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Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s narrative ballet The Nutcracker, based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s children’s story about magical mice, sugarplum fairies, toy soldiers and dolls that come to life, is a perennial holiday favorite. The Miami City Ballet version, with choreography by the renowned George Balanchine and the Russian composer’s melodic score performed by a live orchestra, remains ideal for the Christmas season for children of all ages.

As youngsters gathered around the Stahlbaums’ lavishly decorated Christmas tree for yuletide greetings in Scene 1, Act I, the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was filled with projections designed by Wendall K. Harrington. The graphics continued throughout Scene 2’s childlike dreamland of a fantastical battle between the gigantic Mouse King, a Nutcracker that comes alive and their minions. During the third scene’s lovely winter wonderland sequence it seemed like it was snowing onstage.

Sun Tzu, whose book, The Art of War, was written some 2,500 years ago during a period of constant war, and popularized in the West some 100 years ago (just in time for industrialized warfare), is the leading example of what’s wrong with digging up ancient platitudes as guides for action today in the areas of war and peace.

“That the impact of your army may be like a grindstone dashed against an egg — this is effected by the science of weak points and strong.”

This “wisdom” provides nothing to the modern warmonger on his own terms, and even less to the advocate for peace; yet it’s imagined to be relevant to both, to create common ground for both, and to embody deep timeless meaning.

“But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.”

Read that solemnly as if discovering amazing new insights. If you can, you are a better war artist than I.

Notes from the Birmingham Mall

A bi-racial, multi-generational grassroots uprising is trying to turn Alabama, the Reddest state in the Deep South, Blue in Tuesday's special election for U.S. Senate, as average citizens knock on doors, distribute lawn signs and work the phones for former U.S. prosecutor Doug Jones in his insurgent race against former state judge and credibly accused pedophile Roy Moore.

This is an exposition of the photographic essay by William Pepper about the children of Vietnam that Martin King first saw on January l4, l967. Initially, while he hadn’t had a chance to read the text, it was the photographs that stopped him. As Bernard Lee who was present at the time said, “Martin had known about the [Vietnam] war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it.” Pepper’s essay contains the most powerful creative energy on earth: truth force. It is as relevant 50 years later as it was in 1967. Martin King steadfastly exhorted all to confront and grapple with the triple prong sickness—lurking within the U.S. body politic from its inception—of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.

For actor/activist James Cromwell and other ecologists, December 7, 2017 is another date that will live in infamy, as a Pearl Harbor Day for bald eagles, the symbol of America. As part of his ongoing struggle against fracking, Cromwell was back in court this week observing a hearing regarding the fate of the controversial Competitive Power Ventures power plant in Orange County, N.Y. Although there is currently a moratorium on fracking in N.Y. State, the disputed process is allowed just across the border. According to Cromwell, methane gas is drilled out of the shale fields in eastern Pennsylvania for transport via pipeline across State lines to Wawayanda, N.Y. Activists are anxious about the possibility of leaks, as well as fracking’s role in climate change.

Dred Scott lives!

With the Supreme Court’s declaration that President Trump’s third version of a Muslim travel ban is now enforceable, even as legal challenges against it proceed, the court and the country reopen the racism that permeates American history.

“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?”

Thus begins Chief Justice Roger Taney’s explanation of the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling against the slave Dred Scott’s lawsuit that he was entitled to freedom when he was taken by his “owner” to a free territory. Taney’s answer, of course, was no. Sorry, you’re not one of us.

Donald Trump is tweeting about a particular spot in Hawaii. He visited it recently on his way to threaten war in Asia. It’s a big feature this week in lots of U.S. magazines and newspapers. It has a lovely name that sounds like murder and blood because Japanese airplanes engaged in large-scale murder there in 1941: Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor Day today is like Columbus Day 50 years ago. That is to say: most people still believe the hype. The myths are still maintained in their blissful unquestioned state. “New Pearl Harbors” are longed for by war makers, claimed, and exploited. Yet the original Pearl Harbor remains the most popular U.S. argument for all things military, including the long-delayed remilitarization of Japan — not to mention the WWII internment of Japanese Americans as a model for targeting other groups today. Believers in Pearl Harbor imagine for their mythical event, in contrast to today, a greater U.S. innocence, a purer victimhood, a higher contrast of good and evil, and a total necessity of defensive war making.

Do you use the internet? Like, at all? On your phone, on your laptop, on a big glowing gaming rig or a desktop held together with chewing gum and good thoughts? Then you should know we’re on the cusp of something that could destroy the internet as we know it: the end of government-enforced net neutrality.

Back in our June 2017 issue, I wrote about what net neutrality is and why it matters. But so much has been happening that it feels like years since then, so I’ll give you a refresher: “Net neutrality” is the policy that all internet traffic should be treated the same regardless of its source. Service providers aren’t allowed to throttle, for example, Netflix, which they might want to do to make their own streaming service look more appealing or so they can charge an extra fee to get it at full speed. Or they might just do it because they think it’s too much of a burden on their networks – they’ve done it before.

While the Netflix example is the most likely to spur your average citizen into action, it’s also vital to anyone whose politics fall left of center to keep the internet free from corporate control and censorship.

In his remarks on the recent International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women – see ‘Violence Against Women is Fundamentally About Power’ – United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres inadvertantly demonstrated why well-meaning efforts being undertaken globally to reduce violence against women fail to make any progress in addressing this pervasive crisis.

Hence, while the UN might be ‘committed to addressing violence against women in all its forms’ as he claimed, and the UN might have launched a range of initiatives over the past twenty years, including awarding $129 million to 463 civil society initiatives in 139 countries and territories through the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against women, his own article acknowledges that ‘Attacks on women are common to developed and developing countries. Despite attempts to cover them up, they are a daily reality for many women and girls around the world.’

When I was teaching myself how to write, when I was about 20 to 25, I churned out (and threw out) all kinds of autobiographies. I wrote glorified diaries. I fictionalized my friends and acquaintances. I still write columns all the time in the first person. I did write a children’s book in recent years that was fiction but included my oldest son and my niece and nephew as characters. But I haven’t touched autobiography in more years than I’d been alive when I used to engage in it.

I’ve been asked a number of times to write chapters for books on “how I became a peace activist.” In some cases, I’ve just apologized and said I couldn’t. For one book called Why Peace, edited by Marc Guttman, I wrote a very short chapter called “Why Am I a Peace Activist? Why Aren’t You?” My point was basically to express my outrage that one would have to explain working to end the worst thing in the world, while millions of people not working to end it need offer no explanation for their reprehensible behavior.