, unstable narratives, texts that invite being read against themselves, crowd-told tales, Friday Night Lights Season 5 and what it's like to direct again after a year and change focused on writing. Oh, and there's that whole Bibi/Barack meltdown. And the French Open. But there just isn't time right now. 

I'll post when I can, and in the meantime enjoy the lovely Spring/Summer weather! Hopefully no tornadoes are touching down where you live. 

Fauxrage Strikes Again!

By Isaac Butler

So here's how it appears to have gone down...

Obama gave a speech in which, amongst other things, he articulated the United States's stance towards the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process (or Territorial Dispute or whatever you want to call it).  In that speech, he reiterated and reinforced the policy that has guided all the parties to the negotiations for quite some time:

A two state solution. Based on the pre-1967 borders. With land swaps to make up for some settlements. 

This position has been our nation's stated position (And basis for all negotiations we've been a part of) for the last thirty years. 

And what happened next?  A complete right wing (in the US) and Likud (in Israel) freakout.  

It's really, really fucking disheartening that this keeps happening. And it's really disappointing to see the US news media playing this fauxrage as yet another he-said-she-said.  They're being played.  People are pitching a fit over something they've all known was true for quite some time.

DenGre over at Balloon Juice has a good post where he argues that this is about Obama insisting that the Palestinian state be both sovereign and "contiguous." I'll let him tell (and show you) why this is freaking the Likudniks out over here. Meanwhile, Yglesias takes apart the canard that the 1967 borders are "indefensible," (an argument I remember hearing as far back as middle school) given that, you know, Israel's successfully defended them.  Larison talks about the phony controversy here. Andrew Sullivan has been all over this, here's some post-night's-sleep reflections on the speech and the Right/Likud meltdown. But you can also read his Daily Wrap to find many, many more links to 1967-related posts. 

Words Cannot Describe...

By Isaac Butler

I made the mistake of looking at the news during the gap between Black Joe Louis and the Honeybears and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings last night.  And the story I read made me so angry I had trouble focusing on the first few songs of the show.  And I woke up this morning still angry.

John Jay College was paid by the Catholic Church to do a study on the roots of the Priest Child-Rape Scandal.  They used data supplied by the Church, and used the Church's definition for several key terms (including "child") rather than the standard definitions for them. Lo and behold, the conclusion that the study comes to is exactly what the Church has been saying in its defense all along. It turns out, the Child-Rape Scandal was caused by.... wait for it... 1960s Counter Culture.  I'm not joking:

A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.

Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.

Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims.

The “blame Woodstock” explanation has been floated by bishops since the church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002 and by Pope Benedict XVI after it erupted in Europe in 2010.

But this study is likely to be regarded as the most authoritative analysis of the scandal in the Catholic Church in America. The study, initiated in 2006, was conducted by a team of researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City at a cost of $1.8 million. About half was provided by the bishops, with additional money contributed by Catholic organizations and foundations. The National Institute of Justice, the research agency of the United States Department of Justice, supplied about $280,000.

I think what's actually most upsetting about this is how John Jay essentially sold out their integrity in order to help a worldwide organize cover up their massive decades-long cover up of child rape.  Shame on them.  

I think the more logical explanation for why there was a huge child rape problem has little to do with Woodstock or celibacy. It's that the Church allowed it to happen, covered it up, and no one who did anything faced any kind of punishment. Add in to that the kind of authority the Church and its priests have over their parishoners and it's a pretty obvious recipe for this kind of disaster. 

Breaking News

By Isaac Butler

Stop the presses!  It turns out Rand Paul is f*ing insane. I know... who knew? Good commentary here.

(PS: Important to keep in mind: Rand Paul is a media darling. No one on the left who had views and rhetoric as extreme as his would be.  There are media spectacle/pariahs like Michael Moore, but even Moore's views and rhetoric aren't as extreme as Paul's.  But I guess since Paul is good looking (for a politician) and Michael Moore is, of course, fat and can't stop reminding you how often he's been right about things, Paul gets to appear on the teevee as an important, serious person.) 

Uh oh.

