#683 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Tuesday June 13)
Good morning,
A potpourri of responses today…
THE TONYS AND TRANSPARENT
The only award show I love is the Tonys. It’s scaled-down, less glitzy, and much more writer, director, plot, and creativity driven than the Oscars. If you can catch a re-run of some of the great numbers, it’s worth it.
This past weekend, we went to Transparent, The Musical at the Mark Taper Forum downtown. Don’t listen to the Los Angeles Times—it was a great evening of entertainment. Will the play be streamlined a bit as it continues being refined? Sure. In the meantime, it’s a tad long but really fun. Trigger warning: The story is about the acceptance of transsexual people. But at its core, it is a metaphor for accepting people different from ourselves—presented as a comedy with its share of drama. And who best to portray “the other” than a group that is about as “other” as can get for most of us. As you leave the theatre, you may find yourself humming a tune and thinking differently about some of the most different among us.
If the Tonys had a theme this year, it was tolerance in our current angry time when intolerance of “the other” is out in the open and politically acceptable to some. The winner of Best New Play was Leopoldstadt, centered around the vibrant Austrian Jewish society at the turn of the last century, to be followed by the Holocaust. Best Revival was Parade, about intolerance and murder in America. Many of the other plays were plays about Black Americans (including the revival of the great Topdog/Underdog), Gay Americans, and immigrant Americans. If we could only get some of our fellow citizens to realize these all are very, very American plays. They are about us.
TRIGGER WARNING, REDUX
A lot of folks agreed with my take on trigger warnings. Here is a Trigger Warning that Peter Bain says he would put on my syllabus, were he a professor:
“Warning: The subject matter of this class may challenge your preconceptions, demand rational analysis, reward cognitive rigor, and impact your perspective. Anyone concerned about having their beliefs affected in any way should avoid this class.”
INTERFERING WITH A DEMOCRATIC PROCESS AND TRUMP ON CNN
David Lash notes, regarding the folks that raided the Capitol, whom some people, including our former president, deems to be patriotic and perhaps being pardoned:
“The other thing to keep in mind is that the Jan. 6 rioters were interfering with, obstructing, and making it impossible for a Constitutionally mandated proceeding to take place. Some patriots.”
While I forced myself to watch the CNN town hall featuring former-president Trump, David couldn’t do it. He watched some and said:
“I couldn’t watch much of the CNN town hall tonight, it was just too depressing to think this guy was president and might be again. The lies were just so continual that they were impossible to keep up with. And his supporters love it. How do you combat that??”
HONESTY IN MEDICAL PRICING
On the issues of the cost of healthcare, the insurance companies’ grip on the process, and the general opacity of payment for services, David Berkey shares this:
“My longtime internist at Scarsdale Medical Group (now unfortunately part of Montefiore Health Systems) says that the simplest way to correct the current system is to put prices on everything from MRI’s to stiches. This menu must be easily understandable by the consumer and transparent. The shenanigans that go on in the current opaque pricing system make it impossible for anyone to understand what things cost and by proxy leave ample room for all the (profit driven) stakeholders to manipulate the system. If as a for instance you knew that a hammer at Home Depot cost $10.00 and one at Lowes cost $15.00, you could make a decision about where you want to shop. In the end open pricing will force all the providers to compete thus driving down prices. Of course, this isn’t the only remedy (pardon the pun) but it should serve to bring down prices across the board, which would be a giant step in the right direction.”
Have a great day,
Glenn