I am writing this post quickly rather late at night. So let me get right to it.

(1) The Film. Our neighborhood, community theater had one showing tonight (all 450 seats filled) of the 2025 Academy Award winning documentary No Other Land, a joint Palestinian-Israeli film about the Palestinian villages comprising a region known as Masafer Yatta, in the southern part of the West Bank, and their continual destruction by the Israel Defense Force and – in recent times – by Israeli settlers. The villages, which had apparently existed since before 1900, were designated as unapproved settlements by Israeli authorities and designation for destruction when the land they were on was declared as a military training facility. A legal battle of two decades ended when the Israeli Supreme Court sided with the IDF, and said that the villages could be destroyed and the residents forced to move elsewhere. For most, elsewhere would be leaving their land, their animals, and their rural life, and moving to a West Bank city, probably Hebron, the closest.

It’s a well made film, showing collaboration between Basel, a young Arab and second generation activist, and Yuval, an Israeli of the same age, a journalist who is sympathetic to and supportive of the villagers’ cause. They both appeared to accept the Academy Award a month or so ago.

Not surprisingly, the film is a downer, makes you mad, and makes you wonder why everyone can’t just accept each other and live normal lives. And the film certainly lets you see the fragile lives lived by rural Palestinians in the West Bank. But for me, there was something else. For me, it struck close to home. My home. You know, the United States of America.

I imagined the same story set not in the south of Palestine and not in the 21st century, but somewhere (almost everywhere) in the United States, some time in the late 18th or early 19th century. The Palestinians would be played by Native Americans. The IDF by the U.S. Army. And the settlers…..well, by the settlers. It struck me that it was the same. The Indians always under attack, their villages destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again, and so forth.

There is nothing new under the sun. And the Americans at that time (and now) who support Manifest Destiny and think of the Indian wars just as an inevitable series of events required to enable our country to become what it is today, and no different from the Israelis, who think of the West Bank as biblical lands given to the Jews by God as part of Israel’s Manifest Destiny, and view the Palestinians exactly as the Americans viewed the Indians.

(2) The Book. On Monday, I felt the need to read something light, so I went to my book case filled with books by people in the entertainment industry, and pulled one (primarily based on its size) to see if it was readable. It turned out to be quite readable.

The book, by Shirley MacLaine, is called You Can Get There From Here, and was published in 1975. Shirley MacLaine, who is now 90 (remember when that sounded old?), and has had an interesting life and career, to be sure. This book deals with a much younger Shirley, obviously, a Shirley who was in her late 30s or early 40s.

I still have a couple of chapters to go, but I think that I get the gist of what’s to come. The book can be looked at as having three major sections, and a fourth shorter one.

The first part of the book talked about the period during the very early 1970s, when the Vietnam War was raging, and opposition to it was raging. Apparently, this was a time when Hollywood was in the doldrums, and everyone was turning to television, something that Shirley never wanted to do, finding most TV shows mindless and a waste of everyone’s time. But she had to make a living and signed on to do a show called “Shirley’s World”, which was to be a comedy about a young woman trying to make her way through life, and was to be filmed in various cities around the world. From almost the beginning Shirley thought she had made a big mistake, and after looking at the first draft of the scripts for the first episodes she knew she did. The show was aired for only a few episodes, I think, received terrible reviews, and was canceled.

I had never heard of “Shirley’s World”, which was just as well, but she gives a very interesting description of how the show was put together, obviously from a very different vantage point than that of someone who simply turns of a TV.

The second part of book deals with her giving up show business for several months to campaign full time for, and very closely with, George McGovern as he ran first for the Democratic nomination in 1972, and then against Nixon for the presidency. I did not know that she had done this, and had done it at such an intensive level (she was even with the McGoverns in a hotel room on election night, to give you an idea of her centrality to the campaign), so again her writing here was from an insider’s perspective. This insider perspective, by the way, was quite critical of the way the campaign was run and, as time went on, quite critical of McGovern as a candidate.

The third part of the book (the one that I haven’t completely finished) involved a trip to China which MacLaine took in 1972 as the leader of a group of about eight “normal” American women, selected by herself, the first group of American women to be allowed into China shortly after the opening of the country to Americans. Again this was interesting, because China in 1972 was interesting, but was not a particularly successful trip, in part because the women were “too normal”, and not sufficiently prepared to be pioneers in this sort of travel, and in part because Shirley herself was so interested in China that she didn’t pay enough attention to her job as the leader of her pack. I should also say that, for whatever reasons, perhaps because China travel was so new and the country so unexplored by Americans, that I really didn’t trust her descriptions of the places she went or the people she was in contact with. China in 1972 was not the China that exists now at all.

Finally, the short part. After the end of the McGovern campaign, Shirley decided to visit her parents for several days, something that apparently she did not do that often. Her parents lived right here in the DC area, in Arlington VA, and her visit, as she describes it, was an interesting one. No need for a long description. Let’s just say that if Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton had not been available to play the Bunkers, MacLaine’s parents could have taken on the roles, playing themselves.

(3) The Presentation. The presentation is one that I am making at 9 a.m. this morning to my Thursday morning breakfast group. That’s the reason I am rushed to write this blog tonight, and would not have time to write it in the morning.