At the theater

This week I finally saw the mega-hit show Book of Mormon.  I knew that the musical was set in Africa.   But my friends assured me that it “was equally offensive to everyone”.   I don’t think so. Why does it matter?  It’s only a show.  It matters because the same stereotypes that we accept in the theater endanger black men on the street.

As a public service, I offer below the questions I ask myself to measure offensiveness.

      1. Are the targets equal?

The Church of Latter Day Saints, 95% white, has assets between 30 and 40 billion dollars, according to reporting by Time Magazine and Reuters.  Per Wikipedia, the estimated 2013 GDP of Uganda was 23 billion.  Insofar as money is power, it is less offensive to poke fun at rich people than at poor people.

      2. Are negative historical stereotypes equally emphasized?

The musical reinforces the negative stereotypes of blacks as ignorant, violent and hypersexual while glancing over the negative stereotype of Mormons as polygamous.

 In the airport scene, there are not an unusual number of siblings seeing off the missionaries.  The authors refer to the stereotype of the Mormons as polygamous by putting long fake penises on the Africans, in a play within the play, rather than on the Mormons.

     3. How far do the authors deviate from reality to make the joke?

By and large, the recitation of the history of the Mormons is factual, funny because it is out of context.  Even the line “I am Christ” earned a big laugh because of the campy delivery.  The missionaries are portrayed as zealous and naïve, not stupid.  Much of the white humor is mild “odd couple” gags, between Elders Price and Cunningham.

By contrast, the Ugandan village is unrecognizable as modern Africa. The female lead “texts” using a typewriter, although according to Wikipedia, Uganda ranks 68th among nations in terms of cell phones in use.   The character who loudly proclaims and repeats that he has maggots in his scrotum is the doctor.  Even after graduate school, a black person is an idiot.

     4. Who carries the obscene humor?

A black character is called “General Butt-Fucking Naked” (only “General” in the Playbill) There is no comparably named white character. There is no white person with an infection in an indelicate area.

 If it’s vulgar, it comes from the blacks: the song with which they greet the missionaries or Elder Price’s preposterous comeuppance.

5.     Whose Happy Ending is it?

The Africans are portrayed as overjoyed that the missionaries are going to stay.   

Nostalgia

     I just returned from a visit to Cambridge, MA where I visited two of the Harvard museums, the new combined Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Museum of Natural History.  I don't remember spending much time at the art museums when I was an undergraduate, but my advisor's office was located in what was then called the Museum of Comparative Zoology.    In the evolution exhibit,  I watched a video that featured my advisor, Stephen Jay Gould, the most effortlessly erudite man I ever met, as well as E.O. Wilson, my first biology professor. Both of them became authorities in their fields.   When I met  Gould, he was not yet a full professor and co-taught the introductory geology course.   He was a scientist concerned with social justice at a time when many felt that it was wrong for scientists to express opinions outside of their academic pursuits.  And he was a writer, a wonderful, eclectic writer.  At my weekly tutorial,  I struggled to follow his discourse, darting about paleontology, biology, various languages  and baseball (that was hopeless).  I always left challenged and grateful.  He recognized how odd it was for a  black girl to major in geology  in those political times.   He laughed about being a Jew from New York City, who discovered rocks in museums, as I did, unlike many geologists who have rural roots.   It is his support to pursue my inner nerd that I remember most now, all these years later, not the geology.  When he died in 2002, I was surprised to find out that he was only ten years older than I was because he seemed so wise.  It was great to feel in his presence again.

Spring

It's been almost exactly a year since I  posted.  Last year was the year of my mother.  We celebrated her 100th birthday in April and mourned her death in December.   There is always a tension between actually writing and communicating about writing but when I am under stress, it is the communicating that suffers the most.  

Last fall,  The Threepenny Review published one of my medical essays,  "Faithful to the Corpse", which was inspired by a comment (from an artist)  that only artists think about death.   As a primary care physician and geriatrician, there were times where it felt like death clung to me, the way the smell of formaldehyde penetrated our clothes in anatomy lab.  Since my essay appeared, I read Atul Gawande's lovely book Being Mortal, which argues for a more thoughtful approach to end of life care.   I was surprised to find that he, too, discounted the current role of doctors, primary care doctors, in particular, in this realm.   Although an MD, he portrays himself as previously unaware of the work of geriatricians and looks to the new specialty of palliative care to fill what he perceives to be void in this area. The community hospital where my mother spent some of her last weeks didn't even have a palliative care team.  It's not clear how well the model that was developed in academic medical centers will function in other settings--that was the problem with geriatrics, too.  Fortunately, the primary care doctors in our family were able to reach out to my mother's outpatient primary care provider, a nurse practitioner, who helped the family in our mother's last illness. The NP engaged with us out of the goodness of her heart, since she couldn't bill for our conversations.   Dr. Gawande does not discuss finances in his book, but unless we as a society are willing to pay for end of life care, rather than depending on the goodness of the hearts of providers,  the impetus for palliative care will fizzle, like the geriatrics movement I joined  25 years ago.

Reading

"It takes wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us, with no consolation to count on but art and the summer lightning of personal happiness."

                                                                 Alexander Herzen, 1812-1870

Saw the Shotgun Players production of Salvage the third play in Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia.  They produced all three plays over the past few years, a tremendously ambitious undertaking because  all of them are meaty and long and require many actors.  A theatrical feast.  A few months ago, prompted by the plays and a friend  who kept recommending them, I read the first two parts of Herzen's autobiography, about his early life in Russia and his six-year Siberian exile.  Also saw the American Masters portrait of James Baldwin on TV, which prompted me to return to his essays.   Both literary/political men who lived abroad, Herzen in exile, Baldwin by choice, and eventually found themselves displaced by younger revolutionaries.   Their chunks of history are easier to digest because they write so well.

"But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand--and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible."

                                                                        James Baldwin, 1924-1987