The memory of Kenneth Blackwell’s presence looms as voter suppression along with Russian hacking clouds the last election. Kenneth Starr, as some people could not just get over their baggage from the 90’s Clinton term. This writing would not exist without Kenny Powers.

In many ways, the electoral college victory was the resurgence of the washed-up megalomaniac has been to frame the hipster-era to the failures of the hippies. And somewhat seems to be the thought process of the bulk of the president’s attempts at policy.

True, gentrification probably helped create some of the hipsters that the average Kenny Powers resent. And of course racism. Kenny Powers was not physically displaced by gentrification. Kenny Powers is a device. This makes the current racial climate even more sinister. Land acquisition is never without conflict. However, you can gather why I have no reservations saying the confederacy should have krautrocked during the reconstruction. 

A national business news website, Benzinga.com, recently asked my views on Presidential attempts to muzzle the press. Here is what I told them: “(President) Trump has found that his core supporters, now dwindling but still representing a third of the electorate, dislike the mainstream media and respond favorably whenever Trump criticizes the media. That results in more and sharper edged investigative reporting.”

“All recent presidents have battled with the news media and have, at times, treated journalists as mortal enemies and, at times, tried to pressure the news media into covering things the presidents' way.”

“President Richard Nixon allegedly threatened to take away the Washington Post's lucrative TV licenses after repeated negative coverage.”

“President George W. Bush's people allegedly threatened to charge the New York Times editor with sedition in a coverage dispute.”

(I also noted that President Barack Obama had frosty relations with the press at times.)

o watch America’s structural racism at work, one need look no further than the National Football League (NFL) and its treatment of nonviolent unorthodoxy as expressed by Colin Kaepernick going to one knee during the national anthem in support of the unacceptable thought that black lives should matter as much as anyone else’s. Of course, that’s still a relatively new idea in the United States, dating from 1863 in law and still not fully accepted in much of the country.

When politicians are feeling the heat, they start a war and their popularity goes up even if the war is unnecessary or completely ridiculous. Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who promised that he would not take the nation into another Middle Eastern war, did so when he launched a fifty-nine cruise missile barrage against a Syrian Air Base even before he knew for sure what had happened on the ground. It was totally stupid but proved to be popular, even among talking heads and Congressmen, some of whom described his action as “presidential” in the best sense of the word.

The Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum production of Alice Childress’ Trouble in Mind came to me as a theatrical revelation. It is a classic “the worm turns” tale: Manners (Mark Lewis) is a big shot white liberal Hollywood producer who is making his Broadway stage debut in order to make “serious art” with a play-within-the-play (likewise written by a Caucasian). Manners sincerely believes it’s a powerful, searing social statement about and indictment of racism. Trouble, which is set in the 1950s, also hints that Manners may have fled Tinseltown to escape what is euphemistically called “the investigation”: the Hollywood Blacklist and House Un-American Activities Committees’ purging of so-called subversives (like WGTB founder Will Geer, who was blacklisted).

Willetta (the venerable Earnestine Phillips) plays an African American actress who, in scene one, Act I, seems to pooh-pooh the notion of theater as high art with a mission, as advocated by enthusiastic Broadway newcomer John (Max Lawrence who also does a superlative job portraying the workaholic steed Boxer in WGTB’s Animal Farm).