Marowitz/Steppling

MAROWITZ REPLIES TO STEPPLING:

By Charles Marowitz

Let me begin by saying that I am charter member of the John Steppling fan-club and believe he is one of the most talented playwrights to have come out of the California boom of the ‘80s. His problem has always been that he replaces reactionary dogma with left wing dogma and so is often as injurious to common sense as are his adversaries.

His misreading of my article “The Fourth World” is full of false assumptions and hastily-drawn conclusions, common among people who are so bent on raising their own flag they heedlessly pull down the banners of anyone flying a different escutcheon.

I am chastised for not blaming “big business and corporate hegemony” (two now blood-drained clichés of the Left) for its (I guess he means ‘their’) marked colonization of consciousness….” But ‘big business and corporate hegemony” (just like his previously listed “US State Department, Pentagon, World Bank, IMF etc) are merely abstractions. All of those collective nouns are populated by pople. People with social psychological and moral attitudes which, in my opinion (and I’m sure in Stepplings as well) are often bland, tautological, self-serving and inhumane. I am placing no blame, as Steppling claims, on “people who have been manipulated and brainwashed and who struggle everyday to make a living…etc” “The ignorance of the masses” says Steppling “as described by Marowitz seems to be entirely their own fault.’ - But my indictment of this ’fourth world’ was not directed to the romanticized “poor struggling masses” I clearly mention early in the piece that, in my personalized definition of the term, I am referring to “members of both the middle and upper classes of American Society”. And it is not their standard of living which is being indicted, but the attitudes and opinions they soak up from the media, the Church and political leaders who regularly brainwash them with half-truths, hype and dogma.

For Steppling this is “real elitism and contempt for the poor” but only a mindless radical vigorously fighting the class-wars of the 1930s, could convert a nuance about the brainwashed masses into a struggle between ‘workers’ and ‘capital’. Steppling’s polemics are rooted in the hoary, pre-World War 2 class war – which, it is as clear as the rouge on Lenin’s embalmed face, is not the struggle which is going on today. A little intellectual sophistication would help dry-clean the cerebral smudges which keep Steppling’s mind and attitudes rooted in the dialectical past.

Steppling gives away his own prejudices in a small aside when he writes that I accuse ”the lumpen masses, or multitudes for not voting (because, um, we all know voting makes such a big fucking difference)…” — Well yes John, despite the two-party system which is essentially two sides of the same schizophrenic entity, I do believe that Americans can reclaim their country and replenish its democracy if that two-party system were abolished and replaced with true political diversity which wasn’t bought and paid for by corporate hand-outs and Abramov-like bribes, If it can’t be done by political reform within a democratic system then one has to rely on revolutionary change and history has shown us too many instances of how fatal that can be. It is a great balancing-act in America today to cling to the precepts of the Constitution in the face of those who would prostitute it for their own ends – but I’d rather be a dissenter and part of a vocal minority than disown everything that was postulated by idealists such as Thomas Jefferson and rascals like Thomas Paine. But then, I don’t live in Poland and throw brickbats over the Atlantic in the hope that they might shatter some windows on Pennsylvania Avenue,

My overall point, blithely sidestepped by Steppling, is that if we are to have a revolution of sensibility in America, it has to start vith sense. That means chucking out the pseudo-democratic, ecumenical garbage from peoples minds and replacing it with sensible, humanistic theorems that are intelligently argued. It is the collective consciousness which has to be assailed - not by slogans, dogmas or partisan rhetoric - but by a lucid and liberating rationalism. It is the duped, the bland and the bigoted that constitute the “fourth world’, not as Steppling suggests, the poor and downtrodden.

Charles Marowitz

STEPPLING REPLIES TO MAROWITZ:

Thanks Charles, for your response.

Let me quickly address several things.”I am chastised for not blaming “big business and corporate hegemony” (two now blood-drained clichés of the Left) for its (I guess he means ‘their’) marked colonization+ of consciousness….” But ‘big business and corporate hegemony” (just like his previously listed “US State Department, Pentagon, World Bank, IMF etc) are merely abstractions.

All of those collective nouns are populated by pople.”
(I guess you mean people).And what is your point? Of course they are populated with people….but to list the World Bank and IMF as “abstractions” is just bizarre. No, they are actual functioning institutions that ravage much of the (not) developing world. And yes, Paul Wolfowoitz is a real person.

If you say that you include the middle class and upper classes in your critique, then why label them “lumpenproletarian”? Again, who is to blame, here? Those who soak up the disinformation, or those who create it?And if we agree that the emptiness of public discourse is almost self evident, then why not direct the attack against the corporate creators of propaganda and news-tainment? Or attack the government for destroying what little public education once existed? You seem to avoid any critique of corporatism, of state dominated media and its de facto censorship.

The complaint that I address class divisions is pretty strange, actually. If there is no class conflict between the owners and upper management of major corporations and wage slaves at the bottom of the minimum wage scale, then I guess Im missing something, Charles.
Perhaps you can explain? I mean, Christ, of course there is class division. Of course. Are you suggesting that America is not a class based society anymore? Please clarify.

And finally, on my hurling brickbats from Poland…well, geez, I guess I should’a stayed in Hollywood or where is it you live, Charles…Malibu as I recall?

As for voting. Marx said, rightly, that electoral politics in a class based society was pointless. (Now, he also, at times, said voting was important in a symbolic sort of way). The reality is that voting today achieves nothing, because nothing is at stake. Kerry or Bush? Hillary or Rudy? There is hegemony, and again, its time to read Gramsci. This hegemony creates utter and total control of political theatre — the American electoral system. Will Americans get to vote on bringing the troops home? Of course not.

I wonder where this liberating rationalism is to come from, Charles? If the lumpen masses (and middle class and whoever you designate as lacking) doesn’t have it, how do they get it? I would suggest to you that access to education is a starting place….along with a bit of relief from daily toil and the anxiety of no job security. Those are the very things the system will not allow. Its not in the interests of the ruling 2% to give people options for autonomous thought. If you want to chuck out pseduo democratic garbage, as you put it, and replace it with sensible humanistic theorems (again, as you put it) then how might this take place if one doesn’t address the polarized economic status that exists in the US?

Yours,

—JS