Tony Kushner's Afghanistan
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Tony Kushner's Afghanistan Even an America-hater has his limits. BY JOHN PODHORETZ "IT,S THE WORST PLACE on I earth," a horrified young British woman says in the course of a new off-Broadway play...
...Reagan's AIDS policy are all frivolously lumped together as historical progeny of the Reichstag fire and Dachau...
...Fewer still have made so little of their prominence...
...What New Yorkers learned was something that Kushner is actually trying to teach the world in Homebody/Kabul— that there existed in the world a regime of sadistic barbarity, a fanatical regime that could not be reasoned or negotiated with, that could only be destroyed...
...what have you to offer now...
...Or in which George Bush's ultimatum to Iraq, the Iran-contra scandal and Mr...
...But then again, is the time ever right for a political work in which the National Socialism of the Third Reich is trivialized by being equated with the "national senility" of the Reagan era...
...The Taliban are—were—a singular sort of menace, and Afghanistan is and always will be a singular sort of place...
...Brecht was a stalinist...
...In the past decade Kushner has produced nothing of consequence...
...I set out to write a play about what it was like to be a gay, Jewish, leftist man in New York City in mid-'80s Reagan America...
...It means that when it comes to the face of evil in Afghanistan, some truths are so obvious even the most determined anti-American leftist can't miss them...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ "IT,S THE WORST PLACE on I earth," a horrified young British woman says in the course of a new off-Broadway play set in Afghanistan...
...Market incentives...
...Almost certainly not...
...The blather is instructive, because it reveals the state of the crisis inside Kushner's progressive breast...
...He has evinced far less confusion in examining his native country, which he considers a viciously unjust gloss on Nazi Germany...
...The main characters in Slavs...
...In 1993 and 1994, Kushner won two Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize for his play Angels in America, a seven-hour "gay fantasia on national themes," the text of which was basically completed 10 years ago...
...bellows a character called "the world's oldest Bolshevik" to Yeltsin-like reformers...
...Now we know what collateral damage, as the Pentagon calls it, looks like up close," Kushner told the Times Magazine...
...No one has had to see people fall from a 110-story building before— that's a particular horror that has been reserved for us...
...were exhausted by Kush-ner's re-creation of a college-dormitory bull session about the failure of the Soviet Union...
...But it's entirely to our credit that we are learning something from it...
...In the 1980s, he recalled, "I found a great deal of value in the theories of socialism...
...some people have that, but I don't know where they got it any more than I know, really, why I'm gay...
...Now we have suffered terribly, and we seem to be responding with far less eagerness for war...
...Those singular aspects of Afghanistan and the Taliban give Homebody/Kabul a surprising and powerful resonance...
...Thus, as late as the 1980s, Kushner was puzzled by how a nation professing "the human values of socialism" could be so rude as to invade a neighboring land...
...are supposed to be ancient soviet apparatchiks, but they're really loud-mouthed American fellow travelers sitting in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse blathering at each other about the death of communism...
...In the course of the play, he seems determined to hold the United States responsible for the Taliban...
...Does this mean that Tony Kushner has grown as a writer and a thinker...
...But it's more likely the audiences that attended Slavs...
...Few contemporary writers have risen as quickly to prominence as Kushner, borne to olympus as he was entirely on the back of the New York Times drama critic, Frank Rich...
...Homebody/Kabul is the work of the American playwright Tony Kushner, who staked a claim in the early 1990s to the mantle of Bertolt Brecht and George Bernard shaw as a dramatist intending to merge high art and left-wing opinions...
...This, in a city where George W. Bush elicited manic cheers by promising at ground zero that "those who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon...
...it's set just after Bill Clinton bombed the al Qaeda camps in Khost in August 1998, and throughout characters allude to that event...
...Kushner's aperçus often involve would-be-Wildean invocations of his preference for the male gender and the unexplained relation of that preference to his intelligence: Having the correct opinions is not the same as knowing the truth, having Wisdom...
...But the play reveals that Kushner has actually read far too deeply and considered the matter far too seriously to lay the blame for the Taliban at the feet of the United States or Britain...
...All he knows is that the Great Work is "progressive...
...In the course of his three-hour, forty-five minute epic about Afghanistan, Kushner attempts variously to blame the condition of that sorry nation on British imperialism, oil companies, the Soviet invasion, and the covert U.S...
