Osama bin Laden has been killed. A sense of awe and resolution may pervade the country, but I am unsettled about the aftermath. It’s not because of the pro-USA chanting by crowds which carries a whiff of celebrating on people’s graves. We know that this brings closure to a manhunt that led to two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and thousands of deaths. It also gives credibility to Obama’s administration and affirms his strong hand on foreign policy.
The unease comes from the gnawing thought that once we captured bin Laden, should we have brought him to trial? I realize that there are tortuous, international legal laws that surround such a decision, and that much of this would have been considered by the President’s advisors. And yet it raises the broader question:
What is the best way to deal with a vanquished enemy? Let’s see what the Arts have to say about this.
With Tony season, new shows are blooming on the Great White Way. Catch Me If You Can is the creation of Marc Shaiman and Terence McNally who shepherded the film to musical conversion of The Full Monty. The show follows the true-story, narrative of the movie – the tale of a teenage con artist, Frank Abagnale, who through forgery, wit and luck becomes a pilot, physician and lawyer while embezzling millions of dollars. The show is a gift of 1960’s style – a time when air hostesses were glamorous, bank tellers were trusting, and martinis were plentiful.
Yet the production lacks novelty in the story-telling. We know where the characters are landing before the plane leaves the gate. Kerry Butler’s fiancé to Abagnale is one character altered from the movie and yet her part is relegated to the second half and is given one big song (a waste of her talent). There are points when the production sizzles – Leo Norbert Butz’ portrayal of the detective Carl Hanratty who pursues Abagnale like a modern day Javert is pure joy when he breaks out into song. The obsession leads to eventual apprehension of his foil, and the twist is that instead of putting him in jail, he takes pity on the boy and recruits him to help catch other forgers; a pleasing resolution to a comfortable albeit not very challenging evening.
War Horse, a transplant from London’s National Theater, brings to life through breath-taking puppetry the story of a boy that loses his beloved riding horse to the vagaries of World War I. The plot is simple – boy meets horse, boy loses horse, boy finds horse again – but the staging elevates the storyline into a meta-physical world involving pastoral bliss and horrific fighting. The central character is the horse, Joey, portrayed by three actors who are immediately visible and yet blend into the soul of the animal so perfectly they assimilate into one creature. Joey’s emotions and struggles are real beyond anthropomorphism; one believes his longing to live and see his master again. This should be an easy winner at the Tonys.
There is no surfeit of enemies in this play – Germans and English soldiers fighting a tired war involving, unkind fathers and military leaders wrapped in their ego-driven ambitions. The combatants show little pity in defeating their foes; in fact they can only escape self-examination of their deeds, by painting each other as foreign elements bent on destruction. The true adversary is war itself, because it throws apart loved ones – daughters from mothers; husbands from wives, boys from their horses. No one wins in this slide to annihilation, and the only survivor is the hope of an eventual end.
Tony Kushner’s new play, The Intellectual Homosexual’s Guide To Capitalism And Socialism With A Key To The Scriptures (IHo for short) is as dense and long as the title with a four hour run time. Somehow the writing and acting soar despite the weight of such a premise. A father, Gus, brings together his family in Brooklyn to gain communal consensus on his committing suicide. Gus is a socialist, long shoreman who has toiled for the recognition of the common man’s labor, only to be facing a world where all that effort has been erased and forgotten. His disillusionment with his children and more importantly himself, leads him to the decision of self-immolation. The ensemble is winning and transports the show surprisingly quickly with occasional lapses into inscrutable erudition.
For the father, the foe he is fighting is himself. He can no longer live in a world which has given up on his manifesto, and as we later find out, where he has betrayed his own ideals. In his fight for workers’ rights, he made his own pact with the devil. He was able to achieve the victory of guaranteeing a worker’s income after retirement demonstrating that laborers own the value of what they create. But to garner this win, he gave up on his ideal of union for all people, since the salary was given only to certain individuals. The rest of the workers union were eventually laid off and replaced. Gus has never been able to live with this compromise of principles, and his solution is to find solace in death.
Unlike the fairy-tale ending of Catch Me if You Can, with the capture of Osama, it would be idealistic to think that he would partner with the US to stop terrorism. Although in today’s Op-Ed in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes that Richard Holbrooke was trying to accomplish a similar strategy, by creating a peace deal with influential members of the Taliban.
Instead, we seem to have taken the “eye for an eye” path. Osama would not have thought twice to conduct on his own enemies a similar exercise as the US did, in other words, send emissaries to a foreign country and kill people in their homes or at work. In fact, he repeatedly carried out this terrorism. But as we saw in War Horse, the true enemy is the warring itself. Continued retributive actions leave collateral damage making the entire world blind. In many cases, this is the efficient and realistic path to take, but it demands questioning whether there is a way to elevate ourselves out of these no-win situations.
The elusive solution is a twist on the golden rule: to treat the enemy, the way we would want to be treated if the situation were reversed. By treating Osama the way that he has treated us in the past – without remorse, pity or mercy –we are like the Father in IHo, giving up a little of our moral high ground to achieve the goal of bringing justice to the country. We can claim this as an act of self-defense, but it still leaves me unsettled.
May 15, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
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