Said Tom Stoppard, quoted in "Tom Stoppard Finally Looks Into His Shadow/After years of living 'as if without history,' the playwright belatedly reckons with his Jewish roots, and his guilt, in 'Leopoldstadt,' his most autobiographical play" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).
"I was totally poleaxed. I was in my 50s. I’d had this entire life. I couldn’t change it retroactively even in my mind. So it wasn’t like some kind of new start. I just carried on being the person I was.”
He also has this to say about politics:
"If I were prime minister or president and there was no nuclear weapon, I would’ve liked to have piled into Ukraine and made war. Because we are now all Neville Chamberlains — appeasement, appeasement. There’s a way of being consciously in denial, I guess, but also there’s a way of being unconsciously in denial. You don’t know that you’re in denial, so you’re quite happy about being in denial. You think that’s your kind of resting place....The very concept of an idealistic democracy is beginning to sound quaint. Where is it now? It doesn’t feel like England, let alone Poland. The English are the most surveilled people anywhere.... Whatever the shortcomings are of a liberal democracy, you have to live with the shortcomings and not use them as a reason to grab the steering wheel and just go somewhere else. Because there is nowhere else which is as good. Nowhere else which is as humane."
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40 comments:
Finally!
NYT has found a navel gazing upper class white Jewish writer who will explain it all to the rest of us.
Where would we be without the New York Times?
He’s right about one thing, appeasement is a dead end policy,,as Putin learned with NATO. It’s an ever expanding military alliance that has caused the last three destabilizing events for Europe, Libyan refugee crisis, Syrian refugee crisis, and Ukraine.
How did Lithuania get into NATO? By fighting with us in Iraq, other Baltic states too. The history of NATO is full of proud moments like the Iraq war
In the post-nuclear, post-COVID, post-drone world every nation's moral stance is some shade of gray. I don't see how any country in the world could "garner" support for Total War a la WW1 or WW2. The thought of sending millions of people in thousands of ships and planes to die? Well, don't interrupt my Instagram post. Don't interrupt my video game. I have fake watermelons to harvest to win a badge.
It could never happen again unless we allow tribalism and nationalism to return, and unless we allow establish media to sell government propaganda as truth. Oops. Never mind. Prepare for the male-female-transgender draft and mass casualties in trench warfare.
Article was an enjoyable read until this: "The man who once caused waves in the London theater community by praising Margaret Thatcher’s early tenure said he is “horrified” at the idea of former President Donald J. Trump coming back."
Dowd returning to her own vomit. She just can't avoid it.
Geez, Stoppard sounds like an America First person. He’s Ultra MAGA. And he’s now finished.
I suspect his plays would have read differently if he had grown up knowing where he came from, or who he came from. I suspect that, but don't know for sure. We are an amalgam of everyone and everything we've come into contact with through our lives. And though we think we're the same basic persons as we were when we were 14, we're not. We are always changing, sometimes by degree, sometimes in large, unkempt ways. So Tom Stoppard, even being the highly awarded, well known man that he is, would have been different in some ways, large or small, had he known where and who he came from.
What he says about us all being Neville Chamberlains is not far off. But there are some- a handful of us who are not. Donald Trump is not. Joe Biden, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and that ilk most certainly are.
From the article:
"Whatever the shortcomings are of a liberal democracy, you have to live with the shortcomings and not use them as a reason to grab the steering wheel and just go somewhere else. Because there is nowhere else which is as good. Nowhere else which is as humane."
Short version: lower your expectations.
I suppose you could rationalize the use of poison gas as 'humane,' as opposed to the use of poleaxes...
I guess he lives in England. But he sounds MAGA. to me.
I wonder how Stoppard feels about Joe Biden bringing Hitler back.
One of the big lessons of the Holocaust, (and the Holodomor, and the genocides of Armenians, Sudanese, Cambodians, Kosovo Muslims, and others) is that genocide should never be allowed to occur. Having relatives in a genocide might be emotionally wrenching but the big lesson of "genocide - never again" should be learned directly from knowledge that genocides occurred.
Stoppard's reaction to learning he had relatives in the Holocaust was to ignore it. He is indeed a Neville Chamberlin, unwilling to accept the utter evil of the opponents of his era, avoiding the harsh reality that appeasement will only lead to greater conflict and loss in future, because he can do so for a while before bad things happen to him. Just like it happened to others in the past, including his ignored relatives.
Not being Neville Chamberlaine is the going excuse for being George W Bush. Always choose war.
Hate of Trump is the great unifier. The intellectual world refuses to fear God. They only fear Trump’s middle class Americans.
Boo!
Hate of Trump is the great unifier. The intellectual world refuses to feat God. They only fear Trump’s middle class Americans.
