Ten Years -- And The Apocalypse

[Today marks the tenth anniversary of the start of this blog.]

[Props to lea-p who's been commenting here from day one and with whom I've had some fine conversations. Yay!]

A couple of months ago I was thinking about doing some kind of commemoration of the tenth anniversary of this corner of Blogtopia (h/t Skippy) but somehow it passed my mind and I forgot all about it as often happens the older and not necessarily wiser I get.

Yes, ten years ago, 21 Dec 07, I wrote and posted my very first ChéWhatYouCallYourPasa entry, and thousands of posts later, I'm wondering if "progress in the face of the Modern American Imperium" is possible any more. Or if it ever was.

Have we been fooling ourselves all this time? What a question.

Before I started this blog ten years ago, I was an occasional commenter on a number of sites, at the time primarily at Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory, now archived somewhere on the farthest corner of the intertubes, and later his postings at Salon. If I had to say anything, I attempted to approach it with humor, not very well executed, but not in a hurtful or negative way. Sometimes -- well, often -- I had a contrary opinion to this or that, but I looked at it as merely adding to the ferment and froth of the topic, not trying to take away from anyone else's point of view.

Ah, the Old Days!

Glenn hosted an interesting group of regulars. I see that some are still with him at The Intercept, but most have long since departed for whatever reasons. Because Glenn tends toward Libertarianism (and denies it, or used to) many of his regulars were Libertarians spouting Libertarian cant while presuming to take on the mantle of the weakened or absent Left. It was in that environment that I realized a political Left no longer existed in the United States, and the rhetorical or philosophical Left was so weak it probably should have been put out of its misery.

To me the idea of Libertarians presenting themselves as The Left was appalling.

But it was a needle Glenn wanted to thread back in those days, and some of his "regulars" wanted to go along with him.

I had chosen an ironic online name Ché Pasa some time before I started commenting at Glenn's Place, and some wag had appended "what you call your" between the Ché and the Pasa, and I liked it. At least he or she seemed to get the irony. I've tried to explain it as reference to something that is happening and yet has passed. Che is an icon of the Left, of course, but he's gone. Murdered in Bolivia ages ago. Ché itself is a Belgian "men's magazine" (do they still have those? I don't keep up.) more ironic, humorous, and biting than Playboy or what have you.

But what's in a name anyway?

I didn't see myself as an avatar of The Left, but that's how I was interpreted by some of Glenn's regulars and by Glenn himself. We'd tussle now and then, but mostly from my perspective I was pointing and laughing in both directions, at The (so-called) Left and at the often very rigid Libertarianism trying to claim the "unclaimed territory" of the disintegrated Left.

Someone suggested I "start my own blog." This is typically the online equivalent of purging a commenter whose point of view isn't welcome at some site, but in this case, it wasn't like that. My comments tended to be infrequent but they were often long, and in some ways they were more suited to stand alone posts. I had so little free time in those days (work and travel kept me very busy in meat-world) that I couldn't see making enough time to blog more than intermittently, but during December of 2007 I had a break, and thought why not try it?

The Blogger software was free and relatively easy to navigate. Both Digby (where I occasionally commented) and Atrios (where I had sometimes commented but stopped when the comment section became a surreal pudding bath) used Blogger as did Glenn's Unclaimed Territory, so it couldn't be too hard, and sure enough, it was pretty simple to put something together and publish it. Whoo-hoo!

Why this blog launched on the winter solstice, 21 December 2007, I don't remember. I know I had two, maybe three weeks off that December (whew!) and the time off may have begun the week before. Whatever the case, it launched with a generally positive perspective on what was possible in the face of what had become a soul-crushing empire and the farcical politics of the day.

We were living in interesting times. Bush2 and Cheney had put us and many others through several roiling nightmares.

