Saturday Night Radio Drama - Little John Nee - The Jumpin' Inn and many more

 

The Jumpin' Inn

 

A radio companion to his ongoing audio series, imagining close encounters in the time of the pandemic. 

 

Cast and Production Credits

Written, performed and scored by Little John Nee

With Debbie Wright as Charlie.

The Jumpin' Inn series was originally commissioned by Earagail Arts Festival and the Glens Arts Centre, Manorhamilton.

Sound Supervision: Ruth Kennington

Producer for RTÉ: Kevin Brew

Series Producer of Drama On One: Kevin Reynolds

The posted title is a pretty short almost mono-drama as a lot of these recently produced radio dramas in a time of pandemic have been.  I've been very impressed with  how good some of these quickly produced pieces have been, both in the writing and the productions.   I think current dramatic writing that stays pretty close to the author is generally a lot better than the stuff that gets an expensive production. 

I've decided to post this title from the RTÉ podcast site which lists a very large number of recent plays produced by Irish national radio so you can sample a lot of them, quite a number which I've posted before, a lot which I haven't.

Hate Mail - The Green Party Is Typical Of The Gangster Colluding, Gangster Enabling Play-Lefty Traitors To American Liberal Values They Can FOAD As Far As I'm Concerned

The Green Party is and has semi-openly been a Republican-fascist asset for most of its existence, that was true as it spoiled the election of 2000 putting Bush II - Cheney into office, as it financed Green Party candidates in 2004, as it has tried to Kanye Green Party candidates onto state ballots in 2020. That "left" is just one more example of the kind of "real left" that has done that and which, so many such "real lefties" have migrated openly into the Republican-fascism that I noted David Horowitz, the man who converted the predisposed racist Steven Miller into the pathological fascist he is today.

Has anyone forgotten the above picture of Jill Stein sitting across the table from the Russian dictator patron of Republican-fascists (thanks to Citizens United and other "free press-speech" rulings that allowed that) Putin and the traitor Mike Flynn?

I apologize for not being able to center the picture or put it where I wanted it to go.  That's just one of the many things that New Blogger no longer does.  The one I really don't get is how you can no longer go directly from the dashboard to look at the front page of the blog, no doubt someone had some kind of an idea as to why they were taking that feature out but it was obviously no one who had ever used the product. 

How To Energize Yourself In These Discouraging Times

In the passage from The Prophetic Imagination posted here the other day it mentioned the energizing aspect of the Mosaic account of the liberation of the Children of Israel out of slavery and I am finding that true.   I would recommend to anyone who is feeling unmotivated and discourage to try typing out the text of the book and to write commentaries on it because I'm finding it the most energizing thing I am doing these days.  

Several of my loved ones are being forced back into classrooms to become part of that "second wave" which has every prospect of being worse than the "first wave".  I will point out again that the "first wave" started from one case, the second one will start from millions of cases.  I'm very concerned for their safety as well as those who I don't know at all around the country.  And around the world.

People seem to have, in dangerous numbers, learned nothing but the lies spewed by the fascist media, having learned nothing from the revelations of the past four years, especially in the English speaking world.   That's no shock to me anymore, considering the American left would seem to have learned little or nothing to overcome the jingles and slogans it has used to substitute ideology for even hard, repeatedly experienced truth over fifty-two years. 

The criminality of the Trumpist Republican-fascists would seem to know few bounds.  It is hardly clear that the openly criminal DeJoy won't screw with the first largely by-mail election and the Trump regime will be allowed to retain power through their open corruption of the only means of a government obtaining legitimacy, with the consent of a majority of The People through a legitimate vote.   It is an outrage that in 2020 the means of thwarting, never mind removing the most flagrantly criminal regime   in American hasn't already removed Trump from power AND INDICTED HIM AND ALL OF THE CRIMINALS IMPOSED ON US THROUGH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE.  Nothing proves the inadequacy of the U. S. Constitution, as written and by traditional interpretation than the fact that will the huge list of chargeable crimes Trump, Pence, Barr, Mnuchin, Dejoy, etc. etc. etc. are still there constituting the "executive" which is empowered by the Constitution and law to commit ever more outrageous crimes. 

Again, the alleged opposition, the secular left is left with things like raging at the Democrats who have control of the House, and only the House, can't do the impossible, impeach the criminals and get them out of office.  They do that as they refuse to acknowledge the defects in the Constitution and the culture that makes that impossible.  I would give examples from the lefty media and blogs but I have been avoiding reading them as much as I did in the last election cycles but when I do look and listen, they've learned nothing in the past four years - or fifty-two - either. 

