ARGUMENTS
113
rhetoric does not at all justify the tastelessness of her verse. Dwight
Macdonald thinks the contrary. He writes: "Although I am no friend
of broad comedy, I find broadness here, given this particular subject,
exhilarating and somehow liberating...." I wonder. Did Dwight
Macdonald need to read this play to feel "liberated" from the cant in
Johnson's speeches? But as he notes, Johnson's speeches parody them–
selves. Macdonald concludes: "In sum,
MacBird
is a tasteless, crude,
wholly destructive satire which roughs up everybody and everything
and which is extremely funny, especially at its most tasteless, crude, and
destructive moments." Tasteless and crude
MacBird
is indeed: and
Macdonald's final justification of the work has to be not merely that it
is humorous, but that what it is attacking is so bad.
If
you don't like
this play, just think of the President it's about. And what are we to
think of the President it's about? That he killed his predecessor? At this
point, Macdonald balks.
There are some, though, who will not balk at the implications of
this play in applauding it. These people will say, yes,
MacBird
suggests
the President is a murderer ; why not? Aren't the students chanting,
"LBJ, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?" Why is it worse
to have had Kennedy assassinated than to napalm women and children
in Vietnam? In fact, President Johnson is so bad that any and all means
are fair against him.
Here are my questions: Is our country so horrible? Is our President
so evil? At this point the matter of this rather trivial burlesque takes
on serious meaning. For if our country is as bad as people are saying,
and our President as evil, then questions of art have indeed become
irrelevant. Certainly when Robert Lowell says about
MacBird:
"I have
nothing to say about the political truth of this play, but I am sure a
kind of genius has gone into the writing," he is, to my mind, talking
politics, not criticism, and he would only do this if he thought the
situation of a kind to make criticism supererogatory. Once again, just
how bad is our present situation? Without redemption, according to
Robert Brustein, another supporter of
MacBird.
Approving (in the
New
Republic,
Dec. 3) of Jean-Claude van Itallie's
America Hurrah,
Mr.
Brustein remarks that the playwright has discovered "the deepest poetic
function of the theatre," in that his metaphors, which "solve nothing,
change nothing, transform nothing," yet show"... that it is still possible
for men to share a common humanity--even if this only means sharing
a common revulsion against what is mean and detestable." Are things
so
bad in what Mr. Brustein refers to as "Johnsonland" that a common
revulsion to our state is all that can now unite us? (I do not believe,
