This Blogger has a friend, who is an actor. He played the lead in a Los Angeles production of STEAMBATH. STEAMBATH is one of those plays not produced nearly enough on America’s stages( MARAT/SADE, NO EXIT,SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR and THE BALCONY being others). STEAMBATH is set in an afterlife, in which that afterlife is set in a steam bath;  God is there, as the  Puerto Rican attendant. It is an absurdist play; but, since all of us are living through these absurdist times, it resonates. As the Israeli/HAMAS devolves into absolute absurdity, perhaps God indeed is a Puerto Rican steam bath attendant. The people of Gaza are starving; they need food. Israel, at war with HAMAS, the terrorist overlords of Gaza,  has restricted food supplies; in an effort, this Blogger assumes, to get the emaciated people of Gaza to turn against HAMAS. To alleviate the starvation, a consortium of nations: America, Jordan and Egypt have begun to parachute pallets of food suppl...

  Back in 2009, this Blogger published a Blog which theorized that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be best understood, within the context of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. Interminable war, events foretold, magic realism turned deadly.   The event foretold, in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, was told to this Blogger, by a Christian Palestinian, over drinks, during the Gulf War, in 1991, in Cairo. This Blogger happened to be in Cairo, on vacation, during that war.   The Palestinian, who was an activist, revealed the Grand Strategy of the Palestinian collective purpose; to wait out the acknowledged brilliant leadership of the Israeli Founding Fathers; then strike when Israel self indulged in stupid leadership.   His theory was that all empires, nations, states, monarchies, autocracies, military juntas, regimes  and peoples, even companies, even artistic disciplines, throw up brilliant clusters of leadership, in a specific period of time. And then, inevit...

  This has been a gory week for Mankind, what with  an on-going existential war in Ukraine and a newly minted existential war in the Middle East. And a mournful week for this Blogger; a Russian American, lets call him Gleb, died.  He knew this Blogger from the    old, swashbuckling days; he had driven this Blogger to CHECKPOINT CHARLIE, so that this Blogger could be picked, up by East German tourist guides and escorted out of freedom into Communist dominated East Berlin. He had a long pre-death; during most of it, he lamented the state of America, not the state of the American economy, nor the state of the SAG/AFTRA strike, but the literal state of American thinking. He thought American thinking had devolved into an infantile, delusional paralysis, living out episodes of SESAME STREET, with all the realistic American thinkers driven into premature exile. Gleb was a devout Russian Orthodox, with Sister Elizabeth Romanov as his patron saint. Elizabeth had joined a...