Rick Mercer on Parliamentary Process

I wonder: is there anybody making a more positive contribution to the general mental health of Canadian parliamentary democracy than Rick Mercer?

In North American culture, and in the USA especially, so many comedians attempting political humour tend to take the lowest possible road, making snide comments about personal aspects of politicians that have already elicited abundant sneering: e.g., Bill Clinton and the ridiculously protracted scandal over oral sex; Jean Chretien and his mangled syntax. Now, if these vulnerabilities had more than a merely tangential relation to their jobs, the mockery would provide a salutary correction. But improving the political culture is not the motivation lying behind these sorts of jokes. Instead, the low-brow commentary stands in for more difficult political commentary. It succeeds only because it is an easy, cynical way of flattering the audience: "We all know this about politician X; now let's have a good, comfortable, complacent laugh about the matter."

Well, that's exactly what Rick Mercer tends to avoid. I can't think of anybody who has made me laugh more often, with more sense of joy, than Mercer. But he clearly disdains mean-spirited laughter; and, even then, he is not invariably aiming for the loudest or easiest laughter. Sometimes, in fact, he is not necessarily going for laughter at all. With his rants, for example, he can sometimes tap into a vein of outrage that is very funny; but at other times, he is too level and earnest to elicit much laughter. And in the case of this particular rant, he is certainly not flattering his audience. He is making a criticism about our political culture; and the criticism is, quite justly, directed at us.

The Laggardly Death of William Zantzinger

William Zantzinger, who "killed poor Hattie Carroll" as described by Bob Dylan in "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," is dead at age 69, according to the New York Times and The Guardian. The astonishing piece of news to me is that the man was only 69, whereas somehow I had imagined Dylan's song, because it has such an overtone of long-standing injustice, as describing an event that had taken place perhaps late in the nineteenth century, in the period of reconstruction following the American Civil War. Of course, that's part of Dylan's point: that such outrages against humanity, decency and justice had been around for a long time. But the original news story that prompted Dylan to immediately write the song had appeared on August 29, 1963. That the man lived for another 45 years afterwards is, alas, yet one more indication that "God's away on business" (Tom Waits).



The story reveals that Carroll was, in fact, the third person in a row whom Zantzinger had struck with his cane. So killing Hattie Carroll was by no means an isolated incident of violence. Nor did it mark the end of his criminality, for as The Guardian reports, in 1991, Zantzinger was convicted of fraud. He enjoyed yet another relatively light sentence, however, of 2,400 hours of community service and a $62,000 fine. Zantzinger's sentence for killing Hattie Carroll had been six months imprisonment and $625 of fines.

Zantzinger was apparently asked just a few years ago by Dylan biographer Howard Sounes what he thought of Dylan's song. Zantzinger called Dylan a "no-account son of a bitch" and "a scum bag of the earth." Fitting words for Zantzinger's epitaph.

The Very Real Achievement of Harold Pinter

I’ve been trying to concentrate my main attentions on some other writing at the moment, but nearly a week later, I still feel somewhat provoked by a particularly nasty summing up of the career of Harold Pinter by John Doyle that appeared in the Globe and Mail on New Year’s Day. I’ll come to Doyle’s column in a moment, but I’ll begin with the sense of loss evoked in me by Pinter’s death.

Harold Pinter’s health had been in a precarious state for some time, so his death late in 2008 did not come as much of a surprise. Yet hearing the news of his passing nevertheless made me feel rather melancholy. Pinter was 78, so it was not as though death had taken someone at the height of his career, as it had with, say, Heath Ledger. And yet my melancholy was more than merely sentimental or nostalgic, the sort one feels for an old intellectual companion. Rather, it seemed to me that, notwithstanding his relatively advanced years, Pinter had left many things undone that, somehow, in my understanding, he should have done. Moreover it appears he was of the same mind. John Lahr tells us, in an excellent 2007 profile in the New Yorker, that, while visiting the hospital for a brain scan, Pinter told the lab technician: “You know what you’ll find in there? A lot of unwritten plays.”

