The data science website 'FiveThirtyEight' just published a new 'What's the Point' podcast about the limits of Drone Warfare, and especially the difference between tactical tools and strategic thought. Their guest is William Arkin, a former intelligence minder and current journalist. The prompt for the discussion is Arkin's new book, Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare. an awkward title with an important theme.

The gist of the discussion is that the U.S. security forces have, with the aid of drones, amassed mountains of data which they comb through to find targets to destroy. The United States has devoted tremendous resources to this ongoing project, and it has led to a large number of deaths, and a comparable amount of controversy among ethics watchdogs. Drone strikes though, compared with 'boots on the ground' soldiering, consumes relatively few resources, does not immediately risk the lives of U.S. soldiers, and so receives little media attention. The film Good Kill and the play Grounded explore the moral costs of these issues for those who pilot and command drone operations, but little time is spent understanding the conflicts that we enter.

Arkin argues that an investment in drones cannot displace an intensive investigation of the purpose and end-goal of the conflicts we enter. Good data can lead to good knowledge, but when that data lacks a coherent framework to understand it, it may simply help perpetuate the slack fighting that we have been involved in since September 2001. It's true that drones have created a tempestuous legal debate, and discussions about the morality of assassination. But these debates lack the purposeful depth of strategic discussion.

Why do our leaders want us to engage in violence on the far side of the world? Can the violence we are capable of actually help us achieve the objectives laid down by our leadership? Is the public fully informed of the costs and dangers of entering such a conflict? Can we achieve better outcomes using different tools, including diplomacy, or an alternative military action? How do people interpret our drone strikes, both those that succeed, and those that fail?

When data displaces debate, we silence the most important questions, and replace strategy with rote task management.

This is not, of course, a new trend. It can occur whenever technology or workforce expertise permit rapid gains in data gathering and data analysis. As Lawrence Freedman describes in Strategy: A History (a wonderful read and door-stopper of a book), former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara led a similar data-driven revolution during the 1960s, one that encouraged tremendous introspection and self-justification within the Pentagon, but also one that failed to consider the dark spots in American knowledge and strategic thinking. Pentagon leaders spent more time justifying their beliefs than they did altering them. Here in lies the hard problem: smart thinking does not necessarily lead to strategic thinking. Strategic thinking, even when it takes place, may very well fail due to the overwhelming complexity of enforcing one's political will against an opponent. 

Given that strategy is, at best, a coping mechanism rather than a master stroke, it is tempting to fall into the bureaucratic trap of pursuing further drone attacks as a good unto themselves. Commanders, not knowing how to win the war, may therefore settle for continuous attacks via drone.

Drones (of course) will not go away. Within the military, I suspect that in a few years time they will be  relegated to company and battalion command: a more efficient version of mortar fire. Drones will also likely assume a dominant role in domestic policing--a quiet, efficient accompaniment to traffic patrol and police helicopters.

Drones may also encourage a new crop of useful close air support aircraft to replace the A10. Ground troops have been clamoring for years for air support that flies low and slow, and (unlike Apache helicopters) are not such expensive toys that they cannot afford to take risks in heavy ground combat.

But tactical weapons are not the same as strategy: the pursuit of strategy requires a steady, moderate march disciplined with human dignity and a reasonable hope for peace.

Here is a lousy quote from the opening scene in Gone with the Wind:

There is a tendency in the state of Texas, and in southern literature, to imagine and fantasize about the 'Old South' as the last gasp of feudalism, feudal honor, feudal obligation, and its accompanying virtues and vices. This tendency credits the Old South with retaining special vestiges of nobility, and a connection between the earth and the people on it.

Let's try to clarify when and where feudalism existed. It was a form of politics, or social organization, that predominated in some parts of Europe, especially England, during the medieval period. It began falling to pieces in the Early Modern period, beginning with the Tudor monarchy; that is to say , it began falling apart under Henry VII. Henry VII's successor, Henry VIII, used parliamentary process to destroy the feudal lords that put his ancestors on the throne in 1066; the destruction culminated in the English Civil War, which diminished not only the feudal lords, but the monarchy as well. 

