Hadestown...how do we save the environment? (Hadestown 8/8, episode 37)

To really understand the smash musical Hadestown, you have to understand…mines.  Hear me out.

Hadestown isn’t just a re-telling of the ancient Orpheus tale, as the name suggest it’s a story that focuses on a particular location…the underworld.

And there is obviously a conscious choice to make the underworld much different than the Greeks imagined it, and much more like the company towns associated with the early industrial era.  And not just any company towns, but mining towns.  What you can’t really miss about the show is that it’s focused on Hades and it’s a mining town.

The other thing you can’t miss is that it’s about environmental destruction and oppression – Eurydice has to make a deal with Hades because she can’t find food and shelter on the surface, and Orpheus can’t provide it.  The only one with control over resources is Hades, and he is obviously mostly interested in keeping himself at the top of the food chain.  The show is an invitation to think about the themes in the Orpheus myth, but do so in the context of a real world threatened by growing levels of corporate control and ever-greater threats to the natural environment.

And it’s all centered around…mines.  So what is it about mines that is so important to the central themes of the show?  Grab your pickaxe, put a canary in a cage, strap on your hard hat, and let’s go into the tunnels together on this episode of THM.

Climate myth citations

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/hadestown-coal-fired-lights-are-bright-broadway

https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/06/too-late-climate-crisis-myth/

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-battle-of-blair-mountain/

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/workers-rights-won-by-unions

https://energyhistory.yale.edu/coal-mining-and-labor-conflict/

Transcript

To really understand the smash hit musical Hades Town, you have to understand minds. 

Here we are. Hades Town isn't just a retelling of the ancient Orpheus tale. As the name suggests, it's a story that focuses on a particular location, the underworld. 

And there is obviously a conscious choice to make the underworld much different than the Greeks imagined it, and much more like company towns associated with the early industrial era. And not just any company towns, but mining towns. You can't really miss about the show that it is focused on Hades and that it's a mining town. The other thing you can't miss is that it's about environmental destruction and oppression. Eurydice has to make a deal with Hades because she can't find food or shelter on the surface and Orpheus can't provide it. 

The only one with control over resources is Hades and he is obviously mostly interested in keeping himself at the top of the food chain. The show is an invitation to think about the themes in the Orpheus myth, but to do so in the context of a real world threatened by growing levels of corporate control and ever greater threats to the natural environment and it's all centered around minds. So what makes minds so important to the central theme of the show? Well, grab your pickaxe, put a canary in a cage, strap on your hard hat and let's go into the tunnels together in this episode of Theater, History and Mysteries. I'm John Bruschke and you are listening to Theater, History and Mysteries where I take on musical theater production, go into a deep dive on the questions it raises and the answers it provides. 

I hope that this approach will give a deeper understanding about the lessons that the musical has for theater and for life and I will never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event or supernatural suggestion along the way because in the words of Dirk Jitley it is all connected. We will get on with the show in a second but first couple of quick procedural announcements. Up next is going to be Hamilton. This is our last episode of Hades Town. We're going to take on Hamilton next and so that's going to be our second contemporary musical. If you're interested into deeper dives on Hades Town about the original Greek myths, about the way the show got developed, about what others had to say about the issues of race and political empowerment that are in the show, just roll back a couple episodes and all that content is there. If you're interested in other shows, I mentioned that we're about to move on to Hamilton, which is our second contemporary show, but the past shows have been the Man of La Mancha, the Fan of the Opera, Cats, Jesus Christ, Superstar and La Mis, sort of the big mega musicals right at the start of mega musical history. Each one of those shows literally has an audience of like 100 million people and so there's plenty of content there. 

If you're a musical theater buff, you can go there and I want to encourage you to do that. There's something you like about this show. There's plenty of other shows to talk about. We're about 40 episodes in. So just roll on back, pick a show and give it a listen. 

And if you could help, please spread the word if you like this. This is a show with dense content for people who aren't not dense. That is, there is not a lot of places out there where you can take a piece of musical theater and do a super deep dive, focusing mostly on the high end academic research that has surrounded the show. There's plenty of stuff you can do just to get gossip and whatnot, but only we have crazy ghost stories, weird coincidences, and then a bunch of valid academic research that goes into the various shows. So for instance, if you're doing Les Mis, there's a bunch of stuff about the life of Victor Hugo that is kind of fun to find out. 

