Make no small plans!

Another voice rejecting banality and business as usual at the site of the World Trade Center.

As the task of rebuilding begins in earnest, the Port Authority and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation should heed anew Daniel Burnham’s advice to Chicago’s leaders a century ago: “Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

life for theatre—theatre for life

Martin Esslin, the man who gave us the phrase, “The Theater of the Absurd,” and essentially legitimized for a conservative culture some of today’most iconic playwrights, died in London this past February, it was reported today.

In his book, he linked Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov and Eugène Ionesco with younger playwrights like Harold Pinter, Edward Albee and Fernando Arrabal at a time — 1961 — when they were regarded as artistic outsiders. Eventually, with the encouragement of Mr. Esslin and others, they were accepted as theatrical innovators.

But it may be his words in a book of a generation later that really position the validity of all theatre, in all societies and in all times.

In “The Field of Drama” (Methuen, 1987), he reached out to analyze the semiotics of drama in movies and television as well as theater. In all its forms, he said, “drama provides some of the principal role models by which individuals form their identity and ideals, sets patterns of communal behavior, forms values and aspirations and has become part of the collective fantasy life of the masses.”

police state by executive fiat

Maybe there’s still hope. If William Safire says he’s worried about the Bushies’ assault on the Constitution, we may yet see a bipartisan movement in its defense—and the beginning of the end of this dark night of the Republic?

To fabricate an alibi for his nonfeasance, and to cover up his department’s embarrassing cut of the counterterrorism budget last year, Attorney General John Ashcroft — working with his hand-picked aide, F.B.I. Director “J. Edgar” Mueller III — has gutted guidelines put in place a generation ago to prevent the abuse of police power by the federal government.
….
Some sunshine libertarians are willing to suffer this loss of personal freedom in the hope that the Ashcroft-Mueller rules of intrusion may prevent a terror attack. They won’t because they’re a fraud.

Now Israel has to do us a favor

Out of “concern for the world’s Jews, for the supporters of Jews, and for peace in general,” Israel is asked to remove its semimilitary colonies from the West Bank, Gaza and Golan.

As far as I’m concerned, the flawed idealism of Zionism has run up against a wall. Even if I accepted the biblical premise that Jews are entitled to that piece of Levantine real estate – and I don’t – the political reality is that you cannot find peace by pursuing your current objectives. And you threaten more than yourselves and your immediate neighbors; you are threatening those of us who contributed so heavily to your existence.
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In fact, if Israel insists on maintaining the occupation, I will take action. I will demand my trees back. You owe me.

certain knowledge or reasonable suspicion?

Bloggy has a fresh take on arguments about the distinction between “certain knowledge” (conspiracy treason?) and “reasonable suspicion” (cowardice treason?) as they relate to the Bushies and September 11.

If administration officials felt that the warnings they had were enough to warrant changes in travel plans for the President and members of the cabinet, and failed to warn the American people, I think it’s fair to say their behavior was treasonous.

Pat Buchanan gets it!

[I think.]
Buchanan makes more sense than anything we see in the mainstream media!
The darling of the discontented Right says we are being attacked because of our imperial foreign policy, and not because “we are democratic and free and good.”
[One caution: While he gets it, as far as he goes in this piece, I would wager that his ultimate conclusions would be unlikely to please the progressive Left.]

Before, not after, the next terror attack on this country, America’s leaders should start telling the truth: Evil though they may be, Islamic killers are over here because we are over there. They are not trying to kill us because they dislike our domestic politics, but because they detest our foreign policy.
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Is the empire worth it? French, Brits, even Soviets said no. They went home. And nothing over there – not oil, not bases in Saudi Arabia, not global hegemony – is worth risking nuclear terror over here. I may be the only right-winger in America who loves D.C., but then I grew up here. Washington is my hometown. It comes first, and empire isn’t even a close second.

emperors without clothes

The Dow Jones and other indexes fell over two percent today in the midst of a growing and deepening “mistrust about Corporate America’s top management and finances,” reports the Reuters wire.

Investors’ widening distrust helped overshadow a raft of robust economic data, including a new report on Monday that showed U.S. manufacturing activity grew at its fastest pace in two years in May. Wall Street’s faith in corporate management has eroded after the implosion of energy trader Enron Corp., one of whose executives committed suicide on Jan. 25.

Faith misplaced? Where have these investors been up until now?
I worked for large corporations for many years and never had any illusions about the general competence of management, in my own companies or any others with which I became familiar. I was often simply astounded that things held together at all. Eventually I concluded that certainly within a corporation, and to a large extent even within an industry and throughout the business world, the old boy networks of small minds and smaller imaginations held each other up. The smart or imaginative people weren’t let in, or certainly weren’t let upstairs.
I fear the consequences for the country and the world of what appears to be a snowballing recognition of the emptiness at the top.

CNN just doesn’t do it for everyone

Sometimes it’s refreshing to know that the world is not sitting in the same living room. In Kenya, some of the Masai needed to hear about September 11 in a way that that was most human to them.

Most Masai had learned of the attacks from the radio soon after they occurred. But the horrible television images passed by many Masai, who got electricity in their village only shortly before the attacks. In the oral tradition they rely on, Mr. Naiyomah sat them down and told them stories that stunned them.
Through his tales, Sept. 11 became real. The Masai felt sadness. They felt relief that Mr. Naiyomah was unscathed. They wanted to do something.

the administration disconnects

Climate changes, Bushes don’t.
The Bushies admitted last week, in a quiet report intended not to make the headlines, that we are indeed destroying our climate and our environment with the production of poisonous gases, but they say there will be no policy change.
Rather, we are told, we must adapt to the “inevitability” of our national policy of not reducing these emissions. Huh?

But while the report says the United States will be substantially changed in the next few decades — “very likely” seeing the disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes, for example — it does not propose any major shift in the administration’s policy on greenhouse gases.