People Before Profit blog

“Blueprint for Paradise”: A polished drama about Nazis for our time

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 12:38:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - The ruins of the Murphy Ranch, an abandoned pre-WWII Nazi compound in Pacific Palisades, a stony area of L.A. north of Santa Monica on the route toward Malibu, have inspired a new play, now enjoying its world premiere in Hollywood. Blueprint for Paradise by Laurel M. Wetzork reconfirms that L.A. is a magnificent town for great theatre. Every one of its seven actors has a long list of credits in film, TV, and video - which likely accounts for why they're here.

Blueprint for Paradise was a semi-finalist in both the national Eugene O'Neill playwriting competition and the HUMANITAS/Center Theatre Group playwriting competition (2015).

Set in late 1941 during the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor, and inspired by true events, Wetzork imagines the relationship between African-American architect Paul Revere Williams (designer of landmark L.A. buildings including Saks Fifth Ave and the Los Angeles County Courthouse, as well as private residences for a number of well known movie stars) and a wealthy American couple (he's a fishing magnate) who employed him to design a compound and training ground for Nazi sympathizers - keeping from him, of course, the true nature of the project.

There was in fact a couple, Winona and Norman Stephens, sympathizers of American pro-Nazi groups, who purchased fifty acres of land intended to be a self-sufficient base for Nazi activities in the U.S., complete with its own water storage and fuel tanks, bomb shelter, a four-story, 22-bedroom mansion, and various outbuildings and bunkers. In the play the couple are Clara and Herbert Taylor.

The abandoned site, currently in a state of disrepair and covered in graffiti, is owned by the City of Los Angeles and has become a popular hiking destination. In February, 2016, many of the structures were demolished due to safety concerns, but some of Williams' architectural work is still extant.

Rooting her play in historical events, Wetzork places special emphasis on race relations and the subjugation of women in the larger context of Nazi thinking, especially the sterilization movement. The American eugenics movement, represented by the Human Betterment Foundation, based in Pasadena, attracted support from many "leading citizens," including the president of the University of Southern California, board chairman of the California Institute of Technology, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, university professors, pastors, medical and scientific professionals and other private individuals. The objective was to "improve" society by weeding out "defectives," the "feeble-minded," "mentally diseased," and poor people on public charity - in other words, a whiter America with "fewer or none of everyone else." The German Nazi movement picked up much of this ideology from America.

Members of Clara Taylor's (Meredith Thomas) household include her loyal and insightful, though not English-fluent Chinese maid Fenny Gao (Ann Hu) and an Italian valet Alessandro "Alex" Farnase (Alex Best). They get the "intersectionality" of oppression - of themselves as immigrants with accents, and of their mistress who is squashed under her husband Herbert's (David Jahn) thumb.

When the highly recommended Paul Williams (Regi Davis) appears - to Clara's shock he turns out to be a Black man! - she is initially reluctant to engage him, but Wetzork weaves a subtle fabric of mutually discovered interests that bond Clara and Williams closer. "I wanted to examine the wife's journey," the playwright says, "to discover how Williams' achievements and personality might have shaken her preconceived notions of the way the world should work."

The Human Betterment Foundation, the ultra-conservative Mothers of America, the fascist Silver Legion of America, the America First moment, all formed part of a vast network of corporate-sponsored pro-German groups that opposed U.S. involvement in the war all the way up to December 7, 1941. Among the other pillars of their undemocratic ideology, Wetzork also shows this crowd as intensely anti-Communist and anti-union (no surprise there). If fascism is an extreme form of capitalism as a corporate state that governs in the absence of democratic, egalitarian rights, Wetzork completely nails how a certain sector of American industrialists were prepared to encourage a Nazi victory in Europe and the spread of such a system to the Americas. The compound in Pacific Palisades would have been its HQ for the Western U.S.

Two other characters fill out the cast of seven, the sinister Nazi agent Wolfgang Schreiber (Peter McGlynn) whose promises to Herbert Taylor of corporate monopoly in the fishing sector after the Nazi takeover lead the American industrialist into a relationship of pathetic dependency; and a Southerner, improbably named Ludwig Gottschalk (Steve Marvel), who is a homegrown Nazi leader. His was the only character whose backstory needed more exposition to be completely believable.

