In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
If it's true that Saddam Hussein is coordinating the attacks on American forces in Iraq, I think that's basically good news. 'Cause if he's coordinating them, then when we get him, we've dealt the guerillas a deadly blow. And if he isn't, then what precisely that death-blow might be is less clear.
posted by Noah at 8:54 AM

 
John Howard rode to power in Australia, and revived that country's conservative party, on a platform of opposition to immigration, robust defense of national sovereignty, and cracking down on crime.

Michael Howard of Britain, presumptively the new Tory head, is a Euroskeptic (i.e. defender of British sovereignty) and is identified with Major-era policies of cracking down on crime and trying to reduce illegal immigration.

Coincidence? Or some grand harmonic convergence?

And what does this bode for Howard Dean's chances?
posted by Noah at 4:11 PM

 
How can you be a metro-sexual if you hail from a state that doesn't have a single city?
posted by Noah at 3:30 PM

 
Can I express a little frustration?

Some of us who supported the war were nonetheless skeptical of the prospects for Iraqi democracy, for a whole variety of reasons. So an article like this one isn't exactly a shocker. Indeed, I recall one very precient blogger writing in October of 2002:

I worry about this [that we're unprepared for the post-war period] for a particular and somewhat paradoxical reason: the war is going to be too easy. Twice before in American history, the United States conquered an enemy, imposed its will and reconstructed the enemy's society. The two instances were: the Civil War and World War II. In each case, the United States was fully mobilized for war, was engaged in combat for years, suffered significant losses before the war was over and achieved an unambiguous victory over the enemy's entire society. None of this will be true in Iraq: we will fight without anything like total social mobilization; we will win quickly and hopefully without many losses (the latter is hard to be sure about; what if Saddam has a bomb, and uses it? Or what if his nerve gas is a more effective battlefield weapon than Gregg Easterbrook thinks it is? But even so, the war will be over quickly); and we will win a victory over a regime without popular support - assuming we win it at all, for it is possible that Saddam will escape as Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden did. For all these reasons, America will not be reconciled to the heavy responsibilities and cost of reconstruction, and Iraq will not be reconciled to the justice of a long-term American presence. We will not be used to shouldering a heavy burden, and Iraq will not feel conquered, but liberated - liberated for each group to pursue its own sectarian vendettas or to struggle for the spoils of a fallen state. For these reasons, Iraq will look very little like Japan or Alabama. And yet our task will be rather similar.

It was possible, in other words, to go into this war with one's eyes open. You didn't have to assume that we'd be welcomed with flowers and that Iraq would become a stalwart American ally.

Now, I don't begrudge the pollyannas their optimism. This country was built on optimism. What drives me nuts, though, is stuff like this piece by Bernard Lewis and James Woolsey saying that maybe we should bring back the Hashemites to establish a more legitimate order in Iraq.

I don't remember precisely where Lewis stood before the war, though I know he was supportive generally. But I'm quite sure that Woolsey was one of the pollyannas, a big booster of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, the whole nine yards. Now he's boosting the idea of a Hashemite restoration. But if I recall correctly, one of the main *opponents* of bringing in a Hashemite was the Ahmad Chalabi. I believe he articulated the view that to restore the Hashemites would be a betrayal that would justly result in Iraqi resistance to the American occupation.

I'm not asking Woolsey to say, "sorry, I was wrong." I don't even know if his new angle is right; I can think of a few problems with the idea of bringing back the monarchy. I am, however, asking him - and Richard Perle, and the rest of the gung-ho crowd - to start taking this job seriously and stop acting like rebuilding Iraq is something we can make up as we go along. If we though the way to go was to restore the Hashemite monarchy, we needed to lay the groundwork a long while ago. We needed to make that clear before we went in, before we made anyone any promises, before we threw our lot in with the INC and before we rebuffed Abdullah of Jordan's uncle (the likely candidate for the job of King of Iraq). We can't just pull a switcheroo like this. We're not founding an internet company here that can rebrand every six months with no one left the wiser. We are in no danger of losing Iraq due to excessive casualties. If we are in danger of losing Iraq, it's because sometimes we seem to be going about this like a bunch of amateurs.
posted by Noah at 6:16 PM

 
So I got the latest volume of The Cartoon History of the Universe for my birthday last week. (How old am I? Hint: my age is not the sum of distinct triangular numbers - and that should be enough, in context, to tell you how old I am.) It was enjoyable, but not as good as the last two volumes. Too much fact, and not enough of a narrative thread. The last volume gave us the rise and fall of Rome and the unification of China and its subsequent collapse. (Plus side-visits to India and a couple of other interesting places.) Lots of big-picture, strong narrative structure. This volume starts with the rise of Islam in Arabia, but the history of the Islamic era just doesn't have much structure. After the great conquests, it's just one thing after another. The European middle-ages has the same problem, but there we blame it on squalor and lack of documented history. Not so in the house of Islam. Anyhow, it makes reading - and retaining - the history more of a struggle.

Then I check out the latest City Journal, and lo! Victor Davis Hanson takes a belated swipe at Francis Fukuyama and his "end of history" comment upon the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is kind of a cheap shot; the hubris of the remark is obvious. (Fukuyama should have remembered what his lodestar, Hegel, said about the owl of Minerva and the setting of the sun.)

But what's more interesting to me is: does Hanson believe, with Hegel (and Fukuyama) that History has a discernable - even if not predictable - structure. In other words: does he think that our current moment in history *means* something, or is it just more stuff happening?

He doesn't directly answer that question, but I'm going to try to peg him as best I can. To do so, I'll need a typology of theories of history.

1. History has no structure. This is a very respectable position, even if I think it makes for boring history books, held by such worthies as the author of Ecclesiastes, Samuel Johnson and Stephen J. Gould. There's nothing new under the sun, and all kinds of stuff happens, some good, some bad. What matters is how individuals deal with the stuff that happens, whether they make moral decisions and whether they make sensible ones, and whether their gambles pay off. The study of history, for these folks, is the study of models of heroism and infamy, along with the sheer accumulation of interesting detail. But you can't learn to make decisions based on where history is going because it isn't going anywhere.

2. Structures of internal decline. Ovid and Homer both seem to have thought that there was a Golden Age in the past from which their own eras were a decline. Chinese history is often described in terms of dynastic founding, flourishing, and decay. Indian history is understood to be religiously cyclical, and Nietzsche spoke of the myth of eternal recurrence, and I think these kinds of hermetic cyclical histories are close kin to this kind of "life-cycle" history. Giambattista Vico probably inaugurated the greatest of these theories, hypothesizing that societies go through recognizable historical phases in sequence: a Theocratic Age, followed by an Aristocratic Age, followed by a Democratic Age, and then a period of collapse followed by a new turn of the cycle. What these theories have in common is the assumption that these dynamics are largely internal to the societies in question.

3. Structures of external decline. These are related to but more sophisticated than the foregoing. Ibn Khaldun, the medieval Arab historian, married a pretty classic concept of internal decline (successive generations get more and more decadent as they get used to the comforts of civilization) to foreign affairs (the world is always full of barbarians ready to conquer decadent civilizations), and came up with a new cyclical theory. Yes, civilizations decay internally. But they are overthrown by half-civilized barbarians but who have learned to use the civilized world's technology but still have the vitality that the civilized peoples have lost. The historian Paul Kennedy articulated an a rather different history based on external decline. Rather than declining due to decadence and decay, in Kennedy's view great powers decline because of imperial overreach: the costs of maintaining their power grows faster than their power does. (Why this should be is left somewhat unclear.) This is his explanation for the declines of Spain, Britain, and (he predicted) America: their military commitments grew faster than their ability to finance them. Some version of this historic theory floats in the air behind a lot of left-wing critics of America today. Yet another "external decline" theory is rooted in the notion that imperial expansion changes the internal character of a state, and thereby undermines the dynamic basis of its power. This is the case against Sparta, and the case that Gibbon makes against Rome; it's also the case that the paleo-libertarian right makes against America today. I'm lumping a lot of different theories together under this rubric. What they share is a lack of any notion that history has a direction. They are not progressive theories. And this is something they share with the simpler, life-cycle theories and with the anti-theory of "stuff happens."

But there are also theories that are progressive in character. And here, too, there are three that I am aware of.

4. Providential histories. The archetype is the theory of history propounded in the Hebrew Bible. God has a plan for humanity, a plan that is worked out in history. He makes promises, and He fulfills them - sometimes dramatically (e.g. the exodus), sometimes in mysterious ways (e.g. the Joseph narrative, or the story of the Book of Esther). These sorts of history are not much in favor with historians nowadays (Gibbon's Decline and Fall dealt providential history a decisive blow), but they endure among real people. They are often dangerously vulgarized into a notion that God will always cause His faithful to prosper in history, and therefore those who prosper must be His chosen. This is manifestly false, and Jeremiah's prophecies should have put an end to the notion, but they didn't. Among the religious, providential history competes with the idea that God is outside of history; that His rewards are granted in another world, or at the end of time, or what-have-you. But even those who hold to this view believe that, at the end of history, history will be reconciled with God's plan, and therefore they impose a structure on the future (and, retrospectively, on the past).

5. Whiggish progressive history. This is the dominant mode of history in the United States among those who have not had their brains colonized by French-inspired anti-American nonsense. History has a structure: the structure of the progress of ordered liberty. Human beings naturally seek greater freedom, and therefore history tends - over the long run and at differential rates - in that direction. The Whiggish account of the British Empire maintains - with a straight face - that the Brits intended the Empire to collapse eventually; the whole point was to drag much of the rest of the world up the liberty curve to the point where they were capable of governing themselves, and when they got to that point Britain was happen to let them go their merry ways. Something of the same notion underlies the neo-conservative confidence in our ability to re-shape the culture of a country like Iraq. Other Whiggish histories are more narrowly technological-determinist. These folks argue that history is the story of technological progress leading to the enhancement of human capabilities and the expansion of the sphere of human freedom. Progress is not a function of some spiritual force driving people to be free, but of the cumulative power of human intelligence over time. Like other overarching theories of history, the Whiggish notion of progress is not really refutable; counter-examples can be discounted and plenty of positive examples can be given as evidence. But the notion of progress, just as the notion of providence, gives history a shape, and makes it possible to get on the "right side" of history.

