audition horror stories (part one)

Theater production is a painful pursuit: there's no money in it, little recognition, and really just one seemingly insurmountable humiliating obstacle after another. It's especially no fun if you can't laugh at it. So we asked some of our friends to provide some audition tales. Bad auditions. Wallpaper-peeling bad. Here's the first. (Our correspondent has asked to remain anonymous.)

I had agents. Agents are supposed to be a good thing. And I think for the most part, they are. But their judgment is just as likely to be off as anyone else's, and that's why I have this nightmare audition story.

I had recently played Essie in YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. For anyone who doesn't know the play, Essie fancies herself an undiscovered prima ballerina, and has been taking lessons for years, and spends almost the entire show dancing (really badly) around the stage. According to her own dancing teacher, "...she STINKS." So theoretically you DON'T have to be good, or even knowledgeable, about dancing to play this role (although Ann Miller played her in the movie). I have a little bit of knowledge and experience, but I would NEVER at any point in my life have presented myself as a legitimate "en pointe" ballet dancer.

God bless my (former) agents (the agency is now long since disbanded) - they decided, based on my having done Essie, to send me up for ANOTHER show where "an actress who could dance" was wanted - please bring toe shoes. So I went, toe shoes in hand, to find that what they really wanted was a versatile actress for multiple roles which would require being creative with movement and not uncomfortable in toe shoes. I got the part. In all honesty, I shouldn't have, but I did. (This is not the nightmare story - but here it comes.)

So my lovely, well-meaning agents, bolstered by my undeserved success (and, I suppose, thinking that my hesitancy to audition for that role to begin with was false modesty), arranged for me to return from that role to an audition for THE RED SHOES... yes, the Broadway musical that died HARD: 51 previews and 5 performances.

According to the breakdowns, they wanted a true triple-threat. It was THE RED SHOES, so true ballerinas were required. It was a musical, so serious pipes were required. Acting was definitely going to be involved, but it was unquestionably third priority. So really, they wanted a "ballerina-singer who could act." I, on the other hand, did (and do) classify myself as an "actress who can sing and dance." I had that discussion with my agents - more than once. They were CONVINCED that I could do this. And in spite of my DEEP protestations, they somehow convinced me that I should at least give it a shot.

Oh, dear.

Well, I wasn't TOTALLY unprepared. One of my fellow actors was a choreographer, and knew that my skills were very limited, and graciously agreed to choreograph a two-minute piece for me. He also coached me as best he could - BP, wherever you are, you are a saint! - and so I wrapped up my contract and headed back to NYC for an audition I KNEW I had no business going to. But then, I'd had no business, really, going to the one before, and I'd gotten cast in that one, so... why not?

Against my better judgment, I showed up to the audition. At least I had the right clothes on - dance clothes. But I knew INSTANTLY that I was way, WAY out of my element. First of all, I wasn't overweight by any means - not even by actress standards - but by ballet standards? Well, I was probably twice the size of every other girl there. Food hadn't passed the lips of any of those girls in years (unless it was on a roundtrip ticket). And I was watching them all warm up and mark through their steps - as easily as breathing. Every single one of them was a REAL ballerina, from ABT, or NYCB, or the Joffrey (I heard them all talking). There weren't ANY other "actresses who dance" there. I wanted to turn and run. And I should have. But I thought that would make me look bad (to my agents), so I decided to stick it out... but with candor.

My name was called, and I entered the room. The auditors were all sitting at the table, and I walked over to hand them my headshot and music, introduce myself... you know the drill. In the spirit of candor and full disclosure, I told them straight out, "Hey, here's the thing. I am NOT a dancer. I fake well, but I am NOT a dancer, and my agents INSISTED that I come so here I am. But I know you're all really busy, and that you have real dancers out there to see, so I'm happy just to say 'hi' and 'thanks' and let you get on with your day."

Alas. No. They were so sweet. So supportive. They asked if I had a piece (I did). They asked if I was prepared to do it (I was). They said they would like to see it (I still don't know why). And so began the LONGEST TWO MINUTES OF MY LIFE (and I have no doubt two of the longest minutes of theirs - for that day, at least). I have also have no doubt whatsoever that literally every single thing I did for those two minutes was a complete affront to the dancers/choreographers that were sitting at the table, and I was painfully conscious of that for every microsecond of each of those 120 seconds (but, hey - who was counting?).

