The Golden Flag

CNN ran an article collecting people's letters about the Congress's most recent attempt to pass an Amendment to the Constitution that would ban flag-burning. And in most of the pro-Amendment letters, there seemed something--well, the only word that fits is idolatrous.

But isn't there an injunction somewhere that says something like "Thou shalt not worship false idols"? Wait, yes, here it is, in Exodus 20: 3-5:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.

The flag is a symbol, and worthy of respect, yes, absolutely. But so is the bald eagle, which was so endangered by good Americans' use of DDT that it had to be placed on the Endangered Species list. A symbol is only valuable, and it seems absurd to say this, symbolically. In the same way that a bald eagle in Alaska is just as valuable--symbolically--as one in Cleveland (are there any in Cleveland?), so too is the flag on your lawn just as valuable--as a symbol--as the one that flies above the White House. And symbols are most valuable when they are flexible, when they serve multiple purposes: when they can serve both as a token of national pride while also serving as an instrument of protest. Seems to me that something so powerful is only enhanced by an occasional burning: it says, look at how free we are that we can even do this.
And getting all worked up over the physical object rather than what it represents, well hell, that's just idolatry.

Besides, if you want to talk about the desecration of a symbol, how about taking a mountain sacred to the natives who have worshipped there for centuries and then carving a bunch of faces into it?

The Middle Path

I've been watching, again, Bill Moyers's interviews with Joseph Campbell, collectively titled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. And, as always when I pay attention to Campbell's teachings, my head is exploding. (But in a good way. The best way.)

In the second episode, "The Message of the Myth," they talk about a statue of Shiva in a cave near Mumbai in India. You enter the cave, which is carved with friezes in every direction, and at first you are blinded by the darkness. As your eyes adjust, you begin to see the central carving of the cave, at the end of the path. Nineteen feet high, its most important feature is the depiction of three faces. In the middle, a serene face looks out, toward you. Behind it, two other faces look away from you, to the left and right. These faces represent duality: good and evil, male and female, even mortal and immortal. But that face in the middle represents the unity of transcendance, the perfect oneness from which we have come and must return. "We always think in terms of opposites," Campbell says. "But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it."

Now bear in mind that here Campbell means not the Christian God but the larger, more difficult idea. "The ultimate word in our English language for that which is transcendant is God. But then you have a concept, don't you see?" He quotes Meister Eckhart: "...the ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions."

At first, upon hearing this, I was tempted to look upon it judgmentally in terms of my own religion. "Well," I thought, "here's a place where the Eastern religions get it right. Again. They begin and end with the idea of transcendance, whereas in Christianity, they're stuck on the ethics of good and evil, trapped in duality." But it only took a moment to see past that narrow view. Look at the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: at first Adam and Eve knew nothing of shame, knew nothing of the differences between them, until they ate of the fruit of knowledge and were cast out. This is, of course, all metaphorical: they existed in bliss, innately transcendant, and then were corrupted by this knowledge of duality, and ever since their descendants have been trying to find their way back to that original perfect bliss. This perfectly mirrors the experience we all have as individual human beings: whatever we were before we were born, that was our Garden of Eden, our perfect bliss, and as infants we retain much of that transcendance, completely content to eat and breathe and love and be loved; then we learn about the world, we acquire knowledge, and the rest of our lives mirror the journey of the descendants of Adam and Eve, trying to find our way back to the Garden.

This ain't New Age babble, friends. As Moyers notes during the interview, "Far from undermining my faith, your work in mythology has liberated my faith from the cultural prisons to which it had been sentenced." The evils of the world can be directly traced to these cultural prisons. "...[M]y notion of the real horror today," Campbell said in 1987, "is what you see in Beirut. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can't get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don't realize its reference. They haven't allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, "We are the chosen group, and we have God.'"

I wonder sometimes whether I am open to these ideas because I am a writer or whether I am a writer because I have always been open to these ideas. Probably the latter. This is not to say I'm better than anyone else; I tend to think of the writerly impulse as a gift and a task together. Maybe I am able to see, for example, the conflict in the Middle East from an infinitesimally larger perspective; but that also means that I have the responsibility to try, in my very limited fashion, to report back to the world what that perspective is. (And I already regret what I wrote about the death of al-Zarqawi a couple weeks ago.) In "City of Truth," the screenplay that Marc and I just finished (the first responses are coming in from people we sent it to, and it's been very positive so far), we tried to deal with exactly the ideas Campbell and Moyers talk about. There is a City of Truth in which no one can lie, and a City of Lies in which people take the opposite path and will only lie; our protagonist starts in the first, journeys to the second, and at the end of the story he leaves both behind as they destroy each other. Taking the middle path into the unknown. In our next draft, Campbell has already shown me one change we will need to make: our protagonist, when he enters the City of Lies, must really embrace it whole-heartedly, must be seen to swing wildly from one opposite to the other before he can have the transcendant revelation that leads him away from both opposites, away from dogma, and into the truer, unknowable path that lies beyond the end of our story.

