Victimology, Christian-Style

Yes, we should definitely investigate Hollywood filmmakers, the creators of "South Park," and anyone else who "denigrates religious beliefs." Good idea, Values Voters Summit-guy. (Full article here, via crooks and liars.)



In a little one-minute clip, this guy snappily demonstrates a couple of the huge, glaring hypocrisies of the red-meat, nutbar wing of the GOP. The party of freedom, the party of "get your government hands off my Medicare," is also home to many, many people who believe there would be nothing wrong with having government intervene in the religious lives of its citizens--as long as that religion is Christianity.

Which of course illustrates the other hypocrisy, that these people are always the first to cry "persecution" anytime anyone says or does anything remotely in opposition to their beliefs. As if to have a set of beliefs means that everyone else in the world must believe them too. Or if not believe, at least not challenge or question them, because to question someone's beliefs is to "disrespect" them.

So it is that the religion of 76 to 80 percent of Americans--around 240 million people--is the victim here, being "denigrated," warranting investigation.

It must really suck to be a persecuted majority. Methinks perhaps you guys are doing something wrong here if you're being persecuted by the rest of us.

3.21.11

Jose Zuniga and me. I'm the one leering demonically.

3.21.11

Just shaved my beard and head following my furry stint as psychiatrist Martin Dysart in ‘Equus.’ It’s strange how liberated and free and alive I feel today, and not just due to of the relief of getting rid of all that hair. I should be exhausted; it was an incredibly long week with much theatrical carousing--both standard and long-form--not to mention an added matinee on Saturday. But instead I was up at 8:30 a.m. which is utterly ridiculous. (I haven’t been up that early in a looooong time. It doesn’t count if you’re up all night.)

Instead, here I am, Monday morning, going to the store (it helps my motivation that I was out of coffee) doing laundry, accomplishing things, piecing my life back together after so many weeks of tearing up and down I-25, living out of my backpack. It’s spring, and I feel reborn in that anticipatory early-morning way, like when you’re a kid on the first nice Saturday morning of the year, and the whole weekend opens up before you as you leave the house after breakfast. You can smell summer coming even though there’s still a bit of a chill in the air; the cruel winter gods have been laid to rest for another year.

And goddammit, I want to ride my bicycle.

Of course, there is always a bittersweet sense of newfound freedom when a show ends, a feeling of sadness and simultaneous joy, and perhaps a dose of saudade, that nostalgic feeling of sweetness and loss.

But with this particular character, I feel somehow as if I was carrying around a lot more ennui and self-doubt and angst than I was even aware of. Dysart is such a sad, broken person, truly a man without any hope, suffering the quintessential 1970s existential crisis, an utterly lost soul.

Now, with any character, some of it gets on you. And some of you gets on them. Smarter people than I am say that you can’t play a character--not genuinely, not with true heart and spirit--without there being at least some sliver of that character already in your psyche, some part of you that you can relate to the character’s life and outlook.

And certainly I am no sunny optimist; I definitely go through dark times of doom and gloom, probably more so than many.

But this guy, this fucking Dysart guy, I realize today, rubbing the stubble on my head and watching the sun coming in the window, this guy drained me. Going to a place of despair--utter, bleak, impossible despair, completely desperate hopelessness--doing that every night took more out of me than I realized. The tears after the final show were cleansing somehow, a rebirth, appropriately on the first day of spring.

However, I am not bitching, believe me. I am so happy I did this show. Craig and the entire cast were amazing; we all really functioned cohesively--seeming to be one unit, as an audience member said at a talkback. And my thanks go out to Zuni in particular, Jose Zuniga, who played Alan. He’s one of those fully committed, fully natural actors who--with such ease and grace you want to rip their heads off--raise the bar and force you to take your game to the next level. Go big or go home. And I think playing Dysart opposite him really brought out a lot of unexpected levels in not only my acting, but also in my own emotional life.

That is one of the secrets actors are reluctant to tell you: on some level we get to not only play these people on stage, we get to become them. And not just during the show or during the run, but afterward as well.

The obvious--and correct--answer for why people act is, of course, we’re attention whores. Any actor who says he is not an attention whore is, well, acting when he tells you that.

We’re the perpetual middle children of life, jumping desperately in front of our siblings, raising our voices to ridiculous levels in even the most staid setting. We’re the gabby, cackling douchebags at the next table in an otherwise quiet restaurant; we're the loud laughers at the funeral home. Of course we get off on the adrenaline rush of performing, and the attention, and the applause.

But the secret, other answer for why we act is you also get to take home parts of those characters. Things your characters learn--or at least things they should have learned--can teach you and inform you and carry forward in your own life, if you’re open to them.

Dysart’s angst and bitter disappointment with the world he created for himself will wash away. They are washing away already.

