Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Apr 22, 2017
On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses playwright Eugene O’Neill’s shattering of the American myth in the play “Mourning Becomes Electra”. Hedges is joined by his wife Eunice Wong who is playing Lavinia Mannon in Target Margin Theater’s production of the play and director David Herskovits.
From the archives:
Chris Hedges: The Corporate State’s Assault on the Arts
The Intimately Oppressed by Howard Zinn (repost)
Back To The Future: The Legacy Of Abraham Lincoln by Arthur D. Robbins
Dandelion Salad 
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It needs to be pointed out here that Eugene O’Neill and Dorothy Day had a falling out over O’Neill’s hatred of her conversion to Christ. This is brilliantly portrayed in the movie “Entertaining Angels”. O’Neill eventually succumbs toward a form of nihilism and Day becomes the founder of the Catholic Worker.
Neither O’Neill nor Baldwin really understood that the gospel of Christ was a gospel of life and its affirmation.
As O’Neill is eclipsed by Day, so Baldwin is eclipsed by MLK. Both Day and MLK proved that the gospel is not one of death and blah blah blah … but very life itself.
Thanks for the additional information, Rocket.
thanks . but that does not mean that O Neil and Baldwin were not great writers from an artistic view . they were.
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No escape indeed! I’ve felt them for so many years, those American ghosts…
As the late, great Canadian peoples’ poet Milton Acorn said “dig up my heart…” but that is also the karma/khamma of the world.
Eunice articulates most wonderfully the core of the metaphysical complaint that O’Neill understood so well; that “the two primary crimes of modern civilization were christianity and capitalism ~ ‘christianity’ in it’s life denying form as a gospel of death, like Puritanism; where life is denied and you have to adhere to this lens of sin, through which you see the world…and capitalism…& it was all about life-denying forces….”
Great conversation.
David – the gospel is not one of death but of a qualitative life in the now imparted to those who stop resisting it . If you still perceive it as Christ is dead and that his death was the end then seeing it from the outside is not seeing what it really is . And of course one cannot even begin to really see it until one passes thru the offence of the cross .
but the offence of the cross is rarely proclaimed . it is mouthed here in the good old USA but not really proclaimed in power by those who really live it . So what we have is two things sociologically : one is the truncated form of it . the second is the new age gnostic based reaction to its truncated form as seen in the second book of Seth which is Docetist in nature Soterologically.
interesting though – both American fundamentalism and New Age Gnosticism are both Puritanism and so very puritanical in their approach . Atrocities follow. Both basically denying the humanity of God in Christ …as an extention of loathing their own humanity . So i offer the Apostles Creed as the way to think in paradox – the paradox of the God-Man.
this is why Hedges understands externalizing evil comes from our own self loathing .