6. Dialectical progressive history. This was basically invented by Hegel, and then vulgarized by Marx into dialectical materialism. Hegel's perspective was that history was the progress of spirit, and that this progress proceeded dialectically. Essentially, history had the structure of a political argument, an argument about freedom. Unlike the Whiggish progressives, Hegelians understand that freedom is not a simple thing; there are different kinds of liberty, and they trade off against each other. So you can't just draw a line from bottom left to top right on a graph and say, "this is liberty over time." Rather, a particular society will express a certain set of values, and this structure will itself call forth its antithesis, a counter-structure representing a set of counter-values that expose the limitations of the society. These values clash, and bring forth a synthesis that reconciles the competing understandings of liberty, and thereby give birth to a new society and a new structure. Which in turn calls forth a new antithesis, and so forth. His idea is very appealing to those inclined to understand societies as expressive of values, or of ideologies. It's a model of progress that is less polyanna-ish than Whiggish history. And it's a model of history that comprehends the idea of conflict and understands that it can be productive and not just destructive. I find it particularly appealing as a way of understanding American history, because America - unlike most countries - is self-described as having been "conceived in liberty" and so we are, in our own minds, a country constituted around an argument about what that liberty is.

Where does VDH fall in this typology? Nowhere clear. He seems to have classed Fukuyama as a Whig rather than a Hegelian, someone who thinks history is the story of the fitful progress of humanity towards greater liberty, where the end is known in advance. That may be right for Fukuyama, but if so I don't think he understood Hegel. In any event, VDH doesn't buy this. But he does clearly believe that American might stems from our superior values and the social structure that expresses them, and he does not seem to believe that there is a natural cycle of decay of these values, nor that the vigorous assumption of our foreign obligations in any way undermine the prospects of perpetuation of those values and that structure (indeed, he seems to feel the opposite). And when he talks about Europe, he seems to be arguing that America is, in a sense, calling forth an opposite power, constituted around an idea of liberty at variance with our own.

So: is Hanson a closet Hegelian after all? Not really. But anyone who thinks seriously about history owes more to the German than his vulgarizers would lead you to believe.
posted by Noah at 6:33 PM

 
Nice to know either Steve Sailer is still reading David Frum or David Frum is still reading Steve Sailer. Or, perhaps it's a coincidence that each issued the Murray Challenge on the same day.

Let me take issue with the Frum list first:

1. Ivan Denisovich is not that great a book. Its importance is its existence; it's a great document.

2. The Guggie at Bilbao is already starting to fall apart. It will not be standing in 100 years, much less 200. It certainly won't "matter" because Gehry's is an anti-architecture that cannot be used for building cities. Mind you, I'm someone who thinks his stuff is kind of cute, when it works; I kind of like it. But it's a dead-end.

3. Assuming the tradition of painting is resumed, there's a real question whether pure abstraction will be anything but a curiosity in 200 years. Once again, I hasten to reassure the reader that I *get* abstraction, and I greatly admire the great abstractionists (the greatest of whom was, in my opinion, Arshile Gorky, by a long mile ahead of Pollack and DeKooning and the rest of that crowd). But Abstract Expressionism - and especially Pollack's Action Painting - was a dead-end. You can't build on it. So *how* will it matter, if new painters can't really learn from it?

4. I'll give him this one, with enthusiasm. The Godfather movies will matter as long as movies do.

5. I'm a great fan of Milosz (I like him a lot better than Solzhenitsyn), so I'm tempted to give him this one as well. But I'm not sure what The Captive Mind is really comparable to. Boethius? Montaigne? It's not on their level; I'm just trying to figure out the genre, figure out who is going to read these essays when the dramas of our era are of historical interest only. Beautiful writer, though, it's true, and a moving poet.

6. West Side Story. The music is fantastic. If you doubt that it ranks with the opera canon, listen to a recording of the show, and then listen to Oscar Peterson's suite based on it. The dances are a pinnacle achievement of the period, but will they last? I'm less sure. They might turn out to be more like a period piece. And the book is *awful.* Almost unbearably so. The show'll definitely last, though, and if you put it together with the other great mid-century musicals, the scope of the artistic achievement of the era becomes clearer.

7. Kundera is an over-rated hack whose understand of women is about as deep as Henry Miller's. There are some good bits in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but they are buried in a lot of manure.

8. The collected "I Love Lucy"? Don't get me wrong; Lucille Ball was a great comedienne. But I've never sought out an old episode of the show. I don't know anyone who has. Will artists in 200 years really look to these shows for inspiration? I think "Lucy" readers will be like people today who read Lazarillo de Tormes or other examples of 16th century Spanish picaresque. Is this stuff historically important? Yes; this is where the novel got its start. Is it still readable and funny? Yes. Does anyone but scholars read it? No.

9. I'll give him Naipaul as well. He's great.

10. I'll decline to opine on Watson and Crick because I don't know enough about the magnitude of their achievement. Sometimes the most important advances aren't great scientific breakthroughs, but merely very good ideas (e.g. Adam Smith, Charles Darwin). Other times, they are the product of singular genius (e.g. Einstein, Newton, Archimedes). Other times, you can have a radical advance in science without a single achievement or genius that dominates it (e.g. the development of Quantum Mechanics). And other times, the headline achievement is not such a huge advance, but it gets the headlines because it's easy to write a headline where the scientific advance that underlies it is more diffuse and hard to define. I think that's the case with the discovery of DNA, but I'm not an expert.

11. I'm a fan of mid-century modern design, as I am generally of middle-class aesthetics (I like Eastlake furniture, too, which is roughly the 19th century equivalent of Atomic Age stuff - affordable Victorian style versus affordable modernist style). But fins on cars just look campy, and the UN building is downright ugly. I'll stick with the chairs.

Now: Sailer. He asks for entries in three categories: painting, the novel, and the song.

Let's get the toughest one out of the way first: paintings.

I'm assuming that Murray believes that our long post-modernist anti-art interlude will not last 200 years; that, in such a span of time, either our civilization will have collapsed (in which case nothing will be remembered) or will have reconnected with our historic traditions and made sense of the modernists' achievements in a way that is lasting.

I will assume, for the sake of argument, that appreciation for pure abstraction is a casualty of that precess of re-connection with tradition, so that what survives, and is of interest to artists of two-centuries hence, is art which is recognizably figurative. The only portraitist of stature I can think of is Chuck Close, and he's very hard to approach, and derivative of photography (particularly that of cruel photographers like Robert Frank). One of the more interesting practitioners of the still life is William Bailey; he's sort of the exact opposite of Cezanne, whom I admire a great deal. I'm racking my brains trying to think of someone doing landscape of any stature. There are a couple of Hockney paintings that I think are quite good, but most of his stuff is crap, and he's technically very deficient. Will these people survive? Let's put it this way: I think it's a better bet than Jasper Johns, or Cindy Sherman, or the rest of that crowd. And if you assume great mid-century abstractionists survive 200 years, then the challenge is too easy (and I note that Frum picked *the* abstractionist icon, and the only one whom *no one* is trying to emulate - see what I mean by a dead-end?). If you allowed sculpture into the mix, I think it would be a little easier to come up with names; Giacometti was still doing fine work in the 1950s, though his masterpieces are from the 1940s. It is conceivable to me that no meaningful number of painters since 1950 will be remembered in 200 years. It's also conceivable to me that the painting tradition will not be knit up; since the advent of photography the social function of painting has changed fundamentally, and it's not obvious to me that a restoration will be as easy as it might be for some of the other arts (e.g. poetry) nor as urgent as for yet others (e.g. architecture).

I do want to stress, though, that Modernism per se is not to be blamed for the death of painting. Expressionism and abstraction are not the same thing, and abstraction and post-modernism are very nearly opposites. So long as you teach drawing the figure, the tradition isn't dead, and for a very long time into the Modernist revolution there were painters who could draw. New Yorkers, head to the Neue Galerie and check out Egon Schiele's work if you doubt.

Next: novels.

To start, I'm going to make the same assumption as for painting: that in 200 years we will have reconnected with broken traditions and that the present period will appear as something of a anomaly. But this is a much harder case to make for the novel than for painting, because there has been no hiatus in the writing of novels that read like novels. Tom Wolfe thinks that no one else is doing realism, but that isn't true at all. It may be that for a while the high-culture mandarins disdained the traditional novel, but the novel is not supposed to be a high-culture form, and the popular novel remains realistic, basically. I'm surprised the challenge isn't to find *poetry* that will survive; that would be much harder.

Let's take Wolfe's A Man in Full. That's one book that might survive as a good example of late-20th-century realism. But it's not a Great Book, just a good book. I could as easily choose the best work of Robertson Davies, or The Book of Ebenezer Lepage (whoever wrote *that*), or Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. None of these are Great Books, but they are all good books, and could conceivably survive, though the odds are against any one of them. Greater books, and still recognizably in the realist tradition, were written by V. S. Naipaul (see above), Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Saul Bellow. Odds are better on these guys surviving. I'd be willing to bet on Primo Levi and Italo Calvino as well. We're assuming the likes of Thomas Pynchon (some of whose stuff I like) are headed for the dustbin; if he goes, the Don Delillos and the rest of the wannabes all go with him. But, of the books the cognocenti love, Lolita will definitely survive. It is a Great Book, not just a good one, and it is not an anti-novel in the mode of Gravity's Rainbow. Does it compare with the work of Tolstoy or Dickens or Cervantes? No. But does it compare with Fielding or Sterne or Richardson? I don't see why not. And if you allowed in drama, Beckett's End Game was written in the 1950s, and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (his only good play) was written in the 1960s, and both of these will survive if any of our drama does. They are neither of them as good as a master like Chekhov. But they are miles better than anything written during the Restoration, and people are still putting on Congreve now and again. He's not, in any event, forgotten.

