Cassandra Voices

Tag: about

  • Jim Sheridan Authors Screenplay about Lockerbie

    In entertainment news, reports have surfaced that Jim Sheridan – who directed and co-wrote In the Name of the Father (1993) among other award-winning films – along with his daughter Kirsten Sheridan, have written the screenplay for a new five-part series based on the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Filming is due to begin in Glasgow later this month

    Pan Am Flight 103 (PA103/PAA103) was a transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit, with stopovers in London and New York City. After taking off from London, at around 7pm on December 21, 1988 – while flying over the Scottish town of Lockerbie – a bomb exploded killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew.

    Parts of the aircraft also crashed on Lockerbie itself, killing 11 residents. With a total of 270 deaths, it remains, by some distance, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom. By comparison, 56 died in the 7/7 attacks on London in 2005, and 29 died in Omagh in 1999.

    Colin Firth is set to portray Dr. Jim Swire. Swire’s daughter, Flora died in the disaster and he, along with his wife Jane, doggedly pursued justice for her and other victims of the bombing.

    Following a long investigation, involving UK police and the FBI, arrest warrants were issued for two Libyan nationals in November 1991. Ultimately, in 1999, then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi handed the two men over for trial at Camp Zeist, the Netherlands. This followed protracted negotiations and U.N. sanctions.

    In 2001, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, was found guilty and jailed for life for the crime. In August 2009, however, he was released by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds, after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He died in May 2012. Al-Megrahi remains the only person to have been convicted for the attack.

    Then President, Muammar Ghaddafi accepted Libya’s responsibility for the bombing and went on to pay compensation to the victims’ families, although he maintained that he had never given the order for it.

    Throughout his long career, Jim Sheridan has combined the role of film maker and activist. In the Name of the Father, which he directed and co-wrote with Terry George, is an account of the Guilford Four, four men falsely convicted of the 1974 Guilford pub bombings. In 1989 they were cleared of all charges and released from prison after serving for nearly fifteen years behind bars.

    In more recent times, Jim Sheridan has taken a keen interest in the still unsolved Sophie du Plantier murder case, called. He recently made a series for Sky: Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie.

    Viewers will be intrigued to discover what angle he takes on the events in Lockerbie.

    Feature Image: Bob Quinn

  • About Queen Elizabeth in a Soviet Childhood

    Did I mention that I remember seeing Queen Elizabeth II not as a very old or medium-old or middle-aged woman, the way everyone alive now remembers her, but as a youngish-looking woman in her forties? Okay, my seeing her didn’t take place in real life, but still… for a child living in the Soviet Union, it was a bit unusual. Here’s how it happened.

    My father had a huge stamp collection in Moscow. In the sixties he corresponded with stamp collectors—philatelists—from all over the world, and when I say “the sixties,” it’s important to keep in mind that those were the Soviet sixties, and if you know what the Soviet sixties were like, and what Soviet censorship was like, you might imagine what it felt like to correspond with people from Australia, New Zealand, France, FRG/ФРГ (the usual Russian acronym for West Germany), Belgium, and so on, simply to exchange some stamps for a stamp collection. My father’s stamps were kept in special albums—kliassery in Russian.

    I learned names of foreign countries from them: a stamp from Sweden, a stamp from Hungary, a stamp from Denmark, and always the British stamp, with a portrait of dainty Queen Elizabeth, still a youngish-looking woman in her forties, with a little crown on her head, like a silvery bird on a dark nest.

    It was thanks to my father’s stamp collection that we were able to leave the Soviet Union. I won’t go into all the details of what it was like, in the early seventies, to apply to the OVIR (Office of Visas and Registration) for permission to emigrate, and I won’t compare the process to Russian roulette, although it would have been the right comparison.

    One day we were lucky and got our permission. Now my parents had to buy four plane tickets to Vienna, and they didn’t have enough money. My father sold his whole stamp collection to a well-known philatelist in Moscow, and with that money, he was able to buy us four plane tickets to Vienna.

    So here’s how I saw Queen Elizabeth II. If you missed the part about the queen… Psst-psst, it was in the middle.

  • All About Amy

    “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.”
    Saint Teresa of Avila

    Can’t blame U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Barrett for being born Amy Coney. Nor would I fault my fellow New Orleans native for having Irish Catholic parents who, like mine, sent her to St. Mary’s Dominican High School. Back then it was cool. We were both in the same boat. And far as I know, we still are, that is if you’re in the habit of comparing educated middle class white females wielding our kinda funny Louisiana convent French accent. Women’s tuition is typically tubular. What I mean is, it’s wampum well spent.

    Sod it, hatched on the same patch of swamp, Amy n’ me should be two peas in a pod. However, I’m not ashamed to say gun control and reproductive rights are where we part ways. These were fundamental freedoms guaranteed in the Seventies and Eighties, for girls, rich or poor, growing up in The Big Easy. Matters of… deep breath… life and death.

