Twin Mosques Take (Away?) Two

I leave for one week and the dung hits the proverbial fan - all because of my Parrot's Lamp post. Or so in my delusions of avian grandeur I would like to believe.

What happened? President Obama inserted himself into the mélée, striking another blow for a "right" to practice religion that was not being challenged, at least not by any of the respectable voices in the debate. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin count as "respectable" for these purposes insofar as they do not propose that no mosques should be built anywhere or declare that Islam is a "gutter religion" (does that phrase ring a bell?). But Obama had clearly not read The Parrot's Lamppost until after he was attacked for his stand, or he would have been clear from the beginning about the distinction between "right" and "ought" on which we harped at some length. Instead, he pontificated à la Bloomberg to the effect that "I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country" (NY Times 8/14/10 A1). As the Times correctly interpreted it, the comment was a defense of "the right of a Muslim community group to build a mosque and Islamic center two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan" (8/17/10 A26).

What if nobody was actually saying they don't have that (legal, constitutional) "right" to build the mosque there? (In a building which has now apparently grown to 15 stories, replacing three older buildings?) No matter; interpreting his own phrasing literally, rather than the way he actually meant it, was a sufficient dodge to get him out of hot water. Thus Obama backtracked the next day with the claim that he "was not commenting... on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there"; i.e., more or less what the controversy was actually about; but was rather "commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding"(NY Times 8/15/10); i.e., on what was never at issue in the first place. An astutely imprecise formulation, "the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there" avoids referring directly to putting a mosque there, and restates the issue as one of making a decision to put a mosque there. No matter, after finally having read our Why Not Twin Mosques? post, and having fully grasped the distinction we drew attention to, Obama took the opportunity to pretend that he himself was making this very distinction betwen what one has a right to do and what one ought to do. Better late than never.

On the other hand, a far less distinguished voice - the blog/online press which calls itself GetReligion.Org put the point succinctly: "...ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain — unnecessarily — and that is not right." I have some reservations about this formulation, but I will get to that later; substitute "mosque" for "Islamic Center" and it makes exactly the point I made at the beginning of the previous post.

Meanwhile, the political fray expanded, with light and dark being shed on both sides. Rick Lazio, in a memorable fit of opportunism, stated (alone among major public figures) that the issue is "one of safety and security" (NY Times 8/14/10 A15). What planet is he from, exactly? Oh, Long Island that explains it! (LOL) Perhaps he thinks a group of bearded Muslims are planning to march in their bathing suits from the pool directly to the new WTC in a suicide attack? Maybe they'll be storing dirty bombs in the cafeteria? (Not in a Halal cafeteria they won't!) For the substantial majority of people who oppose the idea of building a major mosque there, losing the love of Lazio and his ilk would be about the best thing that could happen.

Newt Gingrich, not satisfied with the reasonably moderate comment I quoted in my previous post, blurted out that "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington"; though he might have actually said "a site", as in the next brilliancy prize: "We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl harbor." (NY Times 8/17/10 A12). 'Scuse me? First of all, does anyone have the "right" to put up a sign, or a site, next to either of these places? If he is talking about the moral right to create provocations near national memorials, obviously no one has the right to do it, whether they are Japanese, Nazis, or anyone else. If he is talking about the legal right (the illustrious former history professor is no clearer about this distinction than the general run of political windbags) then again, rights are governed by the laws and Constitution and in the same sense that Muslims have the right to build a towering mosque near the WTC site, others have the right to build things that we might consider provocative. Second, is the Holocaust Museum the site of a terrorist attack on Jews, or is it, as I suspect, an arbitrarily located building? Newt's analogy seems to be completely off. Third, by "the Japanese" does he mean Japanese-Americans, the appropriate analogy to the Muslim-Americans who want to build Cordoba House (CH)? Because if he is suggesting that Japanese-Americans have any different rights regarding the Pearl Harbor site than the rest of us that is beyond the pale of legitimate democratic discourse in this day and age; just as it is beyond the pale to suggest that Muslims because they are Muslims have less rights than the rest of us. Obviously Mr. G. has resumed his role as chief demagogue and is unable to back up his opinions with anything like a reasonable argument.

Unfortunately, such bottom-feeders are drawn to any populist cause that thrives partly on narrow prejudices; and there are plenty of those in the air around the mosque issue. We must therefore follow the advice of Benjamin Constant on having unwanted political allies: "If I happen to agree with them on a single point I grow suspicious of myself; and in order to console myself for having seemed to be of their opinion... I feel I must disavow and keep these false friends away from me as much as I can." (Cited by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958, p.79.)

Of less my less comtemptible, if not always commendable, political allies, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, Gov. Basil Paterson, Rabbi Meyer May of the Wiesenthal Center, and Archbishop Timothy Dolan have all put in a plug for moving the center to another site that would not raise so many hackles, and Paterson and Dolan have offered to mediate the issue. Unfortunately, to date, the CH backers have not given anything like a positive response, even when Paterson said he would help locate a new site. This is rather troubling; the more Imam Rauf and his backers insist on a defiant stance in the face of overwhelming national opposition, the more their own stated ideals of reconciliation and interfaith harmony are compromised. There is a point at which you must say: "I still think you are wrong and we are right, but for the sake of compromise, to avoid ongoing discord, and in consideration of the feelings of those who were directly affected by the attacks, we will move it to a more neutral location - especially since it does no harm to the purpose of our mission." Still waiting to hear that sort of sentiment emerge from the builders and backers.

Be that as it may, other things have come to my attention since I wrote my first post, and I think they deserve more of a focus than they have been getting. In my previous post I cast aspersions on the claim by Imam Rauf that the Cordoba House "is not a mosque". A building devoted to Islamic worship is a mosque, by definition, and mosques have always had a community function as well, as do many Jewish and Christian places of worship. So I suggested that Rauf was just dissembling about the building.

Since then I have read some Muslim blogs which suggest otherwise. For example, the Cordoba Initiative (CI) itself maintain a blog which includes two posts about the status of the building. In these posts they describe the building as being, by religious as well as practical standards, unqualified to count as a mosque, pointing for example to spaces for musical performance and a restaurant. In addition, they assert that there will be an ecumenical "prayer space", though it is not completely clear whether the "prayer space" for Muslims is to be separate from this or if this is the only prayer space. Even so, I think I underplayed the fact that a "prayer space" to a Muslim need not be in a mosque; and therefore, a building containing a prayer space for Muslims is not necessarily a mosque. The question is actually quite open, I think. Is the center going to be a space for religious sermons by the Imam, or other Islamic leaders? Will religious services of any sort be held at CH? The fact that it is led by an Imam and not, say, by a professor of Islamic history or (imagine...) someone with experience running Islamic cultural centers suggests that its overall guidance is religious, and that it will support more religious functions than prayer alone. That in turn suggests that it is, after all, a mosque of some sort; and the report that he is already holding "services" of some sort in the building lends more weight to the idea that it is in fact intended to be a mosque, with the usual functions of one. "Come to hear my sermon on Sufi Islam" is a quite different invitation from "Go pray to whomever you want in room 1241b". Furthermore, the rationale that the center is needed because the downtown mosques are overcrowded pretty much undermines the argument that it is not really going to be a mosque.