During this same time period in Early Modern England, feudal lords began severing their relationships with their serfs and vassals; the lords sought to shift away from subsistence farming so as to enter the English wool industry and conduct lucrative trade with Europe. The movement to kick the serfs off the manor and to introduce shepherding was known as the 'enclosure' movement. While it temporarily solved some debt and financial problems for the English nobility, it ultimately created a wealthy merchant class that could maximize its own benefits from European trade. Henry VII and his successors saw the new professional bourgeoisie class as a source of power that would allow them to confront their dangerous nobles. 

So the feudal system in England began collapsing in the mid 16th century, just prior to the establishment of the first English colonies in America. 

Let's look at the South. Remember, Southern legends often associate the Old South with the feudalism of Old England.

Two facts about the Southern economy undermine the notion that it was a feudal system:

First, the dominant economic activity of the south was capitalist, and it came in two forms. First, cotton dominated the economic landscape. Cotton tended to exhaust the soil, and required the opening of new lands to continue its growth. Most of this cotton was sold to Great Britain, where it was processed into cloth. Southern planters sold the remainder to northern industrial states like New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

The original southern lands--those that rested along the Atlantic, like the Carolinas and Georgia, were exhausted after generations of growing tobacco and cotton. So these states, especially after the banning of the international slave trade in 1808, specialized in breeding and exporting slaves to cotton plantations opening in Texas and in the territory belonging to the Louisiana purchase.

Now--what do these two facts tell us? Well, first, they bear no serious relationship to feudalism. In feudalism, both lord and peasant were stuck to the land, and as the land went, so they went. Land ownership was primarily a status symbol and a useful political lever; lords and peasant were judged on their ability to maintain a calm sense of order and habit despite raids, violence, and encroaching rivals. Though lands changed hands, this was viewed as ignoble, and lesser than maintaining custom and holding on to what one already had.

In the Southern United States, on the other hand, Westward expansion allowed the depletion and shuffling off of old soil, and old obligations for new frontiers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The South was not feudal in character. Though feudalism, and more specifically, classical notions of liberty, served as a productive intellectual scaffolding for the processes that occurred on any given plantation. So did traditional morality as found in the Bible. Southerners also used a sort 'scientism' to argue for the 'naturalness' of slavery due to the perceived inferiority of people of African descent. Through Southern society looked conservative and later, after the war, became conservative, it was in fact fairly radical form of agricultural capitalism. No one had ever quite used up soil and labor the way the South did in the years leading up to the civil war. Never before had there been such a worldwide demand for cotton, which we must remember is an inedible agricultural product. Southern planters used the land to grow a product that held no nutritional value. They relied on international trade to maintain their lifestyles, and to help feed their families, their workers, and their slaves. There was nothing feudal about it. The planters were bourgeois, callous, and rich.

By some accounts, when one assesses capital in the United States in 1860, slaves accounted for more wealth than all the railroads and all the manufacturing combined. Southern states viewed the Republicans as a dual threat, both to their wealth and their way of life. Republican candidates, including Abraham Lincoln, did not even appear on state ballots in many Southern states. When Lincoln won 180 electoral votes, and virtually all of the northern states, he only obtained a plurality of the popular vote, and not a majority. Southern states were shocked and outraged, though they had astutely avoided any displays of outrage when the mere plurality favored the South in 1844, 1848, and 1856 presidential elections. 

Now, I do not mean to denigrate the south simply to raise up the northern states as a collection of model states. States both north and south refused women the right to vote. Northern states treated untrained immigrant labor as expendable. Since northern manufacturing could not compete with European manufacturing, the northern industrialists demanded tariff protections to allow them to capture the supply chain to Midwest farmers and Southern planters. 

But as Barrington Moore points out in his classic treatise, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), the North did see a short-lived union between the interests of Northern industrialists and small farmers. What allowed this alliance? In part, it was the rapid formation of the Republican party, and the party's desperate attempt to pull together disparate elements of society to win elections that would swing the balance of power towards the creation of government-sponsored infrastructures like better roads, new cut canals, and continental railroads. 

