Hollywood on the Potomac–movie actors deserting Tinseltown to remind the Big Dogs back east that every time an A-list celeb is arrested for picketing a foreign embassy an angel gets his wings.
Actor George Clooney, his father Nick, and four Congressional Democrats were among more than a dozen protesters who descended on the Sudanese Embassy on March 16 for the purpose of crossing, in a disorderly fashion, a police line.
The cast of characters? Along with Clooneys I and II, it included Reps. James Moran (D-VA), Jim McGovern (D-MA), John Olver (D-MA) and Al Green (D-TX). NAACP President Ben Jealous was also arrested, along with Martin Luther King III.
Clooney’s mid-day performance on Mass Ave was the finale to a 3-day tour in DC that included an impassioned plea to a standing-room-only crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations, and dramatic testimony delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the miserable state of affairs in the border region of Sudan.
Omar al-Bashir’s military, operating out of Khartoum, is working assiduously to wipe out mostly Christian populations hunkered down on some highly contested, oil-rich real estate to the south.
Clooney, who has frequently taken on the role of the world-weary activist in his films, accuses Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and the ‘same criminals responsible for Darfur’ of conducting a genocidal war against his own people, of starving, maiming, raping, and murdering them.
And he says it as if no one has ever heard it before. . .
You know, I promised myself I wasn’t going to write about this. Promised. The fact is I heard about it yesterday, so we’re talking, what? 24 hours? But this is the Foreign Policy Association global blog site, right? And despite my focus on crime and corruption, I like to think I bring a certain (educated) perspective to events too often triggered by what even I, an east coast elitist, can only describe as bad, bad craziness. Boundaries–or their absence–can be important cultural markers, and I knew–I know–even as I write, that this is a name guaranteed to set a lot of very straight, very white teeth on edge: Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa Country, Arizona.
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