A ‘60s Lefty Reconsiders

Most people live in two compartmentalized worlds--a personal world filled with family, love, divorce, down payments and cellphone bills, and the world beyond, the external universe, with its wars and global marketplaces and historical events such as terrorist attacks on New York City. Not so Charles Mee.

At 66, the playwright and activist, whose “A Perfect Wedding” opened to mostly rave reviews in early November at the Kirk Douglas Theatre and whose “Belle Epoque” (directed by Martha Clarke) opened at Lincoln Center a few weeks later, has lived a life that more closely resembles a double helix, two intertwining histories beginning in Mee’s hometown of Barrington, Ill., outside Chicago.

As Mee tells it, his bout with polio when he was a teenager was immediately followed by the Army-McCarthy hearings, which was followed by his exit from theater life in 1963, the “pacification” of Vietnamese village leaders, his trip to a commune outside San Francisco, Watergate, his return to the theater in the 1980s, the rise of the religious right, connubial bliss, the war on terrorism. Bad begets good, which begets the curious or colorful or unexpected: Yes, there is unhappiness and struggle and disaffection in our daily lives and the other worlds we inhabit, but always--always--there is the possibility of something better, something more hopeful in the interchange between the immediate and the not so immediate. It’s not that the personal is political; it’s that the personal and political are simply, inextricably, dialectically bound together.

Twenty-seven years ago Mee said as much in his 200-page essay on American political culture in the post-Watergate era, “A Visit to Haldeman and Other States of Mind.” The book opens with Mee noting that he’s been asked by H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s White House chief of staff, to help write a book about Haldeman’s White House years. Mee had serious reservations about collaborating with Haldeman on anything, let alone a book he suspected was little more than an effort to whitewash the Nixon administration’s crimes against the American people. Still, he couldn’t find a good reason to say no and flew to California from New York. Haldeman looked tan and fit and was terribly genteel, and Mee admits to being taken in just a little. But in the end, he was repulsed by Haldeman’s lies and obfuscations, all his sunniness in the midst of so much malaise. And so a project that was supposed to be about all of the good things that took place from 1968 to 1974 quickly morphed into a book about the death of the republic.

“I had not wished to admit the fact,” Mee wrote, “but there it was, and I no longer had the strength or wish to hold it off, resisting it, saying maybe not, it is not dead, or perhaps it is not so, qualifying here and there, tucking it in at the edges, neatening it up, smoothing over, hoping no one will notice, fearful of finding myself mad or radical or, in giving up the ghost of hope, encouraging the end, bringing on tyranny, ringing up the curtain, striking up the band of jackbooted agents of the police state, giving birth to a new holocaust by whispering of the death of the dear, departed Republic. And yet it is dead. Its death is palpable.”

Today, three marriages, four children and many plays and presidents removed from the 1970s, as he looks back on a political season so divisive that reds and blues quit talking to each other, Mee believes the republic is alive again.

“There I was, a young man who had never seen such a thing before,” says Mee, drinking tea in his Brooklyn basement apartment, recalling the upheaval of Vietnam, the counterculture and the cynicism and despondency of the Nixon years. “Now I’ve lived through another 40 years, and I thought the republic had been demolished back in 1975, and it’s actually still here.”

It’s not simply that the place, the physical entity called America, is still here, Mee explains. It’s that the democratic impulse, the will of the people to govern themselves, is alive--endangered, perhaps, by multinationals or political parties or theocrats who he believes veil their fear in Christian garb, but alive nonetheless.

Pointing to the recent U.S. elections, Mee says: “If you were sitting in Serbia or Baghdad or Kabul or any of these places, you would think, ‘Wow, that’s an amazing thing. They had an election, nobody got shot--sure, there was some cheating, I mean, where is there not cheating?--but it was respected by the losers, and what’s the worst thing Bush wants to do? Make his tax cuts permanent?’ ”

Not that Mee doesn’t see a virus in what he calls the American Empire, the rise of a postwar superstate that presides over a super-military, which polices a super-economy that fuels the superstate. A more honest politics, he believes, would acknowledge the emergence of an empire and confront its obligations and incongruities and stop pretending that we live in a Jeffersonian republic. We do not live in a Jeffersonian republic.

