alias Bruce.

President Trump, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, and a week of atrocities

Tom McCarthy's Jan 28 Guardian piece is a good peek into President Donald Trump's jealous-toddler view of the world and what drives his policy moves, which are best understood as tantrums. What's most terrifying is that his triggers for his despicable acts rest so trivially, and even randomly, on perceived personal slights and disrespect (does the trajectory of Trump's weeklong tear have anything to do with media having dissed his tiny little inauguration crowd?).

 

Maybe it is ever thus with tyrants. But Trump does seem a wicked prototype for the pasty postindustrial piggycrat. He is eerily reminiscent of Dune's Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (below), right down to the first name and the iridescent hair. Call him King Twitter Thumbs. The tub of lard and lies whose tweets kill people.

 

 

Here is an excerpt from McCarthy's piece on this week of atrocities from His Grand Petulance:

 

Donald Trump's first week: carnage, both real and imagined

Tom McCarthy in New York

 

 

Saturday 28 January 2017 10.38 ESTLast modified on Saturday 28 January 201717.00 ES

What started with an ominous inauguration speech has ended with executive orders on everything from immigration to banning refugees and reigniting the fossil fuel industry. What does it mean for his presidency?

 

The crowd was small, the weather was bad and the speech, which described “American carnage”, was dire. For the tens of millions who voted against him and countless concerned others, Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States felt ominous, no matter how widely Barack Obama smiled and no matter how gracefully he and Michelle Obama made the transition from hosts to departing guests.

 

The feeling of foreboding did not last. It was overtaken within hours by the realization, at the arrival of the first of the new president’s executive actions, that the most outrageous campaign promises Trump had made to the smallest core of his supporters were now official US policy, or about to be.

 

Within a week, the rally chant “build the wall!” had morphed into a phrase published on White House stationery: “impassable physical barrier”. A proposed ban on Muslim immigrants took shape as a suspension of visa programs from countries that, as Trump put it, “have tremendous terror”. Grumbling about excessive government regulation had become, in one document, an exhortation to bureaucrats to help an oil company skip the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

 

“He’s delivering the goods to his core constituency in a really visible way,” said John T Woolley, head of the American presidency project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But there are a lot of things that he’s raising that may be above what he truly has the ability to do.”

 

Seven days into his presidency, the accumulation of Trump’s official actions, at the rate of as many as five a day, has created a new national reality on central policy concerns from the environment to voting rights to international commitments to immigration, healthcare and trade.

 

“You have to consider this a pretty aggressive use of executive power early on,” said Julian E Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “Using it not only on one marquee issue, which presidents often do, but on a series of major campaign issues, all within just a few days.

 

“So it’s rapid-fire, but more importantly, each one is a pretty significant decision.”

 

More difficult to assess than the new president’s official actions, but for many Americans just as significant, has been the impact on the public of Trump’s simple presence in office – the finally inescapable fact, as it were, of Donald Trump as president.

 

During the campaign, Trump’s lies about the fake scourge of voter fraud, his vain obsession with the size of his crowds (and his hands), and his explosions of bile and irrelevance on Twitter could be semi-ignored as the faults of a mercurial political figure who was quite likely, at least, to lose.

 

Now Trump is in the Oval Office and his lies are voiced by a press secretary standing behind the White House seal in the Brady briefing room. It was there that Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, falsely declared on the day after the swearing-in that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period”. Trump’s audience was in fact significantly smaller than Obama’s 2009 crowd, but members of the media who tried to brandish evidence of the fact were shouted down.

 

Spicer rolled out another whopper days later, informing the country that the president still (wrongly) believed millions of votes had been illegally cast in November. As supporting evidence, he pointed to a 2012 research report on voter fraud, prompting the author of the report to categorically deny that the report said any such thing.

 

“Of those votes cast, none of them come to me,” Trump told ABC News a day later, embroidering his fantasy. “They would all be for the other side. None of them come to me.”

