A Bizarre Sort of Bible, Indeed

David Michael Green Explains It All for You

By David Michael Green

Here's the story in a nutshell: A far-right predatory overclass has spent the last 30 years undoing the hard-fought gains of the mid-twentieth century, which had produced a robust middle class and vastly more economic and social justice in America than the country had ever known before. 

These regressives used every kind of deceit imaginable to persuade unsophisticated voters to choose candidates whose real agenda was to assist their plutocratic puppetmasters in fleecing the very same people who voted for them.

Such candidates ran on issues like the death penalty, immigration, bogus wars, gay marriage and abortion. But what they really were about as legislators was exporting jobs to where workers are dirt cheap and politically neutered, crashing organized labor, shifting the tax burden onto the mass public, deregulating industry to allow unhindered profit-taking on the upside and socialized public responsibility for risk on the downside, and locking in a Supreme Court majority that would never blanch at even the most outrageous rulings enhancing corporate power in American society.

The Old Bait and Switch, Made New Again

Expand the Awareness

By Dan Hagen

Mindfulness.

Examining one’s thoughts as if they were as remote as the dancing reflection in the pond of the distant streaks of clouds high in the sky.

Mindfulness is awareness of one’s physical and emotional state in the precise here and now of the immediate world. It is not urgency, but calm. It is not tying your courage to the sticking point and trying, but untying and untrying.

Think of your mind as a broad lake, reflecting the world and the sky clearly when calm, and distortedly when agitated. Breathe deeply, fill the senses, expand the field of awareness within and without, and restore calm.

“The adult brain remains open to change throughout the lifespan,” wrote psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel. “Though many brain scientists have … stated that the mind is just the activity of the brain, we now can look at the connection between these two dimensions of our lives from a different perspective. When we consider the mind as an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information, we come to realize that we can actually use the mind to change the brain. The simple truth is that how we focus our attention, how we intentionally direct the flow of energy and information through our neural circuits, can directly alter the brain's activity and its structure.”

In the New York Times, they call mindfulness “presence.” You can also call it “meditation,” as author Alan Watts did.

“We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose,” Watts wrote. “In this respect, it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”

Whatever you call it, it’s the necessary counterweight to the nerve-deadening, attention-fragmenting, solitude-extinguishing daily distractions inherent in the digital age.

Alan Watts and his influences

To Murrow and To Murrow and To Murrow

By Dan Hagen

If Edward R. Murrow had worked for cable television news: “Is London being destroyed by German bombs? Looks like it! All up in flames! Wiped out of existence! A lot of panic out there in the streets that will UNDOUBTEDLY get a lot worse! Buckingham Palace has probably been BLOWN to BITS already, don’t you think, Tiffany? Up next: What’ll Windsor and Wally be wearing at Wimbledon this year?”

The Monster in the Mirror

By Dan Hagen

The men who loudly advertise their loathing of gay people are generally ashamed of their own secret homosexual desires.

There’s not really any question about that any more. Everybody seems to know it, except perhaps those men themselves.

It’s classic psychological projection — the Other being despised because you have identified it with the Shadow you have cast out, that dark secret lurking inside you that you dare not even look at.

What’s really frightening these men is the monster in the mirror.

At the University of Georgia, researchers conducted an experiment involving 35 homophobic men and 29 non-homophobic men. All of the men participating in the experiment considered themselves exclusively heterosexual. This study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Volume 105, No. 3, August 1996, described how each of the participants was shown sexually explicit heterosexual, male homosexual and lesbian videotapes.

Sexual arousal for the homophobic and non-homophobic men was found to be similar when they viewed both the heterosexual and the lesbian sexual activity. However, when the two groups viewed the video of two men engaging in sexual behavior, a significant statistical difference arose. In this instance, the group of homophobic men showed a considerable increase in sexual arousal while the group of non-homophobic men did not. The clear implication of this study is that homophobia in men is a reaction to their own repressed homosexual urges.

Nor is that study alone. “Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires.” That was the conclusion of physiological studies conducted by scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara. “Individuals who identify as straight but, in psychological tests, show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” wrote Netta Weinstein, the study’s lead author. “In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward,” said co-author Richard Ryan.

So the men who rant against gays are, all unaware, announcing to the world what their real feelings are.

That would, of course, include people like former Sen. Larry Craig, the fascist FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the vicious Roy Cohn and the Rev. Ted Haggard, Jonathan Merritt, to name a few from an endless and growing list.

All famous conservatives, you’ll note, and that’s no coincidence. Four common psychological manifestations of defensiveness are denial, rationalization, minimization and projection. All are constantly wielded as Republican political weapons. When your policies actually harm the people you are trying to bamboozle into supporting you, they're all quite useful.

Psychological projection is a key tactic of the contemporary GOP. They always loudly accuse their opponents of doing everything they themselves have done, are ashamed of doing, are still doing and intend to continue to do.

