Pete Seeger, Joss Whedon & William Grieder: Anti-Hierarchical Visions

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun May 10, 2009 at 21:00

Starting off with Pete Seegar, I won't quote him directly, but instead will repeat a brief passage by Dar Williams that I quoted in the Pete Seeger diary:

AMY GOODMAN: When do you remember first hearing Pete?

     DAR WILLIAMS: Let's see. Well, you know, as Peter said, you know, there are certain things that are just in your DNA. So, who knows when any of us first heard Pete? But I do remember a friend of mine working at a camp for disabled kids. And I was just out of college, and I was, you know, trying to figure out what my contribution to society would be. And he showed up and was-he sang "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain."

     And nobody really knew he was coming. It was a camp for disabled kids. You know, there was nothing-it was just he was there to sing music that would include people. And kids in wheelchairs were singing; kids were singing in sign language; kids with disabilities, with very limited abilities to, you know, participate, were participating.

     All the counselors were in tears. I was in tears, because he was just-and I just thought, you know, that spirit of inclusiveness, that spirit of unity. Of all these different abilities, these kids who have this, you know, desire to express and be a part of it, he's completely succeeded. You know? And everyone was going, "Whoo-hoo!"

That's when I realized what his power was and that the power is-what Spalding Gray called like "horizontal." You know, it wasn't vertical, from on top of a mountain speaking down. It was radiating outwards. And that's when I realized that that's the kind of power, that if I ever had it, that's the way I would do it. So, my cognizance of his power was around then.

Horizontal power-the power of inclusiveness-that's part of the very essence of what Pete's life has been about, because it's true essence of what the left is about: power-with, not power-over.  And, of course, that's true of the Net as well.

"I think this is a really rare moment in which it's going to be very hard and ugly for a lot of people," Greider said. "But out of that, I have more than hope - I have a sense that a lot of Americans will step up and reclaim what's really their birthright. This is the way big changes happen in our country, from the bottom up."

Greider also said he believed that the academic community across the country will be strongly influential in U.S. economic discourse.

"University students are very important in the phase of politics I'm describing,
because they'll have the opportunity to explain new ideas," he said. "The university ... will enrich the national debate, and that's why I love speaking to this audience."

It's not universities alone.  Greider sees Americans in all walks of life as having capacities to contribute, and build up from below.  He knows that's how this country was built, and he sees it as how America can be rebuilt.

But of all the artists working in America today, one of the most persistently challenging who deals with issues of hierarchical power is Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, whose newest series, Dollhouse concluded its first season on Friday night.  Whedon is responsible for four tv series, Buffy and its spin-off, Angel were both set in world of vampires and demons, which is seemingly the same world (the "Buffyverse") but then again, maybe not quite.  Firefly was set in an all-human space-faring future, and Dollhouse is set in a science-fictional present.

All four series share some things in common-a natural result of an author with a strong personal vision-as well as other aspects that diverge wildly from each other.  One of the things shared in common is the tension between good & evil (roughly described as life sustaining vs. life-destroying) and hierarchy and anarchy.  Sooner or later, in all of them, the "good" hierarchy proves itself as problematic as the "bad" anarchy-or at least potentially so.  Whedon is far too good an artist to have it always turn out the same, and, in fact, it's just a subset of his more general interest in dealing with moral ambiguity-cause let's face it, fighting inner demons is always tougher than fighting the ones you can actually see.

In Buffy there are various different evils in every episode, along with a big evil for each Season, which serves as an ongoing "big bad"-a different one each season, except for one reinvention.   The "good" hierarchy is the Council of Watchers, who see themselves as fighting evil, with the slayers, who tend not to live very long, as merely their instruments.  One of the basic rules is that the Slayer must hide her identity-one of the many, many rules that Buffy breaks (not that she really has much of a choice, actually)-and it's precisely because Buffy breaks this rule that she manages to far outlive the normal Slayer's life expectancy: it's her contact with her friends, indeed, her continued reliance on them that keeps her alive, in various different ways over the course of the series. She also clashes with the Council repeatedly, until it's finally revealed that the Slayer line was created by the original Watchers in an act of semi-controlled spiritual demon-rape.  No wonder there's bad blood.

