Wallace Shawn, "Developments Since My Birth"
October 30, 2020 7:26 AM   Subscribe

"There was a dignity to feeling kind and good. It was enjoyable." A single-link-essay in which Wallace Shawn expounds on the inherent cognitive dissonance required to perpetuate the myth of American Exceptionalism. Not, unfortunately, inconceivable.
posted by mce (33 comments total) 76 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is really good. It captures a mood, the descent from believing in America as an essential good, to learning better and wanting the truth laid bare, to having the worst Americans lay the truth bare themselves... only for a huge chunk of the population not to feel shame, but relief: they don't have to pretend to be good anymore.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:09 AM on October 30, 2020 [19 favorites]


Wallace Shawn is the only actor whose political opinions are worth listening to. What a marvel, what an absolute delight it was to discover, many many years after first seeing the Princess Bride as a child, that silly, pompous little Vizzini was in reality an extremely thoughtful and articulate person.
posted by adamdschneider at 8:09 AM on October 30, 2020 [9 favorites]


He was such a bizarre choice for that role, but now I can't imagine anyone else.
posted by thedward at 8:19 AM on October 30, 2020 [6 favorites]


He's not just an actor, he's a playwright! Additional context for his upbringing/perspective is that his mother was a journalist and his father the editor of the New Yorker.
posted by little onion at 8:26 AM on October 30, 2020 [11 favorites]


Also, possibly, Metafilter's Own?

Whether that's the actual Wallace Shawn or not, their few but pointed comments on the site are full of quotations from plays and poetry. I give it a better than even chance of being the real deal.
posted by notoriety public at 8:29 AM on October 30, 2020 [10 favorites]


I have some distant family that were very into Trump from the start. To me, voting for DJT was a pretty obvious rebuke to everything that led to my birth and continued wellbeing as an American, and I haven't said much to any of them for years. But my mother has been doing her duty, trying to reach out to "her" people. By this year, I noticed she had switched from offering fact-checking links and different perspectives to simply confronting Trump fans with how awful everything is now. She told me last week that she'd blocked one of my family members. I know she's read a lot of dumb replies during her project, so I assume whatever led to the block was actively malicious. I'm just so done with these people. As Shawn said, the rhetoric has always been a lot nicer than the reality in America. The bar to be decent is so low and they're angry about being asked to even try.

On another note, I will never know a pop culture delight as pure as Wallace Shawn unexpectedly appearing on Gossip Girl! I haven't watched the show in ages, but just the thought of it still brings a smile to my face.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:32 AM on October 30, 2020 [7 favorites]


A beautiful essay, but I wish he went more into just why Americans became less generous over time, just how and why JFK and Obama didn't live up to their lofty ethical aspirations, and how he can square away the America he lived in with its "dignity to feeling kind and good" with the America that built internment camps for Japanese-Americans, lynched thousands of Black people, and socioconomically repressed millions more with Jim Crow. It's probably outside the scope of the piece, but damn, that would have been interesting to read.

A country that can't reckon with its horrifying past and its present is exactly the country that gets someone like Donald Trump.
posted by Ouverture at 8:34 AM on October 30, 2020 [6 favorites]


I've always loved him in "My Dinner with Andre".
posted by aleph at 8:35 AM on October 30, 2020 [11 favorites]


I know bringing up Chapo can be divisive, but Will Menaker had a thoughtful interview with him this summer.
posted by St. Oops at 8:59 AM on October 30, 2020


I will never know a pop culture delight as pure as Wallace Shawn unexpectedly appearing on Gossip Girl!

He was practically a regular on that show! I also loved him as Lemond Bishop's unexpectedly sinister enforcer on The Good Wife.
posted by Umami Dearest at 9:20 AM on October 30, 2020 [2 favorites]


Shawn's The Designated Mourner should be required reading/viewing for every American. There was a film version, but you should just buy the script and read it. (Or better, stage a little living room reading with friends!) It is widely taught as a masterpiece of 20th century theater, and the Times included it in their roundup of the 25 Best Plays since Angels in America a while back.

(Also super super tired of the actors shouldn't have political opinions bullshit. Unless you think that no citizen is allowed to have an opinion about our shared political landscape except politicians, stop it.)
posted by minervous at 9:26 AM on October 30, 2020 [12 favorites]


Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount.

a great point
posted by thelonius at 9:43 AM on October 30, 2020 [6 favorites]


I think this level of realization is hitting liberal-ish educated white folks pretty hard. For me, I was raised to believe that this country was an overwhelming good. There may be some bad apples, but as a whole it was a good place full of good people built on great ideas. But as I've grown and studied, I keep seeing more and more evidence that the only thing we were good at was propaganda to our own people. Shawn says it better than I can, "The country had been brutal for a very long time, from the beginning actually. And now the rhetoric began to mirror reality."

It's hard to accept that it's not a few bad apples, it's the entire orchard that's rotting. My heart aches as if a loved one died because the America I thought I knew never existed and I honestly don't know if it can be built from the ruins of what we have.
posted by teleri025 at 9:47 AM on October 30, 2020 [14 favorites]


Wallace Shawn is the only actor whose political opinions are worth listening to.

