More on Mike Daisey

In a recent article for Dramatics, I wrote about a solo performer named Mike Daisey and his piece The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which was playing (and will soon reopen) at the Public Theatre in New York. It’s a piece in which Daisey, a longtime enthusiast of the technology that the late Jobs developed for Apple, exposed some uncomfortable facts about how this technology gets into our hands. The short answer is China. The longer answer is factories in China in which he alleged that the workers were ill-treated, underpaid, and lived in such miserable conditions that suicide attempts are not uncommon. A more thorough answer... well, that’s why he does the show.

Daisey urged us in the audience to contact Apple expressing our dismay in the hopes that with enough public attention Apple would, well, do something.

Apple’s public relations staff responded by saying that the conditions are nowhere near as dire as Daisey represented them and that they were using their influence to make certain their products aren’t produced in conditions that constitute human rights violations.

Well, it turns out that Ira Glass, the host of NPR’s This American Life, also attended the show and was so impressed by it that he decided to devote an episode to Daisey, including excerpts from Steve Jobs.

And then, suddenly, things began to change. I’ll let Daisey himself articulate how, but it’s exciting stuff.

We’re living in a time when suddenly the arts, rather than only providing much-needed diversion, are interacting with special vigor with our public life.

Daisey would seem to have little obvious in common with Stephen Colbert. Daisey is full-tilt earnest. Colbert, playing a cheerful political commentator who puts what he wishes to believe over the evidence of facts, is a master of irony. Daisey is funny with an emphasis on sarcasm. Colbert’s touch is light, deft. But both have been using political theatre to educate and advocate.

I’m using the term “theatre” here in a more general way because Colbert’s prime medium is, of course, television. But he has increasingly been making live appearances at rallies and as part of official functions, engaging in a kind of political theatre that some of the activists of the Ssxties would recognize as a variation on the happenings on the streets and around and inside official buildings of the times.

Recently, to dramatize what he believes is the danger of big money’s influence on the political process, Colbert got legal license to form his own Super PAC, a financial instrument by which, emulating corporations, he can raise money and, unaccountable to others, spend it to produce advertisements of political advocacy. Colbert, in the voice of the character he plays, has been pretending that he believes that Super PACs are fine instruments, but the comic purposes to which he has put the substantial resources he has accumulated (viewers are supporting this satire by sending in contributions) have illustrated more vividly than a stern editorial could the dangers of this kind of influence.

Mind you, I’m not suggesting that this should be the prime goal of the arts—to champion social causes. Much of the time when plays, films, or TV shows are created with a specific agenda, the results are numbing, heavy-handed and smell of self-importance.

But a lot of people think of artists as being people who run from reality, people who create fantasies to live in and don’t engage the real world. Daisey and Colbert both are using their art in a way that gives lie to this idea.