When I finished, the room was utterly silent... until I began laughing. They were all trying so hard to be kind, but they finally gave in and started laughing, too. And although the audition itself was a nightmare, it DID end well. As I went to collect my music, they all stood up (still laughing) and shook my hand, thanked me for coming in, told me I had "HUGE chutzpah" (and yes, that's an exact quote), and by golly if there was a role that didn't require dancing they'd call me back. I thanked them for their generosity and sense of humor and said that I wouldn't hold my breath, but that I appreciated the thought and wished them the best of luck in their search. (And never, NEVER again after that accepted an audition that I didn't think I belonged at.)

human rights = non-partisan

Andrew Sullivan pointed to this LATimes interview with former Solicitor General Ted Olson last week. It's worth reading in its entirety. He'll be arguing against Proposition 8 before the Supreme Court, and while he's working alongside prominent liberal individuals and organizations (David Boies, the ACLU), his argument as to why legalizing gay marriage is perfectly aligned with what he sees as core conservative values should give shouters on both sides pause:

It is a conservative value to respect the relationship that people seek to have with one another, a stable, committed relationship that provides a backbone for our community, for our economy. I think conservatives should value that.

The argument for equal rights to marry is not a political football that should be used to score points. It's a question of whether our belief in human rights for all is a non-negotiable founding principle, or not. Equality for all is not an instant achievement -- it takes time and struggle. But the movement needs to be constant, in one direction. With human rights issues a victory is not of one faction over another, it's the triumph of justice over its opposite. Also pertinent, from the same interview with Patt Morrison:

We don't learn anything if we surround ourselves by people who think the same way we do.

Something worth remembering for those who hate critics of the President simply because they're critics of the President. Or, as the Economist put it last week,

He has been curiously ill-served by a press short of useful criticism, with liberal America prepared only to debate what sort of water he walks on best, while conservative radio hosts argue over when exactly he became a communist.

keep grandma out of my mural

An interesting article in this month's Economist. Apparently creamtoriums in Denmark are going a bit too far with the whole recycling thing -- proposing to capture and recycle the heat used to burn bodies, as well as reuse of the metal left behind from artifical hips and the like.

This is, apparently, all permitted by a recent rethink by the church, although there were some restrictions:

When the ecclesiastical ministry changed the law to allow such recycling in 2005, it barred the reuse of such spare parts in works of art.

While I don't necessarily disagree, I'm a bit intrigued by the reasoning, as well as the blanket prohibition. Why not merely prohibit the sale of work containing re-used human remains instead of barring their creation as a whole? Is art as a whole so obscene?

(On the other hand, some awkward questions might arise when little Bitsy wants you to put her collage on the fridge...)

lunar lunacy (or, let them eat moon rocks)

I have, for many years, considered myself a lunar skeptic. No, I am not one of the "6 percenters" previously mentioned in this space that believe the moon landings never happened; I'm just a bit leery as to why.

The Cold War mentality that provided the original context for man's alighting on the moon cannot be understated: the can-do, damn-the-cost attitude the defined the lunar mission was born out of a life-or-death struggle with the Soviets in a race to show technological superiority; the second act of that race was mutual obliteration with nuclear weapons. With Armageddon as your second act, it's obviousthat you pull no punches in placing a man on the moon.

Celebrating (and mourning) the 40th anniversary of the moon landing this summer, Tom Wolfe argued in a July 18 New York Times Op-Ed piece that the lunar landing served as a death-knell for man's journey into the stars, rather than the anticipatory first step to bigger and better things:

For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by
presidents and the Congress.

This is, apparently, a massive failure of vision on the part of our leaders: their inability to see past the quibbles of the common defense and upkeep, as well as myriad other trivial matters, has doomed us to remain imprisoned surface of the Earth.

We can all just stop tripping the light fantastic about the moon landing. Along with the Marshall Plan, it is one of the few aspects to the global pissing contest also known as the Cold War we rhapsodize, because buying off Third World dictators and ignoring their crimes isn't as inspiring as a few white guys hopping on gray dust wearing ziploc bags with helmets attached.

In 1969, 7.7 million American children lived in poverty. In 2007, that number was 13.5 million. It might seem a bit specious to argue that the NASA budget and Head Start program participate alone in a zero-sum game (especially since Department of Defense expenditures dwarf every other government program in the Federal budget); but the argument could be made that it's callous to rhapsodize about the wonders of space travel when so many go hungry in the wealthiest country on the globe.