Claiming to speak with the authority of God, for example, Haggard encouraged young gay people to despise themselves while he was practicing homosexuality himself. And he did it to get rich.

I can forgive some vicious actions, particularly if they were inspired by the nasty, ancient dogmas that still blind and shackle so many people in this world. Conformity can create creeps. But I don’t forgive leaders in positions of authority who use that authority to victimize helpless people.

On the other hand, I will always admire those gay people who didn’t cower or hide, who summoned from somewhere the courage and the honesty required to stand up to whatever filth government, society and religion chose to throw at them.

Life’s not worth a damn until you can say, “Hey world, I am what I am.” Sometimes you can find wisdom even in musical comedies.

The damage that people who lead inauthentic lives inflict on their society, on the people who know them and on themselves — that, my friend, is what’s truly monstrous.

'Grease' at the Little Theatre: Ooo ooo ooo ooo

By Dan Hagen

Boy, having already met girl, undergoes the usual complications leading to the customary conclusion in “Grease,” the musical that opens the Little Theatre’s 55^th summer season.

So the point is never what happens, but how it happens — specifically the style and energy the performers bring to this venerable vehicle for 1950s nostalgia. Happily, director Millie Garvey and choreographer Zach Gray have supplied plenty of both.

I must admit this has never been my favorite musical. I thought it seemed strangely kind of old hat, even at the time it was created in the year I graduated from high school. I suppose part of my antipathy stems from the movie version, with its bizarrely aged teenagers cavorting around.

But there’s no arguing with a show that has been a crowd pleaser for four decades. And — as has been in the case in the majority of shows the Little Theatre has mounted in the last several years — the productions are so professionally done that you end up liking even shows that you don’t like.

If that makes sense. I don’t know if it does. It’s awfully late as I’m writing this.

On a tall, colorful set composed of vinyl disks and by Courtney Nelson, the Little cast members hurl themselves happily into the proceedings.

I want to say a word for Little veteran Sam Hay here, who often gets the utility roles that don’t generally attract comment (like the juvenile delinquent Sonny), but always tackles them with heart and dazzling ability as a dancer. Any musical would be lucky to have him.

Kelsey Andres, as the vapid and too-cheery cheerleader Patty, is in a similar position, but she too makes more than the most of her role, forcing the audience to feel affection for a character intended merely as a minor figure of fun.

The best stuff? Costumer Timmy Valentine’s over-the-top scissor-headed delights in “Beauty School Dropout;” the giant-haired crooning Teen Angel (Lincoln Ward) in that same number; the back-of-the-auditorium belting of Cary Mitchell in “Mooning;” the baby-faced likeability of Jacob Lacopo in “Those Magic Changes;” the determined nerdiness of Glory Kissel and Jared Titus; the feel-good energy of famous numbers like ‘We Go Together.”

Gray’s best dance number — hands spearing upward and clap-clap-clapping with adolescent kinetic abandon — is “Born to Hand Jive.” It’s infectious and irresistible.

Watching this show, it occurred to me that what we always have here are types rather than characters. The protagonist Danny is Vinnie Barberino crossed with the Fonz. He’s played by the talented Tony Edgerton, who looks like Travolta, but better. As in “The Full Monty,” Edgerton offers a matter-of-fact working-class masculinity and charm, and shines in “Alone At the Drive-In Movie.”

Tiffany Sparks, as the heroine Sandy, gets the most thankless role of all, spending virtually the entire show as a simpering virginal simp. But she’s pretty and she can sing, and so she gamely makes the most of it.

The better roles, though, are the two secondary ones. There’s Kenicke, played by CJ Pawlikowski, a brooding gang member who loves his “Greased Lightning” (how Americans do enjoy singing to their cars) and the emotionally hard, sexually easy Rizzo, played by Sophie Grimm. Pawlikowski and Grimm’s naturalistic acting makes their characters real and recognizable.

My favorite number in the show is Grimm singing her parody of the 1950s sexual kabuki dance, “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee.” She also helps turn Sandy from simp to siren with “There Are Worse I Could Do.” As my friend Paul said, it’s a song about the virtue of not having virtue.

Wella, wella, wella, I won’t tell you more. If this is the kind of show you like, you’ll find this particular show an excellent example of its kind. It’s the one that you want. Ooo ooo ooo ooo.

Incidental intelligence: The cast also features Jamie Finkenthal as Jan, Loren J. Connell as Johnny Casino, Ashley Klinger as Frenchie, Rachel LaPorte as Marty and Heather Dore' Johnson as Cha Cha. “Grease” has lighting design by Matt Fick. The music director and artistic director is Joshua Zecher-Ross,

Performances will run June 6-17 and tickets ranging from $37.50 for adults and $35.40 for children under 12 and seniors 62 and over. Tickets for Grease may be purchased by calling The Little Theatre on the Square Box Office at (217)-728-7375 or online at www.thelittletheatre.org.