Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Calling Plowshares a "Theatre of the Absurd" is Berrigan doing two things at once: smuggling a moral indictment inside a cultural reference, and pre-empting the predictable dismissal of activist protest as mere spectacle.

The Plowshares movement - Catholic, anti-nuclear, stubbornly theatrical by design - staged symbolic disarmament (hammers, blood, scripture) to expose the insanity of weapons systems that exist to never be used, except as a permanent threat. By borrowing Beckett and Ionesco's language, Berrigan frames American nuclear policy as a scripted ritual: everyone knows the premise is irrational, everyone keeps reciting their lines anyway. The absurd isn't the activists; it's the sober institutions that demand we treat doomsday preparedness as responsible governance.

"Most Americans would agree" is the slyest part. It's a faux-majoritarian shrug, a bit of clerical deadpan that mimics public consensus while also taunting it. If even the mainstream can see the absurdity, why does it persist? The phrase turns "common sense" into an accomplice, suggesting a public that recognizes madness but has been trained to outsource agency to experts, generals, and the liturgy of national security.

As a priest, Berrigan isn't neutral about "theatre". Catholicism understands performance, ritual, and witness. Plowshares borrows that grammar to argue that in a culture where violence is bureaucratized and sanitized, only a counter-ritual can make the stakes visible. The line lands because it admits the staging while insisting the farce is real - and lethal.