HAMLET
The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.

HORATIO
Is it a custom?

HAMLET
Ay, marry, is't:
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honour'd in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and tax'd of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition; and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though perform'd at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
So, oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As, in their birth--wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin--
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens
The form of plausive manners, that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature's livery, or fortune's star,--
Their virtues else--be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo--
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault: the dram of eale
Doth all the noble substance of a doubt
To his own scandal.

I am pleased to say that a peer-reviewed article I wrote for the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies has just been published online. The print version should come out in a few months. Until then, here is the publisher's online link at Taylor & Francis. 

Here is the abstract:

"This article argues for the importance of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 in two key aspects of the transition towards Indian independence: civilian control over the Indian military, and a competition for power between Congress and communists that undermined Indian workers and their student allies.

​"The article begins with an investigation of the mutiny drawing on three sources: a first-person account from a lead mutineer, a communist history of the mutiny, and the papers published in the Towards Freedom collection.

​"In 1946 a handful of low-ranking sailors sparked a naval mutiny that ultimately involved upwards of 20,000 sailors, and then crashed into the streets of Bombay with revolutionary fervour. The Communist Party in Bombay seized upon the mutiny as an opportunity to rally the working class against the British raj, with the hope of ending British rule through revolution rather than negotiation.

​"Yet the mutiny proved less of a harbinger of what was ending and more of a bellwether for what was to come. Congress, sensing the danger of the moment, snuffed out support for the mutiny, and insisted on a negotiated transfer of power. Congress’s action thereby set a precedent for civilian dominance over the military in postindependence India. At the same time, however, Congress betrayed the effectiveness of some of organised labour’s strongest advocates, namely the Communist Party, Bombay students and Bombay labour, thereby undermining their costly mass protest, and hobbling them in future conflicts against Indian capitalists."

​While my author's agreement does not allow me to place the polished, published version of the article on this website just yet, I am able to provide readers with the rough draft of the article I submitted to the editors. Here is the link to the rough draft:         
http://jmmeyer.weebly.com/royal_indian_navy_mutiny_1946.html

​If you would like to read the published version, simply contact me and I can e-mail it directly to you.

Lou Bullock is a generous man and sincere artist from the Bedlam community, and I am very proud that Bedlam Outreach will be hosting a reading of his monologues and short plays on Monday, November 21st at the Sheen Center. Please come and hear his monologues: they will move you. 
​

On Wednesday, November 9th, there will be a reading of excerpts from my work at Columbia University in Manhattan, New York thanks to the Heyman Center for the Humanities. I have decided to focus on new works, so we'll hear from two of my 'works in progress': a monologue about the Odyssey in translation, and a scene from a horror story set during colonial America. The first is a prose piece, while the second is entirely in verse. What the two pieces have in common are a pair of protagonists who filter military behavior through a mythic lens. 

I will be at the event thanks to the thoughtfulness of playwright-poet Maurice DeCaul, who recommended me to the Heyman Center, along with the military veteran and poet Jenny Pacanowksi. Our work will be read by members of the Bedlam Outreach community, which is natural enough since Jenny and I work pretty frequently with that community. 
​
Here is the information for the event, as copied from the Heyman Center's website: 

Crossing the Divide | Veteran Playwrights at Columbia:
An evening of plays and dialogue

Wednesday, November 9, 2016  6:15pmAustin E. Quigley Black Box Theatre
REGISTER HERE 

Columbia University ID cardholders must use a valid ID for entry to the building. Non-Columbia ID cardholders must register using the link above.

Dramatic reading featuring work by three veteran playwrights-- Maurice Decaul, Jenny Pacanowski, and Johnny Meyer-- read by actors and military veterans from the Bedlam Outreach community. Performance followed by a roundtable discussion moderated by playwright Dan Hoyle.
Performance of Maurice Decaul’s “Between the Tigris and the Euphrates” 
Performance of Jenny Pacanowski's "Combat Dick"
Performance of Johnny Meyer’s, “The Cat and Grackle”
Playwright Roundtable moderated by Dan Hoyle 
Audience Talk Back 

Another reading of my play, 'Brides Look Forward', will take place next week in Massachusetts. As with the performance in October, the piece will be presented alongside poems, plays, paintings, and musical arrangements created in Basra and Boston through a process of cultural interchange. 