By Isaac Butler

Remember how we were all freaking out a couple of years ago because all the bees were dying and without bees you can't have agriculture and/or metaphors to explain sex to your little ones?

Well, it turns out that cell phones are the likely cause. Over eighty experiments have yielded near-identical results showing that cell phone signal confuses bees and might even kill them. 

I don't know what to say about this beyond... fuuuuuuuuuck.

Mea Culpa

By Isaac Butler

Didn't mean for it to be all-Game-Of-Thrones-all-the-time round these parts this week. I've just been overwhelmed with end of semester michegas, so that's been easier to crank out than anything else.

What's going on in your neck o' the woods?

Game Of Thrones and Women

By Isaac Butler

This post by Stokes at Overthinking It expands on the point I was making awhile ago about Dany's arc within Game Of Thrones and how a lot of complexity (and agency) has been leached out of it on the TV show. 

Stokes goes on to talk about something I had forgotten-- that a similar flattening happened with Catelyn Stark as well:

 In the book, when Robert Baratheon offers Ned the position of King’s Hand, his wife Catelyn is the one who tells him that he has to accept it.  She’s an uncompromising realist, is Catelyn.  It’s not that she wants Ned to go, it’s just that she understands that you can’t turn down this kind of offer without insulting the king… and she’s not blind to the opportunities this would create for her husband, herself, and their family.  She’s no glory hound, but she’s an aristocrat.  Part of her job, part of being Lady Stark, is increasing the status of house Stark whenever possible.  The film version jettisons this interesting element of her character, in favor of a woman that just wants her man to stay at home with her (although I do love that line they gave her where she’s like “I’ll say, ‘Listen, fat man, you can’t take my husband’”). Then when they learn that John Arryn’s death was not an accident, Cat suddenly becomes terrified and desperate for Ned to stay — oh no wait, that’s the version from the series.  In the book, she’s even more insistent that he go to King’s Landing, not because they need to stay on the King’s good side, not because of the increased opportunity (which under these circumstances she couldn’t care less about), but because an old and dear friend has been murdered under circumstances that point to a treasonous conspiracy. She wants justice for her own sake, and as the Lady Stark, she wants to defend the realm!  

Stark goes on to point out that both of these changes move complicated characters more firmly in the direction of the Damsel In Distress trope. 

This reminds me a bit of our conversation about The Walking Dead, about how one of the changes made in turning the comic book into a TV show was an insertion of an (un)healthy dose of tired genre stereotypes in the show. This involved, amongst other things, turning one of the book's resident badasses into a whiny crybaby who is scared of mice. 

Perhaps-- at least on the grounds of gender representation-- genre television has even narrower prescribed roles for it's characters than genre fiction and comic books do? That's a depressing thought.

Kushner to Receive Honorary Degree

By Isaac Butler

It's official. And there was much rejoicing.

Game of Exposition

By Isaac Butler

While I'm very much enjoying Game Of Thrones, it seems to me that the show has a bit of an exposition problem. There's too much of it that needs to be done, but even with all the exposition, many people who haven't read the books tell me they find the series almost impossible to follow.  Part of this is a bizarre reluctance on the directorial staff's part to tell any exposition visually. This came to a head during the jousting scene in this week's episode, where an important character to the plot of the story whom you've met earlier in the episode is killed, but you never actually get a completely undistorted view of his face so that you know for sure who he is before the fight begins. 

Even Alan Sepinwall of What's Alan Watching consults wikipedia and the HBO website while watching the show to keep track of what's going on. 

With all this exposition, it seems to me some triage is in order. Do we need a list of dragons? No. No we do not. 

Exposition is hard! 

One Little Sub-Note To This Kushner/Weisenfeld Mess

By Isaac Butler

Since it comes up in this Jeffrey Goldberg interview of Weisenfeld, I think it's important to address here what the term "ethnic cleansing" means. It appears to be that Weisenfeld's main opposition to Kushner involves Kushner's use of the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe the founding of the State of Israel:

He went on, "But ethnic-cleansing is a blood libel. You've crossed the line if you've said that. It's Darfur, Bosnia, Nazi Germany. If you say the Jewish people engaged in ethnic cleansing, then you put them in the class of the Nazis."(America was also built on ethnic-cleansing, as was Canada, Australia, Argentina, and so on, but that will be the subject of a different blog post).

