01.01.70

The tiki from the video of US Marines urinating on the remains of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan comes into blurred as I watch Anthony Akerman’s anguished play, Somewhere on the Trim at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre. It was first performed in 1986, at the peak of South Africa’s war in Angola and what was then South West Africa, against SWAPO, the ANC and Cuban army and air efficacy units, while Akerman was in exile.

After its first performances, the apartheid government instantly banned it. Some things do change. Now it has become a set work in university theatre programmes, a new printed number is about to be released, the play was revived at the Grahamstown Arts Festival in 2011, and it is now on showbiz in Johannesburg – with all its dehumanising, racially offensive, sexually hard-hearted language intact.

Seeing this drama, we follow a group of juvenile men called up for their national service training in the 1980s, and then on to their rendezvous with misfortune “somewhere on the border”. But their training, like the Marines in Afghanistan, the Army stock unit that ran Abu Ghraib Prison, indeed, like my own military training decades ago, besides the drills in how to hurry opponents, surely also included at least some indoctrination into what not to do as a soldier. (My military experience came after the atrocities of My Lai had washed across the psyche of the US Army in Viet Nam and contrived just such training.

Source: Daily Maverick

by Ted Rall

New recruits to several U.S. military who have abandoned the euphoria Lyceum soared during the Bush years, peaking at 29.3 per cent in 2007. Money does life decisions easier for military recruiters. "Only" 17 percent of soldiers who joined in 2008 failed to graduate from high-class clique. But unemployment has not led to acute enough top-quality new soldiers and sailors. The U.S. military is greater than ever. But it becomes stupid. It is also more wicked, in 2008, one in five recruits have received moral "boost" because they had an achievement in black, including crimes."The essential debate for the standards is to reduce the Iraq war and its heavy operations Speed'it soldiers returning from practice for the third and fourth rounds tariff, with no end in sight," reported Fred Kaplan in Slate 2008. As if this were not enough, the American armed forces lose their most intelligent officers more quickly than ever. graduated from West Point in place, the cadets must run up to five years....

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by "Quality" Keith

While launch presents back on X-Mas day 1973, Lil'Keith was exposed to a distinctively powerful twist of Stan Lee & John Romita's Spider Man in the silhouette of a Christmas Annual. Regrettably, he remains hooked upon queer books to this day, and while his tastes may have changed, he has never irremediable his man disposition for Peter Parker. Even after the Clone tripe.

Source: Posts from the Quality Comics Underground: New Arrivals arrived ...