August Wilson's King Hedley II

How often can one attend live theater in New York for $15? Grab your ticket -- fast! The tickets went on sale a few days ago. The performances, at the Signature Theatre, run from Feb. 20 through Apr. 15 at 555 W. 42d Street (bet. 10th and 11th Avenues). 212-244-PLAY (7529) or www.signaturetheatre.org

HIV/AIDS

No, there's no big event coming up, no anniversary that I know of. But that's why I'm talking about HIV/AIDS. It's every day. 24/7. Coretta Scott King, God bless her soul, said: "Anyone who sincerely cares about the future of Black America had better be speaking out about AIDS."

Mrs. King was my mother's generation, and Mama hasn't quite come to grips with the fact that my brother, John, and her brother, Richard, died of AIDS. Cancer? OK. Having Mrs. King say what she said was as profound as hearing the Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts 3d of the Abyssinian Baptist Church advising from the pulpit some years ago that folks -- especially men -- use condoms. The Black AIDS institute has great information (http://www.BlackAIDS.org). Phone: 213-353-3610. AIDS has become a Black disease, and we CANNOT deny that. Guys coming out of prison infect women -- many of them more older than younger and ashamed to say so. Teens often don't have a clue.

Read this excerpt from "AIDS in Blackface":

"Today, Blacks represent half of the more than one million Americans living with HIV. Between 2000 and 2003, Blacks accounted for 69 percent of new diagnoses among women -- and with an infection rate 18 times higher than among Whites. Among teens, Blacks are 66 percent of new infections."

We've got to DO SOMETHING about this. As Black History Month approaches and people get all nostalgic about what happened a hundred years ago and who invented what, PAUSE, REWIND and come back to the present.

United Negro College Fund

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste….”

“When my soul was in lost and found, you came along and claimed me….”

The first quote is the slogan of the United Negro College Fund (www.uncf.org)

The second is a line from one of Aretha Franklin’s many hit songs, celebrated in recent days on cable TV’s salute to her as a way to carry on Lou Rawls’ dedication to raise money to make dreams reality for kids of color. Before his death a year ago, he helped raise $200 million for historically black colleges and universities.

I kind of regret that I did not attend one of those HBCUs (www.edonline.com/cq/hbcu); maybe I’ll wind up my teaching days by teaching at one of them – probably in Atlanta.

In the meantime, think of contributing money or mentorship. Go to the website or call: 1-800-331-2244.

Babies

There's so much bad news these days about babies killed, babies abandoned, babies abused, babies kidnapped, babies with health issues that our various levels of government and our private institutions are not addressing.

BUT...

There are also good stories.

I want to welcome into the world two babies born to moms in my apartment building within days of each other: Nicholas and Liam.

At my church, Abyssinian Baptist, in Harlem, we have a tradition of taking responsibility for our youngsters. The second Sunday of each month children are brought forth to the congregation and we, in essence, pledge our allegeiance and our responsibility as part of the village needed to raise a child.

How about making that a national pledge?

Hello, babies!!!

The World Is Watching Us

President Bush's "I like you" ratings are at an all-time low, but so is the US ranking in the world's sight. As I suggest to my journalism students, check out this website to get a sense of what the rest of the world beyond the standard US media is saying. It's quite sobering.

http://www.watchingamerica.com/index.shtml

Get Over It?

A Virginia troglodyte of a legislator recently said that Blacks should “get over” the slavery thing and its aftermath. But how can one do so when just this week – finally - a man with the blood of a 1964 Mississippi lynching on his hands was arrested? In so many ways, the past is still too much the present.

James Ford Seale is 71. He’s lived 43 years longer than he allowed two Black teenagers, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, to live. They were kidnapped, strapped to a tree, beaten, driven to Louisiana, then tossed into the Mississippi River to drown.

This incident caught my attention not only because of the issue of justice but because I am a Moore, maybe or maybe not connected genetically to Charles Eddie Moore given how Blacks took names after slavery. My folks and his folks were from the same neck of the woods.

This from the Associated Press: "Forty years ago, the system failed," FBI Director Robert Mueller said in Washington. "We in the FBI have a responsibility to investigate these cold-case, civil rights-era murders where evidence still exists to bring both closure and justice to these cases that for many, remain unhealed wounds to this day."