The broader Republican campaign in 1860 made the alliance between small farmers and northern industrialists quite clear: "Vote yourself a farm--vote yourself a tariff."

Tariffs and hard scrabble farms along the Ohio River are not especially romantic. But they are a superior part of the American memory to the disturbing nostalgia of some Americans for a feudal Southern society that never existed. 

Ari Shavit, My Promised Land, New York: Spiegel and Grau of Random House Publishing (2013).

The nation of Israel, the last great colonial enterprise of the Western world, exists in a harsh, hot climate, surrounded by enemies that deny it a right to exist. For years, it served as beacon of democracy and Western military supremacy, but now it threatens to fall into theocracy and political isolation. Israeli journalist Ari Shavit presents his own personal history of Israel with My Promised Land, a fast-reading account of a young nation's struggles along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

Shavit drives his narrative forward with extensive interviews. Many of his discussions feature the complex heroes and villains of the Zionist enterprise: settlers, warriors, and spies; capitalists, socialists, and politicians. Though he cuts the interviews with dashes of biography, historical context, and personal reflection, in the main Shavit allows his protagonists to co-author his book, so that they can defend their hopes, dreams, and doubts.

Shavit begins with a chapter out of his own family history. In the closing moments of the nineteenth century, an English-Jewish ancestor visited Palestine for the first time. He surveyed the countryside, and settled there a few years later. The Jewish settlers of the late 19th century tackled the problem of creating a Jewish homeland in a way similar to other herculean colonial enterprises, such as the Suez Canal; they raised capital from abroad, and then added tremendous amounts of human labor. They bought land from the waning elite of the Ottoman Empire. When necessary, they forced the removal of the serfs and tribes that had occupied the land for centuries. Intellectually, the Jewish immigrants felt tied to Europe, but they knew that Europe no longer wanted them; in the desert they began to forge a new identity, one with less room for the individual spirit and conscience, and much more aggressive than what they inherited from their diaspora ancestors.

The European Jews, imitating European colonial powers, looked at Palestine as a backwards, empty land. They never saw the Arabs as inhabitants. They only saw an empty land open to the aspirations of Jewish nationalism. The Jewish settlers especially sought out the rich coastal soils of Palestine. They wanted collective economic success and secular socialism, not the restoration of Biblical landmarks in the hills to the east. In time, the disenfranchised Arab serfs began to push back against the newcomers with sporadic murders and assaults on Jewish settlements.

The Jews responded to the violence with calls for the forced migration of Arabs out of Palestine. By 1938, the language of David Ben Gurion echoed that of world leaders working elsewhere: "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it."

Shavit then traces how individuals like Shmaryahu Gutman drew on ancient Jewish symbols of resistance, like the mass suicide at the Masada fortress in 73 CE, thus "using the Hebrew past to give depth to the Hebrew present and enable it to face the Hebrew future." A rootless nation searched for its Hebrew past like a long forgotten spring and, once rediscovered, held onto those ancient waters with emotions that tottered between tenacity and desperation.

Jewish survival in Palestine required collective organization for social, political, and military conquest. The end of the British Mandate heralded a new era of Zionism. The Zionist political leaders rushed into action in 1948 and sliced off a portion of the region designed to ensure a Jewish majority in the newborn country of Israel.

Shavit cannot help but look back at his country's history with awe, love, and pride--and so Shavit's presentation is as personal as it is insightful. As a journalist he expands that history by inserting the memories, fears, and dreams of other Israelis. His emotional exploration of Palestine brings with it a humor and sadness all its own, one that fights against the coldness of a historical narrative.

