Produced by the Ohio State Department of Theater at the Southern Theater
Guest Director: Steven C. Anderson

After all these years, HAIR is still a force of nature...and a theatrical delight.

The iconic sixties musical is at the Southern Theater for the weekend and it should not be missed. A bright, lively group of very talented OSU students has rendered the show in exactly the spirit it was meant---young, irreverent, fun...and poignant.

It's easy to forget amongst the monumental songs like "Age of Aquarius" and "Let the Sun Shine" that this play is about a good young guy confronting the draft for the Vietnam War---and losing. The play is given its spiritual depth by the memory of the lethal, useless stupidity that was the slaughter in Southeast Asia.

Indeed, HAIR is more than just fun and games. It reminds us that a brilliant generation, endowed with a unique genius, was swallowed by a ghastly error for which we still pay---and which is now being repeated in Iraq.

"After the first challenge, this one big guy stood over me and pointed his finger," Anne Schultz e-mailed me. "Shaking a bit with anger, he said that he could throw me out in a minute for disrupting the election. The woman was on her way out of the polling place, and I asked her to stay until this was resolved, which she was glad to do. I reminded him that I wasn't disrupting the election, I was simply doing what was within my rights, but after that the cozy relationship I thought I'd established with the judges, with the help of bringing donuts, went rather to hell."

This is democracy raw, warts exposed. It's not the kind you see on TV - all sanitized numbers and gleeful winners - but the real deal, one vote at a time, a power struggle in every precinct, as fair as it has to be (and no fairer).

AUSTIN, Texas -- There's been so much in print about how Daddy 41's people are back in the saddle, I was terrified when I saw a photo of Dan Quayle among the pack. If they've called back Dan Quayle to lend intellectual heft, we're all dead ducks. Fortunately, it was just a file picture of Quayle with the old team.

            It does seem that we may be going back to the typical modus operandi of Dubya. Poppy Bush has helped Junior out of the Vietnam War, his failures in the oil business and other efforts all of his "adult" life.

            Unfortunately for us and for the world, the people from the first Bush administration who initially joined this administration were Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Not exactly the most diplomatic, forward-looking, helpful people to be guiding Dubya.

            During the first Gulf War, Bush 41 and his administration knew what it would be like if they tried to take Baghdad -- and opted not to go in. Now, the more sober-headed people from that administration are moving in to try to clean up the mess Junior made in his Iraq excursion.

Have the Democrats learned nothing? Electing a majority leader by 'secret ballot'? Or, is this particular nonsense in sync with other inexplicable strategies, particularly the Dem's decision to use Internet voting in the presidential primaries of 2000, 2004 and 2008?

With all the problems the electorate has faced with a voting system that is completely non-transparent (i.e., "secret"), it defies imagination why House Democrats would resort to a "secret ballot" to elect their majority leader. So much for demonstrating the courage of their convictions.

A 'secret ballot" election is the perfect set-up for those who want to rig an election. See: Vote Fraud 101 - "When elections are conducted by secret ballot, there exists no hard evidence of how people voted. "Voters hand over to election officials a pile of anonymous ballots. For those with the appropriate incentive, substituting ballots is duck soup." Source: me

The secret ballot was created in Australia in 1856. It came to America in the 1880's. And ever since then, in elections here and around the world, nobody really knows anything for sure.

Abstract

Democracy needs to defend itself from the many immediate threats - technology, imperialism, global economic powers, human passivity and reactionary religion. Reactionary religion has taken the lead worldwide in rejecting pluralism and democracy, viewing both values as gateways to secularism and decadence. Both modernism and post-modernism have failed to fully address the success of the continued political advances of the religious right worldwide.

A new, postmodern politics of meaning is needed to address basic human needs currently served by the cosmology of traditional religious orthodoxy. Progressive thinkers in philosophy, religion and in critical theory must work dialectically to retain the good of religion and spirituality, the need for ultimate meaning, and the challenge of reducing negative, anti-democratic impulses. These impulses are embodied in theocracy and a fear of life. Until religion is totally reinvented or evolves to a higher level we will have to defend many democratic values from religious extremists. A live and let live political philosophy is a good defense of democracy.