Wallace Shawn's Essays

In his novel Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut wrote that art is important because, "Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'" I think this is true, especially when the person who sends the message can write or paint or sing much better than the recipient, who then not only feels less lonely but also, benefitting from the creator's more effective expression, knows herself better, too. I bet there is a handy German noun for this notion and if there is such a word, it would have been a good runner-up title for Wallance Shawn's collection Essays (Haymarket Books, 2009). Shawn is best known as a playwright and actor (I have heard that one's culture may be measured by how far into William Tell Overture one can listen before thinking of the Lone Ranger. An alternate method would measure how long it takes one to recognize Shawn as the Sicilian assassin Vizzini from The Princess Bride.) He possesses the compound gift George Orwell described as "a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts," and in Essays applies it to issues of class, war, and art. Describing his political perspective, Shawn writes that his mother taught him that "being an American meant being a person who loved the United Nations and was a friend to poor children all over the world, like Eleanor Roosevelt…" "I never became as nice as my mother. But by the time I was forty-five I understood a few things that she'd overlooked," he continues, articulating the common experience of we who were raised by political liberals and took those liberal ideas more seriously than our folks might have intended. "I suppose I'm something like what my mother would have been if she'd gone down into her basement and stumbled on Eleanor Roosevelt murdering babies there." Shawn condenses radical media theory into a single observation from January 2003, when "each morning, I find in my newspaper two separate narratives, apparently describing unrelated developments: one (a thin little column) says that the preparations for war are going smoothly and the weather will soon be right for an attack, and the other (pages and pages) says that the negotiations about Iraq's weapons are going poorly, and there' s a danger that Bush may 'lose patience.' The thin column describes something that's actually happening." Things that are actually happening are not as welcome in newspapers and tv broadcasts as many imagine. Most coverage of the Haitian earthquakes has treated poverty, rotten infrastructure, and unstable architecture as phenomena as uncontrollable and mysterious as the natural forces that cause tectonic plates to slide around. A couple of ex-president war criminals are dispatched to collect donations, never mind the Haitian blood on their hands. American's can name you all the singers on the Hope for Haiti album they downloaded, but don't ask them why US Marines arriving there makes some folks nervous. As Shawn writes, "When one hasn't noticed that it's one's own boot that's standing on the suffering person's neck, one can be calmly sympathetic to the suffering person and hope that over time things will work out well for them." Nick Holt's website is Grits and Roses.