Perhaps his most effective chapter relates the crisis of Lydda, 1948, in its absolute tragedy. The fatigued, desperate Jewish soldiers scrambled to the very edge of the Arab village of Lydda. And then, assuming the worst, the soldiers (including Moshe Dayan) charged through town with armored vehicles, guns blazing. Israel's founding political leaders abstained from making a clear decision to force the removal of the Arabs from the village, thus preserving their reputation in Europe and America. The absence of oversight turned their young Israeli soldiers into aimless cannons which the Arab civilians had to dodge through flight. The Arabs abandoned their dignity and homes for the sake of momentary security, and straggled out of Lydda (and many other villages) on long, deadly marches. Throughout the early years of Israel, trepidation gnawed at the backbone of Jews and Arabs alike, prompting them to edge deeper into the depths of human behavior.

Interestingly, Shavit mourns the loss of the Israeli character that inspired Zionism in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. "On the one hand [Zionism] was a colonialist enterprise. It intended to save the lives of one people by the dispossession of another. In its first fifty years, Zionism was aware of this complexity and acted accordingly...but after 1967, and after 1973, all that changed...." The victories and traumas of 1967 and 1973 forever altered the political landscape of the Middle East, and the social fabric of Israeli society.

Israel initiated the Six Day War of 1967 to create a political buffer between themselves and the surrounding Arab nations, and in anticipation of an Arab attack just over the horizon. Israel caught its rivals completely off guard, and won the war with superior preparation and complete surprise. The victories of 1967 left Israel drunk with victory, and far more land than they had hoped for at the outset of their enterprise.

The occupied territories soon complicated the problems of Zionism. Many defeated Arabs were unable to immigrate to another country, and to this day they remain imprisoned in small tracts of land in Gaza and the West Bank. Though tragic and inhumane, the experiences in Gaza and the West Bank are not a second Holocaust. As Shavit says, 'no one can seriously think there is any real similarity. The problem is that there isn't enough lack of similarity. The lack of similarity is not strong enough to silence once and for all the evil echoes." And so the Israelis live in close and dangerous proximity to the people they displaced, and those people watch them day after day. The Israelis look back with wary eyes, "the jailers imprisoned by their jail."

Israelis desperately want to believe in their country--their nation--as established fact. They want release from the terrible fear that haunts the low-land orchards, the ancient alleys of Jerusalem, and the drug-soaked discotechs of Tel Aviv. But Shavit sees no release from the fear. Modern Israelis lack the secular hardness of their grandparents and great-grandparents. The melting pot of 1948 now congeals into separate small-minded elements: right-wing, left-wing, Oriental Jew, ultra-orthodox, capitalists, settlers, and rootless Palestinian refugees. The soft selfishness of individualism undermines the collective consciousness necessary for survival in the Middle East. He anticipates a second Holocaust, easier than the first due to the small spot of land upon which the Jews now live, and the tools of nuclear destruction that he believes will soon sprout among Israel's many Arab neighbors.

Shavit repeatedly calls his book a personal history. He offers somewhat skewed interpretations of many key events. For example, he calls the 1936 Arab revolt "a collective uprising of a national Arab-Palestinian movement," but leaves the revolt poorly explained and poorly reasoned, ignoring the way that economic modernization can threaten tribal honor; he also never identifies the key leaders of the revolt, or their localized motives.

Yet Shavit writes with a journalistic candor, and he conveys epic history. To tell his story, he chooses certain perspectives and subjects as stepping stones along the path. My Promised Land, therefore, never presumes to be a comprehensive volume. It assumes knowledge of pivotal figures like David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir. It also assumes a familiarity with British colonialism, the First and Second Worlds Wars, and the conflicts of 1948, 1967, and 1973. Yet Shavit's use of expanded, effusive stanzas of dialogue help paint the story of Israel in powerful, nuanced strokes of darkness and light.  

This week, I had the privilege of staying at Rubber Repertory's Pilot Balloon Church-House. My partner, Karen Alvarado, was scheduled to come with me, but she had to go to NYC over the weekend for auditions. I missed her presence. But her absence compelled me to write a piece that tracks the contours of our feelings for each other.  I suspect I will post more about that in a few weeks. 

