Cold War Stories

In addition to being a Supreme Court nut, I am very much a history buff, specifically Cold War history. I'm one day hoping to create a one-man show around my love of telling Cold War stories, but I have other things on my plate.

Why do I love Cold War stories?

Well, the Cold War is an interesting case that makes something I believe about life very clear. In the Cold War, you have events that are driven, largely, because of the Force of History. Each event calls back to the event right before it, each seems like a natural response to the thing that just happened, and yet by the time you're ten events down history has taken baffling turns. Yet things seem to drive towards inevitable events and conclusions.

As a for instance, a lot of ink has been spilled about why the Soviet Union collapsed, and one of the stories -- the one economists tend to favor -- is that the centrally planned economy was inefficient and created a perverse incentive structure which, in aggregate, corroded the economy from Day One, until eventually it was untenable. (the Reagan-killed-the-USSR theory is really an extension of that theory).

On the other hand, the "inevitable force of history" is kind of boring and abstract. And there's a lot of case to be made that Cold War history can be seen through the lens of a few individuals who appear, in choice moments, to make singular decisions that ripple out through history. After all, the Soviet economy was struggling for years and years before the collapse, but the Soviet Union didn't really collapse until Mikhail Gorbachev decided that he was not going to use military force in Eastern Europe, even if Eastern European countries turned away from communism -- that his democratic reforms were more important than territorial integrity. As a point of comparison, Khrushchev was faced with the same decision at the end of the Khrushchev Thaw, when his resolve to end the bloodshed Stalin had unleashed was challenged by an uprising in Hungary. Khrushchev decided differently, and the USSR persisted.

So on the one hand, you have a view of history that is individuals making heroic decisions -- which is, by the way, the theatrical view of history -- or the view of history where large economies of scale overpower the individual and force their hands. These views are not, in fact, incompatible. In fact, the latter emerges from the former.

(That word is very complicated, and rather than explain it, which I would do a pretty poor job of it, I'll leave it to the masters at Radiolab to do that for me. Honestly, LTTWT)

At any rate, I love those moments when a single person managed to change the direction of the Cold War, whether by accident by pure moxie.

Case 1: Matthias Rust, a young West German Teenager who learns how to fly, flies into Moscow, lands outside the Kremlin, goes to prison for a long time, and gives Gorbachev pretext to fire old-guard Communists from the military chain of command.

Case 2: (my favorite) Guenter Schabowski, a party bureaucrat whose single press conference gaffe brought down the Berlin Wall and, in its own way, set a date for the dissolution of the Soviet Union as it had been known for three full decades.

Ayn Rand II

Freddie DeBoer responds in the comments section to my post on Ayn Rand, which in turn was a response to his post:

Someone who I respect has long made this important point: Rand's philosophy was, in its infant stages, a very direct response to her experiences with Stalinism. It would be truly unfair for me to fail to keep that in mind when I think about her. Where I think criticism remains is in the fact that she lived in America for many decades (and could see very well that, for all of its advantages over Bolshevism, American capitalism wasn't some perfect machine for sorting the virtuous), without ever moderating her message; and in the fact that her followers don't have the excuse of intimate exposure to Stalinism, which makes their devotion to Objectivism less defensible. From my perspective, anyway.

There's a lot in this paragraph that resonated with me, actually.

Point one of what resonated: I was born in Israel, and thusly am descended from families that were fleeing the Holocaust. The national trauma that still exists in Israel is hard even for me, as an Israeli of Israelis, to fathom. It isn't often on the surface of national discussion, but if you push hard against most of the positions taken in Israel, it bubbles up suddenly, lashing out. The increasingly right-wing nation can only be understood in the context of the fading hope for a national haven from the Holocaust.

People close in my family will distance themselves from the rabid right in Israel, but sometimes interject something like, "You can understand where they come from, right?" Well, I can understand how they came to exist. But I don't know if I can call that any more or less "defensible" than those whose hatred I can't easily understand. What makes anyone's hatred or anger more or less defensible? It isn't as though there's a hard-and-fast rule that people who survive terrible tragedies are incapable of seeing beyond hate and fear -- for every Meir Kahane, there's an Elie Wiesel.

It's tough. There's a fine line between "understanding" and "defending." There are those who explain contemporary Israeli policy, and there are those who defend contemporary Israeli policy, and it is important to understand where you fall between that.

