two page essay

1

POLITICS

I propose something to you: to learn about politics go for a walk around the town you live in. A walk, not a drive, because encapsulated in the vehicle you don’t see people – and politics is about seeing people, or at least about noting the absence of people. As you walk along streets that I presume to be empty, save for homeless people, consider how different those streets are now from how they were five months ago. Because “distance” was already a custom of social life for decades before it became a rule. You will surely see boxes: still ones called buildings, and moving ones too called cars. People will be hiding somewhere inside of them, concentrating, “moving forward.” There are palm trees in the sky, and everywhere else, where speech is allowed to be made public, there is advertising. Adverting for products mainly. Cures for problems are also products – and the more problems you believe you have and believe you can’t solve for yourself, then the more the cure-market grows. When you see houses remember you are seeing real estate. When you see restaurants and stores remember you are seeing places where people work for a pittance to survive. When you see cars remember you are seeing people expressing themselves through a language of objects that has been imposed on them by the objects’ manufacturers and marketers. When you see Disneyland remember that it is not really that different from North Korea: propaganda and advertising are essentially the same: a one- sided statement in promotion of an idea or product (what is the difference?) that does not include any awareness of its own negativity – and that banishes any statement of its negativity from being made. Propaganda and advertising are the opposite of critical thinking, for they both just say Yes! and surgically remove the No from the field of vision: perhaps also from the field of consciousness. Continuing on your walk you will notice that when there are elections going on of any type you only see names and numbers on little posters. Quite often it is difficult to distinguish these campaign posters from the advertisements of real estate agents. Do you feel at home in this world? I am very sorry to depress you with all this. Perhaps at this point a break is needed. Stop somewhere and buy your favorite chocolate bar. Eat it in a lonely place and wonder what to do with the wrapper. If the chocolate didn’t give you enough solace then perhaps you will lift your head and look at the sky – the last vestige of nature around us. Maybe you’ll admire the clouds, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to see the dusk. Maybe you’ll stay and wonder for a moment where you are. Maybe you’ll enter a dream… As you stand there holding the wrapper a person who is enough like you to seem familiar but different enough to be interesting approaches you in a friendly way: “Kit Kats, I like them too.” “Where are you from?” “Far away.” Where are you going?” “I don’t know.”

2

“What do you think of this town?” “I think it’s a good place to eat Kit Kats. Let me buy you another one and you can tell me everything you think.” Politics is that dream’s conversation, which hasn’t yet begun. Because politics is like sex, it involves other people involving you. Politics is society talking to itself about itself in a language other than the socially mandated one, through which nothing can be said except “everything is as it’s suppose to be.” And as you know, the first rule of our socially mandated language is: Don’t talk to strangers. Maybe this silly story has made you nostalgic for reality. Maybe when you came be around people again freely you will eat a chocolate bar for a purpose other than satisfying a gastronomical craving – maybe you’ll deploy the chocolate bar as a prop for the purpose of satisfying a political craving for conversation. Do you know how to use objects like chocolate bars outside of the context they were intended to exist in? Do you know how to de-contextualize things, like when you cut images out of magazines (their intended context) and use them to make a collage (their new context where you give them a different meaning)? This hijacking of objects from their intended meaning, and also the hijacking of public space from its intended purpose (work, consumption, work, consumption, work, consumption) allows opening to be made where things can happen. When something happens it is not preprogrammed and expected. “What happened today?” “Nothing.” This means that everything that occurred today was predictable because it was preordained and rigidly controlled. Our society uses most of its knowledge to over-plan and organize things in such a way as to ensure that nothing can ever happen. Knowledge is used for this purpose. The desire for knowledge: the first fall of man. Resulting logically in boredom: the second fall of man. I propose that politics is something that must happen, because if it does not then we will only have administration, or the absolute planning of all of life, which makes the thinking person obsolete. Perfect administration = most efficient control = death. Life must happen today. Yes, kind of like what Bob Ross said about accidents. In this lesson about politics I want to bring your attention to the idea of democracy. Democracy as it was invented and developed by the ancient Athenians. Also, I want to draw your attention to the idea of culture, or the type of “culture for the masses” that is befitting of different types of political systems. In a democratic political system, which supposes that people make decisions together based on their own ability to interpret reality, a thinking person is needed and so therefore must be created (or educated) through a specific type of culture – or leisurely pursuit. Yes, kind of like what Aristotle said about school. For democratic Athens that leisurely pursuit, or form of culture, which was intended to educate thinking people was the theater. The theater was invented together with the democracy in Athens in the seventh century BC. The two are deeply connected and I wish to explore this connection with you. In this lesson I will give you a part of an ancient play to read: Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Lastly, in this lesson I want to return to the walk in public – to the seeing of the public, which means the seeing of society as it lives its everydayness. Because it is an old lesson in Western civilization that the measure of politics, or the measure of whether or not a social system functions well, can be seen on the faces of people.

