Category: Liberal Rants

Thoughtful posts on why the neopaleolithic viewpoint, while perhaps valid for its adherents, is yet not the way I want my country run.

Another Katrina story

Posted on by Dale

Last night I had dinner with some people with whom I don’t want to dine again for a very long time. I don’t see them on a regular basis, but I’ve known them for many years.

Our dinner conversation turned, of course, to the Katrina disaster, New Orleans in particular, and for the next ten minutes I heard nothing but abuse of the city and its inhabitants. One person who had grown up there flatly said it should not be rebuilt, that it was a hell-hole. Others repeated right-wing half-truths that clearly had already taken root after being planted by that President’s team of spinners. No one expressed any sympathy for the people who had lost everything. No one expressed horror at the terrible catastrophe that overtaken fellow Americans. No one mentioned the failure of our national government to provide the kind of assistance before and after the disaster that is clearly its function.

Here are phrases I heard last night: “New Orleans has more public housing than anywhere else”; “Why would they go back? They were all renting anyway”; “The oil companies wouldn’t locate their refineries there because the cost of the bribery was too high”; “Everybody knew you bought your drugs from the cop. He got it free from people he busted”; “It was just a dirty place”; “You can’t tell me they couldn’t have gotten out.”

The last few times I’ve gotten together with these people I have had uncomfortable experiences because it’s been clear that they’ve drifted farther and farther to the right, but last night I was repulsed. Unable to think of anything to say without absolutely losing it or without embarrassing my hostess, I maintained a stony silence and left the table as soon as I had finished eating. This has gnawed at me; I should have rebuked them and left entirely.

These are people who are extremely active in their church. You would call them religious. The empty Baptist phrases spill out of their mouths with the ease given to the true believers. But last night, I strained to hear even an echo of “whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me,” and I failed.

I’ll tell you what I did hear, however. I heard that if some other person or group of persons is different from you, i.e., not middle class, white, and sanctimonious, if those persons are poor, or lazy, or criminal, it is appropriate and just to wish them misery, destruction, and death. If they do not fit within the narrow parameters of your narrow faith/vision, then let them die.

And what I want to know is, how is this different from those faithful who drove the planes into skyscrapers?

Theater drops Klan play | ajc.com

Posted on by Dale

It seems (Theater drops Klan play | ajc.com) that the Arts Station theatre got cold feet over hosting a staged reading of a play about Klan rallies at Stone Mountain. It seems that the opening monologue was not only “racy,” but also “inciting, and slanderous about Jews and Catholics,” according to the director. So they’ve canceled the reading.

I have some questions, since I don’t know any of the people involved, nor have I read the script. I did, of course, run the Newnan Community Theatre Company for over twenty years, so I might actually have a little insight here.

First of all, every theatre has its mission. Ours was to provide a wide variety of theatrical experiences for our audiences. Notice the plural. We didn’t have an audience, we had several different audiences. This allowed us to do whatever interested us as artists, since we were not interested in limiting ourselves to material that it was safe to bring the kids to. (I use the past tense here because of course I cannot speak for the company in any official capacity, currently led by the inestimable Dave Dorrell, but they’re doing just fine without me.)

So my first question is, What is Arts Station’s mission? Is this the kind of play they seek to do? If not, then why did they agree to the staged reading? If it is, then why back off?

Did no one read the play before they agreed to do it? Did the playwright tack on the monologue after they got into rehearsals? How did the “problem” with the monologue go unnoticed until announcements had been made?

Was this an actor problem? Did some actor suddenly decide that “he” couldn’t say those words?

Why the sudden panic over community relations? Are their audiences so generally unsophisticated that such venomous language genuinely offends them personally? Their lineup is hard to read, but it doesn’t seem to be very “hardhitting.” That’s not a condemnation, by the way; it’s all a matter of what your mission is.

Aside, re: the language issue: there’s a good young adult novel, The Day They Came to Arrest the Book, by Nat Hentoff, about the attempted banning of Huckleberry Finn on the usual bogus racial issues, and for me the climactic moment is when a young black student addresses the school board and tells them, “I’m smart enough to know when I’m being called a nigger, and that’s not what this book is doing.” I’ve always assumed any audience that I’ve attracted is smart enough to know that the language in the play is not being addressed to them personally, nor is it being delivered personally by their friends and neighbors.

Still, this was just a staged reading, an agreement that you’ll give the playwright a chance to hear his words out loud, to hear if they work, and to share them with an audience who, because you’ve taught them, understand this is a work in progress. You even put up big red posters in the lobby warning them about the language and subject matter.

And if the opening monologue is too much, that’s when you work with the playwright to say that you understand what he’s trying to do, but it’s not working the way he wants it. Or something. You don’t tell him that you just can’t say those terrible words, because the time to do that was before you agreed to the reading.

And you don’t put out disclaimers that it’s the playwright and not you who’s doing the offending, because again, you agreed to an artistic partnership, and part of that partnership is that you agree with his message. You can warn people to gird their loins before the curtain goes up, but apologize for what you’ve produced? Grow some artistic balls, people. (That’s a generic commandment; again, I have no details about the situation at Arts Station, so I would not presume to issue directives to them.)

One more set of questions: Was this a board thing? Did some board member get antsy and then worry began to pile up and then panic began to set in and then “it was decided” that it would “better” if they didn’t go ahead with this thing?

