are you so dumb

For eighteen years I helped run an organization that attempted to use theater to improve social justice, and nearly every day of those eighteen years I wondered whether it was all a waste of time. We’re shut down now, as you’re aware if you’ve been reading along - and I still wonder. I once went to a session at a conference of Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed, where the facilitator asked whether it was possible for art to change the world. My response was yes, but the problem is that we’re over here with drops of water, while a firehose of art-like stuff - sitcoms, superhero movies, songs about idealized small towns - is aimed at the public, nearly all of it careful not to disrupt the existing social order.

Here’s a story:

I was a freshman at Kenyon. I was riding in a car going - somewhere. McDonald’s, maybe. Someplace in the nearby burg of Mount Vernon. Someone had produced a car and we were going for a ride, headed out of Gambier on Route 308.

I didn’t know everyone in the car. My friend Maggie was there, and her friend Liz. I think it was Liz’s car. One or two other people, or three, who knows, we were first-year students at college and we would pack as many people as wanted to go into a four-door sedan. We were driving past the water tower near Bexley Hall and someone, probably Liz, popped in a cassette and played the song “Free Nelson Mandela.” And in the seats of that sedan, a dance party broke out.

Well, in all of the seats but one, because I was sitting there wondering at two things. One, that one of those moments I’d imagined would happen when I got to college was actually happening. Not the details of it, of course; I hadn’t imagined Route 308 or the water tower or even a car. But I was with a group of friends and we were being carefree, going off for what was mostly a joyride, and emphasis on the word joy: we were - the rest of us were - singing along and dancing in our seats, and I was suddenly a member of a club I’d never managed to locate in high school.

And two, that people were singing this song about Nelson Mandela and how he needed to be freed, and I didn’t have any idea who Nelson Mandela was. I was embarrassed and I determined I’d better learn before the rest of the club found me out and booted me out of the car. There was so much in the world to learn, and I didn’t even know what was apparently the obvious stuff.

I don’t know how I got up to speed on Mandela and South Africa - we didn’t have the internet then, but The New York Times was still a paper worth reading, and for my econ course I was asked to read it daily. It was 1984, and Wikipedia says Mandela was “at the height of his international fame,” so it probably wasn’t hard to educate myself. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, here was a song that somehow broke through to a kid who knew everything and nothing, who had the best classical education the world could afford and no understanding about how anybody actually lived. “Free Nelson Mandela” created the tiniest little bulwark against that firehose of culture, so that I could drink in a mouthful of reality.

I started thinking about this and writing about this a while ago after the death of a member of The Special AKA, or maybe The Specials, or The Beat - it’s really hard to keep the fluid membership of 2 Tone bands straight. Probably Terry Hall. Then I set this post aside, maybe because I was tired of writing obituaries. It came back to mind thanks to an especially feckless politician making especially pusillanimous statements about our current situation - a politician who needs to stand down, as The Beat expressed it.

We’re in a moment, you know, and I don’t need to explain any of that to you; you’re living it as well. But in our current moment something needs to interrupt the firehose, on the one side, that is normalizing shit that just isn’t tolerable, like debating which people it’s OK to send to rot in Salvadoran prisons. And something needs to help us resist the temptation, on the other side, to take refuge in powerlessness and despair.

So, I sit here and make art, some version of art anyway, a book about theater and blog posts about my dog and my car, and an overtly political play (tk). I still don’t know whether it’s worth doing. But I refuse to give into despair.1 I may not be able to do much, but I can do this, and if nothing else I’m going to keep going.

And maybe try to find joy - not just find, but create joy. I don’t really think that’s my strong suit, to be honest; the political play is pretty dark. But as Emma Goldman apparently did not quite say, but Coco Crystal nevertheless took as her rallying cry, “If I can’t dance, you can keep your revolution.”

“Free Nelson Mandela” is a song of joy, the joy that comes from rejecting illegitimate power. Watch the video; watch the singers faces, watch the kids dancing. It helps, I suppose, to be young in order to feel the joy. (It certainly helps to be young in order to dance like that.) The Specials, the whole 2-Tone movement, defied the social order: We’re gonna have Black folks and white folks making music together, we’re gonna use unfashionable instruments like horns, and we’re gonna dance through the misery of Thatcher undercutting social welfare and selling off the water system. What you gonna do?

We need some of the joy of resistance right now. I marched with protesters down Fifth Avenue last weekend, and the chants were old and tired, but worse than that, dreary. Angry. Well, that’s understandable. But someone - maybe me - needs to come up with new songs, some new rhymes, to bring some horns and a rhythm section, and a porkpie hat if they need to, and give this revolution a beat it can dance to.

And maybe, you know, open the eyes of an 18-year-old somewhere discovering what life can be. And be another drop of water against the rock.

Until then, The Specials.

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