Of Fallen Trees and Wounded Knees

The late Whitney Young once numbered Stokely Carmichael’s following at 5,500: Five hundred blacks, said Young (or, in the racist nomenclature of that antebellum period, Negroes), trailed by five thousand news-and-cameramen. Move over, Stokely.

At Wounded Knee, South Dakota, location of the American Indian Movement’s extended guerrilla theater sequel to The Siege of the BIA (off-Pennsylvania production, November ’72), the Carmichael school of hyperbolic method acting has outdistanced itself. There may well be another roadshow performance to follow what the producers and their flacks have billed as The Second Battle of Wounded Knee, but the star quality is gone. It is like watching the Dead End Kids after they became the East Side Kids; a performance of Streetcar with Jon Voight playing the old Brando role; or a rendition of the new Brando non-accepting an Oscar with Sandra Dee standing in for Sacheen Littlefeather. The flesh is willing, but the spirit is gone. In the chant made popular by The Siege of Lincoln Park (off-Michigan production, August ’68), the whole world may still be watching; but what’s left to watch is only the final, banal exercise of an overexposed political art form.

VG

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Victor Gold

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Department of Justice

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South Dakota

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The late Whitney Young once numbered Stokely Carmichael’s following at 5,500: Five hundred blacks, said Young (or, in the racist nomenclature of that antebellum period, Negroes), trailed by five thousand news-and-cameramen. Move over, Stokely.

At Wounded Knee, South Dakota, location of the American Indian Movement’s extended guerrilla theater sequel to The Siege of the BIA (off-Pennsylvania production, November ’72), the Carmichael school of hyperbolic method acting has outdistanced itself. There may well be another roadshow performance to follow what the producers and their flacks have billed as The Second Battle of Wounded Knee, but the star quality is gone. It is like watching the Dead End Kids after they became the East Side Kids; a performance of Streetcar with Jon Voight playing the old Brando role; or a rendition of the new Brando non-accepting an Oscar with Sandra Dee standing in for Sacheen Littlefeather. The flesh is willing, but the spirit is gone. In the chant made popular by The Siege of Lincoln Park (off-Michigan production, August ’68), the whole world may still be watching; but what’s left to watch is only the final, banal exercise of an overexposed political art form.