Boo!
Weird how most actors (of all genderisms) are sociopathic but really good at simulating emotions on camera but I am surprised to see a playwright exhibit similar tendencies.
I would (bleep) love to read this, New York (bleep) Times, but I spent up my free articles documenting your (bleep) (bleep) (bleep) insane (bleep) (bleep) plan to blot out the (bleep) sun, you dumb (bleep) (bleep). And that's what I got to say about that!
There will be no shadows when you blot out the sun you (bleep) father (bleep).
Stoppard has been looking back on his Central European Jewish roots for decades, though this is the first time in an original play.
I have mixed feelings about him. He seems more sound politically than other writers, and I have an idea that he is some kind of genius, but what I've actually seen and heard of his work didn't impress me. And of course, Shakespeare in Love, ugh.
I am sure when Stoppard wakes up in the wee hours of the morning his thoughts do contemplate the deaths of these relatives.
Notice that he says "if I were president" and not "if I were a soldier." His war fantasy doesn't involve putting himself at risk.
One of the world's big brains actually wants to state that nuclear weapons are bad because they stop world leaders from sending thousands of troops to a pointless death. If only we could return to the days when life was a carefree game of capture the flag.
"Notice that he says 'if I were president' and not 'if I were a soldier.' His war fantasy doesn't involve putting himself at risk."
This is true of most ardent advocates for war.
Who started the war in Ukraine? Why are we on the side of the aggressor?
https://mobile.twitter.com/martyrmade/status/1530405122840227841
What he's saying is what Churchill said about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried, but it doesn't look like broad, sunlit uplands are in our future. What he's not considering is whether the distinctions between forms of government are as clear and as absolute as they once were. The convergence of democratic and non-democratic forms of governments, capitalist and socialist economies that some expected a half-century ago may be happening now.
"If I were prime minister or president and there was no nuclear weapon, I would’ve liked to have piled into Ukraine and made war. Because we are now all Neville Chamberlains — appeasement, appeasement."
Is that a well-considered judgement and resolve or just an emotional reaction and a vague wish? Would PM Stoppard really send troops in to Ukraine? Nobody can say, but notice that he says "we are now all Neville Chamberlains."
Stoppard doesn't like it, but possibly he knows that it's not 1939. Putin isn't Hitler, and Western governments aren't going to send their own troops into Ukraine. He also may be thinking more of pre-modern wars which usually didn't have such grave consequences and could be entered into much more easily. Nobody wants another Stalingrad, but some might risk another Blenheim or Fontenoy, if it were possible.
I am looking forward to seeing The Coast of Utopia trilogy someday. I hope it won't be disappointing.
I looked him up on IMDB. Besides Rosencranz and Shakespeare in Love, he has an impressive list of screenwriting credits: Anna Karenina, Billy Bathgate, Enigma, Russia House, Empire of the Sun, and Brazil. I saw most of the latter movies, but Brazil is the only one I can remember. Stoppard also wrote a lot of TV movies that look interesting but are not streaming anywhere.....My mother had a grandfather who converted from non-practicing Jew to a non practicing Lutheran upon moving to America. It probably wasn't such a big deal back then. Religious identity is fluid. Some claim it is more fluid than sexual identity. Ethnic identity is also fluid. My mother's grandmother was born and raised in Denmark, but, thanks to Bismarck, she emigrated from Germany.....Me, I suppose I'm Irish Catholic. I haven't been to church in decades, but my hair is still kind of reddish.
West TX Intermediate Crude said...
Finally!
NYT has found a navel gazing upper class white Jewish writer who will explain it all to the rest of us.
Where would we be without the New York Times?
Finally!
Althouse has found a commenter who doesn't hate Jews per se, but just is sick of hearing about their ideas and plays and money and damned Jew York Times and their obsession with all their family members getting murdered.
Where would the blogosphere be without them?
How could he not know his grandparents were left behind in Czechoslovakia and Jewish? I can understand shielding a child, but his parents must have told him they were dead before they knew for certain. He was born in 1937.
"if I were a soldier"
A Green Beret medic I knew well wrote this from Vietnam in January 1968 to his wife. He was killed in action while assisting a wounded fellow soldier during the Tet offensive February 1968.
"...Usually at Christmas time, there isn't enough time to think about what we're celebrating; out there, there wasn't much else to do.
The story of God taking on human misery out of pity and love and the story of Our Savior coming... I don't know. I think perhaps Christmas is for the miserable. Anyhow, I felt it belonged to us..."
I have felt since then that there are causes worth dying for but our leaders so often prefer us to die for causes not worth dying for. We have to know which is which. Freedom of the press is worth dying for; the present state of the press, of CNN, Twitter, Facebook, NYT, WaPo, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR is not.
