Offshore, Scoops
May 27, 2007
President Bush‘s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, has come under fire for politicizing the U.S. Justice Department for his dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys, apparently because they didn‘t target Democrats. But using the Justice Department for political ends isn‘t simply an invention of Gonzales or of the President; it‘s an old Bush family tradition.
In politicizing the Justice Department, Bush takes a page from his father. The George H.W. Bush Justice Department 25 years ago balked at investigating and prosecuting the key players in the scandal of the criminal, terrorist-friendly bank, BCCI, and moved only, and in limited fashion, after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau forced its hand.
Bush had a strong reason to want Justice to block pursuit of the case: the CIA used BCCI for its black ops, including funneling some of the $2 billion Washington sent to client Osama bin Laden and running money for the illegal Iran-Contra operation.
Theater & the Arts
Eugene O‘Neill‘s play is a sharp political commentary about class, poverty and gender. That overlays what director Howard Davies projects as a story of personal relationships, a male-female pas de deux, with an interfering father thrown in.
It is 1923. The 30-ish Josie Hogan (an assertive, moving, dignified Eve Best) is helping her self-involved father Paul (played by Colm Meaney with a sense of true male entitlement) scrape survival out of a hard scrabble Connecticut farm.
Josie and Paul see their “way out” as Jim Tyrone (Kevin Spacey), a rich, alcoholic, third-rate actor whose inheritance makes him the Hogans‘ landlord.
But the cards are really held by T. Stedman Harder (Billy Carter), the owner of a neighboring estate, who is defined by his pretentious first initial and his position as an executive with Standard Oil.
Theater & the Arts
Inter Press Service (IPS) – May 25, 2007
The international focus on fundamentalist Islam might obscure the fact that western nations have their own experiences with fundamentalist religion — among them the country whose government has most targeted radical Islam, the United States.
As recently as 1999 the Kansas Board of Education voted to delete the teaching of evolution from the state’s science curriculum.
A sense of continuing conflict — not to mention the hardly-veiled contempt many educated people here have for the fundamentalists — is palpable among the New York audiences filling the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway to see a riveting star-studded production of Inherit the Wind. The production is a revival of the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that tells the story of what came to be known as The Scopes Monkey Trial.
In the play, science teacher Bert Cates (Benjamin Walker) is jailed for the crime of explaining evolution to his students. Help comes quickly from a Baltimore newspaper which hires Henry Drummond (portrayed by Christopher Plummer as a wry, sophisticated lawyer) to defend the young man. To chronicle the story, it dispatches its prize reporter, smartly played by Denis O’Hare as a sarcastic, fast-talking cynic.
Blog
May 16, 2007
Paul Hewson, known as Bono, the rock star, is complaining that the seven wealthy nations in the G-7 which had promised to double aid to the developing world by 2010, are more than half behind target. The countries are the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. 
Bono‘s protest might be taken more seriously if he and his U2 band were not participating in the system that deprives developing countries of far more than western aid – much of which has to be repaid.
Bono is a tax dodger. As a result of a change in Irish law that limits the tax exemption for artists and musicians to a punitive $625,450, Bono’s U2 has moved its music publishing company registration to the Netherlands, where the tax on its multi-million dollar income will be about 5 percent. To dodge taxes on non-royalty income, Bono‘s company has used offshore nominees.
Theater & the Arts
Inter Press Service (IPS), May 10, 2007
Conflict historically has aroused playwrights’ passions — think Aristophanes’ famous War and Peace trilogy written more than 2,000 years ago.
In that tradition, New York stage voices are being raised against war in two revivals that clearly retain their relevance today.
Journey’s End, a gripping play about World War I written in the 1920s, is spare and direct, unsettling the audience with the prosaic waiting game of war. And The Brig details the numbing banality of military cruelty as the Living Theatre revives its famous gritty production of the 1960s.
Theater & the Arts
Kenneth Brown’s play The Brig, staged by The Living Theatre, is a numbing expression of the banality of cruelty institutionalized by the U.S. military.
A cell with five double-decker bunks is enclosed by a chain-link fence, and the area outside, concrete floor or gravel exercise yard, is separated from the audience by barbed wire. Ten men, who have committed unknown, apparently minor infractions, are confined for up to 30 days to suffer dehumanizing treatment at the hands of guards who punctuate their disapproval with punches to the stomach.
The guards turn basic minutiae of life – dressing, showering, shaving, smoking – into opportunities for control and humiliation. There is a Nazi sort of order, efficiency and gratuitous cruelty. The spectacle is a macabre dance, a cacophony of voices, repetition, and tension that sears and stuns audiences.
Theater & the Arts
It‘s the ordinariness that at the end is so unsettling. This is not a Hollywood-style swagger tale about intrepid fighter pilots or its 70‘s version of pot-smoking infantrymen. No glamour or anti-glamour here.
Director David Grindley stages a story of prosaic people caught up in the military aspect of a political game whose purpose is far beyond them. These British soldiers – superbly portrayed by a uniformly excellent cast — just focus on staying warm and alive and carrying out orders. It is a powerful and often poetic production.
