Duck Soup

I have been feeling especially busy lately, little time, it seems, to get into a good writing mode. Yet, of all things, I have off and on been picking up Roy Blount, Jr's little book about the Marx Brothers classic movie Duck Soup. I like his approach, almost a kind of DVD commentary, but much, much more discursive. He basically watches the movie and reports on what he sees and thinks about. He thus shares with us his favorite parts of the film and as he does so reflects on the people and the incidents that the flashes on the screen make him think of.

I have always loved Duck Soup, apparently for the same reason that Blount does. Because it is so utterly anarchic. It is one of the freest, most improvised, most outrageously absurd movies ever made, with little logic or plot, but a lot of energy, ridiculousness, and charm. It is now famously the movie that Woody Allen's character in Hannah and his Sisters wanders into when all he can think of is suicide and it cures him of the blues once and for all, sending him straight into the arms of one of the sisters. How silly! How perfect!

But wait! Is Duck Soup quite as absurd and as outlandish as it first appears? This is a movie made in 1933 about two countries relentlessly and foolishly going to war over an insult or maybe two. A slap here, a slap there. And abruptly the insistence that "this means war." That's the basic story. Is that so different from our own time or the period around 1933 as Hitler and Mussolini rise to power or, perhaps most pointedly, the events that push the great European powers into endless and destructive conflict between 1914 and 1918? Hardly. In fact, the clever people who wrote Duck Soup had all of these conflicts in mind as they constructed the script. They wanted to write a hilarious movie, but they also wanted to underscore all the absurd events that seem to force countries to go to war with each other. They were doing nothing less than writing an anti-war movie. They were doing nothing less than expressing their own dismay with how foolish people can be and reminding us perhaps that it doesn't have to be this way.

Of course, the Marxes are forces of nature. They are hard to tie down, to quiet down, to put down. Because they always have another comeback, another way to make somebody else look silly. There is a scene with the wonderful actor Louis Calhern as the president of the rival country, Sylvania, that wants to make war on the country Groucho is now head of, Freedonia. And in this scene Chico and Harpo have supposedly come in to help him, but all they do is annoy him, delay him, and impede him. They cut his necktie and the tails on his coat. They pull out a revolver and shoot at a recording that one of them has just thrown into the air as if rigging a skeet shooting event. They stamp his papers and his forehead, they staple his official documents and his fingers, they bruise him and abuse him until he is literally delirious. It is silly and even cruel, but it is also completely unhinged. To see something that far out, that removed from reality on a movie screen of any kind, even if it is a computer screen, is to see a form of disorganized genius that we have largely lost. We have become a little too mature and, well, sophisticated for the Marx Brothers.

Finally, there is that most modern of characters, Groucho, the man who for some still resonates, because he always has another wisecrack, another retort meant to keep the other person from gaining an advantage. And in the case of Groucho this is all done verbally, with nary a hint of violence. Groucho's character doesn't want war. What he wants instead is a license to insult, to make the other guy look ridiculous. And if he can't take it, then he would just as soon go to the neighboring town in the next county and insult him. 

Using language to impress, to cajole, to seduce, to diminish, to prevail over someone else, that is Groucho's idea of a good time. And it should remain exactly that, a good time. No one's ego should be so fragile as to need to retaliate with violence. That is Groucho's point and in a very real sense the point of this whole brilliantly harebrained movie.

The Early Childhood Education Imperative

Once again, the New York Times has printed a superb op-ed by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman. Heckman continues to make the best case for universal public early childhood education. There just isn't any doubt any more that this is a good investment for children and for society at large. Please read Heckman here and then send a message to your Congressman about the need for more funding for early childhood education. It is one of the surest bets going.

And, if you like, you can read my own post about Heckman from February 16, 2013 on this blog. See below:

There is a Nobel Prize-winning economist named James Heckman who has been at the University of Chicago for many years during which time he has labored mightily to make the strongest possible case for the economic and social value of Universal Early Childhood Education. He led the team that reanalyzed the data of a famous longitudinal study called the Perry Preschool Project which originally seemed to show that high quality early childhood programs didn't make much of a long-term difference, especially when relying on cognitive measures such as IQ. But what Heckman found using econometric tools he created is overwhelming evidence that early childhood education is correlated with long-term changes in such positive social behaviors as persistence, focus, and collaboration that lead to much higher than expected economic success, family harmony, and vocational stability.

Heckman has convincingly demonstrated that:

High quality Early Childhood Education is strongly correlated with positive social behaviors that lead to economic success.

The poorest families have the least access to high quality Early Childhood Education.