Craig Nelson's excellent book about the Apollo 11 Mission, "Rocket Men,"does a good job of balancing wonder of humanity's most astounding feat of engineering with a clear-eyed appraisal of the unique geo-political situation that allowed such treasure to be devoted to a singular endeavor. Calling upon military resources, and using the rocket technology from a former Nazi who exploited concentration camp slave labor to loft V2 rockets on London (Wernher Von Braun), the prize -- dazzling the world with space missions that proved democracy's superiority over Communism justified cutting corners in promoting a "civilian" scientific effort that was anything but.

Nelson summarizes the prevalent thinking among the Washington Cold Warriors sweating appropriations bills:

Key political support for the inauguration of NASA would in part rise from the belief that its shining example to developing nations would help keep them from being infected by communism.

Not to mention the evidence space rockets could provide to Moscow that the United States stood ready, willing, and able to rain down indiscriminate death upon military and civilian populations alike with nuclear weapons:

What is affectionately and nostalgically remembered now as the Space Age might more accurately be called the Rocket Age -- with rockets in underground silos, rockets aboard submarines, rockets that were state secrets, and rockets that were public spectacles.

In fact, as Nelson notes, "The United States alone spent $5.5 trillion on its nuclear missile program." NASA was not only a thin veneer of civilian scientific exploration painted over what was essentially a military rocket project, it was also a sop to the aerospace defense industry, which had exploded in the wake of World War Two and the Korean War, but had difficulty finding its own peace dividend.

[O]ne reason for establishing NASA was a fear that aerospace defense contractors needed government support, as they were falling into a postwar recession.

(As if Presidents Bush and Obama invented corporate welfare.) Perhaps the person we should blame for creating the zero-sum game fallacy that I continuously cite and disown is the same man who flagged it in the first place: President Eisenhower in his farewell address. The words of the great man himself:

We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual --is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower's pitting civilian against military needs dates back to 1953:

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this; a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. [...] This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

(Then again, maybe it's just cause the General was an Army guy.)

To be clear: the pooh-poohing of the impurity of NASA's origins is my own, and not Nelson's; in his estimation the wondrous accomplishments more than outweigh the underhanded motives. In 1954, as President Eisenhower was trying to convince the American people that under a perpetual state of war was not any way to live, a classified overview of American covert operations, the so-called Doolittle Report, asserted that

We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination. [...] There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. [Americans must] learn to be able not to be good, [and the American public] must be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.

(In the wake of Vice President Cheney's ultimately successful attempts to turn American policy over to "the dark side" in pursuit of the Global War on Terror (a constant war, with no clear end in sight), it's easy to see which school of thought won out.)

But we have this lingering problem: as much as we can say that NASA is bloated, wasteful, anachronistic, and a waste of resources, we have these spectacular pictures; pictures of men leaping on the surface of the moon, pictures of a blue globe of life surrounded by the heaping nothingness of space, pictures (thanks to the Hubble telescope) that date back to the creation of existence as we know it. And it's hard to say those are, objectively, useless items.

We also have the words of the returning Apollo Astronauts themselves. Buzz Aldrin, addressing congress in 1969:

What this country does with the lessons of Apollo applies to domestic problems, and what we do in further space exploration programs will determine just how giant a leap we have taken.

There wasn't enough fuel on earth to bring us all to the stars; that the missions themselves did not inspire us to think bigger, or act better, says more about us than about the billions of Federal dollars that could have been spent in other ways.

The Ministry of Louise

Dave Barry once talked about how the Federal government needed a Department of Louise -- a no-nonsense middle-aged woman who, whenever a convoluted or nonsensical piece legislation would come to her desk, would simply say "no."

Guess what? The British actually had this! Not even kidding. From the July 23rd Economist:

George Osborne, the Conservative shadow chancellor of the exchequer [...] says an incoming Tory government would ask competition authorities to investigate this concentration. His plans stop short, as do [current Labour Party chancellor of the exchequer Alistair] Darling’s, of cutting big and dangerous banks down to manageable size.

Both men hope that added capital requirements, foisted on big firms by their supervisors, will make the cost of unwieldy size and over-risky behaviour prohibitive. But this puts a heavy responsibility on the regulator, which must identify and quantify the risks in order to levy the charges. This was the regulatory Achilles heel that led to the present crisis.

How much better, laments a Bank of England veteran, was the “Willie Osborn test”. Bankers wishing to do something “innovative” first had to explain it to Mr Osborn (no relation) in the supervision department. If he did not understand it, then it was too complex.

Just what health care reform in this country so desperately needs. Is Mr. Osborn available?