I had had a couple of previous blogs starting back in the mid-'90s (oh my, dial up was the best, wasn't it?) but I couldn't stick with them due to the press of other responsibilities. One dealt with Mars exploration, another was a sort of Random Notes type thing. I don't think I realized how dedicated you have to be to keep a blog going. I found out to my chagrin, and blogging on dial up was a pain anyway.

DSL made it easier and faster, but it still took more time than I had available.

In 2007, while I was still working and traveling a lot, I had periodic breaks, and so it was possible to think about blogging again, and once I started up this little corner of Blogtopia (h/t Skippy), it was easier to keep up than I thought.

So here we are, ten years on, and what's changed?

Personally, I'm retired now, so I have plenty of time -- or so it would seem. We moved from California to New Mexico in 2012, which for us was a very positive change in environment. We still have lots of connections in California, but New Mexico is very definitely our home-place now, and we're glad it is.

Ms. Ché and I often remark on how this part of New Mexico is very evocative of our more or less rural California childhood homes (me on the Central Coast, she in the Central Valley.) California was very different then and much less crowded and crazy-making. We live in the country now. Well we're a couple of miles from a very small town that was founded as a railroad pit stop around 1900. When Route 66 went through in the '30s, the town relocated north and today is an Interstate pit stop, with three truck stops, and plenty of ancillary hoo-hah, but at heart this is farm and ranch country, like we knew when we were young, the kind of environment we were initially socialized in.

Cowboys, ranchers and farmers are our soul-kin.

This is a portrait of former NM governor Bruce King at his ranch not far north of our place. It's really evocative of where we are and of people who inhabit this region. Tip o' the hat, ya ol' galoot..

We're an hour from Santa Fe, forty-five minutes from Albuquerque so we can, when we want, share in their urbanity and sophistication -- if you want to call it that. We don't have a ranch or farm ourselves, in fact our place is more like a quirky suburban (without the urb to sub) outpost. We're two miles from "town" -- such as it is -- but our house is in a cluster of residences built mostly in the 1950s when 'progress' came to the area. Our house (started around 1900) was originally a hand-built two room adobe ranch house on about 160 acres but the land was sold for development, and so here we are. We have views of the mountains when the trees are bare on the west and north and there are mesas on the east and south. The Interstate is a few miles north and we're only a half-mile from the state highway that runs north and south and connects us with Santa Fe, Taos, and so on.

Rural living is simpler, much simpler, and it's taken us some time to de-compress from the hurly-burly of urban California. But we've done it. At least I think so.

Living where we do and associating with the kinds of people we do has had an effect on my perspective. I no longer have that much interest in changing/reforming things, nor of making headway against the Imperium. I'm more convinced than ever that if Progress is to be made -- if it can be -- it will be small scale, localized, and to the extent possible, independent of the national government.

Putting Trump on the throne and protecting him there has, I think, irredeemably sent the national/imperial enterprise off the rails and perhaps directly into the long-awaited Apocalypse.

How that happened is something to be pondered, but the details are not as important as the bigger picture. The Despairing White Working Class is not the reason why. Something else is going on, and I doubt it is healthy for children and other living things. We are ruled by nihilists who seek the End, and they just might get it.

I've always tended toward optimism, but it's harder and harder to maintain a positive point of view. We (collectively) haven't been able to reverse the trajectory of the Empire since the failure of the anti-Iraq War demonstrations in 2002-3. I think that failure was a turning point, and I think it was an engineered failure as well. It was meant to shatter what was left of the anti-war movement and to inspire hopelessness and despair among a wide range of activists who thought they were getting somewhere against an implacable foe. It worked to some extent.

As time has gone on, it is more and more up to the Black Clad Anarchists (who get themselves arrested) and the Pussy Hat wearing WimminFolk (who don't), the disabled, the disadvantaged, and the persecuted to take to the streets against the depredations of the High and the Mighty, but even they are tiring of this game. The victories are few and far between, and the prize turns out to be tin.

