The Bering Strait Bridge

Very strange and totally unexpected, this. That my political will should find its voice again and finally slough off the dead weight of the malignant illogical who have dominated discourse for so long: hate-mongers, and shrill, every last one of them, fostering straw argument upon intended lack of clarity, and through pure laziness and underestimation of audience, linking unlike to unlike, as if the rejection of one entailed the necessary rejection of the other.

Parse *that*, my friends.

Friggin' obfuscators. But, you know, at worst, obfuscators waste my time.

Piety in rhetoric is the real cagey beast -- is, in fact, most often a downright out-and-out shitty rhetorical device.

I challenge you. Think of a person of your acquaintance whom you'd qualify as "pious." Now, are you having warm fuzzies or are you feeling a wee bit disgusted -- either with said person or with your own hypocritical self?

I'm just sayin'.

To keep myself in check, for you must concur that I'm on the edge of discourtesy, I had recourse to A List Of Fallacious Arguments -- from which the following is a citation:

In the context of debates, a Pious Fraud could be a lie. More generally, it would be when an emotionally committed speaker makes an assertion that is shaded, distorted or even fabricated. For example, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was accused in 2003 of "sexing up" his evidence that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Around the year 400, Saint Augustine wrote two books, De Mendacio[On Lying] and Contra Medacium[Against Lying], on this subject. He argued that the sin isn't in what you do (or don't) say, but in your intent to leave a false impression.

As much as I would love to talk, discuss, and debate salient points of socialism/Socialism or Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian sensibilities -- for I would be in a position to learn a lot, and want to, too -- I can no longer stomach the clinging, dangling, desperate dingleberries posited by some right wing journalists and bloggers -- those cozy little pearls of turds in the middle of what might have been an honest communication...

William Bradley wrote a piece today for HuffingtonPost.com, making reference to the recent reign of bombasters and generally blowing off steam. All citizens of good political will need to get this crap out of their collective and individual systems. Open the window and scream that you aren't going to take it anymore.

CNBC can see Russia from its house. It's just one example of a fin de siècle
folly, albeit one of the most recent and dramatic.

This is clearly end-of-an-era time, but some of the old era standbys haven't gotten the memo. Or been able to read it.

Jon Stewart's already legendary takedown of the CNBC financial "news" network was an extraordinary rebuke of a fitting stand-in for a clueless money culture.

It should have been obvious the era was ended with the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, not to mention the sweeping victory of Barack Obama. But the old attitudes -- which represent a sort of intellectual entropy -- have been very persistent.

He goes on to mention Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele, Katon Dawson, even Joe the Plumber.

I hope he feels better.
I am beginning to.
It doesn't hurt to state the obvious; Certainly, I need iteration upon iteration when asked to absorb what I don't like (or almost anything, actually).

Constant repetition of lies has been this nation's steady diet for eight years. Its cunning simplicity is genius. Witness the Dick Cheney Show on CNN yesterday.

Cheney, against all odds and normal perceptions of reality, still insists that things went great for the past eight years. He and George W. Bush bear no responsibility for the near-meltdown of the financial system. Their policies of torture kept America safe and strong, notwithstanding the general unreliability
of torture as a means of interrogation, or the international opprobrium it brought America. Oh, and the Iraq adventure, which has kept the Americanmilitary pinned down for six years and empowered Iran? A smashing success.

He sees Russia from his house, too.

I'd like to give you a hundred dollars

I have been sleeping most of the day, which is its own pleasure.

I am hiding out from pain and fever, as well as relationships and frozen -- skinless -- boneless --soulless -- chicken breasts.

The television has been on all the while, alternating between lulling and inciting -- rocking the cradle, as it were ("as it were" being one of the weakest of apologies for weak apology... so to speak!).

Yes, yes, I know -- sorry.

Some of you have also probably been watching Tim Robbins' movie Cradle Will Rock this afternoon. It's sloppy fun, nervous intelligence, semi-marxist Marx Brothers zaniness but oh-not-really. And a cast of thousands!

Robbins tells the story of the efforts by Orson Wells, as director, and John Houseman, as producer, to stage the play The Cradle Will Rock, written by Marc Blitzstein, an allegorical treatment of sociopolitical tensions common to the 30s -- mostly, organized labor versus corporate greed and corruption as found in Steeltown, USA. Robbins succeeds in ways the play could not with this meta treatment -- sadly, though, he succeeds more precisely because today's audience could well care less. [Oops. Reminder to self: edit attitude.]

photo credit

He brings in Diego Rivera* and the famed mural for the lobby of the Rockefeller Center as successful foil and contrapunto. PBS Culture Shock tells the story this way:

By 1930, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera has gained international favor for his
lush and passionate murals... His outgoing personality puts
him at the center of a circle of left-wing painters and poets, and his talent attracts wealthy patrons, including Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. In 1932, she convinces her husband, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to commission a Rivera mural for the lobby of the soon-to-be-completed Rockefeller Center in New York City...