But his compassion I get to keep, at least as much of it as will fit in my desiccated, black soul. :D

If I could paraphrase Dysart here, he is essentially saying to Alan: We’re all fucked up, kiddo, the whole goddamn human race. I can’t tell you why we’re so fucked up, or why we’re here, or what kind of fucked-up, evil god would create such a fucked-up, evil species.

But I can tell you there is no ‘normal’ here. This bus don’t go to ‘normal,’ baby. We go to Wackville, and North Nutbar, and probably Crackton, but we don’t go to Normal.

And what’s important, what keeps us human, you and I, we outsiders, we the daring and the different and the weird and the free, and what disallows the machine to take away our souls is realizing this about our fellow humans: they’re all just as fucked up inside as we are.

In order to remain human we must fight, every day to feel compassion for our fellow humans. We must make a conscious effort to do so, even as we and they struggle to make some sense of this fucked-up world, even as angry and frustrated and hopeless as our fellow humans make us feel sometimes.

For if we do not, if we allow our hearts to shut down, then we become part of the machine ourselves. We become dead, eyeless cogs in this clunky, wheezing contraption, complicit not only in our own slow deaths but also in propping up this dying empire where we are told everyone is meant to be alone, wrapped up in the cold arms of the machine, where only things are meant to bring some hollow joy, things that the machine is only too happy to sell you, offering some short-term remedy for your pain and loneliness and your sense that you are the only one who is fucked up, a remedy that will quickly fade, until the next thing comes along and you buy that as well.

And so on.

Compassion is the gift Dysart has given me.

I hope I can hang onto it. I hope I am worthy of it.

And I hope in some small way I have given a form of that gift to you as well.

kjb

more theatre

Here's a neat story. So an Oregon high school decided to forbid its students from putting on a play, 'Picasso at the Lapin Agile,' because a parent complained that the show had references to drinking and sex. But a local college got a request to host the play, and according to state law, the university president says she has to allow the show to be presented there.

'LA GRANDE, Ore. (AP) — A play banned from La Grande High School will instead be done at Eastern Oregon University after the president said she had no choice but to allow a student group to rent space for the performance. University President Dixie Lund said last week she wouldn't allow high school students to perform Steve Martin's "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" on the campus because the superintendent and school board had forbidden it in at the high school.'

Which is kinda cool, on the face of it. The underlying issues are more troubling, to me, however. For one, why has it come to this pass, where ONE SINGLE COMPLAINT can lead to a play, or a book or anything else being banned from schools because the precious snowflakes there may somehow be damaged by the material? I mean, really? Even referring to drinking or sex could so wound these kids psychically that we must ban a play from being performed? I may be out of the loop here, but I was under the impression that high school kids had some vague knowledge that something called 'sex' existed in the world. And I'm pretty sure they may have seen their parents drink at least once.

Now, i'm not saying we should broadcast 24-hour porn on wide-screens in classrooms (although, come to think of it, if you want students to pay attention...) But it seems clear that kids know a hell of a lot more than their parents think they know. And perhaps they even know more than their parents. The more you try to hide something from others, the more it peeks out.

The thought process that leads certain people to assume that they know best for everyone, and that they must somehow bravely step forward to prevent the soiling of others' minds is the last remnant of the dying patriarchy, the sad lostness of Old Religion, that charming set of superstitions and lies that was made up by our tribal ancestors in the desert in order to keep The Mob in line. One can only hope that we're moving forward towards MORE information, MORE exposure to new ideas for children. Good lord, we're getting dumber by the minute--thank the gods that someone realizes that kids aren't going to freak out and run off to join a sex and liquor cult (Elliot's?) upon seeing actors portraying people who drink and fuck.

protest, but do it quietly

Here we go again. Just like G. W. Bush, the man that ‘Maverick’ John McCain is trying so hard to emulate, the one who has a 29 percent approval rating, the McCain campaign seems to believe in freedom--but only if you don’t disagree with them on anything.

You’ve probably heard about this one already, but yesterday at a town-hall meeting open to the public in downtown Denver, a woman was issued a ticket for trespassing and escorted from the public sidewalk outside the event after a security guard called police.

The problem? She was carrying a sign that read “McCain = Bush.” As she told someone who filmed the event, “Why would someone who supports McCain find this sign offensive?”

Here's video of the incident:

If you recall, our fine metro po-po’s have a history of this sort of thing. Back in 2005, three ticket-holders who were attempting to attend a presidential talk in Denver were removed by someone claiming to be a secret service agent after people reported that they found the bumper stickers on their car offensive. The White House later claimed it was a mistake made by a White House staffer. As carpetbagger asks, was this person punished for impersonating an officer with the secret service? Whose idea was it in the first place to remove ‘potential protesters’ who up to then had done nothing wrong but drive to the event in a car bearing a sticker that stated dissatisfaction with Bush’s foreign policy?

Proposed new Republican slogan: “Freedom. We believe in it, as long as you don’t use it."

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