3

I propose to you that you can read more about politics on people’s faces than you can in the news and media. But beware! By doing so you will be breaking the second rule of our socially mandated language: Don’t look at strangers. Shared Life All of the words whose etymology we have looked at in this “class” are common words, words that you already know. The point has been to look at the known words differently, and this is an exercise in looking at the world you already know differently. Of course I can’t help but convey to you my point of view regarding all these things. I do not write from a position of fact, I am not Kiwipedia, instead I write part of a dialogue of truth, which is rooted in perspective, so that you may write the rest of the dialogue and thereby establish your own perspective. Facts are finished things, as the Latin origin of the word indicates: factum, meaning done. Truth, on the other hand, is lived and therefore open to what can happen, or what can be imagined. Truth is the enemy of facts. And that is what makes the truth more interesting. The word politics is Greek. The root of the word is πόλις (pólis) which means, on the superficial level, the city, but on the more essential level it means society. Pólis: as in Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Constantinople (which is an Anglicization of Constantinopolis) and metropolis: a city. But in ancient Greece, the city-state was the fundamental form of the organization of collective life. Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth – these are some of the most famous of ancient Greek city-states, but there were many, even hundreds. Each of these city-states was an independent, self-governing entity, and each had its own constitution and customs. They fought each other frequently, and got along together rarely. Ancient Greece was never unified into a single state until the time of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, when he conquered all of the city-states and imposed on them a central government. An ancient Greek city usually had a population of around fifty thousand people: this is about how many people fit into Costco. I’m sorry, that’s not true. It is about the same as the number of students enrolled at CSU Fullerton (Fullerton College has around twenty thousand students). I say this to give you a sense of proportion: ancient Greek cities were much smaller than today’s cities. But because Greek cities were independent, self-governing entities they were kind of like countries today, wherein their differences stood out to each other. To speak of a city (a pólis) meant to speak of a specific ordering of life together among people, and this can be termed a society. American society is an entity, it is certainly not an island and has things in common with other societies, but nonetheless it has its unique features and is distinguishable to who observes it (and also observes other societies – for if we don’t have more than one society to observe then we can never really understand the specific character of the sole society we are observing; perhaps we aren’t observing at all until we begin to make comparisons…) To denote speaking about society, or about the city (since each city was it’s own society) there is the word πολιτικά (politiká), which becomes our word: politics (política in Spanish). Politics means what goes on in society – and since the person who thinks about politics lives in society, politics also means how a person goes about her way in society, or how a person lives in society (how a person lives with others – since society is you and the others). Please forgive me if I have split too many hairs. My purpose has been to shift the signification of the word politics away from politicians and the state and to identify it instead with social life, with how we live together. Of course the state has a role to play in politics (in how we live together) but my purpose has been to remind you that we should too. And that role we may imagine for ourselves is not just about voting. It can also be