There is some stuff about the French Revolution that's obviously invoked. And if you want to know what all the backstories and how they connect to the show, you get your deep dive right here. So to keep that going, you know, that requires an audience that's pretty sophisticated and has a lot of intellectual curiosity. The best way for any show to promote itself, the only way podcasts survive on the internet these days are if the people who like it, give it some props and spread the word about it. If you can spread the word about this show, that would mean everything to me. You can also give me a shout out if there's something about this show or any of the other shows that you think is interesting. 

You want to talk about a little more, you can go to the Buzzsprout page and link to the email is there. Drop me a line. Let's get going. If we have something interesting that we uncovered together, I'm always happy to add the interview to this show, get some listeners who have interesting things to say and you and I can talk. 

We'll put you on the broadcast and I'm interested in you getting engaged as much as you want to get engaged. All right. That does it for the procedural stuff. Let's get going on this week's episode, which as I mentioned is all about minds. But first, let's review very quickly what it is that got us here so we can understand why it is so important. 

Here's the show basics. Orpheus is basically the first rock star. He's the first great musician, literally a traveling bard with a guitar. 

Sure. Maybe it's a golden liar that was given to him by Apollo, but whatever. He's got his acts and he's walking around singing songs and he is going to save the planet with his song. He is plan as he's going to go to Hades. He's going to play a song. 

So incredible. It's going to restore. It's going to convince Hades to let him go. 

Let him take Eurydice and leave hell together. He almost does it. He gets to the very end, then he turns around some looks. So it's not really a happy ending. And what I just kind of summarized is true to all of the different versions of the Orpheus myth, including Mitchell's at the very end. Orpheus looks back. 

He kind of blows it. He and Eurydice have to go back to hell. But what is important about Hades Town is the end of that. Everybody raises a cup to Orpheus and says, great job for trying what matters was not that you succeeded. What matters is that you put your heart out there and you tried to change the world with your art and tried to do that in the face of impossible odds. That is great. 

All right. That is the show in 90 seconds or less. Now, what does that mean about the climate crisis? Because obviously it's a show about the environment and environmental destruction and set in a post-apocalyptic future, which might be closer than we'd all like. And what does the show tell us we ought to do about this? It is clearly a call to think about the issue and maybe a call to action. So what have other people made of this? 

Well, there's at least four different views that we reviewed on the last show, but our thumbnail sketches are number one. It is totally Sisyphean. You are never going to win. 

You can't beat City Hall. Our author today thinks this is one possible interpretation. And given the ending, it's not very far off to say that there might not be a great solution. One thing is you got to fight. You got to keep fighting the fight never ends. But yeah, I don't think you're going to win and that most of the time you're going to fail. But there is value in trying. So the first vision is that it's not really a show about success or about taking a political stance that is going to be effective. 

It's a show about the importance of trying even though it probably won't be. That's the first view. The second view is that the core issue, it's white supremacy, that it's not just that American society and in fact, most of what we now call Western civilization has power in the hands of a very few people. 

It's that it's power in the hands of a very few white people, that there's always been this assumption that white culture is better than all the other cultures and that justifies a whole bunch of the terrible things that have happened. So you got to name it. You got to call it out and you got to make that central as the message of the show. And that that is what we should be focused on when we watch Hades Town. That is according to Neal Wilson of Texas A &M. It's not the only person to think that, but has articulated it very clearly and in the context of her article about Hades Town. 

There is a third view and that is that memory and critical thought are the key to challenging big power systems. That's according to Valerie Lee and Schrader. She was the author on that. She's from Penn State. She cites heavily Antonio Gromsy and Hannah Arendt. 

Those are two big philosophers. And the idea is that you have to remember what the world is like. You have to be able to imagine that there's something other than the great, big, bad power structure that's there that you've got to challenge. That it is about critical thinking and memory, remembering the way things used to be or remembering and imagining a better future. 

That's the key way we can challenge the system. That is definitely the view of Valerie Schrader. That definitely does come from Arendt and Gromsy definitely does say that that's pretty much what a big power structure is like. But really, I'm not convinced that that's the Orpheus story. Orpheus is not trying to take down Hades based on memory and critical thinking. 

He's trying to take down Hades with a song and with music and with beauty. And so although I think there's some value to thinking about the importance of memory and the importance of being able to challenge the system, I'm not sure that's what is in this show. Which gets us to the fourth view and that is that the key, the thing that will challenge it, is love and hope and trust and especially trust. There is a pastoral psychologist named Melinda Sharp who relies heavily on Howard Thurman. 

Somebody else named Howard Thurman. And Melinda Sharp's point is not just you can try again, but if you try again doing the same thing, you're probably not going to succeed. You want to try again, but what's keeping you down is deception. 