For me, this is not a cold case. I’m on it.

You can hear more about this from Michelle Martin's interview with Charles Eddie Moore's brother on News and Notes: www.npr.org.

What Exactly Is Isaiah Washington Being "Treated" For??

This actor has checked himself into some program after making homophobic remarks about his Grey's Anatomy co-star. Is there a Betty Ford Clinic-style Stars-R-Us place for homophobes? This seems like a stupid public relations move that diminishes the seriousness of seeking treatment for the abuses of alcohol and drugs and such. Through Halle Berry's disastrous marriage to Eric Benet, we learned about the "need" for treatment for sexual addiction to women other than his wife. Mama would have a name for that -- and the Scriptures to back her up! Not to mention something to knock him in the head or whip his butt! There are legitimate reasons to seek treatment, but too often these folks in the public eye seem to equate "I'm going into therapy" with cleaning up their public images. Give us a break!

Homophobia exists in America and very much so in Black America. Washington needs to clean up his act but not pretend that going into therapy is the way ahead. Whatever this "therapy" is is merely the way to hold on to his acting gig on Grey's Anatomy.

She Didn't Wear Red

Did you notice how many women wore red, the color of conformity since the days of Nancy Reagan as First Lady, for the State of the Union address Tuesday?

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not wear red, a sign, it seems to me, that she wants to break out of that old political mold during the two years she will be in control, leading a Democratic agenda.

President Bush, the leader of a fractured Republican Party, played nice-nice in his State of the Union address while still stubbornly hewing to his Iraq policy. But he says he wants to seriously address immigration reform, health insurance for more of the 40 million Americans who have none, better public schools for our children and tax breaks for regular folks. "Our citizens don't much care which side of the aisle we sit on, as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done," President Bush said.

So you go, Madame Speaker! And I mean: Go to work.

State of the Union: What Can the President Say?

When 88 people -- or more -- were killed in a single place on a single day, Iraqis vs. Iraqis?

When other Iraqis were killed on that same day -- Monday -- by other Iraqis?

When he's still stubbornly demanding that 21,000 or more of our men and women go to replace all those who are dying in Baghdad?

Mr. President, the state of the Union is NOT good -- and that's just on the foreign affairs side!

We have to let him know that in more ways than answering to pollsters that his favorability is low.

Academy Award Nominees

Congratulations!:

Dreamgirls for eight nominations
Will Smith for best actor in a leading role in The Pursuit of Happyness
Forest Whitaker for best actor in a leading role in The Last King of Scotland
Jennifer Hudson for best actress in a supporting role in Dreamgirls
Eddie Murphy for best actor in a supporting role in Dreamgirls
Djimon Hounsou for best actor in a supporting role in Blood Diamond

What would Hattie McDaniel think! She, after all, was the first Black person to be nominated and to win the award for Best Supporting Actress for playing the role of Mammy in 1939's Gone With The Wind. A dignified woman, she had a retort to those who criticized her for playing so many roles as domestics. "I'd rather play a maid than be one."

Yet, even in honoring her, Hollywood dissed her: When the awards were presented, she was relegated to the back of the Coconut Grove, where the ceremonies took place. Bursting through racial barriers had its limits even among this artistic and self-congratulatory community.

Ruth Brown: "A Very Special Lady"

Why does it often happen that we learn about the contributions and sacrifices people have made only after their deaths? I found myself asking that question yet again at a memorial service for the late Ruth Brown, the woman once credited with putting Atlantic Records on the map. That company, which will soon celebrate its 60th anniversary, was known in the 1950s as “The House That Ruth Built.”

At her memorial service at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church on Jan. 22d were performers ranging from Little Jimmy Scott to Bonnie Raitt to Chuck Jackson to Paul Shaffer – and Ruth Brown’s band. The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts 3d described her as "a very special lady" and "one of the greatest entertainers of the last century."

John Sayles, the director, was there to show a preliminary recording session for a movie he’s making called Honeydripper, starring Danny Glover and Charles Dutton. She died shortly before scheduled to star as a kind of Ma Rainey character down on her luck in Alabama in the 1950s.