God I hate this take so fucking much. Some of the kindest most empathetic smartest people I've ever known are actors. It's a job that requires empathy and trying to think about the humanity of another person. It's fucking hard work and it requires perseverance and dedication. The idea that a farmer is more worthy than an actor of having political opinions is just the worst.
posted by Uncle at 9:48 AM on October 30, 2020 [21 favorites]


Farmers don't regularly get large platforms to air their poorly-informed drivel.
posted by adamdschneider at 9:51 AM on October 30, 2020


Farmers don't regularly get large platforms to air their poorly-informed drivel

what about the Iowa caucus season
posted by thelonius at 9:54 AM on October 30, 2020 [30 favorites]


A beautiful essay, but I wish he went more into just why Americans became less generous over time, just how and why JFK and Obama didn't live up to their lofty ethical aspirations, and how he can square away the America he lived in with its "dignity to feeling kind and good" with the America that built internment camps for Japanese-Americans, lynched thousands of Black people, and socioconomically repressed millions more with Jim Crow. It's probably outside the scope of the piece, but damn, that would have been interesting to read.

I think he does talk about it - it's a short piece, but that's half of what it's about. My read is that he, like many of us, was sure that once Americans actually became aware of the ugly truths behind the beautiful parts, they would react with horror, say "this isn't us", and work to stop the bad parts and to make amends. Instead, it turns out that too many say "Damn straight that's us, and to hell with you for trying to make us feel bad about it. We'd rather feel good than face the ways we're not good."

The essay charts the course of coming to that realization.
posted by trig at 9:55 AM on October 30, 2020 [15 favorites]


The American education system has always worked pretty hard to cover up and/or reframe the American horrors of genocide, slavery, lynching, systemic oppression, etc. Without alternative sources or diverse communities, white people particularly could go a very long time sheltered from historical context. You know the old truism that Americans can never find anything on a map? Why do you think Social Studies education was so bad?

And then, if you do come across something like Howard Zinn or just a good college class, you are suddenly confronted with a gigantic ethical quandary that can be very easy to run and hide from. This is why organizing is so important: there's no appropriate individual response to our history. It can only be tackled systemically (of course the Republican party rejects tackling it altogether, and the Democrats overall strategy seems to be at best slow incremental change totally disconnected from confronting history head on).
posted by rikschell at 9:59 AM on October 30, 2020 [1 favorite]


I think he does talk about it - it's a short piece, but that's half of what it's about. My read is that he, like many of us, was sure that once Americans actually became aware of the ugly truths behind the beautiful parts, they would react with horror, say "this isn't us", and work to stop the bad parts and to make amends. Instead, it turns out that too many say "Damn straight that's us, and to hell with you for trying to make us feel bad about it. We'd rather feel good than face the ways we're not good."

Yeah, I figured it was out of scope. America's history is so replete of horror, violence, and painful contradictions that it really is a Lovecraft country: to fully comprehend it is to have your mind and worldview shattered.

The cultists are now able to throw their robes back and now openly welcome annihilation.
posted by Ouverture at 10:14 AM on October 30, 2020 [2 favorites]


A beautiful essay, but I wish he went more into just why Americans became less generous over time,'

I have a whole cathexis about boomers and whether they're the product or the creators of the cultural movements that they have powered: invention of the teenager, hippies, Dr. Spock, divorce and singles bars and cocaine, yuppies, tax whacks, 89 crash, 94 crime bill, more tax cuts...I pretty much blame everything bad from about 1954 to 2004 on them. Most of the good stuff came from black women and gay men.

Anyway, I think this is also the (or 'an') engine of selfishness, which is maybe a side-effect of self-centeredness implied by what they did between...oh, let's stick with the 4s: 74-94. 1994-2004 was oriented around preserving the fruits of all that. 54-74 was for figuring stuff out. So three 20-year phases: learning, getting, and keeping, at each stage pulling separate ladders up behind them.

I feel Wally (he'll always be "Wally Shawn" to me, except if I ever meet him) touches on this facet, but perhaps he has some blinders on due to his membership in the cohort. He does bring up nuclear policy, which had an inestimable effect on our late 20th century populations, with layers of predecessors as well as descendants who eagerly took up the ways of the past (skipping right to "preserve," I suppose). However, boomers have to be acknowledged as a continuing force unto themselves, at least as much as "gangs" and "terrorists" and all the other collective groups used to describe our common environment. It's unfortunate that they also run the places in which that force exists and would be described. Looking for who doesn't make the news in this way is kind of like looking for the dog that didn't bark, and it's a pretty significant omission.
posted by rhizome at 10:46 AM on October 30, 2020 [6 favorites]


A beautiful essay, but I wish he went more into just why Americans became less generous over time

He lays it out pretty clearly.