In my play, 'Brides Look Forward', an Iraqi mother compels her daughter-in-law to search for her missing husband after the British Army withdrawals form the port city of Basra. When writing the play, I drew on transnational conversations that took place during our ongoing artistic process, but also on my memories of Iraq in 2007: the translators, the journalists, Iraqi citizens, incoming fire, kidnappings, reunion, violence---and resiliency. 

Here are the details for the reading, pulled from the Fort Point Theatre Channel website. 

​Performance: Friday, November 4, 8 pm
Exhibit: November 4
@ Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Avenue, Somerville
Free Admission

Basra-Boston Connections: An Iraq-U.S. Collaboration in Theater, Poetry, Art, and Music is a free evening of new work offering the fruits of connections among scholars and artists at the University of Basra and their counterparts in the United States, principally in the Boston area.

In a special dual-nation presentation, the events will include a video from Iraq Panorama Joy, composed for the project by Qays Qwda Oasim. Following the video, Boston musicians Jorrit Dijkstra (both nights) and Jeb Bishop (October 1 only) will improvise around Qasim's composition.
Works will be presented also include workshop performances of two plays written for the project: Brides Look Forward by John Meyer, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and In the Reeds by Amy Merrill, one of the project coordinators.

Amir Al-Azraki, a Canadian-Iraqi, playwright who is one of the project coordinators, will read and talk about the poetry and accompanying art of Elham Al-Zabaedy. Poet Mitch Manning, from the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass Boston, will read from his own poetry. Visual artists Anne Loyer and Asmaa Samir Al-Hasan will present original art.
Free admission but space is limited so reservations are recommended. Click here to make reservations for the November 4 performance. 

Basra-Boston Connections is #16 in the Fort Point Theatre Channel Exclamation Point! series of short works, always offered for free. 

PLEASE JOIN US for a BEDLAM OUTREACH PRESENTATION:
A sneak peek into Bedlam Outreach’s Monday Night Classes for Military Veterans.
 
WHO: The Veterans/Actors of Bedlam's Veteran Outreach Class, MC Jenny Pacanowski, Mission Continues Fellow, J. M. Meyer, teaching artist Judy Molner, and Bedlam's Director of Veteran Outreach, Stephan Wolfert. 
 
WHAT: An informal opportunity to meet the Veterans/Actors of the Outreach class and to observe their work in progress, which includes performances of  Shakespeare scenes, monologues, and readings of their own personal writings.
 
WHEN: Monday, October 10th
6:30-7:00pm: A very informal “meet and greet” between Veterans/Actors, Bedlam Company Members and YOU.
7-8:30pm: The presentation, which features scenes from Shakespeare and personal writings on the themes of ‘homecoming’ and ‘infancy.’
 
WHERE: Intersections International
145 West 28th Street, New York, NY 10009, 11th Floor
 
WHY: At Bedlam, we believe in the power of the performing arts to help reintegrate Veterans back into civilian life, and to help them articulate and understand their experiences through the communal process of making theatre.
 
Our "Open Houses" are an opportunity for Veterans and civilians to exchange in an open dialogue toward bringing a deeper understanding between these two communities.
 
The most successful Veteran reintegration programs include camaraderie, communalization of trauma, and Veteran/civilian integration. Bedlam’s Monday night classes provide the opportunity for camaraderie-building as well as the communalization of trauma, but you provide the opportunity for Veteran/civilian integration just by showing up.
 
To learn more about Bedlam and our Veteran Outreach please visit:
http://www.bedlam.org
 
We hope to see you there!
 
RSVP at Outreach@Bedlam.org
 
Admission is free but donations are always welcome.
 
