Showing posts with label Laura Bush. Show all posts
Bad Theater: Tony Kushner Takes On Laura Bush
"Cutting edge" playwright Tony Kushner has written a series of short one-act plays presently gracing the stage in London's West End. One of them features Laura Bush reading The Brothers Karamazov to some dead Iraqi children. If that's the best the most acclaimed playwright of the last 20 years can do, it's no wonder Broadway is struggling:
Tony Kushner is still best known for his epic fantasia Angels in America. But, even in these five short plays imported from the Guthrie Theatre and Berkeley Rep, he reveals his gift for blending the hallucinatory and the political. And, even though the works are variable in quality, collectively they confirm one character's credo that "ambivalence expands our options".Tony Taccone's production saves the best till last: a playlet, which caused a scandal in America, in which Laura Bush treats a group of dead Iraqi children to a summation of the Grand Inquisitor's speech from The Brothers Karamazov.
But even here Kushner's polemical fury at the Iraq invasion is qualified by his residual sympathy for Mrs Bush. Having mouthed the conventional platitudes in defence of the war, she is shocked into a guilty awareness, telling the imagined children "we will pay for your deaths one way or another".
As performed, powerfully, by Kate Eifrig, the piece leaves you in two minds about its heroine: a part of her identifies with the grand inquisitor's belief in the impossibility of freedom, while another side craves the absolution that Christ's kiss, in Dostoevsky's narrative, bestows.
It just so happens that I have been reading Laura Bush's Spoken From The Heart, and all I can say is Kushner is not fit to shake the former First Lady's hand, let alone write a tired polemic about her. Bush grew up in a modest middle class home in a dusty Texas town. She worked as a teacher and librarian, often working in inner cities, doing the sort of work that liberals say they approve of, but would never really do themselves. Bush knows more about the flora and fauna of her native state than the whinging urban Greens who make up the environmental movement - and she has done more practical work to protect the environment than a thousand Greenpeace drones waving signs. During the Bush years, Laura Bush visited Afghanistan, spoke out in favor of women's rights, and faced a lot more physical danger than Kushner, who mostly has had to face the occasional bad review.
Most important, Laura Bush was an advocate for - you might want to sit down - literature and literacy. She always talked about her favorite books, including Karamazov. She founded the National Book Festival. You would think a literary guy like Kushner would appreciate that, but, no, he uses that to mock her. Compare that to our uninspiring current First Lady who is known for organic gardens, obesity campaigns, and power shopping.
Kushner, I might add, had one critical and popular success; that being Angels In America. That was 20 years ago. Whatever artistry Kushner may have is subsumed by his political astuteness. He picks his topics and controversies to appeal to urban liberals and critics who want to be able to write about Important Statements, rather than cats. The "genius" of Tony Kushner is as carefully cultivated and protected as the "compassion" of Ted Kennedy - who then never had to answer for his many personal failings.
Appropriately, the play is part of a collection of one-acts titled Tiny Kushner. It certainly does take a small man to write such a mean spirited piece about a classy lady who represents the best of America.
No Exit: English Professor Arrested At Starbucks
Via Althouse, here's this week's mad-as-hell symbol of America's economic misery in the Summer of Recovery. An English Professor in an Upper West Side Starbucks was ejected from Starbucks after she refused to "play along" with the Starbucks' method of taking her order. High dudgeon has ensued:
Starbucks' strange vernacular finally drove a customer nuts.
Lynne Rosenthal, a college English professor from Manhattan, said three cops forcibly ejected her from an Upper West Side Starbucks yesterday morning after she got into a dispute with a counterperson -- make that barista -- for refusing to place her order by the coffee chain's rules.
Rosenthal, who is in her early 60s, asked for a toasted multigrain bagel -- and became enraged when the barista at the franchise, on Columbus Avenue at 86th Street, followed up by inquiring, "Do you want butter or cheese?"
Things escalated from there:
Yesterday's breakfast-bagel tussle heated up when the barista told the prickly prof that he wouldn't serve her unless she specified whether she wanted a schmear of butter or cheese -- or neither
"I yelled, 'I want my multigrain bagel!' " Rosenthal said.
"The barista said, 'You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!' "
But Rosenthal, on principle, refused to back down.
"I didn't even want the bagel anymore," she said.
The bagel brouhaha escalated until the manager called cops, and responding officers ordered her to leave, threatening to arrest her if she went back inside, she said.
"It was very humiliating to be thrown out, and all I did was ask for a bagel," recalled Rosenthal, who said she holds a Ph.D. from Columbia.
"If you don't use their language, they refuse to serve you. They don't understand what a plain multigrain bagel is."
Sob! I will agree that the barista needlessly escalated the argument. I used to manage a cafe' and whenever a customer started acting like an a**, I told my employees to just get the jerk's money and get 'em out of the shop. Jerk customers aren't there to have a rational discussion about company policy RE: ordering off of the menu. They are there to act like jerks. It is the better part of valor to just take their money, rather than try to "keep it real." The barista didn't have to get cheeky, and his decision to do so gave The Professor all the rope she needed to climb up on her high horse.
(I used to have a bar tender buddy who said he dealt with jerk customers by answering their every statement with a hearty "Absolutely Sir/Ma'am!" In his head he would substitute "f*** you!" for "absolutely." This allows everyone to at least preserve their dignity.)
