"Why I Call Myself A Socialist," by playwright and actor Wallace "My Dinner with Andre" Shawn.

Wallace Shawn is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor.  Unfortunately Shawn has no dialogue in the video clip I've chosen above, from the film My Dinner with Andre (1981), which altered my consciousness during a drunken evening with cousin Don in 1986.

For more on the film, scroll to the end of this page.

Shawn's essay Why I Call Myself a Socialist (Is the World Really a Stage?) dates to 2011. Intriguingly, the word "socialist" does not appear save for the title. It's a lengthy essay, so let's begin after the beginning.

 ... In the old days of the Soviet Five-Year Plans, the planners tried to determine what ought to happen to the babies born under their jurisdiction. They would calculate how many managers the economy needed, how many researchers, how many factory workers. And the Soviet leaders would organize society in an attempt to channel the right number of people into each category. In most of the world today, the invisible hand of the global market performs this function.

I’ve sometimes noted that many people in my generation, born during World War II, are obsessed, as I am, by the image of the trains arriving at the railroad station at Auschwitz and the way that the S.S. officers who greeted the trains would perform on the spot what was called a “selection,” choosing a few of those getting off of each train to be slave laborers, who would get to live for as long as they were needed, while everyone else would be sent to the gas chambers almost immediately. And just as inexorable as were these “selections” are the determinations made by the global market when babies are born. The global market selects out a tiny group of privileged babies who are born in certain parts of certain towns in certain countries, and these babies are allowed to lead privileged lives. Some will be scientists, some will be bankers. Some will command, rule, and grow fantastically rich, and others will become more modestly paid intellectuals or teachers or artists. But all the members of this tiny group will have the chance to develop their minds and realize their talents.

As for all the other babies, the market sorts them and stamps labels onto them and hurls them violently into various pits, where an appropriate upbringing and preparation are waiting for them. If the market thinks that workers will be needed in electronics factories, a hundred thousand babies will be stamped with the label “factory worker” and thrown down into a certain particular pit. And when the moment comes when one of the babies is fully prepared and old enough to work, she’ll crawl out of the pit, and she’ll find herself standing at the gate of a factory in India or in China or in Mexico, and she’ll stand at her workstation for 16 hours a day, she’ll sleep in the factory’s dormitory, she won’t be allowed to speak to her fellow workers, she’ll have to ask for permission to go the bathroom, she’ll be subjected to the sexual whims of her boss, and she’ll be breathing fumes day and night that will make her ill and lead to her death at an early age. And when she has died, one will be able to say about her that she worked, like a nurse, not to benefit herself, but to benefit others. Except that a nurse works to benefit the sick, while the factory worker will have worked to benefit the owners of her factory. She will have devoted her hours, her consideration, her energy and strength to increasing their wealth. She will have lived and died for that. And it’s not that anyone sadly concluded when she was born that she lacked the talent to become, let’s say, a violinist, a conductor, or perhaps another Beethoven. The reason she was sent to the factory and not to the concert hall was not that she lacked ability but that the market wanted workers, and so she was assigned to be one.

And during the period when all the babies who are born have been sorted into their different categories and labeled, during the period when you could say that they’re being nourished in their pens until they’re ready to go to work, they’re all assigned appropriate costumes. And once they know what costume they’ll wear, each individual is given an accent, a way of speaking, some characteristic personality traits, and a matching body type, and each person’s face starts slowly to specialize in certain expressions which coordinate well with their personality, body type, and costume. And so each person comes to understand what role he will play, and so each can consistently select and reproduce, through all the decades and changes of fashion, the appropriate style and wardrobe, for the rest of his life.

This must be read in full, but here's the conclusion.

... If we look at reality for more than an instant, if we look at the human beings passing us on the street, it’s not bearable. It’s not bearable to watch while the talents and the abilities of infants and children are crushed and destroyed. These happen to be things that I just can’t think about. And most of the time, the factory workers and domestic workers and cashiers and truck drivers can’t think about them either. Their performances as these characters are consistent and convincing, because they actually believe about themselves just what I believe about them -- that what they are now is all that they could ever have been, they could never have been anything other than what they are. Of course, that’s what we all have to believe, so that we can bear our lives and live in peace together. But it’s the peace of death.

Actors understand the infinite vastness hiding inside each human being, the characters not played, the characteristics not revealed. Schoolteachers can see every day that, given the chance, the sullen pupil in the back row can sing, dance, juggle, do mathematics, paint, and think. If the play we’re watching is an illusion, if the baby who now wears the costume of the hustler in fact had the capacity to become a biologist or a doctor, a circus performer or a poet or a scholar of ancient Greek, then the division of labor, as now practiced, is inherently immoral, and we must somehow learn a different way to share out all the work that needs to be done. The costumes are wrong. They have to be discarded. We have to start out naked again and go from there.

FINAL REMINDER: In case you missed the Louisville Magazine feature profile of "a small-town dissident."

It feels odd to tout an article about me, so instead, here is the writer Dylon Jones to introduce his feature article in Louisville Magazine.

I spent the last year getting to know Roger Baylor. After months of political humor, debates, cigars, Communist cats, and a good many beers, I give you this: The Independent, my profile of a small-town dissident with the whole world spread out before him.

It's flattering to be featured, but more importantly, my aim is to draw your attention to Dylon Jones as a writer. He spent countless hours taking notes and making recordings, distilled this unruly mass of information to its essentials, then formed an accurate, entertaining narrative. As a journalist, he gets it right, and as a writer, he tells the story well. Writing is damned hard work, and Dylon does it well. Keep your eyes on him.

The Independent, by Dylon Jones (Louisville Magazine)

New Albany craft-beer pioneer Roger Baylor drained his glass and left his brewery to run for mayor last fall. The path ahead is littered with obstacles -- contentious former business partners, the two-party system, "garbage trees." Good thing he brought shears.

Also, kudos to Chris Witzke for his photography and informed chat. The link takes you to the interactive issue of Louisville Magazine (June 2016), which is easy to use.

Fear and loathing on the campaign trail, 2015 -- or, the Louisville Magazine feature about the independent pirate's bid.

It feels odd to tout an article about me, so instead, here is the writer Dylon Jones to introduce his feature article in Louisville Magazine.

I spent the last year getting to know Roger Baylor. After months of political humor, debates, cigars, Communist cats, and a good many beers, I give you this: The Independent, my profile of a small-town dissident with the whole world spread out before him.

It's flattering to be featured, but more importantly, my aim is to draw your attention to Dylon Jones as a writer. He spent countless hours taking notes and making recordings, distilled this unruly mass of information to its essentials, then formed an accurate, entertaining narrative. As a journalist, he gets it right, and as a writer, he tells the story well. Writing is damned hard work, and Dylon does it well. Keep your eyes on him.

The Independent, by Dylon Jones (Louisville Magazine)

New Albany craft-beer pioneer Roger Baylor drained his glass and left his brewery to run for mayor last fall. The path ahead is littered with obstacles -- contentious former business partners, the two-party system, "garbage trees." Good thing he brought shears.

Also, kudos to Chris Witzke for his photography and informed chat. The link takes you to the interactive issue of Louisville Magazine (June 2016), which is easy to use.

Suddeath: "Darkness doesn't last, unless you let it."

Following a long stint at the News and Tribune, reporter Daniel Suddeath accepted a position as editor of the Glasgow Daily Times in October of 2015.

Daniel and I seemingly are destined to disagree on many fronts, and we continue to do so. However, the commentary linked here is fine writing on the most difficult of topics, death. It is catharsis as a writer, and more importantly, as a son and a friend.

In fulfilling the task of the essayist, it also is instructive and beneficial for the reader. Read it, and I think you'll agree.  

A very good job, indeed. May your loved ones rest in peace.

Darkness doesn't last, unless you let it, by Daniel Suddeath (Glasgow Daily Times)

It's that dreary stretch of winter when most of us sane folks who can't stand the winter chill begin dreaming of the freshness of spring and warmer weather.

I was especially glad to see 2015 go, as it was one of the roughest years of my life. My father died somewhat unexpectedly in November, and his passing came just a few days after I received the news that one of my best friends from my former post in Southern Indiana had taken his own life.

Gary Younge: "Black skin in a game where the odds are stacked against it."

I'm sad to see Gary Younge move back to the UK. For as long as I can recall reading The Guardian on line, his byline has been an indication of depth and quality.

Younge's farewell is not easy reading.

However, it is required reading.

Gary Younge: Farewell to America at The Guardian

... This is the summer I will leave America, after 12 years as a foreign correspondent, and return to London. My decision to come back to Britain was prompted by banal, personal factors that have nothing to do with current events; if my aim was to escape aggressive policing and racial disadvantage, I would not be heading to Hackney.

But while the events of the last few years did not prompt the decision to come back, they do make me relieved that the decision had already been made. It is why I have not once had second thoughts. If I had to pick a summer to leave, this would be the one. Another season of black parents grieving, police chiefs explaining and clueless anchors opining. Another season when America has to be reminded that black lives matter because black deaths at the hands of the state have been accepted as routine for so long. A summer ripe for rage.

New York Times: "Why Orwell Endures."

A collection of George Orwell’s essays proved to be the surprise reading hit of my Christmas vacation. I picked it up at the library book sale in December, and tossed in the carry-on bag as an afterthought. It's a good thing I did, seeing as the remainder of my magazines and books were stowed in delayed luggage.

