Theater Production about the Fourth Turning

[sbarrera]

(11-17-2019, 05:19 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-16-2019, 10:55 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Here is an interview with the playwright, Will Arbery.

https://www.wnyc.org/story/empathy-devil...lDD-mt_4wc

I heard this, and it was impressive. 

...In view of the low approval ratings of Donald Trump and his administrative chaos, I can see Donald Trump as a flash in the pan. Although the generations are not monoliths, as class, ethnicity, religion, and region matter, we can see why Trump was attractive to so many people. Americans want a definitive end to the Crisis, and liberals have become a scapegoat for divisiveness. Many want a comforting world in which 'freaks' for any reason are shoved into the recesses and rendered irrelevant. Howe-Strauss theory is meticulously non-partisan and says nothing about any class struggle (which can as easily be everyone else against the middle class as the Marxist interpretation of the proletariat against oppressors in the middle and upper classes).

Nostalgia may be an excellent commodity for marketing, but it is horrible public policy. As a political appeal it is excessively elitist even if it has the populist appeal to the common man.  Such a stock phrase as "Make America Great Again" means whatever one wants it to believe until one realizes that it really means "make America great for crony capitalists like Donald Trump". 

Trump is a false regeneracy, the sort of regeneracy that demands too much and offers too little. Maybe Trump fares best in states in which people rarely come in contact with the economic elites and their enforcers, and rarely get to see the expressions of elite indulgence and arrogance first hand. If a gigantic chunk of your income goes to a landlord so that you have the privilege of working where one can do one's career, then you are more likely to be a liberal on economics. If you see easy income going to people who live like sultans in countries in which the royal family owns the mineral resources that underpin the entire economy then you will be hostile to Trump. You might be no Marxist, but you might be an adherent in practice of Henry George, who suggests that a wholesome society taxes the Hell out of easy income to support a generous public sector. To the fascistic Right, any challenge to crony capitalism is in the same category of evil as is the Khmer Rouge.

Trump is above all else a landlord who owns property in places of high incomes and from which his class can extract high rents. He need not innovate, as he has what may be the easiest way of making money that there is short of outright crime. Where the economy is in the tank (which is much of America outside of the glitter zones), the landlords don't have it so great. Trump would have never gotten rich off real estate in Detroit, Cleveland, or St. Louis. It is far more difficult to get a high income as a slumlord than as a dealer in 'luxury' apartments that would themselves be slums if the high-income dwellers were to vanish with a collapse of the local economy. If you don't believe me, then consider what Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis were soon after the Second World War. The Good Times were never going to end.

In California one sees people driving expensive foreign cars at excessive speeds... and having a sense of entitlement. "My taxes pay your salary, and don't you forget it", says a scion of some real-estate baron or a high-tech magnate to a 'lowly' state trooper. (If I were a state trooper I would throw the book at this arrogant SOB, and as a judge I would assess as high a fine and as many points as possible). In New York City, Studio 54 may be no more, but there surely is some sybaritic replacement. 

I can see how we have an attractive High. Opportunity is more widespread by region so that America isn't Shining Cities on the Hill (for which the rent is exorbitant) and urban wrecks in which the best opportunity for many is to be a domestic servant or hamlets in which the best opportunity for most is to work in a restaurant at a freeway exit. We are going to need more equality of opportunity, and it will take an economy in which the priority is something other than enriching and indulging the Right People.

Turmp could well be a temporary aberration, but his downfall won't solve any problems (other than that of his being in power at all). The "true regeneracy" still needs to happen, which is why I think Arbrery's play could be redone from a different political viewpoint.