You're being lied to and doom and the sense of hopelessness and alienation from everybody else. If you want to do it right, you have to replace all that with things like love and connection and collective action. And that is something that Melinda Sharp adds. I'm embellishing a little bit there on what Melinda Sharp has to say, but that's definitely the fourth view. It's not just about trying again and it's not about getting some big philosophy, right? 

It's about identifying the things that big hedge money power structure has that are separating and make it hard to overcome and replacing that with something better. Okay, that's all by way of review that most of that is an episode seven. If you want to go back and give that a listen. Today, we're going to take on a possible fifth option. And this one comes from Jason DeLara, Maleski from 2023. He's got a PhD from Princeton. He's now at St. Louis University, where he's working as an English professor and writing articles about things like Hades Town. But his bona fides do not come from his academic credentials. He himself worked for years as an underground minor, like not just I've got a job for a mining company, but like I like I strap on that helmet. 

Get in the cart, go underground, take part in the mining labor and I am center of that. And he's not just a minor. He's a minor in a town named Ellsworth, which is named after the industrialists who founded the town on the basis of the mind that he owned and totally exploit. 

He extracted the resources from the planet. So that's what our mind does. Right. So his wealth is based on that. But also, of course, had to do it by keeping down the workers and oppressing them and keeping them from exerting their own rights. And he became fabulously wealthy as a result. He then spent that wealth making himself something like a new voriche, hatred of the arts. He, for example, bought himself a Gutenberg Bible because, you know, who doesn't need a Gutenberg Bible, but it's you can just tell when you read Jason, DeLara Molesky's work that he totally gets that there's a billionaire 1% class and that they are keeping power away from everybody else. And he knows it not just because he's read about it and read a bunch of theories because he has lived it. In fact, here's one of the quotes from his article is that he has a quote, great uncle who at age 15 lost his right eye to a mercenary's tear gas canister while visiting his striking father on the picket line and quote, he's not just a guy who has worked in the minds and not somebody who has seen the danger of mind work firsthand, but somebody whose family is intimately connected with the labor movement and has faced down the thugs that are used by the bosses to keep them out. 

All right. That is Jason DeLara Molesky's background. We are going to now take a step back, give a little context to what that whole history of mining is and then work forward to why that is an important plot point or important choice for the theatrical production 80s town. And here I'm mostly going to be cribbing from the history.com entry. 

I'm going to switch a little bit through to the Yale website and I'll let you know when that happens. But the biggest step back is that the history of mining starts with the industrial revolution and when and where that starts is, of course, a little bit difficult to pin down. But in 1793, the very first textile mill is founded in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. That is a key starting point or an easy thing to point out and say, all right, whatever the industrial revolution is, that seemed to be a moment where it became concrete. 

That was only 1793. And by the 1840s, we are now on full on industrial revolution. There are now steam engines. 

Steam engines, of course, need coal, so you need coal mines. But there's also a whole system of communication systems and banking systems that are coming together to make capitalism modern capital. So there'd always been businesses, but they'd mostly been owned by a family or a sole proprietor or some guy who could lose it. But this whole legal entity called the corporation is just starting to become a thing. 

And for that to work, there has to be a very complex system of banking and a way for banks to communicate with one another. And it's all starting to get intertwined. Is it all connected? Heck, yes, it's all connected. And as Mitchell knows, it's all connected in her book, Race, is definitely connected to class, which is connected to relationships, which is connected to the mining system. 

You can see the connections there. And almost everyone who studies the industrial revolution, it says it's not like it won off and it's not just that coal got discovered, the fossil fuels got discovered. But we went from, you know, there was labor and then there was a thing called capital. There was this new thing called management, right? And that the power systems, the kings and the church were getting replaced by the corporation as this big monolithic, the big power player in the room, the big bad, the big entity that was had all the power. 

And just like the bad popes and the bad kings before them were keeping the power themselves and keeping everybody else at the margins. And it was accelerating rapidly in the 1840s. So that takes stock of how big the change is. In the year 1900, the U.S. fleet of cars was exactly eight, not 8,808. There were eight cars on the road in 1900. 

And here we are, what, 126 years later. And, you know, cars are ubiquitous across the planet. I don't know, billions of cars. We went from eight to what the world is like now in only 126 years. All that required a whole bunch of fossil fuels and fossil fuel extraction. It's an awful lot of stuff that happened in a really short time. And it all involved industry and the exploitation of natural resources. And it also included lead gas. If you are not, as I was not just a couple of years ago, really tuned into what happened with the lead in gasoline. I want you to check out Mark Chrysler's podcast. 

