The Playgoer: "Corrie" Context gets Crazy

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Tuesday, June 27, 2006

"Corrie" Context gets Crazy

Obviously any idle speculation on my part here in recent days about things, uh, calming down in Israel by the time "My Name is Rachel Corrie" premieres here in October was just that, idle. Today the headlines continue to bring news of another Gaza standoff.

Couple that with the interesting reappearance of the infamous "flag burning" photo of Corrie (right) in many of the press stories, here and abroad, covering the play's announcement . (Like here and here.) If you're a news editor, this is obviously the graphic that makes the story more interesting to a lay audience: New York doing a censored play about a crazy anti-semitic flag-burner. Makes New York Theatre Workshop almost look good, doesn't it!

One can't--and shouldn't--deny the photo. Although I do think that's a lame excuse for a flag. (Do crayon drawings even count?) But given this bill making its way through Congress again this election season, don't be surprised if we start seeing the picture even more often in connection with the play. After all, "Corrie" will open in October and play through November.

We may make O'Reilly yet!

3 comments:

freespeechlover said...

Yep. I have to agree with you about Corrie's version of the American "flag." I remember a while ago when punishing people who burn the sacred r,w, & b also came up in the Senate. Diane Feinstein of S.F. said, "the flag is not just a piece of cloth." The S.F. Chronicle said, "Yes, it is just a piece of cloth." I'm crossing my fingers that they've said it again, but I haven't looked.

What I want to know is this-if I have a flag, and it's my property (equally sacred to right-wing), why can't I burn it? Don't my property rights, another right-wing fetish, exceed the rights of Congress to keep me from burning my damn flag?

I actually have an active fantasy that this argument will be made before the US Supreme Court. Just watching the right-wing abandon their love affair with property rights over The Flag, the twisting, turning and contorting it would take, just brings a smile to my face.

Anonymous said...

Makes me smile, too, FSL! Of course they would have to make a distinction between the privately owned OBJECT and the publicly owned (not that they'd quite use that phrase) SYMBOL -- and the Platonic reasoning would get them all twisted up. That really would be fun.

How disgusting that so many senators are pandering on flag fetishism -- that stupid amendment just might make it.

PeonInChief said...

Eric Hobsbawm, discussing the rise of petty nationalism around the industrialized world in The Age of Empire, noted that only in the US did it sink so low that people paid homage to a piece of cloth.