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| Putting on a Play as Protest | |||||||
| Actors from across the nation will stage a sexy anti-war play from ancient Greece on March 3. Our columnist lists his many opinions on the ‘Lysistrata Project’ | |||||||
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| Feb. 24 issue — Are you upset that the United States—unable to persuade the United Nations, unable to shut up the French, unable to de-nuke North Korea—still seems headed for war with Iraq? |
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ARE YOU ANGERED at how this war against Iraq is being sold as a vital battle in the War on Terror—even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks? Are you put off by the fact that most Americans don’t seem to care that President Bush has neither outlined a plan for a post-war Iraq nor explained how much the whole thing will cost us? Well, hey, kids, let’s put on a show! That’s, at least, what thousands of committed anti-war Liberals will be doing next Monday night, when they’ll be presenting staged readings of the ancient Greek comedy, “Lysistrata”—one of the greatest anti-war satires ever. Written in 410 BC, Aristophenes’s play tells the story of a group of women in the war-torn Greek city-states who take an oath to deprive their husbands of sex until they sign a lasting peace treaty. The “Lysistrata Project” was dreamed up a month ago by two New York City actresses who oppose the war in Iraq but had no way of letting anyone know about it (don’t you hate it when that happens?). What started as a simple reading of “Lysistrata” quickly blossomed to 620 readings in 38 countries worldwide and all 50 states (for the one nearest you, check out http://www.lysistrataproject.com). “What we’re doing is similar to the plot of the play,” said one of the actresses, Kathryn Blume. “A group of people who feel powerless to affect change get together to do something.” Naturally, the readings in New York City and Los Angeles feature the usual cabal of show-biz liberals, but the ones in heartland cities like Arkadelphia, Ark., Ames, Iowa, and Duluth, Minn. are being staged by everyday people who not only oppose the war, but also know how to have some good, bawdy fun. I know it was written more than 2,000 years ago, but have you read “Lysistrata” lately? Sure, most Americans think that sex was invented sometime in 1958, but “Lysistrata” reminds us that people were having fun naked long before the invention of the fold-down backseat. I mean, this is a play that would make Dick Cheney blush! While the women fondle each others’ breasts and compare their genitals (hey, that Aristophenes knew how to put the fannies in the seats!), the men are left to groan under the weight of astoundingly huge erect phalluses that they wear for most of the show. And nothing is left to the imagination. The main character, Lysistrata, tells the women that if they refrain from sex, the men “will get their tools up and be wild to lie with us. That will be the time to refuse, and they will hasten to make peace.” The women take an oath of abstinence—”I will have naught to do whether with lover or husband, albeit he come to me with an erection…I will neither extend my Persian slippers towards the ceiling nor will I crouch like the carven lions on a knife-handle” (me-ow!)—and Lysistrata holds together her womanly coalition. The play is so good that after I showed it to my wife, she immediately volunteered—some would say too eagerly—to take the no-sex oath. I quickly reminded her that there was no reason to withhold her womanly charms because I am already opposed to the war, but she rolled over muttering something about patriotic sacrifice. We’ll see what will happen in my bedroom, but in the play, the men are so eager to make peace that they don’t even bother with a treaty. “No need for many words; you can see what a state we are in,” one character says, pointing to his “state.” His fellow negotiator is less subtle: “Good, God,” he says, “this erection is killing me!” Can you imagine Rush Limbaugh reading that part? And that’s the point. The Lysistrata Project may just be a bit of leftist tweaking, but it reveals a great deal about the difference between a Liberal-style protest and its Conservative counterpart. It’s not merely a political divide, but a cultural divide. When a bunch of Conservative activists get together in a room, they talk about getting bigger tax cuts and getting fewer social programs. When a bunch of Liberal activists get into a room, they talk about putting on a show to piss off the Conservatives. We saw that last month, when First Lady Laura Bush hastily cancelled a White House poetry symposium on Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman after hearing that several speakers planned to highlight the poets’ anti-war works. (And they say the well-read Laura is the smart one in the Bush family; any third-grade English teacher could’ve anticipated that politics might infect a literature salon taking place in the East Wing while the West Wing is finalizing war plans.) The speakers thought they’d use poetry to change people’s minds about the war (can you imagine their banners? “Build Stanzas, Not Bombs!” “Free Iraq! Free Verse!” “War is an ‘Epic’ Mistake”). The artistic approach has pluses—artists sway people because they’re so sensitive—and minuses—artists lose people because they’re so oblique. One poet was guilty of the latter, writing, “Teaching the first lesson and the last/great falling light of summer will you last/longer than school time?” (Yeah, that’s stanza’s really going to bring the war machine to a grinding halt.) |
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But at least we Liberals try to have some fun. Let Ron Radosh, Fred Barnes, William Safire, William Kristol and George Will have the Op-Ed page; at least we have those open mike nights at those coffeehouses in Berkeley! To the barricades! Whether it’s “Lysistrata” or “The West Wing,” this is how Liberals approach political issues. How else do you explain all those paper-mache puppets that always show up at the World Economic Forum protests? How else can you explain the naked women playing in the snow in New York’s Central Park so that their bodies would spell out the words “No Bush”? How else can you explain that fatigue-covered father carrying his “dead” son to persuade the Los Angeles City Council to pass an anti-war resolution? Pentagon stunt? You can rest assured, those puppeteers, those naked women and that bloody “soldier” aren’t members of College Republicans. It’s not a new thing, of course. In the 1960s, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young lamented “four dead in Ohio”—the peace protesters gunned down at Kent State—rather than singing songs of support for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Bob Dylan sang “Blowing in the Wind,” not “Blowing Up Vietnam.” Country Joe McDonald sang the ultimate question, “What are we fightin’ for?” and answered it, “Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn” rather than, “Because they’re damn Commies!” And Abbie Hoffman tried to levitate the Pentagon. Even Big Money Liberals are theater majors at heart. Indeed, the New York Times reported this week that a husband-and-wife team of Liberal venture capitalists, Sheldon and Anita Drobny, will start a radio network to counter Conservative broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. But the fledgling effort won’t do for political dialogue what guys like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Limbaugh have done (namely, end the very notion of “dialogue”). Rather, it will “enlist well-known entertainers with a liberal point of view for commercial programs that would heavily rely on comedy and political satire.” The Drobny couple is taking the “Lysistrata” approach because, according to the Times, “Liberal hosts do not have…the fire-and-brimstone manner” that comes so easily to Conservatives. Sure, Liberals have been asking for a Democratic Rush Limbaugh ever since Hillary Clinton spoke of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy,” but the reason is obvious: Liberals don’t want to be Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly. They want to be Aristophenes. And we should be thankful for that. Whenever Liberals cross-over into Limbaugh territory, the results are typically disastrous: the flag-burning Liberal can be just as sanctimonious as the flag-waving Conservative. For instance, have you heard of these new anti-war ads that Ben and Jerry (yes, the ice cream guys from Vermont) are trying to get on the air? These are the kind of remarkably self-righteous ads whose hearts are in the right place, but whose creativity got trapped in some Bill Clinton focus group. I mean, one of them even features Susan Sarandon! “Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know: What did Iraq do to us?” Sarandon says. That’s the last thing that’s going to get America off the warpath. Now, a bunch of horny men with six-foot phalluses—that’s the ticket! Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at www.gersh.tv © 2003 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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