Global citizen, actor, writer and spoken word artist Lanna Joffrey first encountered Valiant Women in War and Exile by Sally Hayton-Keeva in the 1990s. The book has stuck with her ever since as she’s developed it into an ensemble play for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the New York International Fringe Festival, among other venues. Joffrey’s script was recently published by NoPassport Press and I was glad to have read it over the weekend. It’s a stunner.
Reminiscences of war, whether by men or women, can easily become victim narratives (and in many cases, they should be). But these are tales of warriors, witting and unwitting from throughout the 20th century. Because the official combat armies of the time have been largely male, “War speaks in a male voice to all of us,” as Joffrey quotes Keeva in the early pages. But war is a human cruelty and we risk misunderstanding it by ignoring the perspectives of women or by relegating their voices to those of observers of war rather than as participants, perpetrators, rebels and activists. These characters have impressive and infectious agency that pull the reader through these vivid and compelling stories.
NoPassport Press
Through the show we meet survivors of Turkey’s genocide against Armenia experience how the lack of consequences for it led to Nazi Germany. We meet Catholic and Protestant women furing Ireland’s “troubles,” as well as interned Japanese Americans, surivivors of Hiroshima, a flight attendant who brought U.S. soldiers to Viet Nam and a Moscow woman who became a sniper to avenge herself against the Nazis.
I’m mixing up the chronology, but that’s sort of the point — these voices from a century of war remind us of the sheer senselessness of it all. We’re pscyhologically compelled to divide wars into good and bad, just or unjust, but the experience of taking all of this history in together washes away all rationalizations. It’s not just that war is cruel (we know that) or that the innocent suffer greatly (we know that too) but that people are forever changed by these experiences and we’ve found no way to offer them any remediation other than to listen.
The script moves at a rapid pace. Based on real interviews conducted by Hayton-Keeva and expertly dramatized by Joffrey, Valiant reminds me a bit of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf because the effect of the work is built on a chorus of strong voices.
There’s no shortage of takes about how Internet culture is ruining real world culture. I’m sure I’ve written my share. The Game: A Digital Turning Point by Alessandro Baricco (translated from Italian by Clarisssa Botsford) takes a strong opposing view and it convinces. I can never go back to my skeptical and lazy quick takes, having read this argument by an Italian novelist, sreenwriter, playwright, essayist and creative writing instructor. Everything about Baricco would lead you to assume he’d harshly critique online culture and yet, he sees salvation in it.
Your Professor, Alessandro Baricco
It’s nostalgia for the twentieth century, not online culture, he argues, that is truly dangerous for humanity. He makes this argument as gently as he can:
“I hope people who feel nostalgic don’t get me wrong. The twentieth century was many things, but over and above everything else, it was one of the most horrific hundred years in the history of humankind, perhaps the most horrific. What made it unspeakably devastating was the fact that it wasn’t the result of a failure of civilization or even an expression of brutality: it was the algebraic result of a refined, mature, and wealthy civilization.”
To hammer the point home, he recaps:
“A country that had been the cradle of our ideas of freedom and democracy constructed a weapon so lethal that, for the first time in their history, human beings possessed something they could use to destroy themselves. Finding themselves in a position to use it, they did so without hesitation. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the evil fruits of revolutions, by means of which the twentieth century had dared to dream of better worlds, led to immense suffering, unprecedented acts of violence, and terrifying dictatorships. Is it clear now why the twentieth century is not only the century of Proust but also our nightmare?”
Baricco traces the digital revolution from its origins in the video game Spacewar! (play it here) through the development of the first web pages, online commerce, social mediaand the epoch of big data and artficial intelligence we’re entering now. He structures his book as a topography of this new world — a sister to physical reality where some old elites have been replaced by new elites and some old elites have seen their power distributed among the masses.
Admittedly, some of this argument rhymes with the tech triumphalism of the 1990s, when we some believed the internet would be a great democratizing force. If Wal-Mart was culture’s bogeyman then, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are now.
