Kamala. Good for....?

 All you have to do is take one look at $81 million in the first day of her candidacy to realize that Kamala Harris is suddenly likely to be the next President - at least she is barring a third, fourth, or fifth world historic event in the next few weeks. She still might not. She has yet to undergo the coming orgy of Republican slutshaming (she started in politics as the girlfriend of legendary San Francisco mayor Willie Brown), and for all the leftshaming of Harris for being a prosecutor, Republicans will charge that she was disgustingly lax on crime. She'll be thought of as the 'Border Czar,' a thankless job that will cause the right to charge she was absurdly lax on immigration, and the left to charge that she was absurdly strict.

Why is that? Because Kamala Harris has made a career taking on thankless jobs nobody else would take. As California's attorney general she took on what amounted to a political suicide mission and took on the US's five biggest banks all at once and refused an aid package for California of 2-4 billion dollars and even more suicidally, she won. The relief package she got? $18.4 billion! She also took on cases against all the major drug cartels. Imagine the threats to her safety, and all the while she instituted body cameras on police, antagonizing the very people charged with protecting her.

So we may have thought last week that Donald Trump was a shoo-in, but the US is so starved for a new generation of leadership that they will take even the appearance of it.

Kamala Harris may yet prove a greater President than Obama, but does Harris have Obama-level charisma? Let's not pretend she does, but we are all so scared right now that the appearance of any energy that resists Trump's blitzkrieg of negativity is met as though the leader is the reincarnation of Churchill. A number of female politicians can inspire a crowd better than Harris can: Elizabeth Warren most obvious among potential candidates, but unlike Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris can work in a team without burning bridges, she can fade into self-effacement, she can give credit to other people, can you tell I soured on Elizabeth Warren?

So its with maximum schadenfreude that, in this week of reversed fortunes, Netanyahu comes to America. It was supposed to be a Roman triumph of spite to enable Bibi to crow 'Biden's disappearing, but I'm still here.' Instead, Netanyahu is arriving at a moment of maximal Republican panic, and surely must read into the bad timing that his own days are numbered.

And yet... is she good for the Jews?

Kamala Harris would be the first President with a Jewish spouse. The frontrunner to be her running mate is Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania and very, very Jewish - though I still think it will be Mark Kelly. Even if Shapiro is not the Vice-President, this will be, by far, the Jewyest White House the country's ever seen. There is no better time or cover to reorient the US's Middle East policy. What kind of Jew is our potential First Gentleman, ('Doug')? We don't really know, but we do know that his daughter was arrested at a protest against Israel's actions.

We don't really know what Kamala Harris's opinions are on foreign policy. We can guess but they're only guesses. I'd imagine her opinions run much closer to Obama's than Biden's, and even if the difference between the two is much smaller than the difference to any Republican, the difference in approach is enormous. Biden is a man of the 20th century, growing up on stories of the camps and gulags, taking the lesson that totalitarianism is the worst of all possible governments, whether the right-wing totalitarianism of Hitler or the left-wing varieties of Stalin and Mao. Obama literally defined the early 21st, growing up on stories of Hiroshima and Congo, taking from them the lesson that democracy unchecked can be as lethal as any totalitarian power.

Perhaps, being this Jewy, I'm too much a creature of the 20th, but I'm clearly more with Biden than Obama. There are other looming American threats worse than anything in our sometimes shameful history, but most of them would be facilitated by America taking some kind of authoritarian turn. Unfair as I may be, I hold Obama's discomfort with American power partially responsible for the authoritarian turn of the world. Part of Obama is a peacenik who believes that when offered reason, people listen to it. Whether in foreign relations with Vladimir Putin, or domestically with Mitch McConnell, the refusal to wage political war emboldened them. Force occasionally has to be met with force, and not just in those moments when the ends are absolutely definite.

Had Obama been President on October 7th, it's hard to believe he would have tolerated the Israel-Hamas war going on anything like this long, but he would have allowed for a retributive war just like Biden did, and would have been savaged by the left for letting it happen a single day.

And it's reasonable to assume that regardless of what happens, a war like the Israel-Hamas war will never happen under a Harris administration, no matter how extreme the act against Israelis. No matter what her opinion of Israel, with such close Jewish contacts, Harris is particularly susceptible to accusations of collusion, and however she really feels, she will have to go to extreme lengths to give the appearance of impartiality with Israel, no matter how reasonable or unreasonable Israel is in the coming years.

