June 5, 2025 : Wondercab Mini (92A)
ON THE BOARDS
Jodie Markell’s Leni Riefenstahl, back in New York
Some of you will recall my entry fifteen months ago alerting folks to Obie-winning Jodi Markell’s remarkable star-turn as Hitler’s diva Leni Riefenstahl in Cabaret-gatory in Gil Kofman’s one-act Leni’s Last Lament during its short run in Brooklyn, before heading on to considerable success at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer: I think “harrowing and heilarious” is how I characterized the fiendish little production, under the sly direction of Richard Caliban, at the time. Well, it’s back, for another limited run, this time on the Lower East Side at the Paradise Factory on East 4th, through June 14th, and the thing is that in the meantime there’s been this pesky little election here in the United States, such that now, just who’s laughing, and at what exactly? As Leni herself scrawled across the new poster, “I hear Nazis are back in fashion, ja?”
As indeed they are, and with a vengeance. For more on the production, including how to reserve seats, see here, where you will also note that I myself will be moderating the post-show discussion after its Thursday June 12th iteration. So, see you there.
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The Main Event
Speaking of the persistent ongoing need to come to some sort of terms with prior regimes (past and present), there’s this:
SETTLING ACCOUNTS WITH TORTURERS IN BRAZIL
(PART THREE of our three-part miniseries)
In Brazil, after the 1964 US-backed military coup that overthrew the country’s freely elected democratic government, the resultant National Security regime grew so cock-sure of its own impunity that they staged spectacles like this one, in Belo Horizonte in 1970,
parading a political prisoner through the streets trussed up in the dread parrot’s perch position as part of a local militia’s graduation ceremony.
As horrible as that notorious torture was (a favorite as well, incidentally, of William Boger, the so-called “Tiger of Auschwitz”) and as rampant as it became in the dungeon prisons of the Brazilian military police (so much so that years later, it would itself get featured in several monuments commemorating the victims of those dark days, as in this one here in Recife),
it was hardly unique (the activists whose story we have been following in this series would eventually find themselves tracking the incidence of well over 250 distinct types of torture, which is not even to mention the widespread cases of outright murder).
As late as 1975, military police in São Paulo, kidnapped the popular professor, playwright and journalist Vladimir Herzog, chief news editor at the town’s public television station, subjected him to a harrowing night of torture after which they staged his supposed suicide, releasing photographs of same, in a scene so flagrantly bogus—again this strutting sense of impunity,
since who on earth hangs themselves from a rafter lower than their own height?) that the incident quickly escalated into a cause célèbre. The head rabbi of São Paulo, Henry Sobel, announced that he would be burying Herzog in the very center of the community’s cemetery (in conspicuous violation of the Jewish tradition of burying suicides in the outer reaches of such grounds), and Cardinal Arns offered the city’s main Catholic cathedral for an ecumenical commemorative service prior to the funeral, attended by leaders from all the city’s principal faiths, and literally thousands of others. I mention this last because photos of the service prominently feature images of Rabbi Sobel, Cardinal Arns and Reverend Jaime Wright, who was there representing the Presbyterian Church USA, standing resolutely side by side,
this a full five years before the latter two, in response to the military’s sudden and peremptory lavishing of a complete amnesty on itself for any imputations of torture, murder or disappearance (while simultaneously denying that any such acts had ever taken place), began hatching the extremely dangerous, painstakingly longterm, utterly nonviolent and presently entirely successful conspiracy to get even with the military regime’s torture apparatus (using the regime’s own words from their own files to convict them) which has been the subject of the proposed three-part miniseries (like we say, a human rights caper story, a sort of blending of Missing and Oceans Eleven), whose treatment (itself from several years back) we’ve been unfurling over our past two issues, here and here, culminating with the final segment in this issue today, HERE.
Some of my own files on the Brasil Nunca Mais project:
So anyway, as we’ve been saying all along, if the prospect of such a three-part Brazilian-American miniseries coproduction appeals to any of you as well, and you happen to have contacts among potentially interested agents, producers or other such sorts of machers among the international streaming networks, do let us know (or let them know about us) at this address: Weschlerswondercabinet@gmail.com .
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MEANWHILE, A FEW FINAL NOTES ON ONGOING POLITICAL CRISES, ABROAD AND AT HOME
KATASTROFA!