My part of the country is having another terrible drought and my garden is not going to support me as it has in hard times of the past and if you don't think that's scary and discouraging for someone who lives on the economic margins during this degenerate age of Trumpism, well, think again.  I am soon going to face giving up internet service in my house and will find it far harder to do this if I continue with it so I would recommend to those who find this useful to do it for yourselves.  Buy the books, type out passages, read the passages of Scripture cited and referred to,  think about them, comment on them, make them real in terms of our own times and events and experience.  I have found it to be one of the better choices I've made in the past two months.  If not this book then one of his others or someone else like Brueggemann.  It's not escapism, it is engagement with what has worked instead of the ideological muddle that secularism inevitably becomes. 

Update:  I decided to test what I said above and started by going to In These Times magazine and saw that the masthead piece is by Joel Bleifuss ITT's publisher and editor in chief, slamming the Congress for its failure to respond to the Corona virus pandemic, equating it to the failure of the Congress to do something about the Bush II response to the disaster of hurricane Karina, citing an In These Times piece from 2005.  The piece is notable for getting it obviously wrong, through that 2005 clip, NOT ONCE SINGLING OUT REPUBLICANS FOR THAT FAILURE DESPITE THE FACT THEY WERE IN TOTAL CONTROL OF THE GOVERNMENT, BUT SINGLING OUT DEMOCRATS WHO WERE NOT IN CONTROL OF THE CONGRESS, THE EXECUTIVE OR THE SUPREME COURT. The piece, now by Bleifuss doesn't mention Republicans by name, at all, (he once mentions the GOP and the "neo-fascist" Trump) though it's Republicans in the Senate who have blocked the hundreds of bills the House has passed as,in fact, they still did after 2007 when Democrats regained control of the House.  

In the past two election cycles I have looked at In These Times and other traditional on-paper lefty magazines to document that they were slamming Democrats and doing things such as yet again supporting the spoiler third party Greens even as the alternatives were clear disasters. Something they have done in virtually every election since I have reached the age of reason and which the history of the ideological lefty, secular (anti-religious) "left" has done throughout its history.   

One of the things listed as the former deeds of the racist-fascist David Horowitz when he was such an esteemed member of the secular play-left was that he was in on the founding of In These Times by the late James Weinstein.  There was a time that his, not long after, supposed apostasy, taking that well traveled road from the Marxist left to the de facto fascist right into Republican-fascism might have surprised me.  But it doesn't anymore because it's such a common phenomenon.   What I was surprised to realize is how much of that Marxist, quasi-Marxist left has in common with the Republican fascists and how, even today, after the examples of what that left got us in Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and now Trump, which they always have enabled, along with the Greens and such "lefts" as work in Hollywood and the scribbling class.  I was surprised up until recently.  I now know they are not really an alternative, they are just another ideological flavor of the same thing.  Though it was through the publisher of The Nation and her husband and such scribblers as pooh-poohed the Putin involvement with the worst of those election cycles that I had my eyes as to their real nature forced open.  You know, you see that happen as many times as I have, you can't deny what they're doing anymore.  

There is no mystery in why Democrats who have to win elections to do anything in reality don't trust the secular left and why those of us who care about reality instead of ideology shouldn't either.  They will never change, even as they officially cash out by joining with the fascists.  I wouldn't be surprised if, as with the Greens, they aren't benefiting from doing their bidding in the guise of leftist purity, right now.  

Hillary Clinton Said The "I" Word After The "L" Word

If you do a search of this blog for the word "impunity" as in "the Supreme Court allows the corporate media (and now the Putin and billionaire gangster influenced "social media") to lie with impunity"  you will see why I was so gratified when the person with the greatest claim to have experienced what the rule of lies and the lying liars who lie them brings democracy down to,  Hillary Clinton said on Colbert's show that Trump was allowed to "lie with impunity" as a warning to the Biden-Harris ticket as to what they're up against. 

I doubt she got the idea from me, having lived the real thing that I've only experienced in blog trolling, but it was gratifying in a way I felt like mentioning.

