Jun 01

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

A small part of the line for the Bernie rally in Oakland on 5/31/16

A small part of the line for the Bernie rally in Oakland on 5/31/16

I tried to go to the Bernie rally in downtown Oakland on Monday but by the time the BART train let me out, Oscar Grant Plaza was already filled with bodies from wall to wall and there was a long line of people waiting to go through the security tent and get in.  How long?  I walked two blocks to the corner of 12th Street thinking I was close, but the line snaked for two more blocks and then took a turn up to 14th Street, where it turned left, and from where I stood I could see the line string further and I could not see the end.  The line was at least 12 blocks long.  There was no way I was going to get in.  Feeling sunk, and with legs tired from garden work that morning, I headed back to BART and went home.  It took me a while to shake the funk at my personal failure — I should have left home hours earlier — and to realize the great good news that the candidate’s Oakland rally had a huge turnout.  The Oakland police estimated twenty-five thousand. The great majority of the faces waiting patiently in the slow-moving line looked to be under 30.

We’re going to need this kind of turnout by enthusiastic, energetic and tenacious young people in November to beat back the inflamed right wing fanatics who are driving the poll numbers for that rich boy, Trump.  The candidate who can bring this energized democratic youth to the ballot box is, without a doubt, Bernie Sanders.  Hillary can’t do it.  The harder she tries to sound like Bernie, the flatter she falls.  It isn’t her personality.  It’s her record.  Her efforts to sound like a left-wing populist are so insincere, so calculated, so triangulating, that there’s just no credibility.

Hillary wants Sanders out of the race NOW so that she can stop trying to siphon votes from the progressive voter base and tack sharply to the center, where a vacuum filled with money lures her.  Trump has delayed moving to the center, choosing instead to suction up every possible pocket of racist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, hoodlum, and wing-nut sentiment.  Wall Street is voting with its money for Hillary; she leads all candidates in campaign donations from the New York financial industry, according to a Wall Street Journal report.  A forthcoming Fortune magazine poll shows a majority of major corporate CEOs backing Hillary over Donald. But when she tacks back right, where she was before Bernie’s meteoric rise, she looks more and more obviously like the calculating, triangulating one per cent establishment candidate that she is, and she turns off energized progressive voters in droves.  She’s the kind of candidate who helped create the mess of inequality and endless wars that people are angry about.

The Democratic Party machine, with its backing of Hillary, it seems to me, is working hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Facing a widely disliked Republican candidate like Trump, the Democratic Party could probably run a yellow dog and win — if the dog energized young people and got them to turn out.  Let’s face it, a dog would probably be more popular and widely beloved than Hillary.  Her negatives have been hovering just below Trump’s and in recent polls she’s pulling even with him in the thumbs-down contest.  If she’s the candidate, the American voting public may respond to the November offering with a collective retch.  Voter turnout rates may approach the single digits, and it’s anybody’s ballgame.

I’ve gone out canvassing twice for Bernie, and given him some money out of my limited income. I hope he wins the California primary on June 7.  He’s the stronger candidate against Trump.  He’s not perfect, but he’s the candidate who most clearly and energetically advocates a path forward for this country.  As a provocative piece by former Bill Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen in the June 1 Wall Street Journal speculates, if he wins California, he might very well end up as the candidate.  Or he could knock Hillary out and open the door for something like a Biden-Warren ticket.

Let me conclude by saying that if Hillary is the candidate, I will hold my nose, as I have done for decades with Democratic Party candidates, and vote for her. Trump would be a disaster. Clinton will nominate a Supreme Court justice who will uphold Roe v. Wade.  But getting the Senate to confirm such an appointment, if Clinton’s weak showing leaves the Senate in Republican hands, is another story.  On that issue if no other, Bernie is the stronger candidate because he has a greater likelihood of regaining Senate control.

See, along a similar line of thought, this column by John Atcheson in Common Dreams.