During the last several years, I've had some serious health problems (primarily rheumatoid arthritis) that caused me to be less and less active due to intense joint pain. Only in May of this year was I given treatment that seems to be working to relieve the worst of the symptoms and pain. I have infusion treatments every six months or so and I take heavy doses of immunosuppressants in addition, The combination seems to be effective. I'm grateful for that, but it was a long road to get to this point, and I'm pretty sure the medication has affected more than the pain. Of course some of the changes I've noticed are clearly due to age as well.

What a drag it is getting old...

During the worst of the Period of Pain, I wasn't prescribed any serious pain medication at all. Prednisone was supposed to be sufficient, but even in high doses it was not. The situation was getting worse and worse, and just after I started infusion treatment with Rituxan, I was given a prescription for Tylenol-3 -- hydrocodone and Tylenol -- to have on hand if the Rituxan didn't work. I've never taken it, and I'm not sure it would have worked prior to Rituxan treatment anyway.

This is as close as I've gotten to an opioid treatment for pain. And I had to be in extremis for my doctor to prescribe it at all. I only mention it to note that despite the hoo-hah over opioids these days, at least in my experience, doctors are extremely reluctant to prescribe opioid pain relief if there is any alternative -- even if the alternatives clearly aren't working.

It often seems like the last ten years, indeed the last twenty or more, have been catastrophic for the nation and its people and for far too many people around the world. I think of the devastation that's been wrought in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia -- but not just in those places -- as a consequence of the Imperial hubris with which our governing classes have been afflicted for far too long. Dozens of cities have been destroyed, millions of people have been displaced and at least hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in the Forever Wars undertaken against the ever-present and ever fluid "terrorist threat." In some ways Vietnam may have been worse, but this new-ish Forever War has led to so much murder and destruction with no end in sight. Blowback has been constant (not so with Vietnam) and I can't help but think that the consequences have only begun to be felt domestically. The destruction wrought abroad is bound to circle back to its source. We''re in for some nasty times ahead.

Why haven't we been able to stop it? What impels Our Rulers to such slaughter and destruction?

Millions of Americans were forced into poverty by the Financial Unpleasantness of 2007-10. Many of those who survived are still in poverty, and there they shall remain until the End. While we are supposed to hail the "booming" economy today and the historically low unemployment statistics, that won't solve the problem of those too old or too beaten down to take advantage of it.

Our Rulers truly don't care. It doesn't matter which team they're playing for. We are as dust to them.

And so one of the worst examples of the type has been sent to the throne to rule over us in majesty, and it's an ugly thing to witness, but that's where the recent past has led us. Maybe it was inevitable. I don't know. But I don't think it can end well.

I'm not as optimistic as I was. We can still learn to live simpler lives, advocate for peace and the downtrodden, lift up the good and shun the worst, but the road forward is rough and potholed. New Mexico hosts many examples of those who have tried alternatives to whatever disaster/horror has confronted them. Most have failed, some spectacularly. But there are survivors.

The Pueblos, for example, derive directly from the collapse of the Anasazi era signified by the Chaco Canyon and other ruins that dot New Mexico and the Southwest. They not only survived the collapse, they survived Spanish invasions, conquest and massacres, and later American ones. They aren't what they were, they've adapted and grown in wisdom, but despite all, they're still here, and their influence is profound.

A few of the hippie communes that were established in the late '60s and into the '70s are still functioning though on a somewhat different basis than previously. They are not communes so much as business enterprises derived from communitarian ideas and ideals. But that's how they've survived and in some cases flourished.

"Alternative lifestyles" and artistic interpretations of being here are constantly tried, and some survive for the long haul.

Those survivors will be around long after whatever happens to the Imperium.

In another ten years, I'm pretty sure we'll know what that will be.

Strap in, the wild ride continues.

