Destiny and I opened at PECHANGA CASINO Theater for Paul Rodriguez on Friday night. It's a 1500 seat theater, and Seinfeld performs there next month. It was a great show. Rodriguez really reaches out to the Hispanic and Indian communities.
The Indian Chiefs come to see him and are big fans of his.
Doing comedy is like sculpting the air with jokes. Being an actress, I always think I need a script, but it's more fun being surprised — improvising. We got to experiment with a large theater and not freak out! Actually we didn't have any time to rehearse, so I had to take a leap of faith. But the moment we stepped onto the stage, all the fear went away and Destiny and I just played with each other. We are just trying out our new material and getting comfortable with each other. It's kind of scary.
Paul Rodriguez has some very important things to say about Latino immigrants and the sad idea of putting up a wall at the border. He also has a lot of wisdom about Iraq.
KOKOMO, INDIANA: Larry Johnson is an amazing spirit and has a great mission, a great radio show.
Also did a 3-hour co-host gig on Allan James' show (WIOU 1350 AM and WZWZ 92.5 FM The "Z93 Morning Show".) Robert Dreyfuss, investigative journalist for Rolling Stone, The Nation and Mother Jones joined me. We had a blast and did newspaper interviews for the labor unions. We must support the workers of America! They are our backbone. I'll have a full story on this whole trip soon. Where have all the young men gone... to coffins in Iraq.
“ To learn that not only you suffer, but the other person also suffers, the other group of people also suffers… when you touch the suffering in other people you want to help, and when you want to help, compassion is born in you… you don’t suffer anymore, and you are motivated by the desire to do something, to be something for other people…and that is Peace. ”
~ Thich Nhat Hahn
Zen Buddhist monk, nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr.
for the Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless work to end the Vietnam War
Here is a new letter from Marcus Byrne, our brave resident soldier in Iraq:
I've come to realize there is an inherent flaw in Neo Cons running a war of stability and support operations (SASO). They lack the morals and values necessary to fight such a war correctly. To fight a an insurgency correctly requires empathy, to know how the people are suffering and being able to correct it before your enemy can. It require an ability to understand complex social structures and networks and work within those networks to achieve compromise amongst the indigenous people. In other words, a war such as this requires flexible diplomacy from the strategic to the tactical level with a common goal. That goal was unapparent in the beginning months of this war and that's when we lost our momentum. The Neo Cons don't even care about the people they supposedly govern, I reference Hurricane Katrina as one example, why would they care about the plight of people who can't unelect them, or have no power to stop them. Terrorism is the war of the powerless, and war is the terrorism of the powerful. So, what are the powerless going to resort to when they see their grievances, inflicted by us, are not being addressed? The war of the powerless. So, Neo Cons, lacking simple human emotions, morals, and values, and having no other goals but unlimited power, are the wrong people to fight any war, much less a war where the will of the occupied is the center of gravity, and the deciding factor for victory. http://www.airbyrne.blogspot.com/
Great Words from Great Writer E.L. Doctorow, written earlier this year:
I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but
of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the
carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... They come to his
desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his
reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. He does not feel for the families of the dead; he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty; he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance; he does not feel for those who retire only to lose pensions; he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills --- it is amazing for how many people in this
country this President does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal minesto save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously aroused every soul to alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people throughout the world that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who
could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.