By increasing the availability of high quality Early Childhood Education to children from low income families, the return on investment from economic growth and in reduced costs for special education and incarceration is at least 7 dollars for every 1 dollar spent. 

With the support of high quality Early Childhood Education, very young children can better develop key aspects of their characters that include: drive, cooperation, attentiveness, self-discipline, and delaying gratification. When these qualities are combined with nurturing key cognitive abilities, children not only do better in school, they do better in life.

In other words, early childhood education pays big dividends. The evidence is therefore more than strong enough to support President Obama's proposal to make Early Childhood Education a priority.

All of which leads indisputably to one conclusion. We have a wonderful opportunity to invest in our future by fully funding Universal Preschool Education. If we do it, the result will be one of history-making proportions. If we don't, we will be destroying the futures of many of most vulnerable children and in the process losing an important chance to create a society that as Jimmy Carter used to say is worthy of the generosity and compassion of the American people at their best.

Obsessed with Words

Sometimes it seems I am obsessed with print. When I'm not juggling a book or two, I'm trying to catch up on a handful of periodicals that often devote significant space (if not all of it) to book reviews. And when I'm not reading these things, I'm digging deeper into the New York Times to make sure I didn't miss anything essential, usually from their opinionator columns or from, well, yes, that's right, the Book Review. It almost seems as if I am really obsessed with important texts I can't possibly get to, at least for now, but that must be placed on some mental list of must-reads for that future time when I will have the leisure to leaf through some weighty but important 300-page tome about, say, scarcity and what it does to us.

In other words, while I do feel a need to be reading all the time, which is part of the obsession I have tried to capture above, what I'm really sort of tortured by is the book that got away. You know, that book I should have been reading, not so much because I can talk about it at cocktail parties, since, actually, I don't go to any cocktail parties, but that book which will finally and definitively supply me with all the answers to all those knotty questions that the world keeps posing to me and, of course, lots of other people as well. 

You know, questions having to do with the best ways to finally eliminate hunger, poverty and disease. Or questions about what it means to live a truly nonviolent life. Or questions about how to make the best possible case for why a liberal arts education is a good thing even though it may not lead to a high salary and secure employment. And, sure, questions, too, about how to figure out which play or movie to see that will result in the best use of my time given my family's limited budget.

I guess what I'm saying is that I read primarily to become a better person, maybe not in a personal and everyday way, but more in a moral and what's at stake for the world way. In essence, I am always trying to figure out how to live, and I look to books to help me make sense of this.

Maybe. Maybe that's why I read. No, no, let me put that another way. That is definitely one of the reasons why I read, but it may not be the main reason. I read now more than ever for a surprising reason, a reason that has gripped me in the last few years and even now takes me by surprise. I read primarily because I like words. I like how they look and how they sound and what they do when they are pushed up against each other. I am especially attracted to writers who do interesting things with words, though I don't read writers who separate sound from sense. I'm still looking for a good story and some good lessons about, well, you know, about how to live, but I want it done in an artful manner, but not too artful. I don't want it to be arty that is. I want it to be artistic and interesting and even kind of daring, but not so different that I become lost and disengaged and unable to stay awake.

Books don't usually put me to sleep. Unfortunately, I am more likely to fall asleep watching movies and plays, because I still lack that ideal guide who will lead me to all the shows perfectly matched to my tastes. In the case of books, I don't mind difficult texts. I like having to reread sentences, especially if they're really good sentences. Then I like to underline them and consider them more closely and say them out loud to see how they sound. When words are good, when they cogently capture some wonderful point, there isn't anything quite as satisfying. Which is not to say I could sit around reading individual sentences all day long, because most really good sentences need a context, a narrative to make them work. So I just love it when I spot a good sentence inside something really interesting that I'm reading, because it makes me think about how good sentences get formed and pushes me to try to compose two or three.

But it's hard to write good sentences, as you can tell from what you have just read. There probably isn't one really good sentence in this whole piece. Which drives me to go back to my books and my magazines, so that I can find one really terrific sentence to make my ongoing obsession for more print ultimately worthwhile.

Hunger and Food Bank Warehouse

Karen and I and a group of 27 Wagner College students spent our day at the New York City Food Bank Warehouse today. The New York City Food Bank is one of New York City's most highly rated and effective charities. It serves about 60 million meals a year and has worked tirelessly to advocate for public policies and state and federal legislation to keep poor people from going hungry, far too many of whom are young children.

