Review

Plays about real-life human dramas often plumb deep cultural roots.  For the first time in earth’s history, massive climate change is taking place in the presence of a terrestrial species that expresses itself in cultural artifacts.  Human activity threatens the natural world, but humans are also able to study and to project the probable outcomes of that activity.  Human society will also determine whether the mass extinction of species currently underway will bury it as well.

Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress
by Steve Early
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013

At the beginning of 2013, American workers were reeling from body blows -- in Michigan among other places.  How does that state transmogrify from being the heart of the labor movement to a "right-to-work (for less)" locale, taking its place alongside the Deep South?  This anti-worker plague swept through surrounding states.  Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio, in that order, took away workers' right to negotiate their conditions, even though this tack was defeated by a vote of the public in Ohio in November 2011.  Indiana enacted a right-to-work law affecting private sector employees.  A year after the Ohio vote, workers in Michigan were defeated on two referenda concerning government workers' ability to negotiate.   At that stage, what happened in the latter state shouldn't have shocked anyone.

The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is a Baltimore treasure housing the art of self-taught artists – many of them working class, some with histories of mental health breakdowns, of exile and genocide, of poverty and exclusion. This is outsider art that leaves you gasping with awe at the dazzling work people can create out of matchsticks or crocheted yarn remnants or broken dishes. Many of the exhibited pieces are sparkly and intricate and wrenching and extreme.