“She lived the songs that she sung,” her longtime musical director, Rodney Jones, said. That meant lots of blues amid the joy. For a time she worked as a domestic, too ashamed to tell her employers that some of the music they were listening to was her performing. She drove a school bus for a while. But after a fallow period as a singer, she made a comeback in the 1970s. She won a Tony for her performance in Black and Blue on Broadway. Find out more about her at this website: http://www.ruthbrown.net

What she was best appreciated for among her friends in the music industry was her fight for royalty reform so that all those pioneers of R & B and Rock & Roll stood a chance to be paid the money they were due. She eventually received money from Atlantic after a valiant fight. She was a founder of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation (www.rhythmblues.org) that continues as an advocate for not just the music but also the musicians. Sadly, she died within days of two others involved with the foundation, Ed Bradley of CBS News and the singer Gerald Levert.

Thanks Voza Rivers and thanks Chuck Jackson for putting together a great show – that memorial service – that did justice to the pioneer that Ruth Brown was. In the summer, Harlem will pay tribute to her and to James Brown during the Harlem Week festivities.

And more of us will learn more about what they went through to make their records, to gain airtime -- and to be reasonably compensated by the record companies that exploited them. May the current generation of entertainers not have to go through what they did because of WHAT they did.

Something's Happening Out There!

The SuperBowl game is usually a yawner. But as of today, this year's game has got me ready to throw down with a big ol' party on Feb. 4. The two opposing teams, the Colts and the Bears, both victors today in their conference championships, are led by Black head coaches. I don't care which team ultimately wins SuperBowl XLI. We've all advanced.

For more info: http://www.superbowl.com/features/general_info

Hillary: She's In It To Win It

Let's take her for her word. She wants to hear from us.

"I want you to join me not just for the campaign but for a conversation about the future of our country -- about the bold but practical changes we need to overcome six years of Bush administration failures.

"I am going to take this conversation directly to the people of America, and I'm starting by inviting all of you to join me in a series of Web chats over the next few days."

Chat. Scream. Speak out. Whatever.

http://www.hillaryclinton.com

Dreamgirls

Why is Dreamgirls only NOW being widely released? What was Paramount thinking in only releasing it – pre-Golden Globes – to a few hundred theaters? Why didn’t Paramount execs have confidence that such a stellar cast could WOW! the nation?' They obviously saw this as a Black film with no appeal to people who are not Black or are not interested in films involving Blacks.

Three Golden Globes awards later, Paramount is distributing the film to 2,000 theaters.

Hollywood should "Listen" to the film’s soundtrack. It is still “Steppin’ to the Bad Side” when it needs to “Move”.

First Black President? Hah!

In fiction and in fact, we have already had several. I'll start with the fiction because if you don't already know this, you're perhaps not ready for the "facts."

"The most famous Black President of this century is one Douglass Dilman: he is the hero of The Man, a 1964 best-selling novel by Irving Wallace, which was later made into a movie starring James Earl Jones. Thrust into the Oval Office after a crisis of succession, President Dilman swiftly finds himself the target of popular animosity and Beltway intrigue," the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine some years ago, while profiling Colin Powell. At the time Powell was the Barack Obama of the 1996 presidential season.

On the currently popular Fox series, 24, we have our second Black president within the span of a few years: The current president, Wayne Palmer, is the brother of President David Palmer, who was assassinated. Now, how much of a stretch is this? A kind of Bush dynasty.

But let me get more serious. I am a fan of the late J. A. Rogers, a Black man who devoted his life to shredding myths about Blacks in the U.S. and in Africa. Not long before his death in 1966, Rogers, a former Pullman porter, published a pamphlet called The Five Negro Presidents. It's available in many Afro-centric bookstores, on eBay and on other web sites.

This is my thumbnail sketch: When it has been convenient in the US to label people as Colored or Negro or Black to deny them the rights and privileges of American citizenship, this has been done. If anyone could identify even the most minute Black lineage, then that could be held against you. Rogers wanted to turn this "even itty-bitty blackness makes you Black" into a positive. Thus, using public documents and published works, he "outed" Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Warren Harding. He did not name "Soul Brother President No. 5," but a journalist who produced a program about this for PBS told me that he was Dwight Eisenhower. Another historian has added Calvin Coolidge to this list.