To end, Campbell on the idea of sin:

Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner. And when I read that, I thought of my boyhood, going to confession on Saturdays, meditating on all the little sins that I had committed during the week. Now I think one should say, "Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week." Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative.
You see, religion is really a kind of second womb. It's designed to bring this extremely complicated thing, which is a human being, to maturity, which means to be self-motivating, self-acting. But the idea of sin puts you in a servile condition throughout your life.

Libertarianism

There's no question: government budgets are, by their very nature, just like that fat guy on the sofa. He knows he shouldn't eat that bag of potato chips, that he should lay off the Snickers and that having cheeseburgers every night is really truly not a good idea. He can feel the flesh jiggle when he walks and he gets embarrassed at the sight of himself--but still he eats. From time to time he puts himself on a diet and loses some weight and tells all his friends about how much weight he's lost. His friends congratulate him and then politely look the other way when the diet just kinda disappears and the weight just kinda reappears. Governments, and their budgets, are exactly like that.

So I am, in principle, sympathetic to the broad aims of the libertarian movement. I can walk down the movement's list of principal aims and check them off one by one. "Government should be smaller?" Yep, it really should. "Government should be less intrusive?" Oh my lordy yes. "Government should not be enslaved to corporate interests?" Yes, yes and yes. "Government should not be in the business of aggressive, imperial war?" Halleleujah!

But then that pesky little question asserts itself: "How exactly do you go about achieving these ends?" And, more importantly, "Just how small a government are we talking, here?"

So I did a little research today (and yes, maybe it's true that a little research is a dangerous thing). The best summary I've yet found of the ideals of the Libertarian Party of America (which is not quite the same thing as libertarianism) is here, in a Wall Street Journal article written by the late Harry Browne when he was running for President in 2000. And there are some serious places where I find myself saying "Whoa, wait a second."

Browne writes, "I want to get the federal government completely out of every area where it's made such a mess--health care, education, law enforcement, welfare, foreign aid, corporate welfare, highway boondoggles, farm subsidies." Farm subsidies and corporate welfare, yes; but if you take the federal government out of law enforcement, does that mean there is no longer an FBI to hunt for missing persons who have been taken across state lines? Does it mean there is no longer a federal grand jury to prosecute multistate crimes like those perpetrated by Enron? Highways may inevitably incite graft and corruption, but isn't it better to have a national highway system than not?

And what's wrong with welfare for people who've fallen on hard times? When I was very young, my mom got sick for a while and we had to accept food stamps. Then she got better and went back to work and didn't have to take the food stamps anymore; but it sure was nice that we didn't starve in the meantime. As Jimmy Stewart says in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, it's important that there always be "a little bit of lookin' out for the other fella." I feel the same way about foreign aid: sure it gets abused, but if we can help then we should, and I just don't believe that private charities and free trade would take up all of the slack.

Besides, people really aren't so good at regulating themselves. Remember what I wrote about Miami drivers after the hurricane? When authority disappeared, there was chaos, and it persisted for months. Harry Browne and I, as good citizens, are pretty damn good at understanding and practicing our place in the social contract; but in a population this large, even a small percentage of those who don't give a shit about the social contract can really fuck things up for the rest of us.

It boils down to this, for me: there are certain things that only a nationwide governmental effort can really accomplish. The shining example from our recent history is federal legislation that put in place many of the goals of the civil rights movement, namely the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There's no way Southern states were going to allow such measures to pass on a state-by-state basis. (And I say that as a native who loves the South.) Read almost any page at random from Taylor Branch's superb Parting the Waters for ample evidence of this. Only a concerted federal effort, with law enforcement backing, was going to get the George Wallaces of the world to ever back down.

So I just can't bring myself to actually become a capital-L Libertarian. For grins, I took "The World's Smallest Political Quiz," a ten-question Q&A that then scores you on the Nolan scale of political thought, and I came out as a Centrist--but right on the border between Liberal and Centrist, with a leaning toward Libertarianism. Pretty damn accurate for such a short quiz.

