A PLAY BY DONALD FREED
APOCALYPSE NATION
M.C. GARDNER
During five decades of a celebrated career, playwright Donald Freed has often asked “How shall we be saved?” In the starkly minimalist polemic of Patient #1 he posits an answer succinct and sure:
“We won’t be.”
Both Harold Goddard and Harold Bloom have argued that Shakespeare came to a similar conclusion:
“Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror?”
Patient #1 straddles a literary universe betwixt Lear and Strangelove. You can’t have G.W. Bush as one of three characters without the knavish smile of a fool grinning from ear to skeletal ear in the face of the absurd. Freed is after something more lasting than the regular bashing that attends our malaprop President. Malapropism is hardly the point when the Patient can only be coaxed to repeat a single phoneme during the first act of the drama. The Doctor becomes a 21st century Saussure as he attempts to reconstruct meaning from that single, simple sound. As he did with the character of Richard Nixon in Secret Honor, Freed discovers in the 43rd President a frailty that is all too pathetically human. The utterance in question is a breathtakingly moving moment in a play replete with them.
As 2009 begins its sojourn into 2010 the lights rise on the floorboards of a Floridian psychiatric facility that is home to a Doctor; a Secret Service Agent; and a Patient. The Patient is Patient #1, the former Commander-in-Chief, the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush.
The first statements of the Doctor are embittered exclamations. He punctuates each push of his tape recorder’s stop button with “sonofabitch” or “goddamn sonofabitch!” The prognosis is not good for either Patient or Doctor. Hurricane Xantippe is bearing down on the coast of Florida. When you understand that National Hurricane Center christens their storms in alphabetical order it becomes clear that the hurricane season at hand has not been hospitable. Perhaps the Kyoto Accords warranted greater scrutiny.
Aside from Xantippe, another storm is soon to flood the U.S. of A. That cataclysm is the “shit storm” that Freed has long foreseen as America’s judgment day. Reference is made to the first attack on NYC—thereby implying a second. The country is close to Martial Law. The civil liberties that were severely tweaked under the last administration have been all but trashed under the new one. The military is fighting wars on multiple fronts and like the teetering legions of an earlier empire, is soon to topple.
In his seminal essay, The View from Lake Como, the author quotes Socrates’ summation to the Athens court that is about to condemn him:
“It is only a matter of time now before I stumble, and the Long Foot of Time overtakes me. We all run that race, my judges, and we all lose it in the end.”
At the beginning of the last century Henry Adams reflected on that foot in Victoria’s reach and empire:
“Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be America.”
When a much defamed minister prays to “God damn America” we begin to suspect that the Long Foot of Time is not restricted to Florida’s coastline, but rather stretches “from sea to shining sea.” Among the family of nations, America has precipitated a modern alphabet soup of international disorder: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Santo Domingo, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Iran, Jamaica, Mozambique Nicaragua—all subject to our interference, covert or otherwise.
The Long Foot of Time extends to the microcosm of America’s Premier Patient. The sound of Mission bells is played off against the cacophony of a helicopter’s rotor and the roar of a dirt bike. The soothing music of distant waves contrasts with the howl of the approaching hurricane. The Doctor councils his Patient to think of his stay as a half time or rest period: “then back on the field. You leading the cheers—like always—like at Andover—like at Yale.”
The Doctor later confesses of belonging to the same fraternity as the President, Delta Kappa Epsilon: “Didn’t we burn it into the new boys’ butts with cigarettes? Rite of passage, that sort of thing, but your class got caught, ’68 and the New York Times called it “torture” in a headline—I have the clippings, here—and you were suspended—temporarily—but you fought back, said it was all just “Yale Tradition”—and so it was, so it was.”
From a nostalgia that is prelude to Abu Ghraib we are led to the first of two songs that straddle and define the play. Both are instrumental to our understanding of the Patient and the possibility of his cure. Song #1 is the Whiffenpoof Song dating from Yale of 09, the signature lyric of Act 1. The song is a parody of Kipling’s poem, Gentleman-Rankers of 1892. Both employ the chorus of
“We’re poor little lambs that have lost our way, baa, baa, black sheep.”
The Yale version substitutes Gentleman Songsters for Gentleman-Rankers but both tellingly conclude with:
“Gentleman Rankers/Songsters off on spree, damned from here to eternity,
God ha’ mercy on such as we.”
Freed’s cultural reach is as deep as any artist currently working the Queen’s English. What song could be more therapeutically appropriate for a dry drunk President than a Yale drinking song whose subtext is the pathos of men soon to die in wars during the final decline of the English Empire! Kipling’s lyric begins with:
“To the legions of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned.”
The Whiffenpoof counters with the more familiar:
“From the tables down at Mory’s, to the place where Louie dwells /
To the dear old Temple bar we love so well.”
The juxtaposition is astonishing. All the more so since Freed leaves the discovery of the subtext to his audience. War Presidents rarely attend military funerals—there is too much death to acknowledge. They would have to contemplate the “legions of the lost ones and the cohorts of the damned.”