Laura Steinroeder directs this expert crew of actors. Some of these characters, although fully developed, are standard-issue "types" from the Forties, like the German Nazi and the Chinese maid. The fragile but surprisingly resilient Clara and Paul Williams (who reminds me of a younger James Earl Jones) stand out as the most original and evolved. In fact, the Forties esthetic dominates here as Wetzork's homage to the era. If we didn't know otherwise, we could easily imagine this as a stage version of a classic noir film, except perhaps for some allusions to Nazi philosophy that sound purposefully contemporary. The author has lovingly constructed a polished "well-made play" à la Lillian Hellman of The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine.

That once almost obligatory style of drama subsequently came under criticism, if not attack and ridicule, for taking no account of experimental techniques, for wrapping up all the problems and ambiguities in a neat bow at the end. It became "dated" and "passé," but here it works just fine: The tip of the hat to that era is noted and appreciated. If the "well-made play" happens to be your thing, then from that point of view alone, not to mention the politics and the pure theatre of Blueprint for Paradise, this is your ticket.

The effective single neocolonial living-room set design is by Gary Lee Reed; moody lighting is by Matthew Gorka; sound by Cricket S. Myers with timely news broadcasts about military events in Europe; and stylish costumes by Michael Mullen.

Any theatergoer will have a highly satisfying experience with this play. More than that, it is also a cautionary tale about what was going on under our noses just a few miles from where it's being staged, and what, without vigilance, could happen again in the country we live in.

Blueprint for Paradise plays through Sept. 4, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 3 pm, at the Hudson Theatres, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles 90038. For information and tickets, please contact (323) 960-4412 or www.BlueprintForParadise.com.

Photo: Meredith Thomas and Regi Davis / Ed Krieger

“The Suitcase”: Europe’s and America’s Holocausts seen from the Shawng Zeleezay

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 11:25:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - The ambitious Echo Theater Company, responsible for the currently running office drama One of the Nice Ones, is now also staging the United States premiere of a surrealistic Polish play about the Holocaust, The Suitcase. The 2011 work is by Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, born in 1964 and considered one of her country's most provocative contemporary playwrights and screenwriters.

The Suitcase (Walizka in Polish) is a memory-and-dream play taking place in Paris. The Narrator (Jeff Alan-Lee), a suave, ironic boulevardier who's a cheesier version of the Master of Ceremonies in the musical Cabaret, introduces us to unusual stories, focusing on one neurotic Parisian of Polish ancestry whose mother kept from him all relevant information about his father.

Our subject is Franswa Jackoh (Vincent Castellanos), the name itself a vaguely phonetic version of a French-Jewish name. Already we understand we are viewing this story from the distance of the French capital's elegant Champs Elysées, conveniently if confusingly transliterated for the audience as "Shawng Zeleezay." The rest of the play confirms that we are looking at the Holocaust through a maze of prisms, refracting history through filters of language, nationality, generation, physical distance and tone. Even in Artur Zapałowski's translation we hear an English that is not quite vernacular. The humorous pantomimic touch recalls Roberto Benigni's 1997 Holocaust film Life Is Beautiful, which gave rise to serious complaints over the appropriateness of "laughing at everything."

Franswa inscribes an improbable note to the father he never knew, tucking it into a mystical wall connected to heaven, imploring him to "please come back this instant." Sure enough, his prayer is answered in an unexpected way, for on a visit to local Holocaust museum he notices a suitcase on loan from Auschwitz, clearly marked with his father's name. The connection that had been denied to the son now appears in this freakish visitation from the father, who bears the curious name Pantofelnik. A common installation at Holocaust museums is a grimy pile of shoes of the death camp inmates. "Pantofel" is the Yiddish word for a slipper or loafer.

Other characters Franswa encounters, such as The Narrator's stage companion Jackleen (Claire Kaplan); The Miserable Tour Guide at the Holocaust Museum (that's the character's name, played by Alexandra Freeman); The Poet (Sigute Miller) - referred to by a somewhat Germanic name Bruna, closely related to the color braun, as in shirts - who yearns to seek out the unknown corners of her country (Germany?) so she can tell its story with innocent love and goodness; and eventually his father Pantofelnik (Eric Keitel), all contribute to establishing the real difficulty of telling a nation's story in one easy narrative arc.

