I have been working on this post for several days and I just can’t get it into a form where I’m satisfied that I’ve said what I want to say. So I can either scrap it or just hurl it out into the ether and get it over with. I’ve decided to hurl it. Here it is, for what it’s worth. 

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

I often find that protests are counter-productive.

Not always, of course.

For example, Larry Kramer during the 80s with the AIDS pandemic. I never cared for Larry Kramer. I always thought Kramer was a show horse and that he went way too far in his antics and rhetoric, and had anybody other than Anthony Fauci been the recipient of Kramer’s invective, I’d have been right, but Fauci was and is an extraordinary man, and he listened and was able to take steps to make changes in the way AIDS drugs were made available.

I remember well all the protests during my years at Penn State. Those were the years when the United States was interfering with a civil war in Vietnam, and it was none too popular with the students. Eventually it was none too popular with the populace either, but I don’t think the student protests had much to do with swaying the popular opinion. The images from Vietnam itself that were broadcast into people’s homes, along with the casualty lists, those are what swayed popular opinion. Just to be clear, I sympathized with the student protests as I was also opposed to the United States interfering in Vietnam, I just didn’t think the protests were very effective, and once they led to violence, I thought they were counter-productive, but the subject of student protests and Vietnam in that era is incredibly complex and can’t be summarized in one short paragraph.

When the object of the protest is a film or a book, all too often the Streisand Effect comes into play, and all you do is give free publicity to the object that you’re protesting. Ticket sales for what may be a mediocre movie soar, a novel with one or two steamy passages suddenly hits the best seller lists.

And what about a play? Seemingly Noel Matthews and company were successful in closing down a university production of the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical Assassins but I wonder if it was in the end a Pyrrhic victory.

I have no further details about that incident, so all I’m doing is speculating, but I can tell you that from nearly a thousand miles away, I was extremely angry about that protest and closure. If I had been a ticket holder, I would have been furious. Extremely furious with Noel Matthews and her fellow protestors.

I’m going to back up a little. Years ago when I was still employed, I was driving home one late afternoon when traffic came to a standstill. WTF?

It turned out there was a protest up ahead that was stopping traffic. What were they protesting? Why the construction of a casino right here in Philadelphia. The first big steps on the road to degradation! Right here!

Well, actually, the protest was being held miles from the site where the casino was to be constructed, so I have no idea why the protest was being held there. Or what in tarnation they hoped to accomplish by holding up us tired working stiffs on our way home from work.

Up until that point I had no firm opinion about the casino. Had someone asked me, I probably would have said I was sort of against it, gambling ought to stay in Sin City and that Jersey shore city whatzitsname, where it belonged.

But after being held up on my way home for no good reason, my opinion changed. I was now firmly in favor of casinos in Philly. And furthermore I wanted them built right on top of the houses of those fuggin’ protestors! That’ll larn ’em.

OK, back to that wise fool Noel Matthews and her shutting down the performance of a play because it included one utterance of a certain word.

What effect will this have on the theater company? Perhaps they’ll be less likely to tackle a potentially controversial play, especially one with any kind of Black characters. I dunno, perhaps not.

But what effect will it have on the ticket holders? It’s not as if Assassins is an unknown work. There are recordings of the music and even videos of the entire production available on YouTube and elsewhere, so the folks who didn’t get to see the Northwestern production can get a sense of what they missed, magic word and everything. And I suspect more than a few of them might be very angry about the cancellation and their anger will be directed at Noel Matthews and the other Black students who got the production cancelled.

Will that anger linger and perhaps fester?

I dunno. As I said, I’m speculating. Call me all wet if you like.