...In public remarks before an appreciative antiwar audience at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City just before the December premiere of Homebody/Kabul, Kushner said that "the American complicity in arming the mujahedeen . . . [led] to a decade of slaughter...
...Good politics will produce good aesthetics," Kushner has said...
...My impression," said the writer once hailed as a visionary prophet of the New Millennium, "is that New Yorkers are a lot less hawkish as a city now than we were during the Gulf War, when we had no legitimate complaint and there was a frightening feeling of the city all falling in lock step behind the first Bush...
...shaw was a Fabian socialist...
...But I'm reasonably sure I'm gay and I'm reasonably sure my opinions are at least 65% right 70% of the time, which makes me cleverer than all of the Republican party and 90% of the Democratic party and a whole lot of others besides...
...The Great Work begins," he says while standing in front of the Bethes-da Fountain in Central Park—whereupon the play ends...
...His first play, A Bright Room Called Day, received a brilliantly damning notice upon its premiere in New York in January 1991, just before Operation Desert Storm commenced: Perhaps if the world were not actually on the brink of war, A Bright Room Called Day . . . would not be an early front-runner for the most infuriating play of 1991...
...The further problem is that, unlike shaw and Brecht, Kushner has no idea what that Big Theory might be...
...No, just isolated, trapped in those coffeehouse conversations with the world's oldest living Bolsheviks and oldest surviving remnants of the anti-American left of the 1960s...
...support for anti-Soviet rebels there...
...People are afraid of socialism...
...In Angels in America, a present-day AIDs patient—a gay, leftist man living in New York City—learns he is an Old Testament prophet here to announce the coming of a new age, and he rises from his deathbed to deliver the word of the Lord...
...Do [you] have, as we did, a beautiful Theory, as bold, as Grand, as comprehensive a construct...
...Is Kushner mad...
...Kushner has said he was drawn to the subject of Afghanistan by his interest in the Soviet Union...
...What used to be called liberal is now called radical, what used to be called radical is now called insane, what used to be called reactionary is now called moderate, and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking," Kushner said in 1995...
...This is a haunting and beautiful play in spite of its author's best efforts to ruin it...
...in 1996, Kushner complained: "It's much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist...
...To a large degree, Kushner shares those sentiments...
...His certitude about the rightness of his own opinions is probably unshakable, but many of his fans in New York were surely shaken down to their boots by an astonishing interview he gave to the New York Times Magazine in the wake of September 11...
...Indeed it is to our credit...
...Following the yawns inspired by a short play called Slavs...
...remains fascinated with it...
...Kushner has a way of opining about the "Great Work" of our time that makes one's jaw drop...
...And having been a student—not a supporter—of the Soviet Union, I was very disturbed, very repulsed by news accounts of what was happening during the Soviet-Afghanistan war...
...His interviews provide an X-ray view into a mind calcified by unexamined leftist prejudices...
...He wants a big, beautiful Theory to live by, even though he resides in an age that has invalidated living by theory alone...
...Above all things, they were universalists, whereas Kushner became famous because he was a very particular kind of writer at a very particular moment in time...
...The author of these words was none other than Frank Rich, who only two years later would describe Angels in America—which emerges from precisely the same worldview that informed A Bright Room Called Day—as "a true millennial work of art, uplifting, hugely comic and pan-theistically religious in a very American style...
...What might that "Great Work" be...
...Kushner never says, because he doesn't know...
...They're sentiments shared around a coffeehouse table with like-minded folk who have never exchanged a word with anyone whose way of thinking differs even a scintilla from their own...
...But A Bright Room Called Day wasn't about dying AIDS patients, and so it wasn't awash in unearned sentimentality like Angels in America...
...A] Streetcar [Named Desire] is a play about a prefeminist woman in the '40s who has no job and is drinking...
...It's perhaps understandable that people are "afraid" of a political theory that made most of the 20th century a living hell, even though Kushner John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a columnist for the New York Post...
...I found this conflict between what I believed to be the human values of socialism and the grotesque consequences of the attempt to apply some version of it to real politics...
...I didn't set out to write a play about AIDs," he has said of Angels in America...
...Really good politics will produce really good aesthetics, and really good aesthetics . . . [will] probably produce truth, which is to say, progressive politics...
...All theater is political, in his view: "Long Day's Journey [Into Night] is about money and health care...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 21
