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Lileks: brave artists bravely confront the stifling conformity of Amerikkka
Today's "Bleat:"Via Cartoon Brew, a summary of an off-Broadway play performed by the SpankinYanks: A searing look into friendship, national identity and the politics of paranoia, the Happiest Place on Earth will never be the same. Its now playing at a Scottish festival. Book your flight soon; no telling how long itll last before the animatronic Abe Lincoln Brigade telepathically controlled by Walts frozen head hunts down the actors and brings them to justice. Ice-Walts touchy about these things. Im not going to defend McCarthy, because he was a brute and boor and a butter-eating drunk who set back the anti-Communist cause four decades. To say that he was sorta right, in the sense that there were Commies about, is like saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer had a salutory effect on Japanese urban renewal. Im not interested in those debates right now. Id just like to point out that its a little late in the game to trot out a play about the mean old witch-hunts. The bravery of the scrappy idealists! The piggish philistinism of the anti-commie brutes! The smothering wet quilt of Conformity that held America motionless until it was thrown off by the undulating hips of Elvis! (Did you know they didnt show him below the waist on TV, at first! True! It was horrible, the Fifties; no one had sex without weeping in shame afterwards. Sometimes during.) It's just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. US version: communist sympathizers frozen out of screenwriting jobs, justly or unjustly. USSR version: actual communists killed in ghastly numbers by a parody of a legal system underwritten by brute force and an industrialized penal system built on slave labor. Why is the latter ignored, and the former celebrated? Because a herd of frozen zeks dying in the snows of Wherdifugistan doesnt really connect, you know? Whereas six guys sitting around the Carnegie Deli bitching about cowardly sponsors, that strikes a chord. . . . Some day someone may pen a biting satirical look at a government so nervous about sex and the irresistible lies of Mad Ave they banned Barbie, Western Pop music and American ads themselves. If such a plays performed, it wont be in by expats in Scotland; itll run in Tehran after the Mullahs fall. Among the wise and brave in the west, the Red Scare and the Eisenhower Golfocracy will remain the go-to era for the modern Dark Ages, a time when talented, witty people couldnt glibly support a collectivist blood-soaked totalitarian system without fear their boss might get the wrong idea. You can see why the Mouse is Dead premise, however historically flawed, was catnip for the playwrights. Disney = Mickey, and everyone loved Mickey Mouse. He was cheerful, brave, industrious, ingenious, faithful, fair, scrappy and true. He was everything the grownups said we should be. God how we hate him. Posted by: Mike 2006-08-21 |
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