Do Not Read This

If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of three things:

1. You’re contrarian or rebellious and do things you’re told not to just because you can.

2. You’re curious (or bored) enough to look at this strange piece that pushes you away.

3. You’re procrastinating and are reading or doing anything other than what you should be doing.

In any case, welcome.

Hamilton is excellent entertainment and a piece of historical propaganda.

The show came to my town, for better or worse.

Well, the most wonderfully hyped show about America’s “least memorialized” Founding Father finally came to my shores, and I only watched it due to a coincidence – my sister who was supposed to go ended up going abroad to study. Having booked tickets for months in advance, and with my mother and other sister lacking someone else to go, I was substituted in to use the ticket.

Getting to the play involved a one and a half hour drive through traffic to the theatre-resort, where we had to run to get to the theatre as soon as possible. We arrived just in time to see “One Shot”, the number where Hamilton declares with his friends that they have a chance to change their world, and they’re not throwing away their shot.

The whole musical went by in a non-stop, riotous display of music and dancing, covering the American Revolution and War of Independence, George Washington’s presidency, Hamilton’s affairs, Jefferson’s election, and Hamilton’s death by duel against Aaron Burr. After a whirlwind musical biography lasting three and a half hours, with intermission, my sister asked me if I liked it.

“It was okay.”

“Just okay?”

I didn’t know why either, but I had just said it. It was a tour de force – great visuals and special effects, modern quips, verbally ingenious rap battles describing the events of the time, stinging one-liners combining multiple meanings, excellent use of the whole stage, and elaborate skits best exemplified by the time stop at the end during Hamilton’s climactic duel with Aaron Burr. My absolute favorite things about the play were the delightfully smug and evil King George the 3^rd as a palate cleanser and a cover for costume changes, as well as the treatment of George Washington, Hamilton’s patron and mentor, whose journey from revolutionary general to retired former President contrasted Hamilton’s own death in politics. I was, as the Roman emperors at the Coliseum were, entertained.

But that was all. After that, I was empty. Perhaps it was due to the lateness of the hour, with the show concluding around midnight, or perhaps owing to me having to get up early for work the next day, I felt empty after the presentation.

I’m Here for Your Entertainment

I remember when this was being hyped as the new big thing in New York, years ago. People went to watch it, dreamed of watching it – Hamilton the play was sold as this cultural phenomenon that rewrote history and was wildly popular. For me to walk away from it empty but entertained was a betrayal of the promises of the hype.

But as I thought about it the days after the play my thoughts all coalesced around a single theme – this was a Cliff’s Notes of Hamilton’s life, re-arranged to give prominence to modern obsessions – Hamilton’s work ethic, connections, and voluminous writing used as a backdrop for whimsical tunes about deadly serious affairs, and zinger one-liners about “immigrants getting the job done” or “New York being the rightful capital, and the best city in the States”. While the latter was likely a reasonable thing to think at the time, the former strikes me as a modern inclusion into a historical narrative – while Hamilton is portrayed as a bastard orphan immigrant, having struggled to America, the early life section of Wikipedia has him quite well-educated and taken in by a wealthy family, putting him more on the level of an elite-in-exile than a poor dreamer.

It would do the audience well to remember that unlike today, with a high degree of literacy being a common skill, being a man of letters in those times was to be part of a rare and wealthy breed – not as rare as previously, but still a cut above.

This makes the play’s portrayal of Thomas Jefferson by an Asian-American as a foreign-influenced, French-loving, out-of-touch Southern nobleman with an idealistic, unworkable government policy from Virginia quite the pointed statement. No small resemblance is noted to the libertarians like those of the Mises Institute (who quite like Jefferson) and Andrew Yang, both champions of libertarian and decentralized policy today.

Hamilton himself is played by a Black man and is shown as a proponent of centralization, the federal assumption of state debt central to his post-war platform. He is hard-working and hard-charging, making strides to contribute to the war effort under Washington. Held up as a principled, model man, he also happens to make a lot of money and marry a nice White girl – Eliza Schuyler.

