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Tuesday, February 11, 2003 |
No A.N.S.W.E.R.
Peace protest organizers tolerate no dissent. [OpinionJournal]
Well, this is pretty outrageous: Michael Lerner, publisher of the generally excellent magazine Tikkun has been blackballed from speaking at an anti-war rally in San Francisco on Sunday:
Imagine my surprise when I found out that I am banned from speaking at a peace rally here this Sunday. As editor of Tikkun, the largest-circulation liberal Jewish magazine in the world, I have been an outspoken critic of the proposed war in Iraq. I have also unequivocally condemned Saddam Hussein's brutality and called for the world community to bring him to justice for crimes against humanity. But we at Tikkun do not believe that this war--in which thousands of Iraqi civilians are likely to die--will bring democracy to the Middle East. Instead, it is bound to increase the threat of terrorism to American citizens and provoke more violence. It will also fuel American fantasies of world economic and political domination.
So why was I being blackballed over the peace rally?
My sin was publicly criticizing the way that A.N.S.W.E.R., one of the four groups sponsoring the San Francisco demonstration, has used the antiwar demonstrations to put forward anti-Israel propaganda. An A.N.S.W.E.R. spokesperson, speaking on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC, said that they didn't want a "pro-Israel" speaker at their rally.
This makes me sick. A.N.S.W.E.R. is duping thousands of those who oppose the war in Iraq into supporting what appears to be their own anti-semiticism. Creeps like this give the principaled opposition to the war a bad name, and suppressing the speech of those who don't agree with you is totally reprehensible no matter who does it.
Sorry, A.N.S.W.E.R., I oppose the war, but I'm also opposed to you.
10:48:28 PM Permalink
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Suddenly Last Summer
Just back from seeing this Tennessee Williams play at Berkeley Rep. I enjoyed the intense production quite a bit, if "enjoyed" is the right word; it's an intense play, not pleasant. It was well performed and staged, with some subtle, yet dramatic lighting. The performances were terrific all the way around, especially on the part of the two lead women, both of whom give what are essentially long, very dramatic and intense monologues. It's these two framing monologues that make the play difficult to stage, and probably very hard to perform.
10:39:45 PM Permalink
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The Stone Canal
The first of the Ken McLeod novels I've read, but it won't be the last. He takes a big bite, taking on two diffrent kinds of stories. Like the blurb on the book says, it's reminiscent of Greg Bear in the way he tackles a big science breakthrough, one that expands space and time, with a human, political story.
On New Mars, a Mars-like planet distant in time and space from the earth, both a biological human and a robot are clones of Johnathan Wilde, a libertarian/anarchist leader from the late 1970s to the 2050s. McLeod intertwines the political stories of the past and near-future with the far future. If it's not entirely successful, that's no matter because it's a challenging, engaging read.
11:00:41 AM Permalink
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Merce Cunningham Review
Yesterday's SF Chronicle had a great review of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's performance at Zellerbach the other night.
Friday's opening program was a major spectacle by any standard, with a reconstruction of the earliest Cunningham dance in the repertory, a U.S. premiere of an ambitious dance commissioned last year by the Barbican Center in London, and a unique "MinEvent" that brought the dancers together with the Kronos Quartet on the Zellerbach Hall stage.
...Like a mystic who fasts to prepare his body for the word of God, Cunningham at 83 continues to cleanse the body of dance of any received substance, to ready it to receive the ecstasies of chance. His search for a mystical union with the ephemeral, with the surprise each moment brings, has made for half a century of some of the most distinctive dance our country has produced.
8:33:28 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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