Pinter had been blocked for several years from the late sixties through the early seventies, and again throughout most of the eighties. It seemed as if each block came after he had written himself through to achieving the finest possible expression of a certain sort of insight, the first block arriving after he had written The Homecoming (1964) and the second, after he had written Betrayal (1978). Blocked from writing his own plays, he turned himself mainly towards adapting the works of others, writing, for example, a first-rate screenplay of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981); to directing, particularly the plays of his close friend, Simon Gray; and back to his first career, acting, doing particularly fine work in two Beckett plays: the titular character in Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court in October 2006 (a show that reportedly sold out its whole run in sixteen minutes, so it’s fortunate that Pinter was apparently extraordinary in the role), and in the quite perfect 2000 David Mamet-directed film of Beckett’s very short play, Catastrophe, in which he appeared with Rebecca Pidgeon, and in his last performance ever, a silent Sir John Gielgud.

Samuel Beckett's Catastrophe, directed by David Mamet, and starring Harold Pinter, Rebecca Pidgeon and John Gielgud.

So, Harold Pinter by no means wasted the time in which he was not writing his own plays. But it is John Doyle’s contention, more or less, that he wasted the time in which he WAS writing those plays. Here’s a taste of Doyle’s New Year’s Day tirade:

“Harold Pinter was overrated. Oh yes, he was. A small handful of plays, all derivative and slight. Beckett for Dummies, that's Pinter's oeuvre. And he was pretentious, an indulger in reflexive anti-Americanism, anti-this-and-that to the point where he was absurdly serving on the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.”

Now I have no intention of defending Pinter as a great political thinker. He certainly said many things about the morally bankrupt insidious workings of capitalist imperialism that struck the nail squarely on the head. But then, even leaving aside Milosevic, he also voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979, so it is not as though he represented any orderly critique in his person. What is not in doubt is that he was passionately engaged with politics; but, notwithstanding his local and occasional political insights, I would no more look to him (or, in a closely similar case, Neil Young) for a coherent political overview than I would look to other artists I admire for coherent religious views. I think, for example, of Bob Dylan’s born-again Christian period, which was followed by a flirtation with a Hasidic sect, or Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen’s hare-brained dalliances with Scientology before moving onto Buddhism, and so on: all these were weird ⎯ and from a certain point of view, I would insist, courageously weird ⎯ way stations on more profound spiritual quests, and stemmed from moments, I would say, when the essential mysticism of their outlooks was failing to find adequate expression in their creative work. The excesses into which Pinter’s political passions occasionally led him have a similar ⎯ and similarly forgivable ⎯ explanation. Truly creative brilliance cannot always contain itself in tidy packages. Unless we are narrow-minded philistines, we can hardly expect people both to be artistic geniuses and to show up for work in neat, well-pressed uniforms as well. Being a bit sloppy about politics is a different matter, perhaps; but I think the point still stands. So let’s leave Pinter’s political views to one side and concentrate instead on the work that Doyle sneeringly dimisses.

On that topic, it’s worth noting that even where Doyle wants to praise Pinter, on the matter of his adaptations, he ensures that the backlash lands squarely on the original works:

“The frailty and smallness of Pinter’s alleged originality as a writer is underlined by his gift for dramatizing, for film or television, the work of others. Given someone else's material, he was great at whittling it down, finding the essential narrative…”

And from here, Doyle goes on to praise Pinter’s adaptations of The French Lieutenant’s Woman ⎯ although he is scathing about the Fowles novel, which is, in my view, a masterpiece ⎯ and of the Aiden Higgins novel, Langrishe, Go Down, for BBC television. In short, as far as Doyle is concerned, Pinter was fine so long as he was streamlining unnecessarily complex works to make digestible ninety-minute to two-hour screenplays, but the only reason someone would praise the original plays is intellectual pretentiousness.

Now, it is not so much Doyle’s egregious lack of grace or taste in speaking of the recently dead that rankles me (there have certainly been cases, such as the death of Jerry Falwell, that had me speaking with contempt of the life and exulting at its passing), but rather the sense that what he says in the column is, to my mind, effectively a supercilious attempt to plaster over the open questions and lacunae that Pinter’s work had left purposely open.

By “lacunae,” I don’t mean to refer to those works that Pinter never wrote. It’s true enough that Pinter’s output was not enormous, although he wrote a sufficient number of plays to fill four volumes in the Methuen edition, with another two volumes devoted, respectively, to his poetry and non-dramatic prose, and to his screenplays. Beckett, whom Doyle wants to use as a club to beat Pinter, left a body of work that was no larger, really: the plays fit into one volume, the fiction wouldn’t need more than another two at most. But the real question has to do with whether Pinter saw or showed us anything really original in his work. I think he did, but I have to acknowledge that Doyle is probably speaking for many people in responding so truculently as he does.

