Culture Collapse: “White Blindness”

By “W”
Sat, Feb 19, 2022 1:06 p.m.

Culture Collapse: “White Blindness”

“W”: I don’t think I am infected with this malady:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10529327/Bryan-Cranston-says-acknowledging-white-blindness-step-away-play.html

By Altai

Bryan Cranston, son of a narcissistic actor, husband of a narcissistic actor and father of a narcissistic actor as given an interview which reveals him to be a very narcissistic actor himself. After all this newfangled BLM hullabaloo, he wonders how all this could be about him, Bryan Cranston.

In his new play, The Power of Sail, he plays a Harvard professor who invites a “White nationalist Holocaust denier” to speak, so he can debate and refute him in public. The play is about how his character is wrong and a “pointed critique of America’s devotion to the primacy of free speech.”

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-02-16/bryan-cranston-interview-power-of-sail-geffen-playhouse

Here is an excerpt.

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“I’m 65 years old now, and I need to learn, I need to change.”

The words tumble with intensity out of actor Bryan Cranston’s mouth. He sits beside an unlighted fire pit in his backyard on a recent windy morning. Chimes ring mournfully in the breeze, and small white blossoms from a tree twist and twirl their way to a soft landing in the nearby pool.

Cranston is telling me why he chose to step away from an offer to direct a show at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse and how that decision led him to take the role of Charles Nichols in the theater’s West Coast premiere of Power of Sai, written by Paul Grellong and directed by Weyni Mengesha, running through March 20.

As Nichols, Cranston plays an aging, highly respected Harvard professor who faces intense backlash for inviting a White nationalist and Holocaust denier named Carver to speak at his annual symposium. As student protests intensify, Nichols presses forward, claiming his intention is to give Carver and his repugnant ideas a thorough dressing down in a debate.

An avowed “free-speech absolutist,” Nichols says, “The answer to hate speech is more speech.”

Power of Sail had its world premiere in 2019 at the Warehouse Theatre in Greenville, S.C., but Cranston believes the play gained resonance in the wake of the pandemic and the social and racial justice uprisings following the murder [sic] of George Floyd.

As those occurrences shook the world, they also transformed Cranston, who says in these troubling years he came face to face with his own “White blindness” and privilege. It was necessary work for a man tasked with playing a character whose white privilege prevents him from seeing the very real harm caused by his actions until it is much too late.

When, in 2019, Matt Shakman, the Geffen’s artistic director, asked Cranston if he had any interest in directing for an upcoming season, Cranston — who has never directed a play thought he’d like to give it a try. The play he had in mind was Larry Shue’s 1984 comedy The Foreigner, about an Englishman who foils a nefarious plot by the Ku Klux Klan to convert the Georgia fishing lodge where he’s staying into a Klan meeting place.

Two years of global grief and pain later, the play no longer felt like an acceptable choice to Cranston

“It is a privileged viewpoint to be able to look at the Ku Klux Klan and laugh at them and belittle them for their broken and hateful ideology,” says Cranston. “But the Ku Klux Klan and Charlottesville and white supremacists — that’s still happening and it’s not funny. It’s not funny to any group that is marginalized by these groups’ hatred, and it really taught me something.”

[N.S.: What’s the “it” that taught Cranston “something”?]

Cranston says he had been laughing at the play for decades and he had to confront the fact that his white privilege allowed him to laugh.

“And I realized, ‘Oh my God, if there’s one, there’s two, and if there’s two, there are 20 blind spots that I have … what else am I blind to?” Cranston says. “If we’re taking up space with a very palatable play from the 1980s where rich old White people can laugh at White supremacists and say, ‘Shame on you,’ and have a good night in the theater, things need to change, I need to change.”

So he stepped aside, telling Shakman, “If you find a play that you need an old white guy to act in, then maybe I can be available for that.”

Cranston also stipulated that he wanted to be a part of “something that changes the conversation.” In his estimation, the measure of success in theater is always “Does the conversation continue after the play is over?”

[N.S.: What “conversation”? Oh, the political monologue among activists of the White Genocide Project.]

For Cranston, “Power of Sail” meets that criterion with its pointed critique of America’s devotion to the primacy of free speech.

The play asks if there should be limits to free speech, and if so, why? It tests the boundaries of the free speech ideal by examining the traditional arbiters of that speech — those who get to decide whose voice is lifted and whose voice is quashed. It suggests the existence of a moral compass in an age when truth is often called relative by special-interest groups opposed to it.

[N.S.: Oh, so the playwright and Cranston have no principles, just “friends” and “enemies,” “who/whom.”]

Brandon Scott, who plays the black academic Baxter Forrest in Power of Sail, tries to stop Nichols from hosting Carver at the symposium while citing 20th century philosopher Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance.” Popper’s idea is that if a society — in pursuit of tolerance without limits — tolerates the intolerant, the latter will eventually destroy that society.

Altai: They still don’t get the joke, do they? All these Western countries were doing just fine, were open and tolerant until their very legitimacy and self-determination of their native populations were called into question by outsiders who just decided to show up, in violation of everyone’s wishes. “Tolerance” is what allowed the current madness to eventually emerge and led to a backlash. And calling truth relative is a post-modernist and Tumblr-like paradigm. People still believe the Russiagate stuff, because of the prestige media, they believed in WMD in Iraq because of them. And even if they want it stopped, many believe immigration is “good for the economy” or “inevitable” because of them.

N.S.: Bryan Cranston is a ruthless opportunist, and he sees Power of Sail as an insurance policy. But it won’t help him. black supremacists and their non-black allies refuse to honor insurance policies. They set them on fire, and cackle satanically.