It's not clear that she would favor my idea of returning to a world when newspapers and magazines and TV and radio shows could be sued for lying about Democratic politicians - the primary victims of the Warren-Rehnquist-Roberts "free speech-free press" regime and its foul spawn which has opened our elections up to corruption in a way that destroys democracy.   But I don't see any way to have egalitarian democracy under the regime that has proven itself poisonous to democracy for the past fifty-six years.   

One of the most telling things about the lying media is the delicacy they practiced in avoiding calling even the most flagrant of lies told by Republicans,  Reagan, Bush I, II, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, etc. lies HOW THEY EVEN INVENTED THE RULE THAT YOU HAD TO "PROVE" THAT THE REPUBLICAN LIAR KNEW THEY WERE LYING BEFORE YOU COULD PLAINLY STATE THEY WERE LYING, EVEN INTO THE TRUMP REGIME!   That a good part of "journalistic practice" in the last fifty years was to find ways such as "it's being said" to include those lies as reporting and, even more so, in what is euphemistically called "opinion journalism" is proof of how wrong the naive Warren era ideas about the safety of allowing the media to lie UNLESS THEY PRACTICALLY ADMITTED THEY WERE DOING IT! for not only democracy but for decency and, as we have found under Trump, the very distinction between lies and truth, make-believe and reality and that without us choosing to enforce those, nature will step in with scores if not hundreds of thousands or more dead and things like babies being stolen from their parents and put into concentration camps so Stephen Miller can feel virile.   Don't get me started about his mentor, the founder of Ramparts magazine,  red-diaper baby racist David Horowitz, who deserves to be the poster-boy of what the American play-left produces, Republican rule.

I think the oaths that American politicians and judges and "justices" make should be amended to effectively require them to pledge to protect and defend equality and democracy.   I couldn't give less of a bloggers damn for the Constitution, without those it's the extension of the 18th century slave power into our time.  The struggle of Black People, other People of Color, Women, LGBTQetc.  People, working people, POOR PEOPLE which makes up the best thing about us has been largely a struggle against that Constitution as it was written.  As has been proved by the Supreme Court all through it's history,  the Constitution has been far more useful to the enemies of equality, the protectors of the privilege of elites and racial bigots and, yes, enslavers (by law and on a de facto basis) than it has as a means of timely production of justice.   The "founders" did not favor equality, they were aristocrats who feathered their own nests who wrote some features into the Constitution mainly for THEIR protection, the protection of THEIR families and THEIR class.   And the forced extension of those to equally cover everyone has not proven at all easy to accomplish, most of the pending  extension of that is still not accomplished and, as the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have proven, any progress can easily be reversed by a court of thugs bent on privileging a ruling class of wealthy gangsters.  

That's what I've learned from American history looked at as if equality and democracy really matter.  

the unstated counter theme, only whispered, is always "and not Pharaoh."

The energy of Moses' doxology includes:

(a) The speaking of a new name that redefines all social perception.

 

(b) A review of an unlikely history of inversion in which imperial reality is nullified. (Obviously that is not the kind of history taught in the royal court school.)

 

(c) An asking for the enactment of freedom in dance, freedom in free bodies that Pharaoh could no longer dominate (15:20). (We may ponder about the loss of freedom for our bodies and about the ideological dimensions of the current wrath about human sexuality.)

 

(d) A culmination of enthronement, the assertion of the one reality. Egypt could not permit or tolerate: "The Lord will reign for ever and ever" (Exodus 15:18) (We must learn that such doxologies are always polemical; the unstated counter theme, only whispered, is always "and not Pharaoh.")

It is only a poem and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible.

It is worth asking how the language of doxology can be practiced in the empire. Only where there is doxology is there any emergence of compassion, for doxology cuts through the ideology that pretends to be a given. Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transfigure fear into energy.

I shall not now explore further the second and third Mosaic memories of sojourn and Sinai, although that is worth doing. The wilderness theme asks about immobilizing satiation; the Sinai theme speaks of God's freedom for the neighbor. Taken altogether, the Mosaic tradition affirms three things:

1. The alternative lief is lived in this very particular historical and historicizing community.

2. This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace discontinuity and genuine breaks from imperial reality.

3. This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire.

Definition of doxology

: a usually liturgical expression of praise to God

That's the Merriam Webster online definition of "doxology" since someone asks.

