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A Modest Proposal* — To alleviate stress caused by the threat of nuclear war

11/3/2017

For over seventy years, citizens of the world have struggled to accommodate the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Regardless of how imminent or distant the threat may seem, fiery images of an H-bomb endgame glow radiant in our hearts, minds, and sinews.

We’ve all heard the nuclear news: After decades of proliferation, an escalating atomic firefight could incinerate us within seconds.

The atomic era’s brief but impactful history has drawn humanity into an existential freak out. In response, we’ve constructed all manner of defenses to insulate ourselves against the terror of The Bomb.

We’ve been told that those who control nuclear weapons systems have developed elaborate fail-safe mechanisms to prevent a nuclear “mistake.” We’ve woven our own byzantine web of bomb-bred gallows humor. We’ve laughed at our plight, shrugged our shoulders, and mumbled “to hell with it.” A lucky few resolve to live for today and forget about tomorrow. Over time, many of us, aided by the end of the Cold War and media denial, have allowed nuclear fears to fade… until now.

Today, the specter of thermonuclear devastation has raised its ugly heads. No, that’s not a typo. The doomsday scenario has doubled down. Two nuke-wielding leaders currently prance across the world stage, lending a macabre significance to the phrase “two heads are better than one.”

The two heads are screwed into the necks of two bumptious males licensed to commit bilateral nuclear annihilation. Both Leaders have terrible haircuts, odd sartorial preferences, and an inclination toward cruelty. Both are impulsive, reactive, unpredictable, and — despite the power they wield — tightly wrapped in dangerously thin skins. Together, they have resurrected our terror of nuclear holocaust.

Consider our plight. Thugs have already kidnapped our government, creating all manner of waste, destruction, sadness and disgust. Now the public is expected to accommodate two nuke-wielding lunatics. To alleviate this near-intolerable anxiety, I propose that we encourage Our Leader be the first to drop The Big One.

Of course, it’s possible that encouraging such an act could result in uncontrolled retaliation. According to a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), nine nations — the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — possess approximately 16,300 nuclear weapons. The above mentioned, preemptive gambit might spread to other nuke-wielding nations.

Therefore, I’d like to add another element to my proposal. Rather than risk retaliation and planet-wide extinction, I propose that Our Leader should ignore the threats of his counterpart and bomb one of his own cities...now.

A preemptive, self-inflicted nuclear attack would remove any element of surprise from Our Leader’s Asian counterpart. Such an attack would eliminate all possible hit-and-miss missile mishaps and ensure that we didn’t give the other guy a chance to sucker punch Our Leader and his citizenry.

On a more sophisticated level, a national genocide by Our Leader might partially alleviate the hostility he bears toward the American people, whom he profoundly mistrusts and hates. Accordingly, he might experience a newfound sense of benevolence.

Before we dismiss my proposal out of hand, consider the consequences of a unilateral domestic nuclear attack. The most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, Russia’s 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, would only destroy a single city. Chances are the weapons thrown by Our Leader would be much smaller.

A 20-megaton weapon would ignite a fireball with a radius of just 260 meters, only the size of a few football fields. Yes, it would create a deep crater, fatal nuclear radiation would embrace a 12-mile radius, and the resulting fireball would inflict third-degree burns to creatures in a larger area.

However, if detonated over lower Manhattan, a 20-megaton device would kill only about 600,000 people and the fallout would barely reach central Connecticut.

Perhaps a less populous area of our nation might provide a wiser target for our Leader’s domestic outburst. Instead of targeting Manhattan, why not nuke Kansas City or any other mid-sized American metropolis? Better yet, why not drop The Big One on a rural area, for example the state of Nebraska. Yes, the loss would be difficult to absorb in the short run, but after only a few decades, life could resume in all but the most devastated areas.

Imagine the relief: It’s often more practical to confront a reality than to wallow in theoretical fears. The survivors of a self-inflicted nuclear attack would adjust and find resourceful ways to go on living, knowing first-hand that the scope and scale of a nuclear blast was limited, in contrast to the relentless and continuing contemplation of such madness before the fact.

Finally, even if Our Leader failed to find his lust satiated by attacking his own nation he could be impeached for treason and executed for war crimes and that, dear reader, would put an end to this misery.

In closing, I wish to underscore the sincerity of my intent. I am not involved financially in any aspect of nuclear technology for war or for peace. I have no affiliations with contractors, large or small, that might profit from sealing off the irradiated areas of a nuclear blast. And, to the best of my knowledge, I have no enemies residing in Kansas City or Nebraska. I make this modest proposal only in the interests of the greater good.

*Based on Jonathan Swift's satirical essay (1729).

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Nuclear Myopia — We'll all go together when we go

10/20/2017

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Today, we may be on the verge of nuclear war, perhaps closer to a midnight endgame than ever before. But a strange complacency seems to snooze behind this horrific possibility. Many Americans don’t seem to mind the prospect of a nuclear shoot-out.

According to the Washington Post, a recent poll found that a whopping 46 percent of Republicans would support a preemptive strike on North Korea.

In addition, a heart-pounding 36 percent of Democrats and Independents would support dropping The Big One on Kim Jong Un and — of course — the brat dictator’s countrymen and women.

Do current nuke enthusiasts understand that a nuclear attack incinerates everything — flora and fauna, country and city, earth and sky in a blinding orb of heat (540k degrees farenheit) traveling at near the speed of light? That the radiation scattered by a nuclear blast remains fatal for decades, centuries, and millennia, causing cancer, birth defects, and mutation?

