A Bit of Testosterone – A Letter to the Playwright

A note from the playwright about this letter: John Roemer sent me this letter in early August, 2011, shortly after I’d come back from the research trip to Washington. John lives in nearby Baltimore, and since he was a good friend of Norman’s I’d tried to meet up with him, which just didn’t work out. But he asked to read the script. This letter is what he sent me after reading the play. We are sharing it with his permission.

Sean:

I was deeply moved by your manuscript – it was both subtle and powerful; better, it made Norman, McNamara, and Emily real. The reenactment/practice scene with Emily and the pillow was particularly overwhelming.

These many decades later, those people matter more and the issues seem inconsequential. Perhaps it’s age and the waning of testosterone, or whatever chemical drives men (mostly) to acts of war, terror, heroism, self-sacrifice, stupidity, politics. Or perhaps it’s a certain cynicism – wisdom? – about the human prospect, now that I’ve lived long enough to see that the same errors, absurdities and cruelties go on forever, as Vietnam becomes Iraq / Afghanistan / Pakistan / Libya and as the Republican Party replays its role of the 1930’s by attempting to destroy all social reforms from the New Deal to the present, as witness the rise of the “Tea Party” and the debt limit gangsterism.

My cynicism/wisdom has not made me an apostate from liberal causes; I imagine myself with Eugene Debs, A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas as a radical to the end, unlike so many of those execrable neo-conservatives like Podhoretz, who dedicate their lives to proving Churchill’s aphorism about young abandoning their stupid hearts and socialism at 40 to assert their older but wiser brains.

If we live long enough, even old radicals may, as I have, find ourselves with a pleasant house in a forest, a couple of golden retrievers, a happy family, friends, hobbies, and perhaps enough Social Security and pension pittance to get to the end of our life expectancies reasonably comfortably. The idea of dying to stop arrogant shitheads from bombing or looting other presumptive shitheads seems ludicrous; violent idiocy is the ground of our being. Tend your own garden and rejoice that Robespierre or McNamara didn’t get you.

And yet…there were in my lifetime a New Deal and a Great Society; successful movements for black, gay and female rights; an end to the draft; a United Nations. Lots of decent people were crucified in the battles; to expect easy progress is childish and irresponsible; worse, it cedes the fight to the bad guys, who because they have guns and God and gold expect to win everything always.

So my heart wishes Norman were sitting on my back porch, looking out over the rural scenery he loved so much, bullshitting about the Good Struggles we had, while my head (and remaining testosterone) says no – we require heroes to call us to duty, to remind us that the sky is falling and the Visigoths are ascendant and that ass needs kicking, not sitting on.

Perhaps your play will provoke a few people to grapple with all of that. Hell, send Obama copy – maybe under the gauzy rhetoric and brainy calculation, there’s actually a heart. Or at least a bit of testosterone.

John Roemer