SPREAD THE WORD

Spy Behind Home Plate

opens now at Gateway Film Center on June 21

Washington Post article: https://wapo.st/ 2MzTAZT

Los Angeles Times review by Ken Turan: https://lat.ms/2wGKWhA

Aviva Kempner’s The Spy Behind Home Plate is the first feature-length documentary to tell the real story of Morris “Moe” Berg, the enigmatic and brilliant Jewish baseball player turned spy. Berg caught and fielded in the major leagues during baseball’s Golden Age in the 1920s and 1930s. But very few people know that Berg also worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), spying in Europe and playing a prominent role in America’s efforts to undermine the German atomic bomb program during WWII.

If you’re free, if you’re not locked behind bars (and I do realize that this is true of a smaller percentage of people in the so-called Land of the Free than anywhere else on earth), be grateful. One thing you can do is get your hands on important new books. I recommend this one: The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences by Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis, Featuring Six Portraits of Lifers.

The man who would make himself dictator is with us because we have put so many like him in power in so many other places.

And because we have 800 bases around the world, spend unlimited sums on an imperial military, and continue to use it to tell everyone else on this planet what to do and who will rule them. 

Remarkably, many of those rulers turn out to be a lot like Donald Trump.

Think of Trump as the ultimate payback, the balloon payment on the Empire. He is the eternal imperial mobster, a composite of exactly who we’ve foisted on so many other innocents throughout history. 

We need to stop whining about him. Instead, we need to apologize to the world, sell our bases, turn our military to peaceful and ecological uses, and stop behaving like an imperial overlord. If we don’t, our next ruler (even if a Democrat) will be just like this one, only smarter and more brutally effective. And then the one after that. And the one after that. And the one after that.

Imagine yourself in Greece just after WW2. Revolution is in the air. The chances for social democracy are real.

It’s not HBO, it’s live theater as a pack of a dozen or so merry “spanksters” mount a madcap musical spoof of the beloved fantasy series Game of Thrones and try to put the Eros into Westeros. An amiable if mischievous Benji Kaufman plays George R.R. Martin, who introduces and more or less narrates this revival of Shame of Thrones: The Musical, a two-act send-up of that author’s characters and their medieval swords and suits of armor setting.

Shame enjoys poking fun at the backstabbing and sexy hanky-spanky that were the hallmark of Martin’s novels and HBO epic about the cutthroat quest for the Iron Throne. The humor and story ranges from the satirical to slapstick to vaudevillian. Many of the popular long-running series’ beloved dramatis personae are impersonated in the musical parody, from saucy wenches to muscular knights and warriors.

Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, tells a complex, honest, and nuanced story of what overall and in many particular parts fits the UN definition of and the popular conception of genocide. So, of course, it is primarily a story of not surviving genocide, though I guess that would have been too much of a “Dog Bites Man” headline for any publisher.

But parts of the story are of surviving. Some of the surviving is temporary. People slowed and mitigated the catastrophe. There are lessons there for all of humanity as it proceeds to destroy its own climate. There are lessons in particular for Palestinians and others facing similar assaults today. And some of the surviving has lasted until the present. Reduced in numbers, many nations have survived.