Of course, this being Berkeley, two elder women, white with gray hair, exited ahead of me, talking loudly:

“Well, there were so many problems…with the wardrobe. I mean, really! First, Irina’s dress wasn’t pressed.”

“No, really?”

“Yes, not pressed since the last performance. Second, the soldier’s leather straps were all twisted up. A top notch performance would not let the soldiers go on stage, with their straps all twisted like that…”

I crossed the street to avoid them and shivered in the cool East Bay night, savoring the chilled air and the opening lines to Pushkin’s poem Ruslan and Ludmila that Masha repeatedly cites.

A green oak grows by a curving shore.
And on that oak a gold chain hangs;
And on that oak a gold chain hangs.

I woke up this morning with a burning desire to go to Moscow.

So, the play by Chekhov takes place in a rural Russian town, circa the mid-1800s. Rachel Steinberg, in the program notes to Berkeley Rep’s production, explained that Chekhov probably modeled his story on Perm, an industrial center based on metal and salt mining, some 800 miles north of Moscow. She goes on to provide a historical context for the play.

Three Sisters begins at the dawn of a new era following half a century of Russian history marked by upheaval and change. In 1855, in the middle of a Crimean War stalemate that was draining Russia’s troops and economy, Nicholas I died, leaving his son in power. Alexander II soon admitted defeat in the war, losing land, rights, and, as many thought, the nation’s dignity. After the treaty was signed, Alexander II set out to quash a rumored peasant uprising and to quell fury in the city over the high price of goods due to his father’s wartime taxes. These Great Reforms were intended, most of all, to restore Russia’s reputation as a great and powerful empire.

Perhaps none of these reforms was to shape the course of the century (and the fate of his Romanov descendants) more than the 1861 emancipation of the serfs. Prior to emancipation, the 23 million serfs, who made up a third of the population and half of the peasantry, were bound to serve the owners of the land they occupied. Landowners had a variety of significant powers. For instance, they could restrict a serf’s movement or forbid his marriage. If a serf had a child, that child was to obey the same restrictions and share the same loyalties as his or her father.

Theoretically, the emancipation was a landmark ruling. In practice, however, the former serfs experienced anything but freedom. They inherited the least fertile of the land—and that’s only when they could afford it. Having no savings of their own, the peasants were forced to accept mortgages to be repaid over a period of 49 years. Furthermore, land was sold not to individual peasants but to communities that would then distribute the land to their inhabitants based on household size. Because of this distribution policy, the peasant population grew tremendously, from 50 to 79 million between 1861 and 1897. Freed from their landlords, the peasant class was instead similarly indebted and tied, only this time to a community rather than to an individual.

This sounds a lot like the experience of freed slaves, post Civil War, who lacked ownership and access to means of ownership, that the amazing Mistinguette Smith and Danyelle O’Hara talked about in the Black/Land Project.

So, lots of social and political changes were afoot during this time. The landed gentry had their privilege and entitlement challenged by a rising middle class, some former peasants, who would later, as the century went on, find work in factories in the industrial cities.

Before leaving work yesterday, I whispered to a colleague that I was going to see a Chekhov play. She replied, “Oh!” with a knowing inflection. I wondered if she was making a remark on Chekhov as a chronicler of the Russian bourgeoisie, their love lives and tribulations. This play was no exception. We learn about the yearnings of the three sisters—Olga, Masha, and Irina—all fluent in at least three languages, an “unnecessary luxury”, as Masha put it, or “unnecessary addition, like a sixth finger”. This family of three sisters and one brother (who inspired nothing but contempt in me in how he cowed to his wife Natasha) with their “great deal of superfluous knowledge”, what place is there for them in this new Russia?

Irina, the youngest, is obsessed with labor and right livelihood.

We must work, work and work. The reason we are unhappy and look on life so gloomily is that we don’t know how to work.

The Baron, infatuated with Irina, echoed her sentiment.

I intend to work. Just for one day of my life to work so wholeheartedly that I can come home in the evening, tumble exhausted into bed and fall asleep there and then. Workers, surely, must sleep soundly!

As far as I can make out, the lot of them in this play subsist off of pensions or military salaries, drink vodka and cognac during the day, and dance to carolers at night. And, “philosophize.”

None work. Not having obligations to subsist from, Chebutykin (the doctor) questioned whether he even existed, because of his lack of a livelihood, or the pressing need for one.

God damn the whole lot of them. God damn them. They thought, because I am a doctor, I can therefore treat all ailments, but I know absolutely nothing, I have forgotten everything, which I knew, and I don’t remember a thing, not a single thing. God damn them. Last Wednesday I was treating a woman in Zasip – she went and died, and I was responsible that she had died. Yes… I knew something or other twenty-five years ago, but now I don’t remember anything. Nothing. It may be that I do not exist as a man, that I just give the appearance of having arms and legs and a head; it may be that I do not exist at all, but it only appears to me that I walk, eat and sleep.

Vershinin, the self-appointed “philosopher” and Masha’s love interest, does finally say something quite profound towards the end.

You know, if we could only add education to a love of hard work, and a love of hard work to education.

Funny, I remembered him saying “if we could only add art to a love of hard work, and a love of hard work to art” last night.

I am recalling a conversation I had with Julie Henly of the University of Chicago on how work is defined and what is excluded from that definition. This was in the context of attending a UCLA Labor Center conference on long-term unemployment and the need for job creation. So, as progressives, we advocate for full employment and job creation, especially during this time of recession, when certain populations (people of color, women, those without a college degree, and the formerly incarcerated) have a harder time finding sustainable livelihoods. But, what work are we advocating for?

Julie talked about how carework isn’t paid work, like parents raising their children or adult children helping their elder parents. Early feminists like Nancy Folbre, she said, wrote about revaluing unpaid carework as a strategy to create new demand in our labor market.

What about arts, music, poetry, dance, and writing? If we compensated everyone and anyone who had a passion to create, how much more beauty would we have? How many more young people would grow up, aspiring to be a poet or a sculptor or a butoh dancer? Can we expand paid work to include artistic labor?

Okay, yes there is Uhura. There’s the Asian man who’s name I can never remember. And, there’s also the one with the thick Russian accent, proof that the Cold War is over as humans unite to conquer the dark space. But, scanning the faces of the instruments of empire, the Starfleet Academy located in the center of liberal white U.S.: San Francisco, I saw very few faces similar to my own. There was the obligatory green woman, a love slave on former episodes of the television series, the weird alien-thing, and a black man with a striking resemblance to Tavis Smiley as head of a council. Every other face is white, white, and more white.

What type of future utopia is this anyway? There’s one intergalactic government, modeled  after the United Nations, ruled by a charter and a labyrinth of bureaucratic codes and practices, that every budding Starfleet member must remember and recite at climactic moments. It’s funny how at times of interpersonal conflict, whether between Starfleet soldiers or between Starfleet and other beings, an arcane Federation code comes to the rescue with an answer. It seems that in the future, you would live long and prosper if you have the ability to remember contents as prosaic as the listings in the Yellow Pages or the fine print that accompanies your Linux installation.

What is the purpose of boldly going where no (white) man has gone before? To bring order, civilization, and warp speed to the far reaches of the universe. How interesting that it becomes the duty, no, the destiny of the white commanders of the Federation to shine the light of rationality and reason on undiscovered peoples and planets. How similar to the burden that white men have operated under in the past two centuries of imperialism and enslavement of the global south, making the darker ones either cheap labor or new markets to push their goods in.

The Romulans are primitive peoples, who earn their living mining the depths of planets. Their clothing is crude, in a steampunk and future primitive kind of way. Their foreheads are marked with the swirl of jagged black arcs, emblems for many fraternity members who have these signs tattooed on their skin as signs of how they’re down with the people. Does it matter that the Romulans are pissed? Does it count when there is genocide of one species but not the peoples of the Federation?

Now, I am dubious of my zeal to be a Starfleet member. Especially if it asks me to choose: do I want to be a Vulcan or a human? Spock, cursed with this double consciousness, is asked to choose sides. He is born with a veil, gifted with second sight of logic and reason, but a commander in a human-dominated world. This double-consciousness makes him ever feel his two-ness, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one pointy-eared body. The biography of Spock is the history of this strife for people of color, this longing to merge our selves into mainstream society.