But it is worth inviting Rauf and the CI to answer these questions before we decide. Of course, if he is as cagey about this as he has been about other things, the likelihood of that happening is slim. But he should seriously consider it. I stated pretty plainly that I had no objection to an Islamic cultural center near the WTC, and that the significance of a mosque is very different from that of a purely educational and cultural institution. And even if politicians of various stripes are not as impressed with the distinction as I am, I think it would be far less comfortable for most of them to oppose it than to a oppose a mosque. Islamic culture has a lot more to it than religious worship or proselytizing, and if you take the latter out of the mix, it is hard to see anything objectionable about putting such a center anywhere at all. The 9/11 attacks, and all the other manifestations of Islamic radicalism that I discussed, are defended by radicals based on concepts that are part of religious instruction, debate and training. It may not be the interpretation of Islamic law and religion that is most widely supported, but it is pretty hard to write it out of Islamic religious doctrine altogether (see below). That is why building a mosque, whoever may currently be its guiding light, is the wrong signal to send at "ground zero". But no such argument attaches to an institution devoid of explicit religious doctrine, and dedicated solely to entertainment, education, and dialogue.

Thus it seems to me that the author of another Muslim blog has a valid point in suggesting that much of the current debate may be attributable to Rauf, the CI and their associates missing opportunities to get their message out in the strongest way possible. (Indeed I want to refer readers to this post as one of the most intelligent things I have read in this entire debate.) If so, then not only did I underestimate the significance of this question, but the entire national debate has been completely skewed.

In any case, I really don't see why the "community center" must have the function of providing even a "prayer space", much less expanding the mosque acreage of downtown Manhattan. Granted the existing mosques in the downtown areas are insufficient; but why does this space next to the WTC have to be the particular site on which additional "prayer space" is to be located? Build the community center, exactly where they want to build it, and move the divisive "prayer space", which is the reason the project has been branded as a mosque in the first place, to another location. Then the CI gets everything it allegedly wants: an impressive new community center, and a nearby mosque that expands the available space for Muslim worship and services. Frankly I can see nothing wrong with this alternative from any reasonable ideological or emotional perspective.

But I still maintain that building an Islamic religious institution there is morally problematic, and that you cannot reasonably expect people to completely dissociate the 9/11 attacks from Islam in general. There is an understandable desire of reasonable, democratic and humane Muslims not to be associated with the acts and religious views of those who are called "radical". But this is made difficult by the fact that the radicals claim to have as much textual support for their views as the moderates. Like those who argue for a "strict interpretation" of the U.S. Consitutition, they often take intolerably reactionary positions. But one cannot say that strict constructionists therefore fail to uphold Constitutional principles, nor that Islamic "extremists" fail to be Muslims. To uphold the principles of Islamic texts is to be a Muslim, so there is no room for a distinction between "real Muslims" and those who hold strict interpretations of Islamic texts.

The following post at Islamonline.net is a good example. While virtually all scholars agree that whipping is specifically sanctioned by the Qu'ran (80 lashes for a married man committing adultery, 100 lashes for an unmarried man), the practice of stoning is said to be sanctioned by the Sunnah, in which the actual day to day practices of the prophet Mohammed are (allegedly) recorded. Those who say that stoning has no textual basis in the Qu'ran are either reinterpreting, revising or disregarding the Sunnah. Since we cannot, unfortunately, form our opinion of Islam on the basis of taking sides in scholarly debates among its proponents, we cannot really decide whether Osama bin Laden is more or less representative of Islamic thought than Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. All we can say is that we'd rather the latter prevailed than the former.

You can see here just how fine-grained the debate is. But the important point for us is not whether the Sunnah are an authoritative basis for Islamic law or not. Public whipping, a primitive, brutal and perverse form of punishment last used here in the slave system, is carried out in countries not known for their radicalism (e.g., Singapore). It is explicitly condoned in Islamic texts, and is barbaric enough to put in question whether strict Islamic law is within the bounds of civilized practice. And this carries over into concepts like Jihad, which in one interpretation justifies acts like 9/11, and on another is supposed to indicate a purely ideological struggle. Maybe both interpretations are possible, and the real issue is, which do you want to prevail? We cannot simply claim the mantle of Islamic scholarship and insist that what millions of Muslim people and thousands of clerics believe is not representative of Islam. And members of the Muslim faith cannot expect us to do that, either. We can say whose views and practices we prefer, who makes more sense to us from a modern point of view, but not who is right. No one is right. But some very scary forces have been gaining the upper hand over the last few decades and putting an indelible stamp on the religion.

The only alternative for contemporary religious practice is to reject the idea that modern legal, social, criminal, international or any other system should be based on what the Qu'ran, the Bible, the Talmud or any other ancient religious text has to say. But this is not what most moderate Islamic voices are saying. They believe that the rules and practices in the Qu'ran, Sunnah and Aditha have some validity just by virtue of being in the Qu'ran, Sunnah or Aditha; anything else is heresy. But I think that the price you pay for looking to ancient texts as a guide to how we should live today is to either buy into absurd anachronisms or become a hypocrite who picks and chooses but pretends to respect the texts.

In any case, "radical" or not by textual standards, the so-called radicals are anything but an isolated group of extremists. The recent NY Times articles on the Taliban-organized stoning to death of a young couple in Afghanistan and the suicide bombings in the Muslim-dominated Russian republics are only the latest reminders of this. According the Times, though the stoning was organized by the Taliban, more than 200 villagers took part in this barbaric act, including the father of the male victim. Moreover, the action was approved ex post facto by the head of the local Ulema (clerical) council; and the national council, which consists of 350 clerics from across the country, recently called for a strict implementation of Shariah law. The Times reminded us of another gruesome case of a widowed Afghan woman who got pregnant and was then given 200 lashes and shot to death. The Time magazine story on a woman whose nose and ears were sliced off as punishment was another reminder. Then came the story of a request to Saudi hospitals to damage the spinal cord of a man who had caused the paralysis of another man in an attack. The reminders of barabaric practices by Islamic authorities, done in the name of Islam and given textual support in Islamic law, could be offered on a daily basis if the media had nothing else to write about.

