Let's change the subject

I actually do have other interests besides the idiotic antics and the mendacity of our elected officials.

Like serious theater. So, as I was reading the announcements for the new theater season, a few upcoming star turns caught my eye.

There will be a number of celebrity actors starring in serious theater works this season. Maybe with the bad economic situation, they're hoping the names will draw crowds. Most will probably also be worth seeing for the quality of their work.

Helen Mirren will star in Racine's great tragedy Phaedra at the National Theater in Washington. She should handle that quite well, after solving all those crimes and then playing both Queens, Elizabeth I and II.

Cate Blanchett (another former QE I) will do Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Liv Ullman. It opens in Sydney but will come to Washington and Brooklyn Academy of Music. If she can be a believable Bob Dylan in that film about him, perhaps she can also embody the vaporous Blanche; but I worry about the accent, having to go from Australian to Southern faux gentility. But Cate has done some amazing acting. Hmm. A Swedish actress directing an Australian actress in this quintessentially American play.

Jude Law will bring his Hamlet to Broadway for a limited run. I would have been skeptical, but reviews from the London run have been great; and a recent New York Times interview with him suggests a real immersion and understanding of the role. I saw Ralph Fienes' Hamlet from the front row of a small New York theater -- so close that I found myself ducking during the duel scene. He emphasized the brimming rage of Hamlet more than the indecision.

Philip Seymour Hoffman will play the villainous Iago in Othello at the NY Public Theater. Now that should be great. Much better than his miscast (in my opinion) priest role in the film of Doubt. I saw his early career performance in the Broadway production of Long Day's Journey Into Night, as the alcoholic son to Vanessa Redgrave's extraordinary drug-addled, neurotic mother. This was many years ago, and I still remember the way she conveyed her mood and the level of her drugged state with her hands: your attention became riveted on those nervous finger movements and the subtle shifts from agitated fidgets to somnolent repose.

Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig open a new play in NY, A Steady Rain, about two cops who handle a domestic disturbance that changes them forever. Star power, grade A; acting quality, remains to be seen.

And this one made me scratch my head and wonder what they were thinking -- or is there something I don't know about her? Annette Benning as Euripides' Medea -- about as heavy a role as there is: a mother who wreaks revenge on her philandering husband by murdering their children. If she has it in her, then this should be a breakthrough role for her. If not . . . let's hope it at least introduces the LA crowds to a great play. I saw it on Broadway with the marvelous Irish actress, Fiona Shaw, and cringed in abject horror as she staggered onstage carrying the inert, bloodied bodies of those two children. But as an acting tour de force, it was near the top. . . . Mrs. Warren Beatty has quite a challenge to meet.

A side note: while caught up in that scene as a dramatic play, I couldn't help wondering about the reality for those live child actors. What did they think this was about? And what kind of trauma might that have been for them, to even contemplate at that tender age that a mother could murder her children? I guess they could have been told -- look, we're going to put some red paint on you and pretend it's Halloween, and this nice lady is going to carry you on stage and you have to pretend to be asleep. But kids know more than we think about what's going on.

Ralph

Military brass speaks . . . now, finally.

The Miami Herald has an op-ed piece written by two retired generals. Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar. Some excerpts:

In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster.

But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics. . . .

The Bush administration had already degraded the rules of war by authorizing techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions and shocked the conscience of the world. Now Cheney has publicly condoned the abuse that went beyond even those weakened standards, leading us down a slippery slope of lawlessness. . . .

The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality. Moral equivocation about abuse at the top of the chain of command travels through the ranks at warp speed.

On Aug. 24, the United States took an important step toward moral clarity and the rule of law when a special task force recommended that in the future, the Army interrogation manual should be the single standard for all agencies of the U.S. government.

The unanimous decision represents an unusual consensus among the defense, intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies. Members of the task force had access to every scrap of intelligence, yet they drew the opposite conclusion from Cheney's. They concluded that far from making us safer, cruelty betrays American values and harms U.S. national security.

And the 09-24-09 issue of the New York Review of Books has a hard-hitting book review essay on the recently published book by General Richard Myers, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005. The review is titled "The Complicit General." In it Phillipe Sands is harshly critical of Myers for failing to include in his book a discussion of the dissent from the military leaders, as well as the State Department, as the decisions about torture were made and carried out.

Instead, Myers writes that "most everybody involved in the decisions" shared the view that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaida. That may be technically true, since Secretary of State Colin Powell and the top military leaders' opinions were deliberately shut out of the decision-making process and therefore were not "involved in the decisions." But the very statement itself is highly deceptive and covers up what appears to be Myers' own cover-up -- that there was in fact serious dissent within the military command.

Sands also reports from an interview he conducted with Myers in 2002 that Myers mistakenly thought that the enhanced interrogation techniques in question were all in the Army Field Manual. When Sands informed him that none of them are, Myers was surprised and, according to Sands, "inadvertently reveals the full extent to which he has fallen into a fog."

That was in 2002, and yet, in his new book, Myers does not address this question and still vehemently maintains that he did not believe himself to have signed off on torture.

Myers was the military man who should have stood up to Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Yet obviously he did not. It seems questionable now that he even passed on to them the objections of the military leaders who reported to him and were charged with giving their assessments.

Not that it would have mattered to dick and rummy.

