A House full of cowards

‍ ‍

You hide in your mansion
While the young peoples' blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
— Bob Dylan, Masters of War

In Mesopotamian palaces, Egyptian administrative buildings, and throughout the civic architecture of many ancient centers of power, the men in charge built their homes without windows facing the street. They designed their walls to run thick enough to not hear the marketplaces so they would not be bothered with the common people who lived on the street. 

The ruling classes, then as now, hid behind thick walls and issued their declarations and decrees, insulated by the consequences no matter how much carnage these declarations caused to their people. One would be hard pressed indeed to find a more insidious form of cowardice.

Throughout time, as well, we find the opposite. There were, in many of our ancient and tribal histories, leaders that were also warriors and kept the ancient code of courage. They would go first into battle, and the rest would follow. 

During my many years of formal training in the fighting arts I met many amazing people. One of my favorites was Frank, who at the time was 70 and had the look and feel of a man much younger. He was a former semi-professional boxer, a deep reader of history, and had grown up north of the White Earth Reservation in Northern Minnesota playing hockey, boxing and canoeing deep into the Great Lakes wilderness. He was part of the Anishinaabe nation. Over two years he taught me how to throw a proper jab, and shared with me stories of his own people, and many throughout history, where leadership was earned through a covenant of courage. One of his favorites was Alexander the Great.  

Alexander of Macedon left Macedonia in 334 BC and never came back to any form of luxurious confines. For thirteen years he lived on campaign, sleeping in tents, eating from the same pot as his soldiers, marching on foot alongside them. He was twenty years old when he set out and thirty-two when he died in Babylon, having covered twenty thousand miles of terrain from Greece across Persia, through Afghanistan to the border of India. He always led from the front.

At the city of the Malli in what is now Pakistan, in 325 BC, his engineers had yet to complete  the siege ramps when Alexander put his shield on his back and went up the scaling ladder first. He reached the top of the wall before any of his men, stood against the sky visible to both armies, then jumped down into the interior courtyard alone, inside the city while his army was still outside.

His bodyguards came over the wall after him with such urgency that the ladder broke under their weight and stranded the rest of the army on the exterior. Three men stood in a courtyard filled with Malli warriors.

Alexander killed the garrison commander before an arrow drove through his breastplate into his lung. He kept fighting with the shaft in his chest until his bodyguards formed a shield over him and held the ground until the army broke through the gates below.

When his officers found him alive they wept, then berated him for recklessness.

In North American history we find great warrior leaders like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Before each engagement the Oglala Lakota war leader rode quietly through his own lines, and then turned his horse and rode first toward the enemy. His right to ask anything of other men rested entirely on that singular act of leadership, and was renewed at the beginning of every fight.

Sitting Bull approached the same leadership obligation through ceremony. Four days before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, he danced the Sun Dance until the visions came so that when the fighting began he had already given what the moment would require of others.

We also find this covenant forged of courage, not surprisingly, in Iceland's great prose sagas composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. These sagas comprised a literature celebrating the same form of leadership in which they tracked across generations who held their ground and who turned and ran. 

Their famous shield wall combat strategy made this reckoning visible in real time. Warriors stood shoulder to shoulder, each man's shield covering the left side of the man beside him, the line holding only as long as every man held his ground. One gap would open the neighbor's side to the spear and compromise the entire group.  A warrior who positioned himself behind that wall broke the contract the shield wall depended on, and the Norse word for such a man was níðingr.

Níðingr stripped a man of his legal standing and his name in the keeping of his people. Icelandic law gave any man the right to kill a níðingr without paying weregild, the blood price that bound communities together after a killing, because a níðingr had placed himself outside the bonds that made law possible in the first place.

Egill Skallagrímsson, one of the great poets of the Viking Age, raised a níðstǫng against King Eirik Bloodaxe after the king had wronged him. He cut a horse's head and mounted it on a hazel pole facing the king's seat, carved a curse in runes calling on the land spirits to give the king no peace in any country, and left the pole standing where everyone who passed could see it.

One of the most compelling examples of the opposite form of leadership, the kind so commonplace today that it seems simply natural, is found with Xerxes, the ancient king of Persia. 