Perfectly contrasting him is Aaron Burr, played by a man of the same complexion. He is portrayed as ambitious, but without Hamilton’s principles, always waffling around in order to reach higher positions. Born to a prominent family and wishing to live up to that legacy, he is portrayed as refraining from taking a stand and attempting to make hay of every situation, culminating with his loss to Jefferson for the Presidency and his duel with Hamilton. Hilariously to a modern observer, one of the pieces of evidence against him is that Aaron Burr campaigned door-to-door, to which Hamilton responds “oh, that’s new”, in a tone that indicates his surprise and disappointment.

All of these men, in the end, work to help the wealthy, landed general of the Revolution, nigh-deified by his actions into an avatar of the United States of America itself, George Washington, played by a White guy, as he and everyone else here historically was. No further comment.

None of this impeded my enjoyment of the show, however, compared to the weakness of the play as a whole – the urge to cover all of Hamilton’s life.

Write More About Less

The secret of writing well, one often finds, is to write more about less. Each sentence a thought, each paragraph an idea, each essay an argument – from grade school onwards, this idea is drilled into kids as a principle of clear writing. Deciding what needs to be written down or said explicitly is important, particularly in a time-limited format like the script of a play. In order to do it well, some assumptions have to be made – the first and foremost being a strong familiarity with American history, particularly that of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers.

This leaves the play’s whirlwind depiction of Hamilton’s life being surface-level, leaving not much more than the recounting of events long past with excellent musical numbers and choreography. Emphasis is placed on the emotions of the moment and the spectacle of the theatre as the raucous dances serve to allow us to fill in detail that isn’t there, attempting to impress upon us the history in a blaze of passion, like a brand upon the mind.

Every trick in the Marvel Cinematic Playbook (which I assume there is, with how similar they all seem to be) was used to make this work for modern audiences. One-liner quips in the middle of songs, the time stop at the end when Hamilton was about to meet his end by Burr’s bullet, a simple, digestible storyline without pause or second look – I felt I was before the silver screen rather than the wooden stage. Every artifice of riotous sound and light was used to keep the show moving at maximum speed and intensity at all times, the equivalent of speaking faster to make a better argument.

It is entertaining. But it is only that. For all the hype, and how much my sister was looking forward to it, I expected it to be the Les Miserables of the modern day, the novel of which penned by Victor Hugo impressed both the plight of the common people and the intensity of the revolution to me in text.

Hyperpalatable

The whole experience of watching Hamilton reminded me of going to fast food restaurants, or Marvel movies where you turn your brain off and just enjoy it. Hyperpalatable food, made of mostly carbs and fats, bursting with salt and sugar, is a kind of food that is engineered to be cheap and good, to the point of being almost addictive. With highly concentrated macronutrients being what our bodies, adapted for a feast-or-famine life of foraging, crave, these hyperpalatable foods attack our evolutionary weakness, making us love them even as they hurt us.

They taste like everything we want, but feed us nothing we need.

I felt the same way with Hamilton. There was little room for ambiguity, everything was spelled out, quotes from historical letters were provided, the blizzard of song and dance helped the messages be burned right into the back of your eyeballs. Every question the musical asked was answered, every loose end tied up, every feeling and idea given its own little dance number, gesture, or snarky line. It was like taking a test with your notes right there - you could just fill in the answers and get a perfect score. It was too easy, and as I’ve written before, people are born and made to seek challenge, and this just doesn’t have it.