Special note should be taken of the lighting (Chris Wojcieszyn) establishing space and ambiance. Although minimal in approach, the openness of the performing area - edges loosely defined by the fading of the light - made a viewer seem to be peering into a scene occurring inside a mind. The climactic moment of the show is heightened by a dramatic spotlight on Franswa, and we can legitimately ask, Where is that happening?

Most national histories are based on some set of self-congratulatory founding myths, and picking them apart can be devastatingly dispiriting. As the playwright says, "It hurts me that the true History of Poland remains untold," but where will that truth be found? Surely not in one book, nor one place, nor in one memory. Poland is the classic case of the long-suffering, broad-plained, virtually defenseless land mercilessly invaded by Hitler's Blitzkrieg in September 1939. But at the same time its Roman Catholic population took it upon itself to attack Polish Jews, famously in the town of Jedwabne during the Nazi time, and even after the war ended, with pogroms in Krakow and Kielce.

The playwright shows a major concern with French existentialism. At the moment when Franswa hugs this prosaic object, the suitcase, he joyously shouts, "He existed!" bringing Sartre to mind. Moreover, the intense, immediate physicality of what proves to be a psychosomatic symptom, Franswa's shortness of breath, recalls Sartre's nausea. That the play deals with a Frenchman in postwar Europe struggling with feeling whole in his identity without some external referent (his father) seems a generic trope of that intellectual tradition. The Holocaust, or the past, only becomes meaningful to Franswa insofar as he self-identifies and self-justifies with it..

So here is a deliberately Polish engagement with the most popular intellectual response in Western Europe to the postwar condition, French existentialism à la Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, while the world of the Eastern Bloc nations responded with Soviet-style socialism. Perhaps this terse 65-minute play, with its special cosmopolitan mix-up of theatrical genres, is essentially a work by a Pole for Poles. Still, universalizing the themes of that Polish intellectual engagement with the West spins off a fresh and stimulating new way of treating the past.

Facing other Holocausts

Some Jews today for historical and emotional reasons will never set foot in Germany. Not to argue with their choice, but they are missing out on a fascinating national cultural project of atoning for the sins of an earlier generation. Yes, there are some noisy right-wing, neo-Nazi groups still extant in Germany, but for the most part they are powerless, isolated, and deeply opposed by the majority.

Almost everywhere you go in Germany today, you will find many unexpected reminders of German responsibility for the Holocaust. Not only plaques, monuments and museums, but little paving stones indicating that in this house lived such-and-such a Jewish family, deported in a given year and sent to their extermination. And Germany has played a major role in reparations to Jews and in supporting the State of Israel economically and diplomatically. Germany has also welcomed thousands of Jewish immigrants - a few of them returning Germans, but most others from Eastern European lands and from Israel itself. For years Germany has been the country with the largest percentage of Jewish population increase in the world. Few other nations have undertaken such a thoroughgoing assessment of their own culpability in crimes committed under their flag. And when you think about it, there's hardly a country in the world that does not have its dark side to confess.

In a pointed Director's Note in the program, Sam Hunter asks, "It's still controversial to refer to the two major atrocities America has committed within its borders as 'genocides,' but if it weren't, what would the statute of limitations be? What would earn us the right to stop teaching guilt to our children?"

What would an America look like if our Holocausts were acknowledged as Germany has done? We eagerly erect memorials to plane crash victims and terror attacks, but these often assume the character of recording and remembering what "they" did to "us." What if there were a plaque installed at every known site of a lynching, not to mention places where striking workers were shot? Where innocent people were gunned down in the streets by police? Where are the historical markers where slave ships docked with their precious African cargo, where plantation owners held millions of Black people in bondage? How do we mark the Atlantic waves into which dead Black captive bodies were tossed? Where are the hallowed memorials in the cities where African-American families were sundered on the auction block?

And what has the American empire done to our native peoples? A Holocaust greater than the European Holocaust of the 20th century! But is there an American Indian Holocaust museum in every city, and memorials all across the land in every state and community recording who lived here and how they were disappeared, so that our people will never forget, so that we can say together as one, "Never again!" Hardly! The very question is rhetorical in today's America. Quite to the contrary: Our Native population is still the most degraded, the unhealthiest, the most short-lived, the poorest, the least educated in the land.