At the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland this afternoon

At the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland this afternoon

May 02

Bernie Keeps on Keeping On

bernie-janeBy Tom Gallagher

Really, you can’t fault Hillary Clinton’s campaign for trying to get Bernie Sanders out of the race. It’s a campaign – that’s what you do. They want to win the nomination. We on the Sanders side want it too and we’d love to see Clinton out. But we’re also campaigning to change the nation by ending the corporate stranglehold on Washington. And as more and more people come to understand what that’s all about, we think we’re winning that campaign.
And it’s no secret who constitute the bulk of the voters who do see things differently. While most anything may become a bone of contention in the midst of a presidential campaign, one point that no one argues is that Sanders has electrified the youth vote: Pennsylvania exit polls, for instance, showed him winning 83 percent of under-30 primary voters. Why? Perhaps it’s because he has brought the U.S. up to speed with the rest of the world by introducing the idea of democratic socialism into the mainstream political whirl Or maybe it’s because of the clarity of his positions: Whether he’s advocating the $15 minimum wage; tuition-free public higher education; the need for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care system; the legalization of marijuana; the abolition of the death penalty; or his denunciation of the Iraq War as the country’s greatest foreign policy disaster of the last forty years, when Sanders finishes talking you know clearly where he stands, something that is often not the case with the opposition.

One of the reasons for this clarity gap is also itself quite clear. By the time most politicians reach the point of seriously contending for the presidency, they likely face an ongoing conflict between what they or their constituents might think is best and what the big money people, whom they rely on for campaign funding, will let them get away with. But when you actually run a campaign against the politics of the big money interests, as Sanders has, and people support it with unprecedented amounts of small campaign contributions, you simply don’t have to go through those contortions.

This contest pits two profoundly different visions for the American future against each other and those of us committed to dismantling the billionaires’ rule are naturally committed to taking our case all the way to the convention, win, lose, or draw. Many in the Clinton camp, on the other hand, may have a hard time understanding this determination because they have never really understood what the Sanders campaign is all about. The candidate herself certainly appeared fairly clueless as to what’s got us so exercised in this campaign, when she answered a question about why she charged $675,000 for giving speeches to the investment bankers at Goldman Sachs with the memorable words “That’s what they offered.”

The Clintons are a “power couple” without precedent in American history – a past president married to a potential future president. As we know, a significant sector of corporate America liked what it saw in them and decided to invest heavily, giving themmore than $25 million in speaking fees over a period of 16 months. Hillary Clinton now seems to think that’s quite normal and there’s probably no particular reason to think that she’s being disingenuous when she challenges Sanders to name a vote that she’s changed because of any money she’s received from these sources. The issue, of course, is not so much any votes she may have changed, but the world view she has adopted. And so far as super PAC money goes, Clinton may well have gone into this race legitimately thinking she had no alternative but to take it – after all, who could have predicted the way the Sanders campaign would revolutionize presidential campaign fundraising?

While the Clintons and their hard core supporters may never get what the Sanders campaign is all about, we know that there are millions who do – and millions more who will, when the campaign gets to their state. By all signs, the Sanders campaign has yet to reach its full potential: once trailing by fifty points, Sanders has pulled closer to Clinton in national polls in April than in any previous month.

The clock, however, is our enemy and, sooner than we might like, the Philadelphia nominating convention will be upon us, and with it the question of the superdelegates. Obviously the Sanders campaign is not responsible for their existence and there are probably few Sanders supporters who don’t wish that there were no such thing as superdelegates, or at the least that there weren’t so many of them. Perhaps they will be eliminated or drastically reduced in number for future conventions, but they are with us now and so the campaign must deal with them. There may be little cause for optimism on this score, yet we still need to confront them with the question of whether their best option is to present the voters with a candidate pledged to driving big money out of politics or one who has become wealthy through involvement in politics; a candidate who is a critic of regime change-driven foreign policy, or one who professes admiration for Henry Kissinger.