Because of racial head trips, some people I've come across can imagine that Jefferson's father and uncles could have fathered children with their Black slaves, but cannot imagine that Jefferson could be the father of Sally Hemings' children. Or that President Jefferson himself could have had at least a little dab of blackness in him.

Maybe we are moving towards a place and time where these notions about race are irrelevant. After all, Obama is a White man as much as he is a Black man. His mother: a White woman from Kansas; his father: a Black man from Kenya; his stepfather: an Indonesian. He grew up in Hawaii and in Indonesia.

J. A. Rogers would have a field day with this!

Obama Makes A Move Towards The Presidency

Today Sen. Barack Obama announced plans to form an exploratory committee for a presidential candidacy. That's a step saying he seriously believes he has the chops to become President of the United States. I'm not yet convinced, based on his sparse track record. But I had a spirited debate with a friend yesterday who said that the very freshness that Obama brings to the political table makes him formidable. Obama himself says the U.S. is hungering for "a different kind of politics."

Here's how you can see what Obama said today on his own website: http://www.barackobama.com

Lost MLK Speech

If you go to the following, you can hear a speech that Dr. King gave at a synagogue, the Temple Israel of Hollywood, in 1965.

http://historynews.wordpress.com/2007/01/06/audio-of-mlk-1965-temple-israel-sermon/

"Violence cannot solve the problems of the world. Violence is both impractical and immoral," he said in a sermon that might well be made today.

If you haven't heard, many of his papers will go on exhibit today at the Atlanta History Center. They will remain on exhibit until May 13.

In Honor of MLK, A Young Woman's Reflection on Nonviolence

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is upon us once again. In light of the Iraq war, the United States' continued presence in Afghanistan, the carnage in the Darfur region of Sudan and the long, seemingly permanent pall cast by 9/11, let us reconsider Dr. King's most important tool: nonviolence. Today, the very idea of employing nonviolence as a political end to resolve conflict has been delegitimized and defiled. Nonviolence is dismissed as antiquated and effete, its proponents naïve and anti-intellectual. However, nonviolence and its twin, nonparticipation, are still powerful.

In launching an ill-conceived war, President George W. Bush refused to allow diplomatic discourse to be diplomatic. Instead, the bluster and hubris that have hallmarked his administration browbeat the coalition of the so-called willing into joining the United States in a preemptive war. The drumbeat to war was amplified by vengeance paraded in jingoistic rhetoric. To meet out exceptional violence to our enemy was endorsed by our president and substantiated by our country's short, bloody history. War and the rumors of war were the only articulations allowed to emerge on the political and social landscapes. Fear of being labeled unpatriotic silenced politicians, clergy, media and individuals. In such an atmosphere, to espouse nonviolence would be to commit political, social and professional suicide.

Four and a half years into the Iraq debacle, the country is no longer divided, but solidly opposed to the war; and its critics have been unleashed. Now, as President Bush stumps among conservatives for support for his newly unveiled escalation plan, those in the public eye who support withdrawal from Iraq must be careful to introduce their ideas with the caveat that they have no wish "to cut and run." To lay down arms in the face of violence is decried as cowardly. The untenable situation in Iraq has the U.S. in what my Aunt Ruth would call a trick-bag: We have fallen easily into a simple contraption but cannot find our way out. The answer, according to our president, is to ratchet-up our military presence in order to combat increasing Iraqi violence. In short, violence begets violence.

How then is the bloody cycle to be broken? If we are to learn and somehow heal from our national experience in Iraq, there must be those of us who, in times of national crisis, do not fail to offer the legitimate nonviolent examples of the Gandhi-led British resistance movement in India, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and yes, the United States during the oppressive days of the civil rights movement. If we find it too burdensome to research history, we may look to the more recent demonstration of people power in the Orange Revolution that took the Ukraine by storm. We must reintroduce nonviolence as a legitimate, practical concept. We must divest our commercial and personal interests, thereby denying fodder to the war machine. Most important, we must love our neighbor regardless of any divisional constructs. There can be no violence in love.

