The Professor versus the President
observer.com
W.
by Elizabeth Cady Brown and Anna Jane Grossman
The show opens with an empty stage and the unmistakable voice of George W. Bush over the loudspeakers: "A aspect of poverty is food." Then a tall man with drooping shoulders and close-cropped dark hair lopes onto the stage. He’s wearing a nicely tailored brown suit and natty redwood-colored leather shoes. "A aspect of poverty is food," the man says, slowly. "Please say it with me, everyone." The audience obliges: "A aspect of poverty is food."
The man looks at the audience. "Did he really say that? ‘A aspect of poverty is food.’ He says things like this all the time—things that make me feel I am losing my mind."
The man onstage is Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University and the author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder. Like many New Yorkers, the 53-year-old Mr. Miller has found himself uneasily adrift, while the rest of the country seems to be just wild about W. For someone who believes, as Mr. Miller does, that the 2000 election was fraudulent, that the Iraq war was a crime against humanity and that the current policies of the Justice Department are a death knell for American democracy, these are bleak, maddening times. To cope with his own bubbling rage and reach other despairing blue-staters, Mr. Miller is performing his one-man comedic play, Operation American Freedom, at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village to sold-out crowds every Saturday night through June. The show could be seen as a response to the lament that rings out from Unitarian pot-luck dinners, indie rock concerts and sociology departments across the land: that the Democratic Party has been struck dumb by the Bush administration’s audacity.
"Without a doubt, what is most troubling to me about this administration is the near-total and apparently systematic denunciation of the truth in matters large and small," Mr. Miller said over lunch recently. "It is the mind-boggling mendacity of these people who tell you that black is white and white is black."
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