Respect Must be Paid (except for Billionaires)

This cult-like thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I was at the premier performance of How to NOT Save the World with Mr. Bezos at Boston Playwright’s Theatre (BPT) when mid-way through the show there was a sing-along.

Mark W. Soucy and Becca A. Lewis in How to NOT Save the World Mr. Bezos. Photo by Benjamin Rose

BPT is such a bastion of political correctness; attending plays there feels retro as 2021. They offer select performances where all attendees must be masked. They make a land acknowledgement before every performance. The community expectations page on their website lists all the ways that everyone—on and off the stage—must be respected. Those expectations are also repeated on the email you receive with every ticket purchase.

And, of course, there are the trigger warnings, freshly renamed “Content Transparency.” The Content Transparency for Bezos lists: graphic violence, vomit and blood effects, as well as disrobement and discussion of drug use.

What? No warning of sing-alongs?

I’m a fair singer. I like to sing. But here’s the thing that bothered me about the sing-along. The audience got to choose between two ditties whose lyrics were written on placards. The first opened with “How to kill a billionaire…” The second set of lyrics began, “How not to kill a billionaire…”

Now, we are in a theater in the middle of the campus of an elite university, sixty minutes into a play whose premise is that Jeff Bezos, and the other 800+ billionaires in the United States, have neglected their social responsibility. Jeff Bezos has been portrayed as a deplorable man, at this point reduced to his skivvies. It is any surprise that 100% of the people who chose to sing voiced the “kill” verse, while exactly no one sang the “not kill” verse? Or is it perhaps more surprising that I was practically the only person who kept my mouth shut?

In BPT’s self-defined safe space, no one is allowed to be disrespectful based on age, race, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Surely, any playwright who wrote a sing-along suggesting that we “Kill the Poor…Unemployed…Homeless…” would be drummed out of the program. But apparently, billionaires are fair game because, somehow, all their money means they deserve no respect.

I went to a play but, apparently, I landed in a cult.

I’m cautiously optimistic that none of people singing would actually kill someone because they are a billionaire, and wishful singing doesn’t make something so. But I was amazed how this group of lefties who proclaim to care about everyone could invoke such violence. Such is the power of the crowd. “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization, Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual. In a crowd, he is a barbarian…a creature acting instinct.” (Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Crowds, 1895)

More than forty years ago, as a VISTA Volunteer in West Texas, I received an essential life lesson from Emmer Lee Whitfield, a woman on welfare upon whom I bestow great respect. She taught me that: “Each of us, every day, absorbs the world around us, assesses our strengths, our opportunities, and determines how to engage with the world. The systems our society has established, whether they be Wall Street or welfare, are key factors in these decisions.”

I’ve always thought about how people’s best interests are contorted by our social systems in terms of how the poor and marginalized navigate the world. But sitting among this cult of progressives literally singing out loud to kill billionaires made me see, for the first time, that the flip side is also true. Jeff Bezos can only be Jeff Bezos in a world that ridiculously rewards his behavior.

I have no interest in killing anyone, even billionaires. True, the world will be a better place without billionaires, but the way to get rid of them is not to kill them. Rather, let’s dismantle the systems that allow them to thrive.