COMMON DREAMS NEWS
CENTER
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for the Progressive Community
Citizen Dreyfuss
by Katrina vanden
Heuvel, The Nation, Published December 15, 2006
From the Web, April
19, 2007
Richard Dreyfuss stood before a
packed community meeting in Martha's Vineyard last week and asked, "Where do we
offer young people the chance to fall in love with America?" He insisted
that he was "not speaking for Democrats, Republicans or anything else.
[But] as an American who wants to hand to his kids the country he learned
about." He then led a discussion on the importance of reviving civics
education in our nation's public schools.
The man who once obsessively built clay models of a form that couldn't escape
his mind, who warned locals on this same island of a killer shark roaming the
waters offshore, who devoted himself to teaching music at the expense of his
relationship with his hearing-impaired son... Those fictitious events were
part of Dreyfuss's other life as an actor. But it is Citizen Dreyfuss who
spoke at the community meeting -- living what he calls "the second half of my
life."
From the age of 12, Dreyfuss has wanted to do three things: be an actor,
be a movie star, and be in politics. He says that four years ago, after he
was fired from the London production of The Producers, he decided it was time to
retire and do the third thing.
"I've been acting since I'm 12," he says. "I've been famous since I'm
25.... So, I just got really tired of it. After forty years, there
are other things you love and want to spend time with ... I decided that
instead of waiting to be rich enough to do whatever you want to do, you'll just
do whatever you want to do and scramble around for the money."
What he wanted to do was enroll at Oxford University to study democracy.
And he did. "I came there with a notion that I had tried to sell to
Coca-Cola about ten years previously," he says. "That was to create a
two-hour show for kids. The idea was the story of democracy as a biography
like a Dickensian tale. Think of David Copperfield as Democracy, and it
becomes immediately a more interesting story: born under perilous
circumstances, raised without any love and affection -- fragile childhood.
Held in contempt, dismissed ... surprising allies and surprising opponents.
And then, out of nowhere almost, he prevails. And he not only prevails he
becomes the system of choice -- the most popular in England. But he
carries within himself the seeds of his own destruction because that's what he
sought. And I think that that could be a legitimate two-hour movie for TV,
and never stray from the truth. And hook people on that story, and make
them want to go even further."
But Dreyfuss found himself drifting towards political writers at Oxford and
wanting to be in the classroom. And he was deeply distressed about the
state of America's democracy.
"There is no serious place to discuss serious issues any more and that's a
serious problem," he argues. "How do you discuss serious issues without
the melodrama and all that stuff? Kids grow up thinking that shouting is
the only way to discuss politics -- that rumination and thinking things through
is for sissies."
Dreyfuss says that the Framers felt that the people could be relied upon to
maintain our system -- they could be sovereign. But being sovereign
required a thoughtful, intelligent, active citizenry. Dreyfuss believes
that today we know so little about our system; even worse, we are taught so
little about how to preserve and strengthen it. As he said in an interview
on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, "If the people are sovereign, they are
the monarch. Who tutors the monarch? Who trains and teaches the
people to be sovereign?" Dreyfuss says that he became convinced "America
was going to go by way of all the other leading nations which slipped up, kept
hold of its documents which lost any meaning, and simply faded away ..."
But at some point during his time at Oxford Dreyfuss found reason for hope.
"I realized that all of the institutions are there," he says. "And it just
takes the revivification of one or two of these places and the rest will
follow." His original idea for the TV show began to morph into a civics
curriculum -- which he says is the teaching of the tools that are necessary to
maintain our system of government -- "the internal combustion engine and not the
Porsche and not the Chevy." He says that these tools are "pre-partisan,"
and he defines them as reason, logic, clarity of thought, dissent, debate, and
civility. Dreyfuss says that civility was the one "I thought I had to bury
because I knew it was the biggest buzzword." But civility, he insists, is
"the oxygen that democracy requires. Democracy is our willingness to share
political space with those with whom we disagree. We need to share it with
respect -- letting [people] finish their sentences, not patronizing them,
thinking things through, getting to know people. Otherwise we strangle on
incivility."
Last summer, Dreyfuss and his longtime friend and Martha's Vineyard educator,
Robert Tankard, spoke with the island's Superintendent, James Weiss, about
teaching a new civics curriculum. They wanted parents, teachers, students,
historians, and others to collaborate on it, use the Martha's Vineyard school
system as a laboratory, and then offer it as a model for a national civics
revival. Weiss said that if they could generate interest in the local
community he would implement the classes.
"I never heard such a great offer in my life," Dreyfuss says. "It's the
difference between walking and talking." And that's how Citizen Dreyfuss
found himself talking civics with the community last week.
