I don’t recall being this tired during an opera rehearsal period in the past. But then it’s been seven years since I last rehearsed a fully staged opera on top of my usual work schedule and in the interim I have aged rather more than I might like to admit. A pandemic and a few other health issues probably didn’t help. I’ll make it over the finish line in nine days but I’m finding myself with a certain need to pace myself and not take on even more obligations. The opera, well operas as there are two relatively short ones in Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, are coming together and the finished product should be quite enjoyable. Get your tickets now from Opera Birmingham. I have some fun bits of staging, especially in Cavalleria where I play the village priest as well as random Italian peasant. It’s always nice to be given something on which to build a character arc when one is in the chorus. I also have my traditional opera stage drunk moment – but it’s not especially showy.
We certainly live in interesting times as the events of the last few days have shown. Since Easter, the President of the United States has tweeted a vulgar and blasphemous Easter morning message, delivered a random political rant at the White House Easter Egg Roll confusing some poor staffer in an Easter Bunny costume no end, not to mention the small children in their sun dresses and bow ties, threatened genocide and various other war crimes, and acquiesced to a cease fire which leaves the declared enemy in a much better position than they were at the start of hostilities. When the definitive history of the Trump administrations is written by some future historian, it will be interesting to see what is made of all this. Unfortunately, I am unlikely to be alive to read it as it usually takes forty or fifty years to get enough perspective on historical events to really understand what was going on and I am not planning on living to age 115 or so. Most of the healthy centenarians I have met over the years have the same complaint. They’re lonely as all of the people who understand the world through the same lens as they do are either gone or too infirm to me much fun.
While Easter is not an especially important holiday for the Unitarian Universalist church (the divinity of Jesus not being one of the tenets), we did have a sermon on resurrection in all of its meanings. It started off with the story of an aged cat who wandered away from home and was gone for a Biblical forty days before returning to the bosom of his family. And it got me thinking about the meaning of resurrection in my life. No one has risen from the dead around me to my knowledge but I’m quite familiar with the concept of rebirth from loss, having had to do this several times. The collapse of my professional life in California drove me to a state that I had never visited prior to my job interview and now, nearly thirty years later it is home and full of people who accept and support me just as I am. The death of Steve left a void which I ended up filling with music and theatre. The death of Tommy led to introspection and writing and books.
And maybe that’s what we need to think about as a nation. All of the craziness and all of the destruction may be setting us up for being able to move forward and create something better. We’ve been fossilized socially and politically for the last few decades and until we get rid of the old, the new cannot flourish. We used to have a culture that constantly changed as each new generation came of age but since the 90s and the Baby Boom obtaining hegemony, we’ve been in stasis without a whole lot of the new and an unintentional holding back of younger generations from really being able to mature and have their time on the national stage. I have lots of younger friends and I know what creative and dynamic people they are but you’d never really know about what they have to offer as the media focuses on what remains static and comfortable and as crazy politics sucks all of the air out of the room leaving little room for reporting on things outside of the mainstream.
What comes next. Who knows. Events in Hungary may be instructive. Viktor Orban has spent the last decade and a half building an authoritarian regime and hollowing democracy out by slowly changing the rules regarding elections and the judiciary, leading to a party political elite. Guess what, the elite began to think that the remaining rules no longer applied to them and corruption began to creep into all of their dealings. The population tends to notice when the ruling class begins to operate under ‘rules for thee but not for me’ and a meaningful opposition has appeared and coalesced and Orban may go down to electoral defeat in the coming election. The Western World’s right wing superstars have been rushing into Budapest to try and change things. Vance, LePen, Meloni have all been there but it doesn’t seem to be making much difference in the polls.
Something similar can happen here. We need to coalesce around a candidate and set of ideals that we all can agree on as Americans as they are part of our political DNA – freedom, fairness, kindness, equality of opportunity and before the law – all things that have been in short supply with MAGA thinking. The left will have to set aside its ideological purity tests and its rigid thinking regarding progressive values. The right who have become disillusioned by Trump and all of his destructive impulses and broken promises will need to be welcomed without shame or blame. Religious ideals and impulses will need to be returned to church and taken out of the political sphere. We may all have to give up some private wealth to build a stronger public commons. I just don’t know if we’re ready to do all of that yet or what conditions are necessary to push people into taking the necessary steps.
I return time and again to Masha Gessen’s seminal essay ‘Autocracy: Rules for Survival’ originally published in November of 2016 after Trump’s first victory. In it, they laid out six very simple rules for what was to come: 1. Believe the autocrat. 2. Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. 3. Institutions will not save you. 4. Be outraged. 5. Don’t make compromises. 6. Remember the future. I’ve seen far too many people in positions of power and influence violate these rules repeatedly. Media figures, attorneys, and university administrators who have complied in advance. Pundits on both left and right making light of horrific things by focusing on incidentals that are more normal. Religious leaders rejecting all of the lessons that all religions teach regarding love and welcome for a chance to increase wealth and temporal power. Perhaps I should have these placed on a t-shirt next to my simple ‘Get up. Get dressed. Go out. Do good.’ They do complement each other.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 