…or so blared the one-word headline on the Polish weekly Polityka’s newsfeed, early Monday morning, announcing the razor-thin triumph of the only just recently repudiated Polish ultra-nationalist (and many in Europe had even argued neo-fascist, or certainly decidedly illiberal in the Orbanist/Trumpist-avant-la-lettre sense) PiS party’s candidate for the country’s presidency,
a largely ceremonial role which was nevertheless going to have the capacity to inflict decided mischief on the ongoing governance of the country’s pro-EU/Ukraine prime minister Donald Tusk and the parliamentary majority through which he had been hoping to steer the country back to the sort of traditional democratic governance that had been so disrupted by PiS’s own eight years in power up through their parliamentary defeat two years ago. The whole idea with this election was supposed to be that Tusk and his legislative majority were at long last going to be able to wrest themselves out from under the overhang of a prior PiS president, who this time was being term-limited out of office, especially since their own candidate, the mayor of Warsaw, was so obviously more qualified, sophisticated, urbane, technocratically competent, etc than the new Pis stalking horse, a onetime boxer supposed “historian” with a decidedly sketchy background (including undisputed service as a Gdansk hotel’s procurer of female companionship for visiting foreign guests), a background which alas had failed to dim support for his candidacy on the part of the fiercely conservative national Catholic church. And yet by Monday morning, in a sliver-tight electoral decision, all that had come to nought with the Tusk pro-EU project yet further compromised.
Sound familiar?
Not surprisingly, Trump himself had been supporting the PiS candidate (as, for that matter, more surreptitiously, had Putin, always eager to throw a spanner into the works of European unity), but then the Revolt of the Left Behind has similar roots in both Poland and the United States, wending back decades, well into the eighties and nineties, with the worldwide triumph of the neoliberal so-called consensus. The late great David Graeber long maintained that neoliberalism (with its favoring of technocratic elites, deregulation, slashing of social welfare programs, “free trade” with its concomitant hollowing-out of entire manufacturing sectors as capital sought cheaper platforms abroad, the resultant polarization of wealth, etc.) had long been a political rather than an economic program, one that consisted, virtually in its entirety, of the simple retort, endlessly repeated, “Tough luck, you don’t have any other choice.” One might have expected such a slapdown from Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher (indeed the latter was famous for her TINA doctrine, “There Is No Alternative”) but the shock came when Blair in Britain and Clinton in the US adopted more or less the same posture, as eventually did Obama who, following the 2008 neoliberal crash ended up saving the banks and their freewheeling executives without requiring that they in turn save millions of stranded homeowners by refinancing their underwater mortgages, all of whom were left to their dismal fates. Similarly, in Poland, where the astonishing uprising of “ten-million-solid” workers and farmers in the Solidarity movement brought about the up-till-then literally unimaginable collapse of the entire Soviet communist system across the 1980s, many profited handsomely by way of the shock imposition of the neoliberal model after 1989, but many others, and perhaps a majority, fell by the wayside—workers whose factories closed down, peasants without access to the sorts of links with the international elites who now stormed into the country, and with few exceptions (notably Jacek Kuron, who died too young), their onetime oppositionist leaders ceased to respond to their concerns, there being, as everyone kept insisting, simply no alternative.
Only, of course, there was an alternative. As Princeton University (actual) historian Matt Karp remarked in a recent piece in Sidecar, “The deep dispiriting rift between the historical left and the historical working class {…} is the main story of American and rich world politics since the 1970s—a bleak and long running drama in which Trump did not star.” If their traditional allies in the Democratic party abandoned labor and other dispossessed, just as Solidarity leaders abandoned large portions of their own onetime constituencies, there were always going to be others—neofascists among them—there to channel the hurt of such people (even if in the end such would-be leaders might not really have their authentic concerns at heart). “The monstrous spectacle of Trumpism,” Karp concludes, “{…} certainly offers political opportunities of a sort. Yet to seize them, we {on the Left are going to have to} acknowledge and confront this deeper tide within.” Indeed.
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And when it comes to the United States, as I’ve suggested before, there is a further complication that will need addressing, the splintering of a Left once steeped in the tradition of solidarity into one of countless identitarian grievancers. Case in point, the recent misadventures of the sublimely outrageous and often quite heedlessly inappropriate Broadway diva Patti Lupone. You remember Patti LuPone, who back in 2017, on the red carpet outside that year’s Tonys award ceremony, famously had this to say about the prospect of the new president’s ever visiting her latest show:
Click here.
Well so anyway, as many of you will have heard by now, last week LuPone was the subject of a New Yorker profile which ended with the author, staff writer Michael Schulman, bringing up a minor recent kerfuffle involving the production of The Roommate, a quiet two-hander that LuPone was starring in beside Mia Farrow, which as Schulman explained,
shared a wall with a neighboring show, “Hell’s Kitchen,” the Alicia Keys musical, and sound would bleed through. At her stage manager’s suggestion, LuPone called Robert Wankel, the head of the Shubert Organization, and asked him if he could fix the noise problem. Once it was taken care of, she sent thank-you flowers to the musical’s crew. She was surprised, then, when Kecia Lewis, an actress in “Hell’s Kitchen,” posted a video on Instagram, speaking as one “veteran” to another, and called LuPone’s actions “bullying,” “racially microaggressive,” and “rooted in privilege,” because she had labelled “a Black show loud.”
