The Kitchen Renovation Puppet Theater!

     During World War II Colditz Castle, a one-thousand-year-old fortress near Dresden, was chosen by the Nazis to serve as a high security POW camp. Colditz was prison to the most dogged allied escapers and as a result became an elite school of escape.
     After several failed attempts involving standard tactics like hiding places, disguises and ropes, the prisoner's "escape committee" approved a plan to depart by air. In 1943, the prisoners began building a glider that was to be launched from the rooftop of the castle and piloted to a field across the nearby river. Over the next year, the glider was assembled entirely out of parts of the prison: floorboards, bed sheets, improvised fasteners, adhesives and tools. Just before the craft was ready to fly Colditz was liberated by allied troops. The voyage was never attempted.
     A Nova documentary "Escape from Castle Colditz" is a nostalgic and dramatic presentation of the story. The documentary comes complete with a "re-creation" of the original Colditz glider -- purportedly constructed following the original plans. At the conclusion of the documentary the glider is successfully flown for the witness of a vanload of octogenarian Colditz vets. It's a breathtaking moment.
     Dubious congruency between the original glider and the simulation notwithstanding, the need of the documenters to answer "the big question" -- Would it have flown? -- just misses the point.
     What was the point? First consider that, regardless of the flight-worthiness of the glider, it was an absolutely terrible concept for getting POWs back to the front lines. It took years to build. It required a huge amount of resources and the energy of dozens of prisoners. For all that exertion, the glider was to carry just two prisoners. Worse still, assuming a flawless flight, the escapees would have landed in a field just 1000 meters away. Such a position was far from escape. Earlier attempts had clearly established that the walls of the prison were a minor barrier when compared to navigating through hundreds of miles of enemy territory.
     So in the terms of standard escapes from standard prisons, the Colditz glider was a ridiculous scheme. The plan looks different, however, if we adjust the notion of what constitutes prison. If prison is not a singular condition, but a spectrum of confinements ranging in tangibility from iron bars to peacetime suburbia, what qualifies as a successful escape can diversify as well.
     Whether the escape is from a high security POW camp or the high security of a living room sofa, the best plans succeed not because they cross a line from "not-free" to "free" but because they play with and within the terms of confinement. After all, what changes one's relationship with confinement more than a secret plan? The Colditz story is a perfect example. Because the glider plan was so far off of the map, it was able to fly below the radar. It did succeed, at least in its penultimate goal, but I argue that it claimed its ultimate goal: to recreate prison (both literally and figuratively) on the terms of the prisoners. With the glider the soldiers escaped the prison of awaiting rescue and the prison of boring escape. Also, as much to their chagrin as to their longevity, the soldiers escaped the prison of moving through Nazi Germany back to the front line of a war.

      Popular culture is full of crisis stories. These stories work in different ways. Colditz is an example of a kind of bourgeois crisis story. In this type, moderately to highly empowered protagonists experience a loss of power or choice that exposes atavistic capabilities or freedoms.
     Stories of contingency cannibalism are an extreme example of this. One reason these are popular because cannibalism is one of the "fundamentals" that separate "civil" humans from a notion of uncivil humans and animals. Such stories are case studies proving the negotiability of even the most fundamental taboos.
     In the film Alive, a rugby team's airplane crashes in the Andes and we witness an experiment we could never produce. The hypothesis, that certain fundamental morals separate civil humans from uncivil humans and beasts, goes unsupported when the survivors begin eating the casualties. The story is a convincing counterpoint to the morality of fictional heroes like Odysseus who would starve to death before eating Apollo's sheep.
     A scenario like the one represented in Alive calls all manner of lesser rules and morals into question. The film's airplane can be viewed as a symbol for civilization, institution or government; it is a system that offers a service or a measure of protection in exchange for compliance to its rules. A contract exists between the passengers and the plane: the plane safely transports the passengers, the passengers behave within certain limits. But when the plane crashes it is not too long before the passengers adjust their behavior to suit a new arrangement. This is the refrain of the bourgeois crisis story: when protection is withdrawn those who were protected stop paying tribute.

     I am not suggesting that instances of contingency cannibalism expose a hidden desire of humans to eat one another. These stories simply describe an upper range of the adjustments that socialized humans are capable of making.
     In crisis stories, barriers between human and nature break down, class becomes irrelevant or just silly, and the dispossessed or complacent become active. What appears to be going on with the popularity of crisis stories is a latent anarchist curiosity. The crisis story is a thought experiment. It wonders out loud what it would be like to live with radically different rules.
     The Swiss Family Robinson, while certainly an idealized tale, contains a notion of disaster as a kind of liberation. This liberation is not a utopian end-to-struggle or an argument for primitivism; it is a liberation from the notion that meaning and wellbeing are inextricably linked to civilization. At the point of crisis, the family's connection to civilization is severed. When the their ship wrecks traditional modes of power, choice, security and luxury are lost, yet as the story develops happiness and meaning are retained. Furthermore a kind of urgency and adventure take over and we marvel at the ingenuity and cooperation that result.
     Thankfully, those most attractive elements of the crisis can be detached from the crisis itself. There is no need to pray for the scarce good fortune of the Swiss Family Robinson. The desirable aspects of crisis are even commonplace. An example is a snowstorm or blackout that temporarily halts the normal flow of life. This could mean that you finally meet the neighbor you've lived next to for a year and the two of you sit around all day trading stories and eating food from defrosting freezers.

