No Thing Considered Ben Luton – Francis E. Dec Defenestrated, Sc. 1-5

Look for the second installment of Francis E. Dec Defenestrated on Miga, Vol. 2, to be released later this summer.

I would like to thank Patch Point, Berlin for providing me a residency to use their modular studios in 2021 and DJ ShluchT for helping me arrange a live performance of this play in 2023. The idea of performing the typewriter came from him. These scenes were composed from samples, synthesizers, and recordings that were made in Rote Insel and in Kreuzkölln in 2021, at Cashmere Radio in 2023, and in Austin, TX in 2025. The cassette performed with was mastered by Reno Feldkamp.

The play takes the long view of American politics, hoping to inspire the memory of the New Left that seems to have been excised in American discourse. Many of the promises of the 1962 Port Huron Statement have been made real in America, but not enough. Without aligning itself with the CPUSA, the statement attacked anti-Communism in America as undemocratic, warning of the dangers it posed to civil society and of the destruction it would continue to ensure overseas. Treating the life and letters of paranoiac WWII-veteran Francis E. Dec and the right-wing ideology of the John Birch Society within the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, I try to suggest that the currency of my country has little changed, appropriating the language and tenor of anti-Communism while deliberately ignoring the struggles underpinning it domestically and abroad. Trigger warning for Reginald Denny footage, hallucinations, and racist, misogynistic, and homophobic remarks by characters and media.

Show image centers on a photograph of Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg who were executed during the Red Scare, which is threaded through the play.

Written and produced by Ben Luton for Cashmere Radio.