Rivera proposes a 63-foot-long portrait of workers facing symbolic crossroads of industry, science, socialism, and capitalism. The painter believes that his friendship
with the Rockefeller family will allow him to insert an unapproved
representation of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin into a section portraying a May
Day parade. The real decision-making power lies with the Center's building
managers, who abhor Rivera's propagandistic approach... [T]hey order Rivera to
remove the offending image. When Rivera refuses, offering to balance the work
with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the opposing side, the managers pay his
full fee, bar him from the site, and hide the mural behind a massive drape.
Despite negotiations to transfer the work to the Museum of Modern Art and
demonstrations by Rivera supporters, near midnight, on February 10th, 1934,
Rockefeller Center workmen, carrying axes, demolish the mural. Later, Rivera
recreates the frescoes in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, adding a
portrait of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in a nightclub. Rivera never works in the
United States again...

Theresa Burns and Robbins co-authored Cradle Will Rock: The Movie and The Moment in which the political and artistic marriage of concerns is mapped out and amplified. E. L. Doctorow notes: "Like a good writer, Tim Robbins has found a story to hang a whole decade on..."

Wikipedia notes this about the original production of the play:

Originally set to open at the Maxine Elliott Theatre with elaborate sets and a
full orchestra, the production was shut down due to "budget cuts" within the
Federal Theatre Project—though it was widely believed that this was instead
because of its very favorable communist slant. The theatre was padlocked and
surrounded by armed servicemen, ostensibly to prevent anyone from stealing props or costumes, as all of this was considered U. S. Government property. They even impounded leading man Howard Da Silva's toupee.

On the spur of the moment, Welles, Houseman, and Blitzstein rented the much larger New Century Theatre and a piano, and planned for Blitzstein to sing/play/read the entire musical to the sold out house which had grown larger by inviting people off the street to attend for free. Blitzstein encouraged cast members to say their lines from the audience, to exercise their right of free speech.

Just after beginning the first number, Blitzstein was joined by Olive Stanton, the actor playing Moll, who joined in from the audience, since she (along with the rest of the cast) was forbidden by Actor's Equity to perform the piece "onstage". During
the rest of the performance, various actors joined in with Blitzstein and
performed the entire musical from the house. Actors sang across the theatre to
one another.

Many who attended the performance, including poet Archibald
MacLeish, thought it to be one of the most moving theatrical experiences of
their lives. Performances to this day rarely use elaborate sets or an orchestra,
instead preferring a spare set and single piano in homage to this event.

All of this to say... I wanted to find the script to the original play and couldn't seem to put my paws upon it, when I happened across this: The Federal Theatre Project Materials Collection, temporarily housed, and forever digitized, at George Mason University:

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was a division of the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), which was established to provide work for unemployed
citizens during the Great Depression (1929-39). The FTP began in August 1935 and flourished as the first and only federally-sponsored and subsidized theater
program in the United States until its closing in 1939. In order to advertise
FTP productions, the Federal Art Project (FAP), a section of the WPA, developed
a poster division. Using then-new silk-screening techniques, the FAP Poster
Division created the posters which graced theater lobbies from New York to San
Francisco and hundreds of other towns and cities in between. The FTP also
utilized professional set and costume designers, who, along with the FTP workers
who sewed the costumes and constructed the sets, added some dramatic realism to the productions.

In 1974 George Mason University professor Lorraine Brown discovered the Federal Theatre Project Collection in a Library of Congress storage depot and arranged for the collection to come to GMU on temporary loan.
The materials were placed in the care of GMU's Research Center for the Federal
Theatre Project headed by Dr. Brown. Among the many types of archival materials in the collection were original posters and set and costume designs for nearly
six-hundred FTP productions. These materials, though fragile after decades of
storage, still retained their vibrant colors. Beginning in August of 1981, as a
preservation measure, 35mm color slides were made from each of the posters and
set and costume designs in the collection. These slides are housed the
University Libraries' Special Collections & Archives department.

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) Materials Collection contains nearly one thousand different 35mm slides taken from original posters, set designs, and costume designs. These images are of the original designs used on posters to advertise FTP plays in many different American cities from 1935 to 1939. Also included are playscripts for twenty-two productions. The images are indexed by title, author, subject, theater, place, date, and related names.

You guessed it. One of the 22 scripts? The Cradle Will Rock! And for those who love the tactile, the mystique and drama of textiles? A treasure trove.

Why all this jabber? Why this commentary for a play heralded as a heavy-handed leftist baby blessed with a sense of humor that's just out of reach of the... rabble? Why was I searching for the script at all -- given that it is generally acknowledged as being a tepid thing?

I wanted to find the lyrics to a ditty that began:

I'd like to give you a hundred dollars
But I've only got thirty-six!

*A moment of incongruence -- In the film, Rivera defends his use of the boggle-head Lenin while verbally tearing Mussolini to shreds ("I have a feeling Mussolini will need a place to hang before this is all over" -- or words to that effect). Yet, in 1933, the same year as the destruction of his Rockefeller mural, he paints a significant work featuring a boggle-headed Mussolini -- who has promised the artist the unending support of Italy. Okay, so maybe I will have to buy Robbins' book...