The Tempest, Prometheus Bound, and The Greek Thing

We broke off yesterday from following the drama in Brussels over the Greek Thing and went into town (Albuquerque in this instance) to attend a performance of Shakespeare's "The Tempest," far and away my favorite Shakespeare play.

It was fascinating, really, because the production was done as a summer youth project by middle and high school students, and I thought they carried it off well -- all things considered. In addition, most of the male roles were played by girls, some of them quite young. Prospero in fact was played by a female (which has become something of A Thing in the theater lately).

"The Tempest" was probably Shakespeare's last play, dating from about 1603, and it deals with issues and themes of wrongs done, forgiveness extended, reconciliation, love, freedom and... magic. To me the play is a surprise practically every step of the way because often what you might expect to happen is turned upside down through Prospero's magic, Ariel's intervention, Caliban's frustrations, and so on. The resolution seems rather, pat perhaps even formulaic, but it leaves one with something to ponder, too, that even in the worst of circumstances, one's ability to forgive wrongs done matters more than one's urge toward vengeance.

The characters stare into the abyss, in other words, and the abyss stares back. Rather than fall in, they change.

And that change leads to a new dawn and new reality.

Well, if that didn't have something to do with The Greek Thing and what needs to happen -- but hasn't yet -- I'd want to know the reason why.

On the other hand, in some of the consideration of what's been going on with regard to Greece and Europe, the ancient Greek drama of "Prometheus Bound" by Aeschylus has been mentioned as a type-model for the nearly impossible struggle Alexis Tsipras and the Greek people have been engaged in with the Euro-creeps and Euro-crats.

"Prometheus Bound" is a surprisingly short and quite stunning play, certainly one of the masterpieces of Ancient Greek drama. Breathtaking in its tragic implications for those who would do good in the world and good for mankind.

Prometheus is a Titan who steals fire from Olympus and gives it to humans for their use. This angers Zeus who has Prometheus chained to a rock and sets a harpie to eating out his liver -- which re-grows every night, so the harpie comes every day to eat Prometheus's liver again. Through this torture and sadism -- for that's all it is -- Prometheus defends his actions on behalf of humankind and condemns Zeus and the Olympian gods as usurpers (which they are), hypocrites and deceivers (which they also are).

Here's an interpretation of the drama done in Brussels (how appropriate) in 2010 (in French, a little over an hour long):

Prométhée enchaîné - José Besprosvany from focus live on Vimeo.

And here's another version, animated, only 12 minutes or so, in English:

PROMETHEUS BOUND from Manatee Idol on Vimeo.

"Prometheus Bound" was the first of a trilogy of short plays dealing with the myth of Prometheus, the other two being "Prometheus Unbound" and "Prometheus the Fire-Bringer." The other plays only survive as fragments, but according to scholarship, in the end, Prometheus is released from his chains by Herakles, and he eventually reconciles with Zeus after warning him of danger to his rule of Olympus.

The parallels with the current situation between Greece and the European powers is not exact, of course, but the echoes and necessities are surely there. The most recent iteration of  "negotiations" and an "agreement" between Greece and its creditors have led to a realization that the Euro-project, and potentially the European Union itself, are likely to be extinguished in the not too distant future due to the intransigence, greed, and pure venom of the Germans.

This won't end well, in other words.

But eventually, in both "The Tempest" and the Prometheus Trilogy, a way is found to reconcile.

Will it be found in Europe before a tragic conclusion?

In essence, it must be.

We Have Seen This Movie Before

Whew!

Luckily the Dorner movie ended and the credits were running when His Serenity appeared at the entrance to the House and made his way to the podium to speechify for a bit about the State of the Union (it's strong as always).

The shift was seamless.

I didn't really watch or listen to it, nor did I more than glance at the rejoinder by that very appealing Cubano, Marco Rubio (who isn't "rubio" at all!) They say he's quite the accomplished liar and his mother should be ashamed. But that's another story for another time.

The point is that neither of them said anything that meant anything nor do they ever do so at these opportunities for Imperial Display. It's pomp, it's pageantry for its own sake -- and to remind everyone that these people can and will do whatever they want to you at the time and place of their choosing, and you -- by golly -- would do well to sit still and shut up until your time comes.