Mee, whose book “Meeting at Potsdam” garnered national attention when it came out in 1975, traces the beginning of the American Empire to the Marshall Plan in 1948, which marked the United States’ rise to superpower status and signaled the final eclipse of Pax Britannica.

In the more than 50 years since, Mee contends, power has flowed out of the hands of the people and state and local governments and into Washington--not toward the judicial and legislative branches but into the White House. All the while, the commander in chief, the Congress and the bureaucracy have watched passively as the empire has metastasized, acquiring markets and military installations, dissolving Third World cultures, migrating, slipping away from the liberal-constitutional principles of its former self: The country we live in is not the country we are told it is.

It would be easy to portray Mee as Noam Chomsky Lite, a left-winger, a radical, a penseur whose ideas elevate him above the political actors and their handlers and the journalists who report on them. When he starts talking about war crimes in Southeast Asia and a future dominated by multinationals, it’s easy to start thinking of “Manufacturing Consent,” Chomsky’s 1993 documentary about the grand government-corporate scam that is “democracy,” as he sees it, in the United States.

But that would be caricature. And Charles Mee defies caricature.

Mee is a slight man. A half-century after contracting polio and being visited in the hospital by a priest who gave him last rites, he still walks around with crutches that wrap snugly around his forearms. Walking two blocks from his apartment to a local shop to grab a peanut butter-and-banana sandwich is a 10-minute trek.

His ailment, it seems, has given him insight into the national psyche. “I’ve been knocked down on a train platform in India, the home of Mahatma Gandhi,” Mee says, adding that he’s had an unfortunate encounter in France as well. “But I’m able to walk in Times Square at midnight on a Saturday and nobody even brushes against me. They just accept difference, and they accommodate for it.”

That openness, Mee says, that commitment to plurality and otherness, stems from a deep-seated sense of fairness in this country.

He hates the attacks on same-sex marriage. “A Perfect Wedding” revolves around a gay couple who wed. He also doesn’t tolerate the venom he sees coming from right-wing zealots who say they wouldn’t call blacks, Mexicans, Chinese or gays by derogatory names, but sure wouldn’t let them get married.

But he believes there is a basic yearning in America for tolerance and decency. This is a yearning that transcends geography or simple-minded red-blue divides; it goes beyond fads such as “diversity” or “multiculturalism,” and it is lost or misunderstood or misrepresented by the left, with its empty rejection of the American experiment. It is why, Mee says, there remains a genuine hope for government of and for the people.

When he was a freshman at Harvard, Mee recalls, he flirted with going into law and one day running for political office. Then he visited the pre-law club and discovered that all of the future lawyers were sporting three-piece suits and sipping sherry. “They looked like my father’s friends,” Mee says. So he opted for the drama crowd.

After graduating, he moved to New York and launched his career in the theater, interrupted by a 25-year hiatus enmeshed in left-wing politics. Now he churns out three plays a year, supported by Richard B. Fisher, chairman emeritus of Morgan Stanley, and his wife, Jeanne. His plays, Mee says, are not political statements. But they are inherently political. Plays, he explains, are about interactions, and interactions are human beings living and colliding with each other. And that’s politics. In politics, there is drama and frustration and hope.

“If you go back to the Constitutional Convention,” Mee says, “what you find is, oh, yeah, a bunch of white guys got together and conspiratorially designed this system that didn’t give women the vote or blacks citizenship and so forth. But if you look at it in detail, really what you find is that the slave-owning interests of the South fought the merchant-banking system of the North, and there were dozens of other similar conflicts in such a way that they forced each other to resort to general principles in order to defend their own interests, and those general principles set up amendments that gave citizenship to blacks, the vote to women and so forth.”

There are shortcomings and ruptures in the system; the system is flawed. But, Mee says, there is a Constitution and a future, even for those disillusioned with the recent elections or the Iraq war or the rise, as Mee puts it, of an American Empire. “The structure remains, doesn’t it, for an election in 2008?”