It's called The Constant. And he's got a couple episodes about what has happened with lead gas. That it wasn't just like we were extracting fossil fuels and burning them. We were burning them and putting toxic elements into the world that we were all breathing. We were all exposed to. It was one of the biggest cultural and economic and environmental catastrophes of all time. 

In fact, a little bit later in the show, we're going to talk about the Anthropocene. But the big step back is that we are moving from in 1793. We didn't even have textile mills. And then during the course of the 1800s, we developed what is the current modern capital industrial economy. 

All that happened with this whole process of industrialization, which is a lot of resource extraction happening in a really short time. And our show today, important to the show of Hattie's Town, this definitely came with some exploitative labor practices. There were long hours and low pay and child labor and bad safety conditions. And these all resulted in labor unions. And OK, I just want to give a full appreciation for what was happening in these company towns. The companies would go out and they would recruit people from like the deep south, sometimes from the inner cities, but also from Europe. And they would promise them great jobs. I mean, just think what do sex traffickers do? 

Same thing. Find somebody who's desperate, separate them from their family and any social connection, bring them in and promise them a good job. And then that job ends up being sucky. There are long days. There are bad safety conditions. Lots of people are dying. 

I'm going to give you a number in a sec, but it's a lot and a disturbingly large amount. And then on top of all that, the way labor was treated was basically the company would set up the town. They'd set up the company store, which is the only place that you could buy stuff. And then they would hire private security. Think Pinkerton's. 

It was a different private security company, but same general idea. And they basically walk around like prison guards and they would not let you talk right. If you started to talk in smack about how bad the working conditions were, they would beat the living crap out of you, maybe just shoot you in cold blood. They wouldn't let you leave to go by yourself somewhere else. 

You could quit. If you got out of line at all, you were subject to the immediate attack by essentially an unaccountable private security force. And that meant that the company could control your wages and they could also control the cost of living. So whenever you got extra money, they would then charge you more money. So they'd raise the cost of your living so that they got to keep whatever increase pay they gave to you. It was bad. 

All right, I'm going to give you a couple facts here to random just exactly how sucky it was. I'm going to read a piece, an original historical document. I almost never do that on the show. I listened to a bunch of history podcasts myself. Now it's always fun when you get to hear the original historical documents. 

Think this is the first time I've ever done it. But here we go. This is a letter on company stores from M.F. Moran to Edward Robertson, Labor Commissioner in 1890. So this is from M.F. Moran. 

It goes Wheeling, West Virginia, November 6th, 1892. Edward Robertson, Esquire Labor Commissioner. Sir, I received your letter asking for information. You ask, what are my views in regard to the running of company stores by mine operators? 

I have for many years been pronounced regarding my views as to the truck, whereas you have it, the pluck me. Store system either in miner's mills or agricultural communities or anywhere else. It has been my misfortune to see its impoverishing and enslaving work all over the mining regions of America. And the system is regarded by all classes of workmen as the greatest curse that afflicts the mining craft. It is strictly speaking a relic of the barbarous ages of the past. 

Wherever it exists, the system calls for the severest condemnation. And quote, there is more to the letter than that. I'm going to stop there. You go M.F. 

Moran. Think that's a pretty. He's not pulling punches there. 

I think he's got a pretty good take. So that's what the company's town is like. And that's what firsthand account of what people had to say about it. One interesting historical example I'm going to give a little bit of extra attention to here is the Madawan incident and the war that followed. There's actually a movie about this came out, I think in 1987. And it covers all the things that were going around in this mining town. There had been a wage cut and then that was followed by an insistent that all provisions be bought at the company store. 

So cut the wages, force everybody to buy stuff only for them. That obviously created some anger on the part of the miners, which resulted in an armed crackdown and spies placed in the union ranks so that miners were trying to organize around a union. And the company was very actively trying to infiltrate it and did mine using muscle and beating people up to stop it. And then finally, there was a union organizer who was shot down on the steps of the courthouse at Maitwan and that launched the West Virginia coal wars, which were basically nine years of violent conflict between the mining companies and the miners. I'll get back to that war, but let's turn now to the ale history page and it can give a few more details about what all this life there was like. 

What? Hey, was low and the company, which often owned miners, housing and ran the supply store frequently controlled their cost of living. Miners were paid by the ton and conflicts frequently arose a process of weighing the coal. The industry's cyclical nature meant that mining employment could also be irregular and precarious. 

