In his 1970 Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe describes a now famous party at the home of Leonard Bernstein where an elite group of artists and intellectuals sipped cocktails and munched on Swedish meatballs and brie with assorted members of the radical elite: Black Panthers, Young Lords, etc. Readers of Wallace Shawn’s little collection of essays might well expect that he would have been right at home there. Although most famous as a playwright and actor (My Dinner With Andre, Aunt Dan and Lemon), the lion’s share of this book is devoted to essays on politics and society, essays which unabashedly take a markedly liberal, or to use the current sobriquet, progressive point of view. Shawn is about as Liberal as they come (the kind Rush Limbaugh likes to call the crazies on the left) and is refreshingly unapologetic about it.
In his introduction, he explains that he is dividing his book into two parts: the first concerned with reality, the second with the dream world. In the first he writes about things like the attack on the World Trade Center, the invasion of Iraq, and the Israeli attack on Gaza. In the second he describes how he came to write for the theater, the experience of reading plays, and writing about sex. In the first he includes an interview with Noam Chomsky; in the second, an interview with poet, Mark Strand.
His political views are made clear in his introduction. He understands that he is a member of a privileged class and relishes the variety of comforts that membership in that class affords him, from fine restaurants to the time and leisure to practice his art. Still, he also recognizes that those comforts are afforded him on the backs of good many others who are not members of that privileged class: everyone from waiters to cleaning women, peasants in oil rich sheikdoms to starving African natives. It is not strange then, he opines, that there comes a time when the have nots — and there are so many of them — begin to object and perhaps object very strenuously. From this point of view, can one blame the Palestinians for being "unhappy" with the Israelis, the World Trade Center terrorist from being "upset" with America? This chickens coming home analysis of the world situation may not sit well with all readers, but it is not something that hasn’t been said before.
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