Posts Tagged ‘Thailand’

“In a Conventional Dither”: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Camouflaged Critique of Race Relations at Mid-Century

During the three-year stretch in which Richard Rodgers’ and Oscar Hammerstein II’s South Pacific and The King and I reached the Broadway stage, theatrical expressions of support for the equality of black and white were a dicey proposition, courting charges of Communist sympathies. And yet in these two musicals, lyricist and librettist Hammerstein found a way to voice that support. However, in keeping with the times as well as his temperament, he did so by indirection, and also with what might be called camouflage: presenting the “destabilizing” message about race relations in a matrix that included remarkably conventional and reassuring, even retrograde, messages concerning the relations of the sexes and colonialism.

War Powers, War Lies: Part 10: Kangaroo

And here is the moral, strategic, and tactical problem: How we can expect the world to accord full faith and credit to that court’s eventual verdict when we establish and countenance tribunals that are themselves human rights violations? A question urgently worth pondering.

War Powers, War Lies: Part 9: Away Games

In the global war on terror or, as the Bush Administration likes to call it, the GWOT, the U.S. aspires to the situation of a National League team in interleague play — relaxed rules. This time we consider three aspects of the relaxed GWOT away game we are playing these days: foreign assassinations, extraordinary rendition, and prisoner export.