In the meantime, I wanted to share some images from a very small project I worked on while I was here. As a part of Rubber Repertory's  fundraising efforts, they offered their donors the opportunity to receive a piece of postcard art from the artists staying with them in Lawrence. The postcards presented a challenge, as straightforward writing felt inadequate for the medium--I write postcards all the time, and would never classify those as 'art.' So I experimented with a few new methods, so to speak, to earn my keep. The images below don't tell half the story, but I hope they will help me remember the work. 

The postcards I made were inspired by a handful of Mexican youths I saw on the metro near the Autonomous University in Mexico City; I watched them cut themselves with bottle glass and beg for pesos--but the passengers gave them nothing. 

Here's a partial list of materials: postcard, brother EM430 typewriter, milk of magnesia, club soda, soap, distilled vinegar, a memory of Mexico, a broomstick, a shower, a ceramic baking dish, absorbent paper, and a fourteen gauge needle that I brought back from Iraq. 

Many thanks to Rubber Repertory's Josh Meyer and Matt Hislope! I was lucky to have the opportunity to visit them in Lawrence! I am going to miss them, and the intensity of openness with which they listen to human experience. 

We usually notice the absence of justice, not its presence. When present, justice touches us like a mild breeze. Only when we are absolutely still can we notice that it keeps us cool and comfortable. Justice is not a trophy we can brag about, or hold before the admiration of others. In the absence of justice we become cruel and mean. A low pettiness creeps onto the tip of our tongues. 

When justice is absent, we may call it injustice. We notice injustice immediately, and it treats our internals as roughly as the worst weather treats our skin.  Injustice twice corrupts: it corrupts the offender, but it also corrupts the offended. For even the mere fear of being a victim of injustice can corrupt the spirit; to avoid the possibility of injustice, we buckle, dodge, and coerce others. 

Justice might be complicated in description, but it is simple in practice. 

Justice through friendship, or not at all. 

For this reason, I prefer theater when we make it with friends. The more formal the relationship, the less satisfying I find it. Formal contracts can help preserve friendships, at times, such as when individuals promise each other a certain level of effort or resources. But on the whole, we need to want to see each other succeed; minimize each other's flaws, and maximize our strengths; we need fellow theatre-makers that excuse us for being human. 

It is not a close secret that more than one type of drama occurs in the classrooms and hallways of theater programs. Actors, though friends, compete fiercely for roles. Directors scramble for opportunities to practice their craft. Artists, often despite their own intentions, struggle to place themselves in a hierarchy of accomplishment. I've never wanted to get involved in that fray. I figure if I'm going to shallowly scramble for status, I might as well do so on a professional basis, rather than an academic one. And as of yesterday, I have never been so glad that I did not attend a master of fine arts program. Or earn an undergraduate degree in theater. 

My good friends in UT's Theater and Dance Department have offered me a lot of support over the years. Most recently, they produced THE PRICELESS SLAVE at the Cohen New Works Festival. They find themselves enveloped in a scuffle about 'main stage programming.' A similar fracas occurs in any academic  theater department, but its probably exacerbated by the unique tensions at the University of Texas. The department has two 'main stages.' One is a large, acoustically vibrant proscenium, and the other is a large, sound-sucking black box. But the department only puts on a handful of shows each year: a couple of dance pieces, and then a short list of musicals or plays. Ostensibly, all the material serves an academic purpose within the department, and also helps train the students for the professional world of acting, directing, set design, lighting, etcetera. 

To select its yearly program, the department uses a semi-inclusive process that is subject to veto from the departmental chair. A committee of faculty and faculty-friendly students informally surveys the department, and then talks out a list of shows for the coming academic year. They suggest shows that they want to see, and shows they want to perform in. Then the chair of the department looks over the list; he scratches some, adds others, and bounces the list back to the committee. Not everyone is happy with the results. Then actors audition, and 'artistic teams' are put together to work on specific productions. The process is not quite democratic, but then again, not much about art  or academics is democratic. 