With the stench of the smoke of what happened to someone who got uppity about it still wafting around in the background of the speechifications, the message was clear: keep your nose clean, your head down, and your forelock tugged at all times. You are not in charge here, we, your betters, are. Don't you forget it.

At least on the CBS feed I was watching online yesterday, the newsreaders remained fairly skeptical throughout the "movie" (one of them actually said the events unfolding was "like a tragic movie.")  They had a newsman on the scene, Carter Evans, someone who was actually eyewitnessing everything as it was taking place, and who was uploading video (from his phone?) from time to time to show the people some of what he was seeing and hearing. So far as I know, he was the only newsman on scene, and he was there by accident he said, having followed the police brigade up the road, and was setting up for a live shot (teevee shot, that is)  when the shoot out started. He saw the deputies wounded no more than a few yards away from him.

The video he put up was stark -- but it had been edited to take out the naughty words and any blood that there might have been. There were also whole scenes kind of mindlessly cut out. Obviously, he got quite a lot of video that his masters at the studio felt it was inappropriate to show. Some of it may have had the infamous words now gone viral: "We're gonna burn him out! Burn the muthafukka!"

Yes. Well.

They did that all right. We've seen this movie before, haven't we?

Of course we have, over and over again, for decades. When a gunman or a rebel cell of some sort is holed up in a compound, even if it is only a trailer in the woods, and the gunman or cell is firing weapons or has fired weapons in the past causing injury or death to the brave men trying to take them into custody, it has long appeared to be policy to "burn them out." Setting fire to the hideout is the time-honored custom, isn't it? One would think it is standard policy by now.

So is the denial.

We'll never know for sure what happened. There will be endless speculation for years to come. A cottage industry of theories will arise. It is ever thus.

Even though CBS LA had a man on the scene, he may not know himself what happened, of if he does know, he may be too scared to say. Retaliation is a bitch.

The newsreaders in the studio, however, maintained a reasonable skepticism regarding just about anything the police and sheriffs and officials had to say, however, and that was refreshing. At least they seemed to be skeptical. It was not, at any rate, the usual media cop-worshiping. Since nobody had reported actually seeing Dorner at this hideout, they wouldn't even accept at face value that it was Dorner inside -- or that there was anyone necessarily inside.

That kind of skepticism is very unusual in the media, so I was somewhat taken aback by it.

But let's assume that it was Dorner, and that the charred corpse found inside the burnt out wreck of a "cabin" -- it was quite a large house -- was his, and that the single gunshot reported just prior to the start of the fire that engulfed the house and the corpse was Dorner putting an end to his own life. Let us assume that's what happened.

Then let us ask my question: Was Justice done?

We start to see how complicated the answer to that question can be. This whole sequence of events might not have happened at all had Dorner believed that the processes of internal discipline and court appeals that he had endured over the past few years (which also seemed to have included his -- involuntary? -- separation from the Naval Reserve just before the start of his mission...) had resulted in Justice. He didn't think so; what purports to be his manifesto (or his last will and testament, depending) says that he felt betrayed, lied about, abused, and the victim of institutional racism and retaliation for trying to do the right thing when he reported to a superior the police brutality and abuse he said he witnessed during the arrest of a mentally ill suspect.

"Everyone knows" how abusive and brutal the LAPD is notorious for being. That's become true of many police departments throughout the land, if it wasn't always the case. Milder forms of this institutionalized brutality -- and sometimes not so mild -- were on nearly constant and universal display during the coordinated suppression of the Occupy demonstrations around the country not so long ago.

That suppression was routinely violent and brutal, something it is still hard for cop-worshipers to deal with. The specific case of LAPD is no less difficult to deal with, for it seems they have learned lessons from being caught time and again abusing their authority (including brutality, murder, planting evidence, and so on) and at other times, it appears they've either learned nothing or have learned how to be as corrupt and violent as they want to be without getting caught.

In Dorner's case, he was inside the department, and it appears he felt the full force of institutional retaliation when he spoke up against abuse he witnessed.

Yes. Well. Anyone who's been "inside" knows the sensation, knows what happens to whistleblowers, snitches, uppity mouthy punks. They get run out, sometimes run over. It is Iron Law -- institutions must protect themselves first and foremost, and anything that threatens the institution must be controlled, isolated and removed.