So much in this summation of the first chapter of The Prophetic Imagination that I can't but touch on a few things. The importance of how things are said, what things are said, the "language of managed reality" such as rules in the United States, in which a gangster given a "reality TV show" to play a ruthless dictator has become president as a result of the lies the Newt Gingrich era Republican Party told about Hillary Clinton, carried dutifully by the free press from the sewers of the tabloids, the cabloids, FOX, Sinclair right up to NPR and the New York Times (one of the most persistent carriers of those lies right up through the 2016 elections disaster). And the results are the Pharaonic moral atrocity that we face as a new, managed "reality" made real. That language of managed reality is what results when mass media can lie without any restraint.

Why it should be a surprise to anyone that venues of peddling lies constructed to sell appealing to the most easily accessed and worst parts of us, lies bent to the most nefarious ends is certainly one of the most important failures of the theories of modernism that created those conditions. The truth will out but only when it's too late to prevent the worst disasters wrought with lies and unreality and advertising gimmicks and strategies market tested. I read this passage and when I got to the oh, so familiar "language of empire" , familiar from the soc-sci babble about the commercial side of the media "production and schedule and market" the truth of what Walter Brueggemann said forty-two years ago became so clear. When the Republican-fascist Henry Luce's magazine claimed that Mussolini made the trains run on time and Rome's traffic run smoothly, when Hollywood and TV and Wall Street said that what the country needed was a business executive to be president, that's what the are calling for. Well, we have one.

As important as that characterization of empire and its language is important, as important is the point about the necessity of doxology, of the praise of God in words and in dance - expressed in the concrete being of our bodies - as being deadly to the Pharaonic tendencies, the tendencies of those with earthly power to control us and enslave us and rob us and kill us, to turn into gangsters. The point about the power of doxology to cut "through the ideology that pretends to be a given" is as important as any other because, after a lifetime of falling for one after another ideology, "democratic socialism" being the last one, I have come to see that all of them carry the germ of that tendency. The past two election cycles of seeing how many Greens, how many "democratic socialists" how many "libertarians" helped install Trump - after seeing them help the Rehnquist Court install Bush II - AND SEEING IN 2020 HOW MANY OF THEM ARE WILLING TO DO IT AGAIN, I'm fed up with all of them.

I am convinced that the secular left will always have the same effect it has had all along, of enabling the empire instead of opposing it because that has been its record as opposed to the record of the non-secular left. And I think one of the most basic reasons for that is that the ideological basis of secularism in scientistic, materialistic atheism or "agnosticism" is inevitably lacking exactly the thing talked about in this passage. If you have nothing that goes beyond that with sufficient motivating force to move you to break from imperial reality AND COMPASSION AS A MORAL REQUIREMENT IS NECESSARY TO FORM THE COMMUNITY TO DO THAT IN REALITY INSTEAD OF IN THE EVER DEFERRED FUTURE is among the strongest things about that.

Note: I am experimenting with typing out these posts on a text editor that doesn't impose formatting to see what that does to get over my inability to edit HTML on the New Blogger. That might be something that works or it might be something that doesn't. My inclination is to go simpler and less expensive (Feather Pad and Leaf Pad being freeware) and using computers that other people have junked as well as the smallest Raspberry Pi rig I can put together. That part of it is kind of fun, as well as finding places I can access WiFi from without going into it.

I will be having to make radical changes in how I do things because I'm in the same boat so many millions of others who can't make a living are right now. But more about that later. 

 

Update:  I should have included the link to Exodus 15 since, starting with the Song of Moses, mentioned in the passage posted a couple of days ago,  that is what this is about.  This is the Jewish Publications Society edition of 1917. 

where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and people know no justice or compassion

Third, the great song of Moses is the most eloquent, liberating, and liberated song in Israel.  The last energizing reality is a doxology in which the singers focus on this free One and in the act of the song appropriate the freedom of God as their own freedom.  In his recent typology David Noel Freedman places this song at the head of the period of militant Mosaic Yahwism.  By a study of divine names he observes the repeated use of the name,  the very name of freedom which Egypt couldn’t tolerate and the freedom of slaves could not anticipate.  The speaking of the name already provides a place in which an alternative community can live.  So prophets might reflect on the name of God, on what his name is, on what it means, on where it can be spoken, and by whom it might be spoken.  There is something direct and primitive about the name in these most primal songs of faith and freedom.  Egypt is wont to hedge the name with adjectives and all manner of qualifiers,  but the community of justice practicing the freedom of God cannot wait for that.  