Finally: songs.

No post-1950 songs? Has he been living in a cave?

Just to pick two great popular groups post-1950 who wrote their own songs, much of the oeuvres of The Beatles and The Band will survive essentially indefinitely. They wrote great popular songs, certainly comparable to anything in the 200 years that preceded them. Next, the American musical theater reached its apogee in the 1950s with shows like Guys and Dolls and West Side Story. Do you think they'll still be doing Pirates of Penzance in another 100 years? Then they'll still be doing Guys and Dolls in 200. But the best case for post-war music is also the most obvious. I am confident that the jazz classics of the 1950s will outlast much of the modernist classical music of the early 20th century. I mean, which do you think is more accomplished: Kind of Blue or The Rite of Spring? I'm not even going to bother to list the great artists of the era; there are too many to name. It's inconceivable to me that the period will not be remembered for its extraordinary musical fecundity. It certainly won't be forgotten. Whether there's anyone remotely comparable composing and performing today is another matter, but that's not the challenge.

If, perhaps, Murray would disqualify all of the foregoing by saying that orchestral music had undergone a precipitous decline by then, I would make two comments. First, if modernist music is to be deplored, he needs to reach back further than 1950 for his quality cutoff. Second, if orchestral music is all that qualifies then the era of musical accomplishment in the West is itself terribly short - three centuries long, no more. And that seems to me to be extraordinarily myopic. There are moments and places of extraordinary intellectual or artistic achievement that are never really equalled. There will probably never be another Shakespeare, or another Beethoven, or another Aristotle. But that doesn't mean that a Richard Sheridan, or a Scott Joplin, or a William James is worthless and doomed to be forgotten.
posted by Noah at 2:34 PM

 
Um, don't we have a Great Convention already - called the U.N. Security Council?

The cat's not just out of the bag. He's running around the room, clawing the drapes and chewing the houseplants. It's not that easy to get him back in the bag now.
posted by Noah at 11:59 AM

 
Tell me this is mistakenly translated from an Arabic version of The Onion: Zionist Agents Make Men's Penises Disappear.
posted by Noah at 9:17 AM

 
I'm trying to figure out why this story is generally being spun as a "those bleeping Saudis" story instead of a "what are we going to do about Pakistan" story. I mean, the Pakistanis are the ones with the nukes.

We now know that, unlike in 1990, in 2003 Saddam was not particularly close to getting the bomb. Of course, had he remained in power, and sanctions been lifted (which certainly would have followed), he would have quickly restarted his nuclear program and would probably have had nukes within a couple of years.

Now he's gone, and we occupy the country. One problem solved, at a modest expense of $100 billion or so. But Pakistan already has the bomb! And, while currently ruled by a relatively reasonable fellow, the country has a history of political instability and an intelligence service full of radical Islamist sympathizers. The country has already cooperated with North Korea, sharing technology for nuclear weapons in exchange for missile technology. Now they are cooperating with Saudi Arabia (which makes sense, since Iran - another incipient nuclear power - is a traditional rival of both states).

We are on the verge of a nuclear arms-race in the most dangerous part of the world. These are countries that spend all that they have - and then some - on huge militaries that then go on to consistently lose wars. All these countries hate each other and have fought wars against each other at various points in the past. It makes perfect sense that all of these guys want nukes. Pakistan is surrounded by enemies: India, Iran and a newly India-friendly Afghanistan. Iran is making a bid for regional hegemony: it already has a satellite in Syria, wants to dominate Iraq and exert an influence over post-Soviet central Asia. Turkey has exactly the same plans, and is focused on the same countries. Then you've got Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Lybia. Not one of these countries is without nuclear ambitions, except for Turkey, and that's only because of the American nuclear umbrella. If the region starts to nuclearize, the world will face an unprecedented situation: a collection of mutually hostile, unstable nuclear powers. That is not a good world. Those who place blithe confidence in deterrence in these circumstances are whistling past a very populous potential graveyard.

South Korea, Taiwan, Japan: none of these countries has gone nuclear because of American security guarantees. So we have been spared a world where every Pacific country thinks it needs the bomb. Does anyone think the world is more dangerous because of this achievement, and would have been safer if the Pacific were thoroughly nuclearized? As it is, we are rightly worried about the whole business unravelling on account of North Korea's ambitions, and we could just barely take care of North Korea militarily without wrecking northeast Asia. What are we going to do about Pakistan?

Leave aside the entirely legitimate worries that a Saudi bomb - or, for that matter, the current Pakistani bomb - would eventually find its way into the hands of terrorists who would target the U.S. Leave it aside even though we know that these governments (or organs that should be controlled by them) already actively support terrorism (in Kashmir and India, in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, in Kossovo, in Israel, in Iraq, and in New York City), and even though we know that Pakistan's nuclear scientists include among their number sympathizers with al Qaeda and the Taliban. Even if these states did not share nukes with terrorist groups, the prospect of a thoroughly nuclearlized Middle East is terrifying enough. It's hard for me to believe these weapons would not be used in war. The humanitarian and environmental catastrophe that would ensue is horrible to contemplate. The likelihood that such wars would draw in other powers, including ourselves, is high, and the prospect for the use of such weapons against our own troops or on our soil is quite real.

What are we going to do about this? We do not have an adequate policy to deal with Pakistan. Part of the purpose of the Iraq war was to make clear the consequences of attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, and we're very afraid of what is going to happen to them. We don't have an adequate response. North Korea either has them or is about to. We don't have an adequate response. When Iran acquires them, it seems clear to me we will not have an adequate response. The invasion of Iraq has made it all the more important to powers threatened by us to acquire some means of deterrence. We have got to change this dynamic, quickly.

But how? "Regime change" may be a reasonable policy for discrete situations, like Iraq or North Korea, where the trouble stems overwhelmingly from the character of the leader in question. But Iran is likely to want the bomb even if the current regime falls, for reasons of self-defense. The Pakistanis are not going to give up their bomb, and if we toppled that regime we'd get something worse. Ditto for the House of Saud. And the decapitation of Iraq didn't result in spontaneous democratization (not that this writer ever thought it would). We'll be in Iraq for a "long slog" - just like I thought we would. That's an expensive proposition. Pakistan is several times the size of Iraq, much poorer, and has no oil. Who's going to pay for nation-building there?

We cannot afford to topple and occupy a region of hundreds of millions of people, and no one is seriously suggesting that we do so. The Iraq war was supposed to provide us leverage, send a signal that would be understood around the region both that we mean business and that we mean well, and would provoke reforms that would end the basis for much of the region's conflict. Pakistan, above all other countries, is the testing ground for that theory. If we lose Pakistan, we've lost the war on terror. If the Iraq war makes it less likely that we lose Pakistan, that was reason enough to have fought it. If it makes it more likely, we have a very big problem.
posted by Noah at 1:17 PM

 
Yup.
posted by Noah at 12:04 PM

 
Apparently, things are getting worse for Easterbrook. I've already ordered his book. I strongly encourage other readers to do so as well. And any other suggestions people have for how to support Easterbrook, I'm all ears. This whole business is getting me more and more upset. I finally understand how all those moronic "Not In My Name" folks feel. Easterbrook is being persecuted by self-proclaimed defenders of Jews everywhere. Well, as a Jew, let me say: not in my name you aren't. Leave the guy alone.
posted by Noah at 9:34 AM

 
John Derbyshire asks an interesting question: if a 3rd-party candidate ran on a platform of ending illegal immigration, and reducing immigration generally, would he (or she) get enough votes to swing the election to the Democrat? Allow me to ruminate a bit.

First, I'm of the opinion that Perot did elect Clinton, though not because he took a huge number of Republican votes from Bush. Rather, his entry into the race, when he did and as he did, disrupted Bush's reelection campaign by revealing the depth of national discontent with the President, and gave Clinton and the Democrats the time to recover from a bruising primary season and reemerge at the convention united, upbeat and, apparently, different from Democrats of the past. As I recall, Perot then dropped out, citing a "revitalized" Democratic Party as the reason. Had Perot stayed out of the race at that point, I believe Clinton would have won with a clear majority. Had he never entered, the dynamic might have been rather different, and it's conceivable Clinton would have lost - or at least had a very close race.

Second: while I am absolutely convinced that Derb, Steve Sailer and the other prominent immigration restrictionists out there are onto something - this is an issue that many Americans care about, and that the two parties have banished from polite discourse - I'm less convinced that, at least in 2004, a large number of Americans would vote on this matter and nothing else. And a 3rd party candidate who said nothing else is what's being posited. Close to half of the typical Presidential electorate is really pretty happy with G.W. Bush, and will not defect. A good 35% to 40% of the typical Presidential electorate is sufficiently hard-core Democrat that they will vote for any of the current plausible candidates rather than Bush or a 3rd party candidate. So I think a single-issue anti-immigration candidate will mostly draw folks who don't normally vote or are loosely attached to the parties.