But between now and then, there are 14 primaries and caucuses, including the biggest of them all in California, and millions of voters to go. So it’s on to California – and New Jersey, and Indiana, and …

Reprinted with permission from http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/04/29/sanders-campaign-sea-shining-sea

Opening day of Bernie's Oakland office 4/30/16

Opening day of Bernie’s Oakland office 4/30/16

TomGallagherwrites.com

Apr 08

Clinton is the weaker horse

By Tom Gallagher

Gacandidatesllagher is the author of ‘The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex.’  He lives in San Francisco.  Reposted from Common Dreams with permission of the author.

Wisconsin was another great Sanders campaign success story. When the voters realized their choices were not limited to the usual corporate options, a state where a poll once showed Hillary Clinton with a 53 point lead went for Bernie Sanders by 13 points. And yet Wisconsin polls show us that there is still a gap between the campaign’s potential and the vote it actually gets. That’s a gap we’re going to have to close in a hurry if we hope to get the numbers of votes we need in the late primaries and caucuses.

When ABC News pollsters asked Wisconsin Democratic Primary voters, “Which candidate inspires you more about the future of the country?” they named Sanders by a 21 point margin (59-38%). So why didn’t he carry the state by that much? One principal reason is surely the fact that when asked “Who would have the better chance to defeat Donald J. Trump in November?” those same voters gave Clinton an 11 point edge (54-43%) – a position for which there is no evidence, although you would never know it from the day-to-day news coverage of the race.

Lets be honest all around – everyone was probably surprised when this trend developed, since the conventional wisdom coming into this race was that the more centrist candidate – Clinton – would surely poll better among the general electorate. But it turns out that independent voters consistently prefer the long-time independent Sanders. Clinton’s people understandably dismiss these polls as meaningless; commentators have largely ignored them, perhaps because they are at a loss to explain them; and the Sanders campaign itself has yet to make the most of this rather substantial piece of evidence.

Ah, but aren’t such early match-up polls irrelevant? Someone mentioned Michael Dukakis’s 18 point lead over George Bush in 1988. Fair enough, so let’s look deeper. By an 88-10% percent margin Wisconsin voters told pollsters they thought Sanders was “honest and trustworthy;” they only gave Clinton a 58-39% margin. This credibility gap has shown up consistently. In fact, a March CBS/New York Times nationwide poll found that “Compared to frontrunners in previous presidential primary races, Trump and Clinton’s unfavorable ratings (57 percent and 52 percent respectively) are the highest in CBS News/New York Times Polls going back to 1984, when CBS began asking this question.”

But again, perhaps we underestimate the severity of the campaign that the Koch brothers will wage against Sanders. After all, Clinton’s people argue, she’s been thoroughly vetted over the years – or run through the mill, if you will – and she’s still standing, but they haven’t even started on Sanders. Fair enough. So what will they say about Sanders should he get the nomination? Bernie Sanders is a socialist – oh wait, he says that himself. Okay, he’s a communist; he honeymooned in the Soviet Union (remember the Soviet Union?); he supported the Sandinistas (remember them?); he’s a pothead (or he was, or his friends were); he likes Fidel Castro and his beard, and so forth. And, of course, there’ll be the “lower” type of campaigning against him – he’s not a Christian, you know. Will there be financial scandals? Well, apart from that joke about him being guilty of having once accepted free checking from a bank, it seems exceeding unlikely – where there’s no smoke …

The campaign run against Clinton would be equally withering, although obviously very different. And really, despite her telling us in an early debate that by now we pretty much knew everything about her, is there anyone who doesn’t actually think there are more unknowns about what might be thrown at Clinton than there are about Sanders? The millions in speaking fees to the Clintons? The corporate donations to the campaigns and the foundation? It will also be brutal.

In late March, a Bloomberg Politics National Poll asked potential Democratic Primary voters across the nation which candidate “Cares the most about people like you?” They picked Sanders over Clinton by 59-33%. (They also found him “the most honest and trustworthy” by a 64-25% margin.) When the going gets ugly in a final campaign, this is probably the type of support you want to have behind you.