No matter the "protections" they ostensibly have at law.

So let's acknowledge that in the specific instance of Dorner's firing from the LAPD, he felt that a tremendous injustice had been done to him personally, and he attributed that injustice to the inherent racism and dishonesty of his police colleagues and the institution itself.

He wanted revenge.

His form of revenge was to disrupt the institution through various means, including murder. He partially succeeded at least temporarily. If his intention was to destroy the LAPD, he failed.

If he saw his revenge as Justice, then we could say he was able to obtain Justice. But his personal desire for revenge/Justice conflicts with social and political mores accepted by most people that say that "Justice" is found through legal processes alone, and in Dorner's case -- too bad, so sad -- the legal processes he endured did not produce a result in his favor. If the result of the legal process he went through was unjust, oh well, that's the way the cookie crumbles; he should just get over it and move on.

He didn't. No, he fought back. That's how he got to be a folk/cult hero, something that may have scared the LAPD more than his threats and actions. I never thought they were responding to Dorner as much as they were responding to the public disgust with their behavior -- both historic and contemporary. The fact that someone from inside the institution, though rejected by it, actually took them on and made a huge splash in doing so, regardless of whether he was justified, or whether the action he took was appropriate (to put it mildly) was literally terrifying to the institution, and thus I thought his designation as a Domestic Terrorist was more apropos than not.

Fighting back the way Dorner did, violently and maliciously, with the intent to destroy the institution itself is something that is almost never done in this country. Nonviolent resistance or standard political/legal processes are nearly always asserted as the only appropriate ways to bring change to institutions.

The other path, the violent path, will almost always result in the fiery extermination of the rebel foe.

We've seen this movie again and again. It always ends the same way.

Is it Justice?

Depends on who is doing the evaluation, doesn't it?

Individuals can make profound changes in institutions all by their lonesome, and the methods they choose to do so -- whether violent or nonviolent -- often don't make much difference. If the intention is institutional change, the methods chosen to accomplish change are almost beside the point. But in Dorner's case, the apparent intention was the destruction of the institution of the LAPD, and the method he chose (he described it as "asymmetrical warfare") was both physically and psychologically violent. Institutions and states facing this kind of threat tend to throw up the barricades and to hunker down, and in the end, they tend to unleash mindless and appalling violence against their perceived foe(s). Which is pretty much what we saw in the case of the LAPD facing the threat from Chris Dorner. For a time they lashed out wildly at anything that moved.

The parallels, of course, with the actions of Our Great Nation concomitant with the advent of the Glorious and Perpetual Global War on Terror (which Dorner participated in the Navy) are stark and obvious.

"Bringing to justice" became something of an oxymoron during the most intense periods of that conflict, for all it meant was exterminating anyone and everyone who became targets whether or not they had any role in the conflict. How many thousands, tens of thousands or millions of stark innocents paid with their lives and are still paying with their lives in the name of that kind of "Justice" for attacks long ago?

Revenge and random slaughter is not Justice. Not in any conception of Justice I can imagine at any rate.

Thus it is hard to justify Dorner's tactics as having anything to do with "Justice."

On the other hand, what about the later coordinated and fiery response to his revenge? Was that Justice?

Dorner's threat to the institution was eliminated in a very dramatic fashion, covered live on teevee, witnessed by tens of thousands, and the job was completed before the President's scheduled appearance before Congress in the Imperial Pageant of the State of the Union. All is now well, and we are back to normal. Justice has been done.

Or has it?

Is threat elimination by itself "Justice"? Not to my mind.

The elimination of one more perceived threat to the continued operations of a violent, rotting and corrupt institution is not even remotely related to any concept of Justice I can imagine. And the LAPD is practically the textbook example of institutional violence, rot and corruption.

So ultimately Justice still failed to materialize in this tragic movie.

The ancient Greek tragedians faced a similar frustration and dilemma. Going against the gods produced... results: ugly, disturbing, and often fiery or bloody results. Damnation was certain, but often the innocent were consumed along with the guilty, and the only thing the survivors could do was accept their fate -- or struggle against it and fail. Was the result Justice? In the gods' view, certainly.

