Level Up, Step Up, Grow Up, Man Up . . . Wake Up

Clancy McCartney in Leveling Up

The current run of Leveling Up by Deborah Zoe Laufer at the Steppenwolf had its final performance on Saturday night, but I'm confident audiences around the country are going to have opportunities to see future productions. Leveling Up is the creative work that demonstrates just how thoroughly America's new ways of warfare have become intertwined with the other dominant strands in our culture.

In this play, the phenomenon that so many of us in the antiwar movement have been trying to bring to public attention -- the conflation of innocent video gaming and actual war, especially drone operations -- plays a key role. An expert gamer is recruited by the government for his unique skills, youthful acuity . . . and naivety.

"Do you ever wonder if this thing was real?"

But this is not just agitprop for anti-drone activists. The play asks other big questions: What does it mean to have a relationship?  What constitutes fulfilling work? Do we really have to face the world "out there"?

From the after-performance discussion on Saturday night at the Steppenwolf, I could tell that this video-game-immersed young adult world of Leveling Up was revelatory for the parents in the audience and provocative for the teens there. As I reflected on the play in the days that followed, I started to wake up to how provocative  Leveling Up is for all of us -- even outside the trope of the video game.

Leveling Up  -- coming to a stage near you soon (if you're lucky).

MORE:

Leveling Up- Trailer

Download the Leveling Up Study Guide

Steppenwolf for Young Adults Artistic and Educational Director Hallie Gordon welcomes you to Leveling Up

The History Behind and Future of Drone Warefare: Article by Steppenwolf For Young Adults Apprentice Lexy Leuszler


Related posts

There were so many places in this book where I thought, "Holy mackerel - he knows about that? It's as if he was part of the same anti-drone movement that I've been so deeply involved in for the past several years!"

(See 7 Ways the Ugly Facts About Drones Are Hidden in Plain Site in UNMANNED )













What are the 2 or 3 -- or 5, or 10 -- biggest lessons about "collaborating in peaceful mode" that we might be able to witness if we were to seek the answers in Minecraft worlds?

(See Go dig up the solution to world peace in a video game environment )

Grounded raises tough questions. I was hoping that the play would challenge the idea that killing people with drones is good. It's a reflection of the seriousness of this work that that is just one of the issues it raises; others include our society's willingness to destroy the people who we employ to "serve" ("serve our country," serve us in general), our culture's worship of violence / use of force, and the consequences of pervasive surveillance.

(See "Everything Is Witnessed": Searching for "the Guilty" in GROUNDED )


With drones, people become just dots. "Bugs." People who no longer count as people . . . .

(See Drone Victims: Just Dots? Just Dirt? )

The U.S. military is desperately trying to beef up the ranks of its drone pilots - to meet a "near insatiable demand for drones." There's only one way that's going to happen, and that's if we let our young people think that it's okay to sign up. The world of military service is more abstracted and foreign than ever. If ever there was a time that young people needed guidance from others about what military service might mean for them, that time is now.

(See Mothers Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Drone Pilots)


In Chicago on Good Friday, 2013 (March 29), a cast consisting of long-time Chicago antiwar activists was joined by a NY playwright (and defendant in actions against US drone bases), Jack Gilroy, for one of the events kicking off a month-long campaign of anti-drones events across the country: a performance of Gilroy's play, The Predator.

(See "The Predator" in Chicago - Good Friday, 2013 - "A Passion Play for the Drones Era")

Anyone who cares about stopping drone killing should take a friend and go see Good Kill, and then do it again, and again.

(See GOOD KILL: Struggling to Bring the Truth of Drone Killing Out of the Shadows )

Stop Playing "Ender's Game" With Chicago's Young People

I was startled yesterday to see that Harrison Ford has drawn a clear, direct connection between the upcoming major film release, Ender's Game, and drone warfare -- "I don't think it's a metaphor" -- and that the film's promoters have seen fit to create a "recruiting" video to whip up interest prior to the film's premiere in the fall.

"Battle School Needs YOU!"