What is especially impressive about the Food Bank Warehouse is its size - 90,000 square feet in all - as well as its efficiency - everything is carefully inventoried and catalogued - and as a result the Food Bank knows exactly how much food they are receiving and how it is being distributed to the various boroughs of New York City. And given the size of the warehouse and its unbelievable system for stocking enormous amounts of food - we saw shelf upon shelf of macaroni, sardines, and canned fruit - there seems to be almost no limit to the amount of nutrition the Food Bank can provide. And yet, even though the Food Bank serves 60 million meals a year through its exhaustive network, the need for meals is 4 times as great as what can be provided. This is a source of frustration and a goad for Food Bank workers to labor even harder, but the Food Bank cannot solve the problem of hunger alone. Only comprehensive federal programs that ensure every person has enough to eat can finally make the problem of hunger a thing of the past.

In the meantime, organizations like the Food Bank will always be essential. And what the Food Bank now does is nothing short of putting in place a scientific and highly systematized approach to distributing food. They know where the shortages and greatest needs are and using a kind of triage approach are able to work closely with a wide range of neighborhoods to ensure that the need does not overwhelm the neediest families and communities.

During our trip to the Food Bank Warehouse in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, we toured the warehouse and got a sense of the immensity of their effort. It was staggering to step into the various rooms - some refrigerated and even freezer-like - to see how much food they have stored there. It was not unlike the scene from "Bicycle Thief" when we get a glimpse of the endless piles of linens that have been returned to pawn shops and placed on these shelfs that touch the ceilings of impossibly high storage rooms.

Once the tour was over, they put us all to work. Our job was to transfer macaroni from huge bins called pallets - each pallet is over a thousand pounds - into 3 pound plastic bags that were then placed in boxes that altogether hold 10 of the 3 pound bags. These boxes can then more conveniently be transferred to food pantries and soup kitchens for distribution, since few emergency food outlets can handle very large boxes of food.

The work turned out to be fun and fast moving and the more we did it the better we got at transferring the food to the three pound bags. The students felt a pride in doing this kind of work and in collaborating to make the work as fun and as efficient as possible. By the end of the day, they had transferred 5 pallets of food into small bags, which translated to making it possible for 3000 additional people to have access to meals.

Even though it was a trek to the Warehouse and the work was enervating, the overall experience was one of satisfaction. We did work that will help people put off hunger, which will allow them to do better on their jobs and support their children in doing better in school. These were good outcomes that we were helping to bring about and we were proud to contribute. We also know that our support of the Food Bank helps it to continue to attain its mission of ending hunger in New York, by feeding hungry people and by advocating for policies that ultimately make widespread hunger an impossibility. We have a long way to go, but the Wagner students' efforts are testament to how much just a few people can do to make a difference for thousands of others.

We hope that our experience at the Food Bank Warehouse will lead to other such opportunities and to Wagner College students gaining a deeper understanding of the roots of hunger and what can be done to finally eliminate it once and for all.

Betting on the Future

I was intrigued by an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times on Sunday, which turns out to be a brief synthesis of a new book by historian Paul Sabin about a wager between doomsday biologist Paul Ehrlich and conservative economist Julian Simon regarding the world's environmental future. Ehrlich, whose 1968 blockbuster "The Population Bomb," had predicted dire consequences for many parts of the world if population growth and environmental degradation went unimpeded, predicted that the price of five precious metals - chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten - would rise precipitously. Julian Simon predicted that the cost of these metals would stabilize or even decline owing to technological innovations and the inducements of the free market. In 1990, Ehrlich conceded and sent Simon a check for $567.07, which presumably was the difference between a $1000 bundle of the five metals when they first arranged their bet and their actual value in 1990. Simon was right. The price of the metals was considerably lower despite an increase in the world's population of almost a billion people.

Simon was also right that human ingenuity should never be underestimated, especially when it comes to making big bucks from the fluctuations in the price of commodities like these metals as influenced by new technologies and complex but trackable market factors. Simon, in other words, was siding with human cleverness and creativity and found that this faith was not unfounded.

However, as Paul Sabin points out, Paul Ehrlich may have lost the bet in the short term, but his early warnings about overpopulation and the limits of environmental sustainability were far ahead of his time, and his questions about the trade-offs associated with unlimited growth - the barrier reefs that are eroded, the bird populations that are decimated, the public parks that are encroached upon - make one wonder whether such sacrifices for the sake of unchecked economic expansion are worth the price. Just taking into account the unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide that now contaminate the atmosphere and the bizarre and dangerous climate patterns that are increasingly part of our everyday lives, one can't help concluding that Simon's obsession with a short-term gain is exactly the dynamic that has gotten us into so much trouble in the long run. Ehrlich's prediction that India was a lost continent may have been rash, but it was made in the context of environmental policies that showed no respect at all for ecological balance and that now may be leading to the very apocalypse Simon was so quick to malign.