If the State of Israel was considered the world's "reparation" for the Holocaust against the Jews, as part of the guilt accompanying a near-universal sense of shame that the world allowed a Hitler to happen, what shall repair the two great American Holocausts? This is a question of intense debate and speculation, but for starters it would need to include a massive national commitment - international, if you include the Holocaust against Indigenous peoples everywhere - to discuss these Holocaust issues at all levels in the educational system; raising living standards with targeted measures, including jobs and guaranteed income programs, benefiting those surviving communities; and passing stringent, effective anti-discrimination laws.

How likely is this to happen any time soon in America? Not so soon, you say? Well, that's an indication of the national earnestness with which we approach these homegrown Holocausts of our own.

The Suitcase is a heartbreaking, disturbing probe into atrocity and accountability, in which no one - Pantofelnik excepted - comes off with clean hands. Even its audience is implicated. Finally, does the possibility of doing justice to the past thereby absolve us in the present?

The Suitcase plays Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8 pm only through August 18, at the Atwater Village Theatre, 3239 Casitas Ave., Los Angeles 90039. For tickets and information, call (31) 307-3753 or go to www.EchoTheaterCompany.com. Free parking in the Atwater Xing lot one block south of the theatre.

Photo: Alexandra Freeman and Vincent Castellanos / Spencer Howard

Down with the Republic! Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" in Topanga

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 13:25:00 +0000

I often look askance at vintage plays that are updated to different time periods and locations, usually in an attempt to make current productions more accessible to today's ticket buyers. I am usually especially dismayed at refurbished Greek/Roman dramas and comedies that are repurposed and presented without a toga in sight. But leave it to Ellen Geer to tackle a tragedy written in 1594 that takes place in ancient Rome, adapt and reset it in the future and - as if that isn't enough - to do so with an uncanny eye and ear as a comment on contemporary America.

The Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum production of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus may be the best play I've ever seen presented at this Topanga Canyon amphitheater. Now, this is saying quite a lot, as the WGTB is my favorite theatre and company in all of L.A. and over the years I've enjoyed many plays at the Geers' bohemian grove north of Malibu.

Presented in the great outdoors under the stars, this extremely violent play about political power and racial and sexual politics has an epic sweep. In other words, as crafted by director Ellen Geer, it is absolutely perfect for the unfolding presidential race and the ongoing so-called "war on terror." Recast in the near future, the dystopian drama pits various factions vying for power against one another. The production's warriors may wield automatic rifles instead of spears, but the actors essentially use Shakespeare's deathless dialogue without much modification (although they may refer to "bullets" instead of arrows).

As is WGBT's wont, the highly kinetic mise-en-scène makes splendid, thrilling use of Topanga's natural environment beyond the boards, bestowing new meaning on the Bard's dictum from As You Like It that "all the world's a stage." The production's mass spectacle ranges from exciting battle scenes to political assemblages that call to mind Nuremberg rallies - or, for that matter, Trump campaign events.

Unlike Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (which WGTB has presented with much panache), Titus Andronicus does not seem to be the playwright's reworking of historical figures and facts in ancient Rome. Be that as it may, there actually was a Roman emperor named Titus who reigned from 79 to 81 CE and whose full moniker was Titus Flāvius Caesar Vespasiānus Augustus. He had served as prefect of the Praetorian Guard. His affair with the Hebrew Queen Berenice may have influenced Shakespeare's plot.

In Titus Andronicus Marie-Françoise Theodore (who recently co-starred in It's Just Sex at the Secret Rose Theatre) portrays the voluptuous, sensuous beauty Queen Tamora, who is as cunning a schemer as she is a sexy steamer. Another standout in the voluminous cast is the dreadlocked Michael McFall as Aaron the Moor, who like Tamora, is among the victorious Romans' conquered Goth captives - and her majesty's secret lover. Aaron and Tamara share a lasciviously saucy scene in the bawdy Bard's rambunctious play. McFall also expertly delivers some chilling lines as what seemed like an incarnation of sheer evil - although, abused as enslaved Aaron has been, he embodies "The Hate That Hate Produced" (as Mike Wallace called a 1959 TV documentary about Malcolm X and the Black Muslims).

(According to Ellen Geer, the racial references are all in the original Shakespeare; some may find these lines offensive, just as some consider The Merchant of Venice to be anti-Semitic.)

In addition to these two bravura performances, Sheridan Crist excels as the title character, a once proud professional soldier brought so low by the saga's slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune he teeters on the abyss of insanity. In Act II, his apron-clad Titus looms like a cross between the Roman god of fire, Vulcan, and a celebrity chef gone mad, as he serves up a despicable dish of revenge (best served cold, but of course). Crist's bare, bald (perhaps shaved?) skull suggests that other warlike Italian, Benito Mussolini (you know, that fascist who gave Donald Trump acting lessons in "Demagogic Buffoonery 101").