I have been very concerned about the way the "dronification" of the military plays hand-in-glove with the "video-game-ification" of military recruiting. Video battle and the notion that "this is all just a game" is being used to suck our young people into this country's war-making ways using a veneer of "cool" and "awesome." (See Mothers Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Drone Pilots . )

Look at all the cool stuff you get! Call of Duty Black Ops II "care package"

When we see the military and the entertainment industry ganging up to sell high-tech war to our kids -- whether through films like Ender's Game or video games like "Call of Duty" or other aspects of popular culture -- we need to push back.

There are some powerful forces marshalled against us. But the one place we should expect to be able to make progress is in our schools. So I was jolted into action when I saw this alert from a friend today:

Ames Middle School
belongs to the Community.
But Ald. Maldonado wants
to give it to Marine Military HS.

For those not already familiar with the situation in Chicago: at a time when the City cannot be bothered to figure out how to run its own schools, but is instead closing dozens at a time, our leaders somehow think it's appropriate to let branches of the U.S. military have the run of the school and recruit kids -- and in some cases outright convert the school into a military academy. Parents in the Logan Square neighborhood are fighting a valiant effort to stop that from happening to the Ames School.

Ames Belongs to the Community!

As the neighborhood association website makes clear, "Logan Square Neighborhood Association fought to get Ames (1920 N. Hamlin) built to serve the entire community. Over the last 12 years, LSNA, Elev8 and Ames have built comprehensive community school programs—including PrimeCare Health Center, mentoring, sports, art, tutoring, counseling and university campus trips—for students and their families. All of this work could be dismantled if a military school is imposed at Ames without a real community process."

Think twice, Chicago! Is this what we want our schools to look like?

Drone pilot cockpit: just another video game?

Join the campaign to keep the military out of Ames! And make a commitment to get the military out of all of our schools. Tell them to stop playing "Ender's Game" with our young people!


More on Ender's Game . . . .


Related posts

A big Hollywood production of Ender's Game is scheduled for release on November 1. It's a perfect opportunity for us to ask: Are we happy seeing our schools turned into "Battle Schools"?

(See "Ender's Game" and the Militarization of Youth: Can We Talk About This? )





What are the 2 or 3 -- or 5, or 10 -- biggest lessons about "collaborating in peaceful mode" that we might be able to witness if we were to seek the answers in Minecraft worlds?

(See Go dig up the solution to world peace in a video game environment )

There are many books proffered to children that provide justifications for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The discourse on the use of atomic weapons is certainly a worthy topic of study for young people of a certain age. However, there is a distinction between critical reading of atom bombing history and passive receiving of atom bombing dogma. I am wondering about how this can be effectively broken down.

(See Approaching Hiroshima: A Challenge for Children's Literature and Peace Education )

Mothers Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Drone Pilots

The New York Times is trying to tell us something. "Look, I'm not your conscience," it seems to be trying to say. "I'm not responsible for getting everything ethically right: that's your job. I just lob stuff up for you to react to. Have you got a pulse? REACT!"

Let's start with the title of the article that appeared on the front page of today's Times. When a major newspaper uses the term "kill shot" in a headline without irony -- without quotation marks, as I just used -- it screams out for us to say "WAIT A MINUTE! We don't talk about killing and injury so glibly!" (See Elisabeth Bumiller, "A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away".)

Drone pilot console

Moving on to the first paragraph, we are reminded that the nation's newspapers long ago abandoned any pretense of judiciousness in reporting about the combatant status of the targets of the U.S. military and the C.I.A. The people in the story are "insurgents" and "militants" -- apparently because the military says so. The words "alleged" and "reported" and "suspected" are nowhere to be seen. And that's why we, the readers, need to mentally supply those words and restore some semblance of reality to the story.

The story goes on to report that drone operators might feel empathy for the people they follow with their video eyes ... but, on the other hand, they claim they don't lose any sleep over the attacks they carry out ... and yet they do know that it's more than just a video game ... at least when commanders "beat into their crews" the message that it's not just a video game.

Is that all clear?

Anyone trying to get a moral bead on the issue of drone operation could be forgiven for getting dizzy. Perhaps the most honest sentence in the whole article is this:

In his 10 years at Creech, he said without elaborating, "I've seen some pretty disturbing things."

Figure it out, reader!

The U.S. military is desperately trying to beef up the ranks of its drone pilots - to meet a "near insatiable demand for drones." There's only one way that's going to happen, and that's if we let our young people think that it's okay to sign up. The world of military service is more abstracted and foreign than ever. If ever there was a time that young people needed guidance from others about what military service might mean for them, that time is now.

