Global
President Donald Trump’s move to decertify the Iranian nuclear Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), entered into a little over two years ago, was applauded by Israel, Saudi Arabia and a couple of Persian Gulf States, but by no one else. Quite the contrary, as the European and Asian co-signatories on the agreement, having failed to dissuade Trump, have clearly indicated that they will continue to abide by it. Also, the decision to kick the can down the road by giving Congress 60 days to increase pressure on Tehran in an attempt to include other issues beyond nuclear development like its ballistic missile program and labeling the country’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group are likely to create confusion as Washington is unable to communicate directly with Iran. That uncertainty could possibly lead to a fraught-with-danger Iranian decision to withdraw completely from the agreement.
For many years, I have held two shares in America’s only publicly owned major sports team, the Green Bay Packers. There are no dividends, no special seats, no stadium perks. I cannot sell the shares. I can only pass them on to immediate family. But owning these shares does in fact make me a part-owner. And as such, I am registering my first demand: The Pack must hire Colin Kaepernick.
Kaepernick’s pathbreaking “take a knee” before the national anthem guarantees him an historic place in the civil rights hall of fame. Begun last year, it is a carefully considered,well-timed, and very public call to pay attention to ongoing police brutality toward black people in this country.
“Dear NFL: We will not support millionaire ingrates who hate America and disrespect our Armed Forces and Veterans. Who wins a football game has ZERO impact on our lives. Who fights for and defends our nation has every impact on our lives. We stand with the Heroes, not a bunch of rich, entitled, arrogant, ungrateful, anti-American, degenerates. Signed, We the people.”
In The Secure and the Dispossessed, Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes have collected an unflinching survey of a species gone mad. The book’s subtitle is “How the Military and Corporations Are Shaping a Climate-Changed World.” In short, the Authoritarian Exceptionalist Military Corporate Complex is flamboyantly recognizing the hole it is in, and exponentially increasing the rate of digging, while hiring PR firms to redefine “digging” as “robust engagement in advanced resilient green initiatives that save us all by further enriching the rich, militarizing the world, and rendering the earth uninhabitable.”
After reading and hearing wildly contradictory accounts of Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s Vietnam War documentary on PBS, I decided I had to watch the thing. I agree with some of the criticism and some of the praise.
In Las Vegas on 1 October 2017, it appears that one man (although it might have been more) killed 59 people and shot and injured another 241 (with almost 300 more injured while fleeing). The incident got a lot of publicity, partly because the man managed to kill more people than most mass killers. However, because the killer was a white American and had a Christian name, he was not immediately labeled a terrorist, even though his death toll considerably exceeded that achieved in many ‘terrorist attacks’, including those that occur in war zones (such as US drone murders of innocent people attending weddings).
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there is now an average of one mass shooting (arbitrarily defined by the FBI as a shooting in which at least four victims are shot) each day in the USA. By any measure, this is a national crisis.
The Afghanistan War documentary by Ken Burns III may someday be set for release in Spring 2074.
Or maybe not. The peace movement in the U.S. made Vietnam, rather than Korea, a topic for Burns. The peace movement is struggling to make people in the United States aware that the war on Afghanistan even exists, much less that it is entering its 17th year — making it something that people who still don’t recognize Native Americans as full humans call “the longest U.S. war.”
If there ever is such a PBS account of Vietghanistan, it will no doubt steer clear of the illegality, the lasting damage, and the wisdom of those who rightly opposed the crime before it began and all the way through. Yet such a film’s content will likely be so awful, and depict such evil madness, clearly counterproductive on its own terms, that some people will finally catch on.
Or we could skip to the future and just watch War Machine with Brad Pitt right now, which gets a lot of it right.