Citizen: An American Lyric in itself is a tome of witchcraft. By this I mean there is no call for compassion of a supposedly oppressed group. It takes, as the nature of society, a war against all, but in this particular incantation, a war against the white man against the black man and how the latter continues to be enslaved. It does not feign attempting to be sympathetic toward the quote oppressor. Immediately out of the gates we are confronted with a more intellectualized version of Get Out, which might have been intriguing to explore the need or insistence on an African American to maintain a sense of identity, a sense of heritage, with their historical condition. That it makes one feel uneasy to be gently assimilated into the quote white world can be taken humorously or even more powerfully dramatic than what is disapprovingly offered here.
 
We have no consideration, in other words, that what is claimed to be white or black is more necessarily, fundamentally, human. It is an entirely dilapidated and vituperative laceration. This, of course, would explain the reason why the book, then adapted into this play, could not take the peculiarities of human nature as a joke, but as an outright sin. And Citizen: An American Lyric is the sermon explicating the damnation.
 
But of course, this is only a select subjectivity of the experience. Certainly, a sincerer artist, one that does not have a call or even encouragement for vengeance, may take any sort of obstinacy in customs and practices which cause such perturbing frictions with again, a grander sympathy of the tragic nature of man and the obstacles of materializing his will against that which refuses it. To ad hoc label these things as racist, such as the pitiful pontification of a line judge in tennis calling for restraint against Serena Williams, is an absurdity. This absurdity shares the same genealogy as the protestations against grammar as being white and therefore racist. It is as if any form of conditioning of the African American by society is enslaving, rather than the fact this is called acculturation which all lives pass through without having the luxury of issuing grievances. They would be called whines.
 
This sheds light into the higher aspects of the degeneracy of Christian morality into excusing this cultural production as something high rather than something low. The plain consideration that the quote “blonde goodness” of a tennis player is promoted higher than Serena Williams because the corrupt nature of man sublimates African Americans versus the simpler, saner, explanation that sex sells, and this blonde player happens to be bosomy, exemplifies the egregious support of any weak-willed being as more virtuous than the willpower of those that write history. For even now, when the African American has dominated all pursuits in physical excellence in human society for decades now, and has homesteaded and conquered once unreached domains to them as tennis and golf, cultural production does not support a celebration of such estimable achievements unlocked but the damnation of an “other”; this “other” being a specious superior because, frankly so, Western Civilization has created the means for the African American to pursue and obtain such successes. To call being incubated in Western culture and its mores oppressive is within the perpetual paradigm of a master-slave dichotomy in culture and human history which consequentially in Christianity calls for the equalization of the inferior with the superior, contorting the supposed high culture to embrace such bile gargled onto print and now stage.
 
Make note this is one microscopic perspective. This one, which ignores the success and advances of society and humanity in treating itself harmoniously. This one, which does not appreciate a society which actually finds justice in supporting the meekest on Earth. This one, instead, finds grievances in the pettiness of quaint ignorance of white parents as their child brings home someone black and actually equates the doctrine of the Ku Klux Klan with the rules and customs of tennis. It would be humiliating to find anything resourceful in this demonic scripture of hate and provocateur of conflict between humanity rather than reconciliation and pacification if it were not slurped up so eagerly by the stupefied followers of the Church of Progress.
 
And there is nary anything poetically redeemable to the words of the script. There is the veneer of poetical text which soon gives way to the unsheathing of a roguish dagger that stabs and disassembles how the audience perceives their world; that if they are white, they ought to be ashamed of themselves; that if they are black, they ought to feel entitled to get their way because the world has it out for them. Is there no compassion or empathy for other humans in this world? That they, just maybe, suffer the same? What makes this victim more laudatory to hear than any other racial minority? Or again, why is victimhood so celebrated?
 
Because this is the peculiarity, again, of Christian morality. When there are no real atrocities experienced by the subject in the world, when living daily requires no willful exertion which fatigues one to, as Eric Hoffer stupendously sounded, feel accomplished for surviving, when adjoined to a culture which celebrates antagonists to the socially successful for its very sake, the most laughable and shameful topics are misrepresented, delusionally, as somehow endemic of the sinful substrate of the Western World. Make no mistake, this psychology, this mentality, is not equivalent with the one’s in possession of a Serena Williams, a Tiger Woods, a Michael Jordan. This is not their voice that is being heard. It is the voice that is embraced and supporting by the vulgar-elitist; the one that feels unsettled and rancorous because the world does not celebrate pitifulness. The world does not support and ought not support this kind of culture because it contributes nothing but poisonous thoughts on being in the world. Being in the world ought to be celebrated and loved and nourished, not despised.
 
Apart from the neutralizing of the commendable theatrical efforts of bringing to life a stream of piss poor consciousness with the misappropriation of Western Art toward vilifying its Mother, the sermon on the stage was not worth inhaling in full. I am proud to have refused to hear its entire message, abandoning the theatre before completion. For I am a champion of love, not hate.