Should the GOP succeed in evading a Trump candidacy as so many party regulars hope it can, and were Clinton to win the Democratic nomination, she would then be the most unpopular candidate to run in a general election in at least the last thirty years. Is that really our strongest option? It would be one thing if her candidacy were based largely on voters who preferred her on the issues and were therefore willing to support her despite her liabilities as a candidate. Ironically, however, the reality appears to be that she is winning votes precisely because of the presumption that she doesn’t have such liabilities.

We in the Sanders campaign must share some of the responsibility for the lingering illusion of Clinton’s greater electability. Given the novelty of a candidate openly running against corporate domination of politics and the groundbreaking nature of a campaign run without corporate money and funded by millions of small donations, we were, quite frankly, stunned by our success and not always quick enough to make the best of every opportunity. But we have no more time to waste. The voters need to know who the stronger candidate actually is – and in a hurry.

 

Apr 04

Panama Papers a victory for transparency

 

mag-fire (Small)

Yesterday more than hundred news organizations simultaneously broke a wall of secrecy surrounding the financial transactions of prominent business and political figures in more than a dozen countries.  The source of the articles is a treasure of 11.5 million pages of documents leaked from the files of Mossack Fonseca, a law firm in Panama, that is described as the fourth largest offshore law firm in the world. The firm specializes in creating shell companies that conceal assets for various reasons, including tax avoidance.

The source of the leak has not been disclosed, but appears unrelated to Wikileaks or other known transparency activists.  The German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, received the documents about a year ago, and shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for analysis.  ICIJ then released the papers to selected media, including the UK Guardian, but not the New York Times.

Among the Panama firm’s clients whose dealings are now transparent, according to the New York Times, were

President Mauricio Macri of Argentina; President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine; Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson of Iceland; the former interim prime minister and vice president of Iraq, Ayad Allawi; King Salman of Saudi Arabia; the former emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, and its former prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani; and the Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi, according to the consortium.

The cellist Sergei Roldugin, a close friend of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was also named in the documents. The Guardian described Mr. Roldugin as being at the center of a $2 billion scheme “in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore.”

Mossack Fonseca also counted among its clients close associates of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, according to the BBC, and eight current and former members of China’s Politburo. Dozens of influential donors and politicians in Britain have also been named, including Ian Cameron, the father of Prime Minister David Cameron, who ran an offshore investment fund that avoided paying taxes in the United Kingdom, according to The Guardian. Mr. Cameron died in 2010.

The documents have set off an unprecedented avalanche of exposure of corruption in high places.  The reflex reaction of some commentators is to see the material as an indictment of some “bad apples.”  The sheer scale of the documentation released so far — more is to come — points rather to a systematic and structural pattern.  It’s well to remember that this law firm is only the fourth largest of global firms that specialize in this business.

The material released so far confirms in hard detail what probably most people in the world have long suspected, namely that the financial, legal, and political system is rigged to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor.  Some of the obvious mechanisms that generate and sharpen economic inequality — property law and tax policy foremost among them — have been documented and understood for many years.  The hidden strings that reinforce this engine of inequality and hide many of its spoils are now coming into sharper focus, thanks to the Panama Papers.  This trove of papers is further vindication, if any were needed, of the points made by the Occupy movement and the campaign theme of Bernie Sanders.

One immediate consequence of these revelations was a demonstration by tens of thousands of people in Iceland yesterday, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Gunnlaugsson, whose offshore shenanigans are laid bare in the papers.  It promises to be an interesting period now.

Mar 30

Cuba travel: It took long enough

Watching the President of the United States stroll through Old Havana almost like a regular tourist with his family the other day brought back vivid memories of my well-spent youth.  I was in college when the word went out from the US State Department that United States citizens were verboten to travel to Cuba.  This rubbed my young libertarian fur the wrong way entirely.  Plus the Cuban Revolution was such an audacious and romantic success that it became irresistible to many of us who felt stifled by the ‘fifties.