 

For Americans who doubt his leadership, just as disturbing as Trump’s new freedom to spout untruths with significantly inflated authority were early reports on his conduct behind the scenes, as he made his first decisions as the most powerful individual on Earth.

 

Repeatedly, Trump threw thunderbolts from his Twitter account – threatening to “send in the Feds!” to stop violence in Chicago and impugning Chelsea Manning – immediately following negative coverage of those topics on Fox News, which Trump told the New York Times he watches morning and night.

 

It was TV coverage of his small inauguration crowd that prompted Trump to trot out Spicer. The bad press had not allowed the president to “enjoy” his first weekend in the White House as he felt he deserved, the Associated Press quoted “one person who has spoken with him” as saying. Trump’s decision to act on voter fraud was inspired, Trump told members of Congress, by a conversation with a German golfer.

 

If Trump’s character is immutable, however, his executive actions may not be. His orders have the power to guide the conduct of federal agencies and officials, but cannot contravene existing law.

 

Woolley said: “The question always is – and this is a real question for Trump – whether the president is going beyond the scope of the law, whether he’s infringing on congressional power, and whether he’s infringing on the divides between national, state and local power.

 

“There’s going to be a festival of lawsuits about almost every controversial action that he takes.”

 

Next week, Trump is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress and announce a nominee to fill the vacancy on the supreme court.

 

Here’s what he got done on week one.

 

(McCarthy's entire piece is here.)

Introducing Poemmentary.com.

It's news headlines and political commentary -- but exclusively through poetry. Wherever it is found, seen, heard, or scrawled. Its motto is "Freed Speech."

For a different kind of reporting,  go to Poemmentary.com. The April 6th story, for instance, is "Illegal Immigration Is A Touchstone For Anger."

I launched the site this week after years of daydreaming about it. There is much, much more to come. In all kinds of directions. Please visit as it grows.

After Paris, "an odor of early fascism" in America: the demented appeal of Trump, Carson, and the Republican Party

The wicked irony of our insulation as Americans, living as we do galaxies away from the agonies that daily afflict the global billions affected by our domination, is that we entirely lose our minds at the first sight of our own blood.

One-hundred-thirty, the number of people who died horrible deaths two Fridays ago in Paris, is less than half the number of Iraqi civilians killed weekly by bombs, gunfire and other political murder, and an even smaller fraction of those steadily murdered in the Syrian civil war: 220,000 in the past four years or one every 10 minutes. The chaos that set this colossal carnage in motion was the destruction of the Iraqi state by an American war of choice.

And yet, cushioned here in the plush headquarters of global capital and war -- with oceans and empire shielding we Americans from anything like the cascading catastrophe of parts of Africa and the Middle East and even Europe -- our politics now teeter, at even the threat of one or more attacks, into panicked flirtation with fascism. Go ahead, say the word out loud. It is, horribly, the accurate term for a national conversation in which journalists have begun soberly quoting politicians' calls for forced internment of selected immigrants, religious tests for immigration, banning certain nationalities, treating people from some countries like "mad dogs," and suspending checks on state power. The ease with which many of our news media accept this new lexicon is chilling.

It is as if this American readiness to panic and lunge toward authoritarianism is in direct proportion to the outsized privilege the nation has for so long taken for granted: North American conquest and genocide, white supremacy, global riches with little cost, foreign invasion with impunity, a guaranteed satisfactory consumer experience. 

Sasha Abramsky, in The Nation, puts it this way:

Over the past several days, one Republican governor after another has closed his state to refugees from Syria—or, since they technically do not have the legal power to prevent the federal government from admitting refugees, has pledged to refuse all state resources to aid in this process. A Republican mayor in Virginia has called for using the World War II internment system that was used against Japanese Americans—itself one of the most widely discredited and shameful episodes in recent American history—as a model for how to approach the Syrians. 

