About Me
- Freeman
- Matthew Freeman is a Brooklyn based playwright with a BFA from Emerson College. His plays include THE DEATH OF KING ARTHUR, REASONS FOR MOVING, THE GREAT ESCAPE, THE AMERICANS, THE WHITE SWALLOW, AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR, THE MOST WONDERFUL LOVE, WHEN IS A CLOCK, GLEE CLUB, THAT OLD SOFT SHOE and BRANDYWINE DISTILLERY FIRE. He served as Assistant Producer and Senior Writer for the live webcast from Times Square on New Year's Eve 2010-2012. As a freelance writer, he has contributed to Gamespy, Premiere, Complex Magazine, Maxim Online, and MTV Magazine. His plays have been published by Playscripts, Inc., New York Theatre Experience, and Samuel French.
2 comments:
There's a lot of good stuff in here, the major problem so far that I've found (not that we have to discuss problems all the time, we could discuss good stuff!) is the part about the refugee crisis, which involves.... no mention of letting more refugees into the United States which, when you come to think about it, is about the least we could do for Iraqis right now.
Well, there's no way Obama is going to suggest we allow Iraqi refugees into the US, considering how touchy everybody is on the subject of immigration. Anybody going near that with a twenty-foot cattle prod can kiss their Presidential campaign goodbye...
The Obama plan seems as good a plan as I've seen, and I think it or something very much like it will have to be implemented eventually, but I worry that it's not going to go nearly that neatly. I think eventually a phased draw-down will lead to too few troops trying to do too much, all hell will break loose, and we'll see something akin to the fall of Saigon all over again, with Americans and desperate refugees clambering onto rooftops trying to get the hell out. It will be horrifying, there will be tremendous loss of life, and I fear, unless we simply want to stay there forever, that it is inevitable. Furthermore, the idea that there is a diplomatic solution to all this strikes me as naive - we're talking about ethnic, tribal, and political factions that have been trying to slaughter each other for literally millenia...this is way beyond something that can be solved in a conference room at the Geneva Hilton. The only thing that kept any sense of order in that part of the world is a leader so despotic and so homicidal that people felt that keeping a low profile was preferable to settling thousand-year-old scores. Well, we've taken the strongman out of the picture, and now, displaying a stunning ignorance of Mesopotamian history, we're acting all shocked that the Iraqis seem to want to use their new "freedom" to open up long-stockpiled cans of whupass on each other. Hm, didn't see that comin'...wait, yes we did. Cheney did, clearly (bless you, YouTube), but the neocon agenda was more important. So yes, I think the Obama plan is better than anything else I've seen, I think we gotta go ASAP, but I think at some point it's gonna go all to hell. There is no cleaning up the mess we made. What's gonna happen during/after the withdrawal is going to make what we've seen thus far look like a rowdy Girl Scout retreat.
Post a Comment