--Suzette K. Shipp

"A Great Day in Harlem...A Great Day in the United States"

Hundreds of people made those kinds of declarations Sunday afternoon in a lavish Harlem inaugural celebration of Rep. Charlie Rangel’s elevation to what former President Clinton declared to be “the most powerful committee in the United States Congress.” He is now “Mr. Chairman” of the House Ways and Means Committee.

“It’s a new day,” Rangel himself declared, while describing a far-reaching agenda that includes addressing not just the war in Iraq, but also the rebuilding of the states devastated by Hurricane Katrina, poverty in general and education.

The Great Hall at the City College of New York could hardly contain people who came out to honor the chairman – and to eat all that great food supplied by Upper Manhattan restaurants.

Pioneering politicians were there, starting with the emcee, the new Lieutenant Govenor, David Paterson; his father, Basil; former Mayor David Dinkins; former Manhattan Borough President and masterful entrepreneur, Percy Sutton; former Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields and on and on and on. Entertainers present included Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and Tony Bennett, who belted out an a capella version of “America the Beautiful.”

Basil Paterson, who with Dinkins, Sutton and Rangel have been powerhouses in the New York Democratic Party for decades, said he never doubted that Rangel would become chair of Ways and Means. “It took longer than I thought,” he told me.

Rangel said he often thought of leaving Congress, especially these last 12 or so years when Republicans ruled. But, as Assemblyman Keith Wright, who now literally sits in the seat once occupied by Rangel in the New York Legislature, told me: “He stayed the course.”

Now the question is what will he really be able to accomplish not only for Harlem, not only for Black Americans, but for all Americans. He is still a vigorous septuagenarian – and a wily politician.

Hail to Mr. Chairman! For now.

Has the Black church world come to this?

Black churches, apparently affected by bling-bling, materialism and the decline in music education in our public schools, are finding it difficult to attract musicians who are also into the spiritual side of the church. Check out this article that appeared over the weekend in The New York Times by Samuel Freedman: "Black Churches Hungering for Musical Talent".

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/us/13religion.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=5b2fd5781a068214&ex=1169442000


Here's an excerpt:

"Mr. [Eli] Wilson started playing piano at age 6 in the church his father pastored in New Orleans. Now, at 58, he embodies a breed that is rapidly vanishing.

'When I was coming up, the emphasis was on using music to develop and grow people, spiritually,' he said. 'Right now, it’s all about the tightness of the band and spotlighting the best voices. So instead of looking for people who have a heart for ministry, you look for the best musicians. And for them, it’s just another gig.'"

God Grew Tired Of Us: I saw it!

Run, don’t walk, to see this film!. You know the drill: A film about black people comes along that is not a comedy. There is poor publicity. Attendance in the first few days and weeks is spotty; the film disappears.

I spent hours trying to discover where the film could be seen in New York City – and I’m hardly the dullest bulb in the pack. Information should be available at this web site: http://www.godgrewtiredofus.com/. Screenings are scheduled from New York to Nashville through early February.

As important as this awarding-winning film by Christopher Quinn is, however, is the message that much remains to be done to heal the world. The thousands of “lost boys” were casualties of war in the south of Sudan. In the western Sudan, Darfur is one of the latest horror stories, with more than 2 million people driven from their homes and forced into refugee camps in neighboring countries. Women and children are being raped and maimed in what is generally considered to be a genocidal campaign. George Clooney, the actor and activist, has made a documentary that will be aired on television in some markets in coming days. Look for A Journey to Darfur on the AmericanLife TV Network (http://www.americanlifetv.com/)

God Grew Tired Of Us

The film is apparently opening around the country this weekend, but as is typical of matters of a serious note related to Black people, it's hard to figure out where to find it.

It will open in New York City today at the Sunshine Cinema, 143 E. Houston St. between 1st and 2d Avenues (777-FILM, #687).

There's a screening in Washington on Jan. 17; see information below about that and for a further description of the film. One of my earlier postings also deals with this film.