Third: the part of the GOP coalition most dissed by this Administration is the CATO-type small governmentoids and libertarians. These folks don't like the Patriot Act, hate Bush's free-spending ways, and many of them are not happy about the war. But these people also LOVE free immigration. NONE of them will defect to a candidate running on the National Question. By contrast, who's going to get left out of the Democratic coalition? The most plausible candidates for the Democrat nomination are Dean and Kerry (still). They are both Northeastern liberals who will be assembling a McGovern coalition: single and divorced women, blacks and Hispanics, affluent liberals, public-sector unions, urban professionals, etc. Yes, they'll tack to the center in the general election, in an attempt to win more suburbanites. Who's left out? The hard-hats: private-sector unionized workers who might vote enthusiastically for Gephardt but who are going to be pretty unenthusiastic about Dr. Dean or patrician Kerry. These are also the Democratic voters *most* likely to be receptive to an anti-immigration candidate.

My fourth point about how such a candidate would affect the race should be about geography. But I'm not sure what the impact would be. It's obvious to me that an anti-immigration candidate would do very well in California. But California will go Democrat unless there's a landslide GOP victory, so I don't see how a strong 3rd party polling in that state could help the Democrats much in taking the Presidency. Outside of California, I'm less sure how things play out. Fear of immigration was clearly a factor (ironically) in defeating Ron Unz's anti-bilingual ed initiative in Colorado in 2002. Colorado is a must-win for Bush. New Mexico isn't a must-win, but it's an important swing state for Bush. It's also got a huge percentage of Hispanic voters. Assuming they vote solidly Democrat (not certain, but likely) then a split in the white vote could tip the state to the Dems. But the opposite dynamic might operate in a state like Wisconsin, or Michigan, where the migration of white Democrats to a 3rd party anti-immigration candidate could tip the states to Bush. Bottom line: I think the dynamics of such a candidacy, and its effects on the Electoral College, are very hard to predict.

All this is by way of saying: Bush should be thinking about this scenario, but not fretting desperately. A 3rd party libertarian challenge would be of much smaller significance as a national phenomenon, but in a close election might a bigger potential threat, as it would draw overwhelmingly from potential GOP voters, just as Nader drew overwhelmingly from potential Democrat voters. I think an anti-immigration candidate could do very well. I don't think it's likely such a candidate would throw the election to the Democrats. I think it's at least as likely it could help Bush as hurt him.

But what it would definitely do is put the issue on the map.

What happens then? Hard to say. Look at the last French Presidential election. The French electorate basically hated Chirac. And about 30% of the electorate voted for candidates with a nativist message (at least in part): about 20% for Le Pen, a couple of percent for other candidates from the far-right, and a few percent for a center-right candidate who slapped a Beur youth at a rally (which the media thought would hurt him, but obviously helped him significantly, probably cutting into Le Pen's vote as more respectable people defected to a more respectable candidate). So now that Le Pen's success has demostrated the power of the anti-immigration vote, has anything about French policy changed? Not much. Chirac has made some efforts to crack down on crime, and some gestures in the direction of economic liberalization, but nothing terribly radical. And I don't think any significant has changed in policy terms with respect to the French National Question.

I'm much more of an assimilationist than a restrictionist myself; I think high legal immigration has historically been a net economic positive for the country. But it does seem to me this issue doesn't get aired with the honesty it should. Both the corporate Right and the multi-cultural Left, who favor high immigration levels and are unconcerned about illegal immigration, have engaged in too much ad-hominem in debating the question. It would be healthy for someone to put the issue of illegal immigration on the political map, for real. What happens once it's there is much harder to predict.
posted by Noah at 6:14 PM

 
Mickey Kaus has his own thoughts on the Easterbrook affair. I basically agree with him, but I have to quibble with two points.

(1) Kaus hypothesizes on what was going on in Easterbrook's head when he made the argument: "Trying to come up with some new weapon for his side, Easterbrook has the religion writer's idea--did I mention he also wrote a book about God?--of trying to shame studio executives Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein for betraying their faiths, the way he'd tried to shame Mel Gibson a week earlier. (This is in fact what Easterbrook says he was trying to do.) But Weinstein and Eisner are Jewish--and you can't just assume that they are especially religious Jews, the way Gibson is openly religious. Nor, perhaps, does Easterbrook have at his fingertips the particular Jewish teachings he might want to charge the two executives with flouting."

Apart from the last point - why shouldn't he have them at his fingertips? Doesn't he use Google? - the real problem with this is that it implies that you can't "shame" Jews by saying they are being false to their moral heritage. Or, rather, that only Jews can - or only religious Jews to other religious Jews. Or something. As a matter of ettiquette, maybe so. But how does this relate to anti-Semitism? Suppose Easterbrook, in good faith, wanted to say: shame on you Jewish executives for falling so far short of righteous Jewish teaching! What's offensive about that? Should we now tar and feather every non-Christian who accuses someone of behaving in an "un-Christian" manner? Should we, for that matter, be unable to discuss whether suicide bombing is a perversion of Islam in public? There's an implicit double-standard in here, and if you spell it out it's pretty offensive in itself, at least to me.

(2) He then quotes Leon Wieseltier as follows: "Insofar as Gregg's comments impute Jewish motives for everything that Jews do, insofar as they suggest that everything any Jew does is intrinsically a Jewish thing, they are objectively anti-Semitic."

Wieseltier may have thought longer and harder than Kaus has, but what on earth does this mean? I understand the first part: everything that Jews do does *not* spring from a Jewish motivation. But what does the second part mean? If it just means the same as the first part, fine. But I think it means something different. I think it means: holding Jews responsible, as Jews, for their actions is itself anti-Semitic (and "objectively" so, no less!). But this implies, in effect, that a Jew's Jewishness somehow floats apart from him, untouched by any action he takes. And that can't be what Wieseltier believes. He can't believe that one can both claim membership in a group *and* believe that one's actions should never be construed to reflect on the group. It can't be anti-Semitic to say: this Jew is behaving appallingly, and he should stop, because his actions reflect badly on all Jews. (Note: I am *not* saying that Jews have a special obligation to refute stereotypes imputed to them. That *is* offensive. I'm saying that you can't, on the one hand, take pride in membership in the Jewish people and, on the other, say that no one should associate your own actions with that people.)

But all this is irrelevant because Easterbrook did *not* say that Eisner et al should be ashamed for Kill Bill because their actions reflect badly on the Jews, much less that their actions sprang from Jewish motives. (He did not, for example, say that they "love money above all else" because they are Jews.) He said that they should be ashamed because their actions are, effectively, spitting on the legacy of Jewish suffering. He was saying that as Jews they should know better.

What is offensive about this? I admit, I'm at a loss. The best I can come up with is that this is the kind of thing you say in private, not in public; the kind of thing you say to friends, not strangers. It is, in a way, the kind of thing a *Jew* should properly say. And for Easterbrook to say it means he's crossing interfaith lines, and might rub people the wrong way. I'll admit, the first time *I* read Easterbrook's blog entry I was taken aback. But after only brief reflection, I understood what he was getting at, and I didn't find it offensive. If I'd been his editor, I would definitely have made him change the wording (not an option in blog land, of course). But I wouldn't say, as Kaus does, that Easterbrook is guilty of anything more than a poor choice of wording. He tried to say a difficult thing in what must be considered deliberately provocative language, and he screwed up. That's it.

Look, I've been here before as well. It's easy to make comments in a blog that, upon reflection, say things you wish you had not said, even if you think that at bottom you had a legitimate point. You apologize, you repent, and hopefully you are forgiven. Easterbrook's sin is not so great. At least Easterbrook can rest assured that Eisner and Weinstein are losing no sleep over this matter; the post wasn't that personal. He should be forgiven.
posted by Noah at 6:13 PM

 
Actually, Steve Sailer defends Easterbrook better than I did. I think the link goes to him home page, so if his comments on Kill Bill are no longer at the top, scroll down until you find them.

I don't think it's necessary, by the way, to endorse the Easterbrook/Sailer conviction that movies like Kill Bill and NBK cause psychopathic violence to defend Easterbrook. Personally, I hate ultra-violent movies like these, even when they *are* satires. I couldn't sit through Robocop, or through Face/Off, because of the sheer brutality of the bad guys in these flicks. And I'm not a Tarantino fan. But I'm not convinced that violent films cause violence any more than I'm convinced that pornography causes rape. (Ultra-violent films like these should, I think, be understood as a species of pornography.) Indeed, there's a good argument that exposure to this kind of material is desensitizing. Lots of exposure to pornography makes you bored by sex rather than hyper-sexual; lots of exposure to violence makes you numb to violence rather than violent. But that's not my point. Even if you think Easterbrook's point was moronic, it wasn't anti-Semitic.
posted by Noah at 4:13 PM

 
I am particularly amazed that there should be a flap over the Easterbrook comments the same weekend that the Prime Minister of Malaysia reminded the world what anti-Semitism really looks like.

It's touching that the New York Times was surprised to discover that, in the Muslim world at large, it is taken as a given that Jews control the world by underhanded means. (I might add that it's a widespread opinion in Japan as well. I wonder what the Chinese and the Indians think; perhaps a majority of the world believes this?) This notion is so uncontroversial that no one in the audience for the PM's speech even *noticed* that he said anything controversial. Indeed, the speech was received as a strikingly moderate, progressive and enlightened piece of work, its point being that Muslims should learn from the Jews and apply their brains rather than blowing themselves up futilely. That the Jews had applied their brains to achieve world domination was so obvious to the audience that they didn't even consider that it could be controversial.

This is the reality out there, the reality that comfortable Jews like Tony Judt and Abraham Foxman seem to have lost sight of.
posted by Noah at 3:49 PM

 
On the other hand, I have to add that I wish Wieseltier would be more vocal in defending his friend Gregg Easterbrook.

Let's take a look at Easterbrook's supposed sin. What he said is roughly the following. Tarantino's new movie is very violent, and the violence is amoral - cool spectacle, with no moral consequence. That's just a fact. Then, he posits that this cinema violence surely has a deleterious social consequence, and encourages actual violence (and an amoral attitude towards it) in the real world. A debatable proposition, but no one is offended by that part of his claim. Finally, he notes that Jews were in the past and are again primary victims of a cult that worships violence, and that it's particularly disgusting, therefore, that Jewish executives should promote such filth for monetary gain.