Baffled by this “whatever” nuke-‘em attitude, I explored the demographics of the poll above. Who wants to nuke Kim Jong Un?

Seventeen percent of males aged 18 – 34
Twenty-six percent of males aged 35 – 49
Thirty-four percent of males aged 50 – 64

Not surprisingly, women, blacks, and hispanics were less trigger-happy and — most telling — far fewer males over 65 wanted to unleash nuclear holocaust.

Pondering these figures led me to speculate: Many of the people featured in the percentages above were too young to experience the nuclear madness of the 1950s and ‘60s. Without the visceral portent of thermonuclear war, are younger citizens more liable to shrug off the prospects of nuclear cataclysm?

As children of the Cold War, we spent much of our youth surrounded by the threat of nuclear warfare. We watched dozens of 50 megaton mushroom clouds blossom fiery orange, red, and yellow across the covers of Time and Life magazines.

We sat in front of the television and watched the Nevada desert light up with nuclear tests televised with great joviality by NBC's morning show talk host Dave Garroway and his simian sidekick, J. Fred Muggs.

At school we were taught to duck and cover under our desks, as if holding your head down and sticking your ass in the air was a survival technique.

The Khruschev-Kennedy kiloton dual delivered more fiery fears. Our bomb had to be bigger than their bomb.

These early threat-fests terrified us. The awesome power of the bomb struck us all deep in our preteen hearts and minds. Duck and cover seemed the height of folly. We were all going to die in a millisecond of blinding light.

We shivered, lay awake at night, wrapped our psyches in denial, or rendered nuclear annihilation as absurd, hilarious, incomprehensible. Regardless of our contortions, the warheads proliferated, a nuke-driven space race accelerated, but the specter that hung over us never quite disappeared.

Perhaps, for those who came later, now in their fifties and early sixties, the threat of nuclear war has grown dim. During the nuclear-free Vietnam War, today’s nuke enthusiasts would have been infants or children. Reagan scared the world with his Star Wars proliferation plans but the Cold War ended — not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Today, we are back head-to-head with the Russian remnants of the former Soviet Union. We have two lunatics vomiting nuclear bombast.

Perhaps, without that deep-seated sense-memory of mushroom-cloud, Cold War terror, younger Americans have no way to comprehend what might happen if either Donald J. Trump or Kim Jong Un decided to plunge us into the nuclear darkness.

To them, I offer a light-hearted but ominous tune by Tom Lehrer, MIT mathematician and Cold War musical satirist as a wake-up call from the past. "We'll all go together when we go," folks.

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Sputnik

1/23/2016

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We lived at the edge of a forest in Massachusetts. The hay field across the road served as our own planetarium, surrounded by stone walls and maples. From there, the night sky unfolded for us: an unusual moon, the northern lights, an eclipse, but now. . . who could predict?

“Tonight!” My old man shouted. “Sputnik! It’s going to orbit right over our heads. We’ll be able to see it.”

“I thought it was the size of a basketball,” I mumbled. “How’re we gonna see it?”

“It’s a sphere,” my old man said. “It magnifies reflected light.”

“Come on,” I said.

“Look it up. Plug in the ratio of lumens as a function of sphere circumference and distance. . .”

“Distance?” I grumbled. “Distance to what?”

“In this particular situation, my boy. . .” My old man liked to imitate W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny. That night he was W.C. Fields. “The distance from satellite to earth and sun to satellite, the circumference of the sphere. From our vantage point (nobody said POV back then), it should look like an orbiting Venus.”

“Won’t that be lovely,” my mother chimed in. “Venus. Like Botticelli, in that clamshell, for the whole world to see.” My mother was an exhibitionist.

My old man pushed away from the table. He lit the sticky-sweet, cherry-stink tobacco in his five-dollar, Huckleberry Finn, corncob pipe and gazed up at the darkening sky. “For the whole world to see.”

Most people looked upon the unblinking mini-moon as a threat. The Soviets had shot the damned thing up there with a super-powerful spaceship, proving they could send anything anywhere. The Ruskie satellite orbited the heads of humans worldwide, a lighthouse for the devil. “If the commies can do that,” our authorities told us, “they can do whatever they want.” They would then elaborate, giving specifics about whatever aspect of the communist threat was being featured that week.

My old man was beyond all that. “Paranoid bullshit,” he said. A backhand flick of the wrist dismissed the partisan fears. “Give it time. That little ball is going to unite the world.”

Now the family stood in the meadow gazing upwards into the sprawled bowl of stars. Would Sputnik drift? Would it float? Would it crawl so slow as to render its orbit imperceptible, the way the planets sidled across the night sky? Or would it fail, descend, and burn out like a meteor?

“There!” I shouted, my voice adolescent and shrill. A small orb, gleaming with mercurial clarity, broke over the treetops from the east and glided, slow, smooth, and silent across the cold New England sky.

“Jiminy!” my mother said.

“Just like a tiny Venus,” my sister said.

“That’ll make the Pentagon crap in its pants,” my old man said.

Amid Cold War infestation, my old man managed to impart a love for the patterns and structures and physics of astronomy in his son. Despite my resistance, my father’s spiritual, non-religious enthusiasm for the music of the celestial spheres had infected me with curiosity about the world, the planets, the solar system, the galaxy, and how the entire Universe might operate.

I thought sputnik was beautiful beyond belief.

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Digger Bread — you had to give it away for free

1/19/2016

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I graduated Harvard and never looked back. The previous year, I had auditioned for the San Francisco Mime Troupe (pronounced ‘meem,’ not ‘myme’ — a long story in itself) and had been invited to join this wild radical theater company that performed free shows in the parks of the city.