And what if, in life as we know it, the good, the bad and the ugly are inseparably joined instead of being conveniently separated by time? The Vietnam of the boat people was worth dying for; the corrupt leadership was not. One Ukraine, the one threatened by Russia, is worth dying for; another Ukraine, represented by the only two words most Americans know in Ukrainian, namely, "Hunter Biden", is not. Consider our own Republic.
"It doesn’t feel like England, let alone Poland. The English are the most surveilled people anywhere.... Whatever the shortcomings are of a liberal democracy, you have to live with the shortcomings and not use them as a reason to grab the steering wheel and just go somewhere else. Because there is nowhere else which is as good. Nowhere else which is as humane."
That should be a perceived liberal democracy. A surveilled public are not in a liberal democracy - it is not a feature. Also like your typical brit, they have been indoctrinated to believe that (the British) government is good and right. There are better places to live, but if everybody escaped to that place, then who would be left?
Tom Stoppard was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. His family got to Singapore. His mother got out to India with her two sons before the Japanese marched in, but his father (a doctor, I think) stayed and was killed. His mother married a British officer in 1946, changed her children's names and raised them as British.
In "Leopoldstadt," a widowed Jewish mother in Vienna marries a British officer, changes her son's name and tries to raise him to fit in with English children. He returns to Vienna after the war to find out what happened to his grandparents and cousins, only a few of whom are still alive.
It was not uncommon for non-religious Jewish refugees to hide their Jewishness from young children to protect them from fear of a future Hitler.
People talk like "Never Again" can be a reality. It can't.
Those who have chosen sides in, say, the Ukraine--if you had unambiguous evidence that the side you favor was practicing genocide, would it change your mind? Be honest, now.
Probably not. Nor would such news mobilize public opinion or public sentiment more than a temporary point or two IMO.
The great post-WWII myth--it's worldwide and taken as a given--is that if only people had known about the corpse factories then more people would have fought earlier and harder to defeat the Nazis.
I don't think that was true then, and I don't think it's true now in regard to ongoing genocides and attempted genocides.
It can be deplored, but I don't think it can be denied.
Oh Tim in Vermont you ignorant slug. Why are we supporting one side in this conflict? Because the other guys are evil. Is this your first taste of moral clarity? It's bitter right? Don't worry I used to hate gin but now it's my only drink.
Fetus in lieu of baby, deplorable in lieu of granny, for social distancing from her Choice and Her Choice, too.
tim in vermont:
Eight years since the inception of the Baidan/Maidan/Slavic Spring in the Obama World War Spring (WWS) series, where the Zelensky et al regimes in Kiev and paramilitary axes attack and kill people in the Crimea and Donbas regions. The illicit operation of Wuhan-style biohazard labs has certainly not ingratiated Kiev with its neighbors.
People talk like "Never Again" can be a reality. It can't.
Planned Parenthood, also planned parent/hood, non-sterilize, mutagenic medical treatments, transgender conversion therapy, progressive prices, coups without borders, masks with progressive effects, recurring nationwide insurrections... wicked solutions again, and again, and again.
"If I were prime minister or president and there was no nuclear weapon, I would’ve liked to have piled into Ukraine and made war."
The problem is, his 'class' aren't the ones being killed.
It's blue collar and even poorer kids that are the heart of our enlisted men and women.
It's easy to say 'Let's go to war' when you aren't getting shot at...
'Why are we supporting one side in this conflict? Because the other guys are evil.'
Not our war.
Not our fight.
They aren't allies and we have no mutual defense pact with Ukraine.
It is the greatest money-laundering operation since Afghanistan.
Have you noticed, as soon as that grift was shut down another one started?
Not a coincidence.
Of course. An effete ass that has no interest in or empathy for others naturally Would be excited about sacrificing someone else's son in Ukraine; as long as there are no nukes. He wouldn't want his life to be inconvenienced. I hope he steps in front of a bus.
Another disgusting old man who loves war. And can't even give a good reason for it, other than his own FEELINGS. APPEASEMENT. What the hell does that even mean? Its just a label to avoid thinking and giving reasons.
Guess what Tommy boy, old as you are, you can still go fight. Zelensky takes anyone. Or if you have a son, send him. But read his comments closely. He's just saying he want OTHERS to fight.
He's imagining himself President or PM.
The rest of his comment is almost incoherent. odd for a playwright. But if England isn't good enough for him (cowardly appeasers?) he can go elsewhere. I believe he has at least 3 passports.
I like "R&G are dead". but I was shocked at reading his screen/Tv/Play credits. Not much that's great. But you can be 2nd tier talent and still get awards.
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