It took a month and a half and nationwide outrage to arrest the vigilante murderer of Trayvon Martin. The Million Hoodie Marches for Trayvon exposed how racism is part of the International policy of naming of “The Other” as OK to kill.

Tonight I will feel sorry for the Jews who, in the desert, couldn’t eat bread the way they used to, but had to eat unleavened bread. But what the hell, they were out from under the Pharaoh’s slavery. Maybe some of them were even sorry that God had to kill some regular Egyptians who were their friends.

I have a suggestion for my American compañero Jews who may not have any lamb blood available: put a poster saying “99%” on Jewish houses, and be certain that every other house, shack, tent, or inhabited cave in the world has the sign up so God, if he needs reminding, will know we are all God’s children.

Travyon Martin

One month ago in Sanford, FL a 17-year-old African American teenager was murdered.  The murderer is known to police; except for the murder, no crime was committed.

Immediately after 9/11, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said preventing terrorist acts is now more important than punishing crimes after the fact.

Nationwide, police forces, with the cooperation of Homeland Security, effectively deputized all citizens to report any suspicious or perceived untoward behavior.  The iWatch program has published a bizarre list of normal human activity which could be viewed as “suspicious behaviors and activities” that you should report.

The underlying reticence of the authorities to treat murder as murder is a demonstration of the plague devastating our legal and, yes, moral sanity.

How is this justified?  First, it is “the other.”  This can be race, nationality, religion.

Then, we’re given the definition of the other’s bad intentions toward us.  Then, knowing those intentions are hostile, we take the sports idea that a good offense is the best defense.  Preemption is the fancy word for aggression, to destroy the other for what you believe or are told is in his mind.

A public kept constantly in fear will easily forfeit its rights to authorities who designate themselves as security.

These attitudes towards domestic self-defense and preemption parallel our foreign policy.

Some kind of murder is okay, depending on who does it and who’s murdered.

Like racial superiority, technologically advanced killing devices indicate who should be in charge.

When we deny that warfare is mass murder, we will never learn what Sean Penn’s character in Dead Man Walking said:

“Killin’ is bad.  If I do it, if y’all do it, or if the government does it.”

Martin Luther King Jr. said justice delayed is justice denied.

It’s important to know the way Trayvon Martin’s murder is being dealt with is critical to understanding where our country seems to be going.

U.S. Forces at Korean Demilitarized Zone - Joint Security Area

For his third personal visit to Asia, President Obama will visit the Demilitarized Zone in Korea.  The DMZ is the most heavily militarized border in the world.

Is the president’s personal presence at the DMZ so critical to the American people that it deserves to be given such high priority over the myriad of critical issues which need addressing?

The DMZ is 160 miles by 2.5 miles.  Both sides of its border are patrolled by about 1 million North Korean soldiers, 600,000 South Korean soldiers, and 37,000 American soldiers.

Obama insists that his Asia trip “is all about jobs” (NY Times), yet the same article says the President’s visits are about one challenge: the rise of China on land and sea.

“On a previous visit, he went to India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan — and, of course, his non-visit to China in many ways dominated the whole tour.” (The Week)

The Economist notes Obama’s task is to reassure Asia that the U.S. will keep China’s ambitions in check.

“Prickly nationalists” in China are the ones who state U.S. encirclement of China sure “looks fishy.”

If a heavily armed force from a country 3,000 miles away anchored itself along the Mexican border, training Mexican troops and installing 37,000 of their own troops there, would the U.S. feel suspicious?

Is this the way to a more peaceful world?

Click here to view the embedded video.

This Timothy Rhys feature article in MovieMaker includes an interview with me that is so honest and direct, I think it would be of interest to you. Part of it is about the Director’s Cut of LATINO, which has just become available. The rest of it is about all kinds of things. Check it out.

Wexler wins seat on cinematographers guild board in re-run election

Academy Award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler handily won a seat on the board of the International Cinematographers Guild in a new election ordered by federal labor officials.

Wexler won 544 votes, the highest tally among 22 candidates vying for a dozen seats on the guild’s board, according to a summary of the results posted on the guild’s website Friday night.

The 89-year-old director of photography known for his work on the 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?” was initially disqualified from running for a seat last year because the guild said he had not spent enough time “working in the trade.” The rule, adopted in 2009, stipulates that a member must work 120 days under union contracts within the previous three years in order to run for local office.

Wexler and other candidates maintained they were improperly disqualified because they have been critics of the current union’s president, Steven Poster, and had complained to the U.S. Department of Labor. The Department of Labor that Wexler and another candidate had been improperly disallowed and ordered the guild to hold a new election for cinematographers in the western region.

Wexler said he felt vindicated by the election results. “It’s an incredible showing when, not so long ago, they were saying I was not qualified to run for office,” he said. “It does mean that people think otherwise. This is an unfair rule that was specifically used to marginalize certain people.”

The guild did not issue a statement. “I welcome him [Wexler] to the board, but we’ve got a lot on our plate,” Poster said. “Let’s get down to work.”

This is an excerpt from an excellent speech given by Bill Moyers on October 16, 2010:

All bets are now off. The great American experiment in creating a different future together has come down to the worship of individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power, with both political parties cravenly subservient to Big Money. The result is an economy that no longer serves ordinary men and woman and their families. This, I believe, accounts for so much of the profound sense of betrayal in the country, for the despair about the future. As Gabriel says in James Weldon Johnson’s epic Green Pastures: “Everything that’s tied down is coming loose.” America as a shared project is shattered, leaving us increasingly isolated in our separate realities.

John Gardner would understand this dark reading of our gross national psychology. The workings of the human psyche were his field of study. But the Marine Corps, remember, was his finishing school, and Semper Fidelis his personal code. So I will close with his own words, as relevant today as ever:

We are treading the edge of a precipice here….There is a disconnection between the people and their leaders. Citizens do not trust their government. And a variety of polls indicate that this mistrust extends to corporations and the media. People do not feel they have must control of their lives, and the sense of impotence grows like a great life-endangering tumor. Civilizations die of disenchantment. If enough people doubt their society, the whole venture falls apart. We must never let anger, fashionable cynicism, or political partisanship blur our vision of this point.