Plus ca change...

Here is a quote from a book I'm reading. See if any of this sounds familiar.

[After the conquest of Baghdad, it] was evident that [the conquering power] either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi'ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, [and] the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces...made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.

The quote is from David Fromkin's wonderful (but seriously dense) 1989 book A Peace to End All Peace, and the circumstances described concern the period after March 1917 when the British took Baghdad from the Ottoman Empire.

Do I even need to quote Santayana here?

Onstage

It has been, I just realized, eleven years since I last gave any kind of performance on a stage in front of an audience. I did not know, when we did that last show of the 1995 "Buckets O'Beckett" festival for Splinter Group in Chicago (here's a story about their later transformation into Irish Rep), that that would be the effective end of my performing life, but it was. I had always given specific advice to any young person who said they wanted to be an actor: Don't do it. Ordinarily I'm not that blunt, and if someone wants to try something then they should; but any profession in the arts is so brutal that I have come to firmly believe that if someone isn't driven by mortal necessity to do it, then for the sake of their sanity they shouldn't. In other words, "If you're not gonna fall down dead because you're not onstage, then for God's sake don't get on a stage." Therefore, if some young person can be dissuaded from seeking the actor's life, then s/he should be. But a real actor, that poor unfortunate who just can't help it, won't listen to me and will go on and do it anyway, and good for them.

Some time after that last Beckett performance (in the sublime "Ohio Impromptu"), I realized that it had been a few months since I had even gone to an audition, and that I really hadn't even noticed for a long time that I wasn't auditioning. In other words, I wasn't onstage, and I wasn't falling over dead because of it. Sometimes you just have to take your own advice, so I did, and I quit. (It helps, by the way, that that final performance of "Ohio Impromptu" was terrific, maybe the only performance I ever gave that I was completely happy with.)

About a month ago, my friend Ezra Buzzington sent an e-mail. He is a company member at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood, a 25-year old group whose recent anniversary video I edited. Their focus, as represented in the acronym NOTE (New One-Act Theatre Ensemble), is on original work, so every year they have a weeks-long vetting process wherein the various plays under consideration for the next year are given readings in front of the company members, who then vote on which productions they want to mount.

Ezra wanted to do Barry Rowell's "Before I Wake," a fascinating retelling of Stoker's Dracula novel in which, amazingly, the character of Dracula never appears. He is an unseen, offstage, felt presence who constantly influences what's happening onstage without ever being seen as an active participant. The play is short, and constructed like some kind of intricate chamber orchestra piece; indeed, Ezra's direction cast us all for the quality of our voices, and he gave us all instruments to keep in mind (as the Narrator reading stage directions, I was a cello). We rehearsed several times because this just isn't the sort of thing you can slap together in an afternoon, and on Saturday we performed it.

About halfway through, I began to remember--yeah, this is what this used to feel like. An audience sinking into an experience, their reactions transforming the work of the actors, all those live bodies and minds interacting to create something different, something far more interesting, than the piece that had been rehearsed. There was also, again, the impulse to play into the audience's reactions rather than to play with them, and it's an important distinction: the former is indulgent, while the latter can be revelatory. And I'm happy that even after all these years, I was able to spot that impulse as it happened, to avoid the easy laugh and to at least try to reach for the deeper response. (As much as a guy reading stage directions can.)

In other words, it felt good. And for just a second, I thought, Wouldn't it be kinda fun to maybe do this again? But then I also remembered: night after night of rehearsal, traveling across town through lousy traffic to fight for a parking space within a mile of the theatre, weeks of performances when maybe your audience is ten people or fewer, all the time spent and then the performance is gone into thin air as if never been.

It may be another eleven years, then, before I step on a stage again. But it was awfully nice to have done it again, just this once. Made me feel like a guy in my 20s again, and that's pretty nice too.

The Other Cheek

I don't call myself a Christian, mostly because people who do call themselves Christians, i.e. the ones who make a big fuss out of telling everyone how Christian they are, usually just piss me off. But when it comes to what I think is the single most important facet of Christian teaching, namely "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer to him the other also," well shut my mouth and call me a Jesus freak.

Actually, even better than that passage from Matthew is this one from Luke:

But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.

Now, none of this is easy to live up to. The tendency toward anger, the impulse toward revenge, is powerful and easy, and all too often I fail to live up to this best of principles. But I'm always trying, I always hold it uppermost in my mind, even when I fail. Particularly when I fail.