Cheers,

Ché

"Let the Sunshine In"

We starve, look at one another, short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats
Wearing smells from laboratories
Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy
Listening for the new told lies
With supreme visions of lonely tunes
Somewhere, inside something there is a rush of
Greatness, who knows what stands in front of
Our lives, I fashion my future on films in space
Silence tells me secretly
Everything
Everything

Manchester, England, England
Manchester, England, England
Across the Atlantic Sea
And I'm a genius, genius
I believe in God
And I believe that God believes in Claude
That's me, that's me, that's me

We starve, look at one another, short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats
Wearing smells from laboratories
Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy
Listening for the new told lies
With supreme visions of lonely tunes
Singing our space songs on a spider web sitar
Life is around you and in you
Answer for Timothy Leary, dearie
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
...

Some Additional Paintings As The Days Grow Longer...

Not very good photos, but some of the paintings are rather nice...

[Note: These paintings -- and the previous set posted a few days ago -- are in our home, not ones that Ms Ché or I have done. The first one of this set is actually a large framed art print from the 1940's, signed "Robert Wood, 1944." I have never seen another copy of this particular one, though I'm sure they must be out there. The second is an oil on what appears to be a heavy cardboard box lid, unsigned, no doubt done by an amateur sometime in the 1920's or '30's. It's really quite beautiful, though it was damaged somehow before I bought it. The damage can be seen on the edge of the vase holding the magnolia blossoms. The next two landscapes are cheery little things. The first is what I assume is an imaginary rural scene with a custard-colored sky in a kind of folk-artist style. The second is more sophisticated and the location is noted on the back: "Jack Tone Road," which is a rural road in California's Central Valley passing through miles and miles of orchards -- peaches and almonds and apricots and plums. Well, it used to. Times change. Many of the orchards have been ripped out and disposed of, replaced with suburbs or vinyards or bare fields. The last is just a bit of color and gorgeousness to brighten up the bedroom...]
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Oh. One more. I was intending to post it earlier, but got distracted or something:

It

It's titled "Fogbound" -- a scene very familiar to me, somewhere on the coast of California, I'd guess anywhere between Santa Cruz Carmel and Mendocino. This is really the image of the Pacific Ocean I carry with me most of the time, of rocky headlands, fog, distant breakers, the sounds of seagulls and pelicans, the smell of herbs at my feet, kelp, seawater (sometimes petroleum, too, depending on where you are.)

It's cold, windy, not particularly pleasant. Evocative, though. Always evocative. And this painting, by an artist who lived in Boulder Creek  which is in the hills above Santa Cruz, so the site of this painting is probably along the coast there, always reminds me...

Let Us Reason Together -- Competing Propagandas (or "Blame Bernays") (6)

One of our constant problems as Americans -- as humans trying to muddle through somehow and as participants in our own Fate -- is the persistence and predominance of propaganda in practically every aspect of our social and political lives.

Propaganda.

We are exposed to it all the time, through constant advertising, through the entire entertainment realm and much of the academic realm, through the yapping and yammering of "balanced news" broadcasts and opinion writinh, and through the many elements of the Alternative "News" business. Don't even get started on the "elections industry" and their cadres of consultants and pollsters and what have you.

We are seeing such an explosion of competing propagandas over such a wide variety of issues these days, from abortion to domestic and international surveillance, to climate science, to the situation at Fukushima Daiichi, and on and on.

There is much smoke but little -- and often no -- light. At times, every topic seems to be the exclusive purview of propagandists, polemicists and provocateurs. It's little wonder so many people tune it out.

Most people seem to have become inured to propaganda and propagandists and it's understandable that they rarely bother to hack their way through the thickets toward some kind of truth. Instead, as intended, they either ignore it all or they adopt one or another of the competing positions as the functional equivalent of "truth" and go forth, oblivious to any fact contrary to their belief.

In some cases, one is all but required to adopt a side in a controversy and root for one's team in the supposed "marketplace of ideas." And if no side is arguing anything approaching "truth," but all sides are mired in falsehood or irrelevancy, what is one to do?

