Category Archives: Current Affairs

Gina Haspel Marks The Return of “Zero Dark Thirty” — Still Zero; Even Darker

For despite Jessica Chastain’s fine acting, this mute moment framed and underscored her character’s essential emptiness. Maya has already told another female agent, who asked lightly about her plans to party after the mission,  that she has no history, no family, no friends or personal life — in the film not even a last name, no emotional range, and evidently no professional ambition beyond the decade-long, monomaniac drive to wreak lethal revenge on the architect of September 11.

In the end, while OBL may be dead, her life too, it appears, has been all-but consumed in the process. There is evidently a real CIA agent behind her character; and both embody a shameful, emptying time in our history.

Many Americans can no doubt still identify with Maya’s payback obsession. And under director Kathryn Bigelow’s sure hand, the film’s driving pace and vivid visuals make this process easier while the story unreels. Yet for me the film’s emotional frame came to feel increasingly dated, even obsolete. And I believe I’m not alone in that sense.

After all, it’s 2013, and while Osama Bin Laden is dead (and General Motors is alive), by now more and more of us are beginning to realize that even so, America has lost the two reflexive wars our panicked leaders unleashed on Iraq and Afghanistan after the Twin Towers attacks. And besides these major strategic defeats; beyond the trillions of dollars wasted, tens of thousands killed, and millions made refugees — in the process we also threw away many of our rights at home, and values essential to our moral standing in the world. Was this really the only way to deal with the horror of the September attacks?

Read more →

Back To Class: Friends, “Our” Schools, And The Shock of Recognition

Friends Seminary, New York City Settle in, guys and gals; this one is lengthy. But worth it. (It should be especially useful for recovering from an overdose of Supreme Court hearings.) In a couple of earlier posts– here and also here — many months ago, I mentioned discussions of class as a factor that complicated … Continue reading Back To Class: Friends, “Our” Schools, And The Shock of Recognition →

Read more →

Three Homelands: A Revelation In Ireland

Some weeks earlier, an enterprising Irish student of TV production named Cormac had tracked me down on the net. He had discovered that in 1967 I was part of a large antiwar protest in Buffalo New York, organized by Quakers from near New York City, during which we walked across the Canadian border near Niagara Falls.

Sure, I remembered. We were carrying medical supplies for Canadian Quakers to distribute among wounded civilians on all sides of the Vietnam War; my stash was a packet of band-aids.
It was illegal for Americans to do this, under something called the Trading With The Enemy Act. So our border walk was open civil disobedience, and we were prepared to be arrested.

But we weren’t arrested. I didn’t recall publishing anything about this protest, one of many from those years; so how did Cormac, who emailed me from Ireland, know about it, and why was he interested?

Turns out there was an Irishman named George Lennon living near Buffalo at the time. He joined the border protest and noted it in his diary.

Now, 43 years later, Cormac and two classmates were making a postmortem documentary about George Lennon, based on this diary. (Decades earlier, Lennon had been part of the Irish war for independence from Britain, then later emigrated to the U.S., where he evolved into something of a pacifist.) Surfing for material, they found one mention of the Buffalo border protest: turns out it was by yours truly, buried in a talk to a Canadian group of Quakers, back in 1997, which I had since uploaded to an obscure web page (and completely forgotten about).

Which once more goes to show the marvels of the internet, the glory of google, yada yada.

Read more →