Coal camp 11 conditions were often swallowed in social life dominated by the company and basic freedom of speech, movement and assembly restricted by private mine guards and company paid sheriffs. Mining coal was incredibly dangerous work during the industrial coal boom between 1880 and 1923. More than 70,000 miners died on the job. Many more perish from occupational diseases. When we're tallied in official statistics, miners were crushed to death in roof collapses filled by gas explosions and by machinery and many more. And quote, yeah, so suck to be a miner. 

Thank you to Yale for archiving those materials so we can pull them out. Anyway, amidst those conditions at Matewan, there is a union organized who was shot down on the steps of the courthouse that sparks a series of conflicts those nine years war. And it finally ends with the battle of Blair Mountain, which is the largest domestic fight in the United States since the Civil War. There were 10,000 miners. A lot of these guys were, you know, Civil War veterans, so they had guns and knew it with them and about 3000 arms strike breakers were also around during the Civil War, but also had kind of the force of the company and often the force of law. And they fired a million rounds of ammunition at one another. In fact, if you go to those sites today, you got yourself a metal detector, you can walk around, wave it around. You can't go two or three steps in any direction without immediately finding a shell casing or a slog or something from those battles. 

It's still there. And it ends when President Warren Harding sends in the National Guard, take out the miners and that caused some big. bitterness. At the moment, crushed the mining movement. There were tens of thousands of unionized miners before the National Guard came in. 

There were only about 600 hardcore guys that hung onto it. And finally, in about 1935, it was legalized. Their right to unionize was legalized. And the United Mine Workers became one of the key unions in the history of union activity. And in fact, just the ability to form a union, bargain collectively and for all of them to gather together and say, Hey, we all think this sucks. You can't just pick us off when in time to negotiate separate contracts. That right to collectively bargaining was central to the whole mining operation. You know, the theme I take home from this, it's come up a couple of times in these last seven episodes, is that the people in power are not going to give it up voluntarily. 

It's not like they'll say, Oh, yeah, I see that I am getting all this money. I'm buying good and bullocked Bibles and you're starving to death. It's 70,000 of you dying unsafe working conditions. All I could sell my Gutenberg Bible and I could improve the safety conditions and all of your wages. And I could, you know, just let you peaceably assemble or buy stuff from people who aren't me, but I'm not going to let any of that happen. 

I would rather keep all the money in Gutenberg Bible than to let any of that happen because I'm more afraid of you organizing than I am horrified at your living conditions. And I will say there's still litigation as recently as 2019 over education about the event. Like how do we remember this event in that particular battle and that war and what happened at Matewan? And there's also coal companies that are trying to build stuff on that historical site and the miners would like it preserved as a historical site. And the mining companies are like history, whatever, we would just like to continue to develop this area and kind of plow it all under. So that's just to say, this was a conflict that started in, you know, the early 1900s that is still going on today. The wounds of those losses have not yet healed. And, you know, and have a long time ago, we're still talking about it now, but history does not view those mine owners as the heroes of the conflict. And we all still benefit from what the unions have done. Modern wages and working conditions all trace back to the key things that were won, not just by unions generally, but by mine unions in particular, I'm going to quote Teen Vogue magazine. 

Why Teen Vogue magazine kind of rocks. It says, quote, whether you're a union worker or not, you may benefit from policies for which unions have fought long and hard and they continue to fight end quote. Yes. 

Well done, Deacon Vogue. And then they list 10 of those things. I'm going to list a bunch of them for you now. Minimum wage, weekends. You have weekends. That's cause unions, worker safety, retirement, anti-discrimination, sick leave and healthcare. 

If you go to the stupid parts of the internet, they'll say that those were invented by Henry Ford or some industrialist. Woohoo. Go to West Virginia and say that to some of the local coal miners. See what they have to say about that. They've got quite a different story to tell. 

All right. Mines are not the only place that union activity happened. And they're not the only people who are interested in all those things that we take for granted now. Sick leave. Health care. 

Do you get your health care from your employer? Well, thank a minor for that, a union minor for that. And the minimum wage, you're getting paid more than you got paid 20 years ago. 

That came from the unions and like I said, weekends off, worker safety. Anyway, mines are a central place where all of that came together in American history. And so the mining town is a place where big entities bring their oppressive forces as harshly as they can on the workers. 

And if it can happen there, if unionizing and resistance movements can happen there, they can happen everywhere. Okay. I'm going to read you one last quote and just remind yourself as I read this, that Delora Molesky was once a minor. 