Jeb Bush has said we ought to prioritize refugee status for Christians. John Kasich has called for a government agency that would beam “Judeo-Christian values” over Middle Eastern airwaves. In Congress, the GOP-led House, with a shockingly large number of Democrats in support, just voted on a bill that would make it virtually impossible, in practice, to admit Syrian refugees into the country. And Donald Trump has used the crime against humanity that occurred last week in Paris as a prop in his vicious campaign of demagoguery: Because of Paris, he has said, we must get serious about building a wall to close off Mexico. Because of Paris, we must put security first above all civil liberties. Because of Paris, we must start up again the few post-9/11 surveillance programs that were curtailed by courts and politicians because of their abusive properties, and must maintain and expand a raft of others. A surveillance state briefly put in the dock by Edward Snowden will, in this vision, be fully unleashed and unchecked. And because of Paris, we ought to consider registering American Muslims in a special database.

There is an odor of early fascism, or rather of the hysteria that precedes the march away from democracy, to much of this Trumpian rhetoric. An odor of the street fight. An odor of the iron fist.

Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi drowns. We watch. For centuries.

400 years ago, West African mothers and fathers cradled dead children in their arms on beaches as slave ships bucked in the surf.

It is 2015. How much longer will you and I and the world stand for this?

Little three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi drowned, his tiny sneakered feet dangling from the arms of a soldier who picked him up out of the sodden Turkish sand, because his own nation’s government did not belong to him, and because governments from the United Kingdom to the United States do not belong to those whom they purport to serve. They belong, instead, to strongmen and CEOs and senators who prosper when international capital makes money from a fragmented and corrupt Africa and  a politically leaderless Middle East and an obese and self-obsessed America.

The power brokers work with available materials. In a Europe now destabilized by plutocratic greed, we see the tip of a resurfacing iceberg of racist xenophobia that we last saw rise in the ascent of the Third Reich. We also see anti-immigrant xenophobia in the United States, as a portion of the white electorate, for whom Donald Trump is the present demagogue, clings with venomous desperation to its legacy of privilege.

We know, too, that this worldwide crisis of displaced and suffering people is part of the continual wreckage that began with pre-colonial European conquest of the global South and continues through the havoc wreaked upon entire regions of the world, including the Middle East, by centuries of Western-capitalist-fueled war. From Columbus to G.W. Bush, it’s about destroying local sovereignty and sucking all we can from the resources that are exposed.

Yesterday I sent an email to the Hungarian Ambassador to the United States, H.E. Réka Szemerkényi, registering my disgust with the actions and baldly racist statements of Hungary and its Prime Minister with regard to the Syrian refugees who suffer there:

September 4, 2015

To: [email protected]

Dear Ambassador:

Shame, shame, shame on Hungary for your treatment of Syrian migrants, your disingenuous excuses for your actions, and your Prime Minister's contemptibly racist statement in a radio interview on Friday that "We may one morning wake up and realize that we are in the minority on our own continent." 

You bring shame upon your citizens and your nation. I shall surely not travel as a tourist to Hungary as your website so cynically assures readers that we can. And I have lost all respect for your moral stature. 

With disappointment and disgust,

Bruce A. Jacobs

Baltimore, MD USA 

Please email the ambassador yourself at [email protected] .

But what will it take for we Americans, fat within our padding of Big Gulps and Big Macs and Big Savings, to walk out of our front doors and actually do what citizens do when our government is not ours, and when Syrians’ government is not Syrians’, and Hungary’s government is not Hungarians’?

Ebola + ISIS = brown fever.

It is time for more people to call it out. Right now in the United States, what whimpers just beneath the surface in everyday sidewalk throngs and crowded bars and restaurants is, "Are they here yet?"

You know: Them. The Africans carrying the Ebola virus. The ISIS operatives ready to transmit beheading videos from American hotel rooms in which they have taken ordinary folks hostage. You know what I'm talking about. You know people are thinking it. You know the volume is building toward a wider shrieking sound.