Caught up in San Francisco’s free-city anarchy and resistance, seduced by its poets and folksingers and revolutionaries, I had been eager to turn my back on the red-brick traditions of Harvard. To hell with the diploma; I was gonna make radical theater.

The Mime Troupe’s director, R.G. Davis, a theater visionary with a penchant for rebellious thinking, got wind of my intentions. He kicked me down the stairs of the Troupe’s second-story studio and told me not to come back until I graduated. I thought it odd that the radical R.G. was so adamant about a college degree. Wasn’t this the ‘hip’ thing to do? I argued. Turn on, tune in, and drop out?

My question enraged R.G. That’s media bullshit, he growled. Drop out and you disappear. Turning on is irrelevant. Grow your hair, shave your head, no matter. Get high, just don’t forget to bring the ammunition. We commit, he continued. We engage. We breathe the fresh air of the parks and give free shows to the people. Drop out and you won’t be good for anything but smoking dope and playing guitars. We got plenty of that. We need thinkers. So get the hell out of here and learn how to think.

Can I come back after I graduate? I asked from the bottom of the stairs.

Yeah, yeah, Harvard, Davis replied. Come on back… next year. If there is one. Things were feeling pretty apocalyptic in those days, with napalm news clips coming back from Vietnam and American cities burning with uprising.

I finished my final year at Harvard, glowing with the expectation of joining the Troupe when I returned. I gave no thought to grad school or the draft. There was a war to stop and they could put me in jail before I’d kill farmers in a third-world country. Hell no. I was headed back to that rag-tag group of actors and poets, anarchists and carpenters, communists and comics who had set out to change the world with theater. A tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

At the dawn of the over-publicized Summer of Love, I trucked back to San Francisco in a rattling red GMC pickup that consumed more oil than gas. I rejoined the Troupe and landed in a Digger household in Diamond Heights.

The Diggers featured a loose collection of wanderers, free spirits, and anarchists who took their name from a movement in Cromwellian England. The English Diggers had believed in economic justice, an egalitarian contract with the flora and fauna of the planet, and open sexuality. The English Diggers lived largely in rural, utopian communes and developed a self-sustaining livelihood.

In the 1700s, the landed aristocracy descended upon the Diggers when the utopians “liberated” English common land originally granted to the underclass for grazing and gardening. As Europe collapsed and Guy Fawkes rose to prominence, the aristocracy clamped down on the poor. The Diggers were attacked and executed for their liberating behavior. Three hundred years before the Summer of Love, the English Diggers had opened the door for my San Francisco brothers and sisters to liberate San Francisco.

So the Diggers re-birthed themselves in San Francisco, this time in urban communes, largely in the Haight Ashbury. They had taken the name, spirit, and philosophy from their British forebears. The latter-day Diggers launched a contemporary assault on the bastions of private property, conventional thinking, and repressed libidos. Armed with the slogan “one percent free” they set out to create alternatives to the rules, regulations, and expectations of a big American city at the pinnacle — or nadir, if you will — of post-war hegemony.

As the ranks of dreamy hippies descended on San Francisco, the kids found that life was not as Timothy Leary or the Beatles had described. They descended by the tens of thousands and found themselves at the mercy of city and a culture that was simultaneously amazed by and terrified of the roaming youngsters who were looking for the Yellow Submarine.

In resistance to the still-expanding consumer culture, Diggers maintained they could create an alternative society that would depend on neither profit nor war. They set up a Free Store to distribute contributed clothing, blankets, appliances, and abandoned furniture. Need a change of clothes after escaping Kansas City? Head for the Free Store. They set up a Free Clinic, a coterie of Free Presses, helped spawn the Mime Troupe’s free shows in the parks and…

… the Diggers launched a Free Bakery.

Ecstatic with my post-graduate work, studying mime and movement, building shows from scratch, stomping on the boards of a commedia stage before a lawn full of laughing freaks, I lived happily on Mime Troupe wages — twenty-five dollars a week, raised by passing the hat after the show. The Troupe worked nonstop at the gritty warehouse studio leaving no time for a job and no money for food or clothing. No matter, I dropped by the Free Store to exchange one blue-jeaned, plaid-shirted uniform for another. I fought off several bouts of social disease thanks to the ministrations of the Free Clinic, and broke my bread free of charge in the Golden Gate Panhandle, thanks to the Free Bakery.

The first Digger Free Bakery began in the basement of a church on Waller Street. To make Digger bread for free, you need to scavenge free but healthy ingredients and tools. Baking bread for free took ingenuity and the Diggers were long on ingenuity. The church lent its ovens to the endeavor and Digger bakers hustled free whole wheat flour from a Hunters Point wholesaler who gave them damaged sacks. Whole wheat Digger bread broke the mold [sic]: at that time, whole wheat flour and organic foods were largely a thing of the future.

The most ingenious characteristic of Digger Bread was its shape. With no money to buy large baking pans — bakery brothers and sisters collected one- and two-pound coffee cans. They’d grease the cans with vegetable oil and mix flour and salt in warm water to nurture the yeast. The yeast they kept in cultures so they wouldn’t have to buy more. They’d add sugar, honey, molasses, anything sweet, even dried fruit that they collected on their early- morning runs to the city’s sprawling produce market.