He wasn't a wussy academic. And let's chew on this quote for a little bit and then we'll decode it. Quote, These capital frontiers again and again gave rise to dissent as adamant as the initial violence, such that Timothy Mitchell, among others, claims that modern mass democracy, the idea that all stations should enjoy material dignity and political voice, sprang like steam power or ready electricity from coal towns, from coal miners bodies. And quote, to decode that a little bit, violence was definitely used to oppress the miners, that the companies had no problem sending in thugs to beat, shoot, name and dismember the union people who just wanted to organize peacefully and have safe working additions. But that attempt at violence was met with resistance that was just as strong and the entire mass democracy, the entire mass democracy movement, the idea that all economic classes deserve basic dignity and a political voice came from that moment. 

It did not come from the constitution, which famously did not trade all black people as equal, did not treat women as equal and definitely only felt you should have political voice if you were a landowner. All those ideas came, that whole idea of mass democracy came out of those mining camps. And that I think makes those minds and those mining camps the special interview of DeLara Molesky and to some extent Timothy Mitchell. Now we'll say DeLara Molesky says that Timothy Mitchell, who is a very important author in the whole idea behind the coal economy and the carbon impact title of his book is Carbon Economy, DeLara Molesky says that Mitchell locates the minds as central to the modern democracy movement. 

Mitchell kind of does, but it's not as central to Mitchell as it is to DeLara Molesky, but I do think DeLara Molesky is right. You dig into it and you find where did democracy come from? It came from the labor movement and especially the mining movement in the early 1900s. 

Okay, so that's just the background of the history. There's the industrial revolution that results in the oppression of a lot of people by a very small corporate class that is now emerging. It's replacing kings as the rich dudes that are making the world miserable for everybody else. And in the midst of that oppression, the miners are providing the resist. So let's reflect now on DeLara Molesky's next point that is mining and collective action is sort of the unifying nexus, the key point where resistance comes up. It is all connected. Is it all connected? I think it's all connected. 

Does DeLara Molesky think it's all connected? Here's what he thinks, quote, ingesturing toward a sustainable future as well as toward the kind of politics that may further the same. 80s town concurs with writer activists like Ashley Dawson and Naomi Klein that the health and stability of the climate reflects the health and stability of working class communities and the collective action may promise a way forward on both fronts and, quote, let's reflect on that. Inequality exists and mining communities and carbon communities and the whole structure of climate change is built on an unequal economic structure. If we are going to have a safe and healthy and verdant world, we need the environmental impacts land on the poorest communities having safe and healthy working class communities is the way forward, according to DeLara Molesky. 

That's the first connection number one that the economic systems and the environmental systems are all intertwined. That is something DeLara Molesky thinks and he thinks that's true of mining towns and that's definitely something that happens in 80s town and the picket line history of mining organizing is in fact what drives mining towns, quote, picket lines and tear gas bombs and even near mate one surplus warplanes strafing workers spawned an activist lineage of song and story out of which ultimately 80s town emerges in the US women disproportionately spear head of the effort perhaps because as Tilly Olson argues of Rebecca Harding Davis, they understood an adjacent breed of oppression. Many in this line of company town writing have sung their versions of the old song at issues in 80s town. 

Seen from this perspective, the musical's closing note of repetition celebrates the tenacity of radical art and the resolve of diverse working class people like Mitchell's Euridice who together might once again alter the geological future this time for the better and of their own core and quote, I just want to reflect on what we academics would call the intersectional nature of those issues. Now there is a reference in there to surplus warplanes. Yes, that happened that the National Guard and even some of the private security got warplanes to come in and bomb and strafe workers who were on strike as is often the case. Those in power do terrible things, commit violence, wait for the dispossessed to counterpunch and then bring the hammer down on them as hard as they can. They did that with warplanes but I am also struck at how women were always central to this effort and according to the Lara Molesky and Tilly Olson who Lara Molesky cites, women understand the way that these oppressive things intersect with the one another and they see that there is a fight, there is a commonality amongst the dispossessed and that they've got to be a part of that and women take up that mantle. 

So what the Lara Molesky I think is suggesting is that there is a bunch of interconnections and that means that labor movements, mining movements, mining towns, resistance at the site of the greatest oppression is a really important part where all of the mass democracy springs from. Okay, how does all that connect back to our big central issue? What do we do about the environment? Because you can't miss that this shows about the environment and you can't miss that it's about a mining town or how do we pull those two together. All right, well I just want to take a minute and say let's start by acknowledging there is really an environmental problem. There's a real environmental crisis and it's happening in this country. According to the Lara Molesky, their military is actually prepping for various climate disasters so there is an open, if you're wondering if it's real and you think those climate deniers might have a point, I encourage you to educate yourself a little more. There's plenty of good places and good sources of information but at least put it in the back of your head. If you think it's all fiction, why then is the military planning war scenarios on the basis of environmental crises that are caused by climate change? For the Lara Molesky, that's pretty compelling evidence it is for me too but here I'm also going to crib from the world economic form in 2023. 