So, directly after graduation, I seized the chance to go on a journey of defiance and discovery.  I signed up with the “Student Committee for Travel to Cuba.”  I’ve told that story elsewhere on this blog, and only want to add here a photograph from that trip that I had forgotten about. Photo-Cuba,-1963That’s me, on the right, head partly out of the frame, with my chin on the shoulder of the student in front of me.  In this pic I look a little bit like Alfred E. Newman (“What Me Worry” ).  We met not only Fidel and Raul and Osvaldo Dorticos, but a smaller group of us also had a couple of hours with Che, and got to shake his hand.  I still pause for a few heartbeats and feel a shiver deep inside when I think of Che’s hands. The murderers who killed him cut off his hands and sent them to Cuba as proof that Che was dead.

The aim of our trip was to break the travel ban, by which we then understood the State Department’s edict that travel to Cuba was against the law.  We actually succeeded in that narrow aim; a federal judge in 1967 ruled that the State Department had no constitutional authority to create crimes; that therefore travel to Cuba in defiance of the State Department’s edict was no crime; and that therefore it was no crime to encourage and organize others to travel to Cuba, as I among a number of others had done, enthusiastically and energetically, after the ’63 trip.  The subsequent Venceremos Brigades carried on that good fight.

But if we thought that taking down the Sate Department’s regulation would open the doors to Cuba travel, we were mistaken.  Congress and the White House threw up a pile of other roadblocks, notably the prohibition against carrying money to Cuba, that effectively reduced travel to a trickle.  The U.S. maintained its Cuban embargo and boycott in the face of decades of almost unanimous condemnation at the United Nations and in Latin American conferences.  It’s taken another 53 years since our student trip for this shameful American version of the Berlin Wall to crack.  It feels good to win, even after more than half a century.

Others have pointed out, and I needn’t rehearse, the ulterior motives behind the American move,  Fidel’s letter to Obama makes it clear that the Cubans know that the leopard has not changed his spots.  The opening to Cuba removes a high moral barrier that had curtailed American influence in Latin American politics.  The removal of that obstacle will tend to lubricate U.S. intervention in other countries’.affairs. Especially at this moment when the populist, nationalist and laborist momentum in Latin America of the past decade  is encountering a variety of difficulties, the new American initiatives south of the border, beginning with Cuba, need careful watching.

 

Mar 11

Bernie, Hillary and the Numbers Game

My practical education in national electoral politics came in 1964, when I voted for Lyndon Johnson because he was (he said) the Peace Candidate.  No sooner in office than he turned around and escalated the Vietnam war beyond all bounds.  Aha, I said to myself, that’s the name of this game.

Every four years thereafter I held my nose and voted for the Democrat on the lesser-of-two-evils theory.  With a couple of exceptions. I did campaign for McGovern, and I was deeply moved at the first election of Obama, for the obvious reasons. When Obama then promptly installed all the stinking Wall Street engineers of the 2007 recession in the cabinet, I had that LBJ feeling all over again.

This year I’m of course a Bernie supporter, and have given his campaign a few bucks here and there.  I consider Hillary a war monger and a running dog of Wall Street.  Until the Michigan primary last week, when Bernie pulled a historic upset, I figured that the Sanders campaign would run aground in a week or so.  Now I, and many others, am beginning to ask myself, what if he wins the nomination?  Can he possibly?

Tom Gallagher, a former State Representative in Massachusetts, is familiar with the arithmetic of national elections, and has been following the Sanders campaign from very early on.  He’s the author of The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex, a book that goes into the question in considerable detail. Here’s a sort of executive summary, which Tom published on Common Dreams, March 11.  Thanks to Tom for permission to repost it here.us_map

Sanders and Clinton After Michigan: A Look at the Map, by Tom Gallagher

Much as we might wish that the anachronistic Electoral College would just go away, it won’t. At least not in time for this November’s presidential election, anyhow. Which means we need to take a hard look at the electoral map and consider the implications of the fact that the main electoral strength Hillary Clinton has demonstrated thus far lies in states that, unfortunately, are almost certain to go Republican this fall.