Sketches on James O'Connor's "Timor Mortis"

Henry is in a coffin. Numb from the waist down, he attempts to make sense of his surroundings and of the life he lived before landing in this limbo. His only companions come in the form of a wine bottle, notes with meaningless aphorisms that descend from the void (the origins of both are unknown), and a beautiful if aloof woman who stalks by his wooden cell without so much as acknowledging his presence. Henry’s reverie—which has been underway for either eight minutes or eighty years—is interrupted when Henry gets a visitor. The Devil comes calling, with an offer to end Henry’s torment on a rather sweet note; but the price for peace is going to be steep...

It takes a lot of nerve to curse God, especially when you’re his prisoner. Even in a secular society, blasphemy holds a powerful deterrent force.

James O’Connor’s Timor Mortis, which COItc premiered in January and February of 2009, marked our first production to spark audience walkouts, baleful glares at staff, and even a confrontation with our stage crew by one particularly devout woman, incensed we would have a character say to God: Fuck you, you bastard.

“After all,” our erstwhile critic declared: “God is all I have.”

But the shock of hearing the line had blunted the point. For Henry (the character with the chutzpah to curse Him), God was all HE had left as well.

The value of shocking art, religion in theater, and the merits of self-censorship are all topics worthy of their own articles—and that is precisely why they will not be examined here. Instead, we invite you to examine with us some of the larger tropes within which Timor Mortis finds itself—and the ways playwright James O’Connor bucks established norms in this genre.

O happy the man who still can hope
Though drowned in a sea of error!
Man needs the things he doesn’t know,
What he knows is useless, forever.
Goethe, Faust

The problem with the Faustian bargain is that the other shoe barely has time to drop before the final curtain does. Stories of sinners getting their just desserts end just as the dish is served.

DON GIOVANNI
Terrors unknown are freezing me,
Demons of doom are seizing me,
Is hell let loose to torture me?
Or does it mock my sight?

CHORUS
Torments eternal wait thee!
Burning in endless night!

DON GIOVANNI
My soul is rent in agony!
Condemn’d to endless misery,
Oh, doom of wrath and terror,
No more to see the light!
Mozart, Don Giovanni

Elements
Timor Mortis is a full inversion of the typical Faustian tale on three counts:

(1) It begins where other stories usually end;
(2) Its protagonist is unexceptional; and
(3) Its protagonist doesn’t willingly enter into a deal with the Devil.

Syntax
The playwright’s other vocations as poet and translator are reflected in the visceral descriptive power of his character’s words. In the tradition of Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh, Timor Mortis is a play about storytellers whose stories sometimes wind out of their control.

The lighting designer for our world premiere of the play rightfully called it “fully theatrical”: it contains in its execution setups both grounded and otherworldly.

Starting with literally nothing in the void, Henry creates a world with rules and reference points: a never-ending bottle of wine, visitations from unknown creatures, notes from the heavens and a crashing organ. From this perch, simultaneously precarious and firmly grounded, Henry evokes his past life: the freckles of his wife’s back, the sometimes wonderfully messy, sometimes horrifying physics of lovemaking.

These experiences are no less concrete for not being recreated on stage before the audience. On a whim, the Devil recreates the happiest moment of Henry’s life, which Henry subsequently witnesses and relives simultaneously. These are events which live theater—unrestricted by the cold camera lens, and yet far more grounded that the literary voice—can deliver.

The distinctive syntax inversions of O’Connor’s play emerge most strongly in his inversions of trope, outlined above and expanded upon now.

(1) It begins where other stories usually end.
What makes Timor Mortis existential is that the life Henry’s lived is actually a secondary concern. The moments of his existence on earth that resonate after he’s left it are positively pedestrian: Henry is as far as one can get from a Wagnerian hero with his opening:

HENRY: I woke up this morning in a coffin and I have no idea how I got here. It’s a complete mystery to me. I don’t remember being sick. I don’t remember having a heart attack. I don’t remember a car accident. In short, I don’t remember dying.

One can hardly imagine Die Walküre’s Siegmund waking in Valhalla with such words.

Walking along the beach with his mother, the glimpse of his wife’s nipple in the corner of his infant daughter’s mouth—these are not the elements of an übermensch ready to take on the gods, but the offal of an ineffectual bourgeois man who’s spent too much time on a Freudian couch (Sigmund instead of Siegmund?). Which takes us to

(2) Its protagonist is unexceptional.

THE DEVIL: I like you, Henry.
HENRY: Do you?
THE DEVIL: Of course I do! Why do you think I’ve been looking after you?
HENRY: I don’t know.
THE DEVIL: You’ve made me very proud. I almost feel like a father to you.