The stories tell us how Xerxes assembled the largest military force the ancient world had ever seen. Sources numbered his fleet at over a thousand ships and his land army in the millions. While modern historians estimate closer to two hundred thousand soldiers, it was still the greatest single military force that had ever moved across the earth. In 480 BC he brought it to Greece to finish what his father Darius had started.

Before the famous naval engagement at Salamis he ordered a throne of gold to be carried to a hill above the bay so he could watch his fleet destroy the outnumbered Greeks below. He brought secretaries to record the names of captains who distinguished themselves so they could be rewarded afterward.

Unfortunately for the Persians, as their impressive fleet sailed into the narrow strait at Salamis they quickly discovered that a thousand ships in a confined channel could not maneuver very well. Greek triremes, smaller and faster, turned inside the Persian formation and drove through it. By the end of the day three hundred Persian ships lay on the floor of the bay, and the historian Herodotus recorded that forty thousand Persians drowned or burned in the water below the hill where Xerxes sat on his golden chair.

He wept on his throne. Then he went home.

He left his general Mardonius behind with the army of soldiers and returned to Persepolis. The following year Mardonius led that army south into Greece and met the Greeks at Plataea, where the Greeks killed him and destroyed his army. Xerxes never came back.

In the years that followed he retreated further into the palace, into the intrigues and court politics of his day. Growing paranoid and cruel, surrounded by people whose proximity he had purchased rather than earned, he narrowed his world to its smallest possible compass. In 465 BC his own courtier Artabanus murdered him in his bedchamber, then killed his eldest son Darius. In classic mythical irony, the carnage Xerxes had viewed in golden comfort from afar came for him anyway, inside the palace and at the hands of the men closest to him.

Eight years after the battle of Salamis, the famous Aeschylus staged the great play “Persians” in Athens. 

Greek theater in the fifth century BC was a civic ceremony. The city funded it through a public tax and citizens attended as a political obligation. The spring festival of Dionysus that housed the theatrical competitions sat inside the same calendar as the assembly where Athenians voted on war and peace. A playwright mounting the stage of the Theater of Dionysus spoke to the assembled polis, and what he said entered the public life of Athens.

Aeschylus had fought at Marathon in 490 BC, where the Greeks first repelled a Persian invasion, and almost certainly rowed at Salamis. When he staged the Persians in 472 BC, the stone seats of the Theater of Dionysus filled with veterans of the battle, men who had pulled oars in the strait and dragged bodies from the water in the aftermath.

An actor wearing Xerxes' costume entered in torn robes while a messenger already waiting on the stage commenced to speak the names of the dead captains one by one into the silence. Aeschylus gave the weeping king every line of his grief, in full, and held the image up before the men who had been in the water below the hill. This was theater in its most potent form- so much more than telling a smash up story -  and its purpose was to enact a ceremony that held consequences. Theater of this power shaped the future because it gave to the people a language of liberation. It taught them to see, to feel and ultimately to reenact possibilities that the flat telling of history almost always kills. 

We can find examples of this ancient way of shaping history in modern Brazil, starting in Recife, on the northeastern coast of Brazil where we find Paulo Freire teaching fishermen and farm laborers to read.

Decades of poverty and military rule from leaders with their distant decrees had harmed  these old communities in ways that went much deeper than material resources. Freire called what he saw as cultures of silence where a learned helplessness pervaded the people so completely that the people had stopped believing they could act in their own world, let alone change it. 

Freire used literacy to break that silence in order to accomplish what he called conscientização, the awakening of critical consciousness. This form of awakening happens  the moment a person begins to interrogate the reality they had been receiving as fixed. His first book, “Education as the Practice of Freedom”, appeared in 1967. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” followed a year later. The military dictatorship that had seized power in Brazil in 1964, backed by the United States, banned both books, imprisoned Freire for seventy days, and expelled him from his country. He spent sixteen years outside Brazil.

Augusto Boal had known Freire for years, following his work from São Paulo while Freire taught in Recife,  When “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: appeared, Boal recognized in it the foundation his own work in theater had been reaching toward. He named what he was building the “Theater of the Oppressed”, an explicit homage to his friend's book. What Freire had called the culture of silence in the classroom, Boal found waiting in the theater too, in audiences trained to sit in the dark and watch their own lives play out on a stage they had not been given permission to touch.