Up to this point, eleven states that went for Mitt Romney in 2012 have held their Democratic primaries or caucuses. Clinton has won eight of them, gaining 471 delegates to 236 for Sanders. Of the ten “blue state” races held thus far, Sanders has won six, with a 311 to 287 delegate lead. The entirety of Clinton’s current 758 to 547 elected delegate lead, then, comes from “red states.” The votes of red state delegates count in the Democratic presidential nominating convention, of course, but the unfortunate realities of our electoral system suggest that the actual voters from those states will not be able to have an impact on the November outcome, since all of the red states that have voted thus far, and given Clinton her delegate lead, have gone Republican in November in each of the last four presidential elections.

Now, for voters in the upcoming caucuses and primaries who are committed to Clinton on the issues or as a person, all of this will be beside the point. But pretty much everything we’ve seen thus far suggests that the assertion/belief that she has the advantage so far as electability goes is a central component of the Clinton candidacy. In Iowa, for instance, where Clinton eked out a win, 20% of voters told pollsters that the “candidate quality” that mattered most to them was that the candidate “can win in November.” Those voters favored Clinton by 77-17% over Sanders in that poll (Martin O’Malley was still in the race), which would have given the state to Clinton, if reflected in reality..

But perhaps the most pointed example of the question’s significance to the Clinton campaign effort came in Massachusetts. A UMass Amherst/WBZ pre-election poll found likely voters there declaring that it was Sanders who “best represents my views on the issues” by a 64-25% margin. 75% also considered him the “most trustworthy,” compared to 13% who felt that way about Clinton. And yet she won the poll by a margin quite close to the 1.8% by which she won the state’s actual primary vote. Why? In part because 65% thought Clinton was the one who “has the best chance of winning the general election,” compared to 29% for Sanders. This suggests that here again, the difference between what people actually wanted and what they felt they had to settle for may have been enough to tip the state to Clinton.

There are two problems here – for Sanders, obviously, but also more generally for the Democrats’ prospects in the fall. The first is that it is Sanders who is emerging as the more popular among caucus and primary voters in states that Democrats have carried in any presidential election in this century. The second is that polls continue to show that it is Sanders, not Clinton, who has the better chance of beating Trump (and the other Republicans) in the fall. Polls do generally show Clinton beating the GOP as well, but by smaller margins. And with the Koch brothers pledged to bring $879 million in right wing money into play in this year’s federal elections, we probably want to go into this with our strongest candidate. But, you may say, doesn’t Sanders huge upset victory in Michigan show that we can’t necessarily rely on the predictive power of polls? True that, but the fact remains that there is simply no evidence that it is Clinton who has the better prospects in the fall – except for the mainstream media’s feeling that it must be so.

Sanders made the decision to enter the Democratic primary process, after a two-decade congressional career as an independent, because he recognized that in order to have a real chance he had to do so. The results, as we have seen, have been spectacular when compared to most expectations. But there are, of course, drawbacks. The flocking of the super delegates to one of their own, the longstanding Democrat Clinton, is an obvious example (but one that can potentially be undone should Sanders emerge with the greater number of elected delegates). Less obvious is the absence of independents in many of the Democratic races. In some states independents are allowed to vote in Democratic contests and in others not, but overall, of course, their participation is lower. And the principal reason that Sanders shows better than Clinton in November polls appears to be his greater strength with those voters.

At this point, then, we might almost look at the Democratic Party nominating process as something of a bottleneck that Sanders must navigate in hopes of reaching the broader November electorate where he can bring that strength to bear. Our hope for the future must be that primary and caucus voters still to come will recognize that they need not replicate the results of the solid south that voted before them.

Feb 13

Aubergine at the Berkeley Rep’s new Peet’s Theatre

auslide1Aubergine, which opened at the Rep this evening, is a sweet and savory meditation on food, death, and family.  A young man named Ray (Tim Kang) has to confront the imminent death of his father (Sab Shimono).  Referred home from the hospital for hospice care, the father lies on his deathbed and only groans occasionally.  Ray’s mother died long ago.  

The only other family member is his uncle, his father’s older brother (Joseph Steven Yang), who lives in Korea.  With the help of his girlfriend, Cornelia (Jennifer Lim), who is bilingual English/Korean, Ray manages to contact the brother and tell him the news.