Also delivering creditable performances are Christopher W. Jones as one of those characters you love to hate: Saturninus, the conniving, sniveling pretender to the throne who competes with his own brother, Bassianus (Turner Frankosky), for power and in romance. Perhaps for Saturninus there's no difference between the two, as to him, both are about control. Saturninus and Bassianus are sons of the deceased emperor - referred to here as "president" - whose death created the power vacuum that ignites the play's bloody conflict and bloodlust.

Melora Marshall portrays the senator Marcia Andronicus, a tribune who is Titus' younger sister. Willow Geer is Titus' eldest surviving daughter, the popular Lucia. The Theatricum has been a pioneer in nontraditional casting, and in Shakespeare's original, both characters are male. (What's next? A WGTB LGTB production called Titus Androgynous?)

After the tragedy's numerous, skillfully rendered battle royales, Lucia is crowned as president, and as she accepts the leadership role I could not but think of Hillary Clinton's coronation only days earlier, as the first female U.S. presidential candidate of a major party. Shakespeare's ensemble declares: "Lucia, all hail, Rome's gracious governor!"

Another clear reference to current events is all of Titus Andronicus' endless dismemberments - surely a nod to ISIS. To paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there's a "whole lotta choppin' going on" in this ultra-violent drama. Alas, given today's big screen sophisticated special effects, the onstage slicing and dicing and their aftereffects are, to be charitable, very low budge. While the mutilated, ravished Lavinia appropriately shakes, from my third-row, aisle-seat perch I saw nary a tear fall from actress Michelle Wicklas' eyes. (I suspect that Lavinia's harrowing fate influenced Bertolt Brecht's depiction of Mother Courage's daughter Kattrin and her heartbreaking fate more than three centuries anon.)

Titus Andronicus has great dialogue, including additions such as the line "master of war" apparently inspired by Bob Dylan's 1963 antiwar classic. And in the likewise added riot at the end, the dashing, longhaired Alexander Wauthier (credited as Martius) declares the probably improvised line: "Down with the Republic!" Rarely have such ominous words been uttered.

The discordant soundscape composed by Marshall McDaniel lends an appropriate note of dissonance to the somewhat Orwellian action. Jordan-Marc Diamond's costumes are simultaneously futuristic and Romanesque. Saturninus' cleverly upturned collar adds a sartorial splash and may be a visual pun on the term "white collar criminal."

For some reason there were no fewer than three screen versions of Shakespeare's tragedy filmed from 1999-2000. If readers have any explanation as to why this may have been, please email me comments. Perhaps they were motion picture premonitions of the "war on terror" to come, with their attendant, disastrous invasions and unintended consequences? The titan of this trio of Andronicus screen adaptations was Julie Taymor's 1999 Titus, with a stellar cast: Anthony Hopkins in the title role, Jessica Lange as Tamora, Harry Lennix as Aaron and Alan Cumming as cunning Saturninus. Hearing that Titus was an extremely bloody movie, I avoided seeing it when it was released. But after seeing the WGTB rendition, I really want to watch it now. (For a clip see here.)

This stage Titus Andronicus is strong stuff, for adults and mature audiences only. Leave the kiddies at home - but for those who love their theatre adventurous and thought-provoking, strap on your sandals, dash to Topanga and don't miss it! This just might be the best play currently on L.A.'s boards

Titus Andronicus plays in repertory through Oct. 1 at Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum: 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga, Calif. 90290. For repertory schedule and other information call: (310) 455-3723 or see: www.Theatricum.com.

Photo: Melora Marshall, Sheridan Crist, Shane McDermott and Willow Geer | Miriam Geer

New history (with comics) recounts humanity’s long march toward reason

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 12:53:00 +0000

Curious Dave, protagonist of an amusing and informative new book called The Cartoon History of Humanism, Vol. 1: Antiquity to Enlightenment, wanders through time and space to converse with the pioneers of humanist philosophy. On his journey, he meets famous skeptics, atheists, writers, thinkers and hedonists who have all advanced human thought away from the mystical and toward the rational.

