“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Dictators have no time for Tragedy. In their blinkered, paranoid certitude, why would they want to watch a play about the fall of someone mighty. Tragedy is tied to Athenian democracy. As a recent professor of mine said, “It was a democratic form for a democratic audience,” an audience so often restive, even riotous, that “rod holders,” theater police were required to keep order. It is helpful to remember that […]
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Achilles’ heroic identity is tied into combat as theater. How one performs in battle before the eyes of both friends and enemies is all important. This ideal of heroism is fiercely competitive. He performs not in the collaborative sense of theater as we might define it. Achilles is the only star, the only director, the only stagehand. After the death of Patroclus, he takes the weight of Greek army upon […]
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I’m going out to look at the birds and the clouds. They calm me. While I’m immersed in them, I can escape thinking about the war that fool just declared for us or about the civilians in Gaza being massacred daily by Bibi’s vengeance machine or about Iranians and Israelis huddling in shelters as their criminal governments bash each other or how the pig Putin continues his effort to hammer […]
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I. America is devolving into a country without a common agreed upon past, one whose customs and institutions no longer provide the internal political or cultural coherence that is essential for it to properly function in the manner that we have grown accustomed to since the end of the Second World War. It cannot be otherwise; what one portion of a populace accepts as self-evident cannot be contradicted by another […]
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