Outreach “Agreement”
I AGREE to be a part of a safe, secure space where we may “speak what we feel, and not what we aught to say” (from Shakespeare’s King Lear); I also agree to keep what others may share, inside of the room.

Basra, Iraq, is in the news this week as it opens its new antiquities museum, housed in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.

Saddam built some seventy palaces throughout the country, usually as a way of dominating the landscape and providing a permanent reminder of his presence. The coalition forces seized the palaces during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and typically used them as headquarters for their units; during my deployment to Baghdad, I saw the inside of at least three of them, the most opulent (and best preserved) of which was the Republican Palace. The Republican Palace was apparently built on the orders of Faisal II, the deposed king of Iraq who was murdered in 1958. It nevertheless bore Saddam's distinctive signatures, such as his numerous murals devoted to his personal mythology as a great warrior and defender of Mesopotamian heritage against foreign influence. It was very beautiful, with rooms of marble, colored like the emerald green of the Tigris.  

The palaces were often built with the cooperation of foreign engineers, and hardened against both ground and air attack. Thus, the palaces weathered mortar attacks and crude technological 'improvements' remarkably well. The one in Basra suffered damage when the British abandoned it to Shiite militias in 2007; but as the photographs in the article suggest, there is only so much damage that the militias could do to the buildings without heavy machinery.

Now the palace in Basra has been transformed into an antiquities museum, and the people of Basra will be able to see the inside of the palace which Saddam never actually bothered to visit. The leader of the refurbishment, Mahdi Aloosawi, states that the palace was built not with bricks, but with the blood of the people.

The new museum has been curated by its new director, Qahtan al-Obaid; the last director was shot dead in 1991. The British Museum is helping to curate the exhibits. The British have a tradition of alternately developing and conquering Basra that stretches back to the First World War.

The museum is cooperating with the British Council to further develop the space, potentially opening additional rooms for theater and visual arts. The Friends of Basrah Museum is a registered UK charity dedicated to assisting in the project.

'Last Saturday, the Fort Point Theatre Channel artistic collective produced my play, Brides Look Forward, alongside Amy Merrill's absurdist drama In the Reeds.

The plays were of wildly different styles, but I don't think Amy and I could have been more pleased with the results: it was an engaging, interdisciplinary evening of performances, with live music, sounds streamed in from Iraq, and poetry in both English and Arabic.

You have one more chance to catch the Basra-Boston pieces as a collective: Friday, November 4, 2016, 8 pm, at the Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Avenue, Somerville, Massachusetts.

In response to reading on October 1st, I have 'adjusted' my play a bit. Many thanks to the excellent Kathryn Howell, who has cast and directed the piece each step of the away!

Fort Point Theatre Channel's Marc Miller has done most of the hard labour of producing the show thus far--I do not think this project could have happened without his help, and I deeply appreciate his kindness and hospitality.

Fort Point Theatre Channel will present a reading of my short play 'Brides Look Forward' at 290 Congress Street on the Atlantic Wharf as a part of the Basra-Boston Project. The story is told from the perspective of a sharp-witted Iraqi woman whose husband disappears on the night of the British withdrawal from Basra in 2007. 

As the name of the project suggests, I developed the play as part of a collaboration between Iraqis from the city of Basra (the 'bride of the Gulf') and Americans from the city of Boston ('Beantown'). 

I really need to rename my play. It fights the tongue. Brides. Look. Forward. 

Kathryn Howell, a co-artistic director at Fort Point Theatre Channel, will be directing the Boston-based cast. I was delighted earlier this year when English professor Samir Al Jasim asked his students in Basra to give the play a public reading, and provide me with detailed feedback and criticism.

The answer is yes.

European political instability and regional nationalism are historically dangerous instruments of human suffering. In the past fifty years, except for pockets of terrible violence in former Yugoslavia, we have largely avoided the terrors that European fragmentation have unleashed on the world.