We encounter such familiar individuals as Cicero, Ibn Rushd, Boccaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, Hume and Voltaire; as well as Héloïse d'Argenteuil, Pietro Pomponazzi, Isabella d'Este, Aphra Benn, and Julien Offray de la Mettrie. Some of these women were proud, lusty ladies who openly scoffed at the whole notion of sin. Volume 1 features 32 "episodes" plus a bonus. Volume 2 will bring us through the 19th and 20th centuries - plus, who knows, maybe the 21st?

But Dave's time-travel adventure is not truly the centerpiece of this book. The brief two-or-three page synopses of the interviewees' lives that follow each one-page, four-panel cartoon provide the meat of this history. Dale Debakcsy's writing is informed and personal, fresh and elegant. Only rarely does he bog down in philosophical lingo. Presented in short, bite-sized bursts of biographical flavor in almost chronological order, these episodes do not necessarily need to be consumed sequentially, but may be sampled at will. You can return to any episode if you need a quick refresher. What he has to say about some of his subjects - Machiavelli, for example - may pleasantly surprise you.

Debakcsy offers a short epilogue after each episode, discussing his sources and recommended further reading. This book, and the volume to come, are clearly evidence of a love of reading, of ideas, and of human progress.

His stories are framed as struggles against the authority of the church. The church controlled almost every aspect of life for millennia. If you wanted to investigate science or medicine, or practice free love, or challenge the nature of politics and the state, or question the existence of the supernatural, you came up against traditions and laws with biblical or other bases in myth and superstition. The very role of the King was reinforced by his subjection - at least in theory and in certain times and places - to the will of the Pope, who designated himself the vicar of God.

At least a dozen of the author's characters -- who in the author's words "nudged up the boundaries of human potential" -- would make suitable subjects for playwrights, screenwriters and librettists for musical theatre.

As a sample of Debakcsy's writing, consider this first paragraph to Episode 20 about "the most dangerous man in Europe": "By 1670, all of the pieces of modern humanism were in place, waiting for one guiding intellect to join them together at last for a complete assault on the ramparts of organized religion. Abelard had cast doubt on the consistency of the church fathers, Averroes and Albertus Magnus had attacked the cult of theological authority, Pietro Pomponazzi had dismantled the mortal soul, Paolo Sarpi had defanged the temporal authority of the church, and Thomas Hobbes had advocated for a vigorous materialism that rewrote the meaning of good, evil, heaven, and hell. Each had a profound impact on the reordering of some aspect of Europe's religious life, but one man was feared as the greatest threat to the very foundation of religion itself since the dawn of recorded history: Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the architect of atheism."

The historian frequently connects his subjects to discoveries that came centuries later. Speaking of the Roman thinker Lucretius, "the keystone of Materialism," he calls him a "prime example of how staggeringly far a single mind can go in understanding the universe aided by nothing but the proposition that everything is composed of atoms. His masterpiece, De Rerum Natura, published over two thousand years ago, is an astonishing encapsulation of prescient hyper-modern insights into the physical world. From genetics to cosmology, optics to neuroscience, Lucretius's ideas are correct freakishly often."

Another central figure in Western thought is the Arabic scholar Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), who worked in Córdoba, Spain. According to Ibn Rushd, "the true infidelity was disobeying God's command to investigate reality, to be given a divine instrument like the brain and then not use it to its fullest." "In him," Debakcsy continues, "the three great religious traditions of the West met with a full accounting of the wisdom of antiquity and found a synthesis that would define the Western intellectual project for centuries to come, and a tension that would set the stage for the great rationalist turn that we are still enjoying. In the near millennium since his death, the only figure of remotely comparable stature in terms of philosophical impact on the structure of world thought is Karl Marx." (We will surely hear more about him in Volume 2.)

The only weakness of the book, unfortunately, is the cartoons themselves. Some graphic content is, of course, most welcome in such a heady, thought-filled text. But the cartoons - and indeed the whole time-travel excursion theme - strike me as a clever first idea that might have been discarded on further reflection. The artist does not show sufficient skill at portraiture to effectively differentiate the many distinct physical types and individuals in the book, so except for robes and wigs and some incidental props, there is a sameness about them all that disappoints. The conversational speech bubbles in the cartoons are too often forced, elliptic and tedious.

