In 2008 the nationally organized “Poetry Out Loud” competition was promoted in Lake County. Poet Laureate Sandra Wade and Lorna Sides circulated the promotional materials throughout our local schools and waited for the enthusiastic students to line up at the announced venues. It was a no show, except for one person. So they had their contest and declared our county winner and sent her off as the Lake County rep to the state level. The local organizers were just a little vague on the level of participation.

There was never a question about following through with the contest. The participant showed up and performed well. That was all that was required. There was no requirement that other students show up. She gained useful experience at the state semifinals while making valuable contacts. Lake County made the cut as a player for showing up also. The publicity encouraged a fuller participation by students this year, with a selection made at an Arts Council event.

As this year brought a successful second year to the “Poetry Out Loud” recitation competition after building on the first year, another contest was sailing into uncharted waters. The regionally advertised “Dream Weaver” playwriting contest was to be run by two Lake County Theater actors in their spare time. This was nothing like a previous playwriting contest promoted nationally with many volunteers. The subject matter was wide open with only technical constraints officially listed.

I saw this as an opportunity to write my first full length play, moving up from skits and short plays. Unlike writers outside the county, I knew something of the judging milieu. The theater board that would anoint a winner tends to favor producing light faire while recoiling from anything with a whiff of avant-garde.

With eyes wide open, I submitted my play “Yellowgrease” with the belief that it would win and be produced only if it were the only functional play before the judges. As this was the first half-hearted year of a regional contest, I knew this was a small but real possibility.

A month after the submission deadline the board took up the contest as an agenda item at their meeting. There was no announcement about what was decided after a week. A month passed – nothing. They did mail their planned upcoming season program but there was no mention of a play from the Dream Weaver contest or even that such a contest ever existed.

Finally, on May 26, one of the two reviewing actors called me because she thought I shouldn’t be left hanging any longer. The verdict was that there were only two functional plays entered that could be produced. Mine was one of them but there was no way they were going to produce it. It was good enough but good enough wasn’t good enough. It was … straaange, and Lake County Theater doesn’t like “strange.” Their solution was to cancel the contest for “lack of participation” without even notifying the contest entrants in writing that there would be no winner and no production. (Contest? What contest? I don’t remember a contest.) I feel those writers who sent in plays in good faith deserve to be treated better. In fact, I would describe the board’s behavior as “artless.”

So what should have been done? At minimum, if they decided that small town economics and values would absolutely prohibit producing the winning play they could have approached the winning playwright thusly:

“All right Shakespeare, you caught us. We gambled that we would get a good romantic comedy or murder mystery in the stack but it didn’t happen. We got you instead. So now you know that this theater community is not open to all types of theater as we led everyone to believe. In many ways we are a much smaller place. Now we have to deal. You want to be the winner? Fine. You’re the winner. Put it on your resume. We’ll alert the media. But we need an out. We will say that we couldn’t find a director that wanted to direct it or not enough actors auditioned for the parts. Since the prize money was coming out of ticket sales, which we won’t have, we will credit you as a life member in our theater company instead. Good luck shopping your play in the big city.”

See how easy it could have been? Apparently the goodwill of local writers is not something the Lake County Theater Co. values very highly. So be it. I will be signing up with online services for playwrights anyway. However, I will require that future contests by LCTC fully disclose their genre limitations to prospective entrants or I will.

Dante DeAmicis lives in Clearlake. To see an outtake from his play, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ND0IMcl9BA.

Let’s not be exceedingly fooled by talks of compassion at any societal levels: ours remains mostly a dog eat dog world, and many of the top winners of such a senseless survival contest appear determined to make it ever more unforgiving for the losers.

To the iron-willed conqueror, the weak is a burden…to those who espouse social Darwinism, and they are the majority at the very top, the weak is meant to be exploited, abused, and eradicated whenever deemed necessary and with nature’s blessing, since according to Darwin’s fantasies, the survival of the fittest is nature’s plan … It is incidentally extremely ironic that a culture would be so seemingly eager to submit to an imaginary natural law when in every other respect displaying contempt for nature, and being so antagonistic and hostile to nature as to strive to overcome it and make it obsolete.

Who is weak, and who is the fittest? In business as in life, generosity, trust, innocence, vulnerability, sensitivity, openness, compassion, respect, a spirit of cooperation and sharing and even having a conscience can be somewhat detrimental to wealth accumulation and preservation.

The successful top business model is predatory, more often than not ruthless, exploitative of the ignorance, misfortune, or weaknesses of others … at the highest levels the aim is no longer to compete but to eliminate the competition, as in an all out war.