4

about making decisions together, which first of all implies talking to each other. A silent society is already a totalitarian one, despite however it looks in its own advertisements for itself (despite however it calls itself). When the ancient Greeks talked about politics they did not just talk about how a city organized its government and laws, they talked also about how a city (a society) organized its economy, its system of values (what is important in life), its familial arrangements, its education, its leisure, its architecture (what a city/society looks like), its manners of behavior and speech, and pretty much everything that its members collectively participated in. The Latin term to indicate society in the ample sense of the things that relate us to each other is res publica (as in republic), which means the public thing (res means thing and publica means public). The notion of a republic means that we participate in a collective life, we are part of a shared thing. Think of this word the next time you see cars lined up in traffic on the highway. Is isolation our republic? Democracy In ancient Greece, as in all ancient civilizations, there were three primary social classes: 1) The aristocrats: the word is Greek, its root is ἄριστος (aristos) which means the best. The aristocrats, also known as the nobility, were the rich and powerful. They owned an abundance of land and of slaves. They were the class that governed all ancient civilizations. Kings, pharaohs and emperors were, of course, a part of this class: the rich and politically powerful. 2) The demos: this Greek word means the people in the sense of the free, working population that is not rich. Demos does not mean all people, or everyone. It is the name of a class. In Spanish the word is translated as pueblo – which you will note also means town (community) in addition to the people. In German demos is translated as Volk – which reappears in English as folk, as in ordinary folks. 3) The slaves, who worked for the aristocrats. People became slaves in antiquity through being defeated and captured in wars of conquest, and also through the burden of debt (debt slavery). A common occurrence was that a free working person (a member of the demos) took a loan from an aristocrat which he could not pay back, as a consequence this free person became a slave of that aristocrat. In terms of general percentages, aristocrats made up about ten percent of ancient civilizations, the free working people (the demos) made up about seventy percent, and the enslaved working people made up about twenty percent. These are approximations to give you a general idea. Wealth = political power. This was the basic formula presiding over all ancient civilizations. Ownership of land, of slaves, and of money led, quite innocuously, to the command of the state and the making of its laws. In the classical patriarchal conception of social relations (remember the ideal of the patron god), the wealthy and powerful should assume a paternal responsibility towards the people they commanded (and exploited): which means exploiting them more gently, within the bounds of reason, please, please, please, pretty please. But in the seventh century BC in the city-state of Athens something extraordinary happened, something new and of enduring historical significance. The class of people who had never governed before (the demos: the free working people) assumed control of the state. How did this happen? Through a revolt against the increase in debt slavery, which was turning many free people into slaves. By way of a series of legal reforms enacted gradually over a number of years, a new method of legislation was created which was called the democracy: which means the rule of the demos. Slavery was not abolished by the Athenian democracy, women were entirely excluded from political life – by our

5

standards today, the ancient Athenian democracy would seem very limited. But conceive of it as the beginning of democracy, which as a practice has grown in history to the ideal which we recognize it in today. The fundamental novelty of the Athenian democracy is that it broke the equation of wealth with political power. Now, for the first time, the non-wealthy (which in every society in history constitutes the majority of the population) acquired a say in how their society was governed. This is similar and not similar to communism. Whereas communism aspires to abolish the wealthy, the Athenian democracy continued to recognize the existence of the wealthy (the aristocrats) but it included the free working people (the demos) into the political decision making process. It might be argued that the measure of a successful democracy is to be found in how the non-wealthy working class of a society lives. Does it live well, does it have rights, stability, a real voice in politics, or does it not and therefore aspire only to become wealthy in order to attain what the working class (the demos) as a whole is denied? The wealthy are always a minority in every historical society. The notion that everyone can be rich is a systemic impossibility. How the wealthy live is not a measure of how a society is doing over all. How the majority live – and the majority is always working – is a more real measure of a how a society is fairing. In ancient times the members of the demos worked primarily as farmers and as skilled craftsmen. These types of work may seem very distant to us, and we may imagine ourselves to not have anything in common with the ancients at all. But I ask you, does the very ancient equation wealth = political power still prevail today? Democracy is the breaking of this equation. Or at least that is what democracy was a very long time ago. What is it now? Is democracy today simply a restatement of the idea that everyone can potentially become wealthy depending on how hard they try to succeed, and obey, and be “saved”? Because, of course, it is what it is. In life there are winners and losers, so you better choose, man. Pass the Gatorade. The Athenian democracy abolished the aristocrats’ exclusive right to make laws for the city. In the place of the aristocracy, the democracy instituted a system of voting wherein the decisions of the majority held sway. Who could vote? Free men: aristocrats and members of the demos. But since there were many more members of the demos than there were aristocrats, the demos dominated the voting process. The Athenian democracy elected very few representatives. Instead its focus was on the holding of general assemblies in which all citizens could voice their opinions, listen to others, debate, propose legislations, and then vote according to the procedure of majority rule. What did they vote about? They voted about the conditions of debt slavery, about taxation and public works projects, about whether or not to go to war with other Greek city-states, about how to organize and finance public education and culture, about the terms of commerce with other Greek city-states and foreign nations, about public relief projects in times of crisis, and about how to maintain the city’s civic life and orderly functioning. The Athenian democracy held its general assemblies in a public space called the agorá. The word agorá may be translated as public square, or in Spanish as plaza. Here is the ancient agorá of Athens, the scene of the crime:

6

It doesn’t look like anything special. It wasn’t meant to. Today some of the walls are a bit knocked down, and the trees are over grown. On the hill in the distance you can see the Parthenon: the temple to the goddess of practical wisdom (an important quality in politics!), Athena. In the agorá thousands of citizens would gather to debate, to discuss and to vote. When this many people gather today they generally gather as spectators of an event, not as participants. What would happen today if thousands, or even just hundreds of people gathered in the quad at Fullerton College to talk about the rules and laws governing the college? My simple question to you is this: are we respectful enough, eloquent enough, and patient enough to engage in such a mass discussion? Or to put the question more succinctly, are we civilized enough? Do we have a training in the art of discussion, in the art of conversation, in the art of conviviality (living with other people)? If it seems that such a mass discussion today would degenerate into violence, insult, shouting and so on, that indicates that we are not very civilized. We are civilized when we know how to respect each other and live with differences, and live in the presence of each other. If we need a big daddy figure to discipline us and united us under his rule – otherwise all hell will break loose – we are pathetic. Without a strong centralizing authority, are we able to live amongst ourselves in a free and respectful manner? This achievement, or this art, is something that a people must learn through training. The ancient Athenians understood this. For their democratic assemblies to actually function, the citizens needed to be skilled in the arts of interpretation, of rhetoric, and of respect. Because in the pólis (the city) people have to be polite, otherwise there is need for the police to intervene and make sure that people are polite. Now of course the police today are not always polite and our current problems are quite vast. But here I

7

present you with a chain of words that are etymologically related and that establish a concept, or ideal: pólis – politics – polite – police. Maybe ideals are just fairytales, but what would our imaginations be without fairytales? In order to train citizens in the arts necessary for the proper functioning of the democratic assemblies, the city of Athens created, and publically financed an institution that may genuinely be called a school of democracy – that institution was the theater. The theater as we know it is an Athenian invention of the seventh century BC. Its birth and development is intrinsically related to the life of the city’s democracy. During most of the ancient Athenian democracy’s three hundred year existence (600s – 300s BC) all citizens were required to attend the theater as a form of training in political thinking. Ovid’s playful advice about attending the theater to find love comes from another historical context – Rome, where the theater held a different significance than it did in Athens. In Athens, playwrights and actors were commission by the city to create and perform plays that were intended to do something very specific: make people think about reality and discuss. Plays do not tell you what to think. They present you with scenarios taken from life, which in relation to you, the viewer, have to form an interpretation and explain your interpretation to your friends with whom you saw the play. Interpreting art is an exercise in interpreting reality. There isn’t a right answer waiting on the shelf. When people have to make a decision together there also isn’t a right answer waiting on the shelf – they have to create the answer together by putting together multiple points of view. You go see a movie with your friends, you talk about it afterwards – isn’t this like a practice of talking about how the world works (politics)? You interpret and evaluate characters’ motives and actions, you consider context and cause and effect – these are all things that are valid when discussing social life too. In a movie, or in theater, you also hear how actors speak, you are presented with an example of rhetoric. If you want to speak in public, in the agorá, the actors’ speech can serve as an example to you. The agorá is where the audience in the theater become the actors, in the play of life. Here is a photograph of a well-preserved ancient Greek theater, just outside of Athens:

8

It could seat about ten thousand people. Put the images of the agorá and the theater together like that of a person and his reflection in a mirror, because that is what the theater was originally intended to be: a place where, on the stage, the audience could see the parts of itself that it did not know how to see. Plays were entertaining, but they were never about escapism, nor about propaganda. They were about penetrating deeper into reality, and examining it. This is remarkable. A population that is not taught what to think, but how to think – and that is taught so through the interpretation of art, which has the value of training the mind to interpret life more freely. I give you here to read the opening scenes of a play written by Aristophanes in Athens in the fifth century BC. It is from the comedy Lysistrata. It is a play very much about democracy, and how it is lived. But beware! It is also about sex. Because sex is always either a metaphor, or a reversal, of everything else that it is not. Characters Lysistrata1: an Athenian woman Calonike: an older Athenian woman Myrrhine: a younger Athenian woman 1 The name Lysistrata is composed of λύω (lyo): to loosen, to undo, to disband, and στρατός (stratos): army. Thus, Lysistrata means ‘disbander of armies.’

9

Lampito: a rugged Spartan woman Scene: In the street in front of Lysistrata’s house, early morning. The Acropolis can be seen in the background. LYSISTRATA: (pacing) Women! (to audience) Tell them there’s an orgy going on, or a party for Pan, or a fertility rite, and everything stops. You can’t get through the streets. Women everywhere with their tambourines. But today there’s not one woman here. Sorry! Here’s someone. It’s my next-door neighbor. Good morning, Calonike! CALONIKE: Same to you, Lysistrata. But what’s the matter? Don’t squidge your face up like that, darling. Looking daggers doesn’t suit you. LYSISTRATA: I am on fire. Right down to the bone. I’m furious. And all because of us women. You know what our husbands say. They say we’re sly, deceitful, always… CALONIKE: They’re right, too. LYSISTRATA: We promised to meet today to plan something devastatingly important. And what happens? They stay in bed. CALONIKE: Oh, they’ll be along, my dear. It’s so hard to get out of the house. We have to bend over backwards for our husbands, wake the maid, wash the baby, feed the baby, put the baby to bed. LYSISTRATA: But there are other things far far more important. CALONIKE: Is that why you’re calling the meeting, Lysistrata? How big a thing is this? LYSISTRATA: It’s big. CALONIKE: And thick? LYSISTRATA: Massive. It’s big enough for all of us. CALONIKE: Then why aren’t they here? LYSISTRATA: If THAT’S what was up, they’d be here. No, Calonike, this is something I’ve been tossing around for the last few nights. I couldn’t get any sleep. CALONIKE: Sounds good to me! Was it good? LYSISTRATA: So good that… The hope and salvation of Greece depend upon us women. CALONIKE: On us? Bye-bye, Greece.

10

LYSISTRATA: We must make the decisions on national and international affairs. Take the Spartan question. Are you for peace or annihilation? CALONIKE: Annihilation every time. LYSISTRATA: And the same for the Boeotians? CALONIKE: Yes! ... Wait a minute. NO!! They have marvelous pickled eels in that part of the country. LYSISTRATA: As for Athens… It could happen to us… but I can’t bring myself to say it. But listen, if all the women came here, from Boeotia, from Sparta, from the rest of the Peloponnese, we could save the entire country. CALONIKE: Us? Do you really think we could do something practical? All we are good for is sitting in front of the mirror, all primped and flowered in our exquisite little negligees and those chic little oriental slippers. LYSISTRATA: Exactly! Those are the weapons that will save us – perfumes and rouge, slippers and slips, and those see-through negligees. CALONIKE: Save us? What do you mean? LYSISTRATA: The result will be that the men will never raise their spears again… CALONIKE: Then I’ll have my best dress sent to the cleaners… LYSISTRATA: Nor shoulder their shields… CALONIKE: And wear my silk negligee… LYSISTRATA: Nor unsheathe their swords… CALONIKE: And buy me a pair of those oriental slippers. LYSISTRATA: Then wasn’t it essential for the women to be here? CALONIKE: Be here? They should have flown like the wind. LYSISTRATA: Listen, darling, you know what they’re like. They’re real Athenians: never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. But no one came from the coast, nor from Salamis either. CALONIKE: Don’t worry about them. They’ll be here. They’d do anything for a good ride. LYSISTRATA: And where are the Acharnian women? I thought they’d be here first, after all

