Trump v. Sanders For the Heavyweight Title

Wouldn’t it be great if the 2016 election ended up pitting Donald Trump against Bernie Sanders? To begin with these two candidates who were deemed unelectable by most pundits? Yet now Trump is prevailing against Cruz with the help of Sarah Palin whose verbal hijinks would make her a great candidate for Restoration comedy and Bernie Sanders is just prevailing.The race would essentially be David versus Goliath, the representative of the little man with all his failings and foibles against the Ubermensch, the symbol of big business who represents the notion that might is right. Trump is just a slightly more crass version of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead. Roark was an architect and Trump is a developer, but they’re pretty close. On the ideological level Sanders represents socialism and Trump free market capitalism. It’s Adam Smith versus not Marx but maybe someone like Fourier. If the matchup turns out to be Clinton versus Cruz you get a far less black and white scenario and hence something lacking in the superhero effect that would be the result of the combat between two contenders who are basically New Yorkers (something which would parenthetically afford some poetic justice after Cruz’s dismissive remarks about Big Applers during the last debate). In essence the Sanders/Trump fight card is Brooklyn vs Queens since that’s where both candidates respectively emanate from and that has to say something about the state of the nation. Lastly, what is the mathematics of electing two supposedly unelectable candidates? The British bookmakers, famous for making odds on almost anything, will be working over time on this one.

The Master Builder at BAM

If you didn’t know Ibsen’s The Master Builder you might at first think that the character played by John Turturro in the current production at BAM was someone who had an exaggerated sense of his self-importance. In fact, Turturro’s Solness bears an unpleasant resemblance to another architect. Robert Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, rendered by Gary Cooper in the King Vidor movie. And if we were looking for referents in contemporary culture then the sexualization of Solness’s muse Hilde Wangel (Wrenn Schmidt) and his amanuensis Kaja Fosli (Kelly Hutchinson) could easily recall Fifty Shades of Gray. Of course a helluva lot more is going on in both the play and in Andrei Belgrader’s direction, but there’s something in Ibsen that conduces to the kind of distortion that sees the romantic conception of the uncompromising artist as form of bombast and tyranny, with those surrounding him as submissives. The play can easily be turned into The Masturbator rather than The Master Builder. The very name Solness, the state of “soul ness,” sounds like an iteration from one of the great German idealist philosophers. When you step into late Ibsen, you enter the world of aspiration, in which being is trumped by the notion of becoming, and happiness is the price one pays to create  “castles in the air”—the expression Hilde uses to describe her master builder’s calling. The German word for passion is Leidenschaft and leiden means suffering, a kind of suffering that can lead to the ultimate sacrifice, the famous Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde. The recently released Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner contains scenes for a work in progress of The Master Builder that has been going on for years. It reveals another approach to the play, based upon conversation and devoid of hyperbole. Freed from the burden of melodrama, Ibsen’s play becomes as complex as say a Bergman movie.

The Fountainhead

The recent Times piece about the explosion in the iPad plant in Chengdu (“In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad,” NYT, 1/25/12) included the following statement, “In the last decade Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers—as well as dozens of other American industries—have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history. However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves.” Was the Apple miracle too good to be true? Is it a little bit like Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck?” Is the Apple Store with its genius bar staffed by tattooed MIT grads on loan from Utopia, missionaries preaching the iCloud gospel rather than paid employees of an enterprise that marches to the beat of the Wall Street drummer, merely a mirage? The cover of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is almost as ubiquitous as the Apple logo, but who really reads what’s inside. Perhaps the messiah has come or maybe not. The Dickensian conditions that prevail in China’s factories are the dark side of a technology revolution propelled in part by Moore’s Law, which states that microprocessors will double in capacity on an approximately 18 months basis (new microprocessors beget new machines), in part by China’s desire for economic hegemony and in part America’s need to recapture the glory days of its own economic hegemony (Manifest Destiny in technology). Jobs was the Ubermensch, the Howard Roark of Ayn Rand’s Fountain Head, the one hope amidst the carnage of foreclosures, shut down automobile plants and the dying Detroit. An aluminum dust explosion, which could have  been avoided by something as simple as adequate ventilation killed two workers in Chengdu? Will it take another Triangle Shirt Company fire to finally halt the juggernaut we call progress?