Also, speaking of Israeli policy, the current lowest of the low points in Israeli is Avigdor Lieberman who, like Ayn Rand, fled the Soviet Union. Do I understand that, growing up in the oppressive, anti-semitic Soviet Union, he'd be willing to stop at nothing to preserve the "Jewish character" of Israel? Perhaps. But I have no desire to defend him. Regardless of what has happened to him, he should be condemned.

On the other hand, Freddie's post deals with people who are Objectivist (I hate that name, by the way, it doesn't line up with what that philosophy means to me, but okay I'll bite). It takes a remarkable generosity of spirit to remain in dialogue with people who hold extreme views. As Freddie aptly puts it, "There's a lesson, in all of this, I think, about charity, and about grace." Scott Walters also commented on the "lack of generosity" with which Ayn Rand viewed the world. It resonated with me, reminiscent of the difficulty of conversations with the arch-conservative I lived with. That's the second point.

One of the lessons I learned there is to figure out where to fight, and where to let things slide. There's a tendency for us to grip each of our ideas as though they are our most important. Over the last year I've realized, for instance, that the government's decision to authorize torture is one of those hold-your-ground moments.

(from the testimony:

Chairman Conyers: I didn't ask you if you ever gave him advice, I asked you do you think the President could order a suspect buried alive?
Yoo: Mr. Chairman, my view right now, is I don't think a president would - no American president would ever have to order that or feel it necessary to order that.

See that? "I don't think a president would bury someone alive. But if he wanted to...")

The last thing I wanted to say is that Freddie's comment only further underscores how interesting it is that Ayn Rand's writings have lasted so long, and with such visceral power. See, she was writing in response to a specific context, the context that Freddie pointed out: the context of having escaped from Stalin's grasp. That is a uniquely gone context. Firstly, the context faded with the end of Stalin's reign of terror (not to diminish the fear and negative atmosphere of the rest of Soviet history, but Stalinism was a whole other league; post-Stalin is Iran, Stalin is North Korea). Then, the context faded with the end of the Cold War, when the "evil empire" left the daily reality for a new generation of Americans.

And remember, although this context was real for Ayn Rand, it was almost diametrically opposed to Americans' experiences. When Ayn Rand was writing, it was the one period in which more people were leaving the United States than were entering.

And also remember that for the Rand-devotees of my generation, the threat of "socialism" has gotten a lot more vague. Even in "Communist" China, the command economy has devolved into some pseudo-communist/pseudo-capitalist nether-economy. Our biggest threats have not come from the socialist countries (although North Korea has always been a managed risk), but rather from collapsed economies -- areas that were marginalized in the aftermath of the Cold War, such as post-Colonial Africa, Afghanistan, or the Middle East. With the exception of trust-fund ideologues like the Christmas Day undie-bomber, our biggest threats are linked to crippling poverty.

Anyways, my point is not to criticize Rand (although you can tell I think her world-view completely unrelated to the world we actually live in) but to marvel at the fact that many are more beguiled by the possibility of dangers that Rand seems to hint at then the real, immediate dangers of the world around us. Compared to, say, Muslim extremism, Rand's dangers are somewhat hypothetical. That's not to say she's wrong -- this is also the power of Orwell's writings, or of the Constitution itself -- but it's strange that it has so tangible an impact (you can't say that Orwell has the same devoted following).

Rand is an interesting case. She strikes so far outside of her context, and she grips the people she strikes.

On The Meaning Of What We Do II

Freddie deBoer (h/t Andrew Sullivan) has this to say about Ayn Rand:

People far abler than I have prosecuted the case against Rand,

and I don't intend to rehash it here. But this tendency of her writings

and her philosophy to compel people to slap concrete on the foundation

of their own ideas, to build a moat around their intellectual life, to

categorize the whole world into the tiny fraction who are worthy and

the great horrid mass that are simply not to be listened to in any

circumstance... this is the greatest failing of the woman and her

teachings. There are a worse things to inspire people towards--

genocide, war, ethnic cleansing-- but still, a philosopher whose

greatest contribution is a vast incuriosity is a dismal thing.

Emphasis mine. What a beautiful turn of phrase, and a beautiful metric by which to judge an author's efficacy: can they really turn their prose into something concrete, through the minds of the assembled?

What's interesting about this is that it points out something to me that has always been fascinating about Ayn Rand. I find her literary style -- not just her philosophy -- to be alienating and abhorrent. I dislike the way she renders characters, and the quality of the worlds she inhabits. But I have seen her prose transform other people in ways that very, very few other fiction writers have. She really was the L Ron Hubbard of her times. Her words carry a power that, to this day, still holds people in her sway. I wish she had chosen a more positive way to make her impact.

