The other night, someone called me a die hard romantic, which gave me pause. I've got very used to thinking of myself as a pragmatist over the years, and I enjoy thinking of myself as someone who makes the rational choice after careful evaluation of all available facts. The thing is, I know this isn't true at least some of the time, but given my highly unpragmatic career choices, I wonder if it's even the case most of the time.
To witness my pragmatism, there is this fact: Bonnie A. Bohacek, the woman who killed my father, is still alive today after the legal system failed to punish her for killing him. I think it would be a small matter for me to kill this woman, on a purely logistical level, and yet I have not done so because of my over-riding sense of pragmatism: I like to believe that our system of justice functions properly most of the time, and that if the jury found reasonable doubt than I am bound to accept that there is at least some fragment of reasonable doubt that she was, in fact, responsible. Participating in American jurisprudence means believing that it's okay if the occasional criminal escapes punishment as long as we create every possible means of ensuring that innocent people are not punished wrongly.
And, really, killing Bohacek would be about revenge, and that's just silly.
I will never forget the lesson of September 11th, 2001; the literal lesson of the English class I attended that morning before any of us knew we were attacked. We were discussing Edgar Huntly and revenge as a romantic impulse. The concept of revenge requires us to believe that, by the act of inflicting pain on someone else, we can restore ourselves and our world to a time and place before we suffered the injury they inflicted on us. As more than a decade of endless war has shown us, that's just stupid. Revenge is to be forgiven in children, but adults should be held to a higher standard of reasoning.
This is different from punishment. Punishment is what you do to deter an individual from engaging in certain behaviors: putting them in prison for killing someone in a head on collision while under the influence of "a host of drugs," for example; maybe even killing them for this if we wish to deter this type of behavior strongly enough. Were I to kill Bohacek for this, though, it would not be taken as such a warning as I would (rightly) be arrested myself. Even if the rest of society is to view this hypothetical action as a warning, my incarceration removes the deterrent. Therefore, because killing Bohacek cannot possibly prevent any crime, and because killing her won't bring my father back, I refrain from killing her.
It's the pragmatic, civilized thing to do.
Q.E.D. I'm a pragmatist who understands why Hamlet spends 2 hours (or 3 or 4, depending on the cut and pace of the production) trying to not kill Claudius. We both like to think that we're better than the characters who came before us.
But there I go, tilting at windmills, a hopeless romantic in my belief that these great works of letters and art actually matter.
The corporate stooges in the Republican party routinely put the arts on the chopping block. The great masses of our society feels the theatrical experience is even less relevant to their own lives than ever before, and even within my own professional community, Shakespeare and sound design are usually regarded with something on a scale limited by passive annoyance and outright contempt. And yet I continue to do these things. I continue to devote as much time and energy to their practice, and my perfection of their practice, as any skilled tradesmen, and all for the hope that I might make a tenth of what a union electrician makes over the course of his lifetime, and might be able to help enrich a few lives.
But that kinda requires that I believe that there is such a thing as a way in which the world can fundamentally work better because of the work I do. How would I be able to process the death of my father at Bohacek's hands without Hamlet? or 2 Henry IV? I don't really want to know. And I would very much like to think that I am doing everyone a service by helping them have the same cultural experience just in case this terrible thing happens to them.
Or even a more mundane thing, really. Trouble with your boss? Trouble with your wife? Trouble with your kids? Your home? Your country? Your politics? Your wealth? Shakespeare has a play for that. I'm sure there are about a million things I'm leaving off the list, but someone's got a play for that, whatever that may be. It is maybe just a little bit romantic to believe that I can create the plays that will help you be a better person, and I don't plan on stopping any time soon, so I guess that makes me a die hard.
A die hard romantic who still believes my work matters even if you don't, even though I'm doing it for you.
I suppose that's where I have to draw the line between romanticism and pragmatism; where one's ideals and desires cease to contribute to making the world a better place, one must abandon those ideals and desires.
Bonnie Bohacek sees another day,
Whiles I work to produce another play.
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