Baricco is no Utopian. He describes a new world, better by comparison to the blood-soaked one it replaced, though not perfect by any means, or even fair. The digital world is, as Baricco describes, a game with myriad, complex and changing rules. Games have winners and losers. Well-made games do not have obvious and surefire strategies for success. It’s like the stock market — if a strategy existed for producing steady gains with no losses, everybody would utilize it. Well-meaning, well-qualified and hard working people can lose this game, just as they frequently lost all of the games we played before.
A trap for the nostalgic is to insist that pre-digital experiences like seeing a play or symphony in person or reading a physical book or visiting a museum are somehow more real than their digital counterparts. “Listening to the Vienna Philharmonic live at the Musikverein is not the same as watching it online, but for most of humanity it is a choice between nothing and something really quite exciting. It’s not hard to choose,” he writes.
Those of us, and I include myself in this, who feel dislocated from their pre-digital dreams and ambitions would do well to remember that, though it may be harder to publish a book or to produce a play these days, “In its way, the Game showed far greater promise: it opened up all the gates and widened access to theaters, museums, and bookstores. A significant number of new faces started to circulate in places where they had never been seen before.”
Baricco stresses the benefits of open-mindedness and to recognize the futility of stubbornly insisting on old ways of doing things — there is no bulwark against what’s happened, what’s happening or what’s to come. Society will not consent to going back and for good reason. To survive, practitioners of arts and humanities will have to succeed in a game where skills can only be learned by playing.
Interestingly, he recommends that education, which has been sloweest to adapt, needs to change the most. This change, which had been resisted as Baricco wrote, has been forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our son, 10 years old, grew up digital. As Baricco recalls his own child trying to interact with a photograph in a newspaper as if it were a touchscreen, we remember our son, around 3 years old, try to swipe the television to another channel and showing visible disgust at a screen so stupid as to ignore a users touch. He has been remote learning entirely since the Pandemic broke in March 2020 and while this arrangement isn’t for everybody, he has thrived.
Of course, he wants to go back to a physical classroom but as I’ve watched him succeed at computer-enabled scholarship, I realize that we can’t, and shouldn’t ever go back to education as it was. Remote learning is a skill and our son’s practice of it means that he can now access the best teachers in any discipline, no matter where he lives and where they do, if they have an online practice. Why settle for the best guitar teacher in town if the best in the country or world is available?
Further, as I watch friends and family in their 40s and 50s earn professional certificates and degrees online, I think that what our remote students are going through now might pay off massively later in life. In March, Google will launch its first low cost, online professional certifications. For a lot of adults, online learning isn’t natural. I dipped my toe in only recently, because of a professor friend posted a lecture series about Kafka’s The Trial to Udemy. I suspect that many seeking the Google certifications will feel some anxiety about it. Today’s remote learners won’t. For them, an online course will have no more or less value than a book does to me when I read it between covers or on the Kindle app.
The Game is a fascinating study, has a refreshing take and I highly recommend it. I can’t do it justice here but hope I caught its flavor.
My favorite bit of writing by George Orwell is not 1984, which always struck me as dry, though appropriately horrifying. If I had to pick just one Orwell for the rest of my life it would be Down and Out in Paris and London, which was the Kitchen Confidential of its time (a lot didn’t change over the course of a century, either). But, 1984 is the book everybody talks about and everybody claims vindicates everything they believe.
Twitter banned somebody you like? Orwellian. Got a speeding ticket from a traffic camera? Orwellian. Google Home knows you like pizza? Orwellian. Whether it’s the government or a credit card company, we’re quick to toss around references to the totalitarian surveillance state that Winston endures as an involuntary citizen of Oceania in Orwell’s dystopia.
“I wrote this for you!”
I guess it’s helpful to remember that Orwell had a specific agenda. He was very liberal. He’d be to the left of Bernie Sanders today. He’s operating in the socialist tradition of George Bernard Shaw.