11

they’ve had to put up with in this awful war. CALONIKE: I saw Theogenes’ wife as I was leaving. She was flying over here… high as a kite already. But look, hey, here’s a few coming now. And some more over there. Marvelous. Marvelous. Where are they from? (Myrrhine arrives with a group of women from Anagyrus, a village named after a foul smelling plant.) LYSISTRATA: Anagyrus, I think. CALONIKE: Smells like it. MYRRHINE: Are we late, Lysistrata? Well, why don’t you answer? LYSISTRATA: I am very upset, Myrrhine. You are so late when the matter is so important. MYRRHINE: I couldn’t find my girdle in the dark. What’s so important? CALONIKE: Hold on a minute. She’ll tell you everything when the Spartans and Boeotians get here. MYRRHINE: That’s all right with me… Hey, here comes Lampito. (Lampito arrives together with Ismenia from Boeotia, a woman from Corinth, and several others from Sparta.) LYSISTRATA: Welcome, Lampito, you Spartan beauty, you. What a healthy complexion you’ve got, so throbbing with life! I bet you could throttle a bull. LAMPITO: By golly, I think I could. I do my exercises every day – a few push-ups every morning before breakfast. CALONIKE (fondling Lampito): What a nice pair of breasts! LAMPITO: Keep your hands to yourself. What do you think I am? A sacred cow? LYSISTRATA (pointing to Ismenia): And who is this other little girl? Where is she from? LAMPITO: She’s an aristocratic young lady from Boeotia. MYRRHINE: Ah, “Boeotia of the fertile plain.” CALONIKE: (lifting Ismenia’s robe): Looks as if someone’s been mowing the grass. LYSISTRATA: And who is this?

12

LAMPITO: She is from Corinth. Her family is very big back there. CALONIKE (inspecting the Corinthian’s body): She’s pretty big back here. LAMPITO: All right. Let’s get down to business. Who was it called this meeting? LYSISTRATA: I did. LAMPITO: Well, then tell us what you have in mind. MYRRHINE: Yes, tell us, sweetie, what’s so important? LYSISTRATA: I’ll answer you both in a minute. But first I want to ask a little question. MYRRHINE: Go right ahead. LYSISTRATA: Do you or do you not crave to have your husbands, the fathers of your children, home beside you? I know that all your husbands are away at war. CALONIKE: My husband’s been gone for the last five months, up in the mountains of Thrace. MYRRHINE: Mine’s been in Pylos for seven. LAMPITO: My man’s no sooner rotated out of the line than he’s plugged back in. There’s no discharge in this war. LYSISTRATA: And you can’t find a lover anywhere, not even an old flame. And ever since those Milesians revolted and cut off the leather trade, you can’t even find a decent eight-inch dildo anywhere in town. So… if I can provide a plan that would bring an end to this war, I take it that I can count on your support. CALONIKE: You can count on me, and if it’s money you need I’d pawn the negligee off my back – then we could all go out and get smashed. MYRRHINE: I’m with you all the way. Even if they take me and split me up the middle and filet me like a mackerel. LAMPITO: Me, too! I’d climb the highest mountain in Sparta if I could just set my eyes on peace again. LYSISTRATA: All right, then, I’ll tell you. There is no need to keep it a secret any longer. Sisters, women of Greece, if we have any hopes of forcing our husbands to negotiate peace, we must resort to total abstinence. CALONIKE: From what?