On The Meaning Of What We Do

Scott Walters picks up on an important question -- the important question -- posed by Tom Loughlin:

When you stack up the general public’s statistical disinterest in theatre against the general economic condition of the art and the artists themselves, the rational mind has to question why anyone would continue to pursue such a statistically trivial career. Or worse – why anyone would ever educate or train someone to pursue this career. You can choose to take the high road and produce aesthetic arguments supporting such a choice, but only in a first-world country where basic needs are by and large taken care of can this argument actually take place. There are many places in the world where no one is arguing about how many plays or whose plays get produced every year. You own career, stacked up against these statistics, makes for a sober reckoning.

Scott's answer:

Our society is built on stories. We communicate our values, our ways of interacting, our aspirations according to the stories we tell each other over generations. The idea that there is value in helping others who are in dire need, for instance, which underlies the Haitian relief effort, is passed on from generation to generation by the stories we tell that reinforce that value. Without that story, or with a more dominant counter-story, such admirable behavior would likely be scarce.

I think I'll take a crack at answering the question, because the question goes back to what my goal was when I began this blog, the philosophy that underlies how I try to approach theater, politics, and everything.

There's a lot of evidence to support the theory is that what drives humanity to create the complexity of our civilization is our ability to communicate. Mankind makes discoveries, and then it shares discoveries with one another, and passes them down. Mankind discovered other ways to encode that communication -- first carved into stone, then written on pages, printed, broadcast, and then finally put into the digital sphere.

You can look at the history of science. A theory begins with a single man making a statement. Someone responds to it. Someone adds on to it. Someone criticizes it. Someone corrects it, someone else rebuts the criticism. The conversation evolves the ideas, and it only evolves as we respond and add on.

That's what culture is. Culture is an aggregation of everyone's attempts to join a cultural, historical conversation about today, tomorrow, and the future. It's a big conversation, much of which is chatter -- Twitter, in a way, is a microcausm of the language. There are conversational threads like the permanent conversations about sex, about governance, about happiness. There are conversations that crop up and rage suddenly in a context and then fade away as people move on (is the Leno-Conan thing going to be important in 2011?).

I'm reading up on mimetics lately to try and support this idea but the idea is this: our society is built on two things: the fitness of our bodies, and the fitness of our ideas. In fact, at this point, we stress the fitness of our ideas more than the fitness of our bodies, because they are far more flexible and pay back to the fitness of our bodies much quicker.

That's what we're doing here in the theater: we're trying to enter this big cultural conversation in the ways we know how. We've got things to say, memes/ideas to spread, things that we hope will add to the survival of the species. We're a tiny shred of society's conversation, or a sliver of its imagination. We're just individual neurons firing inside the great mind of society.

Can we guarantee that our firings are doing something? I don't know. Ask a neurologist which brain cells are "vital" in the working of the brain. We lose some all the time. Often, it's the connections between brain cells which are more important than the neurons themselves -- and that's the conversation.

I forget who it was who first implanted the meme into my head that playwriting is the supreme act of arrogance -- writing as though people care about what you have to say. But the truth is, people are surprisingly interested in what everybody has to say. And we don't have to reach everyone ourselves -- we just have to be 6 degrees away from everybody.

One of the important memes that this conversation includes is, as Scott notes, generosity. That conversation goes so far back in history we can't remember where it begins, but you can see it in the Gospel ("Give to other people, and you will receive. You will be given much. It will be poured into your hands--more than you can hold. You will be given so much that it will spill into your lap. The way you give to other people is the way God will give to you."), and you can see it in the Gospel of Wealth ("In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to use the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all.")

As we debate the issues back and forth, in sermons and books and advertise and put on plays, the ideas evolve. They get more specific. When I was young, it seemed like people wanted to help Africa, so they sent food and clothes. Then African economists got together and pointed out that buying food and clothes and sending money was counterproductive in the long term. Nowadays, it seems like we've refined our tools for giving. All of a sudden there's microloans, we're debating whether it's more effective to use pesticides or mosquito nets, we're talking about how closely linked government reform is to international aid. A century ago, we didn't even have a movement that believed that people in other countries might be as worthy of our aid as people in our own.