To be blunt, Doyle’s assessment of Pinter is, in my experience, typical of that of many middle-brow people who speak about the work: the provocation of the confusion Pinter creates is somehow affronting rather than enticing, and so they leap to the conclusion that the playwright is practicing some sort of imposture. My use of the term “middle-brow” surely sounds like I’m tossing off a rather cheap insult, but I consider it a reasonably fair description of someone who earns his living as a television critic. I absolutely am not such as snob as to suggest that television is invariably aimed at the intellectually lowest common denominator in our society (although it sometimes is); but I think it is no more than stating the obvious to say that it is very seldom that one encounters the richest and most demanding artistic and intellectual experiences our culture has to offer on television. Could there be anyone who seriously disagrees with that statement? Notwithstanding many fine things to be found from time to time on television, the medium, especially with all the time and commercial considerations constraining it, will only allow for so much density or extension of thought. Naturally, I watch television fairly regularly; but I think I would go mad if I had to devote the majority of my waking hours to taking it seriously, as Doyle does. This is not to say that Doyle is a shallow or incompetent advocate for what is on the television; on the contrary, I think he is in possession of a rich band of critical insight that happens to correspond to what television programming offers when it is good; but the limitations of his mental energy become apparent when we see him face to face with work that is far too difficult to be confined to the small screen.

So here lies the nub of the problem: Pinter demands a great deal of mental work to comprehend ⎯ to a sometimes almost maddening degree. By mental work, I do not necessarily mean education; and I certainly don’t mean recourse to any specialized knowledge. What I primarily mean is the mental work associated with creative imagination. Like many modernists, Pinter consciously places much of the onus for completing his work with the viewer.

Think, for example, of the convention in the plastic arts, whereby certain subjects are repeated again and again. One of the most enduring subjects is that of “mother and child.” Now in the hands of an artist such as Raphael, the subject assumes explicitly religious dimensions: we see the Madonna with the Christ-child, and minute attention is given to achieving an optimal equilibrium between realism and symbology.


However, in the hands of a twentieth-century artist such as Henry Moore, we are looking at a greatly pared down rendering of the same subject.

Gone are the explicitly religious connotations; gone too is any sense of historical moment, of fashion, of specific identity, or even any reference to a specific narrative. Instead, the viewer is invited to engage with the many meanings that are implicit in the sculpture, to build these outward into external contexts, and then to allow these to collapse once again into an unmediated encounter with form and texture. The work of art encourages many interpretations, but it will not support any of them conclusively, because the lacunae and questions are left open. It is profoundly suggestive, but resolutely indeterminate. In short, as I suggested, it forces the viewer to do a great share ⎯ perhaps the lion’s share ⎯ of creative work. It offers the rough equivalent of playing a game of hockey oneself rather than merely watching it on the television.

Now, it is a hallmark of modernist and postmodernist art that its works are always derivative. The Modern period was, to that point, unique in the extremity of its self-consciousness about its place in history, so naturally, its most important and deeply affecting works of art always evince some self-consciousness about their models and predecessors. Beckett, for example, shows consciousness about his indebtedness to Kafka, to vaudeville, to medieval religious drama, and, certainly, to his mentor, James Joyce. Pinter may indeed have derived something from Beckett, along with (again) Kafka, John Osborne, Eugene O’Neill, Terence Rattigan, film noir and Sigmund Freud; but in that respect, he is exactly like every other great modernist artist. The modernist artist who does not make intelligent use of his or her predecessors, nor to some extent, self-confessedly derive his or her work from theirs (if it were even possible to avoid such a thing), is seemingly not worth our attention. Or, at least, I cannot think of one. Indeed, I defy you to name any artist who is so completely original a creature.

