Set against the backdrop of the United Farm Workers’ struggle, the best thing about playwright/director Diane Rodriquez’s The Sweetheart Deal is its dramatization of how being a part of a movement affects a couple. Mari (Ruth Livier) and Will (Geoffrey Rivas) are middle-aged married Chicanos originally from California’s agricultural region who long ago moved to the big city of San Jose. Using the G.I. Bill, Will parlayed his service as a lackey of U.S. imperialism during the Korean War into earning a B.A. This enabled the college grad to get a decent job editing a mediocre newspaper and raise his family with a comfortable middle class lifestyle. (Of course, for many university graduates drowning in student loan debt today, the notion of getting a well paying job upon earning one’s diploma is a quaint fairy tale.)

We have no evidence at this point that the Russians, or global hackers, hacked our electronic voting machines to put Donald Trump in the White House.

But we are 100% certain our electronic voting machines have been hacked by many many others, and could be in the future by virtually anybody with entry-level computing capabilities. As the New York Times and others have reported, cyberattacks have now become an integral part of the modern landscape.   A tool stolen from the very National Security Agency meant to protect us has been used to perpetrate more than 75,000 recent hacks—-and those are just the ones being reported. 

The evidence that our electronics-based election system is particularly vulnerable to such attacks has long been well-established.  It ranges from a wide range of public vote flipping demonstrations to a computing professor using a voting machine to play the University of Michigan fight song. 

The REDCAT revival of Wallace Shawn’s 1996 The Designated Mourner is eerily timely, opening amidst the tyrannical Trump regime’s ongoing attack on its critics, ranging from el presidente’s firing of the FBI chief for his investigation of a citizen above suspicion (but beneath contempt) and the May 10 arrest of a reporter in West Virginia for the heinous thought crime of trying to ask “Health” Secretary Tom Price a question.

In Mourner, Larry Pine (a veteran of the big and little screen and stage with endless credits, including House of Cards and Dead Man Walking) portrays the poet Howard, a scion of the ruling class who turns against them and champions the "dirt people" (working class) in opposing the "rats" (elite). Daughter Judy (writer Deborah Eisenberg) is among Howard’s literary and political acolytes. As opposition to the rulers mounts leftist intellectuals are arrested and executed by the oligarchy.

The Constitution suddenly seems to have bestirred itself and declared itself, through its many Washington spokespeople, to be in crisis.

I’m sorry, interjects the world, but what the hell took you so long?

I attended a meeting in Moscow on Friday with Vladimir Kozin, longtime member of Russia’s foreign service, advisor to the government, author, and advocate for arms reduction. He handed out the list of 16 unresolved problems above. While he noted that the United States funds NGOs in Russia, as well as Ukraine, to influence elections, and described that as a reality in contrast to U.S. stories of Russia trying to influence a U.S. election, which he called a fairy tale, the topic did not make the top-16 list.

He added to the top of the list as something that could be obtainable, and something he considers very important, the need for an agreement between the U.S. and Russia on no first use of nuclear weapons, an agreement that he thinks other nations would subsequently join.