Days before the stories broke about people presumed African reportedly being shunned in retail establishments and neighborhoods in Dallas amid that city's Ebola panic, I and I know many others, particularly people of color experienced in being profiled, were already muttering to ourselves that it would only be a matter of time before the African profiling started. I considered blogging about it in advance but, again no doubt like many, I didn't want to be among those planting the suggestion to folks who are already too suggestible. That was a silly reservation on my part: it's not as if anything I do on this little blog could alter the motion of American public impulses that are so deeply ingrained and so continually remanufactured. That machinery is built to last, baby.

The same goes for our view of the ISIS conflict. While we Americans worry about being snatched in an alley by an ISIS sleeper cell, the actual cataclysm has now embroiled Turkey as well as Syria and Iraq in real and bloody war and internal insurrection -- including, as I write, violent tumult in Turkey over whether to join the battle for Kobani, a city on the Syrian/Turkish border. If the ISIS juggernaut continues to gamble successfully on the cynicism and patience of Western corporate powers for whom continually decimated nations of color and a fearful American public are just part of the dirty job of managing global capital, then we can expect more howling and jostling here in the Homeland beneath the threatened encroachment of the Black Flag. And we can brace for a lunge into frothing hysteria if any local acts of ISIS-sympathist terror actually take place here.

Meanwhile, we quietly accept that more Americans will die by gunfire per capita than in any other industrialized country, that this month alone 50,000 of us will die of heart disease and another 50,000 of cancer,  and that the corn- and cattle- and chemical-fueled enterprises that underpin our deadly diet continue to enjoy the subsidied, panic-free favors of the state.

Call it Brown Fever. Watch for it in your neighborhood.

The U.S. is not willing to do anything meaningful about ISIS.

This is not an ideological claim. It's a fact.

Mere air power against ISIS is doomed to fail, as most of us have thought from the start and as Kurdish fighters have now said out loud. You cannot fight a war without fighting a war. Air power alone, unless you are willing to reduce an entire region to dust with nuclear weapons, is not a war and it will not win.

A U.S.-led ground war is not an option. Neither the U.S. nor any other major power has the resolve or the capacity to take the kinds of awful casualties that ground combat with ISIS would mean. Nor would a ground war change the dynamics that led ISIS to gain recruiting appeal and structural power.

And changing the actual situation that fostered the growth of ISIS -- that situation being a global corporate sucking machine that leaves huge portions of the world's population unpaid for their regions' riches and throttled in their desire for dignity -- is also off the table in the West. There is simply too much money to be made from corrupt extractive economies in the Middle East, Africa and South America.

So there is basically nothing that President Barack Obama, his corporate backers, and his cooperative "allies" are willing to do that will actually beat back ISIS. Nothing. Despite ongoing beheadings, the now tortuously familiar appeals by Western families for their hostage loved ones to be spared, and ground gains by ISIS in areas conquered through force of armed ruthlessness and abdicated governance.

Obama will speak with righteous fury and will act with hog-tied resignation. He has no good options and he knows it. He and his sponsors will wait, watch, and take what losses they feel they must. The winner, as before, will be whatever satisfactorily profitable arrangement Western capital can manage with this latest convolution in a portion of the brown-skinned world.

It's the cost of doing business.

American rage at the embassy murders in Libya is

missing one thing: an understanding of the terrible ruthlessness of consequences.

Give President Obama credit for at least taking a momentary verbal swipe at the looney-tunes hate video that helped ignite this hellfire before he settled into the conventional righteous American narrative of condemning such violence as senseless, incomprehensible, unforgivable, and so on. (We can, however, safely ignore Mitt Romney's laughable snipe at Obama for supposedly "sympathizing" with the attackers.)