I want to put an aside here to Byung-Chul Han’s Burnout Society. He describes a world where we are all showered in positive admonishments. Rather than the disciplined, negative, “do not do this” of the past, using prisons, punishments, and other coercive instruments to get people not to do things, we now use libertine, positive, “you can be anything you want as long as it makes money” institutions of stock markets, offices, and influencing methods to get effort out of people. Rather than repression through always being told “no” to things we want to do, we encounter depression when we are always told “yes” to the things we want to do, and yet we see ourselves falling behind others and failing to get what we want, naturally wishing to copy them to get ahead. Hamilton and hyperpalatable food fill us with comforting positivity - “Yes, I taste good”, “Yes, eating me will satisfy your hunger”, “Yes, historically respectful productions don’t have to be boring”, “Yes, your modern concerns are things your historical figures would have worried about”, “Yes, theatre isn’t all the boring Shakespeare you studied in school". But lurking in the background is a grim spectre, the negative side to all of these statements that grins at us, asking us a question with its eyes.

“We’ve grossed millions, gone around the world, and become a cultural icon. Don’t you want to be like us?”

As a hyperpalatable piece of entertainment, it succeeds at the goal of getting butts in seats and cards swiped for lobby merch. As a vehicle for emotions, it conveys them all to us in a rapid-fire flurry of song and dance deadlier than grapeshot. But it lacks the courage to ask a question and leave it unanswered for any length of time, or to cut asides and focus on the meat of the plot. The script inserts modern issues as filler, such as side comments on immigrants being better for the nation (a modern concern rather than one at the time), or makes references to the American Civil War in the future being over slaves, when at the time, most people of note owned slaves (though its morality was in question even then).

The worst offender, I find, is that we are always told, rather than shown, that Hamilton has overcome great opposition. The best examples are Jefferson and Madison in particular. The former is presented ascamp gay, prancing around in a red bathrobe like a foppish noble, while the latter gets turned into a fat attack dog for the former Founding Father. I don’t know enough of the history to really lay into this, but it makes Hamilton look weak, because he has overcome a bunch of fools. This is excusable in light of the broad span of the production, but it makes this all rather less impactful.

The Majesty of History

I discount my feelings on this matter somewhat because I am contrary. I don’t like most things that are popular, tending to find enjoyment in more niche stories with strange concepts for the medium that have a lot of heart. In anime, Black Lagoon. In classics, Crime and Punishment or Don Quixote. In tabletop roleplaying games, Only War. My favorites don’t tend to be very popular, so I don’t like to talk about my ideas too much – my tastes are just too different from everyone else to be used as a yardstick of any kind.

That being said, I am going to turn around and give this both barrels, since I’ve been an enjoyer of history since I was a kid. I love old books, I love museums, and I love reading, so this is personal. In Hamilton, I see history being used as a marketing tool and an ancient vehicle for modern issues and ideas. In the same way that video games have toned down the difficulty in order to reach a wider audience, Hamilton is an interpretation of the man’s life palatable to modern audiences.

There is nothing wrong with this. History, as we know, is written by the victors, constantly written and revised and changed depending on who is writing, when, why, and for whom. There is nothing wrong with treating it lightly or less than reverently, or cutting it with other media – like the wargames of LittleWars TV that I find myself enjoying greatly along with the accompanying history lesson.

But Hamilton’s levity and desire to make history accessible leaves me empty. The majesty of history comes not from a single meeting, but from falling down the rabbit hole, reading opposing viewpoints and records, resolving contradictions, and coming to one’s own conclusion about what happened. To have this play be so popular, however, disturbs me to the core.

If the majesty of history is in answering questions, what happens when nobody asks? Are we doomed to have only one-sided portrayals of history in the public consciousness, as some kind of historical propaganda that consists of reading off the first sentence of every paragraph of a man’s Wikipedia entry? Would anyone other than the occasional oddball notice the difference?

AI-generated history pages that continuously change to gaslight us when?

Conclusion

I am under no illusions that history is an easy subject to get into, or something that the majority of people are interested in. Each person can only know, or care about, so much, and that often goes to their job, as it rightly should. I just wish they didn’t serve me two slices of sandwich bread and claim it’s a club sandwich. At least give me another slice so I get a toast sandwich!