Neither non-Muslims nor moderate Muslims should kid themelves about the influence of radical Islam or its claim to represent the true Islam. Stonings, whippings and maimings are of a piece with suicide bombings and Fatwas calling for the death of novelists. The connections are deep and ineradicable: in essence, the refusal to endorse the separation of church and state (or even church and judicial process), the attempt to legislate personal morality, a theory of punishment that takes the body as an object for the infliction of pain and disfigurement, and a belief that the most brazen acts of terror, murder and torture are justified if given a religious gloss. This entire ideology has to be disowned, and only the spiritual, cultural and humanistic aspects of Islam preserved. Otherwise we can never really separate Islam-in-general from radical Islam. It is no dullminded bigot who sees a connection between the version of Shariah law implemented by the Taliban, the Iranians, and the Saudis, and the willingness to carry out suicide attacks in the name of Allah. Therefore, no mosque at the site desecrated by one such attack.

In spite of all this, there is a ray of hope, and this leads me to another point regarding the CI's sales job on its center. A NY Times op-ed piece by William Dalrymple drew attention to the particular situation of Sufi Islam, its antagonistic relationship to the radical trends, and its generally liberal and ascetic and universalist outlook. Though I am no expert in comparative religion, it sounds like Sufism is roughly analogous to Kabbalistic Judaism, early Christian mysiticism, and Zen Buiddhism. The interesting point, and one that has hardly even been mentioned, is that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is an exponent of Sufism, and the CI is positioning itself and its Sufi outlook as just the voice of reason and moderation that the U.S. needs to communicate with Islamic regimes and organizations throughout the world. Thus they have formed ties with the State Department, and Rauf is now embarking on a diplomatic mission to the Middle East on their behalf - as he has previously done for the Bush administration. (It is interesting, to say the least, that Bush sent off a diplomat who had previously stated that U.S. policy was "an accomplice" to the 9/11 attacks, but no one ever convicted Bush or his cronies of either intelligence or consistency.)

Whether or not Sufism is a natural choice for Islamic diplomacy, it does seem to be the case, from what I can gather, that Sufism represents a form of Islamic belief that is open to liberal, democratic, humanitarian values, and has no interest in the extremism that has proliferated throughout much of the Arab world (and some of the non-Arab world - Iranians, Malasian and Indonesians are not Arabs). There does not seem to be much hope right now that Sufism will become the dominant trend, or even a particularly strong one, in international Islam. But the fact that it is the guiding ideology behind CH has been heavily underplayed, to the point of making one wonder if some of the project's more acerbic critics are either ignorant or trying to suppress it. And Rauf has typically been nothing if not ascetic himself, failing to reframe the issues in this light, or to divulge any details of his current diplomatic trip, just as he felt he did not have to discuss the funding sources for CH or engage with criticism of his comments after 9/11. Too bad - there could be a lot to say on behalf of supporting moderate Islamic voices. Explaining Sufism to the public and saying why it stands diametrically opposed to acts of violence in all forms would go a long way to calming the waters around the CH issue. It could at least show that an Islamic cultural center near the WTC site is unobjectionable and perhaps even a bulwark against the likes of Al Qaeda.

Although I have surely tested my readers' concentration (as usual) I cannot help adding one last comment. On Friday the Times published an article containing interviews with Muslims living in New York City (some of whom I probably stand in line with at the local fruit and vegetable markets). I am not going to characterize any of them as wholeheartedly agreeing with my position. But many of the comments suggest that there is a more sober, practical and non-ideological attitude toward the project in the Muslim community than there is among the more bellicose white liberal voices in favor of it. A typical comment: "If they want to put it 10 blocks away, that's fine; I believe in compromise, too." (NY Times 8/20/10 A1) Can somebody please hold community board elections so I can vote for this guy - or others who expressed similar views? It is a typical foible of the left that when abstract principle clashes with personal sensitivity, the latter loses every time. This is one reason why ideologues of any stripe are dangerous when they obtain a platform and a little bit of power. I have taken many hours out of my days for the last few weeks defending the idea that rights are a red herring here, and the real issue is one of sensitivity and sensibility.

This, in the last analysis, is a question of the aesthetics of architecture. Every new building is in a public space; every new construction project is conceived and realized in a political environment. The aesthetics and politics of architecture are always interwoven; you cannot appreciate a building that has damaged your sense of the proper use of space, that is out of proportion to its perceived legitimate purpose, that mocks the social ecology of the neighborhood. These are the things we need to consider in approving or disapproving a piece of architecture. The "right" to build doesn't even enter the picture, and had no place in this picture from the beginning.

The Examined Film: Review of Astra Taylor's "The Examined Life"

"The place of philosophy in modern public life" - that is the phrase I remember catching my attention from some web site for this film (though it is not on this one), convincing me that this must be an important film, and one that neatly intersects my mission here. Would that that impression were justified by what I just saw at the IFC theater in Manhattan. After 20 years as a professional philosopher - a bit more studying some of the leftist literature that informs some of the subjects of this film - my reaction was to wonder if it could possibly have been as dull for those viewers not already saturated with the intellectual content conveyed here.

Let me first say this: I have known, or met, philosophers who I would not hesitate to spend hours listening to; chewing the fat with over a beer; or just passing the time with in idle conversation that might range from Quine to Brahms to memorable camping trips. I do not limit this class of people to my personal friends or classmates. I mean people, for example, like Sidney Morgenbesser (a true character in the best Socratic sense) or Marx Wartofsky (who was really the last Renaissance man), both unfortunately resting in Plato's heaven, or David Pears, to the best of my knowledge alive and well and living in England, any of whom could hold court or be the subject of anecdotes for hours on end. I mean people like Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Hilary Putnam, Eddy Zemach, Bas van Frassen, Stephen Davies, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Toulmin, or indeed the Brooklyn native who made the phrase "the examined life" famous as the title of one of his books, Robert Nozick. I don't mean that these are my favorite philosophers - not by a long shot, in many cases - but they are people I have met or heard and who I know can hold the attention of of an audience, have interesting things to say on many subjects, and might just convince a film audience that there are philosophers, neither superstars, crackpots, nor stuffed shirts, who are capable of taking them on a tour of reality or morality that goes just a bit deeper than what they are used to. They speak with passion, humor, and erudition, without being pompous, boring, obscure or intentionally asinine.

But it seems as if Taylor was not looking for good film subjects, but rather for philosophers who fit a certain conception of who would have something to say to a mass audience: feminists, multiculturalists, Marxists, gender theorists, literary theorists, African-American philosophers, or animal liberationists. Forget those stodgy, mainstream Anglo-American analytic types, who would want to hear them? And actually, that's largely true - who would want to hear most of them? But then again, who would want to hear a Continental or Marxist philosopher, or some slightly outré ethicist, who is trying to sound very important and relevant and only succeeds in restating their well-worn theories (because it is all they really know how to talk about)?

That, unfortunately, describes quite a bit of what Ms. Taylor captured on film. Here is Peter Singer walking ever so appropriately down Fifth Avenue, commenting on the wildly extravagant designer items, then standing in the Diamond District, etc., and calling forth references from "Famine, Affluence and Morality" and Animal Liberation that he has been working for about 35 years now. There is Martha Nussbaum going on, predictably, about Aristotle and virtue and feminist ethics, with about as much connection to the audience as a passing cloud. Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire (with Antonio Negri), ponders his failed revolutionary impulses in the 1980's and sets about thinking, in terms no more enlightening than the average activist's park bench conversation, how one can be pro-democracy and pro-revolutionary, or how one can be revolutionary at all in the face of global capitalism. Yawn. In his book, if I have gleaned his views correctly (I have not read it, but I've read several discussions of it), Hardt says that globalization is, in spite of itself, the crucible in which the new democratic society will be born. This is just an updated version of the old "revisionist" idea about how democratic socialism will come about (not a "communist manifesto for the 20th century" as it is sometimes called), but more on that later.

Though other reviewers have been duly reverential towards the sequence in which gender theorist Judith Butler takes a walk, goes shopping, and meditates on bodies and movement in the company of the filmmaker's physically impaired, wheelchair-bound sister Sunaura Taylor, while trying to say very meaningful and supportive things, I found it artificial, cloying and in some spots bordering on condescending. You cannot somehow normalize physical impairments that affect a small portion of the population by meditating on the limitations of bodies in general; all you can do is encourage those unfolding social and scientific developments that give people with physical limitations greater degrees of physical and social freedom, and permit them to participate in ever greater degrees in the type of activities that most of us consider normal, and rewarding. And you don't need a philosopher or gender theorist to do that, just a reasonably sensible and sensitive person. But more than that, in my view, the only dialogic stance that truly delegitimizes and undermines discrimination and prejudice against physically disabled persons is to treat them as exactly equal partners in respect of that asset which is not disabled, i.e., their minds. And that is not what I heard here; rather, I received the impression of a philosopher utilizing a dialogue with a disabled person to create a platform for her own ideas about bodies and movements. At other points she seemed to assent to what Sunaura Taylor said with benign reassurance but little critical consideration. Throughout the conversation I felt a lack of give and take, as if there had been a pact not to challenge one another's presuppositions, or engage in a real exchange of views. Perhaps this reflects the caregiver view of ethics, which is at the heart of the feminist approach, and emphasizes allegedly female virtues of nurture and loyalty to the circle of human beings closest to you. But respecting the dignity of persons also means not patronizing them in the way we patronize children and others for whom we are responsible. The responsible caregiver, be it a mother, nurse, social worker or home attendant, must limit the respect they show for the dignity and independence of the person in their care. Otherwise they will not be effective when they need to make decisions on that person's behalf. That ethical model does not work for normal adult relationships.

Other sequences in this film involved a pretty dry, academic set of thoughts from Avital Ronell, an NYU literary theorist who could not resist the urge to drag Heidegger into the proceedings, ending up sounding like she did not quite get this idea of philosophers (we are applying the term loosely) standing in front of a camera and saying something to a mass audience. As for Slavoj Zizek, who makes an appearance in this film after having a Taylor film of his own, he comes off as a slightly incoherent nutcase who enjoins us to love the piles of garbage among which he has chosen to be filmed for his sequence. Indeed, we are to despise the notions of nature and ecology and embrace filth and excess as the key to overcoming global warming and other environmental threats. This is the type of philosopher who should be kept as far from public view as possible, lest the world at large confirm its prejudice to the effect that philosophers are people whose job is to confuse others by arguing that absurd things are true. Be that as it may, I think there is something resembling a coherent point underlying Zizek's charades, only it would be a minor miracle if anyone understood it from this film. Again, I'll come back to this later.

I have left two people for last: Kwame Anthony Appiah, on whose contributions I'm afraid I can't comment because they came at a time when I had briefly given up trying to prop my eyelids open; and Cornell West, whose wide-ranging and wildly intertextual remarks provided the one bright spot in the film, though their import seems to have passed by most of the reviewers and for that reason probably a bit of the audience as well. While ranging over the history of art and ideas from Plato to Goethe and on through Charlie Parker and the Beatles, West focused his remarks primarily on the idea of life as a space between nonexistence and death, and emphasized the ways in which we give that brief flash of spirit some meaning and make it worth holding onto. Taylor wisely edited West's engaging remarks into several sequences, interspersed around the others, which at least broke the monotony of the other lifeless talking heads as they either failed to focus or rehearsed well-worn ideas in stiff language. While West's parts may not have been perfect, especially for indulging in a lot more references than necessary to make his points, he at least gave a hint of what a philosopher can do when he has a command of popular as well as intellectual culture and has actually thought a bit about life, death, and our place on earth.

While Zizek did display a certain fervor, what really attracted our attention with him was waiting for a payoff that never came, as he tried to convince us that trash on stilts is way cooler than ordinary waste and pollution. Personally I find it extremely unfortunate when philosophers stake out baldly idiotic positions to demonstrate that philosophy can see deeper into the nature of reality than ordinary common sense. It can, but that ain't how. But let's try to tie things together a bit, because there is a little more here than mere antics for the sake of getting attention. We can start by going back to Hardt and his globalization fetish. Since at least the Utopian socialism of the 19th century, there has been a way of thinking about the good (social democratic) society as a kind of algae, or mold, that under the right conditions grows outward from one or more initial sites until it swallows everything in its wake. The Utopian societies were supposed to do this, spreading socialism by example. Then Eduard Bernstein contributed the idea of capitalism "evolving" into socialism. Karl Kautsky conceived of an "ultra-imperialism" that spread peace due to its very reach. Even Lenin suggested that in the globalization of finance capital, the organizational framework of socialism was being incubated in the womb of international capitalism. But Lenin, unlike the others, never imagined that this globalization of capital would just roll over into socialism without a violent revolution.

The core idea that seems to be repeated in Hardt's view is that the endless penetration of capitalism into every corner of the world, and the ever-growing neural network of connections between people and nations, is destined to finally evolve into a vast world culture in which war, racism and other conflicts are submerged in the interest of the great global leviathan. But while these conflicts are removed, the fundamental exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie remains - a kind of 1984-ish dystopia in which the underlying injustice of the whole system is hidden beneath the surface of harmony and uniformity. Hardt's and Negri's main contribution seems to be the idea that we can push this capitalist leviathan to the brink of self-destruction by pushing the democratic logic it hypocritically represents as its own as far as it can go. (This too is not a very original idea, but never mind.) Thus they suggest certain key democratic demands we can make within the framework of capitalism to help the system undermine itself.

So what does this have to do with Zizek? Well, first, he wrote a lengthy article about Hardt's and Negri's book in the journal Rethinking Marxism, in which he accused them of not going far enough in rejecting the logic of capitalism. Zizek suggests that operating within the framework of demands that can be accommodated, if not entirely met, by capitalism itself is self-defeating. He therefore finds it unhelpful for revolutionaries to associate themselves with the progressive movements that capitalism (as the classic Marxist analysis has it) allows to flourish in order to "blow off steam". Environmentalism, as perhaps the movement of the moment, plays into the hands of capitalism by suggesting some sort of idealistic return to nature. Instead, Zizek thinks (not that his ideas are very clearly formulated, but this is the general drift) we should force the issue, let the contradictions of capitalism increase and destroy it from the inside. You see, it is essentially the same kind of Hegelian line, the new form of Being incubating within the old and then splitting it into opposites, the class struggle finally revealed for what it is. In a moment of inspired obfuscation and trendiness he somehow imagines the World Wide Web as the modern counterpart to Lenin's idea of capitalism preparing the framework of the new society and the seeds of its own destruction within itself. Okay, that's about as hip as Herbert Marcuse finding the source of socialist revolution in the student and intellectual movements of the 1960's.

Anyway, what I wanted to show is that Zizek's ultimately loony love affair with garbage follows the logic of a well-worn idea from the Communist Manifesto, that capitalism nourishes the germ of its own destruction within itself. From there it is an easy (but to me, long discredited) step to the idea that a true revolutionary should help capitalism make itself as bad as possible - love those discarded spring water bottles, my friends, rather than protesting them, for they are the spring of self-destruction of global capitalism, or something like that. I guess I should be honest and say I'm doing a lot of interpreting here. Zizek himself tends to stick to safer ways of putting his views, emphasizing that revolutionaries should reject the invitation to engage in the liberal-democratic critique of the shortcomings of "bourgeois democracy". But to give him credit for not being a self-contradictory lunatic means to take his views to be something like this. (I do wonder if he would tell us to love all those nuclear missiles too. I think Zizek's philosophy contains the seeds of its own destruction too.)

Okay, so much for political theory, which is not exactly in short supply in The Examined Life. But there is an aesthetic point here too. Zizek's rants about the virtues of garbage fit into a worldview that is just one step beyond that of Hardt. And this view obviously suggests that the various feminist, anti-racist, anti-discriminatory, post-colonial politics of the other interviewees are just what capitalism needs to continue to dominate us. The filmmaker, however, being apparently no less naive about political theory than philosophy, fails to give the audience any clue that this is the case. So while the rather boring and pedantic pastische of left-liberal interventions based on Continental and feminist philosophical trends is disturbed from within by a philosophical and political rift, this is not even visible to the audience. There is, in effect, an intellectual fight going on here, with Zizek on one side, most of the others on the other side, and Hardt sort of moderating with a foot in both camps, but it might as well be one loose chain of vaguely related thoughts on ethics and society for all we can tell from the film itself.

It would be unfair not to mention that Taylor does attempt to use some aesthetic means to liven things up, encouraging constant movement during the interviews and letting the camera capture dozens of naturalistic images along the way. At its best, it gives us the impression that the generally ordinary landscapes trodden by the film crew and its subjects (few scenes other than those of the dump are more exotic than Central park) are as teeming with life as the philosophers' heads are teeming with ideas. Too bad the gulls and turtles are so much more interesting than most of the ideas that one wants to resist the camera's return to the philosophical promenades.

Another point, no more positive (I guess I am not feeling very charitable today, in case you hadn't noticed) is that Taylor makes only the most limited effort to guide or draw out the philosophers in ways that might get them thinking outside their predefined, well-rehearsed boxes. All I can really recall her asking, in various ways, is whether philosophy is a search for the meaning of life. The answer to this question was actually supplied so well by Cornell West that she should have left it alone for the rest of the film. The truth is, few philosophers know what to say to that question, because "meaning" itself can have so many meanings that it is not even clear what the question is. Is the "meaning" of life like the meaning of a sentence? of a work of art? of an act or event? Is the question implicitly asking if I believe in god?

My advice is, don't ask that question unless you are prepared to give a philosophical answer to the reply, "What kind of answer are you actually looking for?" Otherwise it is sort of a blank check - "say something, anything, about the meaning of life". And if I were to give an immediate answer to that, it could only be that in itself, it means about as much as a pointless film. Because either no one is directing it, or they are doing it without any clear sense of overall purpose. Which, I guess, is as good a place as any to end this review.

(Note: This post was originally published on Friday 3/6/09 at 2:06 a.m. After re-reading it I felt that it was much too sloppy, both in editing and expression of ideas. It returned to Edit mode after about 48 hours online. It is now republished with substantial alterations, mainly intended to clarify many of the original points.)

Point and Shoot: Taro, Capa and the Spanish Civil War

This blog was originally conceived as being devoted to the arts and social issues, and if we have not always hewed perfectly to that course it is nevertheless the pole towards which we gravitate. Few art events could provide a more promising opportunity to emphasize this than the current show at the International Center of Photography (ICP), devoted almost entirely to photographs relating to the Spanish Civil War. That of course means the photography of Robert Capa, but importantly, in this case, the work of his partner Gerda Taro as well. (FYI, there seem to suddenly be about 50 sites presenting the same copy on Taro, all drawn from either a NY Times review or the ICP itself. One thing I can guarantee my readers is that any non-original text you find on this blog will be in quotes, with attribution. The lack of any real info about Taro on the web before this exhibit can be seen from her very short Wikipedia entry. That said, Google turned up a few European sites that I didn't check out but which might have info that pre-dates the exhibit.)

A far less well known figure today than Capa, the ICP documents her status as a highly honored photographer in her day. She did not survive the war, unfortunately, and as a consequence of that, and perhaps also owing to the tendency of art history to brush away all but the most prominent women, she quickly fell off the list of photographers who affected art history. (Even Capa is barely mentioned in Beaumont Newhall's THe History of Photography, so forget about finding her there.) It is rare, though not unheard of, that rediscovered artists in any medium turn out to be the equal of those whose names are well known. This is arguably such a case.

The point could not be made more clearly than by comparing Capa's most famous photo, "Death of a loyalist militiaman" (1936) with Taro's photo of the same year, "Republican militiamen training on the beach" which serves as the icon for this show. (Both photos are shown on the ICP web site; click on the "Exhibition Images" link under the Capa and Taro links above.) Capa's widely reproduced image captures an "essential moment" alright: taken a spit second after the man is fatally hit by a fascist bullet, he stands off balance, arms flayed, rifle just about to fall from his grasp, his half-turned face exhibiting the shock of his misfortune. To say it was a lucky shot would be a major understatement; it is a shot that hardly ever be equaled for its expression of how vanishingly thin the border between life and death can be. The feeling is only enhanced by the awareness that Capa had followed the group of men to their battle positions on the hillside, and taken shot after shot of them preparing for the confrontation. The sudden loss of one whose acquaintance he had undoubtedly made a short time ago only makes more poignant the simultaneous feeling of bonding and parting that we feel in looking at this picture.

