My review of Charles Mee’s Fire Island, directed by Kevin Cunningham, at 3LD Arts Center.
Sometimes they stroll; sometimes they chase one another, playfully or otherwise. They shout, they whisper, they caress, they laugh. Through all of this, though, they never seem to be going anywhere. Mee conceives of his island paradise as a landscape outside of time, a place that enables long philosophical conversations about passions and preoccupations.
Full review here.
Tags: reviews · self-promotion · theatre
In case you missed it, ABC News has recently reported on meetings by high-level Bush administration officials, in the White House, that officially and explicitly sanctioned the use of torture by the CIA.
In an interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz the day after the original report aired, President Bush acknowledged that “yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”
John Amato at Crooks and Liars has joined forces with the ACLU to start a letter-writing campaign to members of Congress requesting an independent prosector to investigate the possibility that the Bush Administration’s awareness and approval of torture techniques employed by the CIA were in violation of several laws (including the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture statute, and federal assault laws.)
In a stunning admission to ABC news Friday night, President Bush declared that he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details of the CIA’s use of torture. Bush reportedly told ABC, “I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.” Bush also defended the use of waterboarding.
“We have always known that the CIA’s use of torture was approved from the very top levels of the U.S. government, yet the latest revelations about knowledge from the president himself and authorization from his top advisers only confirms our worst fears,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “It is a very sad day when the president of the United States subverts the Constitution, the rule of law, and American values of justice.”
More than 80,000 people have sent letters via the ACLU site. They’re hoping for at least 100,000.
Sign here.
Tags: internet · journalism · politics
My sister isn’t the only person who finds the recent Clinton (and McCain) comments about Obama’s characterization of some Pennsylvanians as “bitter” to be ridiculous. Consider this clip from CNN:
And here’s Obama’s response to the dust-up:
As sometimes happens, Obama probably made his point a little more successfully the second time around. And, as often happens, he is being criticized not for the substance of his argument but for an individual word, a decontextualized moment. Obama talks in complete sentences, in complete paragraphs. It’s one of the things I like about him: his interest in nuance, in process, in ideas that require a little more context and longer discussions. When employs soundbites and euphemisms he is accused of lacking substance, but when he is substantive he is taken badly out of context.
Of course, that’s how the game is played, and Obama will have to continue charting paths through such moments. Still, I don’t think this one will play all that well for Hillary and McCain. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and a lot of the people around me were, and are, bitter. Moreover, they would unhesitatingly describe themselves that way. As Angela points out: in the bars and around the kitchen tables, bleary-eyed from cheap beer, cigarettes and bounced checks, nobody is under the illusion that they are something other than “bitter” about the state of the national and local economies. Northeast Pennsylvania has been in a recession for decades; the Scranton area never recovered from the economic crises of the seventies or from the collapse of the U.S. industrial-manufacturing sector.
The population of areas like that, who have seen two generations of children move away as soon as they got the chance, who have seen the roads and schools and hospitals and libraries get worse as the cost of groceries and gas inflate, and seen their property taxes rise faster than the value of their property without seeing any of the supposed benefits and results of those taxes: these people do not need to be patronized and told they aren’t bitter. They need some hope that maybe they won’t have to stay bitter indefinitely.
Obama’s point in the clip I posted above is a direct response to and engagement with the quandary so often discussed in the center-left punditry: Why don’t working Americans vote their economic interests?
Obama’s answer: because they don’t believe that anyone who is elected will do anything to help their segment of the economy. As with a number of other issues, Obama’s approach here is to actually address the resentments and the tensions and the frustrations of those who have turned their back on political and governmental processes so that they know they are being spoken to this time around. It’s not just Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain,” it’s “Let’s talk about this openly so we can figure out what to do about it.” It’s another sign of Obama’s committment to, as Angela’s friend Sandy Heierbacher would put it, deliberation and dialogue, a process he grew committed to during his years as a community organizer.
Obama is not perfect, of course, and I don’t always agree with everything he says. (I feel compelled to acknowledge that from time to time because I am so tired of being told I support him only because of his “cult of personality.”)
Despite his imperfections, though, he is the first national politician in my memory to say that even the people he disagrees with have good reason to be pissed off and despondent and “bitter” about a great many things, and that in order to address some of the issues that lead to fractious infighting among the working poor, rendering them largely ineffectual as a political force, we need to acknowledge that they are angry and talk about why, not congratulate them for “rolling up their sleeves” and “putting their noses to the grindstone” despite diminishing returns.
Even the salt of the earth would like to wash away the sweat of their labor from time to time. And they’d like someone other than their poker-buddies and next-door neighbors to listen to their complaints while they soak their feet after getting home from their second or third jobs.
(thanks to Truthdig for pointing to the clips used in this post.)
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