Page - 93 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

93 Lazarus’s necropolitical afterlife one see when one looks death in the face? What will that face look like? How much will that depend on one’s demographic markers, such as race, class, and gender? And where will one find oneself — bandaged in a hospital bed connected to “life- support” the way Bowie appeared in the video for “Lazarus”? Will one stare into the cold-blooded eyes of an unfeeling or desperately disturbed individual? Will one be packed into a cat- tle car and carted off to a camp? Will one capsize on a small, overcrowded raft in the middle of the Mediterranean because “civilized” nations refused to harbor either those vessels or any that dared to rescue them? The Vienna production thus makes explicit the underlying locational critique in Bowie and Walsh’s play that other, more hope-oriented productions do not acknowledge, namely, the historical journey that the musical performance charts from a world that looked up to the America of the American Dream, which prided itself on offering an empathetic welcome to poor immigrants dreaming of a better life they are more than will- ing to work for, to a world dominated by “Amerika” of the “tor- tured brow, ” which, as the lyrics of “Life on Mars?” have it, is no longer a place of dreams but of nightmares — “Micky Mouse has grown up a cow.” This Amerika is infamous for having produced an ultra-violent, gun-worshipping, racist, xenophobic, homo- phobic culture exported throughout the world via popular cul- ture. The third song in Lazarus, “This Is Not America,” reminds the musical’s audiences of what America had once stood for, namely, “The New Colossus” at whose “sea-washed, sunset gates […] A mighty woman with a torch” named “Mother of Exiles” stood, from whose “beacon-hand/ Glows world-wide welcome” and who so notably cries “With silent lips, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the home- less, tempest-tossed to me: / I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’” These iconic lines, which are imprinted on the base of the Statue of Liberty and are included at the end of both the printed book of the original Lazarus (ibid., 65) as well as the program of the Vienna production, were written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus