Global
By Theodore de Macedo Soares
A grisly old PR pro waddles into a conference room where elite technocrats are waiting for his assessment of propaganda issues. He sits down, looks around, and says, “If you’re going to launch a phony epidemic, the ideal place for it is mainland China. The government will lock down that country quicker than a missile fired from a drone. And then nobody will be able to figure out what’s going on.
Which is exactly what you want.
The night before Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren spoke to several thousand people in a quadrangle at East Los Angeles College. Much of her talk recounted the heroic actions of oppressed Latina workers who led the Justice for Janitors organization. Standing in the crowd, I was impressed with Warren's eloquence as she praised solidarity and labor unions as essential for improving the lives of working people.
Now, days later, with corporate Democrat Joe Biden enjoying sudden momentum and mega-billionaire Mike Bloomberg joining forces with him, an urgent question hovers over Warren. It's a time-honored union inquiry: "Which side are you on?"
How Warren answers that question might determine the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In the process, she will profoundly etch into history the reality of her political character.
"The urgency of Warren's decision can hardly be overstated."
The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal borne microorganism found in a wild bat that was consumed by an ethnic Chinese resident of Wuhan. But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that in that adjacent provinces in China, where wild bats are more numerous, have not experienced major outbreaks of the disease. Because of that and other factors, there has also been considerable speculation that the Coronavirus did not occur naturally through mutation but rather was produced in a laboratory, possibly as a biological warfare agent.
A gush of corporate relief fills the airwaves as Super Tuesday becomes history. A progressive wave was not electorally visible as the Democratic status quo consolidated itself behind Joe Biden and won nine or maybe ten states.
I was feeling a lot more hope when Super Tuesday began than I’m feeling a day later, so the need right now is to regroup.
Freelance writer and organizer Kate Aronoff, speaking on a panel of observers at Democracy Now! as the election results unfolded, made an important point in this regard: “The Democratic establishment is going against the future. . . . There is no normal anymore!”
Two years ago Laguna Playhouse hit the jackpot by presenting a stage version of a 1967 screen classic about sex, The Graduate, starring a famous actress, Melanie Griffith, as Mrs. Robinson. Now the venerable SoCal theater is panning for gold in the same river by presenting another theatrical rendering of a 1967 movie about love, featuring this time not one, but two, marquee names. Paul Rodriguez and Rita Rudner, both known as comedians and actors, co-star in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, which opened on Broadway in 1963 with Robert Redford, who four years later joined Jane Fonda for Hollywood’s take on the beloved romantic comedy.
However, Rodriguez and Rudner, who are both in their sixties, do not play the show’s leads. The newlyweds are portrayed by Lily Gibson as Corie, while Nick Tag - who co-starred opposite (or should we say underneath?) Melanie’s Mrs. Robinson in Laguna’s Graduate - graduates from Ben Braddock to Paul Bratter in Barefoot. Rudner portrays the young wife’s mother, Ethel Banks, while Rodriguez essays the role Charles Boyer played in the movie, Victor Velasco.
Writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu’s slyly stylish The Whistlers is one of those productions film buffs relish largely because of their cinematic references. In one scene characters appear in a theater where John Ford’s 1956 classic The Searchers is being screened. But while the 97-minute-long Whistlers’ Romanian characters may very well be searching for something (and/ or someone), the celluloid genre Porumboiu is most emulating isn’t the Western, but rather Film Noir.
There is also a Hitchcockian panache, paying homage to the Master of Suspense’s most famous scene from Psycho, as well as to mattresses, which hold a special place in the iconography of crime movies. Remember in The Godfather when they “go to the mattresses?”
Human Interest Story, playwright/director Stephen Sachs’ remake updating Frank Capra’s 1941 classic movie Met John Doe, has probably the most extensive multi-media stagecraft I’ve ever seen in an intimate theater production. Matthew G. Hill’s bravura video design conjures up the brave new virtual world of cable television, social media and beyond on the diminutive Fountain Theatre’s set, which Hill likewise wrought. One FX is a first: While an actor types on his keyboard the letters appear on an onstage screen.
Toxic masculinity can be defined as a set of behaviors that are generally perceived to be “manly,” but can be harmful to either the person exhibiting them or those who surround that person. An obvious example of toxic masculinity is a man who picks fights when he sees people looking at his girlfriend. A less obvious example is a father criticizing his son for crying.
Even though most of us male nerds are not hyper-manly, Nerd Culture is certainly not immune to toxic masculinity. Nerdy subcultures may actually have greater problems with toxic masculinity than other parts of society. However, nerd toxic masculinity does not take physical form. It tends to be more intellectual (but equally gross).
Many of us nerds are often obsessed with being “correct,” and that correctness is often racist and sexist. We often see this in statements such as: “Stormtroopers can’t be black.” and “Dr. Who can’t be a woman.”