Obviously, such a one cannot be allowed to play.

Edward Bernays figured this all out generations ago, and our "marketplace of ideas" is one of his many questionable legacies.

The level of propaganda -- and competing propagandas -- we're mired in becomes very obvious when something like the Summer NSA Story hits the "marketplace." There is almost no truth or objectivity in the story, though apparently a good deal of the relatively few documents so far released are authentic enough. The story, however, has all the elements of a spy thriller novel or movie, tailor made to sell a product on the one hand, and to develop loyalties to a team on the other. Much heat, very little light.

As intended.

Let's face it, "reality" is often enough a created fiction. We get mired in these fictions, which we think of at least temporarily as "reality." But they are created, they come out of a shop, quite a cynical shop in many cases, and they are not in any objective sense "real." The Snowden/NSA Story is one of those creations, I have no doubt. What is really going on will probably remain an Inscrutable Mystery for the rest of my life, but the outlines of what may be taking place on the backchannels is fairly clear.

The NSA is having its wings clipped. It isn't being destroyed or nor is its primary work being interfered with. Instead, it is being exposed (as it has been before) by an insider -- peripheral though he may have technically been -- for its gross overreach of mission, an overreach that is being marketed as "The NSA is Spying On You; the NSA is Spying on Everyone!!!!!™ Well. Yes. And?

We knew this. Some of us knew that there are multiple layers of surveillance on practically everyone in the whole wide world, and it has been so for many, many years. We live in a surveillance society, and we know that this surveillance has only increased -- massively -- by law and practice since the events of 9/11/2001, which "changed everything." Yes, we know.

Having documentary proof that it is so is little more than gilding the lily. We now know the names of some of the programs and have (perhaps) seen sketches or charts of how they are organized and what sort of hardware/software may be employed. This is important historical knowledge for those who seek means and methods of thwarting some of this surveillance. It is historical in that what is in place and operating currently may well be quite different than what has been exposed, and it is knowledge useful only to a few adepts. And from what I've heard, they are complaining because the "knowledge" we've been given is far from sufficient to do anything about the surveillance tactics being employed. In other words, it appears that what we've been told is only enough to whip up OUTRAGE!!!!™, not even close to enough to thwart the surveillance/security apparat.

OK then. Every day that goes by, the hoard of material Snowden took with him becomes less and less current and timely. Much of what has been revealed was already many years old, and everything in the Snowden Hoard ages by the minute.

But even as history, the People should know what has been done to them, what has been done in their names, and who the major players are. We don't have more than a hint -- we've never had much more than that -- even after months and months of "revelations" and hot-as-the-sun debate and controversy over them.

That is a function of propaganda. There may be all kinds of truth carried along with the propaganda, but the point of it is to present a kind of pageant that persuades us to believe certain things and root for Our Team against the Other in the supposed contest between something and something else.

In my view, there is a contest, but it's not one that we're involved in.

From what I've seen so far, the contest is between factions -- "shops," if you will -- within the bloated intelligence community, a contest for dominance. Because of the way the NSA is organized and has typically operated outside the lines of its mandate, the NSA is seen as an internal threat to other aspects of the security/surveillance state, and so must be curbed. The way chosen to do it is to invoke a public debate about its means and methods and to generate reforms to be determined and implemented as quickly as possible to rein in a rogue agency.

This sort of thing has an extensive precedence, going back to the revelations of COINTELPRO, the Church Committee, and all the rest. Modest reform comes, but it is very quickly subverted. It doesn't last, and it has to be done again and again. Really, the only way to overcome the threat to democracy and liberty posed by out of control security and surveillance apparats is to abolish them altogether and start over, and so far as I know, no state has done that except in utter defeat after war and conquest.

The only upshot I can see from this Story of the Century is that the NSA will be pruned of its extraneous operations which will be folded into other agencies, some of which will be newly hatched, like poisons out of the mud, and the Security/Surveillance State will go on as if little or nothing had taken place.