    But in order to begin a coherent conversation on either issue, one must comprehend this. Paired like a couple of chromosomes, the right to bear arms or avail of an abortion are inexorably intertwined.

    The Honorable Amy once penned a unanimous opinion affirming the summary judgement against a claimant in the case Smith vs. The Illinois Department of Transportation, finding while egregious, it was not racial discrimination when a supervisor dismissed an employee for what was later stipulated “poor performance” as, and I quote, being a “stupid ass nigger.” Because they were both black. Thus, perhaps she’ll pardon my French when, with Malthusian enthusiasm, I need point out that, unlike me, Barrett is a breeder.

    The greedy GOP plucked this pro-lifer directly out of her indoctrination by a secretive charismatic Christian cult called People of Praise and would have you, me and Barrett herself believe the proceedings around Roe vs. Wade were about her unqualified opinion. One based on a bizarre Czar-like wish to not squish the least little fish. A sweeping generalization to keep inconsequential caviar in its crevice, no matter how marred things get. So, you see, as women we are now all set. In a bind. Because profoundly blinded by nothing more than good faith, the Sturgeon General’s brand of justice finds it sound.

    This is not my first rodeo. I’ve a habit of being in the right place at the wrong time. Managing marketing and advising on regulations in several sovereign nations for a British boss at a bank based in Hong Kong during a currency crisis and the Handover of our S.A.R. to the P. R. C.. Watching an IPO window slam shut on a tech boom not sparing the white knuckles of a thousand plus entrepreneurs, including Connecticut fat cats, four Finns in Malaysia and more than a couple of Kiwis that like a Trojan camel we tried to pass through the eye of a needle. Not tired, I got hired to launch Tokyo ops for one of the U.S. firms which then perished in their entirety when the Twin Towers fell. Sometimes you might as well call it a day.

    Only to sit spitting nails, like an old spy in from the cold, wearing a crusty trusty power suit at a hedge fund desk high up in the Empire State Building. Swearing my federal tax dollars were squandered by an incompetent Army Corps of Engineers, while Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath sinks New Orleans’ natural defenses into the drink. Five years on, an unfettered BP blast on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig heaved 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Left every last bivalve bereft.

    Thing is, for all the money in a world I can’t unsee as my oyster, I wouldn’t trade this front row seat watching Ireland’s Celtic Tiger tumble, jigging in The George the very night same sex marriage legalized. Seeing medical cannabis and safe abortion made less murky than a transubstantiation of the Magdalene Laundries into this tip top corporate tax haven. And learning how to ask for the Ban Jax.

    Where me and homegirl differ, is before we had graduation under our Prince of Wales plaid chastity belts, God didn’t see fit to show Amy how it felt to be raped at gunpoint and escape.

    Hence, the power of Christ has yet to compel the now anointed Coney concerning exceptionally unsexy circumstances. Those surrounding the sort of nonconsensual contortions likely to lead to a swelling belly aborted.

    Maybe I don’t have a womb with a wide-angle view at high tide, but my bet is Barrett’s not tangled in a “long game” as Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker article subtly suggests. At best she’s a half-baked Trump tumor deposited on the Supreme Court, but what if she’s been groomed Brothers Grimm style? The Manchurian Candidate meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers? She’s one of seven who, come hell or Haitian high water is spawning seven more into a scenario not of her own making. Ingenue actress? Goodbye RBG and Hello All About Eve? Or anchor baby for the alt-right?

    What I ask political strategists who bask in what few filthy cards they’ve slipped up their starched sleeve is a burning question. At what point did conservative Christians earn what they’d always yearned for? Carte blanche to pull up to the Republican bumper, and dive in like Flynn to the D.C. dumpster. When did The Religious Right become your Rumpelstiltskin?

    Knowing the ropes on the lesser navigated, one could almost say, fallopian-like, canals of Venice, I’ll venture vetting Casanova’s confessions is yet an even better trip. I for one am not impervious to stumbling on stuff our nuns neglected having Amy, blessed vessel that she is, translate directly from the French. Simply for shits n’ giggles mightn’t they have wiggled something cunning like Sade in to Sophomore English Lit? Not the sublime Nigerian-born British chanteuse…but the felonious philosopher of freedom. An equally smooth operator. I’ll explain.

    Couple hundred years before we were in high school, if memory serves, the year 1787 saw yes, a libertine, one of Fibonacci proportions, imprisoned in the Bastille. During his two-week incarceration, minus a lick of obscenity, the Marquis de Sade managed to nail a novella he named Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue. Seems his fictitious femme fatale was willing to bend over. Take one for the team. Don’t know about Amy. Wouldn’t blame her for being game, but, as for me, I’m not. Not anymore. Are you?

    There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.
    Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

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