Prophesy cannot be separated very long from doxology or it will either wither or become ideology.  Abraham Heschel has seen most wonderously how doxology is the last full act of human freedom and justice.  The prophetic community might ponder what the preconditions of doxology are and what happens when doxologies that address this One are replaced by television jingles that find us singing consumerism ideology to ourselves and to each other.  In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and people know no justice or compassion.  

This section of the book is long and complex and I decided to post the entire thing because it serves as an indispensable introduction to the rest of the book.  It continues on, which I hope to get to tomorrow, but this point, in 2020 when the Mammonist Trump and his goon Barr and the rest of the crooks and gangsters of his regime, joined in by "Reverends" sons of "reverends," bishops and cardinals, are doing exactly what Walter Brueggemann talks about here,  they talk about someone they call “God” but it is not more than a “jingle” a slogan, a button to push to trigger a particular hate-filled, resentful, fearful demographic who like their god domesticated and in service to the stable order they like, one which the Republican party and the media that has served it and, now, the Roberts court in order to do exactly what is said will inevitably be the result “In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and people know no justice or compassion.”  The very same people who stole babies from their parents and put them in cages with plastic blankets and who UNSURPRISINGLY, CONSIDERING THAT RECORD,  insist on policies that have gotten more than one and a half thousand Americans YET  killed in a pandemic they are making worse and are about to make catastrophically worse in school openings so Trump can save face - which he won't - are reciting those slogans to rope in some reliable suckers - they hope.  And, based on the insights of the Hebrew Prophets,  Walter Brueggemann anticipated that happening more than forty years ago.

That is so potent and timely a point that I’m not going to comment more on it just now.   

"news just for this moment and just for this community"

Continuing on with The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann:

Second, in 11:7 there is a wondrous statement of a new reality that surely must energize: "But against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast,  not a dog shall growl; that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel."  In our scholarly ways we may miss the power here.  It is too terrible to be contained in "a doctrine of election."  It occurs not in a doctrine but in a narrative and an unproven memory that we must let stand in all its audaciousness.  It is not reflective theology but news just for this moment and just for this community.  The God who will decide is not the comfortable god of the empire, so fat and well fed as to be neutral and inattentive.  Rather, it is the God who is alert to the realities, who does not flinch from taking sides, who sits in the divine council on the edge of his seat and is attentive to his special interests.  It is the way of the unifying gods of the empire not to take sides and by being tolerant to cast eternal votes for the way things are.  

We may pause here to note the kind of theological reflection in which this primal prophetic narrative engages.  There is not much here for the systematic theologian.  No prophet ever sees things under the aspect of eternity.  It is always partisan theology, always for the moment, always for the concrete community, satisfied to see only a piece of it all and speak out of that at the risk of contradicting the rest of it.  Empires prefer systematic theologians who see it all, who understand both sides, and who regard polemics as unworthy of God and divisive of the pubic good.  But what an energizing statement!  It is like Andrew Young, who takes sides with losers and powerless marginal people, who has not yet grown cynical with the "double speak" of imperial talk, who dares to speak before the data are in and dares to affront more subtle thinking.  The affirmation whispered in the barracks is that he is "up front" about his commitments and Pharaoh is not going to like it. 

Since at a distance, this bald statement is high theology.  It is the gospel;  God is for us.  In an empire no god is for anyone.  They are old gods who don't care anymore and have tried everything once and have a committee studying all the other issues.  For Moses and Israel energizing comes not out of sociological strategy  or hunches about social dynamic but out of the freedom of God.  And so the urging I make to those who would be prophets is that we not neglect to do our work about who God is and that we know our discernment of God is at the breaking points of human community. 

I had to remind myself of what Andrew Young was doing during this period.  He was a former Congressman and a long time civil rights lawyer and activist who was a mayor of Atlanta after the book was published in 1978.   At the time this was written, was Jimmy Carter's media establishment designated "controversial" Ambassador to the UN who took a number of, indeed, controversial stands and made some controversial statements, some spot on right, some very wrong, in retrospect though the ones I was reminded of wouldn't have seemed so at the time.  I doubt Walter Brueggemann would have predicted how apt his choice to mention him in this context was, due to the stands he took that seemed right to him at the time.  For example, he supported the disastrously misjudged Robert Mugabe in a disputed election which was a disaster for Zimbabwe as Mugabe morphed into a terrible despot.  The issue in supporting him was the still hot one of "anticolonialism" which is somewhat understandable, no one knew he would turn so bad, though that should no longer bet so surprising in a general turned politician in the world context. With some exceptions, generals, colonels, etc. along with CEOs usually lack any inclination to value democracy and respect for the common People. 