For the mere mortals subject to it, the Cruel Justice of the Gods, however... not so much.

Let us reflect on Prometheus...

  PROMETHEUS BOUND from Manatee Idol on Vimeo.

We Are All Greeks; We Are All Black Bloc; We Are All Vulnerable

Prometheus the Fire Bringer
"Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends."

The details of the Greek "bailout" remain vague, but there is no sign at all that the Eurozone has backed off any of its sadism and cruelty toward Greece and its people. For all intents and purposes, Greece is being treated the way European imperial powers treated their colonial outposts, seizing revenues and exploiting the people to feed their financial interests. The United States has a long history of doing the same.

In effect, Greece has lost its sovereignty; the country and its people are now the "property" of the Eurozone, principally Germany.

The same fate awaits Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and the struggling nations of Eastern Europe. The same fate awaits all the Peoples of Europe; the march of the Gods of Finance will not be impeded by mere mortals.

The People are reduced to suppliants. Powerless -- or meant to believe they are powerless -- in the face of their ravenous Financial Gods. They are being divided and set one against the other as their Financial Gods loot and plunder everything that is not nailed down, and then they pull out the nails and steal that as well.

Nothing can satisfy them.

Black Bloc is a tactic of solidarity among the Powerless that has been demonized as much as the People of Greece (and now Spain; I just heard a new piece of propaganda on NPR claiming that Spaniards are dastards because some of them are "earning money" while receiving unemployment benefits -- "on the dole" as it was put in the story.) The Powerless are always demonized as a prelude to the "solution" to the "problem" of the Powerless.

The demonization of the Black Bloc tactic is one of the strangest outgrowths of the innumerable attempts to hijack or co-opt the Occupy Movement. Black Blocs are almost entirely absent from the Occupy framework of direct action. Yet from the near-hysteria of the anti-Black Bloc'ers, you'd think they were everywhere, every day, and that there is hardly a window unbroken, a bottle un-thrown anywhere that Occupy occupies. The hysteria is nonsense on one level, but on another, it is pure -- and relatively effective -- propaganda. No different than many other demonization campaigns that have been launched throughout history by the stronger against the weaker (preferably the weakest) elements in society. Whipping up hysteria against the demonized Other is an essential part of the propaganda program.

Anyone can be scapegoated and demonized in this manner. It is one of the least appealing attributes of most human societies. The weaker the target appears to be, the easier it is to scapegoat and demonize them. The result is typically "unpleasant" for the target(s), up to and including genocide.

We are all vulnerable.

Either as scapegoats or as scapegoaters. For those who engage in demonization and scapegoating pay a heavy psychic, and often a heavy physical, price.

While the scapegoating and demonization propaganda campaign against the targets is being ratcheted up, there is a simultaneous propaganda campaign to convince the targets to submit, to not fight back. "Nonviolence!"

The current propaganda campaign from the outside and within Occupy to enforce "nonviolence" -- violently (but only if necessary) -- is part of that effort to ensure the targets don't fight back against their demonization.

So far, it has had a kind of mesmerizing effect, something like the repeated LRAD announcements in Oakland on January 28 as the multitudes were corralled in front of the YMCA. "Submit to your arrest!" Over and over and over. "Submit!"

My proposition has always been that Occupy is by nature a nonviolent resistance campaign. It's obvious. Nothing has happened to change that. None of the rare incidents of vandalism or bottle throwing that have occurred has changed the nature of the Occupy Movement from nonviolent to violent resistance. To assert otherwise is silly. But it is crucially important to propagandists and demonizers to magnify the least incident into a monumental problem, and if there are no incidents, to manufacture them.

I was listening to a very strange panel discussion yesterday on the topic of Occupy nonviolence and Black Bloc -- and "getting beyond" the dispute -- and the point was made by one of the panelists that there has never been a Black Bloc associated with Occupy Wall Street in New York City. Not once. And yet here we were, still, listening to constant denunciations of Black Bloc as if they had a presence everywhere all the time when clearly they don't. It's a major disconnect.

I would say, no, it's propaganda. It's the standard propaganda of demonization and scapegoating.

This is how the Overclass maintains its power.

