I recently appeared in a Broadway production of Christopher Hampton's 1970 play The Philanthropist. It's English, it's densely verbal (though accessible to American ears), it's funny and moving, and it takes place in an unspecified yet unmistakably OxBridge University.
The play concerns the insular lives of academics comfortably nestled in the bosom of their respective subjects who never actually have to deal with the real world, which in the late '60's and early '70's was raging outside the ivy-covered walls they called home. They philosophize, engage in intellectual (and occasionally physical) intercourse and generally exist in a relatively carefree environment. Oh, and they have cocktail parties. Lots of cocktail parties.
At one such gathering, a well-known novelist by the name of "Braham Head" has been invited to join the regulars and, in a fascinating scene in which all the complex dynamics of an ordinary drinks party are laid bare, "Braham" proceeds to provoke his captive audience with outrageous proclamations of brazen, solipsistic, quasi-capitalistic dogma -- the proud gaming of the human soul, surfing the hopes and dreams of humanity for personal gain.
Eschewing his former, more humanitarian ambitions as naive, he adopts (having once tasted the sweetness of naked profit) a stance that is so blatantly repugnant that it actually becomes attractive to a world already reeling from the ennui of mass-media mediocrity:
"....when I was younger, I was a passionate Lefty writing all kinds of turgid, earthshaking stuff...but eventually I realized, and what a moment of five-star disillusionment that was, that it wasn't going to work...God, in his infinite wisdom, had given me the ability to create essentially frivolous entertainments, which were enjoyed by essentially frivolous people for me to be able to amble comfortably through life. Naturally, it distresses me that people are wasting their energies killing each other all over the world, and of course, I'm sorry thousands of Indians starve to death every year, but I mean that's their problem, isn't it, if they will go in for all this injudicious fucking. I actually used to think that in some obscure way it was my fault."
"...obviously my living depends on disgusting a certain percentage of people. If I don't disgust at least a substantial minority, I wouldn't be controversial and if I wasn't controversial, I wouldn't be rich."
"...I realized I belong too that small class of people who make exactly what they deserve. I'm a product. If the public stop wanting me, I stop earning."
Anyone come to mind faintly reminiscent of this "Braham" (braying ham)?
How about any number of high profile gas-bags who bully their way into your living room and your psyche and, in the name of bald profit, seek to brutally crush opposition to their bully-ideology?
How about the great culture warrior himself, Bill O'Reilly?
In a prescient stroke, Hampton has drawn O'Reilly in the form of "Braham Head" as if the No Spin Zone's host himself had modeled for it personally. What was in 1970 perhaps an amusing and somewhat extreme take on media personalities has come to pass with deadly accuracy.
Braham/O'Reilly is a creation born from the playwright's desire to portray the more Machiavellian side of capitalism's need to manipulate rather than cooperate, a side fraught with basic insecurities and the attendant defensiveness erected in order to cover/cope with those insecurities. Bullies in the Braham/O'Reilly mold are cruel in direct proportion to the cruelties done unto them, a nasty link in a dysfunctional chain.
When the unlikely hero of the play (a bookish and introverted teacher of philology) finally deposes "Braham," it is because the bully's method -- apart from his ideology, although each requires the other -- is deconstructed to his face, simply and cleanly, and in a clever twist, with no ill-intent whatsoever. The disassembled "Braham" subsequently expresses his frustration with a combination of childish verbal attacks and frightening petulance, and having been denuded of purpose and identity slinks off. If only life was like that.
In this fictionalized scenario, essential humanity cannot be denied, though it may have been temporarily marginalized by the bigger, the stronger and the more desperate who need to be scrupulous in their lack of compassion in order to maintain some relevance in a world where they would otherwise be rendered unnecessary.
After years of quiet submission, thoughtful people are fighting back. The first blow struck is the understanding of the motivations behind the mutation of hate-journalism and the toxic-jockies of Fox News and other sleaze outlets. When Fox's other smug hit-man Sean Hannity starts to train his bullets on progressive issues, it is invariably done so with the kind of low-brow brutality reserved for backyard brawling, but comes under the knowingly manipulative guise of pretending to be journalism. More and more people are seeing what lies beneath the litany of half-truths and outright fibs by experiencing real-life refutations of their fear-mongering fabrications.
The sheer raving bluster of such obstructionists, whether in the form of media entertainers like O'Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh, as well as the screaming mimis who disrupt town hall meetings (dumbly doing their corporate fearmeisters bidding) or Christopher Hampton's prescient creation "Braham Head" can be momentarily riveting.
But the shallow messages they seek to convey necessitate continual pounding into the psyches of people seeking easy answers to complex problems, lest those messages evaporate. Once exposed, their motives become understood and they lose their hold on people and slink away into the murk, waiting to spring back when society becomes as insular and as sated by frivolous pursuits as the fictional academics in Hampton's play.
The only difference is that "Braham", unlike his real-life counterparts, has the balls to admit it.