For all of our sakes, let's hope that the truth is somewhere in between what Simon expected and Ehrlich predicted. But the conservative adulation for Simon and his championing of unfettered capitalist markets is not just premature, it is downright dangerous.

Theatre Examples

I wrote about the power of theatre in a recent democratic engagement post, but did not give any examples, as my most loyal reader noted, of how theatre has become the site "where we work out many of the perplexities of everyday life." Furthermore, I did not explain how it has become "our collective conscience writ large and writ bare for all to tear down or build up" and can act as the best public space for articulating the civic philosophy that animates our thinking and spurs on our actions. I went on to say, again without examples, that theatre matters as no other art form does. It shapes how we see ourselves, including our very identities, and without it we are diminished as thinkers, creators, and doers. 

So my challenge at this point is to offer examples of how theatre does this. One example that comes to mind is Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart," a play from the mid-1980s about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and how desperate people were to understand what was happening to their community, while also retaining their humanity and their need to reach out to others, regardless of what some saw as great risks. We recently saw a revival of this play, and there is no way in a few words to capture the passion, the love, and the sheer desolation of people diagnosed with a fatal disease they did not understand. But the compulsion on the part of the protagonist of the Normal Heart to speak out loud about the suffering he saw around him and to call on people to rally around one another makes this a vivid and lasting document of a most distressing period.

Clybourne Park is another play that comes to mind, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, that tells the story of a Chicago neighborhood in two periods, first in 1959 and then 50 years later in 2009. It is a story about race and racism, about gentrification and historic preservation, but it is ultimately a story of the lengths people will go to to hold their communities together, even if this means excluding people solely because of their color, because somehow you think it is in your best interests to do so. The people in this play are not racist in the usual sense, but they are so trapped by what the culture seems to want they cannot see or think straight and therefore are willing to do great damage to themselves and their loved ones to uphold property values and keep a community "whole." It is also a play about how time, 50 years in this case, can so completely change the situation that the original dilemma about racial contamination seems quaint at best, and idiotic at worst.

A third example is a play we recently saw by Horton Foote at the Signature Theatre. It is a play called "Old Friends," and it is about a old southern family and how obsessed the family members are to preserve their wealth and their pride and how startling in character and respect the exception to this rule proves to be. Foote shows us people at their worst and at their best and in the process offers a portrait of a community in which the whole range of human emotions and possibilities is on display. We are in the course of the play both appalled and delighted by what we witness and all of this is accomplished through portraits of individuals that are, on the whole, balanced and true.

My final example is Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," which we recently saw in modern dress and which relies on the premise that the two families are divided by race - the Capulets being Black and the Montagues being White. This premise adds interest and contemporary relevance, but the fact remains that the main part of the action, the tension between undying love for a romantic partner and the responsibility to do what a parent desires, remains as strong as ever. The two lovers come from feuding families and their parents want them to select different mates, but all they can see is that they love one another beyond all reason. Their fate as star-crossed lovers, so innocent and so utterly unaware of the mores of their society, remains as poignant as ever. Their parents' objections, which represent all of the rules and expectations of a civilized society, come across as destructive and impertinent, and ultimately serve as the tragic basis for the loss of the two beautiful lovers.

I could go on, and I will admit I may not have made the case as well as I would have liked, but my passion for theatre as the site for hashing out our most searing cultural conflicts remains as strong as ever. Of course, there is nothing like a lovely musical. But great plays that excavate the issues that matter most to us are one of the things, at least for me, that continues to make life worth living.

Why Theatre?

It is through theatre that we are offered the most excruciating human situations to navigate, the most challenging conflicts to adjudicate, the most troubling and confusing incidents to unravel. Theatre gives us life situations in concentrated form to chew on, wonder about, stumble our way through.

In other words, Theatre is the site where we work out many of the perplexities of everyday life, ranging from how to live to how to bring up our children to how to die with dignity. It is the place where we contemplate the right to kill another person and the right to insist that killing of any kind is always wrong. It is our arena for deciding what matters most to us and what can be set aside, at least for now. It is our collective conscience writ large and writ bare for all to tear down or build up. I really do think it is our single, best public space for articulating the civic philosophy that animates our thinking and spurs on our doing.

Theatre matters as no other art form does. It shapes how we see ourselves, our very identities, and without it we are diminished as thinkers, creators, and doers. Theatre defines the issues of our time and in the process defines how we see ourselves and others. It is a kind of public school of what the possible and impossible present themselves as, and it challenges us to become better selves than we ever thought possible.