Global

The man who would make himself dictator is with us because we have put so many like him in power in so many other places.

And because we have 800 bases around the world, spend unlimited sums on an imperial military, and continue to use it to tell everyone else on this planet what to do and who will rule them. 

Remarkably, many of those rulers turn out to be a lot like Donald Trump.

Think of Trump as the ultimate payback, the balloon payment on the Empire. He is the eternal imperial mobster, a composite of exactly who we’ve foisted on so many other innocents throughout history. 

We need to stop whining about him. Instead, we need to apologize to the world, sell our bases, turn our military to peaceful and ecological uses, and stop behaving like an imperial overlord. If we don’t, our next ruler (even if a Democrat) will be just like this one, only smarter and more brutally effective. And then the one after that. And the one after that. And the one after that.

Imagine yourself in Greece just after WW2. Revolution is in the air. The chances for social democracy are real.

It’s not HBO, it’s live theater as a pack of a dozen or so merry “spanksters” mount a madcap musical spoof of the beloved fantasy series Game of Thrones and try to put the Eros into Westeros. An amiable if mischievous Benji Kaufman plays George R.R. Martin, who introduces and more or less narrates this revival of Shame of Thrones: The Musical, a two-act send-up of that author’s characters and their medieval swords and suits of armor setting.

Shame enjoys poking fun at the backstabbing and sexy hanky-spanky that were the hallmark of Martin’s novels and HBO epic about the cutthroat quest for the Iron Throne. The humor and story ranges from the satirical to slapstick to vaudevillian. Many of the popular long-running series’ beloved dramatis personae are impersonated in the musical parody, from saucy wenches to muscular knights and warriors.

Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, tells a complex, honest, and nuanced story of what overall and in many particular parts fits the UN definition of and the popular conception of genocide. So, of course, it is primarily a story of not surviving genocide, though I guess that would have been too much of a “Dog Bites Man” headline for any publisher.

But parts of the story are of surviving. Some of the surviving is temporary. People slowed and mitigated the catastrophe. There are lessons there for all of humanity as it proceeds to destroy its own climate. There are lessons in particular for Palestinians and others facing similar assaults today. And some of the surviving has lasted until the present. Reduced in numbers, many nations have survived.

Every once in a very long while a work of art comes along that is so well done and important that a critic feels compelled to not only review it, but to champion the piece in the hope that more people will discover and experience it. Such is the case for this reviewer regarding Long Beach Opera’s The Central Park Five, composed by Anthony Davis and libretto by playwright and screenwriter Richard Wesley. The LBO-commissioned opera has world premiered during the 30th anniversary of this tragic miscarriage of justice, when five Black and brown teens were wrongfully convicted of the brutal beating and rape of a white jogger in 1989.

Definitions:

War Crimes: serious breaches of international humanitarian law that have been committed against civilians or enemy combatants during an organized, international or domestic armed conflict. (Examples of war crimes include acts of violence such as; murder, willfully causing suffering, injury to body or health, rape, attacks on civilian populations, pillage, and arbitrary destruction of civilian goods, especially those that are essential to the survival of the civilian population (farmland, food, water, clothing, shelter, etc).

Crimes Against Humanity: murder, extermination, rape, persecution and all other inhumane acts of a similar character that are committed by armed combatants as part of an organized, systematic attack directed against any civilian population.

As America ponders the impeachment of Trump and investigating him for crimes a young South American female director has made a documentary about another large democratic nation that recently underwent the ordeals of impeaching one president plus the trial and imprisonment of an ex-president. Petra Costa’s The Edge of Democracy is a sprawling nonfiction epic depicting the rise then fall from power of Brazil’s Workers’ Party (TP), with the senate’s removal from office of left-leaning President Dilma Rousseff.

The former guerrilla’s ouster was followed by the conviction of her mentor, TP co-founder and ex-President Lula de Silva. Being found guilty prevented the popular labor leader from running for the presidency again to replace his protégée Dilma. Strangely, in his trial the absence of a crucial piece of evidence is viewed as “proof” of Lula’s alleged corruption in the Alice in Wonderland judicial proceedings.

Scientists not employed by ExxonMobil or named Neil DeGrasse Tyson have reached a universal consensus. Wanting the United States to attack Iran is the single stupidest idea yet recorded in a human brain. In the words of one, “It isn’t even close.”

In a peer-reviewed report on a controlled laboratory experiment, sample humans were presented with the following 12 items of information.

One of the claims made about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election was that Kremlin-controlled entities were using fake identities to create dissension and confusion on social network sites. This should surprise no one, if it is true, as intelligence operatives have been using false names since Sumerian times.

The concern over fake identities no doubt comes from the deception involved, meaning that if you are dealing with a real person you at least have some handle on making as assessment of what something means and what is likely to occur. A false persona, however, can pretend to be anything and can advocate or do something without any yardstick to measure what is actually taking place. In other words, if Mike Pompeo says something you know that he is a liar and can judge his words accordingly but if it is someone otherwise unknown named Qwert Uiop you have to wonder if he or she just might be telling the truth. You might even give them the benefit of the doubt.

Originally taking place in the sensuous demi-monde of 1840s Paris, in LA Opera’s current iteration director/production designer Marta Domingo has reset Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata during the Roaring Twenties. This revival of Domingo’s Art Deco vision of Verdi’s vintage version injects new visual flare into the opera that was first performed in Venice in 1853. Although the original’s “demi-mondaine” dames (who, in today’s parlance, might be called “high class hookers”) have been replaced by flappers in Domingo’s rendition, the plot of Verdi’s opera (Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto adapted Alexandre Dumas fils’ 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias) is essentially the same.