This commentary is by Marc Estrin, a writer who lives in Burlington.
Jon Kalish, in his Jan. 8 Digger piece “Why Bread and Puppet, the anti-war theater group, is curiously quiet about Ukraine,” is not asking a question, but purporting to answer the question implied.
He claims that Peter Schumann, Bread and Puppet’s leader, “has blamed America and other Western countries for its start,” and “told VTDigger that the conflict resulted from American ‘warmongering.’ He (Schumann) said nothing about civilian casualties or alleged Russian war crimes.”
And, to boot, “Bread and Puppet has so far produced two pieces about the war and neither explicitly addresses civilian casualties or Russian war crimes.” This is the main charge against Schumann in his 1,900-word ax-grinding J’accuse. Not considered, not proffered, or not understood by Kalish is this:
In the 60 years since it began, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater has had one consistent and very clear message: WAR STINKS! (my words, not Peter’s). Which war? All wars. And their variations of police and prison violence. Schumann weeps over the ancient observation that “man is a wolf to man.”
He doesn’t write history books or analytical articles on the subject; he makes puppet plays with no dialogue, only cardboard signs in large letters that can be read from hundreds of feet away. The puppets and paintings are simple, the analysis underlying them general.
American imperialism? Uncle Fatso with his star-spangled top hat, his cigar, and his detachable fist that can run out and punch anybody, anything, anywhere. The “bad guys,” universal, not particular — white-faced men with no eyes, dressed in black suits, collectively called “the Butchers.” The “good guys,” various forms of natural growth and sunshine.
Occasionally statistics are quoted to make a point. But they don’t — and can’t — remain accurate. Mayhem increases during the very moments the audience may be watching last week’s totals. Numbers at Bread and Puppet are qualitative, not quantitative. To ask for causal details is to misunderstand Schumann’s art, and art in general.
When I first worked together with Peter on shows at Goddard College in the 1970s (I was conducting the Goddard Community Chorus), I’d ask him “meaning’ and “why” type questions, and his response was invariably, “Just watch.” Frustrated the hell out of me. Same thing on tours when reporters would ask him to explain something after the show for their reviews, he gave variations of “Let the show speak for itself,” and avoided commenting beyond it.
Of course he has opinions, and one can approximate them by averaging the shows over the years, the paintings and drawings, and the lifestyle gestalt on the farm.
I’ve known Peter closely since the 1970s, and have worked and toured as a puppeteer with him in Europe and Latin America, and now as his publisher. My overall take on him is that he is a deep thinker who relies on grand visual language, and feels detailed analyses too often be reductive compared to what can be communicated by simple words, big objects and big spaces.
WAR STINKS is certainly simplistic, but in no way inappropriate. There is no act of war or violence that does not stink — an important stance. No one takes it as analysis, but as summary judgment, yes. I’m sure P would agree, as who wouldn’t, unless it were their source of income?
The question for pacifists of an appropriate response to violence remains unsolved, though for Americans of our generation, Martin Luther King has an overwhelming presence. And his answer (as was Gandhi’s, his mentor) was nonviolence.
So is it right to manufacture and send machines of death worldwide? And besides that first-order question, how should the U.S. use its corporate power and distribute its taxpayer dollars? Should we not renounce the war gods of capitalism? I think that is what Peter is saying, is not, as Kalish misinterprets it, “that Ukraine has a right to defend itself but it shouldn’t be armed in a way that it can actually do so.” But is supplying tools for violence a helpful response to violence?
Just yesterday, I received from Peter one of his new, tiny, stapled-together chapbooks, in a series called “FIT NEWS.” The last cartoon is one of a person sitting in a chair, his head in his hands. The accompanying text says, “The horrors of Putin’s war are matched by the U.S. refusal to negotiate, & its active pursuit of Russian defeat by avoiding U.S. casualties & sacrificing Ukrainians, & worst: by threats of nuclear weapons.”
That deep, repeating, reciprocal pattern is what Bread and Puppet’s warning is about.