What is apt in this context is that for all its mistakes, many of which he could not have foreseen, Andrew Young's Ambassadorship is an example of the kind of prophetic imagination that is, after all, all too human in its scope of vision, its particular references and its inability to guess the future.  He embodied what Brueggemann said about that, [A prophet is someone] "who takes sides with losers and powerless marginal people, who has not yet grown cynical with the "double speak" of imperial talk, who dares to speak before the data are in and dares to affront more subtle thinking."  If Breuggemann's idea to use Young as an example was prophetic, I'd love to be able to ask him.  

It is one of the things that William Blake so frustratingly mimicked from the Bible Prophets, that his articulation in poetry was at times so obscure and confusing that even some Blake scholars say the "prophetic" poems are incomprehensible.  And sometimes when you think you can apprehend some of what he is getting at, sometimes it seems rather wrong.  I used to think his view of "enlightenment" erudition in the form of Voltaire and Rousseau, that Blake's use of "The atoms of Democritus and Newton's particles of light," was kind of naive.   Now I think it shows what a genius he was in assigning a higher place to this exact revelation. 

One of the things that hasn't been brought up about those who practiced prophetic imagination is the courage it takes, the willingness to, in the kind of contingency Breuggemann so brilliantly describes here, the willingness to speak and decide before all the data are in and to risk being mocked, dismissed, or even killed for being wrong is a big part of it.  It doesn't seem to be much of a career path for careful people, people who make their way in the empires of the world.  

One thing I am convinced of, the vocation of a Christian now and for a long time will be to condemn the kind of "christianity" that is not only totally at ease within the empires of the world, but who have substituted its gods for not only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Moses, but the one of Jesus as well.   And they've kidnapped Jesus and are holding him hostage.   I don't think it's time to forego any religious fights among those who take religion seriously.  Andrew Young's example is exactly the right one to look at, for all its problems.  I wish I had the time to look up to see what Jimmy Carter, also embattled and with the responsibility to prevent the disaster he, alas, could not, even as the media, corporate and "leftist" were attacking him over everything he did.  That's something we will see if Biden becomes president, though, in his case, I don't think he's going to be worried about his own reelection.  

-----------------------------

I'm tempted to go into the annoyingly cute Hollywood, Broadway view of God and the angels, etc. as bureaucrats and their CEO, though, considering how God had been marked as an accountant keeping records of sins (not so much mentioning merits, in that accounting) and coming up with the tally of whether we go to heaven or hell, maybe that's a deeper issue the misconceptions about God.  We would seem determined to make him more like Pharaoh than the Bible should lead us to expect.  In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, Jesus had a pretty radical point to make about God's freedom to be generous quite at odds with the common human conceptions of the human virtue of fairness.  It was certainly at odds with accounting and the bottom line.  Maybe that's what we need to understand,  even the virtue of fairness is a human makeshift that God exceeds, in general, perhaps, quite possibly, quite likely "at the breaking points of human community," where things have already gone dangerously out of that context.  The contingency of prophetic imagination and its risks are in answer to that.  It even risks getting it wrong because we'll never have all the data in.  The realm prophetic imagination is relevant to doesn't have the luxury to pretend that will ever be true in human affairs. 

Sunday Compensation Radio Drama - Rod Serling - O'Toole From Moscow

 

O'Toole From Moscow 

91.7 WVXU and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music joined forces, led by our Media Beat blogger John Kiesewetter, to coproduce and present the radio adaptation of O'Toole From Moscow, a Rod Serling comedy about confusion between Russians and the Cincinnati Reds at the height of the "Red Scare."

CCM students recorded the radio play, which was directed by Richard Hess, CCM professor of acting and directing, in Cincinnati Public Radio's Corbett Studio. Rod Serling’s daughter, Anne Serling, came to town and serves as the play’s narrator. [There is also an interesting interview with her at the link.]

ABOUT THE SHOW

Rod Serling's "O'Toole From Moscow" aired only once, in a live one-hour television broadcast on "NBC Matinee Theatre" at 3 p.m. Monday, Dec. 12, 1955. It was not filmed or recorded. Chuck Connors – best known as TV's "The Rifleman" (1958-63) after a brief career with the Chicago Cubs (1951) – starred as the Russian security officer who ended up playing outfield for the Cincinnati Reds. The cast also included John Banner (later known as Sergeant Schultz on "Hogan's Heroes") and Baseball Hall of Fame manager Leo Durocher as the Reds manager.

