the perfectionist: an interview with playwright tony kushner

18
At a time when the political Right has so effectively
leveraged religion for its own ends, do you think
secularism should be similarly mobilized, as a
countervailing force?
As long as we’re not talking about branding. Secularism
is not atheism. Secularism is not the statement
that there is no God. Secularism is the banishing of
religious discourse in order to have the kind of discussion
leading to the kind of compromises necessary
to form a coherent democratic society. A society that
is self-governing, not governed by theots from above.
So it’s hard to organize around an abstraction. Unless
you’re Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., unless you
have a genius for that sort of Moses-like leadership,
I don’t think you can plan a movement around something.
It’s a hope, rather than something that one can
work towards. And it’s always been the Achilles’ heel
of this thing—of democracy, of progress; of progress
through democracy—that it’s a contract of mutual
indifference, it’s a contract of mutual support. It relies
on the just consent of the governed. It’s only working
when it’s shaky; it’s only working when it’s frail.
The real organizing principle right now, the only
thing that’s really going to mobilize us against morons—it’s
even changing the Evangelicals right
now—is that the world is about to come to an end.
We’ve clearly reached some kind of new and completely
frightening apocalyptic threshold. And we’ve
never been in this place before.
You’re talking about nuclear disaster—or ecological
disaster?
Ecological. We’re really, really, really in trouble. As we
move along, the environmental stuff—it overshadows
everything. And not just for me, but for everyone.
The weather report has become the scariest thing; you
keep waiting for these dummies who are broadcasting
the weather to stop giggling about the fact that it’s 80
degrees in January in New York, and just start to
think: oh my god. There’s a great line in Susan Sontag’s
The Volcano Lover. She’s talking about boys
jumping into the Bay of Naples. There’s a volcano
spuming in the background, and she sticks in, in her
wonderful way, a modern narrative. Which is, of
course, that if you jump into the Bay of Naples now,
the poison water would strip the skin off your bones.
But in the 18th century, people could only think of nature
as being destroying, not of us having the power
to destroy nature. And we are now absolutely universally
recognizing that creation itself is going to be our
next victim. The big question is, are we going to be
able to assimilate that in order to make the changes
necessary to reverse that, in time?
There need to be many, many, many, many more
severe forms of regulation of industry, but also of
what you can and can’t drive, and what you can and
can’t own, in order to turn this thing around. But I
believe that that can be done within the context of
genuinely democratic society.
You’re 51 now. Has age tempered your radicalism?
I worry about that—I think that an absolute hazard
of getting old is that you start to get creaky and tired.
Certainly when I was in my twenties the idea of revolution,
which was largely inchoate, was enormously
exciting. I discovered in the course of my late twenties,
early thirties, a really deep admiration for
political movements that have operated within democratic
structures and produced radical change. But,
yeah, I’m sorry to say that over the years—and you’d
have to be kind of an eggplant for this not to happen—that
I’ve changed. I mean, unless you’re going
to be one of those people who walks around saying
that the Great Leap Forward never happened—it was