While one could probably improve the selection process to better fit the department's diverse preferences, it seems that the real difficulty lies in the limited programming slots available. When there are only a handful of shows each year, the stakes are raised tremendously for each and every show that makes the slow, painful, pitiable journey to appear before  a live audience. Inevitably, the high-stakes process will leave many artists and students out in the cold. Increasing the number of programming slots (and decreasing the amount of funding each one receives) would lower the stakes. 

More aggressively, it appears a sickening waste of space that two venues in central Austin lie vacant most weekends. Increasing the number of production slots would reduce the nights when fertile ground lies fallow. Doubling the number of productions (or quadrupling) (or more) would lower the stakes, increase occupancy rates, and might even lead to more risk-taking.  The stakes are much too high for each show right now (artistically, educationally, and economically). It seems madness to continue on the current path of severely limited programming. 

Increasing the number of production slots would also speak to the interests and habits of some of the younger artists on the faculty. They prefer rough and tumble shows that take chances, mix genres, and dash through diverse landscapes without blinking an eye. They do not want to make or see clunky classical revivals that fail to match the technical achievements of Broadway, Chicago, and London, or that attempt to compete with the narrative powers of film. 

But the Old Guard in many faculties enjoys the stoic, steady and patient pace of limited programming with well-made plays. Good acting, to a certain set, means talent and training, both of which require strong material with which to play. A new, messy, incomplete play coarsens the fragile taste of young actors, whereas a masterfully written play can guide the actors towards greater heights of imagination and nuance. There is something to be said for this approach.

Still, the number of production slots must increase. Perhaps we can increase the number of performances without abstaining from producing well-made plays for the sake of 'new work.' Resurrecting the term 'repertory season' might bridge the distance between the Old Guard and New Guard faculty members, and aptly describe the policy of increased production slots. A repertory season could prejudice efficiency over perfection, craft over product, and cooperation over competition. And perhaps a repertory season might grant a lovable, forgivable and expected rough edge to the main stage productions. For the love of God, mis amigos, it is student fucking theater. In Texas. Of course it has rough edges. If you're not falling down and skinning your knee once in a while, you're probably not running fast enough. 

I began this essay with a note on injustice. I now return to that theme to look at the particulars of the season. 

This year's scruffiness began with In the Heights, a sort of hip hop musical. I dislike musicals. I suppose I get as emotionally involved as anyone else, but I dislike their cheap narrative tricks and manipulative scores. The show Les Miserables, for example, shoots an impoverished child on stage, mid-song; everyone cries; but it is a cheap ploy, and too easily staged. It is far more challenging and necessary to show the slow degeneration of life that shadows all instances of extreme poverty. But in Les Miserables, they shoot the kid. As they shoot the boy, and tears creep into my eyes, I want to punch Trevor Nunn (the English progenitor of the scene) for his vulgar manipulations. (Musicals are pornography, but for the emotions instead of the libido). 

I've been told that this particular musical (In the Heights) was chosen to speak to the growing number of Texas Latinos that attend the University of Texas. If this was the justification, I'm not sure it made sense in the first place.  The 'Heights' in the play's title refers to Washington Heights. Washington Heights is in Manhattan. Manhattan looks and feels a little different than the Rio Grande Valley or suburban Dallas, or even inner city Dallas.

When it came time to cast the play, my Hispanic friends in the department were pretty engaged with the idea. Obviously, the kids who attend a theater and dance program like to be on stage (even if it involves singing and dancing). The powers that be decided not to cast any of my friends in the play. The department decided that due to a dearth of talent within the department, they would offer several roles to actors from outside the university. 

This set off an alarm. It does not matter whether or not the alarm attested to technical instance of injustice in the minds of people casting the play--when it comes to injustice, the feeling is everything. And the casting decision blatantly demonstrated that the department was more interested in 'putting on quality programming' than developing or training the students that walked through its doors. Further, it fed a fire that burns throughout Austin, Texas--it's impossible not to notice the imbalances between actors of color and 'white' actors in this city in terms of opportunity and exposure. Supposedly, those casting the play subsequently increased the number of student actors involved in the project. But now it is too late. As soon as they made the mistake, they should have cancelled the damned musical and started from scratch. 

