Global

In an interview with the Washington Post, Robert Kennedy Jr. revealed that he has come to the conclusion that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill his father, Robert Kennedy (RFK) at the Ambassador Hotel in June of 1968. RFK's assassination came on the heels of his brother John Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in 1963, and Martin Luther King's killing in Memphis in April of 1968. Serious researchers did not believe the official pronouncement regarding these three assassinations from the outset. While painstakingly revealing the discrepancies in the evidence over 50 years, mainstream media in America have served as Pravda for the CIA, clinging to the lone gunman theory in all three assassinations.

Summer approaches and the stench of war is all around. Or, as the great Bob Marley put it, Everywhere is War. Start with the commemorations over a five-week span of Memorial Day, Flag Day and Independence Day, all presented varyingly as celebrations of our war dead, symbols of our greatness, the freedoms we love so dearly and seek to export to every corner of the world and, perhaps most important, the unquestioned rightness of our cause.

Calendar shmalendar - the way this critic knows summer has arrived is by attending the premiere of Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum’s repertory season at its airy Topanga Canyon amphitheater. A joyous annual ritual for me is making the trek out to this woodsy nook north of Malibu where WGTB extends the conventional notion of the stage.

Audiences are familiar with theatrical terms such as “the fourth wall” and “theater in the round.” But ensconced on a hillside amidst a forest, WGTB gives us what could be called “three dimensional theater.” This year’s exceptional opening production, William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is an excellent case in point. The tragedy’s mise-en-scène is barely constrained to the stage per se, as the ample-sized (and talented) company makes full use of the slopes behind the boards and the surrounding sylvan glade. They troupers troop up and down the aisles, gather and cavort behind the bleacher seats and so on, making full use of the Topanga landscape. Corio’s choreo gives new meaning to Shakespeare’s dictum in As You Like It that “all the world’s a stage.”

The personal is extremely personal in Rogue Machine’s Mexican Day. Tom Jacobson’s insightful script intimately, intricately interweaves ethnicity, class, sexuality and more in his story depicting a landmark Civil Rights struggle in late 1940s Los Angeles, when a sort of “apartheid light” was still being practiced in a not so angelic City of the Angels. This segregation is the source of the title of Jacobson’s play, which is part of a trilogy.

At least three of the drama’s thespian quartet depicts actual historical personages in Jacobson’s two-acter. First and foremost is the renowned African American equal rights activist Bayard Rustin (Donathan Walters, who recently understudied Bigger Thomas and The Black Rat at Antaeus Theatre’s gut-wrenching production of Richard Wright’s Native Son). In the late 1940s, Rustin - who eventually became a key organizer of 1963’s legendary “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” wherein Dr. King made his “I have a dream speech” - is dispatched to L.A. to desegregate Bimini Baths, an actual hot springs oasis with mineral waters that had existed in what is now L.A.’s Koreatown.

America does what it wants.

This is obvious, except it’s also monstrously unnerving. Let’s at least add some quote marks: “America” does what it wants — this secretly defined, self-obsessed, unelected entity that purports to be the United States of America, all 325 million of us, but is, in fact, a narrowly focused amalgam of generals, politicians and corporate elites who value only one thing: global dominance, from now to eternity.

Indeed, they’re capable of imagining nothing else, which is the truly scary part. Until this changes, “peace” is a feel-good delusion and “disarmament” (nuclear and otherwise) is the butt of a joke. The American empire may be collapsing, but the war games continue.

Israeli elites failed in their support of terrorists in Syria and were
unable to bring down a resurgent Iran (just look at rising science citation
index for Iran and compare it to Arab countries!).  This failure was o be
compensated with by massacres in Gaza: murdering 125 protestors at the
borders; injuring thousands; testing new weapons on a captive poipulation;
bombing Gaza's remaining infrastructure; and attacking and seizing boats
carrying students and injured people trying to leave Gaza to Cyprus [what
is the excuse here?]. The latest victim of this Israeli onslaugt was a 21
year old paramedic Razan Al-Najjar killed while aiding injured peaceful
protesters. She was a beautiful inspiring girl. I am haunted by the
side-by-side pictures one of her smiling in her white uniform next to it a
picture of her grieving mother. Imagine this your family!

The Yemen and Gaza genocides thus continue while Trump and his
administration play with the media on their on again off again meeting with
the North Korean leader. A simple resolution at the UN Security Council to

Along with William Shakespeare’s Richard III, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto are the stage’s most famous disabled characters. Like Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, they are hunchbacks who share with King Richard, as the Bard wrote, being “rudely stamp'd… deformed, unfinish'd…” and unable to “strut before a wanton ambling nymph.” (Verdi’s 1851 opera, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, is actually based on an 1832 play by Hugo, Le Roi s’amuse, which was banned after a single performance because it criticized royalty.)

Rigoletto is a figure of fun - not only because cruel people take perverse delight in mocking the disabled (like Trump despicably mimicking a NY Times reporter with a disability), but because Rigoletto is also the court jester of the Duke of Mantua. (In LA Opera’s May 27-June 3 performances, Italian baritone Ambrogio Maestri was Rigoletto while from May 12-19 Spanish baritone Juan Jesus Rodriguez played the part. New Jersey tenor Michael Fabiano was the Duke May 27-June 3, while Mexican tenor Arturo Chacon-Cruz had the role May 12-19.)

Five years ago, five activists and I set up a protest action at the Wendy’s restaurant located on South High Street in Columbus, Ohio. We lined up on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant with a 30-foot-long banner that stated, “Wendy’s Stop the Exploitation, Join the Fair Food Program.”

Customers did not turn away or stop driving into the parking lot, but when they sat at the outdoor dining area, they would shout out, “What’s wrong with Wendy’s?”

That’s the problem: not many people know what’s wrong with Wendy’s. It is necessary to reiterate the reason that larger and larger groups of farm workers and consumers demand that Wendy’s join the Fair Food Program.

By David Swanson

“Memorial Day is a time to remember, appreciate, and honor the selfless patriots who gave the ultimate sacrifice in service to freedom. At a time when our country seems so divided, we must not forget that it is because of their service and sacrifice that we live in the most free and prosperous nation on Earth.” —Congressman Tom Garrett

It would be difficult to count all of the lies in the above statement. Let’s just highlight a few.

Let’s start with “most free.”