Essay topics in the ancient paperback, which became shredded into unbound pages soon after opening, ranged from memories of shooting a rampaging elephant while posted as a policeman in Burma to researching the origins of bawdy English postcards. Orwell wrote not only of lofty topics such as his service for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, but also described in excruciating detail his recollections of boyhood boarding school days, experiences so quintessentially English that they might be lampooned by the likes of Monty Python without we Americans never really imagining the real-life sources.

As a piece in today’s New York Times makes clear, Orwell may not have been right 100% of the time, but his pursuit of truth and unwavering intellectual honesty remains noteworthy by comparison to many of his ideologically compromised peers. As fairy tale life in Sarah Palin’s Amerika reminds us, they are qualities worth cherishing.

Lately my thoughts have turned to “Struttin My Stuff.”

Not my own, but the 1976 album by Elvin Bishop, a National Merit Scholar (physics was his bag) born in California and raised in Oklahoma, who became fascinated with what might now be called roots music, specifically R& B and the blues, learned the guitar, and became a professional musician who is still on the road today entertaining crowds at the age of 64.

Bishop embarked on a solo career right about the time that Americans were told by Charlie Daniels that “The South’s Gonna Do It Again,” and the opportunistic Tennessean name-checked the happy go luck Okie: “Elvin Bishop’s sittin’ on a bale of hay/He ain’t good lookin’ but he sure can play.”

Bishop, a fine player and writer who adopted the winking redneck nom de plume of Pigboy Crabshaw, was largely unconcerned with critical approbation in the sense of Rolling Stone magazine, a fact evidenced by some of his most enjoyable and unpretentious songs of the period, including “Stealin’ Watermelons,” “Holler and Shout,” and “Slick Titty Boom.”

While these were lazing, fishing and beer slopping tunes of a particularly effective order, Bishop’s obvious affection for his first musical loves always peeked through even the most formulaic of his early seventies offerings, and his faith was amply rewarded with the release of “Fooled Around and Fell In Love,” the single from “Struttin My Stuff.”

“Fooled Around and Fell In Love,” a huge hit in the spring of 1976, was both a reaffirmation of Bishop’s most fundamental instincts and an abrupt departure from the prevailing Crabshaw norm, the latter owing primarily to the appearance of a genuine singer in the guitarist’s consort.

It may have taken only a few years for Mickey Thomas to become the voice that we all loved to hate during his tenure with various incarnations of Starship in the 1980’s, but in 1976 he was fresh and bright, and the gospel-trained Thomas’s expansive vocal talents brought Bishop a memorable Billboard #3 song and a two-year window of headlining status.

What I remember best about “Fooled Around and Fell In Love” was that it landed in my ears during springtime, acting as a much needed palliative for the maddening emotional outpourings of adolescence that beset me then -- each and every ache of unrequited yearning, tug of hormonal confusion and hammerlock of youthful angst. The song was wistful, yet hopeful. One might indeed survive the sheer confusion of the inexperience of “love,” or lust, or whatever ephemeral reactions of brain chemistry that were being deciphered that way at age 16. Art actually helped. You could write about it, sing about it, sketch it, and work with it.

Three decades later, it is with immense pleasure and relief that I contemplate the cessation of such painful and distracting rites of passage, and find great solace in an unprecedented time of contentment, but for whatever reason, the notion of music for springtime has remained with me, and the joyful and emblematic annual recurrence came at the end of March, after I purchased “Twelve Stops and Home,” the debut album by The Feeling.

This collection of songs by a group of impossibly young Englishmen cannot be connected in any remotely stylistic or meaningfully thematic sense with the Bicentennial release by Elvin Bishop that prompted this recollection, although a case might be made that The Feeling’s comprehensive mélange of pop influences conceivably includes certain groups active contemporaneously with Pigboy Crabshaw’s unexpected popular ascendancy.

Recall that none other than the Bay City Rollers had a radio hit in 1976.

That’s meant as an absolute recommendation, by the way. As one whose musical preferences remain firmly wedded to the intricate simplicities of well written songs, fat hooks and whistle-worthy melodies, The Feeling’s sonic palate is a heaping platter of Krispy Kremes, an assortment of Godivas and a half-dozen servings of crème brulee, with bountiful snippets of the history of British pop from the Beatles through Badfinger, past Supertramp into the Commonwealth (Split Enz, Neil and Tim Finn, Crowded House) and landing somewhere in the vicinity of Keane – another current favorite of mine that I’ve yet to hear pounding from the trunks of passing boom cars.

That’s another recommendation.

It is unlikely that The Feeling will perform “Fooled Around and Fell In Love” any time soon, although the profitably mainstream Rod Stewart has, but if they took a stab at trying to cover Bishop’s classic, a version alchemized through the wry lens of Squeeze would be appropriate. I’ll try to imagine that possibility today while working outside in the yard, or walking the city streets, or merely sitting by an open window.

After all, it’s spring.