Global

At San Francisco Airport I enjoy a filling lunch at the comfy United Club lounge. Relaxed, I then board a United Airlines nonstop direct flight for my 15th visit to Tahiti since the 1970s. I luckily have an entire aisle to myself and pass the time watching a recruiting poster masquerading as a movie called Top Gun: Maverick and the far better genre-bending Everything Everywhere All at Once. Upon arriving at Tahiti International Airport in Fa’a’ā, I am greeted by Tahiti Tourisme and Mana Tang and Vanessa Alvarez, co-owners of Tiurai Tours, and driven to my hotel in French Polynesia’s capital.

Many consider contemporary Tahiti to be a paradise lost. Candidly speaking, the urban/ suburban sprawl of this French colony, stretching roughly northeast from Papeete to Mahina and northwest to Punaauia, does have many of the ailments of “modern times.”

The next Nakba Day will be officially commemorated by the United Nations General Assembly on May 15, 2023. The decision by the world’s largest democratic institution is significant, if not a game changer. 

 For nearly 75 years, the Palestinian Nakba, the 'Catastrophe' wrought by the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias in 1947-48, has served as the epicenter of the Palestinian tragedy as well as the collective Palestinian struggle for freedom. 

"Ducey insists Arizona holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot strip the containers rest on and has a constitutional right to protect residents from ‘imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.’”

OK, he’s a politician — Doug Ducey, the exiting governor of Arizona, who recently began erecting “hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire” along Arizona’s eastern border with Mexico, including through the Coronado National Forest. Is this not his right: to blather, lie and give his constituents an enemy? And what keeps us safer from that enemy than a wall, especially one topped with razor wire?

There is considerable irony in the fact that Donald Trump when president virtually crawled to do Israel’s bidding more than any of his predecessors. He moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he accepted brutal Israeli settlement and control of the Palestinian West Bank, approved of the Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and ignored repeated Israeli war crimes using US provided weapons. Yet for all his gifts to Israel, which did not serve any actual US interest, he is currently being crucified by the Jewish/Israel Lobby because of an idiotic dinner with a pair of alleged anti-Semites, one of whom has been labeled a “holocaust denier.”

After Ranger Benny’s presentation about Alcatraz’s political prisoners, I climb uphill (trams are available) past cannons, barb wire and beneath a water tower to the main facility where audio equipment for “Doing Time: The Alcatraz Cellhouse Tour” are dispensed (at no extra charge). The taped exposition and explanation of the highly informative, entertaining audio tour are edited to be closely linked to what the lines of headphone-adorned visitors behold, unit by unit, while moving through the cellblocks.

Separated by water from continents, islands have always represented freedom to me. When I graduated from Hunter College as a film major in the 1970s, I realized the Age of Aquarius was experiencing technical difficulties in ascending. So, inspired by movies like Mutiny on the Bounty, I decided to go search for paradise in the South Pacific, going on to visit and live at more than 100 islands in Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia.

Before my latest journey, only three islands remained on my bucket list. At the head of the list was the apogee of isles symbolizing liberty: Pitcairn Island, where the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian lovers fled to escape capture and punishment by the British navy after seizing the Bounty and throwing Captain Bligh overboard in 1789.

For others, however, islands exemplify the idea of imprisonment. In 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was confined at Elba in the Mediterranean, 6 miles off Italy’s coast. After the French Emperor returned to France and his army was defeated at Waterloo, the British took no chances and exiled Napoleon to remote St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, 1,200 miles from southwestern Africa.

The problem with most Western media’s political analyses is that they generally tend to be short-sighted and focused mostly on variables that are of direct interest to Western governments. 

 These types of analyses are now being applied to understanding official Arab attitudes towards Russia, China, global politics and conflicts. 

 As Chinese President Xi Jinping prepares to lead a large delegation to meet with Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia on December 9, Western media conveys a sense of dread. 

Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I effect real change.”

This is the caption of a New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant from several years ago. It keeps popping up in my head — I mean, every day. Like everyone else, I want what I do to matter, to “effect real change.” What I do is write. Specifically, I swim in the infinity of possibility. Humanity can kill itself or it can learn to survive. Most people (I believe) prefer the latter, which is all about discovering how we are connected to one another and to the rest of the universe. This is what I try to write about.

Then Congress passes another military budget. And once again, there’s the New Yorker cartoon.

Damn those Marxists!

You know their game, right? They want to spew truth and real history at our kids. No doubt they’re also in favor of dropping charges against Julian Assange, who (as all real Americans know) deserves 175 years in prison for exposing — with the help of the New York Times, The Guardian. Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País — embarrassing realities about U.S. foreign policy.

How do I know the Marxists are behind this? The Heritage Foundation tells me so. In their dismantling of good old Critical Race Theory, they explain that it’s “an academic discipline founded by law professors who used Marxist analysis to conclude that racial dominance by whites created ‘systemic racism.’”

As western countries are floating the theory that Russia could escalate its conflict with Ukraine to a nuclear war, many western governments continue to turn a blind eye to Israel’s own nuclear weapons capabilities. Luckily, many countries around the world do not subscribe to this endemic western hypocrisy.