What, precisely, is anti-Semitic about that last statement? If he said that Jewish executives were promoting violence because of their Jewishness, that would clearly be anti-Semitic. If he said that Jewish executives were promoting violence that afflicted non-Jews because they didn't care about outsiders, that would clearly be anti-Semitic. If he said that they cared about money above their own interests because of their Jewishness, that would be anti-Semitic.

That's not what he said. What he said was: you Jews of all people should be ashamed to make violent films like this, because you suffer and have suffered the most from movements that glorified violence.

How is that anti-Semitic?

I know, I know, there's a bit of a tone problem in his post. He singles people out for their Jewishness. He talks about these particular Jews loving money above all else. But I chalk up this tone problem entirely to Easterbrook's obvious *comfort* with Jews. He said the kind of thing in a blog that no one who already knew him and trusted him would have considered remotely anti-Semitic; they would have seen the comments as motivated by an outrage that springs from affinity and friendship, not from alienation and hatred. But they were made in a public forum, where misinterpretation is easy. Here's my bottom line: if Easterbrook had made these comments to Wieseltier over coffee, Wieseltier would never have considered them anti-Semitic; indeed, he might even have agreed with them.

So I hope he's writing to ESPN to have Easterbrook reinstated. Easterbrook's apology was entirely on-point: he intended to make a valid point that was in no way anti-Semitic, but he used language that was sufficiently loaded and ambiguous that he could see how someone could misinterpret him. That should be enough for all of us.
posted by Noah at 3:23 PM

 
Sukkot's over and I'm done with jury duty; hopefully now I'm back in business.

So while I was gone, I understand Tony Judt wrote a piece advocating the elimination of the Jewish State and its replacement by a Palestinian State with Dutch peacekeepers to protect the Jewish minority in its safe havens along the coast. I thought about writing a response, but you know, I think it's a lot more effective when liberals police their own. Thankfully, Leon Wieseltier has now done so, in spades. It's a great piece.
posted by Noah at 12:17 PM

 
I knew there was a reason I didn't like Richard Perle. He liked Golda? Oy, oy, oy . . .
posted by Noah at 6:15 PM

 
You know, I knew I'd be happy I wrote Jim Talent that check back in 2002. And I am. This is a really good idea, a good bill, and something that could actually get passed. It's not going to solve all the problems in the world, but we don't count on government to do that, do we? And it's just what the Bush Administration is supposed to be about.
posted by Noah at 6:09 PM

 
I'm sorry, this is like deja vu all over again.

Sometimes I think that the Arabs are right, and Israel really isn't a legitimate state, just a gang. Anyhow, that certainly seems to be the way the left treats it, sometimes. In what other country would the leaders of the opposition conduct independent negotiations with the enemy and brag about it in the press?

There are only two possibilities. Either Sharon knew about the talks all along, in which case (a) he's been deceiving his cabinet, and (b) the folks who went to the press have betrayed him and their country to score political points. Which means everyone involved is despicable. Or Sharon had no idea, in which case the folks conducting the talks are skating close to treason.

This sort of thing has got to stop. Oslo was a disaster on many levels, and one of them - insufficiently stressed - is that it legitimated this kind of outrageous freelancing.

Time to grow up, people, while you're still alive to do it.
posted by Noah at 6:05 PM

 
Okay, that last post was kind of heavy. So here's something completely different: the universe is, quite possibly, shaped like a soccer ball. Why am I not surprised that this discovery was made by the French?
posted by Noah at 11:12 PM

 
Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

-- James Joyce, Ulysses

I've meditated for a long time on this passage. There are times that I come dangerously close to making an idol of Fatherhood, and worshipping it. In this, I think I am only in tune with the times. My ancestors worshipped the empty space above the cherubic throne, and so it seems entirely fitting to me to worship an absence. And this is the age of fatherlessness.

The passage came to my mind again today, because yesterday my own legal fiction of fatherhood was completed, at least in the eyes of the State of New York. Yesterday was our court date to finalize the adoption of our son. By a judge's handshake, I am made the boy's father.

Adoption is a strange business. It is not an Jewish custom. The ancient Egyptians had adoption. If an Egyptian property-owner had no heirs, he might go into the slave market and purchase a young boy, and raise him as his son. Indeed, when the God of Israel says to Moses, "I will take you [Israel] to Myself as a nation, and I will be to you as a God. " (Exodus 6:7), the text is using the formula for an Egyptian adoption. God is, effectively, purchasing Israel in the slave markets of Egypt, and adopting them. Adoption was also a Roman custom, and worked similarly to the Egyptian variant: if you had no heirs, you could buy one in the slave market.

But it is not a custom in Israel. Nor, for that matter, is it a custom in Britain. All those wards in 18th and 19th century British literature - what are they all about? They are about the fact that title must pass through a line of blood. If you are the 23rd Baronet of Mortshire, you cannot pass your baronetcy to the street urchin you took in 30 years ago and raised as if he were your son; rather, if you have no legitimate descendants, the title will pass to the nearest heir through the line of your younger brother. Similarly in Israel: if a cohen (a priest) raises a boy as his son, the boy will not have the privileges nor the constraints of the priesthood.

There is, therefore, no real Jewish law on adoption. There is a general precept that one who provides for a child's education is owed the respect and obedience from the child (and the honor from the community) that is due to the child's father. But there is no notion that the law can create a simulacrum of the ties of blood. (I do want to be clear here: to raise another person's child as your own is considered an enormous mitzvah in Judaism, as well it should be. I'm just saying that, by Jewish lights, while you have done a very good deed, you have not, thereby, made the child your own.) The closest Judaism comes to a notion of adoption, or ceremonies attendant thereto, is the conversion ceremony, whereby an individual (including a child, or even an infant) is effectively adopted by the entire Jewish people (and by God), and is, in the eyes of the law, literally transformed into a Jew.

I'm of two minds about all this. On the one hand, I believe, absolutely, that little Moses is my son. He knows no other father (and no other mother but my wife). I have no other children, but if I did, I cannot imagine treating them differently. The notion that I am doing a deed of kindness to a stranger is not what I feel; I feel him, unequivocally, to be my own son.

And yet, I appreciate something about the fact that Judaism will not give me the power to make this a fact, rather than a fiction. It is no accident that, in Egypt and in Rome, adoption was linked to slavery. There is no more essential tie than that of blood, and no more terrible crime in slavery than the alienation of blood from blood, the sundering of parents and children. The power that the Egyptian or Roman slave owner had, to take a child, purchase him, and raise him to the level of himself is, in a way, god-like. It is a power that no man should have over another man. And there is a little part of me that worries about any law, however founded on our sovereign freedom, that would arrogate to itself the authority to create fathers and mothers of paper.

So I return to Joyce. Am I that different from other fathers? Are any of us more than legal fictions? Aeschylus has Apollo outrageously argue (as part of his defense of Orestes) that motherhood is a fiction; that wombs are but the soil, where fathers provide the seed that grows therein (and therefore matricide is really a garden-variety murder, not an incestuous killing). But he's arguing before a motherless judge, so perhaps it's understandable that such a lunatic assertion could be persuasive to her. To us, this is madness, and Joyce's formulation fitter. Mothers know. Fathers never can. Does that make us less? Perhaps. But perhaps it also makes us more.

Call me Buzz Lightyear: I know I am a fiction. And never has happier fiction walked the earth. Let God retain the power of making men and women, and of making mothers and fathers. For myself, I rest content that, at the end of God's afternoon of matchmaking, just before He breaks off work to play with His pet Leviathan, He takes a few moments to make matches of our own odd kind, joining lost children to their true fictive fathers and mothers.
posted by Noah at 11:07 PM

 
I must apologize to the Stratford Festival. Yesterday, I wrote a scathing review of their production of Aristophanes' The Birds. I should retract my criticism. Relative to the production of Henry IV part i that I saw last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Stratford production of The Birds was the best show I've ever seen.

I am genuinely, deeply shocked - still - by what I saw at BAM. The director, Richard Maxwell, instructed his actors not to move, not to use inflection, and only occasionally to look at each other. At the start of a scene, the actors would file on stage and begin to recite their lines in a dead monotone. When the scene is over, they file out. Occasionally the actors could no longer bear their straightjackets with equanimity, and struggled to do a little acting, but these moments didn't actually make the production bearable; rather, they threw into relief the sheer horror of what was being perpetrated on Shakespeare (and on the audience) in the bulk of the production. The "set" consisted of a cheap scrim painted in a faux-10th-grade school production manner, naught else.

This is probably Shakespeare's funniest play. But so far as I can tell, the only joke the director could think to make was, "Shakespeare; heh-heh, heh-heh." Actually, that's unfair to Beavis and Butthead; they would have enjoyed the play's many jokes on fat and flatulence, whereas Maxwell seems to be interested only in directing his afflatus at the audience. This is an abomination. My wife and I lasted 20 minutes; eleven people had walked out of the theater by the time we left.

BAM's Harvey Theater is "decorated" as a ruin: the plaster is deliberately chipped and broken, the brick walls exposed in as crude and unpleasant a manner as possible. I could imagine staging Happy Days in such a set, but the intention of the institution does not seem to be to say: this is the ruin of the world; but rather: this is the ruin we have made of the theater. Aren't we clever and above it all?

The roof should fall in and bury them alive.
posted by Noah at 11:28 AM

 
Fanfare please: my reviews of the 5 plays we saw at Stratford last month. Better late than never, eh? And I intend to make up for the delay with sheer volume of text. (Stop groaning.)

(For those of you unfamiliar with the Stratford Festival, or interested in my reviews of the previous batch of plays we saw this season - Agamemnon, Electra, Present Laughter, The Taming of the Shrew, and The King and I - see here.)

This last trip we took in 5 plays: The Birds, by Aristophanes, Pericles, Troilus & Cressida and Antony & Cleopatra, all by Shakespeare, and Gigi, the musical based on the novel by Colette.

Let's begin with the first, and the worst. The Birds is among the worst shows I've ever seen at Stratford. Comedy is legendarily short-lived, and The Birds is now about 2500 years old, well long enough for the jokes not only to have gone stale but to have moulded over and crumbled into dust, and the dust itself to have blown away into nothingness. A significant percentage of the jokes are puns in Greek (and hence not jokes at all in modern English) or are incomprehensible references to specific Athenians (ditto). Beyond this, a major element of the plot is a satire of Athenian religion; Pisthetairos, as part of his scheme to build a city of the birds, comes up with the notion of laying seige to the gods by refusing to allow the smoke of sacrifices fair passage to Olympos, thereby starving the gods of nourishment. Needless to say, this is so much gibberish to us, as we don't believe anything of the kind.

Much of the social satire, however, could work extremely well, if properly updated. Thus: Pisthetairos and Euelpides (played, respectively, by Keith Dinicol and Bernard Hopkins) leave Athens to find a more congenial life in a city less beset by lawsuits. The opportunities for satire on the contemporary North American city - and our penchant for setting out for ever-greener pastures in ever-further suburbs, which we then blight with every vice and complexity we ran away there to escape - are obvious. The birds repeatedly turn to the audience asking us to vote The Birds best play; the opportunity to satirize modern Oscar campaigns is again obvious. Specific parasitic types who make their way to Cloudcuckooland in the original include a naked poet, a hungry soothsayer, a priest with a portable altar, a surveyor, a seller of newly-minted laws from Athens, and a freelance informer. Most if not all of these satires are limp on the page; the specific social context that animated the satire is gone. But the modern analogues are also obvious, and obviously ripe for satire: the performance artist in search of a public grant; the diversity consultant out to ensure that various species of bird are properly represented in city government; the feng-shui practitioner eager to advise on proper placement of buildings and furniture; the real-estate developer looking to put up cheap and shoddy buildings; the EPA official demanding an environmental impact statement for the construction of the city; the trial lawyer looking for opportunities to sue the new city based on the findings of all of the foregoing. This is, I think, the only way to save the play: by updating it ruthlessly, treating it as a general concept on which to hang pointed contemporary satire.

Unfortunately, the director of this production, Nikos Dionysios, took exactly the opposite route, to disastrous effect. Whenever possible, he keeps close to the original text. Most of the jokes are limp at best; at worst, they are so incomprehensible you don't even realize a joke has just been told. He has directed his actors to speak slowly and with exaggerated effect, as if telegraphing the message, "this is a comedy" would get laughs. Apart from being alienating and bizarre, his decision wrecks the comic timing of the few jokes that have managed to survive. It gets worse. Visual "jokes" are ruined as well. His poet, for reasons that are obscure, wears prison stripes, and howls like a banshee rather than sounding like any poet I've ever heard, good or bad; his scientist does not actually use any amusing scientific jargon, and stomps and waves his hands like a lunatic on the subway. These are not caricatures; I don't know what they are. It gets worse. The play, already overlong, is padded out with "dances" that consist of men in bird suits hopping up and down to New Age music. There's no fluidity to their movement, no excitement, not even skilfull acrobatics - and they don't look like birds (the actors actually do quite a good job of moving like birds when they *aren't* dancing). Visually inert, lyrically limp and backed by the most insipid synthesized music, the dances are torture to sit through.

This production is a disaster from start to finish. I can't even really praise the bird costumes, which are garishly colored and make the birds look like refugees from Sesame Street. I have heard through the grapevine that Richard Monette, the artistic director of the Festival, pressed the director to make the production more accessible, update the jokes, etc. Lord knows, Monette can get a laugh, and he must have known that this production wasn't going to get any. But he obviously didn't put his foot down. Stratford cannot afford disasters of this magnitude, not even in the relatively cheap Patterson theater. I expect they'll never do Aristophanes again after this debacle. Which is a pity.

Thankfully, the next show we saw was Pericles, on the Festival stage (which, for reasons I can't fathom, Monette is calling "The Adventures of Pericles" rather than "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" as Shakespeare titled it). The contrast could not be greater. Pericles is a thin play, with little in the way of character and not much poetry either. But with its exotic locations and richness of incident, it is the perfect canvas for a creative designer. And in this production, Stratford - and, specifically, John Pennoyer, the designer - has outdone itself.

Stratford has an interesting process, not typical for the contemporary theater, more comparable, in some ways, to the way a movie studio works. Well in advance of casting, the production is designed. By the time the actors show up, pretty much everything is in place, and, since the design frequently expresses the directorial vision, the actors have to fit themselves quickly into the roles as conceived by the design. And there's no real time to change course, because the design takes month to execute and rehearsal time is measured in weeks. Stratford's process has been termed "tyranny by design," but this production of Pericles shows just how good a show an effective tyrant can put on.

The tale told is a simple one. Pericles, a good ruler in Tyre, arrives at Antioch to win the hand of the king's daughter by answering a riddle. The riddle reveals (rather obviously; it's not much of a riddle) that the king is, infact, the incestuous lover of his daughter, and Pericles, fearful of retribution now that he knows the horrible secret, flees. He has various adventures, acquires a bride in Pentapolis, then loses her in childbirth during a tempest and tosses her coffin overboard. He deposits his newborn daughter with the royal family of Tarsus. When he returns to bring her home years later, they inform him she is dead; they do not tell him that the queen ordered her murdered because her beauty and grace detracted from her own daughter's virtues. Pericles falls dumb, and is only roused back to health and life when he is spectacularly reunited with both his daughter and his wife, neither of whom have died. The whole thing is narrated by the ghost of John Gower, a medieval poet who rises from the grave at the start of the play, and descends back in at the close.

As should be obvious, this is not a very "realistic" play. There aren't really any 3-dimensional characters, and the situations are fantastic. We're in the realm of fairy tale - or, as Shakespeareans have termed his late plays, "Romance." As an aside: I am puzzled by critics who say that Shakespeare's turn away from the realistic was some kind of innovation of his later years. All the elements of Romance are present from the beginning of his career. How else would you characterize Aegon's woeful speech in the first scene of The Comedy of Errors? If this is not a fairy tale, a Romance, what is it?

In any event, Pericles - like The Comedy of Errors - was enormously popular in Shakespeare's day. The story lends itself to spectacle (tempests, exotic locales, etc.), it overflows with pathos, and good wins out in the end: all things that are good for the box office. For all these same reasons, the play has been mocked through the ages by the critics (starting with Ben Johnson) for being a mouldy and sentimental piece of popular schlock. After reading the play, I was inclined to agree with Johnson; having seen it on the stage, and staged so well, well, what's so bad about pathetic, sentimental schlock?

The production makes the absolute best possible use of the possibilities of stage and script. The exotic locales of the original are obscure; these are transposed into modern equivalents. So: Tyre is Greece; Antioch, Arabia; Tarsus, India; Pentapolis, Japan; Ephesus, Indonesia; Mytilene, China. Each locale is represented exquisitely, with lavish costumes, draperies, and the perfect accents of furniture. Gower, the narrator, is got up as a Buddhist spirit in a loincloth, dusted a funerary white; he rises, at the start, from a hole in the stage floor, surrounded by white sheets that will become, in turn, a tent of Araby (Antioch); the drapes of Greece (Tyre); the sails of Pericles' ship; and so forth. The metamorphosis of the stage with each change of scene is marvelous to watch; this is stagecraft at its best, creating effects that have an immediacy and illusionary power that cannot be approximated by any photographic medium of drama.

Pericles is played by Jonathan Goad, a rapidly rising star on the Stratford stage, and he plays the part flawlessly, with heroism, with deep pathos - but also, at precisely the right moments, with humor (e.g. when Pericles, finally emerged from his deep sorrow and overflowing with joy at reunion with his daughter, notices Lysimachus and says, abruptly, "who is this?" - a very simple line, but the reaction is played perfectly, and perfectly provides release from the lachrymose scene preceding). One believes in his essential goodness, but also in his essential humanity, and when he finally passes the limits of his capacity for suffering, his numb despair is as believable as was his prior determination to survive or his later joy at reunion. Goad has done excellent work in the past as Hotspur and as Jack Cade among other roles. There are rumors that next year Goad will play Macbeth, which is strange casting, but I'd be happy to see him do anything at this point.

Second honors for this production must go to Thom Marriott as Gower. Marriott is an absolutely convincing spirit; he never mocks or camps up the illusion he is creating, which would be fatal, but neither does he treat it with a fatal solemnity. This ghost knows he is summoned to tell a story, and so he does. His sonorous voice and doughy yet supple body and perfectly tuned to the part and the conception thereof in this design. I was very impressed with Marriott last year as Richard Duke of York in the Henry VI plays, but this performance takes him to a new level.

