This weekend I saw a performance of the musical Chicago at the university my friend is attending. I had not yet seen this story on stage or in film, and was not overly familiar with it beyond having to do with some dancers and murder. The performance I saw was very enjoyable as far as productions by college students go, and a good friend of mine had a major role in it. Overall the cast did a good job on the show. But the story itself is terrible; philosophically. In fact it should be renamed to “How to get away with killing your husband by promulgating moral relativism”

The Author and Philosopher Ayn Rand, whom I am a great admirer of, wrote often about how art should serve as a philosophical ideal, representing the way things ought to be in order to inspire us and provide ‘spiritual fuel’ as she said. Most art serves both as a reflection of predominant cultural philosophical trends and a driving force behind those cultural ideas, unfortunately the philosophical ideals being promulgated by much of the art we experience today is very unhealthy when held up to any standard with life as it’s core.

Everybody forms their ideas about philosophy, including ethics and their purpose in the world, primarily through the people, movies, music, and art that surrounds them. Of course some develop those ideas through deep introspection, but these are the exception that make an active effort to study philosophy. The ideas I chastise in Chicago are present all over the place in media and in the saying and phrases people repeat to themselves in order to get by. I don’t know whether the writers of Chicago, which came to Broadway in 1975, really embraced this ethical ambiguity and were trying to promulgate those ideas or were merely reflecting predominate ethical trends, but the philosophical ‘crime’ remains the same. They are either aiding and abetting or are an active participant in the undermining of any rational philosophical basis for ethics, advocating worldviews which lead to a lot of pain and suffering.

With that, let me give a refresher to those who may not have seen this show in a while and an overview to those who have not seen it at all. The show starts out with Roxy cheating on her husband. The man she is cheating on her husband with is ready to walk out right after they finish doing the deed and Roxy, insulted by this, shoots and kills him. She convinces her husband that the man was a burgler, but during questioning by police she confesses to the nature of the crime. She is carted off to a jail where women who are charged with murder reside.

At this prison we are given a song by these women accused of murder called “he had it coming” where each proceeds to not only admit that she murdered her husband / significant other (in one case murdered him and the person he was having an affair with) but to essentially (as the song title shows) blame it on the victims. The theme of the song was satirical and had the audience laughing. I sat stunned, what if we had a prison of accused rapists who were singing a song called “she had it coming” How would they react to that? Or a group of Homophobes singing about how their gay victims were asking for it (this was the same school and cast which performed the Laramie project a few months earlier, where the perpetrators of the murder of Matthew Shepherd claimed just that) The audience would have been, rightly so, absolutely horrified, but when it is women talking about murdering their cheating boyfriends and husbands, it’s funny?

We are then treated with a song by a reporter insisting that there is a little bid of good in all of us. It’s a nice thought, superficially, that even in the worst person there is some good. But to say something like that means you must be holding actions up against a standard of good and bad, or right and wrong, in the first place. When we look at actions, like murder or rape, and compare it against the norm and find it to be bad, surely we must recognize the degree or the severity of the infraction. Stealing something is bad, but it is not as wrong as killing someone. Likewise morally virtuous actions must have a caliber associated with them. Slowing down in traffic to let someone merge is a decent thing to do when necessary, but how virtuous is it compared to staying true to your deepest ideals in the face of overwhelming opposition? So while Stalin may have been nice to his puppy, the fact that he had millions of people murdered can never be overshadowed no matter how many ‘good’ things he has done. While some of his actions might have been good, because of how many evils he had committed there is no way one could assert he has some good in him. Maybe if Stalin could live in a labor camp for a few million years he might be forgiven, but until then it corrupts the notion of good and bad to assert he had some good in him.

Additionally, such a statement undermines the very concept of good and bad, even though it purports to be based on it. If you accept without condition that everyone has some good in them it means that no matter how many horrible things they do, they are never completely vile. Conversely, it means that no matter how hard someone tries, he can never be good. This is because every statement automatically implies it’s corollary, and if one asserts that even in the worst of us lies some good, they are also asserting that even in the best of us lies some evil. So even though you are using good and bad to judge actions, no person can be good or bad. We hear this ethical abduction all the time in many forms, most commonly as “well, nobody’s perfect” with it’s implicit statement ‘so I won’t try to correct my faults’ left unsaid. Why even try? When no matter how hard you try you are destined to fail. This saying and idea is nothing less than one of the remnants of original sin in the secular west.

We are then treated to a duet by one of the inmates, admittedly guilty, and the prison warden about how there seems to be no class or ethics in society today. The talk about theft and bad manners, but conveniently avoid the topic of murder. Everyone tells me this was intended to be hypocritical, but the prison warden was no murderer and was part of the duet, so that interpretation is disingenuous.

The one woman who was innocent was found guilty and hung because she refused to lie, to admit to a crime she didn’t commit, and blame it on the victim. The two female leads, who both wantonly and callously murdered their significant others, got off through a series of lies and appeals to the jury. In the end they were freed and went on a road show together, and the play closes with the narrator saying “That’s America”

America is where the guilty get away with murdering their husbands by blaming it on the victim through legal maneuvering and the innocent hang for crimes they did not commit? Only in the eyes of the artistic intelligentsia of 1975 New York.