"THE CAPE COD WAY"

During an unexpected trip in an ambulance to the hospital, an EMT asked if I'd had any stressors in my life: I acknowledged "man trouble" and he responded: "That's the Cape Cod way!" In the midst of gasping for air, I couldn't help but chuckle. Later, when coherent and after time to ponder the EMT's comment, I felt figuratively betrayed, as if the single, male population had conspired to avoid commitment, compromise and most importantly companionship. What is love without these components?

I must preface the following comments with: a) I admire many men and am not bitter, just seasoned; b) I'm NOT a technophobe, and c) I have a life.

Back to basics: increasingly adult men of all ages, creeds, races, shapes and sizes who remain single after divorce, or by choice, for examples, do so for a reason. I tried to find excuses for these confirmed bachelors but then I recalled modern women often choose autonomy. Why should empowered women who fight for equality and independence deny single men that choice?

Because these same men want it all; hence, the now cliched label, "friends with benefits, or avoiding responsibility for another human being while getting sex and meeting once a week to do an activity together. Sans the conjugal aspect, in this rapid-fire world we live in--Type As abound here, too--who has time for human contact? Many, friends for pleasure and necessity, work or volunteer more hours in the day than not.

More so, some single men call sharing one's feelings "drama," but they don't hesitate to complain about their day, lives, stress, troubles on a regular basis, saying they have a right to be angry. Many women have learned, at least I have, that today's companionship means to share experiences, leaving "feelings" on the back burner, to our detriment. In contrast, albeit reluctantly, the male community has begun to accept women whipping out our fishing rods or becoming involved in activism and politics with the proviso that we "behave," i.e. remain quiet as they ramble. Then, men attempt to stifle us when we want the floor.

Have women enabled these separate but equal men who attempt to dictate how relationships should or shouldn't be? With the influx of technology, most of which has been invented by men (women have been involved but we still see little coverage) such as e-mail, texting, streaming, smart phones which show picture perfect video, and so on, men have more incentive to retreat into their "man caves," and detach from daily intimacy. In fact, they must be inwardly celebrating that they no longer need to pick up a phone and call their girlfriends, partners or wives and can use multi-media as an excuse not to communicate.

If a man has an eclectic taste in humor and appreciates wit, I'm engaged. Surprisingly, I found "Deadpool"  hilarious, and yet, I appreciate sophisticated wit, like that of Jane Austen's stories or Oscar Wilde."Hangover" and "Neighbors" reinforce vulgar behavior; I admit humor has always been subjective, but compulsory? Do I have to laugh to impress when I'm disgusted?

And as women are expected to be strong, no matter the obstacle, does that signify that females with disabilities are, thus, weak? I've met scores of men who have little patience with women's health issues though they have their own challenges.

Per my experience, available men blame everyone, everything for their plights without taking any personal responsibility, without making any effort to improve their lives. Yes, there are women on Cape who also fall into this habit. Expressing discontent is human. Spreading discontent without possible solutions, destructive.

Without bringing in a political agenda this week (read last week's blog or earlier commentary if curious), Cape Cod, in fact, is a microcosm of mainstream America. More people would rather be entertained, than informed. That's their freedom, to choose, and to their detriment, to avoid.

Having lived in an island community more than once, Singapore in particular, I am not surprised by the EMT's remark. He'd be baffled if I told him running from personal commitments is NOT "The Cape Cod Way." It's the American way.

POLITICS AND LITERATURE: MILAN KUNDERA'S "IMMORTALITY"

A man longs to be immortal, and one day the camera will show us a mouth contorted in a pathetic grimace--the only thing we will remember about him, the only thing that will remain as a parabola of his entire life.

(Milan Kundera, Immortality,1990)*

Kundera wrote his philosophical manifesto almost thirty years ago but his observations about politics reverberate today (he had moved to Paris by the time he wrote Immortality). He recognizes the show-biz of politics. Kundera understands that politics and entertainment have been and would be forever linked. Moreover, those who follow our current American circus could link  the "man," referenced above, to today's politico, Donald Trump. 

Trump has shown his narcissistic ambition for immortality as far back as the 1980s. Mr. Trump built his tower on Fifth Avenue, New York City in 1983, and included an enormous stamp on the tower's facade with his last name: TRUMP TOWER. That act, began his never-ending search for everlasting fame, and he recognized how to do it. 

