Category Archive: American Politics
Angels in America
By Tony Kushner; University of Adelaide Theatre Guild; directed by Hayley Horton – Part 1 (‘The Millennium Approaches’) 2 May 2024; Part 2 (‘Perestroika’) on 3 May 2024 The AIDS epidemic hit New York City the worst (San Francisco came second). It emerged in the early 1980s, primarily in the gay community, and became synonymous therewith, but was in no way actually so localised. Poorly understood initially by medical science, it was first tagged as Kaposi’s Sarcoma (cancerous lesions on skin, lymph nodes, mouth and other organs). Like all plagues, it caused fear, suspicion, mistrust, prejudice and panic. Lives and…
Continue Reading →Ring the Division Bell
Recently, we were sent an interesting take by George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, suggesting the likely Republican nominee for U.S. President this year, Donald Trump, was “king of the extrinsics.” Now we have expressed concerns about George before, but felt he deserved respectful consideration none-the-less. By ‘extrinsic,’ Monbiot did not mean a “basket of deplorables,” exactly. He wrote: “Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in…
Continue Reading →The Modern Metternich
Henry Kissinger (27 May,1923 to 29 November, 2023) Like Klemens Metternich, he’d been a refugee, entered into the realm of international diplomacy early on, and took a realist, conservative view of world order, based on the equilibrium of power and interests. Always a ‘foreigner’ in his adopted country, one could impute to him, after Metternich, the line: “I governed the World sometimes, America never.” Kissinger became a bête noire of the left: for example, Christopher Hitchens wrote an incendiary polemic about him, declaring him guilty of war crimes. One doubts not that Henry cringed when remembering the coup in Chile, the…
Continue Reading →Oppenheimer
(Directed by Christopher Nolan) (2023) On 16 July 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated, at a test site named “Trinity”, in New Mexico, USA. It went so well that, on 6 August 1945 at 8.15 am, the US tried it on an actual city: Hiroshima. A blinding flash shot over the city, and then some 100,000 people were vapourised. The morning turned dark; a priest, Father Kleinsorge, wandered in the garden of his mission, dazed and bleeding, to see his housekeeper, Murata-san, crying out “Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai!” (‘Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!’).* Of course, President Truman’s…
Continue Reading →Classic Misdirection
Misdirection, in which the manipulator, by sleight of hand, draws a crowd’s attention to one thing to distract it from another, has an honourable place in the field of magic…. …and a dishonourable place in politics. Remember when political apparatchiks spread the word that 911 was a good day to put out bad news they’d been hiding? We’ve seen 4 inspired examples of misdirection just in the last few months, coming from Joe Biden‘s goons in the Department of Justice: MARCH 17, 2023: Hunter admits the Laptop from Hell is his. MARCH 18, 2023: Trump to be indicted in New…
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