Global

Playwright/director Roger Bean’s Honky Tonk Laundry is like a dramatization of a Country Western song: A hard luck tuneful tale featuring brokenhearted Southerners who are no longer (if they ever were) the belles of the ball, brought to the live stage. Unfortunately all of the music is canned, and most if not all of the songs are CW or perhaps pop standards, such as Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” However, to be fair, the singing that accompanies the plus-one soundtrack warbled by Bets Malone (as Lana Mae Hopkins, owner of the Wishy Washy Washateria) and Misty Cotton (as employee/co-singer Katie Lane Murphy) and their hoofing choreo-ed by James Vasquez is often enjoyable.

Under the new policy just announced in Charlottesville, Virginia, the city will be taking down all but the non-racist war monuments and memorials in all of its public spaces.

Three monuments to the Confederate war, fought to maintain slavery — those of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and a generic Confederate soldier — will all be removed under the new guidelines.

In addition a heroic equestrian monument to George Rogers Clark is coming down, as Native American genocide has been ruled racist.

A statue of Lewis and Clark almost made the cut as not being a traditional war monument, but the figure of Sacagawea kneeling at their feet like a dog has apparently been sufficient to bump also this statue, which stands in a major Charlottesville intersection, onto the list of those to be moved to a museum.

Further, a memorial to the war that killed 3.8 million Vietnamese — although “Vietnamese” is a more polite and less commonly used term for the people killed than several others employed at the time by U.S. war makers — is going to be removed as well.

Racism is not a new phenomenon and while it is an ongoing daily reality for vast numbers of people, it also often bursts from the shadows to remind us that just because we can keep ignoring the endless sequence of ‘minor’ racist incidents, racism has not gone away despite supposedly significant efforts to eliminate it. I say ‘supposedly’ because these past efforts, whatever personnel, resources and strategies have been devoted to them, have done nothing to address the underlying cause of racism and so their impact must be superficial and temporary. As the record demonstrates.

I say this not to denounce the effort made and, in limited contexts, the progress achieved, but if we want to eliminate racism, rather than confine it to the shadows for it to burst out periodically, then we must have the courage to understand what drives racism and design responses that address this cause.

Given the intense media coverage over Charlottesville, a recent small headline largely escaped notice, but it could have a major impact on how Americans come to terms with the excesses that developed from the “global war on terror.” For the first time, several individuals closely associated with the CIA torture program were about to become answerable in a court of law for “legally aiding and abetting and/or factually aiding and abetting torture,” forcing the government to intervene and come to a settlement of the case.

1. Let’s start with the obvious. Charlottesville, Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, are actually two completely different places in the world. The flood of concern and good wishes for those of us here in Charlottesville is wonderful and much appreciated. That people can watch TV news about Charlottesville, remember that I live in Charlottesville, and send me their kind greetings addressed to the people of Charlotte is an indication of how common the confusion is. It’s not badly taken; I have nothing against Charlotte. It’s just a different place, seventeen times the size. Charlottesville is a small town with the University of Virginia, a pedestrian downtown street, and very few monuments. The three located right downtown are for Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Confederacy. Neither Lee nor Jackson had anything to do with Charlottesville, and their statues were put up in whites-only parks in the 1920s.

Several years back, I led a team of authors drafting articles of impeachment against then-President George W. Bush for then-Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

Is silence on racism still racism? Does it matter?

hite supremacy survives on violence, but the President of the United States can’t, or won’t, bring himself to condemn either. Most Americans, it seems, don’t have that difficulty, judging by the outpouring of disgust with the President and the hail of statues coming down around the country.

That’s the encouraging early public response to President Trump’s reactionary news conference in Trump Tower in New York on August 15. The news conference was supposed to be about the nation’s highways and other physical infrastructure. Even though the actual remedy was limited to an executive order that’s supposed to reduce regulatory delays, Trump summarized his accomplishment by saying: “We are literally like a third-world country. Our infrastructure will again be the best. And we will restore the pride in our communities, our nation. And all over the United States will be proud again.”

Los Angeles, Aug. 19, 2017 – The Los Angeles Workers Center and Hollywood Progressive co-present the Ukrainian revolutionary classic Earth (Zemlya).

Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s revolutionary masterpiece Earth is about class struggle in a rural Ukrainian village, pitting poor peasants against “kulaks” (rich landowners). Class conflict erupts after the Bolsheviks make a tractor available to the underdeveloped farmers as a harbinger of the socialist future.

Under Dovzhenko’s lyrical direction, Danylo Demutsky’s stunning cinematography captures on celluloid indelible images and scenes. The poetic pictures pairing peasants with sunflowers are simply   unforgettable, expressing the oneness of the farmer with the land which the Revolution is giving those who till ownership of. Earth’s sequence where the tractor needs water and how the menfolk solve the problem is amusing and - well - earthy.

The people of Durham , N.C., have the right idea. Not only have they taken down a Confederate war statue themselves, but they’ve lined up en masse to turn themselves in for that crime, overwhelming the so-called justice system.

The people of Wunsiedel, German, have the right idea. They’ve responded to Nazi marches by funding anti-Nazi groups for every Nazi marcher, and cheering on and thanking the marchers.

The people of Richardson, Texas, have the right idea. Members of a mosque intervened between anti-Muslim demonstrators and violent would-be defenders, and left the rally with the anti-Muslims to discuss their differences at a restaurant.

Every situation is different, and the same approach won’t work everywhere, or even necessarily work more than once in the same place. The bigger and less accountable the target — for example state or federal government instead of local — the tougher the challenge. But local actions and global communications can create momentum.