I will add, however, that the State we're talking about will be less and less a matter of constitutional self-government and more and more a matter of corporate governance through a staff of employees that masquerade for a time as an elected government, and then, after a while, drop the charade and become what they are: "staff."

Meanwhile, the propaganda is relentless.

The New Model Revolution -- Sunday's Reformation

The explosive events of Saturday night's aborted General Assembly at OccupySacramento led to a remarkable level of reconsideration and recommitment to The Cause that took place Saturday night and into the morrow.

In talking to people on the scene and online -- quite a few who aren't in attendance in person are witness to the struggles thanks to Livestream -- it's clear they were dismayed, upset and angry at what happened, yet many understood that these explosions are a natural part of the development of this sort of Revolutionary effort. It's happened pretty much consistently throughout the movement during the early stages of development of each Occupation, including New York's.

And it's OK. Some would say it is necessary.

Because what happens afterwards is that Solidarity is reconfirmed. Yes, some of the angriest and loudest voices against what is going on may leave the Occupation and the Movement -- it's happened here, and it's happened elsewhere. It is to be expected. They may or may not come back after a suitable cooling off period. It's OK.

People have a right to their feelings and their emotions, and they have a right to make decisions for themselves. They have a right to be wrong. They have a right to their anger and to their pain.

Trying to suppress it or cover it up merely leads to greater difficulty down the road. Let. It. Out. And Let. It. Go.

It was obvious by yesterday that many, many people associated with OccupySacramento had done just that. I arrived at the Plaza just before 4:00p after spending most of the day preparing for a workshop on OWS General Assembly practices. There was a surprising number of people already there, engaged in all kinds of productive and nonviolent discussions and seminars and conversations and actively listening to one another. Ideas were popping, identifying and offering solutions to various problems was being hammered out. Focus was on particularly important issues and a growing disinterest in those issues that weren't so important.

For example, The Mayor and the City Council were no longer seen as a focal interest; they were peripheral at best, irrelevant to many participants. The internal problems of authority and transparency were being worked out as productively as possible in a large group that was tasking itself with finding solutions rather than piling on more layers of problems. I don't know what the result was because I had to go off to the OWS GA workshop, but from what I could tell, there was essentially no animosity involved in what they were doing; there was an active effort to come up with consensus solutions, and after that meeting broke up, there was no sign I could see of continuing animosity or anger at one another in the group.

In fact, cohesiveness was growing all over the Plaza as small groups and large ones explored how to rather than whether to move forward in collaboration and solidarity rather than try to continue to go forward in disharmony and rivalry leading to more and more anger and distrust.

What I saw happening was the process of learning to trust one another.

The OWS GA workshop was intended to provide information -- specifically for people interested in learning to facilitate GAs -- on how the process works in New York. It was a surprisingly large group, twice or three times the size expected, and all of them were intrigued to learn that there really is a way to do General Assemblies that works and works well on behalf of all the participants and the Occupation in general. It reinforced the general spirit that we will get through this difficult period and we will be stronger for it.

Sunday's General Assembly followed immediately after the workshop, and some of the principles and practices we had just discussed in workshop were presented to the GA for consideration and adoption on the spot; sure enough, they were so moved and adopted. This was out of order according to our previous practices, but it was realized through the workshop on OWS practices that there really is no ultimate rule book and that the GAs are quite capable of overriding previous practice by adopting new practice by consensus, and that's what happened.

To say that the transformation was immediate and startling is an understatement. It was remarkable -- and very rewarding -- to witness. The General Assembly became "owned" by Occupation as a whole, it was no longer some annoyance going on off on the side, run by "little dictators" and alienating its participants. There was intense discussion of proposals, yet always with respect for one another's positions. Remarkably innovative proposals were offered for development or adoption on the spot, and some were adopted. Others were sent back to the proposer -- respectfully -- for further development and resubmission. Everyone who had something to say about proposals under consideration was heard, respectfully, and new ideas were welcomed.

