The Model United Nations is all the rage these days in high schools across the United States. School clubs compete at conferences, most held at universities, in committee sessions modeled after the United Nations. 
Each school team is assigned a specific country and topic and then debate other schools (acting as other countries) to come up with resolutions on world matters. For example, a school might be assigned India and the World Health Organization and be given the topic of International Aid for Syrian Refugees. 
It looks good on paper – many students use it as a tool for college applications – but it’s not as solid in practice. The problem is that students come from a place of privilege and thus have little genuine understanding of the issues, and more importantly, lack empathy. 
Instead of solving problems, the delegates strive for personal gain, aiming for the title of Best Delegate, and in the end model not the aims of the United Nations, but its practice at its worst.
Ice Thanksgiving: Sparhawk’s “Nothing But Heart”
I would be your king
But you wanna be free
I am nothing but heart
I am nothing but heart
I am nothing but heart
I am nothing but heart
I am nothing but heart
Anna Deavere Smith’s “Notes from the Field”
The time is now. It isn’t tomorrow. Not yesterday. Today. Anna Deavere Smith delivers a series of remarkable monologues – remarkable for their raw content as well as her impeccable delivery – espousing the immediacy of action in her one-woman show Notes from the Field. 
Ms. Smith moves through the most recent canon of youtube videos and news clips, spotlighting the on-going flagrant abuse of human rights meted by the police on our black youth. 
The images – horrifying not only for their stark violence but also their all-too-familiar content – offer a window on a society in terrible flux, on the verge of change. 
And that, Ms. Smith says, is the key. It is a window of change, an opportunity to join forces and effect movement, guide the politicians toward investment in the future, not in law and order, but in chance for the disenfranchised by the decaying system, the off-spring of the psychological damaged society founded on slavery.
Ms. Smith opens and closes the show by citing Sherrilyn Ifill, President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund: “I encourage your discomfort, that you must contribute, that you must make your voice heard.” 
“That is the essence of good citizenship, that bone-deep sense of obligation that you must work to improve our democracy, and to improve it especially for those who are most marginalized and most in need.”
See the show! Playing in New York now: http://2st.com/shows/current-production/notes-from-the-field
Blitzer & Co: Heads Must Go
They talk. And talk. And talk. And they don’t say anything. They just talk. 
And talk some more. That’s it. They don’t say anything real. They are wrong. They are right. They are in between. They just go one talking. And talking.
Can’t they be removed? Or at least replaced? Maybe Trump could fire them.
At least he could get that one thing right.
Ice Friday: Luigi Pirandello’s “Mattia Pascal”
Oh why…I asked myself desperately…does mankind toil so to make the apparatus of its living more and more complicated? Why this clatter of machines? And what will man do when machines do everything for him? Will he then realize that what is called progress has nothing to do with happiness? 
Even if we admire all the inventions that science sincerely believes will enrich our lives, what joy do they bring us after all?
Not Okay. Not in the Least.
No, I’m not okay. I’m not. I keep thinking that I am, or that I will be, but I’m not. I’m not.
I’m sitting here, typing these words, thinking that this might help, but it doesn’t. I can’t pretend that this is an alternate universe or that I can find a rewind button. This is where we are. This is it. 
This man was elected. 60,000 million people did that. There is no sense to it, no way to frame it, no story to be told, no moral, no aspiration. Justifications and rationalizations are worth shit. It’s only a question of what happens next, who will be targeted, sacrificed, and then the next group after that, until this zeitgeist – or whatever the hell you call the communal will to send us all straight to hell is called – ends. 
Until then, I’m not okay. Not in the least.
“Fire at Sea” & “Le Pointe Courte”
Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea documents the parallel worlds of refugees and residents on the South Mediterranean island of Lampedusa; the takes are long, giving the viewer time to meditate on the unfolding refugee disaster. 
Like Agnes Varda’s 1964 film La Pointe Courte, the director employs local residents to be themselves, providing a context for a world beyond our comprehension. 
Fishermen, it seems, understand the fragility of life. And yet, for all its powerful imagery – foil blankets electric at night, a perfectly made bed – there is something missing. 
The images are not what they could be, still and empty perhaps as intended, but also missing the chance to engage and draw the viewer in. That said, it’s still the best film of the year.
Prolonged Uselessness
I organized my umbrellas – tightening the straps, reinserting each into its plastic sleeve – and discovered three which were non-functioning. 
These I threw out.
Ice Friday: James Jones “Thin Red Line”
The stark World War II prose of James Jones in The Thin Red Line remind us of what happens to the psyche when everything else is stripped away:
He heard the soft “shu-u-” of the mortar shell for perhaps half a second. There was not even time to connect it with himself or frighten him, before there was a huge sunburst roaring of an explosion almost on top of him, then black blank darkness. He had a vague impression that someone screamed but did not know it was himself. As if seeing dark film shown with insufficient illumination, he had a misty picture of someone other than himself half-scrambling, rolling down the slope. Then nothing. Dead? Are we, that other one is I? am he? 
“Am I hit? Am I hit?”
“Yes,” Train mumbled. “Y-you are.” He also stuttered. “In the head.”
“Am I?” Fife looked at his hands and found them completely covered with the wet red. He understood now that peculiar red haze. Then terror blossomed all through him like ballooning great fungus, making his heart kick and his eyes go faint.
Donald Trump: Doom’s Harbinger
That so many people supported Trump’s hateful message is horrifying, a reminder that we are no further than the Germans a hundred years ago.
Hitler: In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. Today I will once more be a prophet.
Trump: They laughed at me when I said to bomb the ISIS controlled oil fields. Now they are not laughing and doing what I said.
Hitler: As Fuehrer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich, I can thank God at this moment that he has so wonderfully blessed us in our hard struggle for what is our right.
Trump: We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again. We need — we need somebody — we need somebody that literally will take this country and make it great again. We can do that.
Hitler: The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness.
Trump: And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives; don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families. 
Hitler: Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone!
Trump (To security staff, regarding protesters): Throw them out! Throw them out into the cold! No coats! Confiscate their coats!
This populist wave of ignorance demonstrates that, like everything, humanity is doomed to sink inevitably back into the abyss.
(*Reblogged from mcphedranbadside.com, February 1, 2016)