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“What’s the point?” Everybody (Nicole Erb) plaintively asks about human existence as she confronts Death (a playful Anne Gee Byrd as a not so Grim Reaper) in Antaeus Theatre Company’s Everybody, a rollicking adaptation of the anonymously-written 15th century Christian morality play, Everyman. With its modern twists, including projections (designed by Yi-Chien Lee), sound (provided by Salvador Zamora) and lighting effects (illumined by Bryan Ealey) plus dialogue that translates Middle English into the 21st century vernacular, including loads of obscenities, penned by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Antaeus’ mounting brings this Middle Ages classic alive. The setting is a sort of dreamscape (Nicholas Ponting is the scenic and props designer)

September 16 marks the 40th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the killing of around 3,000 Palestinians at the hands of Lebanon’s Phalangist militias operating under the command of the Israeli army. 

Four decades have passed, yet no measure of justice has been received by the survivors of the massacre. Many of them have died, and others are aging while they carry the scars of physical and psychological wounds, in the hope that, perhaps, within their lifetime they will see their executioners behind bars. 

Our Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection zoom this week features the great Texas commentator JIM HIGHTOWER.  

Jim’s brilliant populist screeds have been enlightening the airwaves and op ed columns for decades.

Irreverent, witty and often downright belly-laughable, Hightower brings to this show a critical grassroots perspective that virtually no one else can offer.

His reports on the bottom-up campaigning now transforming Texas politics help transform our view of what’s possible in a Lone Star state undergoing a top-to-bottom demographic transformation.

Everywhere beloved for his legendary  commitment to “small d” democracy, Jim’s unique perspective bursts our hour at the grassroots seams.

Do not miss this genius screed from deep in the belly of the southern Heartland.

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Part 2:

There they were again. The dangling irony of memorial Nikes . . .

I was walking home from my neighbor’s house. They’d just had a piano recital and I was still full of music when I saw the pair of tennis shoes flung over the telephone wire that crosses my street – instantly redefining, at least for me, this moment, this piece of earth and sky. Oh my God. I don’t believe it.

Here?

In front of my house?

Every now and then I see a pair of tennis shoes flung over a telephone wire – that wire stretching through a nearby McDonald’s parking lot, for instance– and every time I do, I think about a 12-year-old boy named Jose, who shoved a bit of reality in my face twenty or so years ago. He did so as a student of mine.

I was a volunteer writing teacher at the time. This was part of my decade-long struggle with the Chicago Public Schools, which my daughter attended. One day, when she was in third grade – this is when the school system begins the farce known as standardized testing, and “education” started to mean teaching to the test – she came home angrily and declared: “Dad, I hate writing!”

September 14, 2022 - TUCSON, AZ: AUDIT Elections USA, a nonpartisan, nonprofit public interest organization based in Arizona, filed an appeal in the State of Arizona Court of Appeals on March 31, 2022, against the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors for their refusal to make ballot images available to the public. AUDIT USA is asking the Appeals Court to order the Maricopa Board of Supervisors to follow the law and release electronic copies of the 2.1 million ballot images from the November 2020 General Election and all elections thereafter.

Before the premiere of Sophocles’ Oedipus, most of the outdoor tables at the Getty Villa’s café were filled, and while dining I spied from afar a longtime friend of mine, fellow reviewer Myron Meisel, tray in hand, looking for a place to eat, and I waved him over to our table. Joining us, Myron and I were pleased to see we had both survived the you-know-what. As Myron had co-made the 1993 documentary It’s All True, about Orson Welles’ unfinished South America film made during the 1940s, I told Myron that Voodoo Macbeth – a feature about the legendary Welles-directed all-Black 1936 production of the Scottish play reset in Haiti – had been shot, which was news to the astute Myron. I had received a press release about Voodoo Macbeth, which is to be theatrically released October 21, just a couple of days earlier.

Many media commentators have mentioned that the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is similar to other national crises that have led the United States into wars that are profitable for the “oligarchs” (even.wars against nebulous “terror” or manufactured viruses)

Three other examples include 1] Germany’s sinking of the Lusitania on 5/7/1915 (that led to the entry of the US into WWI), 2] the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 12/7/1941 (that led to the US entry into WWII) and the self-inflicted, controlled demolitions of the three World Trade Center buildings on 9/11/2001 (that led to the G. W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration’s push to invade the Middle East in what many call Operation Iraqi Liberation (“OIL”).

For me, the most pertinent similarity between these events can be stated in the simple truism mentioned in the title above: “The first Casualty of War is Truth.”

“You unpatriotic ‘9/11 Truthers’ can have annual conspiracy conventions on 9/11, with a host of speakers. To use a Russian expression, the dogs may bark as the train roars along. You are the dogs, and we are the train. Keep whining. We will keep on declaring ourselves unconvinced. We still own the TV, we still own the military, and you can chatter on the internet all you want as you fade into ineffectual obscurity.” –Tongue-in-cheek satire from fellow 9/11 Truth-seeker Greg Ziegler PhD, a former US Military Intel officer and retired professor, whose commentary inspired this column.

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Last Friday marked the 14th anniversary of 9/11/01 and the beginning of America’s bankrupting endless war against any and all so-called foreign enemies that, in the opinion of the ruling elites, need to have their sovereign nations de-stabilized so that any number of economic and corporate predators can gain access to the resources of the regions.

“As soon as I left prison, I went to Nael’s grave. It is adorned with the colors of the Palestinian flag and verses from the Holy Quran. I told my little brother how much I loved and appreciated him, and that, one day, we would meet again in paradise.”

The above is part of a testimony given to me by a former Palestinian prisoner, Jalal Lutfi Saqr. It was published two years ago in the volume ‘These Chains Will Be Broken’. 

As a Palestinian, born and raised in a refugee camp in Gaza, I was always familiar with the political discourse of, and concerning, political prisoners. My neighborhood, like every neighborhood in Gaza, is populated with a large number of former prisoners, or families whose members have experienced imprisonment in the past or present.