Awareness needs to be matched with action. Whether our friends in Greece can show the way remains to be seen. Prometheus may still be bound to the rock by Zeus in the single play of the trilogy that's come down to us; but there is more to the story: "Prometheus Unbound," and "Prometheus the Fire-Bringer."

------------------------

In Addition to Which:

This is just great. It's an Open Letter from an 87 year old Greek Resistance Fighter, Mikis Theodorakis, (composer and Parliamentarian) to the World: The Truth About Greece

An excerpt:

There is an international conspiracy whose target is the complete destruction of my country. They began in 1975 aiming at Modern Greek civilization, continued with the distortion of our modern history and our national identity and they are now trying to eliminate us biologically as well through unemployment, hunger and impoverishment. If Greek people don't rise as one in order to prevent them, the danger of Greece becoming extinct is evident. I place it within the next ten years. There will be nothing left of us but the memory of our civilization and our battles for freedom.

...

I am totally dedicated, body and soul, to this cause (the unification of the People in one Front) and I believe that I will be proved right in the end. I have fought, gun in hand, against Hitler's occupation. I have experienced the Gestapo's dungeons. I have been sentenced to death by Germans and have miraculously survived. In 1967 I founded PAF (The Patriotic Anti-dictatorial Front), the first resistance organization against the military junta. I fought underground, was caught and imprisoned in the junta's "slaughterhouse". Once again I survived.

I am today 87 years old and it is very possible that I will not live to see the salvation of my beloved country. But I will die with a clear conscience, because I will continue doing my Duty towards the ideals of Freedom and Justice until the end.

We haven't seen the end of this story by a long shot. Read the whole letter. It's an eye-opener.

The Sadism and Cruelty of the Greek "Bailout"

Brussels is supposedly closing in on an acceptable framework for the so-called Greek Bailout that will formalize the harsh, indeed sadistic, cruelties of the latest round of austerity measures being imposed on the Greek People to satisfy the demands of the Gods of Finance.

Europe should have some genetic memory about these things, as it wasn't that long ago that the futile attempts to meet the demands of the Gods of Finance plunged Europe into devastating wars.

What is wrong with these people that they can't see the patterns repeating? What is wrong with Europe's Rulers that they mindlessly revert to sadism and cruelty when imposing Victor's Conditions on the Vanquished? And why is it always about Money -- specifically feeding the Insatiable Maw of Finance.

What is wrong with them?

It's as if they cannot help themselves; meanness is built in to their DNA. When it comes to the "Periphery," they can't seem to keep their snotty contempt in check -- which appears little different from the historic racism of the past.

Of course none of the Greek "bailout" is bailing out the suffering and drowning Greeks, it is all going to the Gods of Finance, to pay off their gambling debts. Of course it won't be enough. By now, everyone should know there isn't "enough," ever, to satisfy that Gaping Maw.

The cruelty of the extractions from the Greek People to shovel into the Maw is mindboggling and soul-searing. What do the Rulers of Europe think will be the benefit of raging disease, increasing child mortality, suicide, destruction of livelihoods, expropriation of public utilities and infrastructure, and what amounts to a re-colonization of Greece by some distant imperial power?

What is the benefit?

Having had Empires in the past, the Rulers of Europe should know there isn't one. Yet they appear to have learned nothing.

At least now, the tragic nature of what is being done to Greece by their cruel masters is being recognized more widely. That's... good... but the lessons don't seem to be learnable among the European Ruling Classes. That failure to learn will have much greater consequences than merely sucking dry and disposing the empty husk of Greece.

I'm told the German People are cheering Frau Merkel for her "strength" in this matter. Do they realize that what is being done to Greece will be done to them whenever the Maw needs more feeding? Do they have any clue?

No?

Have they never seen Prometheus Bound?

PROMETHEUS BOUND from Manatee Idol on Vimeo.

Teatr Project

I've been working on a project dealing with Socialist Revolutionary Theater in the first couple of decades of the Soviet Union and its ultimate influence on theater in the West and the research is fascinating and daunting. Over the years, I have collected quite a lot of material on Russian and Soviet theater, but unfortunately it's not cataloged and currently it's all boxed up, so I've relied more on internet resources and what faulty memories I have of projects I was involved in long ago. There is so much. So much of it is in Russian!