He was also a ruthless thinker, as hard on his fellows on the left as he was his opponents on the right. He was very worried about lefties in the west being duped by Stalin and tricked into accepting fascism in place of socialism. Thart’s what 1984 is about. If you told Orwell that your iPhone was Orwellian he’d laugh in your face and tell you to stop using the damned thing, then. The oppression of Oceania was not something you could turn off and toss in the bin.
I imagine he’d be similarly incredulous if you complained to him that Twitter wouldn’t let you plan a demonstration against the government. He might wonder why you’d think a multibillion company would take your side over the government that supports its coffers. Go out and print some flyers, he’d say. Get creative.
Mostly I think Orwell would find us pretty coddled and already duped.
I know, I know, I said less politics. But, today’s the day that Joe Biden’s election as president has been certified by Congress and Donald Trump told his most fervent supporters to gather in Washington, D.C. to protest. Some breached the capitol, I saw reports of one person having been shot, Senators were evacuated and Trump… fled to the White House and seemingly went into hiding?
What we're seeing right now is what we've always known: President Trump is a dangerous, violent threat to the American republic. He's also a coward. He appears to be literally hiding right now.
It’s amazing cowardice. Nobody is chasing Trump. Nobody is looking to arrest or harm him. What is he hiding from? It all reminds me of some of my favorite surrealist plays, the Ubu Trilogy by Alfred Jarry.
He even looks like Trump!
Pa Ubu, the main character, is the undeserved King of Poland. He’s a parody of Macbeth and Jarry’s math teacher. He has nothing but appetite for food and comfort. He murders only when he has ther advantage. He flees from any other foe. In the second play of the trilogy, he and his family decide that the work of ruling is too hard and that the prisoners, who never have to go outside and are fed daily, have it easy. So they storm the prison, kick out the inmates, and barricade themselves inside.
It leaps from the puppet stage of 1896 and right onto CNN, if you ask me.
This is a literary, rather than political place (so it’s a supeior place) but Molly Ivins was a literary journalist with great wit, so it’s fair to ask what she might have said about Donald Trump, had she not died in 2007.
In her papers at the University of Texas, there’s tantalizing mention of some of her notes about Trump in 2007. It’d be lovely if somebody from the university would put those online, as I’m sure they’d be of interest.
The internet mostly has articles where other writers fantasize about what Ivins might have said and while that’s fun, it’s not quite what I was looking for. It looks like, though Trump was a public figure throughout Ivins’ career, that she didn’t care much about him, which is just more evidence of her judgment and taste. I did find this but from The Texas Observer, where Ivins bemoans the lack of tough questions being posed to either Al Gore or George W. Bush leading up to what turned out to be a historically important election in 2000:
“Early in November, we had the grave matter of whether Al Gore is an alpha male thoroughly parsed for us — one newsmagazine made it the lead story. We were also confronted with George W. Bush’s ignorance of the names of three out of four leaders in world trouble spots, and this called for much double-doming and deep dissection. After Ronald Reagan, who didn’t know all the names of his own Cabinet members, you would think there was little excitement to be mined in that department. The disquieting news that John McCain has a temper has been thoroughly mulled over by all and sundry. All this follows months of discussion on burning topics like W. Bush’s alleged drug use thirty years ago, vast attention to Gore’s shifting from blue suits to earth tones, Donald Trump being treated as though any reasonable citizen would consider voting for him, the Warren Beatty candidacy, and much more that is of no help whatever in selecting the next Leader of the Free World.”
So, there you have it. Ivins dismissed Trump, then running as Reform Party candidate, as an irrelevant clown.
J.R.R. Tolkien cautioned against reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as simple allegory, as the mythos is meant to speak for itself. But taken as an epic cycle, it’s the story of an innocent Bilbo Baggins who takes a heroes journey and unearths a great lost power when he discovers the “one ring” forged by Sauron, the greatest, most powerful and corrupting evil in the world.