Big business is indeed war, just as war has always been big business, the collateral damage being the majority of the world population. The fittest is then the successful predator, and the poor, the working class and increasingly the middle class, are its prey.

While most small businesses offer real, valuable, honest services and products, many large businesses and multinational corporations simply feed on the public the way a wood tick feeds on a mammal, or government feeds on the taxpayer. The problem with the law of the jungle, however, is not so much that so few get to exploit so many, this sickness has always been part of the civilized world ever since the Roman Empire, but that the acquisition of wealth and power for their own sake leads to the development of philistine cultures, where the focuses in living are no longer meaning and quality but survival and quantity.

Mostly gone are, for example, reasonable interests in art, poetry, literature, philosophy, unless the popular trash that passes for such leads to marketable formulas and significant corporate profits. The barbarians are no longer at the gate, they are in the temple, and are in a position to dictate, with an implacable logic that is exclusively grounded in the harsh principles of money making, the terms of the world enduring slavery, which is that of barely existing under the burden of society’s ever more oppressive commercialism.

The habit of an obsessive pursuit of money for its own sake appeals to people whose uneducated motivations cause them to be oblivious and impermeable to any kind of refinement, sophistication or higher aspirations, to display a hatred of even the slightest traces of intellectualism, to distrust imaginative, independent, creative, free-thinking individuals, to favor conformity, uniformity, blind group loyalty as in nationalism, and to delight and perhaps even take pride in idiocy, as long as it is group idiocy, as can be seen in the media and mass trends.

Let’s compare objects created in previous centuries, to today’s mass-produced junk: most old objects, antiques, bear the mark of their human makers, a rare and beautiful quality of heart and soul involvement and individuality. Today’s objects only bear the mark of speedy profitability, they are vacant of all humanity, as are becoming our lives: plastic, rushed, impersonal, increasingly insensitive and hollow, and ruled by the crass corporate model of profit at all costs, by the ideas that what is not profitable is irrelevant and what impedes profits is the enemy of human society.

In this regard, the true artist, the true poet, whose main motivations are anything but money, are suspiciously regarded as being almost seditious, adversarial to the norm, while the norm, first defined by the productivity of the assembly line, now causes workers and professionals to compete with an increasingly faster electronic standard of productivity, natural time being perceived to be a great obstacle to monetary gain, which is to say that our very own humanity is currently defined to be an obstruction to profit.

What kind of world is this, then? A world that, for those who reject the social conditioning that encourages relentless competition, the manic pursuit of material rewards and a drive to achieve recognition within the boundaries of limited social frameworks, makes no more sense than a treadmill would make sense to someone who would rather run free in the wild open prairie.

To make sense of a world that keeps people down, immobilized, functioning like robots and barely living, and whose only practical freedom is financial freedom, without which life remains, under any form of government, slavery, one has to become a willing and obedient hostage of conditioning indeed, and follow the vastly unintelligent social script as closely as a prisoner follows incarceration rules.

The prison, the evil here is not money itself, but the utter fantasy that high artificial living standards create happiness and fulfillment while more modest natural living standards cause misery…why then do the richest people on earth are plagued by so many mental illnesses such as depression, bi-polar disorder, etc? Not to romanticize poverty and demonize wealth, but a simpler, calmer, more natural, authentic and cooperative way of life is in my opinion far superior to the mania of pillaging the earth to manufacture ever more toxic products and substances that are ever faster consumed and discarded while entire populations are exploited in every possible manner or even killed to keep this madness going.

What is today called material poverty becomes psychologically unbearable only within an environment that is culturally bare, alienating, and devoid of authentic human fulfillment, a cultural, spiritual and psychological wasteland. Where and when populations have very close family units, meaningful social roles and connections, essential values and a propensity to fulfill real, natural human needs rather than artificial desires and fancy cravings, a humbler lifestyle is not perceived to be anymore humiliating or unfulfilling than not having a 3000 square foot house would have been perceived to be damaging to the self-worth or well-being of a 19th century Inuit, or than not growing up in Beverly Hills and not going to summer vacation in the Hampton is damaging to the average American child’s psyche.

It is time to initiate new social and cultural standards to restore a sense of inner self to the individual, to understand that frantic productivity and consumerism are not conditions fundamental to fulfillment, and a quasi imperial standard of living is not essential to human happiness, so that the earth is no longer trashed and the future generations sacrificed to elevate the low self-esteem and fill the inner void of the neurotic and the spiritually vacant.

Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.