But lost amid the roaring American condemnation of the awful attacks and murders in Egypt and Libya is any sense that there is a pattern here, that this sort of thing has happened before, and that there is a terrible logic connecting a history of American racism and bloody American recklessness in the Arab and heavily-Muslim world with the stream of horrific hatred aimed at Americans from some in those nations. From the shocked outrage issuing from American megaphones in the past 24 hours, you'd think there had never been an American-orchestrated overthrow of Iran's democratic government in 1953; disproportionate American support for Israeli brutality and apartheid over the decades (again, a nod to Obama for his at least refusing to parrot some recent lines in the script); a succession of American invasions carried out with brazen dishonesty and racist hubris; and a tradition of American persecution and exploitation of brown-skinned non-Christians here and abroad.

The Independent's Robert Fisk provides a good moral and political accounting here.

The point is not that American diplomats deserve to die, but that we as a nation will never get out of the crosshairs until we stop engaging in willful amnesia about how we got there.

(Thanks to Tina at The Agonist.)

Gunter Grass, Dave Eggers, Germany, Israel, Iran, and "What Must Be Said."

So Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Here is a link to the Grass poem, titled "What Must Be Said."

And here is what must be said about this whole conflagration:

1.) Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the contemporary Israeli regime has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand.

2.) It is horribly ironic but not shocking that the Israeli regime, over its lifetime, has plunged into such a long moral fall. Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.

3.) Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obedient or self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in some Israeli trends. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

4.) Grass's poem is lousy as a poem. It's barely a poem, actually; it's more like a proclamation with lots of line breaks. But that's not the point anyway. Nobody cares about it as a poem. We care about what it says. Presenting it as a poem in a publication, actually, was a good move on Grass's part: it assured that his message would be disseminated intact, in its entirety. Had Grass simply called a press conference and issued the message as a statement, it would have been sound-bited and paraphrased beyond recognition.

5.) Eggers's refusing the personal tribute while accepting the money stinks to high heaven. His excuse in published reports that the controversy had become too much about Germany and Israel and Iran just doesn't hold water. A response of integrity would be to either be okay with the moral context of the award and to accept the prize and the money, or to not be okay with it and to reject the prize and the money. You can't have both. Good luck washing those dirty little hands of yours, Dave.

President Obama's call for the 1967 borders

as a starting point for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations was a refreshing breeze in the stale Israel-ruled room of recent American mideast diplomacy. That the comment came as such a shock to Bibi Netanyahu is an instructive indication of how far toward Israel the standard American policy line has drifted.

Good for Obama. It's about time a White House occupant offered something like a reality check to an Israeli regime that has careened out of control in its insatiable aggression and hunger for dominance.

My question -- and it's a question I've grown to hate because it has proven so endlessly justifiable -- is if Obama will, yet again, shift into chronic backpedaling mode once his sensibly provocative statement threatens to generate actual consequences. I have grown dog-tired of Obama's habit of blurting a truth and then just as quickly retreating from it. I told a friend a few days ago that I suspect Obama may suffer from a kind of political Tourette syndrome: he spits out an utterance or position, realizes he is not allowed to go there, and swiftly finds as safe a way as possible to withdraw the offending statement or stance.

Is there a demon inside President Obama devilishly channeling his Inner Truthteller? Or is it a medical issue? We may never know.

CUNY's withholding Tony Kushner's honorary degree

on the basis of his criticisms of Israeli policies is a bush-league witch hunt that does more damage to the reputation of the university than to that of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright.

As you may have heard, the board of trustees of the City University of New York voted Monday to withhold an honorary degree that had been slated to be awarded to Kushner. According to the NYT, the prevailing board contingent, led by trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, claimed that Kushner, who like many artistic intellectuals has been critical of Israeli actions, "disparaged the State of Israel." The board's surprise kick in the teeth to Kushner, which has not happened to a would-be CUNY honoree since 1961, has set off a storm of criticism from CUNY faculty and students. Even the CUNY administration has tactfully distanced itself from the board's decision; a CUNY spokesperson said that “The CUNY board of trustees acted independently and exercised its authority.”

CUNY's leadership looks like a den of dunces right now. And it should.

