Dan’s post the other day on how much responsibility we choose to take on and how much our day-to-day existences and our consciences simply cannot bear – “We draw a series of lines beyond which we refuse to trace the web of harm we’re potentially inflicting on others” – was very serendipitous for me, as I’ve just finished listening to a recording of one of my favorite monologues of all time, and one of the great moral arguments or, to be clearer, arguments for ethical self-reflection and responsibility, I’ve ever read/seen/heard (saw the original run of the show in NY twice, read it several times, now I’ve got the CDs!): Wallace Shawn’s “The Fever.” It’s two hours of a privileged American white man, urbanite, aesthete (albiet one with that great Wally Shawn voice), sitting in a hotel room in a small foreign country where his language isn’t spoken, questioning the legitimacy of every aspect of his existence. The "fever" in question is, among other things, the result of his realization of his inherent culpability for the harsh lives and cruel deaths of others seemingly far, far removed from him in every way. I can’t possibly do "The Fever" justice by repeating how great it is (I’ve been grading papers all week and writing "SHOW DON’T TELL" over and over, and now look at me. Students of mine, if you should happen by some freak chance to read this, do as I say, not as I do!) But it’s an amazing piece of writing. It’s most amazing to see Shawn (whom you may know as a Ferengi on Babylon 5, or as the Smartest Man in the World in “The Princess Bride,” or from his films “My Dinner with Andre” and “Vanya on Broadway” or as the scion of NYer editor William Shawn, OR whom you may know as perhaps America’s greatest living playwright) perform the monologue, but barring that, it’s an essential read and/or listen. Here’s a snippet in which our bourgeois (anti)hero tries to deny what’s becoming wretchedly apparent to him – that somehow he’s in some part responsible for atrocities such as the deaths of innocents by firing squads:
I’m doing whatever I possibly can. I try to be nice. I try to be lighthearted, entertaining, funny. I tell entertaining stories to the janitor, every single morning. I try to be amusing whenever I can be, to help my friends get through the day. I write little notes to people I like when I enjoy the articles they’ve written or their performances in the theater. When a group of people at a party were making unpleasant comments about advertising men, I steered the conversation to a different topic, because my friend Monica was feeling uncomfortable because her father works as an advertising man.
It’s 68 pages long, you can buy it used on Amazon for next to nothing – read “The Fever.”
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Now, as for, as Dan, again, puts it, “the problem of figuring out where to draw these somewhat arbitrary lines in the realm of masculinity,” I am reminded of a conversation I recently had with a friend who wrote an epistolary, semi-tongue-in-cheek short story in which a father, quite amusingly, and bittersweetly, gives his infant son the advice to pursue the sexual adventures, the secret, hidden world that dad had foregone in his youth.
After reading the piece, I asked my friend whether his character would give a daughter this same advice. His response was a quick and certain Hell, no, and it felt like the kind of “hell, no” that suggested that, duh, dude, no man in his right mind would encourage his daughter to be sexually adventurous, let alone reckless. As liberated a man as I consider my friend, he, or at least his fictional stand-in, unequivocally wants to protect his women from the likes of, well, us. Will I do the same if I’m ever lucky enough to be the father of a daughter? My hope is that I would protect and encourage a boy or girl child equally, but would I? Would you? Will you, Dan? Starting next week, or so? As you, Daniel Oppenheimer write, about the future with your daughter-to-be: “We’ll talk about people, and we’ll vent about them, and although I’ll protect her from a lot of the darker things that go in inside my mind and the minds of the people in her world, I won’t protect her from all of it.” Of course, you can’t protect her from all of it, but will you protect her more than you would a boy? How much more?
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Among conceptual and word artist Jenny Holzer‘s "Truisms," which I bow down to for their blunt ambiguity and cock-sure ambivalence, by is "Raise boys and girls the same way." Another is, "Turn soft and lovely any time you have the chance." Another is "Use what is dominant in a culture to change it quickly." Another is "Abuse of power comes as no surprise." Make of this what you will, Grasshoppers.