Let's talk.
------------



God Grew Tired of Us -
Special Preview Screening
Wednesday, January 17, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. (in Washington)

In 2001, John Bul Dau arrived in the United States, ending one incredible journey and beginning another. One of Sudan's "Lost Boys," displaced by a civil war that made refugees of thousands of children, Dau had walked over a thousand miles at the age of 14 to reach a refugee camp in Kenya, dodging ambushes, massacres, and attacks by wild animals along the way. "I have seen the hyenas come at dusk to feed on the bodies of my friends," Dau has written. "I have crossed a crocodile-infested river while being shelled and shot at. I have walked until I thought I could walk no more...Those were the times I thought God had grown tired of us."

In the refugee camp, Dau began his first formal schooling at the age of 18, eventually earning a secondary education degree and becoming a leader in the camp, mentoring and teaching younger refugee children and instilling in them the values of his Dinka culture. He was selected along with a group of Lost Boys to emigrate to the United States, where he began a whole new cultural journey, encountering such things as telephones, appliances, snow, and grocery stores for the first time. Meeting difficulties with the same refusal to despair that had enabled him to survive his escape from war, Dau worked his way through community college, became a human rights activist on behalf of Sudanese refugees, and has established foundations to help other Lost Boys pay for education and other necessities in America. In recognition of his efforts as an aspiring adventurer and visionary, Dau has been selected as a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and has recently been named Director of the Sudan Project at Direct Change.

The experiences of Dau and his fellow Lost Boys, Panther Bior and Daniel Abul Pach, in Sudan, and their later immigration to the United States are recounted in an inspiring new film. God Grew Tired of Us, directed by Christopher Quinn and co-directed by Tommy Walker, is a Newmarket Films presentation of a National Geographic Films and Lost Boys of Sudan Inc. production. Dau has also told his story in a new National Geographic book of the same name. In this special event to mark the release of the book and film, National Geographic Live! will present a screening of the film, followed by a discussion with John Dau and Christopher Quinn. In addition, copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. Don't miss this chance to meet a truly inspiring hero for our time, and see a powerful cinematic meditation on the durability of the human spirit.

A profile of Dau appears in the January 2007 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Location Tickets
The Grosvenor Auditorium
National Geographic Society Headquarters
1600 M Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20036
+1 202 857 7700
order tickets

Pricing: (See Ticket Info)
All Tickets $5

Mayor Nagin is not New Orleans' worst problem

It was not the mayor or the police or the judges who committed all those murders in New Orleans. The people in New Orleans need to recognize that and do something themselves. The march on City Hall was a start this week, but come on! If a man kills his woman or vice versa, how can the mayor or the "system" prevent that? If a sociopath decides to shoot a man, woman and child, how can that be forseen and prevented -- unless, of course, said sociopath was already known to the "system." It seems to me that whether we are talking New Orleans or Newark, we are ignoring the power that individuals can have in monitoring what is happening in their own families, on their blocks, in their broader communities. If you see something, say something. DO SOMETHING.

Congressman Rangel and Iraq

I just spoke with the congressman from Harlem who is now in the powerful position as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. In Washington, he had re-floated his idea to bring back the draft. That's right. Young people of a certain age and, more importantly, from all classes and economic status, would be called up to carry the burden of the war that President Bush now realizes is a mistake.

About Bush's speech to the nation Wednesday night, Rangel said: "I was embarrassed for the President." Rangel, a veteran of the war in Korea, said of this commander-in-chief who ducked out of doing time in Vietnam, "He looked like a deer caught in the headlights of a car." Gone, Rangel sensed, was the "swagger" of the Top Gun-Mission Accomplshed days.

The President has said he'll send at least 21,000 more troops. But Rangel, like retired Gen. Colin Powell and others in the military, say there aren't enough fresh troops out there to fill that request. Those 21,000 will be currently serving men and women who are nearing the ends of their tours but will be told they have to remain. That number will also include people who have served and are now at home and will be told that they have to go back.

Where are the sons and daughters and nieces and nephews of the privileged, including President Bush's and Vice President Cheney's and so on and so on?

This is so irrational -- and so unfair!