The New York Times is putting us on notice -- this is where the real battleground is -- at the recruiting station. It's not the job of The New York Times -- or any other part of the media -- to pass judgement on the state of the world. Their job is just to tee up the issue. It's up to us, on the other hand, to face those issues head on, and to do something about them.

JOIN OTHERS NEAR YOU to oppose drones! See the full state-by-state list on the No Drones Network website.


Related posts

Grounded raises tough questions. I was hoping that the play would challenge the idea that killing people with drones is good. It's a reflection of the seriousness of this work that that is just one of the issues it raises; others include our society's willingness to destroy the people who we employ to "serve" ("serve our country," serve us in general), our culture's worship of violence / use of force, and the consequences of pervasive surveillance.

(See "Everything Is Witnessed": Searching for "the Guilty" in GROUNDED )


We need to do several things for our young people. First of all, we need to show them pictures of war and explain: "This is what real chaos looks like." And then we need to ask, "Still think this sounds appealing?"

(See The Few, the Proud ... and the Chaos)

A big Hollywood production of Ender's Game is scheduled for release on November 1. It's a perfect opportunity for us to ask: Are we happy seeing our schools turned into "Battle Schools"?

(See "Ender's Game" and the Militarization of Youth: Can We Talk About This? )

Ames serves a largely Spanish-speaking community. Is the militarization of Ames anything other than a signal of what the Democratic party means by equitable treatment for immigrants?

(See The Militarization of Ames: The Real Meaning of the DREAM Act )

Drones, Dronespeak, and Death TV: "Intense"

Yesterday the New York Times published what is likely to become a landmark piece of rhetoric that may come to define the future of discourse about warfare, especially the use of drones. The article purported to provide background on an incident in February, 2010, in which 23 Afghan civilians were killed in an attack by U.S. helicopters. It turns out that -- just their bad luck -- the Army was suffering from "information overload" that day.

Just like playing a video game, right?

The article goes on, in what can only be dubbed "dronespeak," to explain away all the deadly consequences of the U.S. drone program in terms of information theory and neurobiology:

. . . in the "swirl of data" . . . it's "like a cubicle worker who loses track of an important e-mail under the mounting pile" . . .

. . . screens in jets are packed with too much data and "some pilots call them 'drool buckets' because, they say, they can get lost staring into them" . . . and "data center teams monitor an avalanche of images on screens" . . .

. . . "it's a multitasking generation" . . . but, on second thought, "multitasking might actually have negative effects" . . .

. . . blame it on "theta" . . . a kind of electrical activity in the brain that spikes sharply under stress and data overload . . .

. . . solving the problem is just a matter of "human factors" and "applied cognition" . . . "mindfulness-based mind fitness training" . . .

. . . with the help, of course, of "iPhone apps" . . . "instant messaging systems" . . . and, of course, for relief, "video games" . . .

The article concludes on a triumphalist note; our "cubicle warriors," it seems, will prevail! How can they not, as they experience the apotheosis of our 20th century inventiveness and ingenuity: " 'Death TV' - live video streams from drones above Afghanistan showing Taliban movements, suspected insurgent safehouses and American combat units headed into battle"? "I'll have a phone in one ear, talking to a pilot on the headset in the other ear, typing in chat at the same time and watching the screens . . . . It's intense."

The article's headline was "In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly," and one might be forgiven for mistakenly thinking that the deadly consequences alluded to are ones being suffered by us and not by unsuspecting civilians on the ground half a world away. George Orwell taught us about Newspeak in 1984. Alas, Newspeak had nothing on "dronespeak."


Related posts

Leveling Up is the creative work that demonstrates just how thoroughly America's new ways of warfare have become intertwined with the other dominant strands in our culture.

(See Level Up, Step Up, Grow Up, Man Up . . . Wake Up)

Some people think it's not yet time to worry about drones, because they're "not really making decisions on their own" -- and they're certainly not at the point of trying to out-think humans. People think, "There's still a 'man in the loop,' so what is there to worry about?"

(See Drone to Human: Leave the Thinking to Me)

Re-reading George Orwell's 1984 recently made me see at least 15 ways 2013 is like the world he describes in the book . . . .

(See 2013 = 1984 ? )