With Stephen Sondheim’s passing, remembrances and celebrations of his life will roll on for however long it takes for our attention to turn eleswhere. One of his lesser-known shows, Assassins, first produced in 1990, has come and gone before, sometimes dodging historical events that made marketing it problematic. Constance Grady at Vox provides a review of the revival by the Classic Stage Company.
I’ve never seen the show, but the commentary sparked some thoughts that have little to do with Sondheim. Wikipedia summarizes:
Using the framing device of an all-American, yet sinister, carnival game, the semi-revue portrays a group of historical figures who attempted (successfully or not) to assassinate Presidents of the United States, and explores what their presence in American history says about the ideals of their life and country. The score is written to reflect both popular music of the various depicted eras and a broader tradition of “patriotic” American music.
A gun salesman (The Proprietor) and a narrator (The Balladeer) offer contrasting views of American history, Grady writes:
While the Balladeer allows to the audience that “every now and then the country goes a little wrong” and that a madman or two, or nine, might happen to come along with a gun, he assures us that we have nothing to worry about in the long run. “Doesn’t stop the story,” he croons. “Story’s pretty strong.”
Which story do you think is stronger, Assassins asks, the Balladeer’s song or the Proprietor’s? The story that tells you this is a country where dreams come true or the story that tells you if your dream has failed, you are owed retribution? Is there really a difference?
Those two contending views are at loggerheads in ways the country has yet to resolve. These things take decades, and it is not clear how far into the cycle we are today.
Kelsey and Chris Waits moved to Hastings, Minnesota to pursue their American Dream. The town along the Mississippi River seemed the right size, just far away from Minneapolis to be idyllic: “All around are nice houses, nice cars, nice shopping.”
Kelsey ran for school board to work for kids who had trouble learning but whose parents could not home school like she did her oldest child, Abby.
Then came Covid, the animosity, the controversy, and her youngest, assigned male at birth, asking to be called Kit after a Kit Kittredge American Girl doll the child wanted for a fourth birthday present.
Their American Dream runs downhill from there. Personal attacks, accusations of child abuse, etc. The typical backlash against difference by those threatened by it whether the difference is racial, ethnic, religious or having to do with non-binary sexual anything:
So the Waits are moving from the dream house they designed, the one where Kelsey spent hours hand painting murals. They are seeking more privacy, and they believe safety, in a new address that has not been publicized.
Conservative men have convinced themselves they are under attack for being men. Sarah Jones writes about Republican senator Josh Hawley’s favorite, new wedge issue at New York Magazine:
Society is changing in ways that directly challenge the norms that are so precious to Hawley and his ilk. Americans are more likely than ever to identify as LGBT, a trend at odds with the traditional rigidity around men’s and women’s roles. Forty-two percent of American adults say they personally know a trans person, according to a recent Pew poll. Though the Pew poll also found that 56 percent believe that a person’s sex as assigned at birth determines their gender, it also found “that younger people tended to be more likely to know a trans person and comfortable with gender-neutral pronouns,” the 19th reported. That prospect will disturb conservatives like Hawley, who opposes basic equality for trans people, most notably in the guise of protecting cis women. The consequences of Me Too linger, inducing the feeling among some that men will be disproportionately punished for minor transgressions. The rising cost of living further threatens the male breadwinner and renders him impotent before forces he cannot control. Hawley believes men will turn to pornography — another old conservative foe — and neglect his responsibilities to his family, if indeed he marries at all.
Difference. It is a more fearsome foe than communism. Society in the eyes of people like Hawley is zero-sum. Equality means some are not be superior to others. Equality for you comes at my expense, or something like that.
And if my dream fails, am I am owed retribution? If I don’t get my country my way, we go to insurrection. Or we go to guns. Whatever seems more inappropriate.
There were shootings at malls on Black Friday. Maybe you noticed.
I’m reminded of an Esquire article in the wake of the John Lennon murder in 1980. In “Letter from an ANGRY Reader” (now found most often on gun enthusiast sites), Chip Elliot wrote, “The United States is becoming more European…but it is a Europe of a different century … Think of it in terms of a vast panorama, a huge cross section much like the—world Balzac,, Hugo, and Dumas described. Think about Dickens. Read Weber’s The City. Read Pirenne’s The Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. None of this is new. What is new is that we’re experiencing it. What was new was the social structure in America of the past three or four decades, which has collapsed.”
They were times when people “wore swords and pistols whenever they went anywhere.”
Elliot’s California Dreaming was shattered not by discrimination but by street violence. His family armed itself and abandoned its Venice, California home for the Midwest. Like Kelsey and Chris Waits.
How’s that working out for them, I wonder. Because America today seems less like the world of Balzac, Hugo, and Dumas, and more like that of The Road Warrior. People I know are dreaming now about walking away to escape it. But walk away to where?