Two years ago, I made the horrible mistake of watching the video of Nicholas Berg's beheading. (No, I damn well won't include a link to it.) It was truly horrifying, perhaps the most devastatatingly awful thing I've ever seen, and I instantly regretted the "see something for myself and render my own judgments" idea that led me to watch it. The only consolation is that I watched the video without sound; if I'd actually had to hear poor Nick Berg screaming, I don't think I could have stood it.

The man who claimed "credit" for that horrible crime was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today, as probably everyone has seen, the papers are all leading with the story that al-Zarqawi was killed in a massive U.S. bombing raid.

And I really only have one reaction to al-Zarqawi's death: I'm glad he's dead, and I hope it hurt.

...and another one down

Another draft finished. This time, over the weekend Marc Rosenbush and I finished our adaptation of James Morrow's City of Truth. (And by the way, Morrow has a new book out called The Last Witchfinder. I haven't read it yet but Marc has--he finished Sunday, the same day we finished our script--and he reports that it's wonderful, definitely Morrow's best work.)

This was an incredibly tricky piece, and the problems were all built in. I can't say too much about it at this stage, prior to agents and managers and studios seeing it, but anyone who's read the book knows the essential premise: there is a City of Truth where citizens are conditioned to only be able to tell the truth; and there is an underground of liars, to whom the main character turns when his son becomes desperately ill, and the father finds he can't give his son hope without also lying to him. To us, the story was about dogma, and we pushed even further the fundamental sameness between the competing dogma of truth and lies. (I was fascinated to discover, during all this, that during the most recent British elections, there was a new political party called the Veritas Party, which seeks to be "honest, open and straight" and avoid the old parties' "lies and spin." Life imitating art?)

What it meant for us was that, to pick just one example, characters' language became extremely tricky. You cannot have someone in the City of Truth say "Good morning" unless he really truly believes the morning is notably good. Nor can a character say "I'm afraid I can't do that," because of course he wouldn't be afraid therefore he wouldn't say it. We long ago lost track of the number of times we wrote something like that then had to backtrack and correct it.

So now the revision process will begin; but we took so much time mapping everything out in advance that, with any luck at all, revisions will go pretty quickly. We're already putting together a cast list of friends for a reading, and hope to have this ready to go out by the Fall. Similarly, I'm nearly halfway through touch-ups on Beaudry, and--again, with a little bit of luck--that might be ready by Fall as well. It would be very nice indeed to have three scripts, then (including Marathon), ready to roll out the door at once.

Jury Duty

I am a big fan of jury duty. Honoring one's civic responsibilities is crucial to the functioning of a democracy, so I have always taken very seriously a lot of the things that people like to complain about: voting, paying taxes, sitting on a jury when called. The nation doesn't really ask much of us anymore--in a time of war there is no military draft, our taxes were not raised but cut, we have not been asked to compile steel or rubber or anything at all, we have not been urged to buy war bonds. Being a citizen of the United States has become one of the cushiest gigs on the planet, which is probably exactly why the few times we are asked to do something for our community, we get so damned grumpy about it.

Obviously there are times when the citizenry has stepped up in a big way--the aftermath of September 11th was, obviously, America at its best. And I've always been inclined to think that the way people grumble about jury duty was in the same spirit as grumbling about Mondays--it's just one of those things people say as idle conversation, but that for the most part, when Monday comes it's not really all that bad, you go and do your thing and then you go home and that's just how things are, no big deal.

Maybe things have changed; maybe all the wartime burdens we have not been asked to share have made us lose something essential in our civic spirit. Or maybe I just got a bad bunch of jurors, I don't know. But my most recent spin through the jury selection process was--there's really no other word for it--shameful.

I am sympathetic, to a point. The case for which we were being selected looked to be about as boring as it could possibly be: a stupid little auto-accident where one of the vehicles happened to be leased from a major auto manufacturer, thus leading that company's Sales division to be named as a defendant. For this, the court was anticipating a seven-day trial. When we were surveyed as to whether we recognized the names of any of the defendants or witnesses, the list of medical experts went on for about ten minutes. It was going to be a long, deadly dull case, the sort of thing that would cure an insomniac. I did not want to be seated on that jury. Particularly since I had originally been slated to go to the Criminal Courts building downtown, where there would have been a nice juicy crime to consider, but then at the last minute was diverted to this dull civil matter way the hell up in the Valley. (The courts aren't supposed to send you more than twenty miles from home. This was twenty miles to the dot.)

