Global

I have just spent a couple of days in New York City. Returning to Virginia on Wednesday morning, I had a somewhat strange experience. I cleared through my emails before leaving the hotel and also read through a number of the featured news articles. One, in particular, caught my eye. It described how the Democratic Party primary in Queens New York had returned a startling result. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won over mainstream incumbent Joe Crowley, signaling that not everyone in the Democratic Party is buying into the Clinton model of good governance by big donors and powerful interest groups. Many want change and even a radical departure from the political game whereby media savvy pressure groups and narrow constituencies are pandered to to create a governing majority.

here have been two developments in the past month that illustrate clearly what is wrong with the White House’s perception of America’s place in the world. Going far beyond the oft-repeated nonsense that the United States is somehow the “leader of the free world,” the Trump Administration has taken several positions that sustain the bizarre view that such leadership can only be exercised if the United States is completely dominant in all relevant areas. Beyond that, Washington is now also asserting that those who do not go along with the charade and abide by the rules laid down will be subject to punishment to force compliance.

ICE has strayed so far from its mission. It’s supposed to be here to keep Americans safe, but what it’s turned into is, frankly, a terrorist organization of its own, that is terrorizing people who are coming to this country.
 

“We offer your love to all of our children . . .” the Episcopal priest said, her eyes closed in prayer. Some 170 people were gathered around her, as she stood in a gazebo in a park in Huntsville, Ala. This was one of the 700-plus protests across the country last weekend, as Americans gathered in unity and outrage over Donald Trump’s cruel treatment of immigrants and their children at the southern border.

“Womp, womp!”

Even before the guy pulled the Glock from his waistband, wow, this was the American recipe: sarcasm and hate and racism stirred into our prayers and deepest values, into the best of who we are.

When we describe the United States in the abstract, the best of who we are prevails. Our ideals loom like mountain peaks on a picture postcard: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”

But the real America has always been parsimonious in its allotment of freedom and respect.

Noël Coward meets John Osborne in Enid Bagnold’s mid-1950s The Chalk Garden. This funny yet pointed two-acter set in an upper crust country house in Sussex, England is sort of somewhere between a Victorian era drawing room comedy and those British class conscious “Kitchen Sink” dramas that emerged mid-century in the UK.

To be sure, there is lots of witty repartee between the wannabe grand dame Mrs. St. Maugham (Ellen Geer), her (on- and offstage) daughter Olivia (Willow Geer), granddaughter/daughter Laurel (Carmen Flood), and the other dramatis personae. Although it may not be as enraged as Osborne’s classic Look Back in Anger, there is also a strong undercurrent of class conflict in Bagnold’s not-so-genteel play. (Both works emerged around the same time, although Bagnold, who was 64 when she wrote Chalk and had married into the upper class, had more regard for tradition - if not an unswerving allegiance to it.)

I’m going to praise the heck out of yet another terrific book I’ve just read while yet again exclaiming (into a deep empty echoing canyon?) my bewilderment and outrage at the glaring omission it makes — the same one as all the other books.

George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis is part familiar; part original, creative, and inspiring; and pretty much all right-on and necessary. Its first chapter should be required reading everywhere — with the hope that whoever needs or wants the details will finish the book.

The German Luftwaffe’s Panavia Tornado fighter jet.

WBW’s Pat Elder is encamped with antinuclear resisters just outside the gate of Büchel Airbase in Germany and he sends us this report.

Early in the morning, when I approached this sprawling airbase that employs 2,000 civilians and soldiers, the bucolic setting was reminiscent of the rolling foothills of the Blueridge Mountains in western Maryland and Virginia. Scattered large, well-kept farmhouses amid the beautiful rolling land planted in wheat and corn reflected this prosperous and peaceful country.

s we celebrate our nation’s birth, and organize to once again overthrow an illegitimate tyrant, we might pity Trump’s classic liberal enabler, Al Dershowitz.

The pitiful self-promoting professor is being horribly snubbed by his fellow liberal neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard because he now supports Trump.

The ordeal must be every bit as painful as being separated from one’s children at the Mexican border.

But all whining aside, it should be clear that The Donald’s primary enablers (alongside his mob boss, Vladimir Putin) have been self-proclaimed “liberals” far more important than Dershowitz – namely Nancy Pelosi and her Corporate Democrats.

Their corruption and incompetence got him into the White House in the first place. And he can’t continue to rule without them.

Let’s count a mere 57 of the ways:

1) Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the Corporate Democrats are nearly all multi-millionaires, locked into the corporate oligarchy;

2) Hillary Clinton lumped all us social democrats into that “basket of deplorables”;

Reader Supported News

04 July 18

s we celebrate our nation’s birth, and organize to once again overthrow an illegitimate tyrant, we might pity Trump’s classic liberal enabler, Al Dershowitz.

The pitiful self-promoting professor is being horribly snubbed by his fellow liberal neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard because he now supports Trump.

The ordeal must be every bit as painful as being separated from one’s children at the Mexican border.

But all whining aside, it should be clear that The Donald’s primary enablers (alongside his mob boss, Vladimir Putin) have been self-proclaimed “liberals” far more important than Dershowitz – namely Nancy Pelosi and her Corporate Democrats.

Their corruption and incompetence got him into the White House in the first place. And he can’t continue to rule without them.

Let’s count a mere 57 of the ways:

1) Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the Corporate Democrats are nearly all multi-millionaires, locked into the corporate oligarchy;