Here we go. Quote, the climate emergency and its effects compromise the top three risks to the world over the next decade according to the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2023 with failure to mitigate climate change as the risk with the biggest impact on life on earth. A global survey commissioned by the forum and conducted by Ipsos found that more than half of adults on the planet say climate change has already had a severe impact on their lives and that a third fear it may force them from their homes. Yeah, okay, so that's bad. There were other quotes that we had in Episode 7 but let's just climate change is just bad. We are not just at a climate problem point, right? The show Hadesdown is about a post-apocalyptic future and right now we are on track to arrive at that actual future and in particular the question is what the crap can we do about it? And one of the major problems is the belief that it is simply too late and that's an issue, right? 

The whole idea that it's Sisyphean that there's nothing you can do that we can give up, you ought to give up. This is again from the World Economic Forum in 2023. It's a bit, yeah, it's a little quote-tastic here but I think it's worth it quote and yet researchers have found that increasing numbers of people say that it's too late to save the planet. In fact, it's becoming the leading climate myth globally, outpacing arguments that the science is wrong or that the rising temperatures are not due to human activity. A study by academics from the UK, Ireland and the United States found that the argument that it's too late has become the dominant climate myth among climate skeptics over the last 10 years and said it was holding back climate action. Lauren Upnick-Cindywood, the World Economic Forum's head of climate strategy said, quote, within a quote, it is critical that we overcome this narrative that it is too late to save the planet, which both ignores the significant progress that has been made to decarbonize our society and also hinders future action. We cannot afford to be paralyzed by climate pessimism but must rather accelerate action at all levels of society from our local communities to global corporations. Every fraction of a degree counts when it comes to global eating and so does every action we take to reduce our climate impact. 

End quote. All right, so let's just reflect on that and we'll get back to this in Hattie's town and its concluding message but climate change is real and a huge problem that we face regarding climate change is that people are giving up hope. They think that it's too late or they think there's nothing to be done and so they don't do anything and real researchers, actual policymakers, actual policy institutes are all coming to the conclusion that this is now the number one climate denying message on the planet and across all the crap that has been spewed about climate change. The number one problem I face now is that people are giving up. They're getting hopeless. 

All right, I'm going to read another quote by DeLara Molesky who thinks that art and minds and collective action is the solution and first I just want to say Anthropocene. This is an awesome idea but they're different. If you had your geology class, you remember they're different. Era's ages and epochs and right now there is a big debate in the scientific community about whether or not we have reached the Anthropocene. That is the era of geological history where you can see in the geological record that it's been altered by human activity and that lead in the atmosphere that now shows up. That is a key part of that but there's other things too like if you were to go back hundreds of millions of years ago you could find fossil remains as evidence of dinosaurs were there and you are now being old-defined very recently that there is evidence that humans have altered the geology of the planet and that's only happened since the industrial era. So the question is are we now in an Anthropocene and there are scientists who care about this and debate about it a lot. Many people take it as red. 

DeLara Molesky is one of those. Okay here's his conclusion. We'll decode it a little more at the end but he's going to eat. He definitely thinks that art, minds and collective action all come together in the show and is an important part of the solution that we all face in the planet. Quote, art too has become like Orpheus a geophysical force. Artists and scholars who envision their work on the Anthropocene as a praxis of descent might join Mitchell in seeking provocations in company towns. The foremost site where workers have contested the paranoid corporate logics that wrenched the epoch from the earth. 

Class consciousness reemerges in Hades town to take aim at the socio-economic infrastructure subtending climate chaos. End quote. Okay just remember that guy used to work in a mine then he got a PhD. 

His language isn't super accessible but I think his point is pretty clean. Art is the key. The foremost sites where corporate power has resulted in death of workers and in threats to the planet and our collective environment is in the mines and what artists ought to do. More people ought to do just what Mitchell has done and put that question in front and central and center and he ends on a pretty hopeful note. Quote, Eurydice is framing the question anybody got a match? Thus situates the musical itself as kindling in the world on fire. Hades town epitomizes the hope that old songs raised up and reformulated can move us to keep our heads and ignite a countervailing flame. 

