Withdrawal Symptoms
Dunkirk NY – It’s come down to something as simple as this: I think I am losing interest in American society. I think it’s that simple, and I think in some measure it is affecting every other aspect of what I am doing with myself.
Signpost: I don’t really much like today’s movies. If I hadn’t already seen The Best Years of Our Lives 50 times already I probably would have picked it over all the movies I looked for in Movies On Demand last night. But my wife (who loves the movies) and I settled on Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock instead. It was a pleasant enough movie, with echoes of the Woodstock festival all through the movie (for which I had tickets but could not get the car from my parents, so I ended up not going), and it had some decent performances (particularly from Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton as the parents), but in the end the story was fairly uneven and unsatisfying. Too many disjointed events in the story not really coalescing into anything other than a young man’s drive to leave home. Not stunning. And not to go unnoticed, of course, is the particularly unflattering portrayal of theatre people as represented by the Earthlight Players.
Signpost: It seems now that the morning skim of the newspapers tends to reveal nothing new. All the news seems old. Problem-solving is not the central focus of politics. Self-interest and a whole raft of inane ideology is. Politics have become a crushing, mind-numbing bore. The incivility and inarticulateness of political figures today is utterly bizarre and totally depressing.
Signpost: Education seems not to be helping the situation much. From revisionist social studies in Texas to the reported lack of empathy on the part of today’s college students, the state of education overall seems as much in deterioration as anything else I can think of.
Signpost: The Gulf oil spill is a natural disaster of immense proportions that does not have an immediate technological solution. People seem stunned by this. Why can’t anybody fix this? Everyone had the same reaction to situations like Katrina and the European ash cloud that halted air traffic for two weeks. When did we ever get the idea that all the technology we’ve created is somehow foolproof? Why do we keep fooling ourselves into believing that if we build all these technological marvels that we will be better off?
Signpost: This political ad. And the comments.
Signpost: My next-door neighbors acquired a dog in January. All they do with it is chain it to a short leash and bring it in and out of doors all day. It roams the small length of its leash. It shits on their small cement walkway and they leave it there for a couple of days before cleaning it up. It now barks at every little sound it hears, beginning at 6:30 in the morning when they first let it out. Now that I am home most of the day I hear it almost constantly. They talk to it as if it will understand what they say, telling it over and over again to be quiet. They barely walk it. Why would anyone get themselves a dog only to turn it into a neurotic mess?
Can one really think about creating theatre at a broad national community level when one takes a hard look at the national conversations and behavior going on? At this point, it becomes harder and harder to try to imagine what kind of theatre would possibly attract a nation that actually allows a movement with as little intellectual acumen as the Tea Party to grow and become a political force. The signposts seem clear enough. -twl