A generation later, Bilbo’s nephew Frodo Baggins, equally as innocent as his uncle, is asked to deliver the ring to the wise and immortal elves. But even they are potentially corrupted by its influence and so Frodo and his friends, including the deposed king of men, a representative from the elves, a representative from the dwarves and Frodo’s hometown friends undertake to destroy the ring by hurling it into the fires of Mordor. Along the way, they are stalked by a pitiful creature corrupted by the ring’s influence and all are twisted by a plant engulfing war that spares no one and allows for no neutral parties.
In the end (spoiler alert?), Frodo and his best friend Samwise succeed at their task, but at the painful loss of their innocence and childhoods. There are themes of heroic sacrifice and, yes, the notion of seemingly powerless people accomplishing great things against the forces of history.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have occupied significant space in western popular culture, from Leonard Nimoy singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins to two film trilogies by genius director Peter Jackson that redefined the Hollywood blockbuster. Nerds love it.
Nerds name their businesses after it.
The most prominent example is Palantir, a global surveillance and big data analysis company that took its name from the crystal orbs that wizards in the Tolkien universe use to see far away places. It’s a clever name for a company that, as The Intercept described, “Helped the NSA Spy on the World.”
But it’s also misnamed. Palantir, founded by libertarian techno-tyrant Peter Thiel, who once destroyed the media outlet Gawker because he didn’t like it, has built a company where the looking glass focuses on others but nobody can see into Palantir (well, except that now Palantir wants to sell stock so we can see that prying into the lives of everybody on Earth is still a money-losing proposition.)
In The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf is aghast to find that his colleague Saruman is utilizing a Palantir. In the books, this is not a one way device. When you look into one Palantir, somebody looking into another might be watching you. In The Lord of the Rings, the evil Sauron is on the other end.
Another evil company with a Lord of the Rings name is Anduril. In The Lord of the Rings it is the sword of Aragorn, forged from the remnants of the sword the heroic Isuldur used to chop the ring off of Sauron during the first world war. So, this is the weapon that, in the novels, defeats the worst evil the world has ever known and reminds us that there’s always hope and cause to fight.
Thje real-world Anduril, however, supplies drones to the U.S. Border Patrol for use stopping brave people fleeing political, social and economic oppression by making a hazardous trip across our militarized southern border. So, it is evil. Not only is it evil, it delights in its crapulence by boasting on its careers page:
“We won’t tell you that you’re making the world a better place with ad optimization and emoji filters. We believe the most socially impactful thing we can do is help people in life-and-death situations make better decisions.”
Ha, ha. Make the world a better place by utilizing drone chicanery against defenseless refugees. How heroic. Dorks.
My aim here is not to write much about politics but creative arts are often, if not always, political and lines cannot be clearly drawn all of the time. We’re in the midst of Democratic primary season for the 2020 presidential election and former New York City mayor and the multibillionaire founder of Bloomberg LP, Michael Bloomberg, is running on a “can do” mantra, touting his competency and accomplishments. Fine. But he’s also complaining that his campaign offices are being tagged around the country with spray-painted epithets like “Oligarch,” “corporate pig,” and “Eat the rich.”
Of course, the Bloomberg campaign will take exception to this but, at the same time, the candidate has said he’d spend maybe $1 billion of his own money on advertising. His ads became quickly ubiquitous on all major social media platforms and on cable television networks. He bought a massive amount of ad spots to run on MSNBC during a debate where he was a participant and MSNBC was one of the sponsors. He bought Superbowl ads. Bloomberg is using his massive wealth to flood and takeover public spaces both online and off.
Graffiti is a communications tool used by people without $1 billion to also get their message out to the public. A Mike Bloomberg campaign office is an advertisement to everybody who walks or drives by it. So is a graffiti tag. Bloomberg will never see it that way, of course, but in the spirit of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hambleton and more importantly, to resistance movements around the world, we should see these tags not as the affront that Bloomberg does but as artists taking back space that Bloomberg is buying in our minds.