All that said, from a compositional point of view, the picture is all wrong. I once said something like this to my uncle, the photographer Harold Roth, about a picture he had taken of a woman walking with a ram. He laughed and said something to the effect that "when you see a picture like that you don't stop to think about the nice details". So be it; Capa's photo is life, death and courage all in one. But the man is all the way on the left side of the frame, which leaves about 2/3 of a photo frame without interest or detail. One almost wants to crop it, at the risk of doing damage to the extraordinary candor of the piece. I do think there is at least some justification in not doing so, for the hill to some extent enhances the sense of falling; he leans back, as if in a futile attempt to defy gravity, and symbolically, death itself. All the same, one would not choose this composition if one had such a choice. One does not need so much unused space to make the point.

Now consider Taro's shot. Taken not in battle but during training exercises, it is one of the most perfectly composed pictures in the history of photography. A woman kneels on her left knee, facing to the right, her right foot on the ground so that her bent leg forms a perfect right angle. Her right elbow rest on the leg above the knee, her arm straight up, with the hand bent at another right angle. In it there is a pistol. Her head is positioned so that her eye looks right out over the barrel. That, in essence, is the shot. Can you picture it? Let me elaborate.

What you should be seeing in your mind's eye (unless you cleverly clicked on the link above to see the actual photo) is two images of a pistol: one, that of the gun itself, and second that of its owner. The woman's form almost perfectly mirrors that of the gun. This much is more than a neat formal trick, and is accentuated by various formal echoes that take advantage of the square format produced by Taro's Rolleiflex camera (about a year later she switched to the rectangular format Leica that Capa was using). But form follows function here: the woman's fierce concentration on the firing of that gun tells us that she has in a sense become the weapon itself; her mission, defense of the Spanish democracy, has completely absorbed her, effectuating a complete harmony of spirit and purpose. That is not all, though. She brings her eye down to just above the barrel, looking directly at the target from the gun's point of view; we feel the stillness she concentrates on her aim. This is the photographer portraying herself in her subject, so careful in her focus, so still as she opens the shutter. Point, and shoot. This photograph is almost too perfect to be a candid shot.

I am not suggesting that Taro's shot is somehow "better" than Capa's. Different kind of work, different motivation for selecting it for presentation. Most of what constitutes the "art" of photography takes place in selecting among shots already taken. The rest, historically at least, is developing, printing, cropping, touching up. It goes without saying that the taking of pictures is of great importance, particularly when working with large formats. But it is saying too much to call that the only critical step in the process. Every serious 35mm photographer produces numerous images that can be thrown in the sea; the first cut is the one that separates these from those worthy of presentation. Taro had some time to compose her shot, Capa didn't. They both understood that something special had happened and preserved these two amazing photos for posterity.

In fact, Capa's eye for formal niceties can be appreciated in another of his images from the Cordoba front (this one is unfortunately not shown on the ICP site). Entitled "Loyalist militiaman running with rifle", the formal element of the triangle formed by two rifles and a bent elbow lend a strong sense of composition to a shot that is otherwise all motion and emotion. Another exceptional shot is "Telephone call to army command" (Rio Segre 1938). Several military men sit around a table covered with a map, and one of them holds a telephone, whose wire snakes across the map. Here a combination of formal elements like lighting, shape, and diagonals serve to stimulate a sense of community among the participants; the phone line stretching across the map is highly symbolic, connecting the figures both with one another and with the outside world. This gives them a sense of imperviousness in their cocoon-like shelter. I can only guess how Capa achieved the lighting he did indoors; I don't believe he was using a flash (nor do I know if one was available to him for the Leica at that time) and I also doubt he had a tripod, though that seems less unlikely. But a time exposure would have resulted in more blurring than I recall in this picture. Sometimes photographers can't remember themselves how they got what they did.

Taro made conscious and careful use of the square format while she was using it. One idea dominates, though. She tends to find a line that divides the vertical space, not exactly in thirds, but in half, from what would be the left upper corner of the lower third to the right lower corner of the upper third (or vice versa). In "Republican militiaman with a group of boys" the children appear to form phalanx, surely not an accident. Later on, when she switched to the Leica, it seems that her formal arrangements became more diverse. In some cases she repeated ideas but arranged them differently. For instance, the square-format picture "Republican soldier stepping through a hole in a wall" (1937) is echoed later that year in the rectangular "Republican dynamiters". (Is that you, Robert Jordan? Perhaps the bell tolls for you, but you're never more than a shutter-click from eternity, if it makes you feel better.) Both are strong compositions, and suggest that stepping through that hole is as much a metaphysical and moral act as a physical one.

It would be impossible and pointless to try to convey the force of the many gut-wrenching scenes that came from both Taro and Capa. Taro's simple, eloquent "War orphan eating soup" could be plumbed for philosophical depth, but ultimately, it doesn't need to say more than meets the eye. Ditto Capa's shot of a refugee in Barcelona, waiting with her dog, having lost her husband and son. And of course the heartbreaking shots of the dead and wounded. Comparisons with the work of Salgado present themselves here, but I'm not sure where they lead. Salgado has practically redefined socially conscious photography as an art, in a way that some people find distracting from the content. I am of the opposite view, feeling that technical and formal precision can never do anything but add to the significance and merit of a photograph. Yet these refugee pictures could be summoned to the cause of the other side, if anyone so desired. In their unadorned simplicity and directness, they suggest a photographer making a friend and study of her subject rather than using them as material for a new work altogether.

It is the unique and crucial property of photography that its rendering of images constitutes a special kind of documentation, and that it can stand out by drawing our attention to either intrinsic or formal elements, or both. Famous images like the one of a woman screaming over the body of a fallen student at Kent State, of a child running from the flames of a U.S. Napalm attack in Vietnam (Hue?), or the shot of John Kennedy Jr. saluting at his father's funeral, bring out a kind of empathy that perhaps even being at the scene ourselves would not have done. (For this and many other reasons, I disagree with those who take photographs to be windows of a sort, "transparent" frames of reality; for if they were, knowing what we do of human nature, I simply doubt that they would have either the impact that they actually do have, or the formal coherence that reality never has.)

Capa survived this hazardous and heroic line of work longer than Taro did, and he lived to capture other essential images. It is shocking to consider that his blurry, electrifying D-Day pictures must have been taken in the line of fire, possibly in the water. Though it may sound like a cliché, after reading David Guterson's description of the landing in Japan in Snow Falling on Cedars, hearing my father's description of crossing the Rhine, and seeing these pictures, I feel as if I can almost recall having participated in a marine invasion myself, with blood swirling around me, my boots leaden with water, and shells grazing my whiskers. Through luck, skill, and pure audacity, Capa captured the war against fascism from its first great battle to the fight that would eventually end it.

