Domination at Home and Abroad

As the midterm election heats up in Ohio, it’s time to recognize the important role minor political parties play in our bellwether state, as well as across the nation. Although commonly referred to as third parties or alternative parties, the ideas behind these groups are popular and can have a major impact in the future of our nation’s political landscape as the millennial generation continues to look for its voice.

For example, in my personal experience I always considered myself a Democrat -- I turned 18 in August 2001 and was an adult for one month before we entered a post-9/11 world. During my formative college years I quickly grew to resent the Bush administration and their war mongering, socially conservative, anti-civil liberty agenda. But as the Democrats eventually took power in 2008, I started to realize that they had a similar corporate, anti-populist agenda that differed from my own and I looked elsewhere for where exactly I fit in. I took my political activism seriously and knew that my generation had a lot of work to do to make a difference in the future we were inheriting.

here have been two developments in the past month that illustrate clearly what is wrong with the White House’s perception of America’s place in the world. Going far beyond the oft-repeated nonsense that the United States is somehow the “leader of the free world,” the Trump Administration has taken several positions that sustain the bizarre view that such leadership can only be exercised if the United States is completely dominant in all relevant areas. Beyond that, Washington is now also asserting that those who do not go along with the charade and abide by the rules laid down will be subject to punishment to force compliance.

“We offer your love to all of our children . . .” the Episcopal priest said, her eyes closed in prayer. Some 170 people were gathered around her, as she stood in a gazebo in a park in Huntsville, Ala. This was one of the 700-plus protests across the country last weekend, as Americans gathered in unity and outrage over Donald Trump’s cruel treatment of immigrants and their children at the southern border.

“Womp, womp!”

Even before the guy pulled the Glock from his waistband, wow, this was the American recipe: sarcasm and hate and racism stirred into our prayers and deepest values, into the best of who we are.

When we describe the United States in the abstract, the best of who we are prevails. Our ideals loom like mountain peaks on a picture postcard: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”

But the real America has always been parsimonious in its allotment of freedom and respect.

Noël Coward meets John Osborne in Enid Bagnold’s mid-1950s The Chalk Garden. This funny yet pointed two-acter set in an upper crust country house in Sussex, England is sort of somewhere between a Victorian era drawing room comedy and those British class conscious “Kitchen Sink” dramas that emerged mid-century in the UK.

To be sure, there is lots of witty repartee between the wannabe grand dame Mrs. St. Maugham (Ellen Geer), her (on- and offstage) daughter Olivia (Willow Geer), granddaughter/daughter Laurel (Carmen Flood), and the other dramatis personae. Although it may not be as enraged as Osborne’s classic Look Back in Anger, there is also a strong undercurrent of class conflict in Bagnold’s not-so-genteel play. (Both works emerged around the same time, although Bagnold, who was 64 when she wrote Chalk and had married into the upper class, had more regard for tradition - if not an unswerving allegiance to it.)