Saving the World

The President has gone to Ft. Benning, in Georgia (my home state) to continue to try to make the case for his "new strategy."

But he still doesn't get what the US get.

Check him out on your favorite venues in cyberspace.

What the rest of the world is saying about our president's new initiative

While those of US are in turmoil about the way this Iraqi war is moving forward, don't lose sight of the fact that the rest of the world is watching. Here's one way to find out:

http://www.watchingamerica.com/index.shtml

God Grew Tired Of Us

This documentary by Christopher Quinn, with the support of the likes of Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman, helps US understand what war and famine and bigotry is doing to the children in so much of Africa, a continent I've never visited because of that, frankly. But I am thinking of volunteering to teach and otherwise help out at Oprah's school in South Africa. Africa is a continent, not a country, and it has thousands of ethnic groups and even more stories to tell. BUT...

"God Grew Tired Of Us" is making its way around the nation, telling the story of four of at least 25,000 "lost boys" through their journies from the hell they endured in the Sudan in Africa to the safety they more or less found in the US. NYC, LA, San Fran, Atlanta, Washington DC, Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, Nashville, Dallas, Seattle, Pittsburgh --- hey, wherever you are, look for this film where screenings are taking place and get people together to discuss it.

You can find a video clip at: www.ifilm.com/video/2810465

Lordy. Lordy. Lordy.

NPR's News and Notes

Check it out in your locale. In NYC, you can hear it in real time at WNYE-FM, 91.5. You can hear it at 10 p.m. on WNYC. But play around with your computer and go to www.npr.org. Check out News and Notes. You can catch the programs online, archived. I'm usually there on Wednesdays. But forget about me. Consider the issues raised each weekday morning on the program and -- do something.

John McCain is such a disappointment

The Republican senator and media darling and all-but-announced candidate for president in 2008 is hanging in there with President Bush on Iraq, though he acknowledges that many mistakes have been made, including not deploying enough troops at the outset once the US decided to save the Middle East by invading Iraq. McCain says that we should expect a surge in deaths among young Americans sent to do the dirty work while people like him and like the president are armchair quarterbacks. God bless them, he says. Mr. McCain, your blessings are not enough.

Anderson Cooper's 360 Program on CNN

I'm thinking Sartre's No Exit.

Cooper's program, available via the Internet as well as via cable, is on point but terribly MALE. Where are the women's voices about this "new strategy" of President Bush????

Did You Hear What I Heard?

The President sorta, kinda, almost took responsibility for the failure of all these years of US presence -- occupation, if you will -- in Iraq. "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility is mine," he said while announcing the deployment of more of US.

Thousands of US and billions of US dollars will transform Iraq into a model of democracy, he says. The President sees this as "the decisive ideological struggle of our time" and the opportunity to assure "peace and security for our children and our grandchildren." Who's he consulting? Not the folks I've been talking to, for sure.

Mr. President, I'm not convinced -- nor are most of those of us in the US.

Commander in Chief – or in Desperation?

To the dismay of many Americans, and no doubt people in nations allied with the United States, President Bush is thinking of putting into harm’s way thousands more in our military services.

Why, Mr. President? To be partisan about it, even members of your own party are questioning your judgment. And don’t get the Democrats started.

“The public is way ahead of the Congress saying that enough is enough,” Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) said a few days ago. That after Iraqi fatalities among Americans has exceeded 3,000 and the wounded far outnumber the dead. On New Year’s Day, The New York Times ran the photos of 1,000 of the dead – teenagers, men and women in their 20s and 30s, a few in their 50s. They’re mostly from small towns across the country, according to a report in The Financial Times.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, (D-Nevada) said in a letter to the president: “Our troops and the American people have already sacrificed a great deal for the future of Iraq. After nearly four years of combat, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, and over $300 billion dollars, it is time to bring the war to a close. We, therefore, strongly encourage you to reject any plans that call for our getting our troops any deeper into Iraq. We want to do everything we can to help Iraq succeed in the future but, like many of our senior military leaders, we do not believe that adding more U.S. combat troops contributes to success.”

The President’s message tonight has to be slamming to convince a whole lot of us that sending 21,000 more people to Bagdad makes any kind of sense.