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| Greg Lam |
So-called “cancel culture” is the phrase used by those who feel threatened by the idea of one being held accountable for one’s own actions. Tearing down a Confederate statue is not erasing history, it is no longer accepting the adulation of bad history. The history remains, but we will no longer allow it to be held up as an example of good behavior.
How will future generations judge us? Four, five mass shootings in the span of one week? And we remain indoors, we aren’t in the streets, we have not called for the resignation of every elected official for their refusal to act? What does that say about us? Are we not all responsible?
Lam’s play Last Ship to Proxima Centauri is fucking hilarious, and deeply troubling. And fucking hilarious. What if the Americans were the last to arrive at a planet already resettled by all those other survivors of our dying planet, none of whom are of European ancestry? Why on Earth (or Yeni Dünya, the “New World”) would they not be less than happy to see us?
“They all had guns. And they shot all the blacks all the time.” That is our history, as it is remembered. Any argument to the contrary begins, “Whatabout ?”
What keeps this play charging along are those gut punches Lam includes, without additional commentary, suggesting that the 100,000 Americans held in stasis for the 2,000 journey include some “very fine people” or when the one BIPOC American who is received during the ship’s crash landing defends the reputation of white Americans by stating that “most of my friends are white.”
It’s devastating, devastatingly funny, and now I need to write my Senators.
Who should I read tomorrow?
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