Serling knew a lot about Cincinnati and the Reds. He started his career at Cincinnati's WLW TV/Radio in 1950, after graduating from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He lived in Cincinnati until fall of 1954, the year Reds slugger Ted Kluszewski led the Major Leagues with 49 home runs and 141 runs batted in.

THE PLOT

In Serling's script, a Russian consulate staffer named Mushnick is being sent back from New York to Moscow for re-education because of his high absenteeism due to attending Brooklyn Dodgers games at Ebbets Field. So Mushnick and a muscular naive Russian security officer named Joseph Bishofsky hop a train and go west as far as their money will take them – to Cincinnati.

Bishofsky panics in Cincinnati and goes to the Reds office and turns himself in to a bewildered general manager. Mushnick bursts in to explain that Joseph – whom he calls "Joseph O'Toole" – is an outfielder wanting a tryout. The Reds give O'Toole a shot, and he ends up being a better slugger than Kluszewski – until the Russians find him.

CREDITS

"O'Toole From Moscow" is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio in cooperation with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

PERFORMERS

Matt Fox

Jack Steiner

Lucas Prizant

Chandler Bates

Frankie Chuter

Cameron Nalley

Dustin Parsons

Austin James Cleri

Narrator: Anne Serling

Director: Richard Hess

Dialect and Vocal Coach: Sammi Grant

Executive Producer: Richard Eiswerth

Producer: John Kiesewetter, who also adapted the script for radio.

Recording Engineer: Josh Elstro

Special Thanks to Reds organist John Schutte.

It's interesting to hear a Rod Serling comedy, not exactly what he's famous for.  It's a period piece from the world I knew as a young child, lots has gone on from then.  I do think the script shows the difference between a drama written with visuals assumed and one in which the writer doesn't have those to depend on.  Serling was noted as a very experienced radio drama writer before he got involved with TV, a medium he often seems to have longed to return to and which he did, briefly, revive again in the United States after it was considered quite moribund.   He has said that he liked the freedom he had as a radio drama writer, the cheap cost of production and the exigency to have ever newer material meant management would let stuff on that they wouldn't if the production costs were higher.   His famous Twilight Zone TV shows, the early ones, reflected some of the opportunities he'd come to expect with a minimal overhead, reportedly not so much as it became more popular.  I'm not a huge sports fan so some of it went right past me but it reminded me of being there while my father and grandfather listened to ball games on the radio on hot summer days.  Not so many night games in the 50s, as I recall.  

We Face The Hardness Of Heart We See Now And Overthrow It Or We Will Face Even Harder Hardness And Very Soon - The Plague Cycle Is As Timely As Could Be

It is precisely the prophet who speaks against such managed data and who can energize toward futures that are genuinely new and not derived. I suggest three energizing dimensions to this narrative that are important for prophetic imagination.

First, energy comes from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness. That darkness which is frightening in its authority appears here in the hardness of heart. That motif pervades this strange text. At every turn, it is affirmed not that Pharaoh’s heart is hard but that Yahweh hardens it. It is Yahweh’s peculiar way of bringing the empire to an end. It is Yahweh’s odd way to present the possibility of historical freedom. There is more here than can be understood, but whatever else it means it begins in the conviction that God works on both sides of the street. The despairing ones do not see how a newness can come, how evil can be overcome, or how futures can arise from the totalitarian present. This awesome programmatic statement affirms that something is “on the move” in the darkness that even the lord of the darkness does not discern. It is strange that neither Egypt nor Israel understands the movement in the darkness! Israel is no more privy to God’s freedom than Egypt is. And when Israel yearns to know too much about that freedom, Israel easily plays the role of Egypt. In any case, this narrative knows that the darkness may be trusted to him as it surely cannot be trusted to Pharaoh. That is energizing because the alternative community dares to affirm how it will turn out. It knows that Pharaoh does not know. It knows, but it does not understand. It knows because it has submitted, and that submission began when the cry was cried toward the free one. There is new energy in finding one who can be trusted with the darkness and who can be trusted to be more powerful than the one who ostensibly rules the light.