Sadly, we have seen this kind of hard-line pro-Israel foolishness before, as in 2006 when the New York Theatre Workshop knuckled under to pressure to cancel a play depicting the life of activist Rachel Corrie, an American defender of Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood in protest of Israeli demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip. (See below.) Some apologists for the brutality of the contemporary Israeli regime – who will brook no criticism of Israel's hyper-militarized dominance of Palestinians – just plain lose their marbles when confronted with intelligent indictments of Israeli policy, especially from Jews such as Kushner. Like an exponential magnification of certain blacks' defending the actions of President Obama no matter what, such rationalizers of Israeli actions fiercely denounce critics as being anti-Israel and anti-semitic.

Most such accusations, including those against Kushner, are, of course, complete nonsense. Condemning the current Israeli regime's actions is no more anti-Israeli or anti-semitic than condemning the Bush 2 regime's behavior is anti-American. In fact, I believe that in the long run it is pro-Israeli to criticize current-day Israel's self-destructive contempt for the rights for Palestinians, just as it was pro-American to criticize the Bush 2 regime's trampling of due process and international rule of law.

Many Americans already know this, which is why CUNY now looks so stupid. In fact, I think the intransigence of defenders of Israel's self-pitying posture is in direct proportion to the growing backlash against Israel's hopeless aggressiveness. Decades from now, when reality has forced Israel to acknowledge the territorial and human rights of Palestinians, none of this will even be subject to debate.

Which is why Tony Kushner, a playwright who will be remembered long after the wild-eyed CUNY trustees have been entirely forgotten, doesn't need any stinking honorary degree.

_________________

Here is what I wrote on this blog in 2006 about the Rachel Corrie controversy:

A Sorry Showing.

With our official chroniclers being so generous these days in dispensing the mantle of "hero" (the title is now bestowed upon the tragic legacy of virtually every uniformed American man or woman who dies following senseless orders), the story of Rachel Corrie serves, like an ice-water dunking, to shock us back into understanding the meaning of the word.

You might remember her: the 23-year-old activist from Olympia, Washington who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer as she stood with outstretched arms, wearing an orange vest, attempting to block the demolition of the home of a Palestinian family amid Israel's campaign to clear-cut Palestinian border neighborhoods in the name of security.

As it turns out, Corrie was a writer of some ability as well as an activist, and her copious and revealing journals were edited into a play, a one-woman show titled "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which took London by storm last year. The play was the biggest sellout in 50 years at London's Royal Court Theatre, and has since moved to the West End, London's equivalent of Broadway, where it is expected to be a smash.

This year, New Yorkers were also expecting to be able to see the play until, weeks before its scheduled March 22 opening at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), the theater suddenly announced an open-ended postponement of the play's debut amid intense pressure from groups not pleased with the dramatic message of a blue-eyed blond American pro-Palestinian activist. It seems that in an age of quisling liberals diving for cover from post-9/11 political vigilantism, these tickets were, in the words of a cover story in The Nation, "too hot for New York."

The outrage from theatrical luminaries was deservedly swift and widespread. The play's co-creator, Alan Rickman, proclaimed in the Guardian of London, "This is censorship born out of fear." Nobel literary laureate Harold Pinter, in a letter to the New York Times signed by nearly 20 other well-known self-described Jewish playwrights and writers, said that NYTW's claims of recent Mideast developments making the Corrie play too controversial "make no sense," and asked, "what is it about Rachel Corrie's writings... that New York audiences must be protected from?" Actress Vanessa Redgrave declared to Pacifica Radio that NYTW's failure of will is "an act of catastrophic cowardice." Famed playwright Tony Kushner, whose own work has been featured at NYTW, wrote in a letter to the New York Observer that he is "disappointed and disheartened by this decision and... baffled by the subsequent attempts to justify it."

