[Music]
TONY KUSHNER: In times of crises, I think there is only direct political action and
nothing else takes its place.
[Music]
Art has great power, I mean everybody has encountered a work of art or many works of
art depending how receptive you are to it that has had an impact on you.
Sometimes measurable and sometimes not, but when you're making art, I think it's a terrible
mistake to believe that you have a direct power.
I don't believe that you can directly change the world by writing a play or painting something
or writing a song.
I think that—and I think that you make a mistake in believing that.
Y'know, as Shakespeare says, I believe the relationship between it and its audience this
is especially true of theater which is after all the art that Shakespeare was talking about
is the relationship of the dream to the dreamer.
I think that you have to accept the fact that the audience is then going to have a choice
to take it or leave it and understand it or not understand it or understand it correctly
but in ways that you hadn't imagined.
So I think it's an indirect power and I think that indirect power is in some ways as important
as direct power, but especially in times of crises and we're in a time of just horrendous
crisis right now, I think there's only direct political action and nothing else takes its
place.
Instances where the Internet obviously y'know creates—can create in the case of like Egypt
or something—can create a revolutionary circumstance and it's an enormously powerful
and effective tool.
It can help get Obama elected.
So I mean it's obviously incredibly valuable but there are obviously dangers to it.
Rumors tend to live forever and facts are not so easily checkable and so on and so forth,
but I don't believe that it's a replacement.
It doesn't seem to me that it's a replacement for getting bodies together in a room.
Henry Ford and Taylor when they were planning the maximum efficient way to run factories
in Detroit, when they were putting together the whole assembly line system decided that
people having families live in independent houses was not as cost effective as just putting
all the men in a big dormitory and putting all the women in a big dormitory so they put
all the men in big dormitory and the women in a big dormitory and they found almost immediately
that people started organizing and forming unions and so they realized it would probably
be better to sell them houses that the factories own, but y'know and when people vote absentee,
for the most part, I mean there are circumstances where this isn't true, but what I've always
been told is that absentee ballots as a whole tend to lean more to the right than to the
left.
That when people show up at the polls, they vote more progressively because they're surrounded
by other people.
And a big thing—part of being a progressive is you remember there are other people out
there.
There seems to be among Internet driven political movements a problem of longevity.
I mean, there's a problem with longevity with political movements anyway.
What Brecht says in Mother Courage, do you have a long anger or a short anger?
And if you have a short anger, stay home and stay safe because it'll burn out and you'll
just wind up getting killed.
You have to have a long anger that'll last a long time.
People have long anger but there's something about the possibly just the etherized quality
of Internet organizing that tends to make it kind of come and then go rather quickly.
I think that human connectivity is essential to our astonishing ability to comprehend reality
and we do it collectively and I think it's really important to get together collectively
to do it.
[Music]
I'm Tony Kushner.
I'm really thrilled and happy to be on THNKR and you're watching and hopefully having an
Epiphany!