Toward the end of Act 1 the Doctor attempts to reach the Patient through a word association game that recalls sound bites from the inferno of the Patient’s subconscious: “Shock and Awe, Guantanamo, Skull and Bones… Waterboarding… White phosphorous… Organ failure… Osama Bin Laden, Gay marriage… The World Court, Hate Crimes… Harken Oil… Hurricane Katrina… Taking the gloves off… the late Saddam Hussein, Dick Cheney, the late Dick Cheney… Terror…Ter/ror—Remem/ber Ter/or? The Cheapest Word in the English language!”
Freed matches Orwell in his mastery of the governmental double speak of its agents. This he learned first hand from institutional harassment at various junctures in his storied career. The Agent attending the President rarely gets beyond “that’s a roger,” “affirmative,” “copy that,” or “decline to answer.” That even this citizen cyborg is individualized and given a quiet (if often hilarious) dignity is testament to the powers at work in the play.
In the second act the Doctor must enlist the aid of the Agent to break through to the Patient: “I’m going to do what I have to do—save this phony fucking frat boy war criminal—do it out of hatred for Them! But what I’m trying to tell you is that my hate and loathing for Them isn’t enough.” Those familiar with Freed’s Death of Ivan Ilych will recall the emphatic It that haunts that drama. In Tolstoy’s story It was the personal mortality of the dying protagonist. In Freed’s Patient #1, Them is the collective mortality stalking the world’s remaining superpower. The powers that be are those that have shaped the destiny of the nation since Whitman warned that the United States could become “the greatest failure of all time.” They are also the powers that shaped “Little George, George the 2nd –Junior, and My name is George, uh, I’m uh, an alcoholic…”
The Doctor emphatically pleads with the Agent for a hopeless compassion: “It is all over unless you can do something—out of love—for him!—Do you copy?… unless you give me this key—you’ll be out there naked, in the swamp, and the jungle, hauling the dead body, of the Commander-in-Chief, a half step ahead of an alligator…he’ll be dead, the phones and computers’ll be down— I’ll be gone… and no one in the City of Lies will know your name, Mr. Doe! …he’s been a sleepwalker all his life… Never had a chance. They—the “Family” and the “Friends”—they put those chants and those cheers and that fake Texas accent in his mouth and they hard-wired him to steal the Presidency, steal the country, steal what’s left of the world’s oil and then this kleptocracy of kin folk programmed him to kill himself on that goddamn bike of his at Camp Victory—except that their perfect puppet started to actually believe the word salad that they had force fed him all those years, and he somehow got into his tortured—I say “tortured” reptilian brain that for some inscrutable reason Jesus Christ did not want him to die!”
The final exorcism is an attempt to free Bush and America—Vidal’s United States of Amnesia—from the mutual history of their bad faith. Roy Acuff’s Wreck on the Highway balances and refutes the Whiffenpoof insouciance of Act 1. Acuff’s prominence as the King of Country Music makes the lyrics of his song a chilling elegy not only for the Patient but, as well, for America. The theme of intoxication—blood and alcohol—returns with a telling vengeance. At the conclusion of the 1st Iraqi War, the road to Baghdad was christened: “the highway of death” for the massacre of retreating Iraqi soldiers. President George W. Bush will leave the U.S. Military still mired in the 2nd Iraqi War at his departure from office in 2008. Perhaps by 2010 he might contemplate the devastation to American lives that have, in his name, also been left on that highway. Freed imagines the President, the Doctor, and the Agent intoning a final lyrical interlude—the Patient’s last possibility of salvation—a nation enfolded in song:
“Who did you say it was, brother? / Who was it fell by the way?
When whiskey and blood run together / Did you hear anyone pray?
Their names I’m not able to tell you, / But here is one thing I can say:
There were whiskey and blood mixed together, / But I didn’t hear nobody pray.
I didn’t hear nobody pray, dear brother, / I didn’t hear nobody pray.
I hard the crash on the highway / But I didn’t hear nobody pray.
When I heard the crash on the highway, / I knew what it was from the start.
I went to the scene of destruction / A picture was stamped on my heart.”
Patient #1 and America have heard the wreck on the highway but will they acknowledge the picture stamped on their heart? The Doctor’s efforts fail. Apocalypse is Now. Bush swaggers with a cowboy’s gait and salutes Death from the velvet coffin confinement of a remembered Skull and Bones initiation rite. The stage direction reads: “Completely lost in his damnation he whirls out into the storm.” Freed ratchets up the tension between the dissolution of the Patient and the land fall of the hurricane. The human and natural elements are pushed to their extremity: “…outside the roar of the madman’s motor bike and his ghastly Rebel Yells merge into the fury of the storm.” Florida becomes the blasted heath of Lear’s “cataracts and hurricanes… striking flat the thick rotundity of the world”.
One of the great playwrights of our generation has given us one of its greatest plays. When Lear exhorts the elements to Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! his furor at mortality becomes our own. Freed has led us to the discovery that we are each Patient #1. Famed for his political inquiries he gives us, at the last, a national nightmare resolved in the pathos of a decidedly human finale: “Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart that is sorry for thee.” Patient #1 is nothing less than the startling image of a horror stamped upon the heart of an unflinching masterpiece.