Artless by Gary Cole
Apr. 9th, 2006 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
weaktwosSo, over the past few days, I read Gary Cole's Artless.
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ariedana, you might find this fellow interesting, since he lives in Raleigh, and may indeed become an active part of the local theatre scene there.
The book appears not yet purchaseable online. It was availabe in the Elliott Bay Book Company.
Summary:
Here's a rough summary of Gary's life story: He's Jewish, but he spent his life not acting like it, really, or so he says. When I heard him from around the corner at the reading event, he sounded Jewish. Maybe he decided to come out of the closet. According to his memoir, it was not a conscious effort to not act Jewish, he was just raised in a non-practising household, and he didn't feel a bond with them. He even visited Israel and still felt unconnected. And that's okay, but maybe since he mentioned it, it's important in his development. He was born in Chicago, went to Williams College, then to Stanford Law School. All throughout, he acted in local/school theatre projects. All throughout, he was a Republican because he held onto two core values: personal liberty and a skepticism of government. Further queries on "skepticism of Government". Of course, when I asked him for clarification of this, since he did not appear to be skeptical of a Republican government, he clarified that he didn't feel Government could perform certain tasks as efficiently as private enterprise could.
Of course, government isn't all that efficient an operation by its very nature. And I currently don't see Halliburton doing any better for the people at large. But perhaps they are acquiring profits for themselves efficiently by say, ripping the government off.
But I digress.
So, Gary graduates from Stanford and hops right into a job at the CIA. He even is involved in the Iran Contra affair in some minor fashion that he really wasn't aware of until after the fact. And no, those Shenanigans weren't enough to put him off his Republican feed. Meanwhile, he continued to pursue his interest in theater as a hobby. He works as a partner in a prestigious DC firm for a while, but his love of the arts takes hold. He moves the family to Portland and gets involved in creating a few theater companies, on specializing in putting plays to video. His theater companies meat with some success, and all the while he is still heavily involved in fundraising efforts for the Republican Party. He develops various contacts and plays the fence in both of these worlds. Zoom to 2003 and he gets an offer to be a high ranking official in the NEA. He is interviewed by the head honcho of the NEA, Rove's shop approves him. He is offered the position. A day or so later, it is rescinded without specification. Through some of his contacts, he finds out that the offer was rescinded because of the content of two plays he helped put on contained profanity and homosexuality.
Needless to say, he felt betrayed and stunned. The end result is that he's giving up politics and sticking with the arts.
My feelings:
There's no doubt this fellow has led an interesting life. However, I find it suspect that after all these years in the Republican party, the single event that causes him to be disgusted with the party is a garden variety backstabbing commonly found at those levels. Considering the fact that Bush and his cronies have chipped away at our personal liberties, and even the Reagan administration caused such governmental bloat cutting taxes, etc. and so forth. Sadly, at higher levels of management in a corporation or in the government, it seems you need to be a team player through and through. And that means that you need to embody the same values as the leadership. Any personal liberties you want to have outside of the mould need to be kept quiet.
He also reminded the reader that the Republican party was the party of Lincoln. Sadly, the Republican party hasn't acted like Lincoln for years.
He also fessed up to not disclosing to his fellow Republicans that he was not a Christian. Not that it was any of their business. But he appeared to have the knowledge that in order to make the gains he was making in the Republican Party, he had to keep that stuff quiet. Which is another demonstration that the Republican Party was not living up to the values of personal liberty.
He seemed like a decent enough fellow, but something didn't ring true about him. Maybe it was an internal bias on my part, but something tells me he still doesn't quite know who he is, or he wants us to think he doesn't know who he is.
The more I think about Democrats and Republicans, however, I become increasingly discontent. I think it's becoming impossible for current politicians to do their job as they were hired to do.
Their job is now merely to make us believe they are doing the job we hired them to do while they engage in power struggles behind the scenes. I think elections need to be scrapped of private funds. I think bills submitted for vote to be less than twenty pages in length so that our congressional leaders can actually read the entire content. The tax code needs to be simplified. Considernig the calibur of the current elected officials, I think the legislative branch should be filled with randomly drawn citizens who serve a year. Like jury duty, but different.
ariedana, you might find this fellow interesting, since he lives in Raleigh, and may indeed become an active part of the local theatre scene there.The book appears not yet purchaseable online. It was availabe in the Elliott Bay Book Company.
Summary:
Here's a rough summary of Gary's life story: He's Jewish, but he spent his life not acting like it, really, or so he says. When I heard him from around the corner at the reading event, he sounded Jewish. Maybe he decided to come out of the closet. According to his memoir, it was not a conscious effort to not act Jewish, he was just raised in a non-practising household, and he didn't feel a bond with them. He even visited Israel and still felt unconnected. And that's okay, but maybe since he mentioned it, it's important in his development. He was born in Chicago, went to Williams College, then to Stanford Law School. All throughout, he acted in local/school theatre projects. All throughout, he was a Republican because he held onto two core values: personal liberty and a skepticism of government. Further queries on "skepticism of Government". Of course, when I asked him for clarification of this, since he did not appear to be skeptical of a Republican government, he clarified that he didn't feel Government could perform certain tasks as efficiently as private enterprise could.
Of course, government isn't all that efficient an operation by its very nature. And I currently don't see Halliburton doing any better for the people at large. But perhaps they are acquiring profits for themselves efficiently by say, ripping the government off.
But I digress.
So, Gary graduates from Stanford and hops right into a job at the CIA. He even is involved in the Iran Contra affair in some minor fashion that he really wasn't aware of until after the fact. And no, those Shenanigans weren't enough to put him off his Republican feed. Meanwhile, he continued to pursue his interest in theater as a hobby. He works as a partner in a prestigious DC firm for a while, but his love of the arts takes hold. He moves the family to Portland and gets involved in creating a few theater companies, on specializing in putting plays to video. His theater companies meat with some success, and all the while he is still heavily involved in fundraising efforts for the Republican Party. He develops various contacts and plays the fence in both of these worlds. Zoom to 2003 and he gets an offer to be a high ranking official in the NEA. He is interviewed by the head honcho of the NEA, Rove's shop approves him. He is offered the position. A day or so later, it is rescinded without specification. Through some of his contacts, he finds out that the offer was rescinded because of the content of two plays he helped put on contained profanity and homosexuality.
Needless to say, he felt betrayed and stunned. The end result is that he's giving up politics and sticking with the arts.
My feelings:
There's no doubt this fellow has led an interesting life. However, I find it suspect that after all these years in the Republican party, the single event that causes him to be disgusted with the party is a garden variety backstabbing commonly found at those levels. Considering the fact that Bush and his cronies have chipped away at our personal liberties, and even the Reagan administration caused such governmental bloat cutting taxes, etc. and so forth. Sadly, at higher levels of management in a corporation or in the government, it seems you need to be a team player through and through. And that means that you need to embody the same values as the leadership. Any personal liberties you want to have outside of the mould need to be kept quiet.
He also reminded the reader that the Republican party was the party of Lincoln. Sadly, the Republican party hasn't acted like Lincoln for years.
He also fessed up to not disclosing to his fellow Republicans that he was not a Christian. Not that it was any of their business. But he appeared to have the knowledge that in order to make the gains he was making in the Republican Party, he had to keep that stuff quiet. Which is another demonstration that the Republican Party was not living up to the values of personal liberty.
He seemed like a decent enough fellow, but something didn't ring true about him. Maybe it was an internal bias on my part, but something tells me he still doesn't quite know who he is, or he wants us to think he doesn't know who he is.
The more I think about Democrats and Republicans, however, I become increasingly discontent. I think it's becoming impossible for current politicians to do their job as they were hired to do.
Their job is now merely to make us believe they are doing the job we hired them to do while they engage in power struggles behind the scenes. I think elections need to be scrapped of private funds. I think bills submitted for vote to be less than twenty pages in length so that our congressional leaders can actually read the entire content. The tax code needs to be simplified. Considernig the calibur of the current elected officials, I think the legislative branch should be filled with randomly drawn citizens who serve a year. Like jury duty, but different.