The point with respect to Pinter, then, is that while his work is, naturally, derivative, he altered the dramatic conventions that had come to him in particular ways that caused the individual spectator more work in the effort at comprehension, and thereby called a deeper and broader field of meaning into play as the context for that comprehension. In his greatest plays, a group in which I would include The Birthday Party (1957) The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1964), No Man’s Land (1975) Betrayal (1978), One for the Road (1984), and Moonlight (1993), Pinter offers us human relations stripped not only of all the comforting distractions that the ordinary material world provides, but of the desperately cherished notion that life is, at bottom, somehow rational. The effect, if one allows oneself to play along, is vertiginous: by turns frightening and hilarious, these plays show us human beings engaged in competitive games and efforts to assert their identity in contexts in which their understanding of truth is always deeply uncertain, and their understanding of their own identities is at best mere bravado. In other words, Pinter’s characters try to look and act assured despite their repressed recognition that, as Pinter put it in his Nobel speech: “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” My mentor, Ronald Bryden, in his review of the original production of The Homecoming for a newspaper (either The Observer or The New Statesman, I forget which) memorably compared the action of the play to the activities of a group of apes engaged in a tribal power struggle, albeit these primates were using language instead of physical violence to assert their supremacy. This was a brilliantly penetrating insight, because Pinter’s interest in the essential patterns of human actions ⎯ as opposed to their apparent intentions and meanings ⎯ does tend to draw our attention to what is primal in human identity, in both the individual and cultural sense. Pinter’s dramas show us as Freud, in his most visionary moments, such as in Civilization and Its Discontents, saw us: as animals that struggle to belong within the excessively elaborate culture we have made for ourselves as a species.

Of course, to reduce the significance of his oeuvre to a few sentences in that way does nothing like justice to the range and complexity of Pinter’s work, but I hope it offers a corrective to the supercilious notion that Pinter was engaged in some sort of intellectual imposture or cheap con job. I believe that Pinter adumbrated the dark side of our own self-understanding, and it is to our great loss that he was not able, because of those times when he felt blocked, and because of the limitations of poor health and, finally, death, to go even further with this project.

A scene from Peter Hall's film of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming

Go, Iggy!

Well, things on Parliament Hill are looking up since I last posted. It appears that the Liberals are now taking ample advantage of the opportunities Harper has presented them with his series of petty acts.

(To recap, these include, first, calling an early election in defiance of his own legislation, because he saw in the weak Dion an opportunity to gain a majority, thereby showing himself a rank hypocrite; second, deciding to sneeringly attack the arts in Canada because, evidently, he felt they were not friendly towards him, thereby losing credibility and support among Quebeckers, who take cultural identity very seriously, and condemning himself to another minority government; third, using the financial crisis not as an opportunity to be a statesmanlike, non-partisan leader, but as an opportunity to attack the opposition, thereby galvanizing their disparate antipathies toward his government into the united threat of a political coalition; and most recently, refusing to express regret or to attempt to work with the exasperated and disaffected majority opposition, and instead trying to end run them by refusing to allow parliament to meet for nearly two months while he attempted to whip up a national unity crisis by raising the bogus threat of separatism, in the process snuffing out his last ember of integrity as remorselessly as one might grind a cigarette butt underfoot.)

At any rate, the backlash from Harper's attack has resulted in the early resignation of Dion and the sudden promotion of Michael Ignatieff, a much more formidable opponent. Under Ignatieff, there is no risk that the idea of the coalition is going to look like an act of childish and petulant retaliation against Harper, as it did under Dion, nor as an attempt to wrench the Liberals out of the political Centre and toward the Left as it did (albeit probably unfairly) under Rae's guidance. Instead it looks just as it should: the threat of a group of intelligent, prudent patriots who are exasperated by an incompetent dictator's appallingly reckless egoism and petty partisanship.

For a taste of what Harper can expect now, have a look at THIS CLIP of Ignatieff in action.

Liberal-NDP Coalition versus Harper: What now?

A couple of friends have asked me whether I feel angry about Governor General Michaelle Jean's decision to prorogue Parliament until late January. The answer is no, not really. I feel frustrated at the whole situation, I suppose, but not really angry at Michaelle Jean. I think that she more or less followed constitutional protocol, which, as I understand it, declares that the Governor General is obligated to follow the advice of her first minister (i.e., the Prime Minister) before all others, so long as the PM does not openly counsel action contrary to the interests of the nation. And, unless Stephen Harper is a yet bigger fool than he has lately shown himself, in his private conversation with Jean, he won't have told her that he wanted a prorogation because (as Bob Rae aptly put it, he is "afraid to show up for work") but rather, he would have argued blandly that since the stability of the country and the demands of the majority opposition both demanded a sound financial plan, and since such a plan cannot be written overnight, a suspension of parliament was necessary. I'm quite sure that Jean, as a small-l liberal, was gnashing her teeth when she heard this, knowing that Harper was a disgusting hypocrite who only wanted to hold on to power; but perhaps she was hoping that the very fact that Harper was willing to have the country go ungoverned for two whole months (!) during a national crisis would demonstrate conclusively to Canadians just how bad a leader they were stuck with. In short, she may be expecting that, through his crass attempts to save his job, Harper would have destroyed his career. It's certainly likely that he will now NEVER win a majority, because he has alienated Quebec so far with his anti-separatist hysteria that they will be unable to ever convince them of his honesty again.