The Dangers of Crisis Fetish

      Crisis stories almost always show an institution or symbol of an institution being destroyed and the subsequent triumph of something human. In that sense what could be more dangerous to institutions than a popular fascination with crisis? The abundance of crisis spectacle is one way that institutions distract or defuse these desires.
     "Reality" teevee is a prominent spectacle that serves this function. In the typical mode of the crisis story, many reality shows represent characters in eccentric scenarios working with novel rules. Of course such shows are not designed to inspire people at home to experiment themselves, but rather to continue watching as actors* perform skits about such things.
     Consider the "reality" teevee show, "Survivor." It would be wrong to think of Survivor as an updated version of Gilligan's Island. The Gilligan's Island "crisis" is a cooperative and funny respite from class, law, luxury and tourism. Survivor, on the other hand, is a complete inversion of that idea. Its characters contend in a winner-takes-all, losers-take-none scenario of scheming and back stabbing. Apparently the free market survived the show's hypothetical shipwreck. This isn't the survival story we are used to; this is the capitalist survival story as celebrity feud or sporting event. Instead of selling soap Survivor employees sell the citizen-testimonial that life without sofa, television, hierarchy, capital, cops, etc. is a life of even more conflict, misery and destructive competition than we (the privileged) currently know.
     To complete the image Survivor adds the justice of democracy to top off the story. Although the reasons that a particular character survives (wins) seem petty and arbitrary, the whole selection process is run by vote. Indeed, the losers who go home with nothing do so voting for the winner. For the winner the prize is the very cat in whose (supposed) absence the mice did play, a one million-dollar check that fortifies against a single additional day of survival. Here, crisis fetish, with its anarchist underpinnings is being reigned in as aggressively as possible. The magnitude of the recall is both embarrassing and quite inspirational.

Thinktank and "Reality" (teevee)

The thinktank experiments certainly feed off of the same desires for alternate systems that are vented in reality TV. Ultimately, however, they undercut these spectacles because those participating in their own projects are not watching, reading, purchasing products or buying into passive participation.
It certainly seems that contemporary media must walk an increasingly fine line in order to both display "real people" doing interesting and eccentric things AND discourage (ostensibly the same pool of) real people from following suit. I only wish I saw Survivor or Junkyard Wars and said to myself, "Well hell! We can do that." If television actually messed up enough to bump a few customers from spectator to participant that's just the kind of slippage I can get behind.

* Yes, let's not kid ourselves, these "real people" are actors just like "actors" are real people! What's an actor anyway? Survivor contestants are carefully cast for their rolls. They perform their character for a camera on set or on location. After filming a director selects from the footage to create the desired characters and stories.

Auto Revision and the Big Question

     The Automobile Revision Project was a tabletop crisis, a bench test. The primary characteristics were all there: limited choices, inspired work, unity of purpose and sparse amenities. But the most important characteristics were our locally determined rules. Our central legislation was the dumping of volumes of legal and social code governing the use of a car. As with many crisis situations, what had been product became a material, what had been solid became fluid.
     To our interest, our visitors could rarely be shocked by the broken rules of car nation. But our broken rules of sanitation and privacy were a different story. For all the strange things that one could hear and see through our window, visitors concerns were concise: number one, what do we do about poo, pee and bathing, number two, "Aren't you killing each other in there?"
     The questions seemed so strange. Was it "reality teevee" that naturalized the idea that humans just don't get along with one another? Do we really owe what civility we have to smelling fresh, flush toilets, mobility, privacy and distance communication?
     For me the Auto Revision was a counterpoint to all that. For two weeks, we didn't shower or change clothes, we slept on the ground and we used a bucket as a toilet. Those things caused no stress. For two weeks we couldn't check e-mail or talk to anyone at a distance. We also couldn't talk privately about anyone else in the room. Those things acted to eliminate many standard collaborative stresses. For a visitor to see what was going on in the micro-culture of the Auto Revision she/he had to see through the surface of restrictions into the world those restrictions revealed.
     This was a world in which we couldn't run errands. But we also "couldn't" sit in traffic. By design of the project, all of the solutions were right before our eyes. We worked at interesting activities all day without interruption. We cooked for each other every evening and talked about new ideas as we ate. In the evening we played the instruments we had made that day. At night we fell asleep totally exhausted. That is to say, things were great, so great that we began to turn the question around asking visitors, "Aren't you killing each other out there?" And, of course, the answer is, "Yes, even with showers."

"If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy."
-Article 3, U.S. Military Code of Conduct