Global

In just a few words -- “those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future” -- George Orwell summed up why narratives about history can be crucial. And so, ever since the final helicopter liftoff from the U.S. Embassy’s roof in Saigon on April 30, 1975, the retrospective meaning of the Vietnam War has been a matter of intense dispute.

The second I entered the Matrix Theatre on the opening night of June Carryl’s Blue, Rogue Machine’s new play immediately got me into the mood. Not only was a woman in an LAPD uniform present, but soon she started barking orders to theatergoers assembled in the Matrix’s library and proceeded to have us line up and individually march through metal detectors as she searched our bags. Was she an actual police officer or a thespian? Was it live or Memorex? (For good measure, Blue’s press kit is also cleverly in the format of a police dossier.)

After passing through the ersatz (or was it?) tachometer about 30 audience members climbed up a flight of stairs to the inaugural performance to be held in the Henry Murray Stage and sat around a space about as big as a medium sized room. In the middle was a table with files and an old-fashioned cassette tape recorder atop and a light above it, plus two chairs, from which Caucasian officer Boyd Sully (John Colella) and African American LaRhonda Parker (Julanne Chidi Hill) face off against one another in an inquiry about a traffic incident with a young Black man that went very, very wrong.

Three museums are commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist, the darkest period in Tinseltown history. What happened during this period of rightwing repression? As actor Humphrey Bogart put it: “We saw it—and said to ourselves, ‘It can happen here.’ We saw American citizens denied the right to speak by elected representatives of the people! We saw police take citizens from the stand like criminals, after they’d been refused the right to defend themselves. We saw the gavel of the Committee Chairman cutting off the words of free Americans. The sound of that gavel, Mr. Thomas, rings across America, because every time your gavel struck it hit the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”

As a former chair of a Government Oversight congressional investigative subcommittee, I am calling on Congress to investigate whether or not the Biden Administration initiated the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, near Denmark’s Bornholm Island, on September 26, 2022.

Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s comprehensive account of the Biden Administration’s role in the bombing of Nord Stream has provided a road map for a series of congressional inquiries necessary to confirm or disconfirm Administration culpability. 

President Biden’s own statements predicting the end of Nord Stream , preliminary to  the devastating attack on its infrastructure, point to the necessity of determining whether or not the president was speaking from his singularly informed position of the Chief Executive, as Hersh indicated.

A deconstruction of Hersh’s detailed narrative, (published two months ago on Substack), makes possible the development of a stream of subpoenas to determine the details of the planning and execution of the dismantling of Nord Stream by explosives.

When I excitedly shared the news on social media that Indonesia had refused to host the Israeli team as part of the Under-20 World Cup,  scheduled from May 20 to June 11 in Indonesian cities, some readers were unimpressed. 

“At school he was told he would never write . . .”

Here was a kid – here was a man – who refused to listen to the authorities, and refused to be anything but fully human. And yeah, he could write. His spelling may have been iffy, but he could write. His name was Taro Joy. He drowned three years ago, in Bali, where he was living, at age 48 – but thanks to his mother, Penny (quoted above) and the rest of his family, his words and thoughts and deep reaches into the collective soul live on. They have just put out a book of his lifetime of writings, a book of his prose and poems: The Tao of Taro.