How often is theater at the center of the debate? Not all that often. But then again, how often is any of the 6 billion people on this planet at the center of the debate? The new rabidly self-aggrandizing type of person typified by the Balloon Boy family or the Salahis is the compulsion of Americans who do not want to be at the edge of the debate, do not just want to be one neuron in a mass of coordinated neurons -- they want to drive the debate. The Salahis, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck; people who aren't content with chiming in with their two cents.

Let's just keep the conversation rolling, so that our ideas can literally evolve and hopefully make us more fit as a society.

Court Commentary: American Needle v. NFL

So, if senior year of high school I had realized that the arts had no future for me, I know exactly what I would have done. I would have gone into Constitutional Law and worked my ass off to work towards my deepest secret desire: to be a Supreme Court Justice. Seeing as I'm a non-native born liberal Israeli male, the odds of me getting onto the Supreme Court are low to none, but I might have made a Federal judgeship, and I think I'd be okay with that.

Anyways, I follow the Supreme Court closely when I can, and what I love are cases like this one: American Needle v. NFL.

The case, as I can sum it up:

• The 32 teams of the NFL license the NFL their logos, and the NFL in turn licenses those logos to a single merchandiser, Reebok.
• Another merchandiser, American Needle, sued the NFL, saying that it was a trust -- a collection of competing entities that had unified to distort the market.

The claim hinges around whether the NFL is a single, unique entity, or whether it is an umbrella organization for 32 entities in the same market. If it is the former, then it is not a trust. If it is the latter, then it is.

Anyways, as the oral arguments have progressed, it has seemed to me to be clear that the NFL is a trust.

1. The teams existed before the NFL, and came together to form it.
2. Teams such as the Harlem Globetrotters have proved that teams don't need the league to exist, and thus are not dependent on it.

But really, that's not the part of the case that interested my brain. I was interested in something my mother brought up. You see, my mother is not a sports fan. She kind of dismisses the entire notion of sports. When I told her this story, she waved her hand and said, "Oh, if the NFL is raising prices on Football hats, why not buy hockey hats?"

It made me wonder how you can define a market. Really, the question is "are the two products equivalent?" If, from the consumer's perspective, you can swap one product for another and they can be comparably equivalent, then they are in the same market.

Silly Illustrative Example 1: If I am shopping for a blue baseball cap, and they are out of blue baseball caps, it is not unlikely that I will buy a black baseball cap. This are roughly equivalent options.

Silly Illustrative Example 2: If I am shopping for a car, and they are out of cars, it is unlikely that I will buy a scooter. These are not roughly equivalent options.

But what about something like a sports jersey? Suddenly, people's emotions come into play. If a person wants to support the Bengals because Chad Ochocinco is the greatest person alive today, they will not accept a New York Giants jersey in exchange (by the way, apparently these are equivalent for Justice Breyer, who doesn't appear to give a shit about sports, unlike Justice Blackmun or Justice Sotomayor). There's some sort of emotionally distinguishing value. Football fans are a distinct crowd from hockey fans, and Bengals fans are a distinct crowd from Giants fans. Sometimes it seems like saying there isn't much difference between a Mets fan and a Yankees fan isn't that far from saying there isn't much difference between Arabs and Persians.

I wonder how that concept pays out in the arts.

This morning, when I first thought up this post, I had a brilliant insight on that score, but I was driving and now it's 1:30 AM and I can't remember.

MSM Win?

By the way, speaking of the media, has anyone noticed the quality of reporting on Haiti? The ability to communicate the magnitude of the suffering to the United States, the round-the-clock coverage, on every network, the paper news, the internet news, NPR. It's almost painful to watch, so I read most of it online in ways I can digest. But considering the failure of news organizations regarding the ongoing turmoil in Iran, it's good that they know that they can do this, when they want to.

Also, dig my use of the question mark to hedge in the post title.

Grassroots + Power VI: Separation Between Arts and State ctd.

So I was wondering the other day about the separation between arts and state, and I want to return to that subject, because I don't think I delineated exactly what I meant. The arts are, for instance, used by the State Department. They're used by the MTA. To discuss "arts" and "the state" blithely as though it's all the same is not the level of specificity I'd like to leave the discussion on.

Let's start with political content. One thing you'll notice is that many artists, even when they strive to be political, try not to be ideological -- they at least say they want to present "both sides" or "provoke debate." They certainly aren't out there to propagandize. I occasionally meet an artist who has an agenda, but rarely, so very rarely. It's a taboo. (I also tend very much not to like their work, so I'm definitely part of the taboo).