Dreyfuss spoke about the risk of doing nothing. Without doing the rigorous
work, the training, and learning "the tools of democracy, we leave the running
of our system to happenstance and luck. We can kiss it goodbye in the
lives of my children and yours."
Dreyfuss found a receptive crowd. On the importance of civility an elderly
man said, "You were born with two eyes, two ears, one nose, and one mouth.
Use them in those proportions." Others complained of people "making up
facts in order to win arguments." Or "bashing others to score political
points instead of working to solve problems." They felt that civics
education needed to start younger so that by the time people finished high
school they were practicing citizenship rather than learning it. Historian
Gordon Wood told the group, "We are a nation of immigrants ... What holds us
together? It can't be Starbucks and McDonald's. That's why we go back to
the Founders -- equality, liberty, self-government ... If younger people don't
know [this foundation], they will lose any sense of collectivity, identity as
Americans." Sociologist James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me,
also participated in the meeting and called the teaching of civics "one leg of
many in our culture to revive and renew us." A retired principal spoke of
the obstacles created by No Child Left Behind -- the forced focus on reading and
math, and the consequent cuts to music, arts and other programs. "To be
successful, we need to think of the whole child again," he said.
There was another target on the mind of Dreyfuss and many of the citizens at the
meeting: the media, and especially television. (Dreyfuss calls
television "possibly the worst thing that ever happened to us. I think it
shortened our brains. I think it created road rage. I think it
killed rumination. I think it allows us to think that we are discussing
serious public issues when we're not. I think that it has become the place
of serious public discussion of issues but it isn't. And it just passes
for that.") He said that television is where we go for news information.
It delivers information through image (rather than text) instantaneously,
leaving no time for rumination. He cited 9/11 coverage as an example --
the instantaneous images of the Twin Towers replayed over and over again --
leaving room for nothing other than feelings of "grief and revenge."
Dreyfuss believes television has caused us to reinterpret what makes a good
politician (the image being more important than the text). He called
people in the industry "like addicts -- denying that a problem exists."
Meanwhile, he says, we accept the medium as offering the same level of
reflection and insight as reading and rumination. There was general
agreement that we have lost our way in teaching young people to be critical
thinkers and sort through the information industry.
As the meeting ended, Dreyfuss asked: "Are you in favor of teaching civics
in American public schools?" He called for the nays and there was silence.
Dreyfuss allowed it to linger. Finally, he asked for the yeas, and
hundreds of people responded with enthusiasm. The contrast was striking,
and Dreyfuss had clearly drawn on his skillful sense of timing to orchestrate
the moment. Dreyfuss and Tankard had achieved their objective of
demonstrating strong public support. Participants were invited to attend a
follow-up session at a local high school the next day where the focus would
shift to developing a pilot program.
After the meeting Superintendent Weiss said that there is an eighteen-month
window of opportunity to revamp civics education on the island. The
standardized testing in social studies for the state will be decided during that
time period and curricula will be revised. He said that eighteen months
was "just enough time" to succeed.
The next morning, Dreyfuss was pleased with the conference but also tired and
frustrated as he reflected on the contributing factors that he perceives as
threatening our system of government -- a system he undeniably loves and is
passionate about. He railed at a media that fails to demand the truth on
the gravest matters of our time ("You want someone to say [to the President],
'Excuse me, you're full of shit, and answer the question.' And they don't
do that"). He decried the infighting of the Democratic party ("Democrats
eat their young") and the failure of the left to articulate a compelling case
that people can rally around. He denounced Republicans for not being
straight with people about what they stand for and why. He said that
America has broken the hearts of young people and caused cynicism to be rampant
among them. Dreyfuss believes that civics -- despite what he calls its
boring reputation -- is the way young people can begin to have "a love affair
with America."
Whether or not one agrees with Dreyfuss's critique of political culture, one
thing is clear: He's not only talking the talk, he's also walking the walk
-- and demonstrating the kind of committed citizenship he espouses. How
many Oscar-winners walk away from their profession to develop curricula ("The
only time you'll ever see me in a movie or anything like that is when you know
they paid me a billion dollars ...")? To Dreyfuss, "representative
democracy is as thrilling as anything Charles Dickens wrote and Alfred Hitchcock
ever shot." It is both a thriller and a romance, and offers a narrative
with a distinct beginning, middle and end. The beginning and the middle
are history -- and to Dreyfuss, the still open-ending begs this question:
"What country do we want to hand to our kids?"
With reporting from Martha's Vineyard by Gregory Kaufmann, a
Washington, DC-based journalist and screenwriter.
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