A torch constant enough to light the path as we labor towards the threshold. End quote. All right let's just try to wrap this all up. We got a whole bunch of stuff on Hades town and on different challenges the environment poses or environmental destruction poses and what we ought to do about it. I think Anas Mitchell has got the right message for the right time. Is she got a great idea for how the workers can get together? Collective action can happen. The answer is no. 

It's not clear to me even if Orpheus leaves Hades what happens to the workers left behind and at the end the workers aren't really inspired to do that much. That's not great in my view. There are others that think you got to focus on white supremacy or they got to focus on class consciousness or that you got to focus on hope and love or that you got to focus on memory and critical thinking. 

I don't think there's anything wrong with all any of that. But what I think is so powerful about the show right taking aside all the academic arguments is that Mitchell has come across the right message for the right time. She is focusing on the climate issue. 

Is it a great big deal? And she puts front and center in her play and she follows all the connections. So I think that it's not just standalone problem. It's not just one town, but there's a connection between questions of race and class, gender and economics and corporate control and oppression and working people. All of that is all connected and she addresses the central problem that we have. 

Academic researchers are saying the central problem, the number one message that we focus right now that we've got to be able to come up with an answer to is that it's not too late. And what is the main theme of Hades Town? It's an old song. It's a sad song, but we're going to sing it again. At the end, Orpheus doesn't succeed, but we raise a glass, we toast him and we know that he's going to try again and we know that we got to go try again. What Hades Town is is an extended argument against hopelessness and against giving up and against deciding that there's nothing we can do. 

So why even try? I think Hades Town, its central message is you got to try. You got to try no matter what and you got to try even if you're likely to fail. 

And if you want to add to that, critical thinking and memory recovery and hope and love and anything you've got in pastoral psychology or psychoanalytic criticism or anything else, that's all right, but you got to try. There's too much at stake. The climate is a big deal and we have to centrally address it. 

Okay. Now if there is one thing that I think you got to roll back a little bit on, it's that Hades Town is probably better at setting up the problem than providing a solution. If you were to read Antonio Gromsi and how Antonio Gromsi thinks that powerful people stay in power and keep everybody else at the margins, that is front and center in Hades Town. You can understand why it is Hades does the thing he does to try to separate different members of the working class to try to buy off Orpheus and keep him away from the workers. He presents Orpheus with the challenge that Orpheus takes and it works. 

Orpheus fails in his challenge and it separates Orpheus from the workers. Hades wins. And I do think that's a very, you could just perfectly line up the ratings of Antonio Gromsi on top of that. If you were to say, what did an AS Mitchell do? Why is the show successful? What does it do really well? Really does a good job of explaining the very complicated concept of hegemony. What's the solution to it? 

Well, it's less clear. But it does land on, you got to try. Like, what do you got to do? It's not evident from the show what have scholars and other commentators said, well, they've said, you got to focus on class, you got to focus on race, you got to focus on memory, critical thought, maybe the solutions are maybe it's open love in the face of deception and spare. 

That's not clear, but what Mitchell lands on is, but you got to try. This is from Courtney Lindwall of the National Resources Defense Council. And this I quote, I believe came out in 2016. 

So it was just right as the show is getting released. Quote, the show's tagline, come and see how the world could be presents, of course, the same fork in the road dilemma as the real life climate crisis. Like Orpheus and Eurydice, we must choose between fear and hope, chains and freedom between a life spent above ground in relative harmony with nature or life as a cog in the machine, way down in Hades Town. And quote, the fact that the National Resources Defense Council was doing a review of Hades Town right as it was getting released, I think is a pretty good indication of how carefully this show is linked to an actual environmental crisis and what they're doing. 

So what did Mitchell do? She took one of the oldest tales and gave it a real contemporary relevance. The gods and the threats that exist in the ancient Greek myths are replaced by corporate robber barons and climate change and things that might kill us all. But the question of what to do in response still matters. 

Are art, beauty and love enough? An ass Mitchell thinks so. So does Melinda Sharp. So does Jason DeLara-Molesky. And frankly, so do I. I hope you think that at least a little bit. Okay, well that'll wrap up Hades Town for us. It is the show about environmental change. 

The tape draws on Greek mythology. It's been a good romp and it brings an important message to what we're doing now. The next thing we need to do is talk about Hamilton, which of course has its own themes. I mean it's taking founding father, literally father, story and retelling it with rap music and enter a ethnically diverse past, which is definitely something new to Broadway. We'll try to figure out what that show is all about. We'll get to it next time. In the meantime, I hope you have enjoyed this episode of Theater, History and Mistress.