The produce marketeers looked forward to visits from the Digger scavengers. They began to applaud the Digger mission. After all, the wholesale workers shared common purpose with the colorful diplomats from the Haight-Ashbury — to feed the hungry. They set aside fruits, vegetables, and grains that quietly dropped off the market’s loading docks and found themselves joining bubbling soups and stews in the cauldrons that Digger cooks brewed, lading out a bowl to anybody hungry, daily in the parks.

In the beginning, you had to slice the first Digger bread by hitting it with a hammer. Some folks claimed that Digger Bread could also be used to build retaining walls and walkways. Nonetheless, it was free and for many that meant sustenance where none other was to be had.

Gradually, the Digger bakers improved their technique and Digger bakeries opened up, six or seven of them around Northern California. Anyone could become a Digger baker. The only stipulation? You had to give it away.

In the spirit of their ingenious determination to create a free society, Diggers brought food to the Americas, those who had been spit from the belly of the beast and those who chose to walk away from the American Dream. Digger bread was tough, nourishing, went down warm, smelled of molasses, and it was one hundred percent free.

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What is to be Done? Discovering climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

9/7/2015

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Did you know that monarch butterflies flew south in the winter, just like birds? As with many of her novels and essays, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior sails on the wings of the novelist’s scientific alter ego. Flight Behavior excels in using the microcosm of small lives in flux — human and otherwise — to explore how we grasp and respond to macro concepts and realities so daunting as to appear overwhelming, e.g., the consequences of climate change.

But in Flight Behavior, Kingsolver doesn’t stop at exploring impact. With typical courage, the author explores how living beings confront seemingly impossible phenomena and struggle to address the universal existential question that presses all species…

What is to be done?

Flight Behavior follows Dellarobia Turnbow, a young mother of two who — en route to an uneasy assignation — discovers a migration of Monarch butterflies that has flown astray and crash landed by the millions in the Appalachian forest above her home.

Kingsolver introduces this environmental calamity with mystery, through the eyes of her bright, quick-witted, poorly educated protagonist so that the reader struggles alongside Dellarobia to understand the powerful apparition that has landed in her familiar forest.

The unhappy young mother’s bewilderment is tinged with irony: Dellarobia left her glasses at home to please the manifestation of her restlessness — a local lineman hunk. As she climbs through the forest, the newly arrived Monarchs appear to her as a lake of fire, unidentifiable, anomalous, possibly a warning against her sinful intent.

The clandestine tryst with the lineman is never consummated but a new love begins for Dellarobia — the discovery of her rapacious curiosity and deep-running wonder for a world beyond her child-father husband, overbearing in-laws, and the demands of survival in a churchy community ravaged by chronic rural poverty.

Word spreads quickly. Something odd has happened in Dellarobia ‘s hardscrabble farming township. The community first responds with denial and pragmatism. How will Dellarobia’s husband and father-in-law log the mountain top with an infestation of bugs covering the trees? Who cares about a bunch of butterflies? There’s plenty more where they came from… right?

Ironically, Kingsolver sets the Monarchs demise —an event of sudden and gigantic proportions — in a community long-besieged by soggy, deviant weather that has delivered a near-Biblical saturation to the delicate landscape, ruining crops and making life tougher than ever for its hard-working tenants.

The unprecedented rain also serves to introduce Kingsolver’s exploration of how humans cloak themselves in denial and blind faith in a world where life had been defined by everyday life and the predictable cycle of the seasons.

Denial and lack of understanding play major roles in Flight Behavior. Her characters are not dumb; they’re complex and worthy of high regard. The women are stoic or whipsaw sharp, the men stubborn but often thoughtful and surprisingly vulnerable. But Kingsolver’s butterflies numb their sensibilities and intelligence, despite their deep understanding of the prominent role nature plays in their lives.

So now, when nature goes awry in Dellarobia’s world, Kingsolver serves up folks too busy, too poor, and too religion-bound to recognize the significance of the Monarch's confused arrival. Besides, what are you gonna do? How do you fix a world that has run amuck?

Enter the dialectic forces of the media and science. Feathertown’s citizens may be annoyed by their majestic, orange-winged squatters, but the outside world has gotten word of the aberration. The beleaguered insects' newsworthiness appears in the form of an inevitably blonde, disinformed, and ambitious broadcast journalist who corners Dellarobia.

Dellarobia awkwardly spills her jumbled but intelligent reflections for the charming lady, with Kingsolver making sure we see both versions: Dellarobia’s awkward truth versus the media-ized outcome where our journalist personifies Dellarobia as a simple but intuitive native, a sexualized witness to the profundity of the Monarchs, her words yanked from her mouth and twisted into a separate reality.

Science arrives in the form of Ovid Byron, a tall, Jamaican lepidopterist who appears unannounced in Feathertown, makes a preliminary foray into the forest, and returns with a research party and a field station. Ovid’s return brings with it the realization that the aberration in the forest is earth-shaking. Ovid’s exhaustive scientific focus also provides Kingsolver a voice that explains what the Monarch’s distorted flight path means for the planet and with a scientist's mind that gives us a window into the deep, darkness that often comes with knowledge.

Ovid’s exhaustive scientific focus also provides Kingsolver a voice that explains what the Monarch’s distorted flight path means for the planet. For Dellarobia, Ovid reflects the claustrophobic inadequacy of her own life and reveals the excitement of an urgent new world represented by the troubled Monarchs and the exactitude of scientific inquiry. Through Ovid’s carefully moderated response to the Monarch displacement and Kingsolver’s detailed and fascinating description of how a scholar studies a natural phenomenon, we see Dellarobia begins to absorb and codify her own response to this earth-changing butterfly visit.

