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When Joe Biden was declared the winner in the US elections last November, expectations in Ramallah were high. A Biden Administration, compared to the brazenly pro-Israel Trump Administration, would surely be much fairer to Palestinians, was the conventional wisdom at the time. 

Several million dollars’ worth of fiction exploded the other day, leaving cinematographer Halyna Hutchins — age 42, a wife, a mom — dead, and plunging Alec Baldwin, who accidentally shot her, into a state of unimaginable hell.

This happened on Oct. 21, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the set of the movie Rust. Despite the enormity of coverage the incident has gotten, I remain bewitched with incredulity over one unanswered question. Baldwin, the star of the movie, a Western, and one of its producers, was practicing his gun draw, using a prop gun he’d been given — except the gun wasn’t a prop. It was real. And it was loaded.

My question, of course, is: Why?

On October 26 I saw Tom Stoppard interviewed on PBS’ Amanpour & Company and the British playwright stated that “theater is a storytelling art form.” While I hold the bard who wrote 1966’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in high esteem (see my review of A Noise Within’s 2016 production of Arcadia: “Arcadia”: Tom Stoppard’s complex Byronic drama to the manor born – People's World (peoplesworld.org)), there are some intrepid souls in the realm of the stage who’d beg to differ with Stoppard’s definition/description of theater.

Wishful thinking aside, the threat of nuclear war has not receded. In fact, the opposite is the case. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moving the “Doomsday Clock”ever closer to cataclysmic midnight; the symbolic hands are now merely 100 seconds from midnight, in contrast to six minutes a decade ago.

When the news circulated that Morocco's leading political group, the Development and Justice Party (PJD), has been trounced in the latest elections, held in September, official media mouthpieces in Egypt celebrated the news as if the PJD's defeat was, in itself, a blow to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement. Regionally, political commentators who dedicated much of their time to discredit various Islamic political parties - often on behalf of one Arab government or another - found in the news another supposed proof that political Islam is a failure in both theory and practice.

As Tannhäuser’s lovely, rolling overture is unveiled, the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion becomes visible, as if being revealed in a cinematic fade in. The set is bathed in ethereal scarlet and blue lights designed by Connecticut’s Marcus Doshi, as about six dancers cavort onstage in what composer and librettist Richard Wagner described as “the whirlings of a fearsomely voluptuous dance.” A bacchanalian orgy is taking place, with nymphs performing Kama Sutra-like positions and moves choreographed by Canadian Aszure Barton. In Opera 101 author Fred Plotkin notes “some modern productions have included nude dancers” in Tannhäuser’s stunning curtain lifter, but although nudity has appeared in other LA Opera offerings, alas, this less adventurous show’s sexy sprites are appareled in flimsy androgynous outfits.

The Pentagon’s offer of “condolence money” to the relatives of the ten people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan — originally declared righteous and necessary — bears a troubling connection to the government’s ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and punish him for exposing the inconvenient truth of war.

You know, the “classified” stuff — like Apache helicopter crewmen laughing after they killed a bunch of men on a street in Baghdad in 2007 (“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”) and then smirked some more after killing the ones who started picking up the bodies, in the process also injuring several children who were in the van they just blasted. This is not stuff the American public needs to know about!