Ah, well, who knows? Theatre companies are precarious, byzantine organizations, and those like Art Station who actually do provide playwrights with venues for new work are to be applauded. It’s just that when something like this actually hits the newspapers, unlike, say NCTC’s production of Pericles, which hadn’t been done anywhere in the Southeast at the time, or our world premiere of David Hyer’s Lying in State, currently playing at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, VA, nor even our Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, with a new translation, none of which got any coverage at all, then one does have questions.

Turtles all the way down

Posted on by Dale

I was going to write about King Lear today, and I may yet, later. But in the meantime, eyes must be rolled and lips pursed over the state board of education in Kansas, hosting a little show trial for creationists before they vote to allow Genesis to become part of the state’s science curriculum.

But no, I hear them say, they’re not creationists. Oh, no, they’re proponents of intelligent design. G*d didn’t create the world… but it couldn’t have happened without him. Her. Them.

Honey, please. I am not about to get into arguments pro/con on this blog, because the whole thing is preposterous. But two comments made by the creationists testifying before the Kansas board bear examination.

One is the whole “teach the controversy” shibboleth. Charles Thaxton, creationist chemist and author of a book that says so, said, “There is no science without criticism.” He and his cohorts are described as arguing that Darwinism has become a dangerous dogma, and they are simply open-minded.

Fooey. Anyone who believes that Darwinism isn’t constantly examined and challenged by scientists of all stripes needs to vote Republican. All science is constantly critiqued. That’s what experiments are for. That’s what peer-reviewed journals are for. Biologists and their compeers have been bickering about the details of the evolutionary process since before Darwin sailed on the Beagle.

But suggesting that science should include ideas that cannot be tested is not open-minded, it is lame-brained.

Witness the other statement, by another chemist, one William S. Harris. He and his fellow travelers had been dazzling the Board with the complexities of RNA and all that jazz. “You can infer design just by examining something, without knowing anything about where it came from,” he said. Referring to the scene in The Gods Must Be Crazy in which the Bushmen marvel at a Coca-Cola bottle thrown from a plane, he said, “I don’t know who did it, I don’t know how it was done, I don’t know why it was done, I don’t have to know any of that to know that it was designed.”

Well. That was not exactly the Bushmen’s response, was it, Dr. Harris? If they had thought like that, they wouldn’t have assumed it was from the gods, would they? They would have realized it was a man-made object, albeit one from a society whose technology they could not fathom.

No, the Bushmen did not infer design. They inferred divine intervention, and that’s exactly what the intelligent designists want us to infer as well, despite their disingenuous pose.

Not only that, but while the complexities of life on this planet may cause some of us to infer an intelligence behind it all, they do not necessarily imply that at all.

One day an incident occurred in my elementary media center that put this in perspective for me. I was working at my table on my spiffy PowerBook laptop, using my graphics tablet pen as a mouse, when one of our special education students stopped by to watch in wonder as I worked. Finally she asked, “Mr. Lyles, is your computer magic?” I gently explained that although it looked like magic, it was just a very complicated machine, and demonstrated the tablet for her.

These people fall in the same category: it’s too complicated for us to explain, so it must be the work of powers beyond our comprehension. It is a lazy, intellectually dishonest way of looking at the world.

Turtles, all the way down.

An amusing little contretemps

Posted on by Dale

Here’s an amusing story from the New York Times, today, May 5, 2005, p.A11:

“American officials rushing to start small building projects in a large swath of Iraq in 2003 and 2004 did not keep required records on the spending of some $89.3 million in cash and cannot account at all for another $7.2 million, a federal watchdog reported yesterday.”

Well.

You might think that I, liberal as I am, might choose to rant and rave about this. After all, can you imagine the wingnut echo chamber’s rant if Head Start couldn’t account for $96.6 million? What would Rush and Sean and Anne say? I think we can agree that they’d be apoplectic.

But I’m not.

It’s not that much money, is it?

See, here’s a $100 million. (I’m going to round up for tidiness’ sake.)

It takes ten of those to make a billion dollars.

And what has Iraq cost us so far? Can we be charitable and agree on about $190 billion? I mean, that’s not even $200 billion. Then we’d be talking real money.

So here’s that amount. See if you can find our $96.6 million.

See, $96.6 million is just not that much to get excited about, is it?

What to do with smart illegal immigrants

Posted on by Dale

You will want to go read this article: La Vida Robot. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Wasn’t that the most wonderful article? Did you click on the scholarship link before you came back here?

This would be the best part of having won the lottery, reading a story like this one, and before you even get to page 2 of the story, click on that scholarship link and donate your little heart out. I could not only pay for their education, but pay for their access to appropriate legal counsel, and perhaps alleviate some of their families’ problems. And what would it cost? Not even half a million. If I just paid for their school, it would only be about $200,000. I’m assuming their legal counsel would add another $100,000, lawyers being lawyers.

Incredibly, there are those who read this story and who have a different reaction. There are those who read this article and take umbrage that anyone would want to allow these illegal immigrants access to American education. Why should we allow these wetbacks to take one of the limited state school slots in place of one of “our own”? Why should we spend our tax dollars on these people, these undocumented losers who sneak across our borders and steal jobs from honest Americans?

Or, to put it another way that probably the wingnuts wouldn’t, why would a nation like ours seek to embrace the best and brightest minds we can find and provide for their future, here, with us?

I put my money on the future with the best and the brightest.