The politician is dependent on the journalist. But on whom are the journalists dependent? On those who pay them. And those who pay them are the advertising agencies that buy space from newspapers and time from radio and TV  stations.

Kundera goes on to argue that ideology has become "imagology": 

What matter is the word finally lets us put under one roof something that goes by many names: advertising agencies; political campaign managers; designers who devise the shape of everything...; fashion stylists; barbers; show-business stars dictating the norms of physical beauty that all branches of imagology obey.

Sound familiar? Donald Trump and his staff, children apparently understood/understand this neologism, "imagology" (Kundera's term) to the point of mastery. Trump grew up learning the business from his father, who left the son his empire, giving Donald Trump a platform for Donald to exercise his innate and learned media savvy. 

Tabloid newspapers feed off any crumbs thrown at them by wily publicists so that often the stories, embellished or not, are secondary to the persona. Trump recognized this from the beginning of his real estate career. And "the Donald" discovered every trick of the trade from New York dailies such as The New York Post and The New York Daily News.

What's more, Trump knows how to play to the public. For example, Internet providers, television producers and newspaper editors have ensured that public opinion polls are as pervasive as gobs of gum on city streets. No matter how hard we try to avoid them, these polls grab our attention. Kundera sensed this phenomena would explode:

Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of the imagology's power, because they enable the imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards the people with questions...And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a higher power of reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth.

Friends and like-wise thinking acquaintances shake their heads in disbelief: how could Donald Trump have progressed this far with his campaign to become the presumptive GOP candidate? He gets it. Trump has played to the opinion polls, to those who believe what they see instead of learning what isn't there. Many of Donald supporters watch reality shows, read tabloid newspapers, listen to bombastic, superficial talk shows and assimilate what they believe is "the truth" when in fact, they're being manipulated. In essence, they're being controlled by puppeteers with invisible strings.

Lastly, I have read Milan Kundera's words again and again, trying to grasp how he could so perspicaciously explain our present electoral chaos from his author's chair in 1980s Paris? Well, you will need to read Kundera's novel to answer that question. Suffice it to say that I wish Kundera would win the Nobel Prize for Literature next year; just on the basis of his uncanny awareness of the political machine, which like a master's template, could be applied to any country's ideology and propaganda (contemporary and historical) as well as its politicians. 

*Written in Czech and translated to English.

A WRITER'S DISCOVERY: WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?

Mother wrote, in English, a Greek play in perfect meter when she was twelve years old. The play, lost in storage during the Depression, disappeared into Prometheus' fire, but the spark remained. She couldn't continue school in New York City but never lost her pride in her accomplishment or her love of writing.

I'd forgotten that as a child I'd written plays about romance: melodrama coupled with a withdrawn girl's imaginings about what love could be, despite life's obstacles. Yet, years followed and I forgot my attempts, and with those years my confidence waned. By the time I reached high school, I had lots of imagination but little grammatical form to write a simple essay. Only with the dogged persistence of my beloved English teacher did I eventually regain some coherence, clarity and structure. The child playwright, however, had disappeared.

Life experience, as the pundits often pontificate, taught me how to see the world with depth and perception. Graduate school helped me find my inner voice. And the creative juices brimming over here, on the Cape, in the land, in the sea as well as past voices and surging artistic energy which any writer can't help but embrace, all have helped me rediscover my muse. What I didn't anticipate? That I'd find my mother's words from among her ashes, a play's burnt embers floating in the sky.

Like Mom, I have always loved mythology. Since arriving on the Cape, I've experimented with playwriting using universal themes steeped in classical canon, especially social justice and feminism. For anyone who has read the Greek classics: The Iliad, The Odyssey by Homer or more powerfully, many of Euripides' works, e.g. Hecuba or The Trojan Women can find modern-day issues that speak to us. I remembered, also, that I read plays from high school and beyond, for pure pleasure.

Then, a synthesis began. My years seeing theatre in New York and elsewhere; reading Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Hellman, O'Neill, Williams, Stoppard and so on; acting in high school; working at theaters behind-the-scenes, all led to what I've become, for the moment at least: a dramatist. I'm exploring territory my mother had delved into a generation before: that young girl who had such high hopes for a future as a playwright. I may not have my late mother's gift for meter. I do have her daring. So, when my, albeit ten minute, play is produced the first weekend in June, along with other dramatists' for the Provincetown Theater's Playwright Festival, I will hold stand proud if for no other reason than to salute my mother.