The Monarch’s presence resonates throughout the tight community. The local pastor labels Dellarobia’s discovery as a vision. Her judgmental mother-in-law struggles with the concept of no return in a world where seasonal repetition and weekly sermons has established the rhythm of the universe. Her husband opens his eyes to his child-bride’s power, and the village patriarch yields his forest clearcut plans with grace and dignity.

Perhaps the high point of the novel comes when Ovid Byron locks horns — or antennae — with the blonde, assumptive media maven. He shoots down her media clichés and assumptions and banishes her from the scene. But always, Dellarobia’s heart and mind beats at the center of Flight Behavior, giving us a window into the reality of the unrealizable — that our planet is changing, fundamentally, drastically, and forever.

Kingsolver is one of my favorite novelists: she inevitably weaves deep social meaning into the fabric of her skilled and gorgeous works. But, as with many writers who have reached well-deserved heights, she needs editing. In Flight Behavior, she indulges us — and possibly herself — with a near-endless chapter in a goodwill store, describing in revolving detail the items for sale, the speculated-upon origins, and her kids' reactions to her 'yeses and nos. The scene serves a purpose, Dellarobia discusses plot points with her sidekick, Crystal but ten pages would have covered the territory; the other 40 seem over the top.

Conversely, toward the end of the book, Kingsolver seems to rush to the finish, using narrative to briefly describe life-changing scenes and circumstances.

Editorial problems notwithstanding, As Dellarobia moves into her next chapter, beyond the end of Flight Behavior, the reader is left with Kingsolver's subtle but definitive answer to the question "What is to be done?" Plenty.

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A CUBAN DIARY — Periodo Especial

12/18/2014

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Periodo Especial hails from a collection of short travel pieces drafted while I traveled through Cuba as a writer, musician, and theatrical performer.

SANTIAGO DE CUBA, 1993 — The green room, like the rest of the Cabildo Theater, suffers from deprivation. The embargo has been relentless and now the Soviet Union is gone. Fidel calls it a special period, the Periodo Especial and assures his people that they will survive. Water stains tattoo the ceiling where a single bulb glows in the brown-out of a Cuban night. The women whisper. There is no toilet paper in the bathroom.

We have been traveling since yesterday morning when we left Miami for Havana. Now, in Santiago de Cuba, the ancient city at the other end of the island, it is midnight. Our musicians don’t have the drums or amplifiers we asked for, the technical director for the theater is not present, and our hosts are both drunk.

Eduardo Uribazo, the artistic director of the Cabildo, is a frail, handsome man of sixty-five years with narrow Spanish features and thin hair slicked straight back. He is flanked by a hawk of a man with a bushy crew cut. The hawkish man sits erect in a straight-backed chair, hands on skinny thighs, a cigar burning between his fingers. He has not been introduced.

“Bienvenidos al Santiago de Cuba,” Uribazo begins. I catch fragments, a word in the phrasing, Teatro Cabildo, the festival, and our “espiritu, valor, y corazon…” something, something “…contra el bloqueo.” I translate Uribazo’s flowery language to mean our courage to defy the bloqueo, or blockade, the word the Cubans use to refer to the embargo placed around Cuba by Eisenhower so many, many years before.

“Gracias,” I reply. Of all the cast, I am the only one willing to try speaking Spanish. Fifteen minutes after she landed in Havana, Sonia, our Newyorican conguera, decided that we were an embarrassment to her Latinisma. She has distanced herself from the entourage, sitting on the floor in the corner, arms folded across her sweat-stained blouse. All this, despite the fact that we are traveling with Shishir, a dark East Indian from Madagascar, Paige, a svelte but distinctly Chinese-American actress, and Gus, our African-American director. The Cubans have welcomed us all equally with open arms, but Sonia refuses to participate, leaving me in this embarrassing position.

“Pero, es necesario a preparer,” I continue. “Uh, we would like to know a dondé estan the drums. Para tocar la musica.” I drop the bumbling lingo and mime the playing of congas. “You said they would be here.”

Uribazo smiles. The Hawk glares.

“Fuck you Sonia,” I mutter in an aside.

“What do you want from me, hijo,” she hisses. “They talk so fucking fast, I don’t understand any better than you do.”

My friends, my colleagues, my wife the playwright, thirteen actors and musicians, all cross-eyed with fatigue, turn to our Cuban hosts.

The Hawk leans over and speaks rapidly to Uribazo. Sonia is right. Nobody speaks Spanish as hard and fast as the Cubans.

Uribazo nods curtly. He refuses to look at his compatriot.

Cigar smoke spikes the room.

Uribazo smiles at me and closes his eyes. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says and turns to the Hawk.

I catch something about a music school. “Una escuela de musica,” I mimic. “A donde es…” Is that where the instruments will come from? I wonder why the equipment we requested so far in advance is not already at the theater. My collar is soaked with sweat.

“Cuando?” I repeat, turning to address the Hawk. “Es necesario a rehearsar. Uh…You know, to rehearse. Es possiblé, en la mañana?”

An actor sneezes, startling us all.

A second weary trouper laughs at the absurdity. The company needs to meet with the theater’s tech director. We need to rig the drops, set up the instruments, rehearse specials, do a sound check and run-through before show time, less than twenty-four hours away.

The Hawk pokes Uribazo and fires off another burst. It sounds as if he is asking and answering his own questions.

Uribazo glares at the Hawk, spits back a reply and turns to include us all. He smiles warmly but adrenaline spritzes into my bloodstream.

“Una pregunta, por favor,” Uribazo says, holding up a single, thin finger. “A question,” he enunciates in careful English.

A ripple passes around the circle of tired performers. Confusion, aggravation, despair register one, two, three across tired faces. They are sweating like pigs in the low-ceilinged room.

“Here it comes,” says the actress to my right.

My wife looks down at the back of her hands and places them in her lap. She says nothing.

“Yes?” I reply.

“Tiene usted una precisa?” Uribazo motions vaguely with his hand, a listless, resigned gesture. His eyes go back in his head for a moment and I realize how drunk he is.

“Una precisa?” I look to Sonia.

She shrugs. I can see that she doesn’t know the word.

“No comprendo,” I say.

“Una historia corta, una synopsis dramatica,” the Hawk explains. It is the first time he has spoken. His voice sounds like gravel. “Una chica.”

“A short one,” Sonia explains. “Like a script or something.” Maybe she’s coming around.

“Para la commission,” Uribazo says.

“Ahhhh,” I utter aloud. Of course. Now I understand. Uribazo has been unable to persuade his colleague that we are not the enemy. Who is to say that we are not propagandists, sent here by our state department to demoralize the Cuban people?

I imagine these two men, arguing, trying to settle the matter before we arrive. Hopefully, Uribazo has defended our right to let the work speak for itself. The Hawk has kept his guard up. Now he is scrutinizing our appearance and behavior for any signs of counterrevolutionary intent.

“Of course,” I say. “Es posible. Una historia dramatica. No problema.” I turn to the Hawk. “I hope you understand,” I say. “No one sent us.” I give up the lingual butchery. “Our government is useless in situations like this. We came here of our own free will. We admire and respect your revolution and look forward to sharing our work with you.”

The Hawk stares straight at me, eyes bright, unwavering. Americans have strafed their fishing boats, poisoned their livestock, bombed the national telephone exchange, withheld medicine from children.

“And the instruments?” I ask. “Our rehearsal schedule?”

“Quién sabe,” says the Hawk. He stands. The ash falls from the end of his cigar. It does not disintegrate on impact but lies on the frayed carpet, a tiny, gray barrel of integrity.

I nod and we all rise, stepping out into the narrow street. Night walkers pass us like ghosts in the gentle darkness. We have come all this way with the best of intentions, thirteen performers, costumes, instruments, makeup, and a stage set stuffed into two trunks and a duffel bag. Now we float unannounced through the eerie, unlit streets of Santiago de Cuba. Sonia walks behind, separate, proud.

Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but laugh.

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Reflections on the Cultural Revolution via the poet Wang Ping

11/8/2014

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I recently met the poet Wang Ping* via twitter, a social medium that — at its best — can illuminate the time-space continuum and all its riches.

Wang Ping had been a child during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and wrote a poem — “Flash of Selfish Consciousness” — about her experiences as an “excellent Red Guard of Chairman Mao.”

At a live reading, Wang dedicated her poem, "Flash of Selfish Consciousness" to the memory of the cultural revolution. “I grew up there,” she said, “and for 10 years I had to write self criticism every day… since I came here I never had to do it and sometimes I get kind of nostalgic.”

Wang Ping’s poem — complete with ironically understated Red Guard vignettes and whimsical snatches of rhetoric from Mao’s teachings — sparked recollections of our own cultural revolution here in America.

In the late 1960s, amidst the effusion of hippie and countercultures, American artists joined their political activist compatriots to celebrate the teachings of Chairman Mao. We adopted the red star as an icon, studied from Mao’s little red book, discussed his writings on politics and art and called ourselves cultural workers. We considered ourselves to be revolutionary artists, practicing in theater, music, poetry, journalism.

As theater artists, my cohorts and I had already studied mime and movement and adopted the shrewd, bawdy, class-conscious style of 16th-century Italian street theater, commedia dell’arte. Our leadership possessed artistic vision, skill, experience, and strategic savvy.

Commedia’s grotesque, lascivious postures made a perfect counterpoint to the obscene scenarios of our mid-century Machiavellian nation-state — anarchist thespian bandits vs. Amerika at war.

Our theater troupe formed liaisons with the Students for a Democratic Society, a powerful student movement dedicated to bombing Amerika with social justice and halting the Vietnam War. Everywhere we took our commedia performances, campuses exploded. We didn’t cause the revolution… we were the revolution!

Student organizers greeted us with multitudes of protestors; we greeted them with our theater of insurrection. The cops weren’t ready for any of it. They responded to our power with violence.

The troupe had become a threat — the power of art. We thrived on our role as provocateurs. On campus, student power broadcast us over the radio, scattered our leaflets, packed university auditoriums. When it was over, they snuck us out of town in our unmarked vans. As with our dreams of Mao’s China, our mission had been victorious, romantic, and impossible to maintain.

Eager to keep our urgent revolution alive, we searched for models. We pored over Mao’s writings, practiced self-criticism, studied Maoist social realism in pieces like The Red Detachment of Women, one of the Eight Model Operas that dominated the Chinese national stage during the Cultural Revolution.

We believed that China’s young red guardians proved that a revolution could continue to evolve. In Mao’s brave new world, the young became the leaders while the leaders were sent to breathe the fresh air of the countryside and work with their hands.

Far from Mao’s China, we eerily mirrored the environment that surrounded Wang Ping the child. We adopted Mao’s rhetoric, practicing unity, struggle, unity.

“To rebel is to do the right thing,” Ping recited in her poem. In our troupe, we echoed her memorized lines. “Revolution is not an invitation to a party but a thunderstorm.”

Knowing but not knowing, the urgency of the war and the need for change drove the troupe into its own great leap forward. Armed with American ingenuity, inspired by Mao, our unholy cadre of actors massaged the Cultural Revolution into our radical theater collective.

Yes, the troupe needed to change, to adapt to shifting circumstances and the struggles within the antiwar movement, we moved to address our self-perceived stagnation. We chose — as had the young cadres of China’s cultural revolution — to turn our own leadership, with its vision, skill, and experience, out into the countryside.

Pressured, outnumbered, insulted and arrogant, our leaders retreated. Criticism, self-criticism took over for consensus. The troupe mounted many more pieces of insurrectionary theater but, in keeping with its adoption of social realism, its style became broader and lost depth. I dropped out of the collective, caught in an abysmal confusion between personal and political conflict.

Now — long after the contradictions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution emerged — I can’t help thinking that we — unlike Wang Ping, who resisted the forces around her with the canny innocence of childhood — had embraced "a flash of selfish consciousness" in a movement we knew too little about.

"No history, no self," my student's sweatshirt reads. "Know history, know self."

More about Wang Ping

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Kill the Messenger — How I met the film industry head on while Reagan’s handlers hooked America's longest-held hostages (in Iran) to a deadly and illegal overthrow of a Central American government and flooded our cities with coke 'n crack.

10/12/2014

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I see that Jeremy Renner is starring in "Kill the Messenger," a promising feature film about the destruction of an American journalist by the U.S. government and the Fourth Estate (New York Times, Washington Post, etc).

Why all the pressure on a single investigative journalist? Because the journalist, Gary Webb, was investigating the origins of the Iran-Contra scandal. Why my interest?

Because I wrote a similar screenplay about Iran-Contra and hope to see this critical story well-told on the silver screen.

Iran-Contra unfolded back in the mid-1980s, when South and Central America formed an always-necessary axis of evil for the Reagan administration. Back then, you could still do anything you in the name of anti-communism. And thanks to the post-Vietnam depression and the “Arab” oil embargo — the Middle Eastern hordes were once again our enemies.

Iran-Contra proved how effective ideological hysteria and xenophobia can push the American people to accept any outrage. This, I hope, is what “Kill the Messenger” is all about.

Back in 1986, government "advisers" coordinated a money-laundering scam designed to help the CIA, the weapons industry and the Reagan Admin fight an illegal war in Central America while they failed to negotiate the release of the longest-held American hostages in history, the U.S. embassy staff in Tehran.

Reagan's Central-American war was illegal; Congress had banned attempts at overthrowing Nicaragua's sovereign government. Reagan was doing it anyway.

Thanks to the manipulations of little-known Reagan denizens like Oliver North and Eliot Abrams, the scammed money flowed into a White House basement office from two very different directions.

Direction one — Our boys in the basement offered U.S.-made missiles and other weaponry to Iran, our sworn enemy who was still holding the U.S. embassy hostages.

Direction two — the CIA hooked up drug cartels north and south of our border to expedite the injection of force-fed cocaine into the United States. Profits flowed into Iran-Contra coffers.

The L.A. ghetto served as ground zero for this second effort and created a win-win situation for the CIA — crack helped destroy the social fabric and economy of a major, uppity African-American community while it generated cash for the Reagan-backed Contras.

Called "Freedom Fighters" by the Reagan Administration, the Contras were a rag-tag blend of child soldiers, rounded-up conscripts from Honduras and El Salvador and mercenaries led by American advisors and Nicaraguan military people displaced by Nicaragua's new socialist government.

Profit from the east/west guns-and-drugs caper was then funneled secretly into Central America via drug cartels to fund the Contras or "Freedom Fighters" as Reagan termed them. All of this was coordinated by former Marine Captain Oilver North and others out of the White House basement. Hard to believe? Yeah, well, as a friend once said, 'you can't make this shit up.'

As hopefully covered in “Kill the Messenger,” journalist Webb’s oft-denounced “Dark Alliance” reportage exposed the Reagan Iran-Contra caper. Once the White House, money-laundering deal was exposed, the thing went high profile very quickly, prompting a huge investigation of the CIA, the Reagan perps, and a major turnaround by the skeptical news media.

All this brings us back to "Kill the Messenger" and why I find the current re-surfacing of the scandal so fascinating.

Years ago, I wrote the same story in "Down to Sleep," a feature film script that began with the murder of an brash young reporter who had gotten too close to the Reagan/CIA Iran arms-to-cocaine, cash-from-ghetto scourge that was brokered through the White House basement.

I had first learned of all these shady dealings from a brief series of articles written for The Nation by investigative reporter Alexander Coburn, who was often right-on but — because he was such a curmudgeon — he was easily dismissed.

At the time, I was playing jazz in a Hilton Hotel. The drummer was as fascinated by this outrageous network as I was and we fed each other's brains from what we read as Iran-Contra was first exposed, stone by upturned stone.

I finished “Down to Sleep.” It needed work (they always do) but it as right as it was ragged and all they players were there. I got an agent interested. I thought it was weird when I pitched “Down to Sleep” that this very Brentwood purveyor knew about the early, obscure reports that were unfolding about Iran-Contra.

A week later — on the same day that a posse of LA cops were found 'not guilty' in the Rodney King beating and the city began to burn — the Brentwood agent told me to forget about it. She had just sold the script of another writer who had developed a script on the same subject.

Of course she knew what I was talking about in our pitch meeting — not from The Nation, but from the other writer.

After I stopped hollering, I drove away from the agent's office and sat down in my office, looking out at a nest a pair of doves had built in a tree just outside my desk window. I watched their still-featherless offspring totter around their treetop home. How sweet, I thought, how simple...

The phone rang. I picked up the receiver, loathe to relate, but I was in Hollywood. You never knew. A writer friend was on the line.

"Charlie, I will never have faith in this city again," she said, in tears.

"Tell me about it," I said. " My script..."

"Never mind that!" she snapped. "The Simi Valley jury found those LAPD guys who beat Rodney King..."

"Uh oh..."

"Not guilty. And all of South Central L.A. is going up in flames. Turn on your television." She hung up.

I didn't have to turn on the television. I could look out my office window, past the treetop with the baby doves in their nest and see the angry yellow smoke rising out of a community that had been driven mad by poverty, racism, and the CIA’s influx of crack cocaine.

So now, somebody has finally made a film about the man who uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal. Good. It's about time. Let’s hope “Kill the Messenger” lives up to its promise.

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Climate change and climate fiction — hope versus reality

9/28/2014

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A new fiction genre has sprung from the tortured brows of writers who see fiction as a tool for social change, want to sound a tocsin about climate change, or simply create a dismal future scenario. Just two years ago, climate fiction, or cli-fi, as it is known, could monger disasters with impunity or generate fanciful planet-wide redemption tales.

Today, my perceptions of the future have changed drastically with recent scientific surveys from U.S. and U.N. climate change research concluding we have passed the point of no return. Climate change is an indisputable and irreversible fact. These realities can render optimistic cli-fi writing a bit naïve. Still we must survive with hope. A case in point...

Ten years ago I wrote a cli-fi filmscript set in the near future. At that time, global warming, pollution, and energy depletion spiraled and a spate of disaster/dystopian films appeared on the scene and began raking in considerable profits for the culture industry.

My thoughts on the lure of disaster were validated by Walter Benjamin in a much earlier work, “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction (1936).” Here, Benjamin wrote that the culture industry’s penchant for creating dystopian and disaster films provides proof that “…[society’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.”

I began to contemplate a film story that would stand in contrast to the “What’s the use?” disaster litany of the culture industry and would foster “…the development of a credible, engaging feature-length film that depicts the overthrow of a dystopian, corporate-driven society by wilderness rebels an egalitarian, renewable, cyber-ingenious, multi-species society that reinhabits the corporate wastelands of the planet. The rebels, of course, emerge victorious, and the planet is theirs to renew.

Today, this scenario seems incredible. Where do we go from here?

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Endless War — Cops of the World

9/20/2014

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The United States grew to power because we could make stuff. As we grew better at making stuff, we could compete with England, France and other Old World colonial powers that we separated from.

By the beginning of the 20th century we were builders and bankers on a par with the biggest, baddest European colonialists, with the weight and muscle to back up our supremacy.

We crested on that massive, ethically rationalized shift in power and capital known as WWII. As we rolled into the Cold War, the United States had become the Boss of the World.

Now, all that is gone. We sold our industries to the highest offshore bidders and crippled our economy with tax breaks to the rich and to corporations. We redirected tax money from the working and middle classes from education and New Deal social services into war prep and weapons production. This tax flow siphoned capital from the general population into corporate and ruling-class coffers.

We auctioned off our elections and began to erode our civil liberties. The costly defeat in Vietnam and the 1973 Arab oil embargo underscored our vulnerability while we pretended our economic collapse wasn't happening.

Gradually, we began to build back our military strong suit by demonizing communism. Yes, we still played cards at the green baize table with the international chips and the the stacked decks, but we no longer played a dominant role in the world economy.

The Red Menace dematerialized. Without communism to combat, we were rudderless. We tried a war on drugs that has never succeeded and never ended. We tried to bully Central America for a while but there was no money in it.

We have degraded our work objectives from production to service to a series of short-lived bubbles — the dot.com explosion and the sub-prime real-estate fad are just two examples of the tragicomic rise and fall of phony economic boom... the bubble boom.

Now, when we elected Obama, we thought, "okay, we don't run the world anymore, but if he helps our crippled domestic well-being with a hand up to education, the environment, healthcare, and social equality, that will be enough." I never expected Obama would be in control of foreign policy but — we could enforce worldwide priorities.

In the midst of his efforts — many successful despite the worst Congressional obstruction in American history — President Obama has learned from the mess he inherited from the Bush Doctrine and the Neo Con manifesto. He has learned how to protect and serve globalization by serving the need for an endless war.

Today, despite the cost in lives, the distortion of our economy, the degradation of our morale and our integrity, we are really good at playing Cops of the World.

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Forward>>

A Modest Proposal* — To alleviate stress caused by the threat of nuclear war

Nuclear Myopia — We'll all go together when we go

Sputnik

Digger Bread — you had to give it away for free

What is to be Done? Discovering climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

A CUBAN DIARY — Periodo Especial

Reflections on the Cultural Revolution via the poet Wang Ping

Kill the Messenger — How I met the film industry head on while Reagan’s handlers hooked America's longest-held hostages (in Iran) to a deadly and illegal overthrow of a Central American government and flooded our cities with coke 'n crack.

Climate change and climate fiction — hope versus reality

Endless War — Cops of the World

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American Postcards: growing up absurd in the land of the free

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American Postcards: growing up absurd in the land of the freeCovidream 2.1Outside AgitatorsThe CrashArchives

American Postcards: growing up absurd in the land of the free

Covidream 2.1

Outside Agitators

The Crash

Archives