Of my immigrant ancestors that I am aware of, more than four out of five left Europe because of starvation and violence rooted in that continent's fragmentation. My Palatine German ancestors fled the Rhine river valley as it was sacked by waves of French and British troops in the 17th and 18th centuries. My Irish ancestors fled the famines induced by the English domination of Ireland, which in turn was connected to Protestant suspicions of Irish Catholic religious and political connections to the mainland. Even my Pilgrim ancestors fled the Church of England, established in Holland, and then immigrated to America because their religious way of life made no sense in an increasingly nationalistic England and Holland of the 17th century.

As attested by two world wars and countless smaller conflicts, Europe can be a dangerous place. But the common market provided by the European Union has made it a safer place. The common market helps reconcile the interests of the Germans, British, French, Italians, and Spanish the largest economic powers of Europe. When continental elites benefit from economic cooperation across the continent, they are less likely to drag their nations into war. 

Yesterday the enfranchised voters in the Kingdom of Britain cast a protest vote against the idea of Europe, and demanded that the government at Westminster withdraw from the European Union.

The fact that the British electorate even had a vote was something of a historical oddity. The decision to join the European Union has typically been made in bureaucratic terms,  and largely for bureaucratic reason of facilitating trade, with the added known bonus of reducing the incentive for violent conflict.

But David Cameron agreed to hold the vote in order to appease the far-right members of his own party, and the nationalistic (some say xenophobic) United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The far-right agreed to support Cameron's continued premiership, and in return he promised them a vote on Britain's membership in the EU.

In holding the vote, Cameron assumed that the British people would, on the day of reckoning, listen to his advice and simply agree to remain within the common market.

But nationalistic politics are dangerous. Nationalism is hard to pin down, difficult to control, and most often develops on playgrounds and kindergarten classrooms rather than in the adult world of economic stability, long-term economic performance, and national security. Nationalism is about fear and jealousy, pride and prejudice.

​The voters who demanded that Britain leave the European Union are not wholly senseless.

​It is true, for example, that the British working class has suffered, and this was also reflected in yesterday's vote. Margaret Thatcher ruthlessly broke the unions in the 1980s, sold off public assets and businesses, and reduced state protections for lower income families.

​But  larger forces were also in play, far beyond the scope of the British government, or the one in Brussels. China opened up to international markets. Eastern Europe emerged from the Soviet Union. Radical Islam swept through the Middle East. American military power flailed restlessly against opponents too amorphous to squash, and instead weakened the foundations of nation-states across the world.

​In sum, David Cameron made a historic miscalculation. The British voters were either angry, confused, or simply disenchanted with the idea of Europe.

​The Brits who wanted to remain in the EU failed to mount a meaningful campaign. But David Cameron did not give them an easy task. It is hard to explain to voters that by saying 'yes' to Europe you are not necessarily saying 'no' to Britain; and that economic security is one of the best ways to ensure international security.

A sliver of the British electorate--perhaps even the sliver that swung the election--may have been reacting to the British-national spirit that swung through the country on the eve of 2014's Scottish referendum. Then, many politicians (Labour and Conservative, Scottish, Welsh and Irish) begged the Scots to keep Britain together.  A year later, and those same politicians were demanding that Britain stay in Europe. For the country's elite, the relationship between these various conceptions of sovereignty is obvious, but perhaps it is foggy for those less drenched in the terminology of security studies, international relations, and economics. 

​At this point, it is not clear that it matters. Perhaps the bravest course for British politicians would be to defy the voters and remain in the European Union regardless of the outcome of the referendum. The EU is, after all, a treaty, and perhaps beyond the scope of direct democracy.

​That is unlikely. Cameron has already pledged to begin the withdraw, even as he has set a timeline for his own removal from the premiership, tail between his legs.

​Political events often diffuse throughout regions. The outcome of the British referendum will likely spawn other protests against the EU in less wealthy and less stable European states.

​Over the past half century, Europe has been a model of security and stability despite possessing historic animosities dating back at least a millennia.

​The world is a less stable and less safe place today than it was before the referendum took place.