Re-Reading Angels in America Again: A Gay Lamentation on National Themes

 

I've been thinking a lot about Angels in America this week. A friend of mine texted me last weekend about joining her old law school cohort who were saying Kaddish for Ruth Bader Ginsburg via a text exchange. Where are we as a nation right now? We cannot sit together, yet for many of us the communities to which we belong were already spread all over the country. So, we reach out in little electronic attempts to ease our collective pain. Kaddish has been said in many places—a Eurasian steppe, synagogues in Jerusalem, in unnamable camps during unbelievable times. And via text message by some now-graduated law students, sending to whatever god who listens these words of blessing for the dead.

 I think of Angels in America a lot these days. I think of Roy Cohn's fictional avatar swearing to the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, "Better dead than red" while I know that his protégé occupies the White House thanks to the past and still-occurring assistance of a foreign leader who was once an agent in the KGB. And who—the protégé in his starring role as president—gave the presidential medal of freedom (I've left this intentionally uncapitalized) to Ed Meese. I can't decide if the blatant corruption of our democracy at the behest of Putin would trouble the real Roy Cohn, who claimed to hate the Commies. Or if, as seems to be emerging in our national crisis, the real motive of all of these "Saints of the Right," as Kushner calls them, was always just a craven pursuit of power. The fictional Cohn may die spitting venom at the memory of Ethel Rosenberg, the Russian spy; the real Cohn was probably just riding a zeitgeist to power, though his real animosity was towards a woman he didn't like. Methinks his protégé learned many of his tricks.

 My particular reason for thinking about Angels in America this week, however—as opposed to the million different things happening in our country that make Kushner's masterpiece feel so unnervingly prescient—was that collective Kaddish my friend join in honor of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I am reluctant to hold any public figure in such high esteem that I consider their passing in biblical proportions, but I wept when I heard the news about Ginsburg's death. I do honor her and acknowledge her extraordinary accomplishments. And, towards the end of her life, her courage and, to give a word to it, martyrdom. She should have retired a couple of years ago and spent a year or two at rest with her family, but she fought through cancer and other illnesses to the point her body finally gave out—all for the cause of preserving one seat on a court the loss of which could truly undermine basic freedoms in this country so completely as to return us to the final days of Reconciliation. These are the terms of America; for this cause, Ginsburg gave her full measure of devotion even unto her last. Thus, I wish I had joined with people in my community, or any community, to say Kaddish for her. I am not Jewish, but I honor all prayers for the dead. Ginsburg was Jewish, and I'd have liked to participate in some capacity in honoring her through this deeply moving prayer.

 Meanwhile, I started thinking about Louis saying Kaddish for Roy at Belize's insistence in Angels in America. The film version of this scene in the hospital is stunning—the already quiet hospital room and the dead body in it; the secrecy of Belize's mission to steal a supply of AZT for Prior; Louis' general shock at being, for the first time in his life, in a room with a dead body. These quiet contexts give way, of course, to Louis’ angry disbelief that Belize would ask him to say Kaddish for Roy, mixed with his own admission of being a "deeply secular Jew" who doesn't know the prayer in the first place. Kushner adds a touch of humor; in the film, at least, Louis places a napkin on his head because the entire scenario is divorced from anything that should be acceptable. It is doubtful Roy said Kaddish for Ethel Rosenburg. It is doubtful he gave two figs for any of the lives he destroyed (in this his protégé also learned many lessons). What person would say Kaddish for him, then?

 No one. Which is why Belize calls Louis. Roy was, after all, just a man, and "he died a hard death" (as did so many gay men in the AIDS ward at St. Vincent's, so many alone, so many with no one to say a prayer for them). In the end, we do, in fact, all die alone.

 That same friend of mine who said Kaddish via texts messages with her law school cohort apparently was in a similar headspace as I this week, thinking on this scene and its significance. We were texting each other a few days later and weighing in on why this scene resonates. I offered that it is "a raw reminder of the stakes of life and death," meaning that we all die and that death is significant. No one should celebrate it. No one should dance on any graves.

 My friend had a clearer way of seeing this scene, and her words struck me as the better way to see it: "To me it is the refusal to live by the terms of people who hate you."

 Yes. And that is what makes me who I am; Louis and Belize who they are; and, in his opposite perspective, fictional Roy Cohn (and his real-life protégé) precisely not like me and others (my friend) who stand for the value of human dignity. It is as simple as that. I would like to say Kaddish for the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs of this world; I will also say Kaddish for the Roy Cohns.

 Oh, but the scene then gets even more stunning. As Louis tries to remember the Kaddish, he first misspeaks a different prayer. He tries to find ways to say he can't do it. He wants an excuse not to do it—but he keeps trying. To circle back to that napkin on his head, if nothing about the scene is or allows for the appropriate way to say Kaddish, you make do as best you can. As Louis stands there, lamenting how ridiculous he looks and feels, Belize quietly looks on. Belize and Louis are not exactly buddies, but here they are still two queens, two people who know what it is like to be on the receiving end of the hate of men like Roy Cohn. They are there together, saying Kaddish for the dead.  

 Then the lights go down, and from a dark doorway in the wall, Ethel Rosenberg emerges—she says a line; Louis hears her and repeats it. Cut to Belize's perspective: the lights are back up and Louis stands beside Roy's deathbed, speaking the Kaddish alone. Cut back to Louis with Ethel, from the darkness of death and eternity . . . and life and those still living. They begin to speak together, to engage in a call and response. A deep gap in time and experience lessens, and history, in all its magnitude, heartbreak, loss, and potential, reaches down from some high heaven and in touching this moment touches all of us. 

 Then Ethel adds a final line, which I think is not in the Kaddish recorded in books to teach new generations these old Jewish prayers. If I were to say Kaddish for the Roy Cohns of this world, that is the amen I’d add to the end of my prayer as well.  

 Ruth Bader Ginsburg died right as we eclipsed 200,000 deaths from COVID (officially), right as Cohn's protégé said it was affecting basically nobody, at least no one who mattered. It might even be, some still feel, be a giant hoax after all—or so I thought last night while sitting at a bar watching NFL teams play in empty stadiums to very realistic crowd noise piped in from the PA system. To quote Louis from elsewhere in Angels in America: "This is progress?" He says this line in his apartment in Alphabet-land, and he delivers it with a performative irony borrowed from an impression of a Jewish grandmother, but he adds to it the irony inherent in the perspective of any world-weary queen. It fits so much right now.   

 I taught Angels in America for the first time in Fall 2016, just past midterms, our second-to-last book for a Gay and Lesbian Literature class I teach every semester. I had been using so many scenes from it to explore the impact of AIDS on the [gay] community (thanks, Fran Lebowitz) that I figured I might as well just have the students read it instead of showing them clips from it to explain scenes in other books.

 I bought a new copy for that semester—the most recent revision by Kushner and published by Theatre Communications Group in 2013. This "revised and complete edition" includes a new introduction by Kushner, written in 2012, about the presidential campaign, fears of (Mormon) Mitt Romney and the descent into a madness too familiar from the play set in the 1980s and published nearly 20 years before that election wherein the contrast felt so stark.

 In the days after the 2016 election, I struggled to find the energy to feed myself, much less read anything. I would start crying in the middle of the day, at random moments. The fall skies in those mid-November weeks were golden but the sun set so early. By the time I got home from work, it was just passing dusk. On the weekends, I sat in a chair by the enormous front window in my apartment in Mineral Point, watching what felt like the sunset on the last days.

 Then, at one point, a couple weeks after the election, I met three of my colleagues for dinner in Platteville. We all had been in collective mourning and shock, but we wanted to meet to see each other, to share our emotions. We sort of pretended we weren't going to talk about the election, but that was just a way to get ourselves together so we could talk about it, about each other, about our world and our lives. It was a dinner that I found so deeply necessary. It pulled me up from a level of despair to which I did not realize I had descended.

 Then, on the way home, after dark, I got off the exit for Mineral Point, and just past the first silos and in front of the tractor dealership, I saw too late two raccoons scurrying across the road. I hit the second one. The impact was so loud I knew that I had killed it. I pulled over, right there where I had hit it, and cried to the point I couldn't breathe. And begged and begged that I was sorry. Because all I could think of was not the life that was taken, but the life that now had to go on, alone.

 After a while, I opened my door to see what I had done. No other cars were out. The raccoon lay in the road, unmoving, exactly where I'd hit it. I finally drove the mile to my apartment, got a broom (the only thing I had), drove back, and scooped it up out of the road. I walked it into the ditch, a few feet off the highway. I didn’t want any other cars to hit it. I wanted it, even in death, to find a quieter place to lie in peace. Then I texted some friends, but I couldn't explain it. I was distraught at the time and thought that is why I couldn’t put words to why I was so devastated. Now, despite this blogpost, I still can’t quite tell you what it means.  

 I suspect the other racoon ran for its life; at best it hid in some distant bushes, terrified of the ogre who had taken the life of its traveling companion. And they were companions. They were near the same size, young adult. Walking one behind the other. I killed the one behind. It was an accident, but still I did it. It was a loss that is irreplaceable. There is no undoing what is done.

 That weekend I began re-reading Angels in America, Part I on Saturday, Part II on Sunday. I had to read it for my class—I can quote the nearly the entire play from memory, but I wanted to re-read it even before the election, just so it was fresh in my mind. After the election, I felt compelled to re-read it, and I did so knowing that I was not reading it for teaching. I was reading it looking for its singular vision of future hope.

 I'll conclude here where the play begins—with that rabbi at the funeral. He tells the story not of a woman but of a people who carried one world on their back and set it here to make a new world for their children; but the rabbi insists that their goals were not to cross a divide never to look back on what they left behind them. They wanted to bring with them what they carried, what they experienced, and what they knew. These are the things that made them who they were and in turn make their children who we (yes, we—all of us) are today. But we don't make that journey, the rabbi insisted, in fact we can’t make that journey. For the actual journey—all journeys of such enormity and significance—they no longer exist in the world, he says. Then the play proves him wrong, but with kindness and dignity. A night plane across America; a motley crew gathered by Bethesda Fountain in Central Park; angels in heaven, coughing in heavy coats and waiting for god to return (also, intentionally uncapitalized, god, that is).

 Somewhere Walt Whitman is thinking of his tan-faced children. Somewhere he is also reminding us that those of you 100 years from now are more in our thoughts than you know.

 So, this weekend, I'm re-reading Angels in America again, for the first time since the 2016 election. And I am thinking about our journey from that place to here. From here to tomorrow. From thence, on.