Wiesenfeld argued that Israel never engaged in systematic ethnic-cleansing: "The Jews never did this on a systematic basis. The Jews don't plan genocide. If there was ethnic-cleansing, how come there are more than a million Arab citizens of Israel today?"

On this issue, both Kushner and Wiesenfeld have good, if partial, arguments. There were instances in which Arab villages in what is now Israel were forcibly cleared of their inhabitants by Israeli forces. On the other hand, these episodes occurred during a war initiated by Arabs, after they rejected the United Nations partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.

I think if you've lost Jefrey Goldberg's support for your hard core zionist views that you've truly gone beyond the pale, as Goldberg regularly acts as an enforcer policing what is and is not allowable in public discourse about Israel (just look at his writing around Seven Jewish Children). 

The thing is... both Weisenfeld and Goldberg are wrong on an important ground.  Weisenfeld seems to think that ethnic cleansing and genocide are interchangeable terms with identical meanings. Goldberg seems to think that ethnic cleansing is justified within the context of war if you were not the party that initiated the conflict.  On both fronts, they're wrong.   

The fallacy of Goldberg's point should be obvious, but I'll just note that intentional law makes no exceptions for what side can and cannot be involved in ethnic cleansing. You're simply not allowed to do it (duh).  As for Weisenfeld's point, Kushner is right here if you look at what the term actually means which is "the purging, by mass expulsion or killing, of one ethnic or religious group by another, esp. from an area of former cohabitation." It takes a real stretch of the imagination to say that that's not what happened in 1948, regardless of whose side you're on. 

Now I don't think that means that Israel doesn't have a right to exist or anything. After all, by those standards, neither does the United States or any of the other countries Goldberg mentioned. I join Kushner in believing that it's founding was a mistake*, but that it exists, is going to continue to exist and the issue now is how to create a just peace. But for Weisenfeld to say, essentially, that because the historical record is insulting to the dignity of the Jewish people (which it is!) therefore it isn't true is just absurd. And his proof-- that there are a million Israeli Arabs while he doesn't mention the over 4.5 million Palestinian refugees-- doesn't amount to bubkis. It's not like those refugees don't exist. And it's not like there weren't a chain of actions that put them there. 

*(note that by mistake here I mean that the setting up of States for the express purpose of serving one ethnic or racial or religious group is, in my opinion, mistaken regardless of who the ethnic or racial or religious group is. I'm a secular pluralist, not a nationalist, and it's hard to square secular pluralism with the idea that ethnic and religious nationalism is okay when practiced by one's own cohort).

Andrew Sullivan on Jeffrey Weisenfeld

By Isaac Butler

Sullivan's no Kushner fan, but man does he get what's going on with this controversy:

All of this is a deliberate and sustained dehumanization of an entire people. It's important to see its full context - the cultural PTSD and understandable paranoia of Israelis, and the traumatizing psychological impact of the Holocaust, even now. And I am not saying that this kind of thing isn't also common throughout the Arab and Muslim world with respect to Jews, who are demonized, dehumanized and lied about on a regular basis. It is extremely common; it is far more prevalent than its opposite; and the hideous history of anti-Semitism in the twentieth century makes eliminationist language about the Jewish people and their absolute right to a homeleand repellent in every way. But we would not allow such anti-Semites to sit on university boards judging the work of writers, based on their politics, would we?

So why is Wiesenfeld not just on such a board but capable of commanding instant assent from his peers? How has American public discourse on this question been so thoroughly distorted by the unhinged tribalism of a few maniacs? And when will we begin to stand up to these bullies?

RTWT here, it's a perceptive and passionate diagnosis of the interplay between dehumanizing policies, dehumanizing rhetoric and the stalled out Israeli Peace Process, amongst other things.