The record, sadly, illustrates NYTW's willing surgical removal of its own spine in this matter. In response to early opposition to the play from some quarters, the theater's leadership, by its own admission in a March 22 interview on Pacifica's Democracy Now!, began a community "dialogue" process that involved pro-Israel partisans but no Arab-Americans. It began backing away from previously-agreed commitments to stage the play. It started to suggest, after the fact, to the play's British creators the need for audience "discussions" including pro-Israel scholars after each performance to place the play in "context." Most damningly, NYTW revealed its own lack of stomach for defense of artistic and political principle in the face of politically and financially influential opposition.

It is to their credit that, after the compost hit the fan, NYTW Artistic Director James Nicola and Managing Director Lynn Moffat agreed to do the Pacifica interview at all; the broadcast was a debate between them on the one side and the play's co-editor, Katherine Viner, whose sense of offense at NYTW's moral cave-in reflects the feelings of the play's other British creators and backers as well as of Corrie's parents themselves [full transcript of the debate is at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/1435259]. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is not known for lobbing softballs, and Nicola and Moffat, clearly no more morally steady on their feet than when they first took on the Corrie play, were out of their league. One might feel sorry for them but for the fact that the political cost of their cowardice is, for the broader artistic community, much greater than its personal cost for the two of them. Throughout the interview Nicola and Moffat betrayed, to their lasting shame, a feckless aversion to fighting back against the currently intimidating forces of cultural censorship.

I suggest that you go and hear (or read) Nicola's and Moffat's remarks for yourself. It wasn't pretty: Nicola stumbled, whimpered and equivocated through tortured attempts at self-justification by reiterating how very, very hard it is to try to mount a play when people get mad. And Moffat, for her part, stuck to a steely script of utter nonsense about the play's unique incorrigibility and the awful practical problems it posed. The British co-writer Viner, admirably restraining her likely desire to knock Nicola's and Moffat's squishy heads together, dispatched their hopeless arguments with civil precision. She also left them flat-footed by refusing, on the air, their plaintive offer to try to find some way for NYTW to stage the play; NYTW no longer merits any trust, she replied, and the play's creators have been inundated with offers from other American theaters to put on the play, one of which they hope to accept.

The heart of the matter, I think, is that theater people like Nicola and Moffat have been accepting toasts at cocktail parties and bowing for applauding trustees at board meetings for so long that they have forgotten how to take a flurry of punishing shots to the chops (or to the gut) for the sake of their mission. In the Pacifica interview, both Nicola and Moffat recited, like a mantra, that it was their Herculean task with the Corrie play to, in Nicola's words, make it "safe" for Corrie's message to be heard without its being "polluted" by the raging political argument surrounding the Israeli occupation. It is as if Nicola and Moffat hoped to shuffle mute audiences in and out of this political fireball of a play -- in Manhattan, no less -- with no muss, no fuss, and no need to take a fighting stance in the face of irate theater funders and infuriated political zealots. The essential and unavoidable need to stand up and fight in public for a work such as the Corrie play seems to have entirely taken these two by surprise. Even on the radio, one could sense their blinking disorientation. I think they are still in shock at having had such demands made of them.

Nicola's blubbering, in fact, reached its absurd peak in the interview when he cited, as if pointing to a newly-uncovered neutron bomb, a friend's having told him of an online claim that Rachel Corrie was a registered member of Hamas. People are out to slander Corrie and my play! he gasped. Well, duh. A lot of people hate the cause that Corrie supported, and some of them lie on the Internet, and a few are flat-out wacko, and others will go all-out with their financial and political clout against a theater that takes a stand for a Palestinian-sympathetic production. Hello? Earth to Jim. This is part of the job description for a theater artistic director who has principles. It is high time more artists posed dramatic challenges to the orthodoxy of American support for the amoral militarism and self-excusing atrocities of the current Israeli regime.

Welcome to the new McCarthyism: an era of contagious and officially-mongered fear that, like the 1950s, separates the heroes from the, er, James Nicolas.

(Posted 3/27/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)