How could such a pedestrian man spark the protection of the Prince of Lies? Clearly because this is not entirely true: Henry is exceptional, just not while he’s on Earth. Henry’s moment to shine comes after he’s departed.

This tension, between the prosaic and the profound, underpins the entire play: if he is not a great lover like Don Giovanni, if he is not a great physician like Faust, what is it that makes this man exceptional, that makes him catch the attention of Lucifer himself?

The basic question confronting all acting students (and playwriting students, and directing students) is sometimes called the Passover question: why is this night different from any other night?

Henry’s plight is at once prosaic and profound because he makes clear that he has been in this state for some time, and the events he witnesses—notes dropping from the sky, aloof women strutting down imaginary catwalks—are everyday occurrences. However, the play mainly encompasses exceptional moments: his intimacy with the messenger, his colloquy with the Devil. What changes? What makes these things happen now? Why is this night different?

In a similar vein, Henry divorces, re-marries, continues to have affairs, and lies to his second wife (a lot). These are, sadly, not abnormal behaviors for a man. So why is he special? Because out of Henry’s commonality springs the audacity to speak truth to ultimate power.

HENRY: Who are you?
THE DEVIL: You know damn well who I am. By the way, I’m the one who wrote that message regarding solitude.
HENRY: Well, forgive me for saying so, but you’re not much of a writer.

Henry’s essence is irreducible because it started at such a basic level; a philandering husband willing at first blush to blame his children for the failure of his marriage has no compunction cursing God’s love; a post-man stuck in a coffin with a numb, engorged penis has nothing to lose in telling the Devil he’s a terrible writer. The power of Henry’s defiance is underwritten by his ultimate impotence, underscored by the fact that it is preceded by a shrug.

And that defiance takes us to

(3) Its protagonist doesn’t willingly enter into a deal with the Devil.
Henry is, in fact, exceptional to the Devil by possessing a quality he has in common with all of humanity: free will.

The Devil needs Henry to choose his path in order to claim him as one of the Devil’s own. This is something Henry simultaneously accepts and rejects: even as he takes the oath, Henry continually defies the Devil’s will, up to their final exchange.

There is not a little wish fulfillment in the Devil’s fascination with Henry. Lucifer as a fictional or dramatic character holds such interest to many because he is usually used to embody our collective id; he offers us the most tantalizing rewards the corporeal world has to offer, but also is that very desire personified.

We want the Devil to appear and tell us the things we desire the most can be ours, and moreover, that desire is—in and of itself—okay. (See The Devil’s Ten Commandments, below.)

The Devil
The Devil that occupies the pages of Timor Mortis, like the play itself, takes a sharp right turn from the expected Lucifer of lore and popular culture. He is closer to the fallen angel of the Bible, less warped by being the embodiment of evil and more by the loss of love. From the Devil’s first significant question to Henry—It’s not easy giving up love, is it?—love is revealed to be a touchstone; the harvesting of Henry’s soul an inconsequential byproduct of Henry’s declaring allegiance to the Devil’s nihilism:

THE DEVIL: You must renounce the afterlife. You must renounce your own soul. You must believe in nothing. Nothing, Henry, but the earth and the stars.

The Devil’s bargain of Timor Mortis is perverse in its most basic sense. It’s one thing to declare one’s nihilism as a means to grab onto something definite—the refusal itself—in the face of the indefinite (existence of God, the afterlife, etc.); it’s quite another to do so in the very face of its evidence. The Devil requires Henry to disbelieve his own eyes, to defy them. This is the sordid underbelly of free will; one can freely choose one’s own annihilation, and the Devil exploits it to its utmost.

Setpieces
The Devil’s Ten Commandments

THE DEVIL: Forget your wife, Henry. You’re dead. And now you shall be judged according to my Ten Commandments.
HENRY: You have Ten Commandments?
THE DEVIL: What! I can’t have my own Ten Commandments?
HENRY: No, I just thought...
THE DEVIL: Only God can have Ten Commandments! Is that it?
HENRY: I wasn’t saying that.
THE DEVIL: I’m sure you know God’s Ten Commandments! So why don’t you know mine? Nobody ever knows my Commandments!
HENRY: But I don’t know God’s either. I mean, yes, I know a few of them, but I don’t know them all.
THE DEVIL: You don’t know even one of mine! You didn’t even know I had Commandments to follow!