One other question I wish Debakcsy had dealt with a little better is the dissemination of ideas in the pre-modern era. If someone wrote a "book" in the centuries before the printing press, how did its content become known? How familiar were the author's contemporaries, and subsequent generations, with all this evolving progressive thinking? Without comprehensive, cumulative passing on of all this collective wisdom, most people must have been largely ignorant of it, still lashed to the dogmas of those who ruled them. Even today, with all the available means of spreading information throughout the universe, many communities remain practically immune to rational thought.

Discussing the French encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713-1784), whose work of gathering and categorizing all knowledge of the world anticipated the French Revolution, Debakcsy suggests that characters in Diderot's literary works "re-enact dramatically the conversation that I think every humanist engages in privately - what to do with one's self in a doomed world." The implications for every sentient human being of knowing what we know affect every action we take.

The Cartoon History of Humanism
Vol. 1: Antiquity to Enlightenment
By Dale Debakcsy
Art by Count Dolby von Luckner
Humanist Press
122 pp., $24.99
Release date August 23, 2016

Photo: Dave meets Voltaire, art by Count Dolby von Luckner.

I watched Dinesh D’Souza’s awkward anti-Hillary movie so you don’t have to

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 11:09:00 +0000

Dinesh D'Souza's latest hate mail to the Democratic Party, the film "Hillary's America" is a tedious, cheesy, self serving slog through the unsavory underside of American History. Dour D'Souza selectively culls, bends and ultimately breaks history in a desperate attempt to show how all evil flows from Democrats.

He also uses the film to argue that his great patriotism exonerates him from his conviction for felonious election fraud. D'Souza's two earlier films "America: Imagine the World Without Her" (2014) and "2016: Obama's America" (2012) were similar polemical skewers of history, wrapped in copious American flag images and amped up patriotic music.

But no amount of flag waving could save this felonious Fellini from conviction for knowingly making illegal contributions to the Senate Republican campaign fund using "straw donors." D'Souza plea bargained his admitted guilt down to eight months in a half way house near his home . . . which he misrepresents in the film as being a dangerous facility stocked with killers and gang members.

In between attacking President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the entire Democratic Party for their immorality, D'Souza was terminated from his position as President of King's College in New York, a Christian College home of the Campus Crusade for Christ. He was discovered conducting an adulterous affair with the already married Denise Odie Joseph while D'Souza himself was married to Dixie Brubaker, the mother of his child. D'Souza ended up with neither woman, as he later married Debbie Francher in a ceremony presided over by pastor Rafael Cruz, father of Texas Senator and Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz. Clearly this staunch Republican moralist has taken to Hollywood ways!

As he did in his earlier films, D'Souza starts his new work by disingenuously posing objective questions. He claims to want to know the history of the Democratic Party. But anyone viewing his earlier movies knows that D'Souza has already concluded how thoroughly terrible the Democrats are. He can hardly wait to reveal their dastardly deeds!

Unfortunately, his breathless revelations have a few problems. Certainly the early Democratic Party upheld slavery 150 years ago and impeded equal rights through the beginnings of the twentieth century. But D'Souza fails to explain how and why the overwhelming majority of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Jews and immigrants gravitated to the Democratic Party. His failed explanations suggest that these minorities merely could not make the decisions that D'Souza himself knows would be best for them. He obscures the reforms that Democrats won championing the rights of these groups and raising so many out of poverty. Nor does he explain why ultra right wing candidates like the Ku Klux Klan's David Duke or even Donald Trump prefer to run for office under the mantel of the Republican Party.

Two thirds of the way through the film, D'Souza awkwardly shifts to attacking Hillary Clinton. He gives full rein to all allegations on Bill Clinton's illicit affairs. But D'Souza, whom we have found is an experienced observer, exonerates Bill and shifts the blame to Hillary. Hillary Clinton is the master mind, using Bill's addiction to promote her own lust for power and riches.

A far flung litany of accusations concludes that the reason that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would not get help to Benghazi was that she couldn't find a way to profit from it. D'Souza hardly feels bound by the 9 Congressional Hearings and 8000 pages of data that conclusively proved otherwise, even to the satisfaction of Congressional Republicans.

D'Souza finishes his film with the warning that if Hillary is elected President, the Democrats will take "everything from everyone." "The Clintons have stolen from the United States . . . they are hateful, depraved crooks." Still one cannot help but observe that it is the film maker who is the felon and he is once again attempting to steal, though this time it is only the price of admission.

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