There were no blocks but not every proposal was adopted, nor should they have been. Nothing was discarded out of hand. Nothing was accepted mindlessly. People really thought about what they were doing and about the decisions they were making, and from my observations and talking to people afterwards, they felt that they were in charge for the first time. They weren't being led or forced or cajoled into doing something or adopting something that they didn't understand or that was potentially not in the interests of the Occupation. They decided based on their best assessment of the matter before them.

And that produced what used to be called "process buy in."

Some of us have been hoping for this to happen, but there is no way to force it. It has to happen organically. And it did. Some of those who have been so frustrated by the way things have devolved over the last few days were very moved to see the transformation.

Hizzoner is supposed to report back to the Assembly today. Whether he will show or not is unknown, but I doubt he will be allowed to hijack tonight. He won't be shouted down, but he won't be given the floor for more campaigning either. Should be interesting....

Also, finally, there is supposed to be a press conference this morning to announce the filing of a civil rights lawsuit on First Amendment grounds, though no details have yet been released.

Things should get very interesting indeed...

Musical Interlude: "Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In," from "Hair", Arizona Theatre Company, 2008

Feeling a little better, so it's time for a good cry.





The videos ain't so good, but it's one of the finest contemporary productions of "Hair" there has been anywhere, and there isn't any other number in the American Musical Theatre that can reduce me to a blubbering wreck every time I hear it or see it performed.

"Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In" does that to a lot of people, and not just of my generation, surprisingly enough. It did it when I first saw the show in 1969 in San Francisco, and it's done every time I've seen the show since (in revivals in which the cast had no clue to what the show was about... oh, dear.) The one time it didn't do it was when I saw the movie. I could intellectually accept the transformations Milos Forman was making with this and other numbers and appreciate what he was doing, but when it came down to it, he had sucked almost all the emotion out of the show and left it just "a movie."

Much as I denounce Arizona for cause, this production of "Hair" -- which played in Tuscon and Phoenix -- was outstanding. Of course, they'll probably never do it again.

A side note about "tribalism." "Hair" was promoted as the "tribal love-rock musical," partly on the basis of how the casting was done (not looking for a lot of bubble-headed American Musical Theatre Perfessionals), and the kind of literal tribe the producers and directors were trying to create with every company, back from the very beginning. It wasn't entirely revolutionary at the time -- it was an adaptation from the Living Theatre -- but the way it was done with "Hair" seemed most successful.

The point of making the company into a tribe was primarily for cohesiveness, of course. It's not an easy show to approach or do, and it wasn't easy back in the day, either. It took courage and talent, but it took trust even more. At least at first, it didn't have stars. There was no "name part." The story was relatively simple, but it was complicated to tell it, and that complication made it a "star" vehicle for practically everyone in the cast. There was no chorus and first and second leads and all that, at the time, and still, typical of the Broadway Musical. Every moment counted.

There was another point to the tribe: bringing the audience into the show. Letting them join in, freely, uncoerced. It worked.

But then, as time wore on, casts became jaded, much of the glow and luster of the early productions dimmed. They became... "shows" almost like any other. Audiences could sense it even before the casts did in some cases.

"Hair" closed on Broadway well before the end of the Vietnam War. It was still playing on tour at home and abroad, but on Broadway, it had fizzled out.

At least by that time there wasn't any draft any more.

So there is that.

----------------------------------------------------
The first video above has been made private for some reason. This is a video of the same scene(s) from the 2009 Broadway revival of "Hair" -- the staging is almost identical, and I'm not sure, but I think the Claude is the same actor.



[Update: No, it's not the same actor playing Claude in Arizona and on Broadway. The Arizona Claude, whose video of him singing a knock-out performance of "Flesh Failures" is Kyle Harris; the Claude on Broadway (who was no less good) was Gavin Creel.]