Marlene Clary, COItc's Director of Readings and Young Artist Development (as well as the director of Timor Mortis' world premiere production), has observed that although the Devil sets his own commandments as a parallel to God’s, where God’s Ten Commandments are proscriptive, the Devil’s are descriptive—even permissive. They allow Henry to justify his behavior. The Devil himself describes them as insights gained over millennia of observation: Devil-as-anthropologist. This is a far cry from Goethe’s source of torment. The Devil’s Commandments are anything but: they establish him as Henry’s advocate.

The Bargain
The temptation of what the Devil in Timor Mortis has to offer in no way resembles classic soul-selling tales: or if it does, it is a Faustian bargain taken to its most extreme degree, temptation on steroids.

In one reading, rather than sell his soul for a short-term gain on earth while losing sight of the long-term picture (like Faust), Henry is persuaded to embrace the Devil’s view of a life that Henry has already lived, and thus can either re-live it in his mind for all eternity, or re-live it in actuality one more time before having his existence nullified permanently.

In the other, this actually is a Faustian bargain: but instead of luxuriant decades on Earth in exchange for an eternity of torment in Hell, Henry is given the opportunity of ten minutes of ecstasy in exchange for an eternity of nothing. This is extreme on both ends of the bargain: ten minutes of heaven is powerful stuff after a century of numbness. (But the other side of the deal is equally overloaded: it is arguable whether an eternity of torment [and therefore self-awareness] is preferable to an eternity of not existing—but it’s less debatable that the latter is a far more drastic result.)

Hell is Others, Hell is You
It’s a dilemma reminiscent of Sartre: no matter how seductive, tempting, demeaning, or demented the Devil appears, his ability to torment Henry has nothing on Henry’s capacity to torment himself.

the thread of denial

This June saw the 40th anniversary of the most spectacular, if not especially practical, achievements of government intervention: the visit of mankind to the moon.

On the precipice of this anniversary, the New York Times chronicled how

polling consistently suggests that some 6 percent of Americans believe the landings were faked and could not have happened.

This isn't just suspicion of a Cold War hoax; in the logic of those who believe the moon landings never happened, the whole endeavor quickly becomes shrouded under the rubric of "conspiracy" -- a more sinister, far-reaching crime.

There is a very strong resistance in this country to received wisdom from those in authority, because Americans are trained (by those in authority) to think they are skeptical of a concentration of power -- when, of course, the very opposite is true.

The common narrative is that Americans are an independent, rebellious, trailblazing lot who use their own moral compass to chart their individual course. Born out of a cauldron of resistance to a monarch to found a republic that glorified the freedom of the individual, Americans are self-made, resist cast-based societies, and live in an orgy of equality.

Naturally, Americans don't believe something simply because Someone Told Them It Was So. (Especially if that Someone is with the government.) And, naturally, the following events of the past ten years are sources of extreme skepticism on the part of Government-leery, free-thinking, individual-worshipping Americans:

1. the suspension of habeaus corpus,
2. voluntary erosion of privacy rights,
3. the endemic use of excessive force on the part of police departments nationwide (taser fever)

Not quite.

Instead, Americans seek out the threat of a too-powerful government in an X-files like attempt to fake a lunar landing. This isn't limited to events of the 20th century -- the explosive popularity of Dan Brown's best-selling "The DaVinci Code" shows how this country is fascinated with the idea of secreted knowledge -- knowledge that's powerful enough to kill for. It's a fascinating dichotomy for a nation, many of whose inhabitants believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. We love knowledge, but shy away from the evidence that forms its foundation. We like knowledge when it's a plot device, not when it's a tool.

Those who deny the lunar landing, who believe Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who examine the ballistics of JFK's assassination ad nauseum, who think the current President of the United States is some kind of one-man Kenyan sleeper cell, these people all share a common trait: a cowardice to confront the present.

The most popular American conspiracy theories have to do with past events -- historical facts that cannot be altered. You can dicker as much as you like about who shot JFK, whether the flag planted on the Moon waves in some incongruous air current, or whether Barack Obama's third cousin twice removed saw him born in a Kenyan hut. Those things wont affect the life you live now, because you can't change the past. The all-powerful shadow state has drawn the wool over everyone else's eyes, but not yours, and you're going to use this knowledge to ... do what, exactly?

The difference, of course, is that if you're worried about events in the here and now, things you can actually take action on -- like, say, the continual erosion of miranda rights -- you would have to actually do something. That's not really what conspiracy theorists are all about. The fantasy of an all-powerful state that re-writes history justifies a do-nothing present: you're powerless in the face of such power, so why resist?