Beam me into the future and I will shun the Starfleet Academy. Instead, I would join the rebels on the planet Tatooine. Meet me in the Mos Eisely Cantina, where we’ll plot the overthrow of the Empire. Or, wait. Am I getting my sci fi/fantasy worlds confused?

For all of those reasons and one more, I am not satisfied with the conclusions of my last post. The other basis of my frustration? I am not a Hegelian. He of the awful master-slave dialectic, and that terrible “p” word pomos abhor: progress.

Hegel saw the slow, steady rise of mankind as a struggle for freedom — a process that liberated the human spirit and drew the human race forward. This struggle was unavoidable, even as the object was always unattainable-an ideal to be approached, but never achieved.

Hegel thought the old world would be destroyed, and on the ruins would be built the new. This is not dual power or reformism, this is apocalypse followed by transcendence and immanence, then mutation into a different species. It’s like punctuated equilibrium instead of evolution.*

An old world is destroyed as a new one rises, [Hegel] noted-citing the arc that bridges the seed and the fruit, and arc which we call the plant. And noting the curious Vedic legend of the dance of Lord Shiva, who created with one foot and destroyed with the other.

This is evident, argues Harpers blogger Scott Horton, in two misadaptations of Hegel — Marx and neocons. The former, I can see. (Is it not problematic that the man that brought us a labor theory of value and so on, also had a social theory of evolution determined by the mode of production? Marx was very much taken with Lewis Henry Morgan’s book on the “noble savages”, the Iroquois.) The latter, I understand less.

I intend to read Francis Fukuyama and search out a history of the neocons before I write my next post on this subject. An unhappy and hesitant subscriber to certain ideas of Marx I may be. But, no Hegelian.

* I meant to say punctuated equilibrium (evolution by jerks) instead of phyletic gradualism (evolution by creeps).

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate
conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died at 82.

Breathes the first sentence of Buckley’s obituary. Described as the “sesquipedalian spark of the right”, Douglas Martin credits Buckley as the architect of U.S. conservatism, the one that transcended and dominated this country’s political discourse post-WW II.

Liberals ruled this country since the FDR’s New Deal, so that,

Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

Thanks to Buckley, neoliberals had an ideology that married right wing libertarianism, free market economy, and anti-communism. How did the bourgeois scion of an oil tycoon author an ideology that was to so captivate the white working class, and usher Reagan and the Bush family into the White House?

“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”

Buckley was an anachronism: a throwback to the interests of the white aristocracy who subsisted on the profits of the land and black slaves. What I’m curious is about is how his genteel and obfuscatory white supremacy and classism translated into a populist ideology for the majority of white workers, and how did the religious right react to this pompous fool?

His magazine National Review professed to “stand(s) athwart history yelling Stop.”

An essay written for an August 1957 issue justified southern segregationists in preventing blacks from voting, because of the former’s cultural and biological superiority. Here’s the essay, taken from an email sent to the NYMAA mailing list.

All the ten-dollar words in the world can’t hide Buckley’s sneering racism and support of the white elite’s class power.

William F. Buckley, 1925-2008, the angel of history sees you as another catastrophe piled at her feet, attempting to impede her progress with your wreckage.

Update five hours and 20 minutes later — Accolades about Buckley are pouring over the web. Slate offers another Buckley nugget, “Letter from Spain”, published in the National Review and cited in Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal:

General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihlistis that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain’s historical identity.

Goodness. Timothy Noah offers a different interpretation of Buckley: he distinguishes between small-state conservatism and large-state, or those who embrace the New Deal versus them that hate it, at least in principle, and Eisenhower-style Republicanism. Therefore, according to Noah, Buckley is the last of a dying breed: a small-state, free market, white supremacist and fascist. Reagan and Bush I and II were Buckleyites, in talk, but not walk.

Reagan had railed against big government while doing little to reduce it; Bush dispensed with the rhetoric and used the federal agencies as a patronage machine for disastrously incompetent loyalists. Bush also turned his foreign policy over to the neoconservative movement to a much greater extent than Reagan had, with the unending Iraq war the result. Buckley had never cottoned to the neoconservative movement, probably because it was too tolerant of the New Deal.

This is interesting; I’m going to mull over this a bit more.