(Plus--the temperature in the Valley the last couple days was about 157,000 degrees. Celsius. And the air conditioner in my car just ran out of whatsit-fluid.)

California operates under a one day/one trial system (so does Illinois). The idea is supposed to be that when you report, if you are not seated on a jury by the end of that day, you are sent home and your responsibility to the jury system is fulfilled for at least twelve months. Since I haven't lived here for that long, my only prior experience with this process went exactly as advertised. About a month ago, however, a friend of mine was summoned and found the exception to the one day/one trial system: if you've been called into a courtroom but they have not been able to select twelve jurors and two alternates by the end of the day, then you have to return the next morning.

Between Chicago and L.A., this was my fourth (maybe fifth?) time through jury selection. And it sure seems to me as if the mere process of getting people out of the jury assembly room has become increasingly complex and time-consuming. Before anyone could be called to a courtroom, everyone who thought they might have an excuse had to make their case; medical excuses had to be reviewed by a judge. Never mind that most of those excuses are laid out in the summons form we were all sent several weeks before our reporting date; most people hadn't even bothered to fill out their names and addresses yet. You'd think that if it was so all-fired important for them to get out of jury duty, they would have done that little bit of work in advance so that they wouldn't even have to show up, but no--I guess this way they at least get one day off work, then get themselves excused without having to actually, you know, do anything.

All these preliminaries--only the first round of shirkers and malingerers trying to weasel out of their duty--took so long that by the time my group got called up to a courtroom, there was exactly enough time to seat the first eighteen people for consideration in the jury box, then send us all to lunch. With a ninety-minute lunch break, it was nearly 2:00 p.m. before a single potential juror was asked a question. Then we got dismissed for the day at 4:00. So let's do the math: we were called at 8:30, had ninety minutes for lunch, and left at 4:00. That's six hours total of working time, out of which four were completely wasted by the weasels.

So there's one obvious result right there: the preliminary round of eliminations takes so long that it's probably impossible to get a jury seated in one day, so that those people who are determined not to have their time wasted thus guarantee that those of us who are willing to stay and do what needs doing end up having our time wasted. As I said--used to be I always in and out in a day. Now, that no longer seems to be true. Abuses of the system always lead to the breakdown of the system, and penalties falling on the people who are trying to play by the rules.

I came back the next day, fully expecting that we would done by noon. Ho ho ho, it is to laugh. At the beginning of the process, the judge had volunteered to allow any juror who had an "embarrassing" problem to discuss the matter in private in the jury room; that happened at least half a dozen times, requiring the judge, the two attorneys, the clerk and the court reporter to disappear into the back for several minutes at a time. On at least three separate occasions, the judge asked the supposedly-fixed jury to rise and be sworn in, and suddenly there would be a sea of hands shooting into the air as people suddenly thought of a new way they might be able to squirm out from under.

The excuses became increasingly idiotic. "I just hate big corporations, man," one juror really did say, referring to the big auto dealership. "I'd be really inclined to go for the plaintiff 'cause I just hate the multinational corporations." And it became apparent, as time went on, that once a couple of jurors were allowed to get away with this nonsense, more and more of them decided that they would be allowed to as well. Hence the sea of hands.

But hell--I'm not crazy about the multinationals, either. And I tend to think that punitive damages are often excessive. I have all sorts of opinions that I could have trucked out, but I wouldn't have even thought to do so. Everybody has opinions; it's your responsibility as a juror to rise above them and judge the individual case solely on its own merits. You can't blame Wal-Mart for what Enron did, just as you can't blame Sony for the labor practices of Wal-Mart; and the fact that your cousin once filed a frivolous slip-and-fall lawsuit doesn't mean that the guy in front of you wearing the neck brace did as well. It's really just as simple as can be: listen to the facts, look at the law, do your duty and do it well.

Out of a jury pool of forty people, there were only four left by the time the jury was finally seated. And me, with my fierce devotion to civic responsibility, by luck of the draw I was never called at all. Thirty-six people were required to seat only fourteen, and I was never one of those at all. The judge finally started getting tough with people toward the end of the day, which is the only reason we didn't go through all forty. And I didn't leave that courtroom till somewhere past 3:30, which meant that probably the trial didn't actually start at all that day--and their seven-day trial probably got extended to eight.

Just as a last little touch--the folks back in the jury assembly room who do the paperwork accidentally typed the wrong dates on our certificates and had to do them over.