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“No War 2022, July 8 – 10,” hosted by World BEYOND War, will consider major and growing threats faced in today’s world. Emphasizing “Resistance and Regeneration,” the conference will feature practitioners of permaculture who work to heal scarred lands as well as abolish all war.

Listening to various friends speak of the environmental impact of war, we recalled testimony from survivors of a Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin, Sachsenhausen, where over 200,000 prisoners were interned from 1936 – 1945.

As a result of hunger, disease, forced labor, medical experiments, and systematic extermination operations by the SS, tens of thousands of internees died in Sachsenhausen.

 The Israeli government had then justified its siege as the only way to protect Israel from Palestinian “terrorism and rocket attacks”. This remains the official Israeli line until this day. Not many Israelis - certainly not in government, media or even ordinary people - would argue that Israel today is safer than it was prior to June 2007. 

Playwright Willard Manus’ The Funny Man is a one-man show starring Sam Aaron as the Oscar-winning humorist S. J. Perelman, who ​The New York Times called “an artist whose nonpareil gift of ridicule, dazzling verbal effects, polished style, and keen observation made him a unique and precious figure in our literature.” The conceit of this solo show is that Perelman has been invited to the University of California at Santa Barbara in order to deliver a lecture on creative writing in 1976, when the screenwriter/playwright/author/essayist was 72. The Brickhouse Theatre’s stage is adorned by Zad Potter with a lectern, from which Aaron as the ersatz Perelman holds forth on the literary life, as well as Hollywood, Broadway, comedy, monogamy, travel, The New Yorker magazine and about what one suspects is the guest lecturer’s favorite subject: Himself.

In this day and age of superheroes deluging the big screen with their derring-do, it’s a delight to discover a production performed on the live stage about three very real women grappling with the various vicissitudes of everyday life. This revised revival of playwright Ernest Thompson’s The West Side Waltz is about a trio of females of different ages who reside in an apartment building on Manhattan’s West 72nd Street. The Waltz part of the title refers to the fact that widowed 70-ish Margaret Mary Elderdice (Ellen Geer) is a former classical concert pianist, while her 50-ish neighbor Cara Varnum (Melora Marshall) accompanies her on the violin for household duets. And I suppose that Waltz could also refer to the dance of life that this play poignantly choreographs on the outdoor stage of Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum.

(Dedicated to the memory of Ghassan Kanafani, an iconic Palestinian leader and engaged intellectual who was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad on July 8, 1972)

 This is, according to the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci, the ‘interregnum’- the rare and seismic moment in history when great transitions occur, when empires collapse and others rise, and when new conflicts and struggles ensue. 

 The Gramscian ‘interregnum, however, is not a smooth transition, for these profound changes often embody a ‘crisis,’ which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. 

 “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” the anti-fascist intellectual wrote in his famous “Prison Notebooks”.  

I’ve made my own choices along the path of life — spiritual, mental, physical. I declared myself a non-believer in my parents’ religion at age 16. I’d just read the book Exodus, by Leon Uris, and couldn’t tolerate the church’s teaching that all non-believers, including all Jews, were going to hell.

Bye bye, church on Sunday. My mother was devastated, but we slowly came to terms with one another. On a family vacation that summer, as we were driving on the Chicago Skyway, the radio announced a tornado warning. Mom later wrote a published essay that ended thus: “Three Christians and one agnostic prayed.”

(Dedicated to the memory of Ghassan Kanafani, an iconic Palestinian leader and engaged intellectual who was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad on July 8, 1972)

 Years before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, US media introduced many new characters, promoting them as ‘experts’ who helped ratchet up US propaganda, ultimately allowing the US government to secure enough popular support for the war. 

“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

GREE-GREE #100 begins with the great ANDREA MILLER of Center for Common Ground telling us how grassroots organizing and Democracy Centers can make a real difference, and could decide the 2022 election.

She’s joined by STEVE ROSENFELD and RAY MCCLENDON who fill us in on the political realities in the Peach State, including the likelihood of a Trump indictment and what’s needed to save the races for Stacy Abrams and Raphael Warnock in the fall.

JAN GOODMAN then tells us of the hard battles to save democracy at the Pacifica Radio Network, which has been ravaged by a series of stolen elections and insider destruction.

KPFK’s DENNIS BERNSTEIN, host of the legendary Flashpoints Show, adds vital background to the fight over the progressive nation’s most valuable piece of media real estate.

We also hear from TATANKA BRICCA on the California showdown between the lethal madness of the Diablo Canyon nukes vs. the desperate need to protect rooftop solar and a real green revolution.  

In the second hour we go to the insane overturn of ROE v. WADE with WENDI LEDERMAN, LYNN FEINERMAN, DANNETT ABBOTT-WICKER and many many more.