13

MYRRHINE: Yes, what? LYSISTRATA: You’ll do it? CALONIKE: Of course we will, even if it kills us. LYSISTRATA: Very well, then. We must resort to total abstinence from… the cock. (Strong murmurs of disapproval, gestures of dissent. Several of the women seem on the point of leaving.) Why are you turning away? Where are you going? Hey! Why all this moping and shaking of heads? Why so pale? Whence these tears? Will you do it or won’t you? Well, what are you going to do? CALONIKE: I just couldn’t do it. On with the war! MYRRHINE: Me neither. On with the war! LYSISTRATA: Is that all you have to say, my little mackerel? Two minutes ago you were ready to be split up the middle. MYRRHINE: Look, I’d walk through fire if you told me to – but give up sex, never! There’s nothing like it, Lysistrata. LYSISTRATA (to Calonike): What about you? CALONIKE: I’d rather walk through fire too! LYSISTRATA: I didn’t realize that we women were such incorrigible nymphos! It’s no wonder they write tragedies about us. We’re good for nothing but having sex with Poseidon in the bathtub. But you, my Spartan friend, if you, just you, join me in this we can still salvage my plan. Give me your vote. LAMPITO: It’s pretty tough by golly, for girls to sleep without their men, but I’m with you. We need peace so badly. LYSISTRATA: Oh, you darling! The only woman worthy of the name. CALONIKE: Well, suppose we did… well, as far as possible, abstain from… what you said – God forbid. Could something like that bring peace any sooner? LYSISTRATA: Good God, of course. All we have to do is lounge around all beautifully made up, wearing only transparent silk negligees, or nothing at all, and then we just walk by them, perfumed and powdered and shaved smooth in all the right places… Wham! Up they’ll go. Lusting for it. But we won’t let them touch us. Total abstinence. I wouldn’t be surprised if they stopped the war within a week.

14

LAMPITO: It could work. Menelaus dropped his sword when he saw Helen all nekked. CALONIKE: (to Lysistrata): Wait a minute, darling. What if they just ignore us? LYSISTRATA: Then we’ll just have to take matters into our own hands. CALONIKE: But darling, there’s nothing like the real thing. MYRRHINE: What if they grab us and drag us off to the bedroom? LYSISTRATA: Hold on to the door. MYRRHINE: What if they beat us? LYSISTRATA: You can give in. But don’t enjoy it. Be nasty about it. It’s no fun for them when it’s no fun for you. It’s not copulation without cooperation. MYRRHINE: I suppose it’s all right if the both of you agree to this. LAMPITO: You can be sure of one thing: we Spartan women will make our men do exactly as they’re told. But this lot in Athens! (pointing to the audience) You’ll never convince these fighting cocks. LYSISTRATA: We’ll take care of it. I know how to make them listen. Translation by Nicholas Rudall You have understood that Lysistrata organized a sex strike. You have understood that this is a way of expressing power: by withholding that which you have that other people want. Have you ever done anything like this with other people? Have you ever expressed a collective power that is not simply a protest (a statement of grievances)? Have you ever had fun – the way Lysistrata and her friends do – while attempting to change reality in a serious way? Have you ever even had fun while writing? Why does doing “serious” things and having fun have to be separated? Dear students, without fun nothing serious really happens. Notice that Lysistrata talks to other people about real life, about common problems (the war that is going on), and about what they can do themselves about it. Does all of this seem like it comes from another planet? How broken are we in spirit to not even be able to imagine the courage and the freedom of someone like Lysistrata? How unable are we to organize ourselves? How dependent are we on patron gods (big daddies) to organize us like docile children? How unable are we to have conversations, to find a common language? By posing these questions, my purpose is to indicate to you the way we have regressed dramatically from ancient times. History does not move forward in a straight line, progress is not the autopilot of history. Without being guided by a central command, many of us do not know how to coexist with other people and make decisions together. This is shameful. And this mainly occurs through institutions, like