What irony. We put civilian government officials in charge of making the major decisions about war in order to put restraints on those whose job it is to fight. Yet in this situation, it was the military leaders (including Colin Powell, though he was then part of the civilian force) who warned against torture, and civilians -- without military any service time among them -- who insisted on it.

Ralph

Cry all the way to the bank

Representative Joe Wilson yells "You lied!" at President Obama on Wednesday night and, in less than 48 hours, protest campaign contributions for his 2010 Democratic challenger, Rob Miller, have exceeded one million dollars.

Of course, Wilson also has his followers, and they're sending him money too.

I guess maybe the recession isn't as bad as we thought.

Ralph

More on childish behavior

A letter in the New York Times evoked a satisfying fantasy:

It would have been audacious but, nevertheless, a teaching moment had President Obama called Representative Joe Wilson, who heckled him during his address to Congress, to the well, like a teacher calling an errant child to the front of the class, asked him his name, asked him what state he came from, asked him to repeat his remark, asked him to explain why he called him a liar, straightened him out, then told him to sit down.
. Richard Rosenthal, New York.

Wouldn't that have been lover-ly?

Ralph

Olberman on Wilson

Keith Olberman is always good as a denouncer of idiots.

About Representative Wilson, he said that the only thing more offensive and embarrassing than the lack of civility Wilson displayed in "shouting at the President like he was a referee at a ball game and you were a drunk in the stands," is that Wilson was glaringly wrong in a comment that has "embarrassed the nation."

All fact checkers agree that Obama's plan does not give health coverage to those in this country illegally. Yet many Republicans continue to insist that it does. I heard one being interviewed: his assertion was that illegals are not supposed to get various other government services but they do anyway. Ergo, they will get health care, no matter what the law says. So how in this world can you write a law that will satisfy them? The answer is you can't.

One of the many progressive groups on whose emails lists I seem to occupy a space wrote that Obama's speech marks the end of the silly season.

Let's hope so.

Ralph

Childish Republicans

Robert Creamer, progressive political strategist and author, wrote this on Huffington Post today:

When Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled out that President Obama was a "liar" in the middle of Obama's nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress, he became the poster child for the new Republican Party.

I definitely mean poster "child." Since President Obama took office, the language of the Republican Party has become more childish and irresponsible by the day.

President Obama's powerful speech to the nation last night could not have contrasted more sharply. He was the adult in the room, calling on Congress to take responsibility for our future -- for stepping up to solve the health care crisis that worsens every day, for making the changes necessary to allow America to live up to its own democratic values -- to acknowledge that no one should be denied the health care he needs because he can't afford it.

By contrast, the Republicans have careened into schoolyard name-calling; Obama the Nazi, Obama the "Joker" from Batman.

They have begun to act like a gang of juvenile delinquents, doing everything they can to frighten senior citizens -- attempting to convince them that health care reform would jeopardize their Medicare and that the Government would set up "death panels" with the power to pull the plug on Grandma, when both were patently untrue.

There has been a brazen, bullying quality to their rhetoric -- shouting down and intimidating opponents -- a willingness to break the rules and say anything that serves their purposes with a complete disregard for consistency or intellectual honesty. . . .

As children grow up, one of the measures of increasing maturity is their willingness to begin focusing on the long term -- on saving for the future -- on getting a good education -- on the long-term welfare of their family. Instead of throwing a tantrum because they want an ice cream cone now, they start savings their nickels and dimes for the bicycle they want to save up to buy in the future.

But you won't find the Republicans dealing with the affects of global warming on the next generation, or reforming the health care system so it won't devour our economy in the future, or regulating investment markets to prevent reckless investors from wrecking the economy in the years ahead. No, instead of the needs of the next generation, the Republicans want to squander our treasure on short-term tax cuts for millionaires, and short-term profits for large corporations.

Republicans used to have a reputation of staid "conservatism" like they were your stingy old rock-ribbed grandfather. Today's Republican leaders behave like a bunch of teenagers who got their inheritance too early and can't find enough ways to indulge their short-term desire for "more." They no longer reflect the values of middle class families. They reflect the values of reckless, "go go" Wall Street speculators who think anyone who isn't rich like them is a "chump" and that the purpose of our society is to let them indulge their own self-centered, jet-set fantasies.

There's more, but that's the gist.

Creamer is calling it just right. And this may be the best response to their antics: ridicule. If they act like children, call them children.

And, by the way, besides being crassly rude and insulting to the President of the United States in the most august of occasions, Rep. Wilson (R-SC) was just plain wrong in his accusation. He is the one who lied.

Ralph

Civility and irony

What irony !!!!

Unlike the British Parliament, where shouting and rancor are considered the rule, our Congress prides itself on being, for the most part, a civil institution. Members call each other "my distinguished colleague from X."

And never is this decorum more august than in a joint session with the President speaking -- until last night. Not even at the height of George Bush's lies did he receive the disrespect that Republicans showed for Obama last night.

Through much of the speech, there was rudeness from the Republicans. I don't mean remaining seated and not applauding. I mean holding up copies of their bill in defiance, laughing, booing at one point -- and then culminating with the "undistinguished colleague from South Carolina" calling out "You lie !!"

Everyone, including other Republicans, were shocked at this breach of respect and decorum. Rep. Wilson later apologized.

But what irony that, following this, Obama ended his speech with these noble words:

We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it. I still believe we can act even when it's hard. I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history's test. Because that is who we are. That is our calling. That is our character.

That is our character. I'm afraid last night some of the members of Congress showed the flaw in their character.

Ralph