1984 Theater Review

 

Watch Big Brother Watching You: Actors’ Gang Stages Oracle Orwell’s Prophetic Thought Crime

 

By Ed Rampell

 

[NOTE: This review may contain plot spoilers for those unfamiliar with 1984.]

 

Halloween is the spookiest time of the year, when scary shows are de rigueur on stage and screen. For example, Oct. 25-31 Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 scream-fest Psycho is being screamed - uh, I mean screened - in Downtown L.A.’s ornate Theatre at Ace Hotel, accompanied by LA Opera Orchestra performing live Bernard Herrmann’s hair-raising score. (See: https://www.laopera.org/performances/201920-season/psycho/.)

 

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Army Chief Gen. Apirat Kongsompong has announced
a communist conspiracy is plotting to seize power in Thailand, led by
elderly politicians and academics who had "implanted communist chips"
in their brains.

These secretive Thai communists have allied with Hong Kong's new
generation of protesters and could lure Thai youths to unleash an
insurrection in Bangkok, he warned.

Gen. Apirat's speech came after the military spent more than $480
million in recent purchases of U.S. weaponry including eight attack
reconnaissance helicopters, 50 Hellfire missiles, 60 Stryker infantry
carrier vehicles, 200 Advance Precision Kill Weapon System rockets,
plus .50 caliber machine guns, grenade launchers and other arms and
ammunition.

The general's 90-minute speech at the Royal Thai Army Headquarters on
October 11 was titled "Our Land From a Security Perspective." The
audience of 500 included university students, academics, local leaders
and the media.

While speaking, Gen. Apirat -- who trained in the U.S. -- appeared on

Collage of pictures from Mary Jane's activism

What an honor! I am extremely proud to be named the 2019 recipient of the Free Press “Libby” Award for Community Activism. I’m guessing that such an accolade means that I know a thing or two about the subject matter, activism. So please allow me to expound on what it means and what it takes.

First, Dictionary.com an activist as “an active, vigorous advocate of a cause, especially a political cause.” Yep, that’s me, and my cause for more than twenty years has been marijuana, aka cannabis and hemp.

Born from a passion for social justice, my inspiration to become an activist took fire with our nation’s draconian War on Drugs. The late 1990s saw a raft of wrongs smear its battlefield. In Tulia, Texas, almost half of this tiny town’s black male residents were arrested and incarcerated on trumped up drug charges. Blind to the real threat, schools locked down classrooms so drug dogs could sniff backpacks for marijuana. Drug testing. Mandatory minimum sentencing. Civil asset forfeiture. Stop and frisk. But most egregious was the murder of activists Rollie Rolm and Tom Crosslin by the FBI at the Rainbow Farm in Michigan.

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Pete Buttigieg burst on the national scene early this year as a new sort of presidential candidate. But it turns out he’s a very old kind—a glib ally of corporate America posing as an advocate for working people and their families. That has become apparent this fall as Buttigieg escalates his offensive against Medicare for All.

There was what might be described as an extraordinary amount of nonsense being promoted by last week’s media. Unfortunately, some of it was quite dangerous. Admiral William McRaven, who commanded the Navy Seals when Osama bin Laden was captured and killed and who has been riding that horse ever since, announced that if Donald Trump continues to fail to provide the type of leadership the country needs, he should be replaced by whatever means are necessary. The op-ed entitled “Our Republic is Under Attack by the President” with the subtitle “If President Trump doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office” was featured in the New York Times, suggesting that the Gray Lady was providing its newspaper of record seal of approval for what might well be regarded as a call for a military coup.

The Ohio Statehouse and words Stop Abortion Bans

Tuesday, October 22, 9:45am-12pm
Ohio Statehouse, 1 Capitol Square
Join us Tuesday, October 22 in the Senate Health, Human Services and Medicaid committee (South Hearing Room) for the third hearing on two anti-abortion bills - SB 155 and SB 208. The hearing is set to begin at 10:00 am

RSVP HERE - http://bit.ly/SB155SB208

 

Maori moviemaker Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit is in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 anti-Nazi masterpiece The Great Dictator. Rabbit blasts off with a laugh-out-loud sequence comparing Beatle-mania-like celebrity worship to the Third Reich’s cult of personality for the Führer. In this tragic-comic satire Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is a boy growing up during World War II who fantasizes that Adolph Hitler (Waititi, who also wrote and directed) is his best friend.

 

The picaresque picture follows Jojo’s misadventures in wartime Germany (but actually shot in the Czech Republic), where he joins the Hitler Youth, the Nazis’ militaristic counterpart to the Boy Scouts. Aided by goofy true believer Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson), the Hitler-Jugend unit is commanded by Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), a wounded soldier transferred from the frontlines back to the homeland to train the Aryan youngsters for combat. As they blunder through exercises such as tossing grenades, Rockwell slyly portrays the one-eyed officer as realizing that the Hitler Youth are, like National Socialism and the war effort, futile and farcical.

 

Words Equality Act typed on a paper in a typewriter

Sunday, October 20, 2-3:30pm
Parsons Library, 1113 Parsons Ave.
Hosted by Columbus Club, Communist Party USA, The Anna Hass Morgan Club and Communist Party of Ohio, CPUSA. Political discussion, report on Ohio's denial of LGBTQ rights. Meeting Room 3.

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