Global

“And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.”

Take a day, pore over a few of his words. I’m talking about Martin Luther King, of course. His “day” is over, but his message still pulsates. We must speak! The world is bleeding with the wounds of war and poverty and racism, just as it was 57 years ago, when he spoke — infamously, you might say — at Riverside Church in New York City. He defied LBJ and stared directly into the muzzle of the Vietnam war, declaring it to be moral savagery, declaring the United States to be “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Really, Reilly? Charles Nelson Reilly – a fixture on stage and the little and big screens for about half a century, best known as a habitue of televised variety, talk and game shows plus sitcoms – attended one of America’s most renowned acting schools in Manhattan during the 1950s. But who knew that the comic performer – who appeared countless times in skits on The Dean Martin Show, as a panelist on What’s My Line?, Password and Match Game, as a guest 100-plus times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and as an actor in the sitcom The Ghost & Mrs. Muir – studied acting under the revered Uta Hagen at New York’s fabled HB Studio? That his classmates at Herbert Berghof’s famed Greenwich Village acting outpost included Hal Holbrook, Geraldine Page, Steve McQueen, Orson Bean and many other luminaries – some of whom Reilly would go on to teach at HB Studio himself?

A friend of mine who follows international developments closely recently observed that the United States and Israel have “own goaled” themselves to become widely perceived as together the two most evil governments on earth. It is a judgement that is hard to disagree with regarding the Jewish state if one examines the abundant evidence that Israel is systematically committing war crimes against the largely unarmed Palestinian civilian population in an effort to bring about ethnic cleansing or even genocide in Gaza and on the West Bank. The process would include removing the Palestinians physically and/or killing them if they resist, which is what is currently taking place. Something like 10,000 dead Palestinian children attest to the brutality and inhumanity of the effort, together with nearly 400 doctors and nurses who were directly targeted plus more than 100 UN employees trying to bring aid to the civilians. What Israel is doing is monstrous, almost unimaginable.

What are we to say about a U.S. culture in which people can openly admire Germany for backing yet another genocide, and condemn warning of World War III as reckless endangerment?

Q: Why does it matter what really happened to John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 OR to Martin Luther King, Jr on April 4, 1968 OR to Robert F. Kennedy on June 6, 1968 OR to Malcolm X  on February 21. 1965  OR to Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone on October 25, 2002 OR, for that matter, to the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on September 11, 2001?

A: “The national leader of the people is only a figurehead and has no real power. Power lies behind the scenes within dark secrets. Others pull the strings of the politician puppets. If an upstart, politician puppet makes waves or rocks the boat or doesn’t play ball…that puppet gets eliminated. It is why Caesar was killed. It is why Kennedy was killed. If you disturb the real power structure, you can be targeted for removal. Such ‘assassinations’ demonstrate to the world who has the real power; it is a bloody statement of who is really in charge; and the truth is our secret rulers control from dark shadows.” -- Doug Yurchey

“Don't worry, Mr. President, help's on the way. Your brothers are coming, there'll be hell to pay.

“Brothers? What brothers? What's this about hell?