Shawn touches on everything from his own childhood, traveling to India at the age of 21, putting pressure on Barack Obama, and why the Democratic Party is part of the imperial system.
Wallace Shawn: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
| By: GRITtv Wednesday July 2, 2008 11:00 am |
There is no justification for inequality. That is a thought that playwright and actor Wallace Shawn says could poison your life. It has poisoned the lives of some of the characters in Shawn’s plays including The Fever, which recently received a staged reading in New York at Revolution Books. In this interview Shawn discusses his work, the perverse pleasure of power, and the subject of a recent speech he gave at the Academy of Arts and Letters: The Unobtrusives.





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THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I’VE BEEN WRESTLING WITH FOR YEARS! I’ve cost myself years of comfort because I felt I didn’t deserve it anymore than anyone else. As far as taking things to their logical conclusion, if someone is more clever or smarter, of course they don’t deserve more than someone who is less smart or clever than someone who is less so, because neither decided to be born with the innate advantage or disadvantage. And if we think that people are born equally, and someone ends in dire straights which they currently would like to be out of, can we hold their past bad decisions against them since their honest desire to have a better life means that had they known, honestly and foreseeably known, that the outcomes would lead to them where they are, then there is no way they would have behaved in the same way. You cannot hold either genetic disadvantage, both physical and mental, against someone, an idea which is not entirely controversial. But neither can you hold bad decisions against someone, as no one has the ability to foresee in concrete terms the long term outcome of those decisions. Relating it back to the advantage of rich over poor, if someone who is poor makes a bad decision and ends up flat broke, the road back or out of penury is either impossible or at the least improbable, whereas if one is rich, the fall is broken by a money filled mattress, and these people with the money filled mattresses are the ones currently in control of the decision making in this world.