The reason I bring this up is because recently, I've been watching some vintage Capra with my family off of Netflix. Specifically, we saw Meet John Doe. What a fantastic, fantastic, film.

Also, a very blatantly ideological one. Most of the characters are incredibly one-dimensional, in a way that isn't bothersome -- the setting is basically that, in unstable and corrupt times, people are reduced to base instinct or strategy. The female protagonist will do anything to keep her job, the paper owner will do anything to sell papers, the politician will do anything for votes. The only character who doesn't fit into this is the film's "John Doe." But he doesn't have an ideology. He's just pushed around, a vessel. You spend the length of the movie debating within yourself which ideology he should allow himself to accept (a sneaky way of saying you spend the movie wondering which strain of thought is right). Finally, at the end, everything ends discredited except common human decency.

Or the Frank Capra we saw last night, You Can't Take It With You. (By the way, I think Eugene Jarecki should have used this instead of It's A Wonderful Life for the Move Your Money campaign -- here too the antagonist is an evil banker). The Turner Classic Movie synopsis says it all: "A girl from a family of freethinkers falls for the son of a conservative banker."

It's a far cry from the way politics is tackled in my favorite film, 12 Angry Men. There, each character is represented, and -- like the trial it mirrors -- each side gets to make its persuasive case. There are shades of emotional complexity and doubt in each character, and each character honestly believes he's out to do something good. The victory of 20th Century Realism over 20th Century pedagogy.

I'm mulling over: what are the rules of making a piece that emphatically asserts an opinion? I've heard before that art is about the question, not the answer. For a while I've believed that. And I still think it's usually true.

But a while back I spoke about my conviction that culture is a conversation, and each cultural act we perform, be it an ad or a play or a book is just a moment in the conversation.

If that's the case, then why the hell isn't there some way of asserting something? Just as we don't have to find ourselves trapped permanently in the passive-aggressive mode as we talk naturally, there has to be some way we can assert the things we believe in ways that are respectful, insightful, and useful.

It's surprisingly tough in spoken language. I've seen plenty a conversation where somebody had the gall to assert an opinion -- on some topics, not others -- and the conversation has ground to a halt.

When I was in Prague, I had the strange experience of living with one of those conservatives we're always seeing on the news. Someone whose approval of Sarah Palin grew when it turned out that she tried to ban books, and who didn't believe that we should have national health care. The fact that he supported Mitt Romney and Romney's health care reform didn't particularly sway him.

He was a very well-educated young man from a wealthy background, he was studying to be in the communications industry, and every time he went to downtown Boston he carried a concealed weapon tucked into the back of his pants.

We were all at lunch, and somehow the conversation turned to gun violence, and someone said something along the lines of how problematic it was that guns are so easy to get access to, and he hotly stated that anyone who wanted to limit access to guns was taking away his right to defend himself. There was a halt in the conversation. Slowly, we tried to discuss the issue. I was fascinated simply watching people slowly figure out what they could or couldn't say. Nobody wanted to argue, but they wanted to discuss, and clearly this was something he was very passionate about, and nobody wanted to say the things that would explode the anger.

At the same time, sometimes he would say things that were absolutely horrifying. I won't repeat them on my blog, but a lot of time people would simply let it slide because it was easier than arguing with someone that angry about issues. He felt persecuted, because every time he would drop one of these incredibly offensive statements, people would get angry at him.

It reminded me that sometimes -- just sometimes -- we have to stand by what we believe. Not on everything. I, for one, believe that a public option would be important. But it's not the battle we should fight to the death, certainly not at the expense of the health care bill as a whole. But on the other hand, the fight against torture is something that I'm willing to say is an imperative. There are some things that we can assert, decidedly.

Some of our most beautiful cultural legacies -- the Declaration of Independence, Edward R. Murrow's address from Buchenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the execution from the Vietnam war -- these cultural legacies are not handed down because they were a question. They also were not handed down because they were the "answer," a single, immutable, truth. They don't speak a single universal moral. But they speak to one moment, one crucial crossroads that our culture faces, and it passes a specific judgment, asserts a specific impact.

That's why I get mad about media equivalency, about headlines like Reid's Race Comments: Was There Truth In His Comments? Sometimes -- not always -- you just have to say what the hell is on your mind. There are times when it's simply not appropriate to use the question mark.

This doesn't mean we have to yell, or vilify, or engage in all of the rancor that is attached to fighting over passionate issues. It just means we sometimes have to find the way to make our case clearly, concisely, and with a period at the end of our statement.