Arts & Culture

We have only to look at how Trump conflated Christianity with white nationalism and threw in a pinch of opposition to reproductive freedom to see how far someone who is skilled at manipulating religion can get.

Anita Little, Religion Dispatches

May 17, 2017 | “Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

This inner monologue from Offred, the protagonist of Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, is a warning that echoes in our time. When Margaret Atwood published the dystopian novel in 1985, she said there was nothing in the book that hadn’t already happened. What makes the story so eerie to read now is that sense of recognition, of creeping familiarity.

Anita Little is the editor of the Remapping American Christianities initiative at Religion Dispatches. Prior to that, she was the associate editor at Ms. magazine where she spent three years covering the intersections of gender, race and class. Little's work has been published in Ms., Angeleno, Alternet, Ebony and Pacific Standard. 

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Baltimore Orioles player Adam Jones at a game against the Tampa Bay Rays in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 25, 2017. (AP Photo / Patrick Semansky)

The Baltimore Orioles COO has had enough of racism at the ballpark and enough of a society that is breeding more and more hate.

Dave Zirin, the Nation

May 2, 2017 | On Monday night, a large group of “fans” at Boston’s Fenway Park called Baltimore Orioles All-Star outfielder Adam Jones a n—– from the outfield seats and one threw a bag of peanuts at him. The incident has provoked widespread uproar. Here is an exclusive comment about the incident from Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos. People may remember Angelos from his intensely just and political response to the killing of Freddie Gray while in police custody in 2015. (What follows) needs to be read and reread.

For what it is worth and since you asked, and speaking as one man and for myself here, my thoughts on incidents of this sad and tragic kind and what they represent today are the following.

Dave Zirin The Nation’s sports editor, is the author of eight books on the politics of sports, most recently, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy. Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World,”

Full story … https://www.thenation.com/article/we-must-actively-stand-up-john-angelos...

RT via YouTube

O’Neill viewed the illusions that continue to power the American myth machine, “which have now largely supplanted reality itself, as a kind of disease eating away at the American soul.” --Chris Hedges

Kasia Anderson, Truthdig 

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Apr 23, 2017 | A culture saturated with artifice and false promises of success and happiness doesn’t easily accommodate the kinds of ideas playwright Eugene O’Neill made it his business to dramatize onstage. As Chris Hedges explains in this week’s episode of his RT show “On Contact,” that’s precisely why his work is so important at this moment.

Calling O’Neill “America’s most revolutionary and perhaps greatest playwright,” who took on the critical project of “shattering of the American myth,” Hedges invites two people who know his work from the inside out—actor Eunice Wong and director David Herskovits—for a conversation about O’Neill’s significance. Wong, who is Hedges’ wife, as well as Truthdig’s book review editor, will appear as Lavinia Mannon in the Target Margin Theater’s production of “Mourning Becomes Electra.” Directed by Herskovits at the Abrons Art Center in New York City, the play opens Wednesday and runs through May 20.

Kasia Anderson is a deputy editor at Truthdig .

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The YouTube vlogger PewDiePie, who paid two Indian men to hold up a sign reading “DEATH TO ALL JEWS”. Photograph: Adithya Sambamurthy/The Guardian for the Guardian

• Immersed in life online like the followers of 4chan or PewDiePie, we start to imagine that nothing matters – even racism, misogyny and resurgent fascism.
• Related: Chris Hedges | A Nation of the Walking Dead

George Monbiot, the Guardian

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Tuesday 28 February 2017 | Everything is possible. Nothing is possible. Nothing hurts any more, until the consequences crash through the screen. Immersed almost permanently in virtual worlds, we cannot check what we are told against tangible reality. Is it any wonder that we live in a post-truth era, when we are bereft of experience?

It is no longer rare to meet adults who have never swum except in a swimming pool, never slept except in a building, never run a mile or climbed a mountain, never been stung by a bee or a wasp, never broken a bone or needed stitches. Without a visceral knowledge of what it is to be hurt and healed, exhausted and resolute, freezing and ecstatic, we lose our reference points. We are separated from the world by a layer of glass. Climate change, distant wars, the erosion of democracy, resurgent fascism – in our temperature-controlled enclosures, all can be reduced to abstractions.

George Monbiot is an English writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He is the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain.

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Related:

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

Chris Hedges | A Nation of the Walking Dead, Chris Hedges,  Truthdig  / Rise Up Times

• This is more about mood modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and exit the world. We don’t just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate is a desire to really lose a sense of self.
• Related: We Are All Deplorables