Well, I studied Russian briefly on my own when I was in college, never took a course, but I did become more or less familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet and could muddle through a few halting phrases. Now I have to read it, and that's proving to be something of a challenge, though not a hopeless one, and I need to understand spoken Russian much better than I ever did before in order to fathom out some of the un-subtitled film clips I've been looking at. Not too long ago, I picked up some of the language again while interviewing immigrants from the former Soviet Union and I learned a great deal about their experiences -- though of course I had a translator with me, so it wasn't like I was carrying on a conversation in their own language. I couldn't possibly.

With this project, though, I don't have a translator, so it's taking some time, but, Oh My, what I've been learning.

Although I was a theater professional for many years, my interest was always in the art form itself and the practical means of realizing the artistic vision, whatever it might be. I spent far more time analyzing the Greeks and Shakespeare trying to absorb how -- and to some extent why -- they did what they did and how to translate that analysis to the stage today, especially when the play being done wasn't ancient Greek or Shakespeare. The Greeks and Shakespeare are the foundations for contemporary English-speaking theater, even though the work itself may be based in or derived from a very different tradition. What those plays were like to the audience originally is still what we are trying to accomplish today, and part of the problem I've found with productions of the Greeks and Shakespeare is that the approach is all but backwards. All to often, the approach is to try to impose something on the work rather than draw out the depth of what's already there.

One of the most profound works I ever encountered was the "Prometheus Bound" of Aeschylus, very short, extraordinarily powerful, soaring and painful and wonder-struck in every imaginable way, and I pondered it for what seemed like half a year or more trying to fathom what it must have been like for audiences in Athens 2,500 years ago and how any of that spirit could be found or recovered today.

There is no way to deal with a play like the "Prometheus Bound" in realistic terms. It is not a realistic drama. It is a tragedy, one of the purest that's been handed down to us. It is towering mythology, both horrifying and uplifting at the same time. There is no method nor any psychological analysis you can do that will make "sense" of the play, because it isn't a play to be made sense of. It is a play to feel, to touch and experience the deepest emotions you may have -- and to survive it.

Over time, I could draw on a lot of complementary performing arts experience, not merely (oh, well!) the Theater in the conventional sense, but all kinds of street performance, circus, spectacle and pageant, movies, and so forth. And still I pondered the Greeks.

I would ponder the Greeks even when the production was Chekhov or Brecht or O'Neill or (god save me... ) Irving Berlin.

All this is a round about way of getting into the question of Socialist Revolutionary Theater in the newly hatched Soviet Union.

The forms utilized in the early Soviet attempts to create a truly Proletarian Theater weren't entirely new, nor in many cases were the creative people involved, but the way they were combined and recombined and utilized, and the frankly social and political purposes for which they were used was something new, and often the visualizations were entirely new. (On the other hand, sometimes they were recycled.)

But what is striking to me right now is that so much energy and effort was put into reaching as deeply as possible into the emotional core of the People, drawing them in and holding them "bound" if you will, bringing them into the performance, and in many cases having them create -- and live -- the performance themselves from beginning to end. The point is to create a true People's Theater, not impose an idea of Theatre upon them.

Somehow this seems very Greek -- or very Shakespearean -- to me, for at least in part, it is how they did it. The production, the performance was an organic whole from within the community, not something imposed upon it from without.

While there were trusted regulars, there were no "professionals." And so it would be -- or at least it would try to be -- in the Soviet Union.

Outside of an academic context, there's little of what they were doing -- such as their plays and their pageants -- that we are exposed to these days, but in the 1920's and 1930's the influence of Soviet experimental theater was profound in the West, and the deeper nature of what they were trying to get at is to be found in all sorts of places and performances. The Soviet experiments in Revolutionary Theater haven't gone away. They've burrowed deep.

So. This project is taking time because I'm once again trying to burrow deep into an art form I haven't practiced for fifteen years, and I'm trying to do it in a language I can barely comprehend -- sometimes. The strangest thing is that I've got this silly grin on my face so much of the time while I'm working on it.

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An animated version of "Prometheus Bound":

Prometheus Bound from Manatee Idol on Vimeo.