This has been running through my mind/memory and on my flat screen these past few days... :
the whole film is on You Tube and is SO worth seeing!! the acting alone is stunning, the writing even more so. most of the cast had been performing this on stage for a year or more, so ... tight.
but all that is truly besides the point. this film/play first came to mind a few years ago when Hamilton was first making it big... this is similar in the way that Punk is similar to the Beatles... the accents are the same, but children, the anger is NOT the same. A lot of liberals and random human beings are rather wondering what the fuck happened in the good ol' America/AmeriKKKa of the past few decades... it's like the 60s never happened they say. well they did, and i know because i lived them.. but i also know that that was 50 fucking years ago when many things were different even as some issues, as these songs and the texts of Jean-Paul Marat and the Marquis de Sade (yes THAT Marquis de Sade) remind us--as they said then and we still automatically chant today: "Le Roi est Morte--Vive le Roi" (the king is dead--long live the king" -- supposedly shouted out at the beheading of Louis XVI (XV?) ...
so we look back or we are stunned, stymied and astonished that things haven't changed, that many policies and humanitarian, environmental, and you know, scientific, issues are being abandoned and rejected in favor of very short term gains. Fear paralyzes and blinds, paralysis empowers, and the perception of power invariably un-levels the playing field.
but as Kennedy prophetically observed - nobody can avoid the lone gunman. we need to recognize that yes, there are cycles, that there are repetitions and spirals, and back-sliding - but so very much of that is really just turning the lights on in a formerly dim bar--that filth and disorder was/is always there, just unnoticed... the 60s were a grand time, if you didn't get drafted, busted, and happened to be able to live a middle-class predominantly white urban life. inner city? not so much! Viet Nam? very much not so much! blue collar jobs and life--pretty dead end, and once again, paralyzing..
was Marat right? is anarchy an answer? a response? even possible? wait 20 years and mother nature will very likely provide y'all with a chance to find out! ... I prefer some of the thoughts of De Sade on this one--to feel, passionately feel, to think to keep a sharp eye out for when and where a word, a letter to a senator, a confrontation in the Walmart parking lot can make a difference. You can make the best soup in the world, the most addictive sedating soup in the world (Fox news for example)... but ONE DROP of cyanide (Facts) can poison the whole pot.
Get facts as best as can be determined, get questions and listen for answers not workaround replies from "officials" - remember they are an amazingly scared bunch, and scared people fight hard, dirty and desperately, so go in armed for a fight and recognize that you have to be willing to ruin a person's professional life once and for all to make your point. anything less, and you're gonna leave the O.K. Corral slung over the backside of an ass...