But, alas, if the Globe and Mail polls are accurate, the rest of the country has not, apparently, yet realized what a disastrous mess Harper has made with his egoistic approach to governing. Most of the country still blames the crisis on the coalition parties, not on Harper. That is a crazy notion that seems to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of parliamentary democracy. I am not sure whether the saturating effect of American television is to blame here or not, but most Canadians apparently still do not understand how their system works; and when Harper's apologists speak of our government as if it were a republican system, crying out, more or less, that Stephen Harper was "elected" leader, and that to depose him would be a usurpation of the duly elected head of state, people seem to believe this. Yet, the fact is that we do not elect Prime Ministers or Premiers, we elect Members of Parliament, and those people, along with other party members, choose party leaders. The Governor General, in deputation for the Queen, is our head of state, and one of her jobs is to invite a leader and party of her choice to form the government. By convention, she invites the party which has had the most members of parliament elected, because the crucial point is that the government of the day must have the confidence of the house. So, in the case of a majority government, the choice is a no-brainer. But in the case of a minority government, the matter is not so straightforward. To take a theoretical example, suppose we had a parliament in which as many as twelve parties were represented by elected members, and one of them was an extreme-right party like the Nazis, which had, simply through a splitting of the centre-left vote, gained the most members of parliament---albeit still a minority, just a larger minority than the other parties, for whom a fascist government, naturally, would be anathema. Well, in that case, the GG might, quite legitmately, declare that she did not believe the Nazis held the confidence of the house, and instead invite a plausible coalition of non-fascist parties to form a government, provided they could sustain the confidence of the majority of the house. That's how it works. So a leader of a minority government is forced, in such a situation, to consult and co-operate so as to sustain the confidence of the majority of the house, and we thereby see democracy in action. At least, in theory that's what happens.

However, in this case, although Stephen Harper had secured the confidence of the house with his Speech from the Throne, he then promptly lost it by (a), refusing to offer or vaguely promise or even seriously consider a financial strategy consonant with those which virtually ALL economists and other world leaders declared was necessary given the financial crisis; and instead (b), using the occasion of the greatest financial crisis facing the country in eighty years and the opportunity presented by a lame duck Liberal leader to viciously undermine the other parties by removing the per-vote financial support which a previous bill had put in place. (The notion of that per-vote support was to level the playing field, so that a party that attracted very rich voters with promises of high income tax cuts (e.g., the Harper Conservatives), would not be able to buy elections by easily winning the financial support of the very rich and thereby buying the most effective election advertising.) Harper did this without consulting the rest of his caucus. His arrogant bet was that the Liberals were too weak and would never dare to risk an election by removing their confidence, and he certainly never dreamed that they would be angry enough at his combination of complacent ineptitude and mean-spirited pettiness to cut a deal with the NDP, let alone the Bloc. But he was wrong. He ruined himself through hubris.

Now, of course, Harper is in full panic mode. His request that parliament be suspended for two months is an outrageous abdication of responsibility, but under constitutional protocol, the GG could hardly be expected to deny the request. I only wish that there were at least a little more public indignation about his ostrich strategy during a time of national crisis, which, surely, with a little nudging, even the most partisan idiot can see represents an unacceptable dereliction of duty.

However, having said that, I am no longer eagerly awaiting the coalition to take over, as I was last weekend. I have regretfully concluded that, at this point, we are really better off sticking with a (presumably, for public appearances anyway) contrite Harper and his party for the next year, because as things stand, the Liberals have just got to get another leader in place before they can govern effectively. Stephane Dion badly screwed up his last best chance to redeem himself by botching the video response to Harper's attempt to portray the coalition as some sort of anti-democratic usurping force. Dion's was a weak and banal speech in any case (and it would have been so EASY to make Harper look like the duplicitous manipulator that he is!); but even setting aside the underwhelming content of the speech, the technical ineptitude with which it was assembled and communicated is simply inexcusable. After all, this was possibly the most important television address of his career, and yet Dion seemed to have handed responsibility for making the recording over to Laurel and Hardy. In case you haven't read, the thing arrived more than an hour late, at the wrong address, and in the wrong format, and in the video Dion is positioned before a bookshelf upon which, prominently displayed, is a book entitled "Hot Air" just to the upper left of his head. Was this deliberate sabotage, perhaps? That would explain something. At any rate, Stephen Harper must have been crowing with laughter.