The military arrested Boal off the street in 1971, tortured him for four months, and expelled him from Brazil. He went to Argentina and then across Europe, building in exile what he had begun in São Paulo.

He called what he built Forum Theater. Every session began with a play that ended in defeat, the protagonist crushed by forces that seemed fixed and inevitable, and then a stop. The facilitator, whom Boal called the joker, turned to the audience and opened the floor. Anyone who saw a different possibility could call out stop, walk into the playing space, take the protagonist's place, and try another way through. His genius was the dissolution of the space between the spectator and the actor into one form, what he called the Spect-actor. Each performance was a rehearsal for refusing the ending it had shown, and was a way to literally create new possibilities and new histories. 

Boal performed Forum Theater on the floors of community centers and bus stations, in markets and public squares, because the form required only people and a story. After his return from exile in 1986 he established a Center for the Theater of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro. In 1992 he ran for city councillor as a theatrical act, won his seat, and used it to develop the Legislative Theater Forum where sessions were conducted around actual proposed legislation. The community's interventions on the floor became the basis for real laws.

When Freire died in 1997, Boal said he had lost his last father. Now all he had were brothers and sisters, and some of them - like me- were working on the west coast of the United States without knowing his name.

The 1990s were the height of urban violence in American cities. An amazing crew of artists, musicians, revolutionaries, professors, surgeons, probation officers, community leaders, young people and myself worked with the young men and women caught inside the maelstrom of violence in that era, along with their families and the organizations trying to hold those communities together. 

Theatrical intervention was a crucial element of our work, and served as a kind of foundational layer within the larger revolutionary project we built where our goal was to teach those young people, and their families, that they had shared history with warriors before them. Our goal was to show them how they actually stood in a much bigger story than they were being told. We saw this is the first step of many on their path to true freedom.

We played out so many stories it is hard to count, but a typical experience would go something like this: 

A young man would walk us through the moment he had pulled a gun on someone and, by some grace, missed (or by a lack of grace did not) We would reconstruct that scene with him present, his family present and a room full of other families and facilitators in dozens of ways to uncover its secrets and unseen possibilities. The process worked both as a ceremony of seeing and as a ceremony of responsibility. 

We learned early on that if one does not see the full story, it is impossible to be responsible. And if I am not responsible for my past, I will never be free to create my own future. . 

With every new group, we would role play the opening scene of Menace to Society. We would reenact Caine and O-Dog walking into a Korean grocery store in Los Angeles to buy some forties, and ending up in the end killing the shop owner and his wife over a simple statement directed their way by the husband when they were checking out. 

A mother would take O-Dog's part. A young person would play Cain while a probation officer would play the shop owner's wife and another young person would take on the role of the husband. The room would always get transfixed,  and then someone would step in and try something different. 

The magic was that the story was no longer happening to someone else on a screen. It was happening here, with these bodies, and anyone present could change what came next. Needless to say, nobody in the justice system had ever seen anything like what we were doing. In the early days, when we would do this with a room full of both Bloods and Crips, the group would be circled by on-duty officers. They were certain we were all going to end up killed.. 

The work we did belongs to any community where people have been trained out of the knowledge of their own power, and finally decide they are going to find out what happens when they leverage this power to shift the balance of the future in the present. Our whole purpose in those days was never rehabilitation, it was liberation. 

Today, we all have seen the story of Xerxes in a hundred forms. The screen delivers it daily, and yet the golden chair gets carried up the hil, over and over again. Something in us, pervading the very air we breathe, has created a learned helplessness so deep that the one thing left we all seem to share is a collective state of frozen immobility..

A first step, it seems to me, is to remember that across every tradition those who went first have existed alongside the man who watched from the hill. Xerxes is only half the story. 

When human beings act together in the public sphere they disclose new possibilities, fields of action that could not have been predicted and cannot be manufactured from above. The polis, the political space where people appear to each other as citizens rather than subjects, does not sustain itself. It requires the people inside it to enter it, to act, to refuse the role of the fixed audience watching a stage they are allowed to observe but not touch.

We are a Faustian age determined to meet the Lord or the Devil before we are done, and the ineluctable ore of the authentic is our only key to the lock.

                                                                                -Norman Mailer, 1971