Of course, In the Heights is not the only play the department will perform this year. The other plays fall into a broad category that I call "shit that other people have done well, but that we can probably do okay." Our Country's Good, Dial M for Murder, Dead Man's Cell Phone.  Austin Playhouse and ZACH Theatre put on similar plays, but with big-kid actors and easier parking. Student  theater clubs also put on similar programming, but with cheaper tickets, lower expectations, and smuggled liquor. 

I have been around Austin since 2005. That's not all that long. But it's long enough to know that there have always been conflicts over these departmental shows at UT Austin. The programming has always been as flat and as warm as an old can of Coke. It is not the selection process that is at fault. A strong, autocratic leader can put together a good program. A broad, diverse coalition of voices can also (though more rarely) put together something interesting. But there must be room to fail. Increasing the number of production slots is the only way to go. 

A smaller university in town, Saint Edwards, puts on a series of four or five plays that typically resemble, in spirit, the plays appearing at UT. But I think Saint Edwards succeeds where UT fails. Why? Conditions are different. They emphasize acting over set design. They only use one black-box, and it never changes format. The theater only holds a handful of patrons at a time. Saint Edwards consistently mixes Equity actors into its productions. Saint Edwards only has a handful of students for whom they must provide roles. Saint Edwards does not allow student directors, thus granting more consistent directing opportunities to their faculty to keep their skills fresh. In short, and for a lot of unchangeable reasons, Saint Edwards puts together a program that I find more rewarding than what appears in my own forty-acre neighborhood. This has nothing to do with talent, and everything do with broader structural conditions. 

I love my friends at Texas, and I am sure that as the months go by, they will find solutions that restore the tenor of justice to their program. Break legs. I am glad I do not have to go to any of the formal meetings--I much prefer working on art outside of UT's academic boundaries. As the fracas develops, I hope to see a diverse set of productions that breathlessly move from one imaginative landscape to another. Play. Play. Play. 

Bayly, Christopher and Tim Harper. Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945.  Allen Lane, 2004.       

In Forgotten Armies, Bayly and Harper embark on a five year odyssey of British Asia during the hell-fires of the Second World War. The authors encounter nearly the full spectrum of humanity: fools, cowards, leaders, and luminaries, but very few heroes; the tensions of British Asia and the Japanese conquest sharpen even the most virtuous of spirits into blades too quick to cut. Racism and class distinctions, prior to the war, make for sordid lives bent towards economic necessity. With the Japanese invasion of 1941, the economic basis for social order disintegrates, yet the terrible distinctions remain. The British imperial power fails to protect its subjects, especially the socially and economically disadvantaged minorities. British Asia collapses in a rush of blood and disillusionment. The fall of Singapore, in particular, stands as a historic embarrassment. In a failed defensive effort with little effort and less planning, a garrison of 85,000 men surrenders to a Japanese assault force of 30,000. Many thousands die in the aftermath. The Japanese conquest feeds off of anti-British sentiment throughout the region, and turns 40,000 captured Indian troops into a detachment of the Japanese army. The Japanese shock troops, rather than liberating British colonies, induce wave after wave of ethnic violence, and glory in the rape of women and the humiliation of men. The British never manage to call the bluff of the overstretched Japanese forces, but eastern monsoons accidentally collude with the Battle of Midway to halt the Japanese expansion. The British Empire crawls back, but never returns to its pre-war position of dominance.

            The book earns its title. One can read a history of the Second World War (as I did just last week) and not hear more than a paragraph about anything that Bayly and Harper uncover. The authors render the political context of the fighting with authority and candor. They maintain a neutral stance towards most agendas and parties, though they exhibit sympathy for nationalist feelings, if not nationalist leaders. The authors write beautifully, and their sense of humanity urges them to include details that others might miss, such as 1942's surreal conjunction of mass starvation in Burma, the kerosene burning of the corpses, and the unusual beauty and quantity of Assam butterflies before the monsoon rains.