Henry A. Giroux’s rap on the commodification of our kids has to break your heart. You can check out http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21094 and/or http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21180 …if you feel like reading a lot. Short of that, just stick with this.

One of the reasons I’m working on my play Arlecchino’s Ariel has to do with what Giroux comments upon in his article, what he observes spot-on. [Among other things.] But he didn’t get me started on the new dramatic work. Rather, Jefferey St. Clair’s piece on carcinogenic air in California, focusing on how children — in two weeks — get exposed to what the conservative EPA allows (in toxicity) for adults in a lifetime …gave me my jump start. See http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair12262008.html.

And the Netherlands’ Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who painted in the middle years of the sixteenth-century, really broke the camel’s back dramatically.

Bruegel’s Children’s Games must be seen in person in the Kunsthistoricsches Museum in Vienna. Short of that, however, perhaps what’s below will do.

In Bruegel’s 1559 painting — depicting the games of some 200 children — the artist is really attacking grown-ups. Only their size and dress make the subjects children. For example, when five of them start pulling the hair of their victim or killing flies, they behave as adults. Furthermore, there is not a single face among them expressing joy or the fun of playing a game. Their movements are restrained, like some gnomes or puppets manipulated by some invisible force, closer to madness than to childhood. See http://www.artyfactory.com/perspective_drawing/perspective_14.htm.

At the top of the painting on the left is a landscape free of human pollution where anyone can escape into the fresh air. This foreshadows an idea that became very important to Bruegel in some later works, namely that nature alone can redeem the world from the follies of mankind. We’re gonna have to work on that. Yesterday.

Short of that, you might want to treat kids like kids right now, love the child in yourself, do something for children not yet born, and get down with my play in the mud.

The playwright, Richard Martin Oxman, can be reached at headburg@yahoo.com.
P.S. Check out http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair0807.html, and then review http://www.scorecard.org/community/index.tcl?zip_code=89406&set_commun ity_zipcode_cookie_p=t&x=4&y=3. Zip code 89406 covers Fallon, Nevada’s Churchill County (from the St. Clair piece above). If you’re my kind of person, you should go out of your mind noting how nothing related to the military is traceable via the Environmental Defense Fund delineation/stats for Churchill County. Why is such a major environmental (carcinogenic) villain not noteworthy? Why are REAL takes on the air quality for ALL counties/neighborhoods so very hard to come by, virtually inaccessible? Why does our population continue to think that our government cares more about its citizens than Saddam Hussein cared about his Kurds? Contact me… if only to tell me why you don’t have to get with me to figure out something we can do together to make a difference. For Arlecchino’s Ariel, my play on this subject, will never be — by itself — sufficiently satisfying on this count. Whether there’s one person or a billion people in the audience.