“Oh, my God,” LuPone said, balking, when I brought up the incident. “Here’s the problem. She calls herself a veteran? Let’s find out how many Broadway shows Kecia Lewis has done, because she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.” She Googled. “She’s done seven. I’ve done thirty-one. Don’t call yourself a vet, bitch.” (The correct numbers are actually ten and twenty-eight, but who’s counting?) She explained, of the noise problem, “This is not unusual on Broadway. This happens all the time when walls are shared.”
I mentioned that Audra McDonald—the Tony-decorated Broadway star—had given the video supportive emojis. “Exactly,” LuPone said. “And I thought, You should know better. That’s typical of Audra. She’s not a friend”—hard “D.” The two singers had some long-ago rift, LuPone said, but she didn’t want to elaborate. When I asked what she had thought of McDonald’s current production of “Gypsy,” she stared at me, in silence, for fifteen seconds. Then she turned to the window and sighed, “What a beautiful day.”
It was. In Central Park, New Yorkers were strolling among the apple blossoms. “Oh, people sitting by themselves, lonely as hell,” LuPone observed, peering from her window. “HA! Just lonely as hell out there.” She was ready for a nap. As I walked out, she announced, “I, my dahling, am taking to my bed.”
End of piece. I’m sure even those of you who don’t know can surmise what happened next—this incidentally during a week when scores of civilians a day were once again dying in Gaza, many children among them of starvation; when Putin had taken to the worst nightly bombing raids of his war on Ukraine as Trump washed his hands (here as well) of any responsibility for the ensuing mayhem; when tens of thousands of HIV victims worldwide were starting to die every week thanks to Trump’s executive action eviscerating the USAID and its PEPFAR program; when ICE agents were disobeying explicit judicial orders and disappearing individuals, including several American citizens, off the streets for wholesale extradition, without any due process; when Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that was going to finance billions in ongoing tax breaks for the top ten percent of Americans at the cost of savage Medicaid and food assistance and similar sorts of cut for millions of others, not to mention all sorts of horrible policy goodies larded between the lines, was wending its way through Congress; and oh yeah, then a whole chunk of globally warmed glacier went careening down a Swiss mountainside, burying an entire village in the process; and so forth.
Notwithstanding all of which, within a few days, we all woke to this sort of headline story:
500 Broadway Performers Sign Open Letter Urging Tony Awards to Disinvite Patti LuPone for ‘Degrading and Misogynistic’ Comments
Followed a few days later by the mandatory grovel of apology from LuPone herself, the fact that she of all people was actually doing so being the only surprising thing in the whole sorry sarabande (although then again the fact that she felt herself forced to do so said much about out current moment).
Anyway, all I could think of in the midst of all this (and I’m sorry if I am repeating myself here) was that remarkable passage I keep quoting from the great poet essayist Elliott Weinberger’s response to a similar sort of moment, back in the early eighties, which took the form of an address to fellow poets at a New York convocation, in which he started out by saying that he took “the word ‘politics’ in a very narrow sense: that is, how governments are run. And I take the word ‘government’ to mean the organized infliction or alleviation of suffering among one's own people and among other peoples.” Not a bad definition, that. After which he continued:
One of the things that happened after the Vietnam War was that, in the U.S., on the intellectual left, politics metamorphosed into something entirely different: identity politics and its nerd brother, theory, who thought he was a Marxist, but never allowed any actual governments to interrupt his train of thought. The right however, stuck to politics in the narrow sense, and grew powerful in the absence of any genuine political opposition, or even criticism, for the left had its mind elsewhere: It was preoccupied with finding examples of sexism, classism, racism, colonialism, homophobia, etc.—usually among its own members or the long-dead, while ignoring the genuine and active racists/ sexists/ homophobes of the right—and it tended to express itself in an incomprehensible academic jargon or tangentially referential academic poetry under the delusion that such language was some form of resistance to the prevailing power structures—power, of course, only being imagined in the abstract. (Never mind that truly politically revolutionary works—Tom Paine or the Communist Manifesto or Brecht or Hikmet or a thousand others—are written in simple direct speech.)
Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan was completely dismantling the social programs of the New Deal and Johnson's Great Society....
And so forth. Words, alas, as valid today as they were then, if not more so. And honestly, I’m sorry, do we really any longer have time for this sort of nonsense?
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Finally, there’s this, passed along by friend-of-the-Cabinet Michael Benson, thousands of Chinese drones systematically returning to their launch pads following a spectacular mass-synchronized demonstration
View video here.
Now, put that together with Ukraine’s recent drone triumph in Russia,
and then as well this Sixty Minutes segment from a while back (ah, poor “Sixty Minutes”),
and then recall that the American military’s strategic response to all of this right now is being led by “stable geniuses” Commander in Chief Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,
and all I can figure is that we are all well and truly screwed.
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Okay, enough said. And on that cheery note, I’m now going to take a few weeks off from my Cabinetry duties so as to try to catch up with everything else that’s built up in the meantime. But don’t worry—or do—we’ll be back in no time. And meanwhile, stay engaged and try to keep sane (one truly does help the other).