The brother arrives from Korea and convinces Ray to cook a last meal of turtle soup for his dad, even though his dad is unable to eat or even drink water.  There are genuinely funny scenes where Ray, who speaks no Korean, converses with the uncle, who speaks no English. There are flashbacks and meditative dialogues about food and death and the bonds and tensions between parents and children.  At the end, Ray takes his dad’s ashes back to Korea, then returns home and opens a restaurant.  

It’s a small, intimate cast with a minimum of action.  The Rep’s spiffy renovated thrust stage, reborn as the Peet’s Theatre, and the new Meyer sound system provide excellent visibility and audio even up in the nosebleed section.  The new seats are very comfortable.  As usual, the Rep’s stage set features minor miracles of changing scenery, although the death scene blackout is a bit melodramatic.  The acting throughout is at a high level.  The audience was very pleased and greeted the curtain call with a standing ovation.

However, there were some things that did not work for me in the script.  Item:  In an opening monologue, a character (Safiya Fredericks) who is unrelated to the rest of the action, and who describes herself as an extreme gourmet, recounts a late night at home when the smell of frying butter woke her up and she found her father making a hot pastrami sandwich.  She says it was the most delicious dish she ever tasted, even though it had “only two ingredients, meat and bread.”  Hello?  She forgot the third ingredient whose fragrance drew her to the dish, the butter. No gourmet would forget butter. It’s a small oversight but right at the outset it undermines the credibility of the script and of the character who has to voice it.

Item:  Ray, seconded by his uncle, describes his dad as the ultimate bad food eater.  He had no sense of taste.  He hated good restaurants and even considered a Big Mac too pretentious.  We hear extensive descriptions of what a poor eater he was all of his life.  Yet Ray says that his dad always weighed his food with a scale.  That makes no sense.  Junk food eaters don’t weigh their food. It doesn’t work.

I also had trouble with the business of Ray, who is presented as a great chef, preparing a dish of Korean turtle soup for his dad. There’s a completely unnecessary riff on slaughtering a turtle (it had the audience on the verge of protest). It could just as well have been chicken soup instead of turtle soup.  And the trouble taken to prepare this very fancy dish for a man who hated fancy dishes struck me as borderline contemptuous of the dying man. A simpler dish would have been kinder to the father and to aquatic wildlife, especially since the father was too ill to eat, in any case.  

There are several threads of dialogue and monologue about the tensions between parents and children. These don’t break new ground.  Apart from a few very brief flashback scenes between Ray and his father, these meditations are just talk.  The early scene between Ray and his girlfriend, where she almost walks out on him, has sparkle and wit, but most of their later conversations lack depth and interest.  

The death of a parent is an experience that resonated with many people of a certain age in the audience. The hospice nurse (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson) is a fount of experience and wisdom for Ray, teaching him much about how death may occur and how one can handle it. The nurse’s role struck me as very well written.  But the script’s effort to show that the experience of witnessing his father’s death has somehow penetrated Ray’s emotional firewall fails, to my mind.  It all hangs on Ray’s speech to an audience of zero at the memorial service. (That’s another script glitch, because the hospice nurse had promised to be present).  The speech is just too talky and too late to serve as catharsis.  Ray, the main character, remains emotionally inert except about the knives that are the tools of his trade. There’s no convincing scene here showing Ray coming to any kind of emotional bond with his Dad, even in death.  There’s not much of an arc here to give the whole structure coherence.

Ray’s central insight, he says in his memorial speech, is that we are all dead, or partly dead. This cryptic line could be the start of some deeper reflections along various lines (Sophocles? Freud? Sartre? Zombies?), but the script doesn’t give Ray anything to work with. He simply jumps to the conclusion that “therefore” we need to live each day to the fullest. Carpe diem. Quite true, but this wisdom is won too easily, like a Hallmark card message.   

Food, death, and family are a good mix for a stage drama.  Quite a few films have explored similar ingredients.  Quality acting and stagecraft make Aubergine a pleasant enough stew, but it could use a bit more sifting and a great deal more sizzle.