In the Angel half of the Buffyverse, the Council of Watchers barely even get's mentioned..  The "good" hierarchy is the perennial off-stage "Powers that Be".  But when they finally do put in an appearance, they're even more controlling, and not to be trusted-all in the name of the greater good, of course.   The bad hierarchy is constant throughout, however, a "law firm" known as Wolfram and Hart-or "Wolf Ram and Hart" in another dimension that's visited for a period of time.  Mixing up the sides, at one point, in order to save his son from impending suicide, Angel agrees to a deal in which he and his band of demon-fighters take over the LA branch of Wolfram & Hart, which actually lets them do far more good than they otherwise could, but at the cost of having to facilitate evil as well.  It's a deal that troubles Angel from the very start, and eventually has to be broken.

In Firefly and the movie spinoff Serenity (named for the somewhat worse for wear spaceship on which the show and movie are set), the good and evil hierarchies are one and the same-the Earth-centered Alliance, which has successfully crushed the outlying worlds in a war that Serenity's crew still feels like its fighting much of the time..  In an interview somewhere I recall Whedon saying that the problem with the show's protagonist, Malcolm Reynolds, was that he could only see the bad side.  And, in fact, we see do see a whole lot more of that bad side, since after all, that's how Whedon sees things, too. Me too, in fact.

Dollhouse is more like Serenity, in that the primary hierarchy is overtly evil: it's a commercial slavery outfit, in fact, named, oddly enough, the Dollhouse.  The slaves are called "dolls", they've had their identities "wiped"-to be restored after their 5-year "contracts" are up.  Yup, "contracts", the exact nature of which, including conditions under which they are signed, are one of the shows deeper secrets. So it's a very modern type of slavery.  In the meantime, they are virtual automatons, with the personality of vacuous models under heavy sedation.  They're given new identities for every assignment to play one sort of role or another for very high-plying clients.  Some are sexual, some are criminal, you get the drift.  And when the assignment is done?  Another mindwipe, and back to the blank slate.  The principal doll is Echo, and she takes on a wide range of roles, but always ones that rely on considerable strengths. She's never the shrinking violet type.

The good hierarchy?  Well, that would be the FBI, I guess.  But the FBI agent who's trying to bring down the Dollhouse is not taken seriously by his superiors, and eventually gets suspended.  Although it's quite clear that the Dollhouse is evil, most of those we see working there are rather sympathetic, and at least two openly express misgivings of one sort or another.

The description I've presented here is too schematic in flavor, as I'm trying to highlight just one aspect of what's actually a very rich and complex body of work.  There are also some rather benign hierarchies, for example.  Buffy has her own Watcher, Giles, for example, who gets fired by the Watchers Council, because he rebels against them, and displays "a fathers love" for her, thus rendering himself useless to them.   Buffy also gets a magical little sister along the way, and takes on a quasi-parental role toward her.

Dollhouse is much more fluid than the other series, due in part to the fact that dolls are different characters every week, and in part to the rapid developmental pace of the overall story.  But there's a strong connection between Buffy and Dollhouse--both are concerned, in part with the emergence of their protagonist's identity.  Slayers normally die rather quickly.  The fact that Buffy doesn't means she has time to reflect on her role as Slayer and struggle in all sorts of ways to resolve the tension between it and the desire for a normal life.  But that's really only the beginning.  The bigger struggle is really define for herself who she is-the same struggle everyone goes through passing from adolescence into adulthood, only in her case portrayed in mythic terms.  After all, she does die and come back several times, and saves the world on a semi-regular basis.  

Echo's story is parallel, but in a completely different register.  Just as the slayers' short life-span precludes their development, the dolls mindwiped state precludes their's. Dolls aren't supposed to have any identity or any carry-over form one imprinted personality and assignment to another.  But Echo does.  The people running the dollhouse don't know how or why, but it represents a potential benefit as well as a threat, so they monitor the process by which a non-person, without really knowing it, takes a series of baby-steps toward personhood.  

That's a pretty amazing affirmation of selfhood, when you get right down to it.  And every step of the way, there's always an element of community-building as well, however minimal it necessarily is.

If there is to be an emergent global networked consciousness that doesn't superceede us as individuals, but allows us to expand who we already are, and take back our power from the hierarchies that pretend to act in our interests and our names, then these stories that Joss Whedon has been telling in various different forms are a kind of prefiguration of what that process may ultimately be like--what it's perils, promises and possibilities may be.