15

schools, which tell you to only worry obsessively over your own personal success which is achieved through competition with everyone else. The result is a person who does not know how to exist intelligently with other people, and who therefore is essentially isolated in his existence. Hateful, paranoid, ignorant: the perfect automaton. But then there is Lysistrata, isn’t she cool? Can you imagine organizing a homework strike? A tuition strike? A rent strike? A labor stike? A fashion strike? Can you imagine organizing anything – other than a bake sale – with other people? Perhaps we need practice in this. Perhaps this fairytale gives you something to look forward to for when we can leave our Boo Radley existence once again. It helps if you are a bit mischievous, and a bit intelligent. Are the plays, or the films, that are made today interrogate the lives of their audience? Do they open reality’s possibilities or close them into idealizations that are one-sided? One of the qualities of the theater, which makes it unique, is that it can be very rooted to the social location where it is performed. For example, are there plays performed in Fullerton about life in Fullerton? On the stage do you see the truth of everyday life laid bare, or do you venture off into a distant world of little relevancy? At Cal State Fullerton, and also at Fullerton College, the theater departments are governed – like all other departments – by the dogma of job training, and this means, in concrete terms, preparing young people to work at Disneyland or in Holly- whatever. Being a success! What about connecting the theater to the life of the people in a given place? What about performing plays for freshmen about real life in school? What about being honest with people? There is not much money to be made this way, but instead a wealth of possibilities to be imagined. The ancient Greek theater, through its comedies and its tragedies, was intended to make people look at the real lives they were living more acutely, so as to open a discussion about them. The theater was the basis of a democratic culture that needed intelligent people to function. I want to make a comparison now. What kind of a culture does a non- democratic society need, which will make people passive, docile, and content with nonsense? The answer is provided to us by the Roman empire, wherein the people (the demos) were meant to be quiet and simply follow orders, and to amuse themselves with stupid things that did not cultivate their minds but instead lowered their standards of behavior. Here:

16

The Roman Colosseum, built in the first century AD. Inside the Colosseum, people who counted for nothing politically were amused with gladiatorial games and the spectacle of violence. Just as the theater was a state-sponsored entity in democratic Athens, the games of the Colosseum were also sponsored by the Roman imperial state. So here we can see two different cultural institutions corresponding to two different political orders: one that needs and cultivates thinking people (a democracy), and another that needs and cultivates ignorant people (an oligarchy). Ignorant people are needed in a society wherein people aren’t suppose to count, because an oligarchy commands everything. Think about the difference between these two experiences: attending a performance of a play in ancient Athens, and attending a performance of brutality in ancient Rome. Consider that that experience you have is intended by the society you are living in to make you feel and think a certain way. And today? What are the public, generalized, mass produced and mass consumed forms of “culture”? Of course a person has the right to be an eccentric and hide in obscurity, but what is the general norm? What kind of a mindset (what kind of a person) does our culture produce? This question relates very much to education, because essentially culture is an extended form of education for all of society, after it has “graduated” from school. Back Outside For A Walk In medieval Italy (500s – 1500s) the entity of the city-state prevailed again as it did in ancient Greece. The famous Italian cities you have heard of: Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, and many more, where each self-governing kingdoms, or republics, quite often at war with each other and

17

rarely at peace. I want to show you here a medieval Italian incarnation of the agorá, which in Italian is said piazza. It is in the city of Siena, between Rome and Florence, built in the 1300s. Here is a scene of public life:

The piazza, or public square, is called the Piazza del campo. The building you see with the tall tower is city hall, the seat of local government, called the Palazzo pubblico (public palace). In the Palazzo pubblico is where the government of the autonomous city-state of Siena convened for many centuries. Today the mayor and city council of Siena meet in there. Look at the piazza, the public square, look at all the people – what are they doing? Here markets can be held, meetings and rallies can be convened, encounters can be made, public life can happen and be observed for how it looks. Because remember, how people look in public is an indicator of how a society is doing. And so the city government, in the Palazzo pubblico is in a position to observe what public life looks like, so that it can stay in touch with it, and not hide from it. But there is more. Inside the Palazzo pubblico, in the room wherein the city council has been meeting for centuries, there is a large painting on the wall called The Effects of Good Government in the City. It was made in the fourteenth century by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Here:

18

What does a city look like if it has good government? What are people doing in this painting? On the one hand they are working in shops and producing things, but look at the group of women in the center holding hands – what are they doing? They are dancing and singing in the streets. They are happy. The effects of good government are there in how people feel, in how you see them in real life. The state of politics is written on people’s faces and mannerisms, it is written there much more clearly than in the pronouncements of any expert or investigative reporter. Walk around your town, dear student, and tell me about the state of politics. Relate the expressions and behaviors you see in individual people to economic, cultural and political procedures. See politics in life, not in its representation on the screen. See it perhaps in your own life, and refashion it into what you want. Dimitri Papandreu October 5, 2020