Global

When I was teaching myself how to write, when I was about 20 to 25, I churned out (and threw out) all kinds of autobiographies. I wrote glorified diaries. I fictionalized my friends and acquaintances. I still write columns all the time in the first person. I did write a children’s book in recent years that was fiction but included my oldest son and my niece and nephew as characters. But I haven’t touched autobiography in more years than I’d been alive when I used to engage in it.

I’ve been asked a number of times to write chapters for books on “how I became a peace activist.” In some cases, I’ve just apologized and said I couldn’t. For one book called Why Peace, edited by Marc Guttman, I wrote a very short chapter called “Why Am I a Peace Activist? Why Aren’t You?” My point was basically to express my outrage that one would have to explain working to end the worst thing in the world, while millions of people not working to end it need offer no explanation for their reprehensible behavior.

Writer/director Alexandra Dean’s nonfiction Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is a 90 minute slice of cinema history - and much more - about an enigmatic screen star who was also a behind-the-scenes inventor. Like 2015’s documentary Listen to Me Marlon, Dean uses tapes featuring the thespian’s own voice to tell the inside story of the iconic, exotic actress who dazzled and delighted audiences in movies such as 1938’s Algiers (where Hedy romances Charles Boyer as jewel thief Pepe le Moko in this classic directed by John Cromwell, scripted by John Howard Lawson - both of them future blacklistees); the 1940 Soviet spoof Comrade X (appearing opposite her Boomtown co-star Clark Gable for the second time that year); the titillating Tandelayo n 1942’s White Cargo; the Biblical temptress in 1949’s Samson and Delilah co-starring Victor Mature, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; etc.

Daniel Ellsberg’s new book is The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. I’ve known the author for years, I’m prouder than ever to say. We have done speaking events and media interviews together. We’ve been arrested together protesting wars. We’ve publicly debated electoral politics. We’ve privately debated the justness of World War II. (Dan approves of U.S. entry into World War II, and it seems into the war on Korea as well, though he has nothing but condemnation for the bombing of civilians that made up so much of what the U.S. did in those wars.) I’ve valued his opinion and he has rather inexplicably asked for mine on all sorts of questions. But this book has just taught me a great deal I had not known about Daniel Ellsberg and about the world.

In order to shed some clear illumination on what is really at stake in Alabama's December 12 US Senate Election, I am submitting this pair of letters from two key Alabamans regarding Roy Moore. Alabama may be a long way geographically from California, but these two letters brings us closer together!

The first, from the first accuser of Roy Moore going back to sexual manipulation when she was 14 and he was a 32 year old Assistant District Attorney, recently ran in Alabama.

The second, that of his former Law Professor, Guy Martin, was also published his in Al.com, the largest newspaper media group in Alabama, on Sept. 21, just before the Alabama Primary. We acknowledge the high principles of the journalism displayed by Al.com, in their originally publishing these two letters, and thank the editors there for their courage and their integrity in leading this effort, and making clear, as they put it recently, that they don't want to be "on the wrong side of History."

Letter from Leigh Corfman to Roy Moore:

http://www.al.com/…/…/11/roy_moore_leigh_corfman_accuse.html

he most dangerous thing about the North Korean missile launch is the reaction of the unprincipled, under-informed, white identity extremist sitting in the Oval Office. If there’s a nuclear war coming out of this manufactured “crisis,” the buck will have stopped with him. Not that President Trump doesn’t have other fools egging him on to risk global chaos and destruction in response to an imaginary, inflated threat from an impoverished nation of 25 million people. Sadly, this is not a surprising development after more than sixty years of aggressive US behavior toward North Korea.

We’re supposed to think that the United States is threatened for no reason by irrational subhuman monsters arising out of the less important bits of the earth found beyond U.S. borders.

We’re supposed to think that the bigger the U.S. military is, and the more places it’s based in around the world, the better it can counter those monsters.

We’re supposed to think that other nations don’t have this sort of problem or depend on this sort of solution because the United States does it for them.

We’re supposed to think that selling and giving weapons to the rest of the world makes the world safer.

We’re supposed to think that arms dealing and militarism are economically beneficial.

We’re supposed to think that helping people would cost more, economically, than killing them.

We’re supposed to think that U.S. wars kill few people, most of them soldiers.

We’re supposed to think that wars happen on things called battlefields.

We’re supposed to think that genocide is something different from war and can be prevented with war.

We’re supposed to think that war has always been present in human existence and always must be.

In a time of endless war and triumphant cynicism, I found myself the other day unexpectedly walking through the doors of perception. Yeah, those doors.

“You know the day destroys the night/Night divides the day/Tried to run/Tried to hide/ Break on through to the other side . . .”

The words, the music — the Doors, the voice of Jim Morrison — ignite not just the Summer of Love but a crazy something I don’t dare call hope, because those days of cultural and political revolution overdosed and imploded, didn’t they? War won. The Vietnam War dragged on, millions died (or thousands, if the only death toll that matters to you is that of U.S. soldiers), MLK and RFK were assassinated, the Cold War quietly morphed into the War on Terror and eventually the 911 attacks gave the military-industrialists the “new Pearl Harbor” they needed. Today’s military budget is securely bloated.

Knowing this, I was blindsided by the impact a remarkable exhibition I recently attended with my daughter had on me. And the star of the show was born in 1757.

The Stop the War Coalition has just published a short summary of what’s wrong with foreign policy, going through a partial list of current wars one by one.

SHIP’S LOG, February 15, 2018 — How the Earthlings have survived is a mystery. Ever since the United States impeached and removed Donald Trump for accidentally live-streaming himself sexually assaulting a tourist (or was it really for refusing to bomb Moscow? unclear) events have spiraled out of control.

Trump is now residing on a private island, making offers by tweet of trillions of dollars to various nations in exchange for their willingness to bomb the United States. No nation is known to have yet accepted. Nor has anyone yet seen Trump’s tax returns. He may or may not have, or have access to, trillions of dollars.

Some of the earthlings believe the impeachment process drove Trump out of his mind, while others blame the water supply on his island abode. But 92% in a scientific survey conducted in 43 countries this week actually volunteered or wrote in: “When was he not out of his mind — WTF?”