The other roles are generally well-played as well, but there are three parts that are a bit weak. Nazneer Contractor is an adequate but not an inspired Marina. She is childishly innocent, even pouty in the face of death (when she is set to be murdered by the servant of the queen of Tarsus) and in the face of degredation (when she is sold into prostitution), where what is wanted is a kind of saintly innocence. She is beautiful and obviously very young (and plays even younger), but she doesn't display the wisdom beyond her years that should be necessary to turn the heart of, say, Pandar, the brothel's steward, who threatens to rape her to rob her of her virgin's modesty and make her suitable for her new profession. Charles Azulay as Simonides is less-than adequate; alone among the potentates of the drama, he lacks convincing authority. The scene where he pretends to object to the match between Pericles and his daughter is odd on the page; on stage, his wholly inappropriate petulance only makes one wonder why Pericles bothers asking permission. As Azulay was an equally inadequat Lun Tha in The King and I - both as a singer and as an actor - I can only wonder how he was selected for the company this season. Finally, and most damagingly, Simonides' daughter Thaisa, Pericles' bride, is played downright amateurishly by Karen Ancheta. No emotion is convincingly conveyed by her performance, and it is a role that demands pathos, lest Pericles' devotion seem bizarre. She alone among the cast seems to trivialize the play. Her casting is all the more bizarre because, in spite of being of East Asian ancestry, she was *not* cast in The King and I. So, presumably, she can't sing. But apart from these three the cast was very fine, and on the whole, I cannot rate this production highly enough.

Troilus and Cressida was the third play we saw, and I was apprehensive. The play is very difficult: the poetry dense, the characterizations apparently inconsistent, the plot confusingly complicated, the genre itself obscure. And more than anything, the play is just plain *nasty.* There is not one character - with the possible exception of Hector - who arouses our admiration, nor even our pity. The play could as easily have been written by Brecht as by Shakespeare. I was curious to see what Stratford - and Richard Monette, the director - would make of this very hard text.

In preparation, I re-read the Iliad and, for the first time, read Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (albeit in a verse translation rather than the original - forgive me; I plead a brevity of time). The Iliad was, I'll admit, tough going; the Lattimore translation is very formal and correct, and Homer himself is largely lacking a sense of humor. But there are moments that stay with you always: Hector tossing his babe in the air on the walls of Troy; Menelaos enraged when Paris is whisked away from death by Aphrodite; Ajax nearly single-handedly defending the beached Argive navy from the assaults of the Trojans; the endless combat over the body of slain Patroklos; Hector, stading before the gates of Troy, struck terrified by the warlike form of Achilles running towards him in the aspect of Ares; Achilles and Paris weeping their dead in Achilles' tent. And when he chose to, Homer could paint an image in words as vivid as Rembrandt could in oil. It is a commonplace, I think, that Homer's Greeks and Trojans knew no chivalry. His Hector is, essentially, a fool and a loser, who "slays" Patroklos only after he is already struck fatally by another, who loses his contest with Ajax and is found more often in the rear than in the front, whose success is owed to the gods who continue to aid the Trojans even as they are forbidden from aiding the Greeks, who rashly presses the fight when there is neither reason nor good augur, and then, when the tide has turned, refuses to seek shelter in the city for honor's sake, but who flees before Achilles in the final, fatal contest. And yet, to a later age, Hector was the only hero, the only human being in a contest of god-like men, the only one who does not want to fight, who knows his cause is not just and regrets it, the only one who arouses pity.

Chaucer, of course, wrote a tale of chivalry, and of courtly love, its kissing cousin. Troilus makes a one-line appearance in Homer, and Cressida does not appear at all in the poem, so Chaucer has free rein to do what he likes with them, and he uses them to subtly satirize the cult of courtly love. This cult was a strange thing, the worship of the god of Love, explicitly opposed to marriage and constructed as a kind of parody of Christianity (with the Lady, object of selfless devotion, taking the place of Christ). How this notion ever got going is a question for another time; what is interesting is how useful, and how useless, the Trojan War is as a setting for a critique of this value system. For the Trojan War was started, after all, by the goddess of Love (Aphrodite gets Discord's golden apple for offering Paris the greatest beauty in the world, Helen, who unfortunately happens to be married to Menelaus, and her abduction provokes the Greek expedition to lay seige to Troy and bring her back) and ends in Troy's destruction. What, then, of the cult of Love? Perhaps this is why Chaucer chose it as a setting for his tale.

Chaucer's Troilus is not terribly interesting; struck stark by Cupid on first seeing Criseyde, he is being punished by the love god for his previous disdain for lovers and their sighs. Now, struck himself, he is undone. He is succored by the most interesting character in the story, his friend Pandarus, who absorbs himself completely in Troilus' suffering for love, to the point that he endeavors - successfully - to persuade his niece, Criseyde, to surrender her virtue to him to ease his sufferings. It's an extraordinary situation, and Pandar is a very strange character; I'm sure modern critics of a psychosexual bent have had lots of fun explaining him. It's not that he has any lust for his niece that he discharges vicariously through Troilus; neither, at least in Chaucer, does it appear that he lusts for Troilus, and discharges *this* vicariously through Criseyde. It is, perhaps, their youth he envies, and feeds on through his Pandaring, even as he thereby ages them with Experience. In any event, he is a splendid, original invention, only nearly matched in the poem by Criseyde. Her drama - of submission to the desires of her lover, Troilus, and then, when she is sent from Troy to the Greek camp in exchange for Antenor, a Trojan general, submits in time to a new lover, Diomed, against all her vows - is either incredible, horrible, or deeply pathetic, depending on one's views of love and womankind. I do not doubt that she truly loved Troilus as she said she did. But she is, perhaps, not so chivalrous, not so besotted with the cult of love; and, when return to him is impossible, she does not choose to die. He is, after all, only a man, and this, I think, is the heart of Chaucer's critique of the idolatrous nature of the chivalrous cult.

Chaucer does not attack chivalry in arms as he does the cult of courtly love; that is left to Shakespeare. A common view holds that Shakespeare was deeply conservative in his politics; that he was not pro- or anti-war but pro-chivalry, not biased towards any class but deeply invested in the class system, the medieval Great Chain of Being. In this view, Ulysses speech in the first act of Troilus & Cressida is taken for Shakespeare's own views on the importance of degree in maintaining order and discipline. I do not incline to this view. I do not think that Shakespeare had a proscriptive politics of any kind. He was, however, interested in description. And I can only conclude, from many instances in his work, that he was aware that success in politics is not synonymous with virtue, and that the proper ordering of classes is no guarantee of order in the state. Ulysses speech cannot be squared with the tragedy of Richard II as an expression of Shakespeare's politics; Shakespeare knew that a weak king, though legitimate, is a deep problem for the state, even as he also knew that a strong king, if illegitimate, is a problem of its own type. In Prince Hal and Henry V we have Shakespeare's greatest portrait of a successful king, but he is less clearly a picture of a good king, or even of a good man. Hal, after all, betrays his friends and kills his prisoners. Ulysses may think that proper respect for degree would bring order to the Greek camp, but his efforts to put his philosophy into practice - by building up Ajax to make Achilles jealous, and rejoin the fight - fail utterly; Achilles inclines more to uphold his private vow than to defend his public honor, and Ajax, puffed with pride, himself withdraws from battle.

Troilus and Cressida is, ironically, sometimes held up as evidence for the contrary view: that Shakespeare was a libertine who hated war and celebrated love. T&C is often described as a deeply nihilistic play, a play that tears down the happy lies we tell ourselves about our states, and exposes what the world looks like after seven years of fruitless war in a bad cause. But I don't know that that's quite right either. I do not know that this is a portrait of *the* reality any more than As You Like It is; rather, I think it is a play that gives to the satiric voice of Thersites full throat, and sees what nobility can survive its taunts and assaults.

Little does. Troilus, in the play, is a thing of hunger, eager to devour Cressida, no different, really, than Paris, a lustful dolt. Achilles is a vain coward, who is only able to kill Hector with much assistance after coming upon the Trojan hero when he is unarmed. Ajax is a rock-headed fool, and mocked as such by one and all. The play's twin geniuses are Pandar and Thersites, the former a terrifying caricature of the character from Chaucer, the latter a minor character from Homer (the only ugly man among the Argives) expanded into a bilious Brechtian chorus in the Greek camp. Only Hector seems admirable; he knows the Trojan cause is unjust (as he did in Homer), and he fights with honor. But he is also a fool, continuing the fight in a bad cause that he knows will lose, and fighting on a day when all the omens are ill, for the sake of the bubble reputation whose chase he should long since have outgrown. And Shakespeare denies him his most honorable action in Chaucer, when he argues vainly against trading Cressida for Antenor; the scene is absent from the play, and Cressida is dispatched without voiced dissent; "the times" permit no reprieve.

What is the play about? On the one hand, it bears comparison, I think, to Henry IV part i (which, coincidentally, I am seeing tonight), another story about vice and politics. Pandar is a kind of vicious parody of Falstaff, Hal's tutor in vice but also in humane knowledge; Pandar likewise is tutor to both Troilus and Cressida, but his laughter is deathly wicked where Falstaff's is life itself. And practically everyone in the play acts like a second-rate Hotspur, thinking with his spleen rather than with his brains. It also bears comparison with Romeo and Juliet, with Pandar in the role of the nurse and the Trojan War substituting for the feud (though the feud was taken far more seriously than this war is). To the extent that I have an opinion about what this play is, I think it is an attack on chivalry as disastrous in war (fight fair and you get slaughtered) and in love (like Menelaus and Troilus, you are doomed to be betrayed). It is not an attack on the sentiments that animate chivalry, which Shakespeare recognized as noble. Rather, it is a picture of a terrible world where these sentiments have no place, where Thersites' view of reality - "lechery! Still, wars and lechery!" - is all too accurate.

I am pleased to say that Richard Monette did an excellent job with the play, and fully immerses himself in its stinking ooze. He plays up the lechery to the hilt. His Troy is like the Playboy mansion in its heyday, every line delivered with a leer. Pandar is a truly terrifying creature, practically ready to devour Cressida himself so determined is he to see her deflowered. (When the deed is finally done, Pandar stalks the post-coital couple waving the bloody sheet and cackling.) The production is quite graphic; Paris and Helen simulate intercourse onstage; Patroklos walks around clad only in a towel (whipped off for effect at one point); Pandar fondles every low-status male character in the play, with his hands or his staff or whatever suggestive object is available. All the male characters go around basically naked from the waist up. I should stress that all this is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the play; it is a filthy business. But it is still something to sit through.

