Of Fences and Offenses

            Last night my wife and I experienced the privilege of opening night at the Space Theatre for August Wilson’s Fences, his Pulitzer and Tony Award winning play about a black former baseball player whose dream of playing in the majors never gets a chance. In fact, if he is the Jackie Robinson who never made it to the big time it is mainly because he spent his prime in prison. After prison and long past his biological window for baseball success, he eventually settles for a job as a garbage collector for the city of Pittsburgh, the setting for all of Wilson’s plays. As the play unfolds we learn Troy is fighting to become the first black driver of a Pittsburgh garbage truck rather than remain confined to being a mere garbage can handler at the back of the truck.

            As with all of Wilson’s plays racism serves as the fuse that burns slowly through the early stages but inevitably what must ignite is more universal human dynamite, the measuring stick of all great literature. Wilson is no playfully punning Frost whose narrator in “Mending Wall” challenges his neighbor’s adage “good fences make good neighbors” by asking what they are walling in or walling out as they restore the rocks that have been “frost-heaved” and tumbled from a stone wall that separates their properties:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

                Wilson’s protagonist is named Troy implying he is capable of catastrophic, large-scale destruction... including self-destruction. He is of classic scale, larger than life, orbiting somewhere between Loman and Lear.  From the beginning we see him strutting around in front of his dilapidated house within what is the beginning of a new wooden picket fence that he adds to on weekends during most of the play. As his humiliation of working at the back of the garbage truck is relieved by his promotion to driver, so is his humanity diminished by the  appetite for more that blossoms unchecked into selfishness and grandiosity at the hands of an unstoppable charismatic “de-fenceless” ego let loose by even a small success. He is now in the driver’s seat, so off he goes. He lacks the self-discipline to manage his new power and freedom constructively and lets it run on a path to self-destruction and isolation. There is no fence to hold him. We need fear the fences of our own making more than those imposed.

                Meanwhile, he prevents his youngest son Corey from having the chance to use sports, in this case football, to make his mark and go to college ostensibly because Troy wants to protect him from the pain of being denied fulfillment of that dream. In reality, Troy himself refuses to recognize that his own behavior, not racism, was instrumental in his failure to become a major league baseball player. So he builds a fence around Corey consisting of various interventions that prevent him from fulfilling his dream. Troy cannot stand the thought of either son transcending his own garbage-collecting station in life. That’s how selfish Troy is.

                The final expression of this selfishness loses the affection and devotion of his wife when he announces he is having a child with another woman. His excuses are all self-serving and add to the fence he has built walling himself out of a meaningful life. He ends up essentially friendless, wifeless, and fellow workerless by having moved to the driver’s seat of the garbage truck his life has become.

                The message is we become our enemy. Frost was on to something.  We may think we are walling in when we are walling out and giving everyone offence (a fence). At the end of the play Corey returns home in a Marine corporal’s uniform but he is still giving power to his chief oppressor, his father, who is now dead and about to be buried. His mother, half- brother, and even his young half-sister gradually break down his defenses little by little and take apart the fences he has built that still allow him to be his father’s prisoner. He is finally freed to attend his father’s funeral and bury not only his father but the legacy of anger and hatred his lineage has so adamantly maintained for generations. He is free at last from the bondage of others but especially the bondage of self.     

                What made this production especially great was the very high level of acting across the stage throughout the play. All the characters were believable, wonderfully human, and flawlessly represented.  For a first show or even a seasoned production, the details were exquisitely refined.

                I will not soon forget this production, and I will never look at a fence the same again.         

              

The Truth about the Tea Party

            The great disadvantage of an incumbent today is that facts are available. President Obama has a very public record of his presidency; Romney does not. In a nation that embraces facts only when they are convenient, the candidate with the most reality attached is at a distinct disadvantage.  The most glaring reality available today is an 8.3% unemployment rate. It is the albatross that weighs Obama down.

            Never mind the fact the Tea Party was created as soon as Obama arrived in the White House. Made to look like a grass roots movement, it was funded and orchestrated from the beginning by the likes of David Koch, an American oil baron, who, among others, was not about to let a pragmatic black man run the show. Even though Obama inherited the worst economic mess since the 1930’s, the very people who created the mess would quickly use the artificially inseminated grass roots trick called the Tea Party to make sure Obama’s solutions would not work. By installing Tea Party candidates in the House by 2010, the blockade was successfully erected. No further Keynesian solutions would be allowed. The “market” would be restored as mover and shaker and this uppity community organizer out of the wrong side of Chicago would be thwarted and neutered.

            What the Tea Party has been taught to fear more than anything is a powerful government. If government could actually succeed in reversing all the damage done by bubble and bust laissez-faire capitalism on the loose, the high stakes games played by the fast and loose players on Wall Street and the corporate big guys like Koch would be curtailed. They no longer would be able to generate bubbles as large and profitable as they once had.

            Meanwhile, thanks to voices such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News brainwashers, the lowly soldiers of the Tea Party are convinced that their self-interests are the same as the Wall Street gamers and corporate giants and that government is the problem. The truth is corporations such as Wal-Mart and Target have had a much greater negative impact on small businesses throughout the country than government ever could.  And yet the small businessman has been taught to see big business as a big brother rather than his destroyer. Unlike the unemployment statistic, there is no comparable index that measures the job or small business loss through Big Box economic oligarchy.

            The dimming myth of the American Dream is kept alive by the same trick that gets statistically impaired people to buy lottery tickets. You, too, can be a winner. All you have to do is play. Target and Wal-Mart are simply the current winners. Your turn is just around the corner. With hard work and a little luck, your business can become another Home Depot. The only thing that stands in your way is…government. That’s like blaming the referee for your winless or mediocre season.

            Let’s call Big Box stores Big Boxers. In the sport of boxing there are weight classes. The heavyweights do not box the bantamweights. In capitalism it’s a free-for-all where all weight classes are in the same arena, small businesses and large. The only hope for the small business is that a heavyweight does not come to town and pummel the lightweight with prices and variety it cannot possibly match.

            The American Dream was once most broadly alive during the Eisenhower administration when taxes on the rich were about 90%. Employment was high, home ownership was on the rise, and the difference between the wages of the average worker and the CEO were about what they are in Japan today: CEOs made twenty times what the average worker made.  Today,  a president, who is labeled a socialist by today’s extreme right (the Tea Party folks), is actually right of Eisenhower in relative conservatism. But the American public has been sitting in the ever increasingly conservative cauldron for the last three decades like the frog in the proverbial pot of boiling water and failing to notice that their American Dream is dying a slow death.

            It is time to wake up, America, to the truth. Stop being true believers shaped by Wall Street and big business. They are pursuing their self-interests, not yours. And their self-interests have become all-powerful. Your only hope is a more powerful referee, not the absence of one.