It is one of the things that I remember wondering about, why God kept hardening Pharaoh’s heart, leading to ever greater plagues against, not only Pharaoh but also the People of Egypt in general. That’s true in the Prophetic tradition that hardness of heart is a recurring accusation against the Children of Isreal, too, and in the period in which they had their own nation only to give it up in the face of dangers and temptations. Brueggemann’s analysis of this difficult issue is one that makes sense in human experience, putting your faith in a static seeming security that you hope you can depend on is comforting but it leads nowhere. We in the United States are still not over those conventional, comforting and totally failing institutions and idols and largely mythological national myths but those have led us to favor ignorance and corruption and a lying promise of secure prosperity.

It isn’t as if we haven’t been warned by our own prophets, Dorothy Day, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Cone, as I pointed out last week, John Oliver when he was speaking prophetically, even as the anti-prophetic voices that dominate the mass media and the Pharaonic entertainment regime that brought us Reagan and then Trump, and encouraged the moral and intellectual corruption that has led us into hell has ignored and led away from those warnings. That is not a surprise, as I have always needed to point out, truth is often hard to take and it cannot be made palatable and icky sweet in ways that lies can because the substrate of a lie is not in hard realism but in malleable, ductile, shapable, deceptive opportunism. That is something that the judges and justices have either not realized or they have intentionally used, that fact makes lies more powerful than the truth until the truth prevails and its hard lessons cannot be put off any longer, but by then the crooks, gangsters, sadists and their minions in the legal profession and in judging and “justice”ing are retired or dead.

Anyone who wants to see hardness of heart that we will have to get past to get onto a future can look at the Supreme Court that recently ruled that there is no obligation to provide prisoners with ways to avoid the deadly plague we are going through. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas are little pharaohs with hearts as hard as osmium, what we do with that hardness of heart is up to us. We can use it to energize us to dump them or we can live with the even harder hardness that will come without us doing that.

 

The Great Big Little Word That Starts With "Y" And What Has To Be Done To Cut It Down To Size - And Now The Worst Yet

That thing I thought was going to hit on Friday hit yesterday so I didn't get anything posted.   I'll try to make up for that today.   If things go as planned I'll post a radio drama for tonight.   

Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.  And that's the optimistic way to see things.   We are having first hand experience of the danger we have gotten into by allowing some idiot creep in the Department of Justice effectively put presidents above the rule of law while they're in office and, of course, after they leave if they and their partners in crime were investigated and prosecuted the Republican enabling media would declare it "vindictive" or other such words to allow the criminals the media helped into office escape consequences.

 If we are lucky our experience with a made and criminally insane king will lead to a real American revolution that will prevent this happening again but it's not going to be easy to make that happen, we have to overcome a bunch of national mythologies about our distant and recent past

One of the earliest pieces I posted online said that Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon was one of the worst things an American president had done in the past fifty years.  I slammed the Kennedys who gave Ford a medal for doing it in the piece, which got some notice, not all of it positive.  Our establishment, even the "opposition" to the likes of Nixon likes the pretense that let Ford pardon the man who made him president, single handedly.    Which if it wasn't a blatant quid pro quo was suspected to be one with complete justification. But its effects on subsequent history could not any more obviously fostered even more corruption and law breaking among the party that produced and nurtured both Nixon and Ford.    If he had not pardoned Nixon and Nixon's crimes had been fully investigated and Nixon and more of his criminal associates had been prosecuted, convicted and punished the massive criminal regime that Reagan, Bush I and II and now the worst yet, Trump have run would likely have not happened.  

And note the adverb "yet" the criminality of  Bush II-Cheney had not yet become as blatantly, proudly, intentionally and self announcing as Trump's.    He and his criminal cohorts - De Joy is the current featured blatant criminal - have been flagrantly breaking the law to subvert the only thing that gives a government any legitimacy, the election and they are getting away with it because the Republicans in the Congress in the courts and, most of all, in the inaptly named "Department of Justice" are all  criminals too.

If Trump wins OR IF THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, THE COURTS, THE CONGRESS AND, MOST OF ALL THE MEDIA LETS THE TRUMP CRIME FAMILY AND ITS ASSOCIATES OFF WITHOUT THE MOST SEVERE PENALTIES, ESPECIALLY IN THE CONFISCATION OF WHAT THEY STOLE AND THE JAILING OF THE CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES, we should expect that "yet" to become operative.  It will prove, in the not at all distant future to be the most operative word in this whole thing.