For this alone he certainly deserves his places in photographic history. But the show reveals more. For those who are historically minded, his shots of "Zhou en-lai next to a portrait of Karl Marx" and "Meeting of the Executive Yuan, Hankou, China" (both 1938) place one almost voyeuristically at the very moment which would dramatically change the lives of a fifth of the world's people. To see Zhou there, and then, having grown up with the image of him as a central figure on the world stage, is to peek into a crystal ball that holds history as it unfolds. Did Capa to recognize the magnitude of the occasion? What incredible prescience if he did.

There are of course a great many photographers whose social instincts have led them to social documentary, from Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to Mary Ellen Mark and Salgado. Capa and Taro stand out in the risk they took, but they are not alone in that either, the latest example being Kenji Nagai, the Japanese photographer who was killed in Yangon, Myanmar on Tuesday while covering protests against the dictatorship. It appears from videos that Nagai was intentionally shot by a soldier at point blank range, and left to die; a horrifying reminder of the power of photography to threaten even the mightiest and most ruthless of regimes. There is no question that since Vietnam, photographs have changed popular sentiments and indirectly changed the world. Capa and Taro had quite a following in their time, a 2-person Lincoln Brigade with the power to influence millions. It may have taken Pearl Harbor to force the U.S. to enter the war against fascism, but even though photography did not manage to win U.S. support for the first line defense in the war against Nazism (while both Hitler and Mussolini supplied Franco with troops, weapons and advisors) we should consider the less tangible role that Capa and Taro may have played in raising consciousness about the fascist menace.

The grisly aftermath of that menace is documented by Francesc Torres in "Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep", another exhibit at the ICP. In 2004, anthropologists unearthed a mass grave where some 40 Loyalists were massacred in the town of Villamayor de los Montes. Torres captured the work, skulls, spent shell casings and all, in vivid b&w, which ICP has considerately blown up to mural size and given its own room for our viewing pleasure. It hardly matters whether this is world class photography. For one other thing that this exhibition demonstrates is that photojournalism shades into fine art at certain dramatic points, organically as it were, without great leaps over hidden aesthetic gorges. Now it is documentary; now it is art - neither can be entirely stable without the other. Even our contemporary photographers who fetishize messy households and "mall chick" types have at least that most universal of documentary styles, the snapshot, as background to their efforts. In the face of an event so closely tied to the sordid history of the 20th century, Torres' work becomes something more than a photo op at a Spanish dig: it reveals the faces that could be us, one day, if we allow our own house to go far enough down the road of hysteria over national security and militarism as a means of diplomacy. And haven't we seen enough hints, from Guantanamo to the mass arrests at the last Republican National Convention, to make us pay attention to these chilling scenes? Generalissimo Cheney & Co., beware: we are armed with DSLR's, are apertures are wide, and even controlling the film supply won't stop us now!

(The ICP exhibit continues until January 6, 2008.)

Weick in Marx in Soho at Vox Pop in Brooklyn

That's a lot of nesting up there; but this is a Parrot's hangout after all!

Speaking of hangouts, where might a couple of feathered friends bide their time on a Saturday night (or just about any other) without straying too far from the nest? The local Dunkin Donuts? Unfortunately, in this neck of the woods, in can come to that. You see, this is the heart of Multicultural Brooklyn, where speaking Parrotese does not necessarily put you in the minority. Indeed, most businesses around here shut up as tight as a vulture's... err... grip, come sundown on Friday, and stay that way until pretty late Saturday night at the earliest. Though the Parrot shares some DNA with these folks, we do not appreciate the Friday/Sat night morgue routine (we could always touch down in Greenwood Cemetery if we were into that), so we are apt to take wing and find more welcoming venues.

And venue is just what we find when we drop in to Vox Pop, the only place this side of Park Slope that qualifies as a genuine Coffeehouse. Only this is not your run-of-the-mill yuppie joint with the $2.50 cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Well, okay - I guess it is about that much for a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. That's the funny thing about Vox Pop, the name of which is short for "vox populi", the Voice of the People. I know, it sounds like a leftie tabloid from the '30's (or '60's). Which is, roughly what it is - updated a bit. The place was started a couple of years ago by Sander Hicks and some friends, though Sander is definitely the main presence there. Nothing if not a risk taker, Sander took over a small storefront on Cortelyou Road, a commercial strip that had all but faded into oblivion; where the one bookstore in the entire neighborhood could not make it, where you could count at one point 12 hair salons, 4 dry cleaners, and not one restaurant you'd want to stick your beak into. Now, I don't want to use a hysterical term like "renaissance", but there has been a noticeable pickup of commercial activity on this strip, which sits smack in the middle of a neighborhood full of expensive Victorian homes and not a few large apartment buildings. You'd think somebody would figure out that this is a potential goldmine - at least, it would be, if there were enough going on there to deter the locals from heading to Park Slope every time they need a toy for their kids or a Fine Dining Experience.

If it is headed towards "renaiassance" (or, ironically, gentrification), Vox Pop will have had a lot to do with it. To start with, they did an amazing, and amazingly quick, job of turning the space into a warm, welcoming little java joint - not crowded or cramped but a real homey feel, helped along by lots of natural wood grains. Kids dig Vox Pop (there's a play area); so do adults. So do parrots. But this is not yer ordinary Starbucks wannabe. They sell books, which seem to have 2 main themes: radical rock music, and radical politics. They have readings (by, you guessed it, radical writers), and they do self-publishing. They have music in the evenings, not all radical, but much of it inspired by either the Clash or Pete Seeger, depending on which night you happen to walk in. And they sell food. None of it cheap. They do have "free wifi" - the scare quotes indicating that "free" is to be interpreted here as meaning "please spend $6 an hour or else..." Or else what? Who knows, I guess you become a Vox Populi Persona Non Grata, at least if you speak Latin. The Open Mike is also free, but the 2 beers to cover the minimum will cost you $10. (Pay to Play, is that what it's called?) Well, let's put it this way - if you are already one of the converted, consider it a contribution, to whatever cause Sander happens to be promoting at the moment. And if you are not, I don't think you could stand the heat for very long. The Parrot long thought he was redder than a scarlet tanager, but at Vox Pop we have to perch in the loft to avoid getting into a harangue with some "9/11 Truth" type (a cause Sander actively promotes), or someone who wants Ralph Nader to run again. All the same, better this than listening to the discourse on the other side of the fence. (Question regarding evolution and Sam Brownback: does the evidence suggest that he more likely evolved from Neanderthals or Cretins? Could it be his ancestors were the evolutionary fork that leads to both? This would explain his position on Darwinism.)

