rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

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politics

Kharkiv and My “Grandpa Meyer”

Kharkiv is the 2nd largest city in Ukraine. It’s now being pounded by Russian troops & missles daily, fighting desperately for its life and survival. ————– It’s also where my paternal grandfather, Meyer, was born. —————- ———— I always wanted to, and planned on, going there, to see the place my grandfather was from. But I when I finally went to Russia in 2018 to teach theater in Moscow, I didn’t have time to go east to Kharkiv. —— —– You can see in these photos I’ve posted – a piece of paper I gave to my grandfather, on his…

Turkey Day in the Time of Corona

        Frozen turkey’s in the oven since last night. Special Trules recipe. Last employed almost forty years ago, on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South in New York City, in my clown loft, when my parents were still alive, in the early 1980s. Slow roast. Get the bird to stew overnight in its own juices. Guarantees a moist, delicious feast. Or least it used to, as I said. Let’s see. Forty years is a lonnnnnng time. The times, they have-a changed. Indeed. Bob Dylan, the sage himself, is almost 80. I’m 73. I’ve lived in sunny California…

Friendships Across the Aisle, Abridged

This is not a political piece. Or maybe it is. It is a piece about friendships. New and old. And how they can make you see yourself, and the world, differently. Especially at the start of a new year, on the East Coast of not so sunny Florida, half way between West Palm and Miami Beach. I’ll start with the new friend. Mr. Bobha. That’s not his real name, but it will suffice, even though the man is not a Buddhist, in fact far from it. He’s a devout Christian, Catholic in fact. He and his childhood sweetheart, now wife,…

Terror Magenta

It’s been on my mind, really bothering me…. that although in no way can I condone the “terrorist” attacks on America; they’re deeply brutal, frightening, and wrong. BUT…. How can we blow up the San Bernadino attack by these 2 radical jihadists into “the worst terrorist attack on America since 9/11”? Well, ok, 14 people were killed in a small, insular California community. Not good. Brutal, sad, and scary. But there was Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon well before it. And… it’s not the 3000 victims killed like at the World Trade Center in 2001. And…. at least as…

Eduardo Galeano, Latin America’s Leftist Literary Giant and Poet Laureate

The great, subversive, political, and poetic Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano died on April 13, 2015, after losing his second bout with lung cancer. Galeano was one of my favorite writers. He was little known in America (of course he would poignantly call us, the rapacious and hegemonic “the United States of America,” in contrast with his own, much-maligned and violently-exploited “LatinAmerica,” but that made sense since he always compared the European rape and conquest of the New World in the 15th-18th centuries to the USA’s current exploitation and subjugation of Latin America in the 20th-21st centuries. Precious metals like gold and silver from the mines…

The Modern Crusades: Militant Islam & Collateral Damage, 2 Inhospitable Bedfellows

First, let me say that I finished this piece just days before the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. “Je suis Charlie”, and I have not changed a single word. On Friday, January 2, I read, with distress, in the Los Angeles Times‘ “Year in Review” a grim and disturbing piece entitled “Militant Islam’s 2014 March”. In it, Carol J. Williams recalls, in shocking detail, the disturbingly violent assault of extreme religious Islam on both the East and the West: “In April, Boko Haram abducted more than 270 Nigerian girls and dispatched them to sexual enslavement. As the year drew to a close, the Pakistani…

A Baby Boomer’s Belated Blog to George Will

Dear Mr. Will, Hello. How are you? I am sorry that it has taken me so long to write to you. Almost 25 years, I suppose. I see that you are a very popular man to attack on The Huffington Post these days, what with your recent “controversial” article about sexual assault on college campuses, where in the interest of full disclosure, I have worked for the last 28 years, albeit only as a “crazy theater professor” at the University of Southern California, which I’m not sure qualifies for true condemnation or contempt in your morally superior world of intellectual…

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