Monette made one interesting choice against the text, about which I cannot decide how I feel. When Cressida first arrives in the Greek camp, the Greeks press against her, begging for a kiss. She parries them with flirtatious wit, and is taken off by Diomed to her father's tent. As Monette stages it, the Greeks press in with much more than words; Cressida is man-handled and pawed by the lot of them, and her discharges of wit serve to delay, and not avert, the apparently inevitable ravishment. Diomed then comes to rescue her and bring her to her father. This provides a far more convincing psychological basis for her betrayal of Troilus than is evident in the text of the play - and a very different one from Chaucer's Criseyde. Monette's Cressida simply makes the necessary choice in a bad situation; if she is to survive in this hostile camp, she will need a protector, and if Diomed is to be he she will have to love him, as he demands. This is logical and makes Cressida much more sympathetic than she would otherwise be; it is also in tune with our moral sense as an audience. But I wonder whether Shakespeare's Cressida really deserves such an excuse made for her. In any event, it was an interesting choice, and very effective as played.

The entire cast did a great job; I cannot think of anyone to fault. Stephen Ouimette is vicious as Thersites; Bernard Hopkins horrible (in the best sense) as Pandarus; Peter Donaldson sage as Ulysses; Claire Jullien beautiful and moving as Cressida; Jeffrey Renn oafish as Ajax; Geordie Johnson noble as Hector; and David Snelgrove, another rising star, powerful as Troilus. Indeed, I think Snelgrove achieves the impossible and makes us genuinely sympathetic for this self-involved and lustful hero; he is not wise at the end, but we feel the pain of the little knowledge he has gained by his betrayal, and want to kill Greeks along with him to vent our common rage. The weakest performer was Jamie Robinson as Achilles, but the character is so despicable that his presence does little damage.

My only quibble with the production is the ending. After Pandar comes on to bequeathe us his diseases - and he is truly revolting by now, covered in open sores, wrapped in bandages and his eyes dripping pus - Monette chose to bring Thersites, Troilus and Cressida back on-stage for a final tableau, each under a red spot, and to have a voice-over recite the line from earlier in the play: "'tis but the chance of war." But, unless love be war, Pandar's fate owes little or nothing to battle, nor does Cressida's seduction. Whether this is an anti-war play can be debated, but it is certainly not a "make love not war" piece; indeed, love is at least as horrible as war in this drama. And the ending left me wondering whether Monette understood just how uncongenial this play is to any hedonistic utopia. Monette, I suspect, holds a live-and-let-live attitude towards matters erotic, and Pandar - who says leeringly to Cressida, before she goes to bed with Troilus, "if my lord get a boy of you,
you'll give him me" - is a vicious caricature of anyone with such views. Making this play an advertisement for free love is like making Anais Nin an advertisement for abortion rights; you are making the other side's case for him. Nothing in the play but the ending suggested to me that this is what Monette thought, but the ending gave me just a little pause. It didn't spoil the play, though, and I happily recommend this very worthwhile production.

We gave ourselves a bit of a break that evening, and saw Gigi. Now, this is not a very good musical, and I won't have that much to say about it. Suffice it to say that everyone in the cast seemed to be having a grand old time, and the feeling was infectious. The set was beautiful, the costumes were beautiful, and no one took herself too seriously. James Blendick, as Honore, seemed much more at home than he did as Alfred P. Doolittle last year. Jennifer Gould was radiant as Gigi, Domini Blythe warm as Mamita, and Patricia Collins appropriately terrifying as Aunt Alicia. And everyone seemed to be enjoying putting on awful French accents.

As I said, though, the musical is not a good one. There are no really memorable tunes, and the only two good songs - "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," and "I Remember It Well" cannot actually be sung with a straight face. But the biggest problem with the show is the profound dishonesty of it all. No one in the audience is actually nostalgic for the world depicted. No one would laugh merrily at the prospect of their own daughter in Gigi's position. And the ending! If everyone was going to be happy at the prospect of Gaston marrying Gigi, then why on earth doesn't he propose marriage as soon as he realizes he loves her? Why on earth does he go through the whole business of making her an offer to be his mistress? The whole thing is absurd. Gigi is an excellent example of self-satisfied, middle-class entertainment, a big, gaudy lie.

But it was fun while it lasted.

The final production we attended was Antony and Cleopatra, with Peter Donaldson and Diane D'Aquila in the title roles. This is a very hard play to put on: numerous scene changes, difficult characters, complicated plot. But it is a gorgeous play, and every director should relish the opportunity even as every actress cast as Cleopatra should dread it. I am slowly coming around to the conclusion that Cleopatra is not ideally played by a woman. It is extraordinarily difficult for any woman to measure up to the extravagant praise lavished on her, and very difficult as well for any woman *not* to appear to confirm the common Roman opinion that she is a manipulating slut. I have a fantasy, in fact, that Stratford would do a production of A&C casting Brent Carver as Cleopatra. I'm quite sure he would jump at the chance, and Richard Monette, I'm sure, would love to direct it. But I doubt they'll do the show again while he's artistic director.

In any event, I have mixed feelings about this production. First: the set and costumes. The Romans look appropriately Roman, and the Egyptians Egyptian. But why does Cleopatra roam the stage in a nightgown all the time? Where is her finery? Egypt's wealth and splendor are not at all in evidence, and this is a real loss for the play because we need to feel what it is draws Antony in, what Cleopatra's natural environment is that makes her so effective. And we get little of this.

Next: Antony. I adore Peter Donaldson. He did a magnificent Malvolio a couple of years back, and he absolutely knocked my socks off as George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. He does a fine job, and is perfectly cast, as Ulysses in Troilus, and likewise last year as Peachum in The Threepenny Opera. But he is cast very much against type as Antony, who is a big hearted, lusty carouser where Donaldson is apt to be aloof and critical. His Malvolio was so good because he was so convincing in the earlier parts of the play, when he is fully controlled, that when he cuts loose in his crossed garters his mania is startling. His Antony is strongest in Act IV Scene ii, the "make his followers weep" scene - but this scene is when Antony is least like Antony; not a good sign. On the whole, I found his performance interesting, and I am glad I saw it. But I was not convinced by it. I could not tell, watching him, why Cleopatra - or his soldiers - would have loved him so. He did not seem a ruined Hercules.

Worst: Cleopatra. Diane D'Aquila impressed me five years ago as Paulina in Winter's Tale. Since then, I have not seen her do anything I liked, and with each performance I am more convinced that she is a congenital over-actor. Her Cleopatra is utterly unconvincing; she has none of the allure, the justified narcissism that Cleopatra must have. But she also is unconvincingly in love with Antony. And her ordinariness makes him seem the more the fool. Why forgive her her many trespasses if this is all she is? And she is never worse, in this production, then in Antony's death scene, when she histrionically cries her woe like nothing so much as a bad actress, which Cleopatra never was. She is somewhat better preparing for her own death. It is essential for the actress playing Cleopatra to keep us guessing whether she truly loves Antony as he, helplessly, loves her, or whether she ultimately loves only herself, and enjoys Antony - as she did Caesar an Pompei before - while pleasure serves policy. In D'Aquila's performance, there is no doubt: she does not love him so. If this were a choice, it would perhaps be interesting, but I think it is merely a limitation of her ability. And it leaves Antony's love for her a greater mystery.

There are other problems with the production, notably with timing. The director, Martha Henry, rushes many scenes of tenderness and anger alike; she seems eager to get on with the plot, as if too aware of just how many scenes there are in the play. As a consequence, some crucial exchanges are almost crushed between speakers competing for their chance to talk rather than reacting to one another. She seems most comfortable, ironically, in the Roman scenes, and these are some of the strongest in the play - and the supporting cast was generally quite fine. Brad Rudy took over the crucial role of Enobarbus for the performance I saw (it is normally played by Wayne Best, whom I like a lot and was eager to see in the role), and he did a creditable job, though he did not bring to the role the sarcastic edge it deserves. Paul Dunn was an interesting and, I thought, effective casting choice for Octavius. He played him, essentially, as an honest man, genuinely devoted to his sister and authentically offended by Antony's extravagances. This is a surprising choice; I should think he is usually played as a cold and effective Machiavel. But it worked. I should mention Tim Askew as Eros, as he also played Aeneas in Troilus, two small parts; he has a freshness of delivery that I hope to hear more of. Barnard Hopkins was excellent as both Mardian and the Clown; Daniela Lama out-lucioused Cleopatra as her attendant, Charmian; and Andy Velasquez was carousing Sextus Pompeius.

I am not sorry that I saw this production, but I cannot recommend it, for fear that it will turn the attendee off to one of Shakespeare's richest tragedies. I hope Stratford does the play again soon, and does it better service.

This season was something of a disappointment, redeemed by two productions that I will remember for a long time: Pericles and Troilus and Cressida. Next year, they are doing a schizophrenic season of the deeply obscure and the most mainstream. They are doing Macbeth, Midsummer Night's Dream and Guys and Dolls on the Festival stage. But they are also doing Henry VIII, Cymbeline, King John and Timon of Athens. Most worryingly, they are essentially turning the Avon theater into a purely popular house; this year that stage hosted productions of Gigi, Present Laughter and The Hunchback of Notre Dame; next year it will host Anything Goes, Noises Off and The Count of Monte Cristo. I fear that the Avon is being sacrificed on the altar of a profitable festival, and while the festival must turn a profit, I wonder if this isn't too great a sacrifice. There is crowd-pleasing entertainment that is also up to Stratford standards; the Avon has hosted G&S's Patience, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Henry V, Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Wilde's Importance of Being Ernest in recent years. They can do better in that venue than next year's bill, and still be profitable, I have to believe.
posted by Noah at 4:17 PM