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By Robin of Berkeley
AmericanThinker.com
September 23, 2009
One of my fondest childhood memories was going to Broadway musicals with my parents. I saw many of the great ones -- Brigadoon, Hello Dolly, Mame. My folks, consummate performers at their local beach club, loved the singing and dancing. They'd purchase the soundtrack, and perform around the house for months afterward.
I've continued enjoying musicals as an adult, though I refuse to see the overpriced shows in San Francisco. Plus, getting accosted by derelicts (excuse me, "street people") and stepping over excrement detracts from the theater experience.
So for the last few years, my hubby and I have bought season tickets at a more civilized locale -- a converted movie theater in a strip mall in the suburbs. The average age of the attendees is 70 (we feel like spring chickens since we're 50-something.). Being in a conservative area, there's a good chance many people come straight from church to the 3 pm matinee.
The theater staff must have been high on something when they made the bizarre decision to bump Chicago from the line up and substitute Hair. Apparently, the revival is all the rage on Broadway and won a Tony Award.
I found the selection of Hair disturbing for several reasons. First, I saw the original on Broadway when I was l4. My parents surprised me for my birthday with tickets for my best friend and me, and dropped us off at the theater. The experience may have scarred me for life.
What I remember as vividly as yesterday were naked people running up and down the aisles, touching each other and the audience. One young specimen was jumping like a monkey from the top of one seat to another. The image of his organs dangling above me as he straddled my chair is burned forever in my psyche.
So when my tickets for Hair arrived in the mail, I called the box office and asked whether the performers would be nude. The guy said yes, but there were a few performances where it wouldn't be full frontal. I switched to one of these.
I couldn't wrap my brain around watching these young people -- many of whom are probably living with their parents and holding day jobs at Starbuck's -- running around naked. It would be like watching strippers perform at a nursing home.
As it was, I was mighty embarrassed for the earnest, young performers. They were stroking their bodies, simulating oral sex, rhapsodizing about sodomy, and degrading the flag and Jesus in front of people the age of their grandparents. At the end, when the actors ran down the aisles bringing people onstage to dance to the Age of Aquarius, they struggled to find enough folks who were ambulatory.
I assumed that after four decades, the play would look tame compared to today's decadence. No such luck. Hair is a nonstop, aggressive assault on your senses; a veritable orgy of insults to the body, mind, and soul.
I left the theater wondering why on earth this dreck, with a few snappy songs, would be revived; why a flag being thrown in the trash is art; why a young guy sucking on a marijuana cigarette while snickering, "I'm eating the body of Christ," garners a Tony.
The answer is obvious: Hair is the perfect play for the Age of Obama. It started a 40 year love affair with the body, an obsession with the self, that has never stopped.
We've had one generation after another that worships pleasure. They're immersed in a 24/7 drug and sex culture, where oral sex is now the moral equivalent of the 50's good night kiss. Girls swap their self respect for attention; and boys measure their worth on how many babes they've bed.
But the pressure on kids is even more extreme than in the 60's. Militant gays have forced homosexuality down our throats; a huge portion of television shows and films seem to have graphic sex scenes. Studies have shown that record numbers of teens are experimenting with gay sex, which many view as a rite of passage like one's first beer.
Along with the unbridled sex and drugs, Hair and the 60's unleashed a tsunami of rage that has only gathered force over time. In Hair, the performers were literally in your face with their fury. Thus began a 40 year temper tantrum that has never stopped.
Today the angry people of the Left are still enraged, but they don't even know what they're pissed off about. Being ticked off just feels powerful; it produces feel good brain chemicals like adrenaline. After a while, fulminating becomes an addiction, like cocaine. So even though they have the President of their dreams, they're still on a rampage.
Hair helped to unleash the genie from the bottle on all the impulses (if it feels good, do it!) and, like Frankenstein, created a monster. Now we have an almost feral society where people no longer know how to control themselves. And they don't want to button up because hedonism feels so good, and pleasure is their sole reason for existence.
And the climax of the decades of debauchery? The quintessential President for our times. People elected Obama because he fortifies the Self; he makes them feel cool and magnanimous. Plus Obama reinforces the intoxication with desire because he promises endless goodies. And despite his calm tone and demeanor he whips the masses into a rage with every word he utters. [TL1]
While I'm trying to forget the unpleasantness that is Hair, there's one scene that still lingers: when the middle aged actress becomes convinced that all this promiscuity and lighting up and tuning out is a win/win for everyone.
She turns to the audience and makes a long, inane speech about how we should go home and tell all parents that their kids should be able to do anything they want, at any time, with anyone, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
The actress pauses for a moment, expecting wild applause from the crowd. While I'd bet good money that the Broadway audiences roared with pleasure, we were stone silent.
Maybe it's just because we're old fogies. But I think it's more than that.
I think that we've learned through the years that doing anything you want is actually not okay; that it hurts you and others, and it degrades society. To update a 60's anthem: hedonism is not healthy for children or other living things.
A Sodom and Gomorrah nation betrays children because they look to adults for guidance and protection. It physically injures them through viruses like HIV, unintended pregnancies, and date rape.
And it's not just youth who are put in harm's way. A pleasure saturated society makes us look weak to our enemies who revile our decadence and see us more and more as easy targets.
Most significantly, gratifying the self insults the Sacred. A Higher Power created us for greatness, not just great orgasms. When we reject everything that is good and wholesome and pure, we mock God because that is where He lives.
One of my favorite poems is this one, by Sufi poet Hafiz, who penned it in the l4th century:
Why all this talk of the Beloved,
Music and dancing,
And
Liquid ruby-light we can lift in a cup?
Because it is low tide,
A very low tide in this age
And around most hearts.
We are exquisite coral reefs
Dying when exposed to strange
Elements
God is the wine-ocean we crave -
We miss
Flowing in and out of our Pores.
We have people walking around so broken that they are more dead than alive. Because a life fixated on the self is a form of soul murder. It creates the worst possible poverty, what Mother Theresa called a "poverty of the spirit," far more sorrowful and wretched than anything she saw in the poor of Calcutta.
Because when we become lost from our Source, we're as frightened and lonely as a small child separated from his mother. We're like Dorothy in the Land of Oz, who faces a treacherous and terrifying journey to find her way back home.
Dorothy discovers at the end, to her utter incredulity, that she possessed the ticket homeward all the time. Simply by clicking her heels and reciting, "There's no place like home," she finds her way back into the safe arms of her loved ones.
We have millions of people so empty, that they'll touch anyone, ingest anything, indulge every desire, just to stimulate themselves, just to be reminded for a brief moment that they are still alive.
Because they have no one -- no Good Witch Glinda or Auntie Em -- to tell them that they also have the key right now, at this very moment; that they always have and always will.
And that their suffering can be over in a heartbeat if they remember why they came here and who they are; and that the One who loves them fiercely, unconditionally, never abandoned them, and never will.
A frequent American Thinker contributor, Robin is a psychotherapist and recovering liberal in Berkeley.