More on Jeffrey Weisenfeld

By Isaac Butler 

The Times does everyone a favor by getting an interview with Jeffrey Weisenfeld, the former Pataki fixed who is at the center of the torpedoing of Kushner's honorary degree from CUNY.  It turns out the guy is a racist, ultra-Zionist wackadoo. And that's, I think, putting it mildly:

I tried to ask a question about the damage done by a short, one-sided discussion of vigorously debated aspects of Middle East politics, like the survival of Israel and the rights of the Palestinians, and which side was more callous toward human life, and who was most protective of it.

But Mr. Wiesenfeld interrupted and said the question was offensive because “the comparison sets up a moral equivalence.”

Equivalence between what and what? “Between the Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. “People who worship death for their children are not human.”

Did he mean the Palestinians were not human? “They have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history,” he said.

The scandal in this particular case is less that Weisenfeld is on the board of CUNY-- he's a political appointee, shit like that happens--and more that the other board members of CUNY listened to him about anything. And this leads my back to Kushner's questions in his open letter. What were they thinking? And why didn't they invite Kushner in to speak for himself? Why did they trust this guy's opinion on anything? They should be ashamed of themselves and should go ahead and give Kushner his honorary degree already.

No. F*ing. Way.

By Isaac Butler 

Julie Taymor to address TCG conference in LA this year. 

Things I Agree With

By Isaac Butler

George Hunka edition. Except for the silliness (and poor word choice) about pro-Israel "cabals" at CUNY, which George himself dismisses.

UPDATE: Jeffrey Weisenfeld, the figure at the center of this whole Kushner mess, has a track record of using his power to squelch academic freedom. Here's a story from earlier this year where an Adjunct lost a job because Weisenfeld disagreed with his politics. He was eventually reinstated. It seems to me there's a number of different directions one could go with this story. George explores with great precision the problematic nature of public-private partnerships and the power that donors and board members can wield over programming.

But-- and perhaps this is because I'm in academia now-- there are also large issues of academic freedom and the policing of professors. I'm thinking here especially of the work of hard right wingers like Daniel Pipes and his "Campus Watch" group or David Horowitz and his book "The Professors."  Even outside of the issue of the Middle East and the State of Israel, there is a concerted effort-- particularly on the Right-- to limit freedom in academia and control the conversation by getting people to implicitly adopt ideological litmus tests for professors. There's also the ongoing promotion of the inaccurate meme that academia is overwhelmingly Leftist (no doubt this is partially so that studies produced by colleges that contradict Republican talking points can be dismissed).  While some departments (Sociology, for example) tend to have lots of lefty professors, no one seems to complain about the Right Wing consensus that dominates Econ departments.

The third issue is of course about the scope of the debate over Israel and its practices in this country. And there are a lot of people (the ADL comes to mind here, as does AIPAC) who use their power and influence to try to control and narrow that debate. You'll find a much healthier mainstream debate about Israel and Zionism in Israel than you will in the United States. 

 

Here's What I Like, And Now I'll Tell You Why

By Isaac Butler

The magical, terrifyingly hilarious Amy Staats has a web series called Here's What I Like, And Now I'll Tell You Why. It's the Posh Nosh of buying things. Here's the latest episode. I recommend you check the whole thing out:

 

Just a Quick Thought

By Isaac Butler

I'm happy to see Andrew Sullivan demolish the right wing meme that torturing prisoners lead us to Bin Laden. That being said, the weakest case against torture is that it doesn't work (although, in general, it doesn't).  If torture is wrong, it's wrong regardless of whether or not we get actionable intelligence out of it.

Narrative Related Idea: Feedback Appreciated

By Isaac Butler

So... obviously there's lots of interest both here on the site and elsewhere to dive into issues of narrative and plot and how they relate both to audience involvement and content.

Well, it turns out that there's a supposedly really great book that happens to be about this subject, Peter Brooks' Reading For The Plot. It's considered both very smart and very approachable (according to both novelists I know and literary theory types I know).

How would you all feel about doing a read-through of the book on this blog? It's a book I've been meaning to do anyway, and I think having a reading group for it (complete with regular comments threads) would be a great way to go about it.

The only issue with this is that I probably couldn't start doing that until June 15th because of other commitments I have. 

Would this be something you would be interested in?