So where was I? Vox Pop, the radical coffeehouse that is going to revive Cortelyou Road, expand into all major U.S cities within two years, and capture 10% of the multibillion dollar coffee market by selling Fair Trade coffee and locally brewed beer... Or not, but I am damn glad they started here. And one of the latest reasons I'm glad - I was starting to talk about what I did last Saturday night, wasn't I? - is Marx in Soho, the one-man, one-act play by Howard (A People's History of the United States) ZInn. Incidentally, he's the guy who wrote A People's History of the United States. Like Vox Pop, Zinn dared to tread where few had gone before, writing a lengthy, detailed account of U.S. history as seen not from the vantage point of the elite few who directed the show but the dispossessed, disenfranchised many who actually (come to think of it) built this country. And interestingly enough, he also wrote some plays, including this one. It has not been produced very often, at least until Robert Weick took it upon himself to learn the demanding solo part and promote the show to college campuses, small theatres, and radical coffeehouses like Vox Pop (possibly a class of one).

So what is it? Alright, I'm going to tell you, but you have to promise one thing - you won't like tune out, log off, turn on the parrot filter, etc., until you give the idea a chance. Okay, ready? Here it is: Marx comes back from the dead to deliver a critique of contemporary Western society. All right, are you still with me? Good, because it's not quite like what it sounds. A little, but not cloyingly so. Marx comes back, for sure, granted a one hour reprieve by the Opiate of the People (Opius Populi?). And he does give us plenty of reason to believe that were he alive today he would bore us with what we already know if we are not comatose, that profits mean more than people under capitalism, that the Imperialist West supports its standard of living with wars to keep the Oppressed Nations down, that we stole half the country from Mexico, that America was built by immigrant labor who we repay with racism and immigration quotas, and other true clichés. (Dear Mr. Sarkozy, friend of the U.S., enemy of all that post-colonial riffraff that is filtering into your country, please focus on the "true" (vrai)", not the "cliché (cliché)".) But luckily for us, and for the possibility of this play getting performed without coming off preachier than an Easter sermon by Cardinal Egan, this is not what Mr. Weick spends the hour or so talking about.

In fact. Marx seems to have more to say about his boils than about politics, and even more to say about his wife Jenny and their daughters (mainly Elizabeth, though I think he had about 11 in all) than about his boils. He spends several amusing minutes discussing the slovenly persona of Mikhail Bakunin, the Godfather (ooh, would he hate that!) of anarchism. And he talks about the Paris Commune in terms that still manage to be moving 135 years later. There is a lot of history going on, good for the classroom crowd - especially today, when you can't assume that the average, educated 19 year old has the faintest idea what Marxism, communism, socialism, or just about anything else (other than iPodism) means. Marx of course decries the distortion of his views in the hands of the Soviet regime. He lambasts Stalinism (not necessarily by name) and declares (as did the historical Marx) that "I am not a Marxist" (though I can't say that Zinn's script brings out the meaning of this utterance very clearly).

In the end one is glad to have happened to be in Soho (sort of) when Marx dropped in. The performance alone was well worth the price of admission, which included, for $23, a politically correct burger, a small salad, and a damn good pint of some dark amber Dogfish Ale, which I must admit may have enhanced the play without any extra work on Zinn's or Weick's part. Typical Vox Popitis - Sander managed to get an article about the event published in the Times, emailed his constituency, and then had a line of patrons waiting for that PC burger, forcing them to start the play about 40 minutes late. When I came to buy a ticket a few days earlier the only staff person at the store had no idea there was a play, how to buy a ticket for it, how to handle the various discounts, or what the price of coffee is in Nicaragua. (Okay, I didn't ask that - maybe she did know.) Considering they run a printing press and have done performances before I thought it was a little odd that they didn't just print up some tickets. Oh well, organizing the revo takes a lot of energy; ditto organizing to become the third biggest brewed coffee retailer in the U.S. Anyway, what do I care - I'd ten times rather have Vox Pop with all their little quirks and growing pains that Barstucks with their dirty bathrooms and overpriced pastries. More than that, it is the fact that they never uses their spaces, of which they have sometimes three or four within a few blocks, for anything like a musical presentation or a reading or just about anything other than pulling in every possible yuppie, not to mention the occasional emerald-plumed biped in search of an oatmeal cracker. Suggested corporate slogan: "Not A Coffeehouse (Just a "¢offee Hou$e)". Vox Pop fills a cultural vacuum created by the demise of the coffeehouse, be it a folk club, a chess bar or a poetry salon. They've become a neighborhood cultural institution in a little over a year, and I daresay it is awfully refreshing to sometimes find oneself politically to the right of a small business owner. It ain't no Utopia, or they'd give me that pot of fresh brewed tea for being a nice guy. But it's way cool, I mean awesome, groovy, whatever.

Now, to get back to the Marx-Zinn-Weick connection, though the play was definitely entertaining, and Weick's performance top notch, there were things I missed. In the brief discussion session afterward, my question was: when do we get the second act, in which he tells us how socialism is really supposed to work? Aside from that, I was kind of surprised that the only references to 20th century socialism were some digs at the easiest target, the Soviet empire. What about China, Cuba, or Yugoslavia? What about Chile under Allende, Grenada under Bishop, the Prague Spring - are there no models worth praising? If not, then that is a bigger problem for Marx than boils or Bakunin: it's like, you all screwed up, if you had only done it the way I said... And what way is that? Zinn's Marx tells us very little about socialism "as it was supposed to be", actually. You would think this Marx would have a thing or two to say about his vision, even if it were straight out of what the historical Marx said in his Critique of the Gotha Programme and a few other works. Because it is fine and dandy to say, "You see, capitalism still stinks!", but if every attempt to institute socialism since the Paris Commune stinks too, you need a little more than that or you're just getting a stream of hot air. Which is fine for a parrot, but the flight-challenged spectator might not be so thrilled.

I'm dead serious (so is Marx, for that matter, but nevermind) - I think Zinn should write a second act. The play is far from losing our attention by the end, at least with Weick's capable handling of the part. And now that he's memorized all that.... a second act, in which we actually get a sense of the man's vision, seems like it's waiting to be written. Aside from that, I was a little surprised that this Marx, who shows up clutching a wad of contemporary newspapers, has so very little to say about contemporary social problems. Other than one or two passing gestures about the environment there is nothing about this most urgent of political issues. What would Marx think of a European Union? Computers? The Internet? Okay, maybe it is safer not to weigh him down with ad hoc advice on every issue under the sun. And the focus on his own time and immediate surroundings seemed appropriate. As a historical play with a few passes at contemporary updating, it works fine. Be that as it may, having gone this far, I would have donned my Dialectical Materialism Thinking Cap and given my audience a more robust sense of the man's continued relevance.

But all of our Avian Advice aside, this was a surprisingly enjoyable theatrical experience, supported by an excellent one-man perofrmance and I'm guessing a wee bit more than a pint of Dogfish Ale. And now that we know about the ale, the old Wingtipped Minstrel just might pop in to the Open Mike pretty soon. Better plan to walk home, can't afford to get points on my flying license.