But I was just depressed. Up until then, I had been rather hoping that, in January, when Harper tabled his budget, the three oppostion parties would give a vote of no confidence and then, when the inevitable election was called (it being no longer five or six weeks after the election, but a full three and a half months), the NDP and the Liberals would go into the election with a sort of non-agression pact that saw them making a pact in which one or the other removed candidates for ridings in which, by presenting the electorate with either a Liberal candidate or an NDP candidate, but not both, they could unseat a Conservative. Now, however, I think it would be a bad idea because the chance to allay the suspicions of Canadians was botched the other day, and the whole enterprise now looks likely to backfire. And on that note, I also believe that it's a really, really bad idea to have Bob Rae, of all people, as the points-person for this coalition. Personally, I like and respect Bob Rae, but we must be realistic: if he has an albatross around his neck, it's the perception of the flakiness of his Ontario Provincial NDP government of the early nineties, with, first, its year of wildly impractical overspending, and then, when it became obvious that this could not be sustained, its years of desperate cutbacks. There might well be mitigating factors, but as things stand, Rae is only going to bring the taint of suspected head-in-the-clouds socialism to the whole idea of the Liberals getting into bed with the NDP, let alone the Bloc. Certainly, the Liberals could benefit from making SOME headway with the left, but mainly they need to win back the centre which has, bizarrely, been wooed over to the Harper Conservatives. People look at Harper and they mistake his banality for moderation.

At any rate, I now believe that the best scenario for those of us of whom Harper has made enemies (such as people with some respect for the arts, some concern for the environment and some compassionate sense of fairness with regard to gay Canadians) is this: the Liberals limp along until May, and in the meantime take advantage of the golden opportunity to show up Harper as the small, spiteful, incompetent, duplicitous man that he is, and also to allow the Conservative government to begin to feel the pain of the financial cataclysm to come in the next six months. Then, in May, the Liberals might be able to perform a rebirth at the leadership convention, and after a summer of subtle campaigning Ignatieff might win the election when they call a vote of confidence in Fall of 2009.

Salutary Disorder

On Sunday morning, at a rally in Kingston which preceded a blitz for the “Art is Your Story” project, there were two middle-aged men who were angered by the rather small, extremely mild and good-natured demonstration held by the fountain. They were both inarticulate in their objections, complaining bitterly that they were “offended” by the gathering, and they both declined to engage in further debate (and certainly not with me, another middle-aged male) and so walked away in angry huffs after separately hurling their complaints at a female photographer whom they incorrectly assumed to be the organizer, perhaps because she was a few years older than the students who were still gathered there.

Now, the voices of those who spoke could only just be heard over the roar of the fountain, so it was clear that what these two men objected to was not a disturbance of the peace but of their own complacence. They wanted the gathering stopped not because it interfered with any other activity but because the sight of people gathered in a public square to collectively make a statement of concern which they did not share was inherently an affront to their comfort. Implicitly, what they want is a world in which they are not required to hear dissent, to accept differences or to scrutinize themselves. They vaguely invoked the threat of the police, which would be merely laughable were it not that it conveyed what is, at its base, a deeply fascist attitude towards society: the world must not merely BE but APPEAR to be wholesome; dissent must be silenced and conformity to the status quo---the pleasant bourgeois blandness of the usual antiques and vegetable stands, untainted by (as one man said, with furious disgust) “politics”---should be enforced by physical coercion if necessary.

Well, all this goes to show exactly why the arts are so necessary and why they are so distrusted by some of those in power. The arts pose questions and doubts to those who believe they have all the answers; and they force alternative perspectives upon those who feel they have seen it all. They represent a salutary dose of disorder in our society which, understandably craving stability and comfort, by setting these so high a priority that pursuing them becomes a vice, is wont to settle into a morbid rigidity. Our society would be no more than an ossified hierarchy of privilege and intolerance were it not for the shifting perspectives and hard questioning and downright turbulence represented by art. In Classical Athens, where democracy and drama came of age together, this point was understood—at least until those who were frightened by any public airing of doubt and dissent had their way, and democracy and drama were crushed simultaneously to be replaced by an intolerant bland oligarchy. Let’s not drift towards the same reckless failure of imagination. Let’s not be silenced by those who want no more than bland conformity.

You Have A Choice