1. White middle class people felt generous when they were enjoying post-WW2 prosperity.

2. That feeling of generosity was always more important than actually doing anything to help people in this country and others who did not share in this prosperity.

3. As they became less prosperous and it became harder to ignore how many people had always been even less prosperous, they became less interested even in the feelings and rhetoric of generosity.
posted by straight at 10:54 AM on October 30, 2020 [9 favorites]


Brilliant.... sad....sweet....evolving.... like a fine piece of perhaps tragic, classical music.... Thank you Mr. Shawn and thank y'all for posting
posted by swlabr at 12:18 PM on October 30, 2020 [1 favorite]


MetaFilter: so replete of horror, violence, and painful contradictions that it really is a Lovecraft country.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:19 PM on October 30, 2020 [4 favorites]


Didn't someone say, "playwright?"
posted by swlabr at 1:51 PM on October 30, 2020 [1 favorite]


He's not just an actor, he's a playwright!

Walking by one evening, I noticed he was giving a free performance of The Fever at Radcliffe's Agassiz theater, quite old, wood seats, I was last in line. I'm tall and got the worst seat I think in my life, behind a pillar, almost no leg room, needed to twist and bend sideways to even see the stage. Almost punted and did actually have some pain for a week. Show started late of course.

But then he walked on stage, and about a sentence in I lost track of time, was enthralled. One of the best performances for me ever.
posted by sammyo at 2:11 PM on October 30, 2020 [6 favorites]


Over one third of Americans think it would "fairly good" or "very good" to have "a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections".

About one fifth of Americans think it would be "fairly good" or "very good" to have the military rule the country.

About half of Americans think that living in a democracy is something less than absolutely important.

These numbers have increased significantly over the years (and in other countries, too, not just the US). The cultural and social forces that make fascism possible are on the rise.
posted by jedicus at 3:30 PM on October 30, 2020 [4 favorites]


Somewhere way back in my photo history I have a snapshot of him and his wife (I think?) from a big protest against war in Iraq in ‘03. I always just imagine him in some cluttered and somewhat fading yet elegant brownstone having his breakfast then reading the paper, then deciding to walk down the street in solidarity with the kids.
posted by condour75 at 6:12 PM on October 30, 2020 [2 favorites]


It turns out that by the time the American public learned the sorts of things I’d felt they needed to learn, by the time they came to look in the mirror, what they saw there didn’t look so bad to them.

i don't think the american public, by and large, has learned these things or looked in the mirror. where would we find a mirror?

supporting anecdatum: a friend/collegaue, some years my senior, who told me this summer he was unaware of the tulsa massacre -- and, by extension, innumerable other race riots and pogroms of that era and lynchings throughout american history -- until hearing me refer to it this year... in discussion of a popular television show. i don't think he differs significantly from his -- or my, to the degree they are different, for that matter -- generation in this regard, except, possibly, that he didn't react with resistance or outright denial, which i suspect many of both generations are/may be likely to. instead, he acknowledged the deficiency in his education. not sure whether that history is accepted as fact broadly in subsequent generations y and so on. pretty good bet his and my educations were deficient in other regards. most of my, admittedly incomplete, awareness of the geopolitical legacy of the dulles brothers, for example, did not come from schooling.

anyway, high-quality essay. thanks, mr. shawn & mce.
posted by 20 year lurk at 6:36 PM on October 30, 2020


It's a lovely essay. It's true that the bubble he grew up in was a charmed, protected, defended, middle-class midcentury white bubble, and that allowed him to believe the rhetoric - as most around him did. But it's still a good discussion of the failure and passing away of that rhetoric, even for its intended audience. It crashed and burned on the shores of inclusion.
posted by Miko at 7:19 PM on October 30, 2020 [1 favorite]




I remember mail Jeeps.

The idea that we all were eager to help our fellow humans didn’t ring true anymore. In fact, that sort of rhetoric embarrassed people and made them feel bad, because it spoke of a compassion that they knew they didn’t feel.
-from article.

Wally: "Suppose you're going through some kind of hell in your own life, well you would love to know if friends have experience similar things. But we just don't dare to ask each other."

Andre: "No, It would be like asking your friend to drop his role."

-My Dinner with Andre.
posted by clavdivs at 11:23 AM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]


A fundamentally decent man.
posted by y2karl at 9:36 AM on November 2, 2020


This essay, which is now behind a paywall (although you can still read it with textise.net), focuses on something that I was having a very hard time accepting. Trump supporters kept saying, "I admire his ethics. I admire his moral stance." Were they lying? Trump is a racist, a rapist, a fascist and a compulsive liar and cheat. But I was overthinking it. They really do admire him. And evangelicals kept saying, "We know he's bad, but he has promised to give us power, so we will vote for him." That's called making a deal with the devil, right? Surely they understand that? But they do understand that. And watching the 2020 election results has really caused all this to sink in.

As Shawn writes, "A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good."
posted by jabah at 6:08 AM on November 4, 2020 [1 favorite]


« Older “You are a bold and courageous person — afraid of...   |   When the votes will be counted Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments