"It must be very difficult being Michael Moriarty," remarked Kiefer Sutherland over dinner one night in Toronto. This comment came on the heels of a very nice compliment for my performance in his production of Woman Wanted, in which Kiefer also co-starred with Holly Hunter.
Oh, well, I thought, it has been predictably hard being me. My baroque tastes in acting are unavoidably out of fashion these days. Only Sir Anthony Hopkins fulfills my complete expectations of what a "player" should be, and is obliged to achieve with such considerable talent. Yet Hopkins will be saddled with the character of Hannibal (The Cannibal) Lecter for the rest of his life. His greatest performances will sit shrunken beneath the specter of a mad dog's muzzle.
My albatross, the character of assistant district attorney Ben Stone on the endlessly-syndicated TV series Law and Order, is not so bad as all that, I suppose.
I don't think, however, that Kiefer was referring to my difficulties as an actor when he remarked on how hard it is being me.
I am one of only two high-profile actors who are ardently conservative believers in the sacredness of a Republic. The other one is Charlton Heston. Briefly put, Heston defends the Second Amendment of the now-endangered United States Bill of Rights -- the right to bear arms --, while I defend that which the Second Amendment was intended to protect unto death: the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech.
Perhaps Kiefer had encountered the unexpected refusal of distributors to release a film featuring Michael Moriarty, regardless of who else is in the cast. Yes, I suspect therein lies my "identity crisis."
Kiefer may eventually correct my diagnosis, but with what I've encountered in the last eight years, since I left the U.S. to protest the disgraceful abuse of power by the Clinton administration, I agree with a Canadian Foreign Affairs officer who once categorized me as a "political refugee."
Presently, two labels are stuck on me. The first and by far the most popular one is "crazy." The second one is "political dissident" in any part of the world that fancies itself a "socialist federation." Therefore, it is safest under the omnipresent United Nations to label me crazy. Anyone who would turn his back on the Clinton/Chrétien Utopia must obviously be insane.
When I consider the possibility of being exiled from Canada -- the most profoundly socialist federation in North America --, I'm no longer ruffled Voltaire -- the great French author and philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment -- was kicked out of France and then out of Germany. He was finally and reluctantly endured in the country most adept at taking no position on anything -- Switzerland. Voltaire was bounced from those esteemed cultural temples, Germany and France, for calling the ruling elite "enlightened despots."
I have basically hung the same label on most of North America's recent leaders. I will continue to do so until I'm either buried somewhere on the peninsula of Tierra del Fuego, or until the U.S. realizes that I'm not just crazy. I'm a crazy American. When Paris realized their not-so-respected hero was actually French and not a troublemaking alien from another planet, they called Voltaire back. I'm certain, as he returned to Paris in triumph, Voltaire looked at the admiring crowds and muttered: "You haven't changed a bit, have you?"
Voltaire certainly hadn't changed. I have no plans to change either.
So, here we come to the "difficulty of being Michael Moriarty."
It's a remarkably exotic experience best captured in a novel by Milan Kundera entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the story of a former surgeon in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia who is reduced to working as a window-washer. His demotion is due to his being viewed as a "dissident."
There are only three ways the Left can deal with a law-abiding, political dissident: demotion, demonization and/or death. The hero of Kundera's novel slips so far out of sight that the demotion seems sufficient remedy for the Communist Party bosses. They needn't use Soviet Plan B: incarceration in a mental hospital.
The hero and his beloved eventually die in a bizarrely unexplained truck accident. Their abrupt "disappearance" leaves several questions unanswered.
With exquisite eloquence, Kundera describes the condition of a man whose entire life has, in essence, been erased. All notions of his boyhood dreams and established profession are vaporized, leaving him in a dream-like state of unbearable lightness, that he can only ponder in the context of "eternal return."
References to the French Revolution abound in Kundera's book. The inference, at least to my almost unbearable lightness of opinion, is that the fate that befell the architects of the French Revolution such as Robespierre, Danton and St-Just, will be fulfilled yet again by the "luminaries" of the Socialist Revolution. Whatever means of purging the New World's politburo is adopted -- whether the guillotine or the gulag -- is unimportant. It will be a falling-out of socialist thieves and the "people" will cheer as the carts and paddy-wagons roll up to deliver their now-politically- incorrect Leaders of the Revolution.
If you accept the legend of eternal return, a state of unbearable lightness is not only inevitable but metaphysical as well. The only thing akin to it is cyberspace. An e-mail address is and is not a reality. It's an office on a silicon chip. At your fingertips, however, are paths leading to roads and highways. Which of a million directions do you take?
Increasingly, the decision will be made for you.
A man who most certainly experienced the lightness of being is the Nobel-Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. The establishment diagnosed him as insane, yet could not refute the clarity of his discoveries, nor the genius that brought him there.
Lightness of being is another term for Heaven on Earth. The problem is not the paradise within us, but the fear of paradise surrounding us. Therefore, what is unbearable is not the gift; it's the inability of friends and loved ones to accept the gift. They not only reject the miracle within you, but the one within themselves as well. They would prefer to parade their health and well-being as proof of their own "happiness," when, in reality, they measure their heaven by their power on earth, by a precarious magnetism bestowed on them by envious and easily-manipulated onlookers.
Power on earth is the enemy of "being." The more powerless and unattached you are, the profounder the lightness. If emerging dictatorial power cuts into every attachment you've made to your work, friendships, relationships and sense of meaning in life, the resulting pain can only be relieved by surrender to a land devoid of expectation, to a profound acceptance of the lightness of being.
What is also unbearable at times is the bliss. The heights are limitless and can only be scaled by surrendering. To resist is to imprison the past, to grieve for your expulsion from Eden.
Looking back on a tyrannized author in Prague, I applaud his mystical fall to the status of window-washer, hanging from the towers of heaven, both looking in and looking out. The nightmare below -- the totalitarian state -- presses on in the vast distance, while our hero's head is in the stars.
So far, Kundera has written only one unforgettable work, but it's all the explanation I need to fill in the gaps between what it was to be Ben Stone on Law and Order and what it is now to be Michael Moriarty anywhere. It's the difference between portable alarm clocks and the bells of St. Peter's in Rome.