Of course, the fact that the barista's manager backed him up, rather than the customer, tells me everything I need to know, which is that The Professor was a known quantity at that Starbucks, and not a well-liked one at that. Managers are always biased on the side of the customer unless the customer is acting like a prima donna, as was the case here. The Professor is trying to play up this Howard (Howard-ette?) Beale role, standing up to corporate bullying with her grammatical integrity. But, who was the bully here?
On the one side, you have a 60 year old woman - a college professor, no less! - returning again and again to Starbucks to order her bagel, despite knowing that she doesn't like how Starbucks handles her order. Now it's been years since I've been in NYC, and maybe they do things differently there, as opposed to here in SF, but it is my understanding that there are a number of establishments in Manhattan that will sell you a bagel, and do so in a manner that has little reference to the methods employed at Starbucks. But, for some reason, this was not an option. You could almost say that The Professor was looking for a fight and would not rest until she was able to cause a stink, at which point she retreated into her "I'm a victim" crouch.
On the other side, you have this unnamed (maybe Steve Slator found a new gig?) barista. We don't know how old he is, although it's a cinch that he is much younger than The Professor. He probably makes a little above the minimum wage, plus tips. His shift probably started long before The Professor woke up (Starbucks' earliest shifts start at 4:30 AM). No one wakes up in the morning wanting to recite the Starbucks dialogue; it's pretty much imposed on you by that company's endless layers of managers. And here comes this lady, again and again, who wants to turn the simple act of ordering a bagel into a moment of High Urban Drama. I'd mouth off, too.
The Professor, and the sympathetic reporter who wrote the linked article, would love for this car crash to symbolize something, and it certainly does although not in the way she would like. What she would like is to be the brave heroine of tradition and old-fashioned values: of a time when everyone spoke proper English and a trip to a restaurant didn't include getting roped into a dopey dialogue scripted back in some corporate HQ. What we really have is a woman old enough to be this barista's mother, if not grandmother (meow!), bullying someone just trying to get through the day. She is acting no differently than a baroness sniffing over the the "help."
The Professor undoubtedly believes in equal rights and progressive values (can we all agree that a Manhattan college professor on the Upper West Side probably voted for Obama/Kerry/Schumer/etc?) ... in the abstract. But, in a face to face confrontation, she is as bitchy and snobby as all of those Republicans she imagines in her head (and can you imagine how Laura Bush would have reacted to the barista? She would have fixed him with a Look and made him feel lower than a worm). The fact is that our "betters" are often much worse than the rest of us.
Laura Heads Off Into the Sunset
I've already said my blogging farewell to the President, but I think special mention should be made of his wife, Laura.
In a lot of ways, she was the best part of his administration: cool, understated, very intelligent, witty. Best of all, she absolutely refused to engage in a pity party when asked the inevitable questions about "How do you feel about all of your husband's critics?" Instead, she would smile patiently (while also turning the corners of her mouth down), lower her voice just a touch, and say "Well, there's always criticism..." But, with the tone of her voice she would express what she REALLY thought, which was deep deep disapproval. I have a lot of relatives in Texas - most of them women - and, believe me, if The Left knew what Laura Bush thought of them, they would hang their heads in shame.
Whether she intended to or not, Laura Bush is the quintessential GOP woman of her era, just as Pat Nixon and her cloth coat were once the exemplars for the Greatest Generation.
When I see Laura Bush, I also see women like my mother and all of my aunts - Republicans all, and exact contemporaries to Laura - who were smarter, funnier, more dignified, more fun, more youthful, more stylish, better read, better educated (even if it was at at SMU and UT), better able to handle their men, and much more confident than their dour, pioneering "sisters" on the other side.
Truth be told, I was more offended by the Laura = Stepford Wife jokes than I ever was by the Bush = Hitler ones. W could take care of himself, but Laura never asked for this role. But, once it was thrust on her, she always carried herself well. She didn't make many "political" statements, but when she did she was spot on. Believe it or not, she was the administration's clearest eyed spokesman for the oppressed citizens of Burma, going as far as to publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. She was also a clear voice for women's rights in the third world, an area where most of the western world's brassy, loud mouthed feminists often couldn't find on a map, let alone in their hearts.
I love that Laura Bush was a librarian, and made it her cause to support reading. Maybe that's a more "typical" first lady cause, but she really threw herself into it - setting up the National Book Festival, giving speeches about the importance of reading, and best of all discussing her favorite books. Her favorite book was "The Brothers Karamozov," and her comments about it showed that she had read it many times, and thought about it quite a bit. Maybe she didn't reform healthcare, but she did show the world what a sophisticated thinker a "regular" person can be. Michelle Obama appears to be preparing to follow Laura's path, rather than the activist role that seems to be the default position for Democratic First Ladies. I like to think it's because of Laura's understated example that this is the case.
And, unlike a lot of political marriages, it was clear that she and her husband really loved one another. I suspect the most interesting White House conversations of the last 8 years - especially in the dark days after 9/11 - took place in the private quarters after the last door had been shut against the world.
So, good bye Laura. You have a lot of years ahead of you and I know that you will live them well.