Let's not kid ourselves: Israel deserves a turn against it - how much of a turn is an open question, but the idea that Netanyahu is celebrated in the Capitol tells you all you need to know about Netanyahu or about Republicans. Israel's own authoritarian turn may be gradual, but government by government, Israel turns more and more into the enemies it loathes: an overmilitarized gerontocratic theocracy where constitutional rule of law can be overridden by a leader with no limitations on his power.

Make no mistake, Israel on its worse day is no Iran on its best, but in fifty years on its current trajectory? Are you kidding? The average secular Israeli family has 2.08 children. The average ultra-orthodox Israeli family has 6.6 children. For all the right's handwringing about Islamic birthrates in the west, Israel is being overtaken by its own bellicose fundamentalists so much more quickly. Eventually, all that would be needed is for the ultraorthodox to militarize and the transformation to a halachic state (run by Jewish law) would happen overnight.

But nothing would facilitate that Israeli transition quicker than an economic boycott which dried up opportunities around the country for Israeli business to flourish. Every educated Israeli would move away, leaving nothing but a dried out husk of a boycotted country sitting atop a nuclear stockpile.

None of that is likely, not for a while at least. But if Harris doesn't turn against Israeli defense, the worldwide left will take matters into their own hands, and the spread of a grassroots economic boycott becomes so much more likely.

So brace yourselves, being a Jew is probably not getting easier any time soon.All reactions

Great American Art: Part 1

 The Musicals of Stephen Sondheim: If I had to go to bat that there is one American creator that can inspire the immortal love that generation after generation get from Shakespeare, Mozart, Rembrandt, Montaigne, Pushkin (read him if you don't believe me...). Leaving aside that he's one of three creators I can think of who unquestionably transcends the classical/popular divide (Gershwin and Joplin, more on them anon), his musicals are owners' manuals for life itself - packed with the wisdom of the world. In Sondheim comedy stands proudly next to tragedy, realism next to the most astonishing fantastical flights - often in the same show, along with a gallery of characters possibly as unforgettable as Hamlet and Juliet. Look particularly to Gypsy, Company, A Little Night Music, and especially West Side Story and Into The Woods. 

New Hollywood: when we talk about 'New Hollywood', we really mean the years 1967-1983. These were the years that movies, beset by television, had no idea what to do to keep audiences interested, so they did the only thing they could: trust the moviemakers to make the movies they wanted to make. There were a lot of creators who had one-off conferences with the mysterium, but they had it because Hollywood was, for that brief period, more interested in art than money, and many of the usual impediments to making something great just weren't there. Look particularly to The Godfather Epic and Star Wars obviously, but just a little more obscurely: Bonnie and Clyde, The Producers, M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, Harold and Maude, Cabaret, American Graffiti, Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Network, Carrie, Being There, The Right Stuff.

Scorsese and Spielberg: but there are two creators from that period whose entire output courts the kind of lastingness we attribute to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. No prizes for guessing who they are. Now that they're on either side of 80, they're still doing much of their best work as though it's still 1975. If Sondheim plants a bullseye between classical and popular, Scorsese and even Spielberg exist just barely on either side of the high/low divide - again, no prizes for guessing which is which. Scorsese, for all his encyclopedic art, would be nowhere near so compelling without the streetwise dialogue and the pop music soundtracks, and that's nearly as true for his historical epics as his gangster ones - epics like Last Temptation of Christ and Killers of the Flower Moon seem to exist as much in the times they were made as they do in the times they're set. Spielberg, on the other hand, would not be Spielberg without shots that use light and darkness with all the virtuosic beauty of Rembrandt or Caravaggio, and whether popular blockbusters or historical epics, seem to have the spiritual charge of painting's old masters. I won't say which to look to by either, they're too well-known to need any recs from me, except to make a special plea for late Spielberg nobody went to the theater for like West Side Story and The Fabelmans, and certain less known  early Scorsese like Mean Streets and After Hours. 

The Simpsons, seasons 1-8: Screw you, it's my list, and any list of great art from me is going to have it. You either get why it's there or you don't. Whether its comedy will need footnotes in 50 years, all of American life is in it. If you want to understand what it means to be American, that's what you watch. 

Louis Armstrong Symphony Hall Concert, Boston, 1947: It was with Satchmo that it all began. Play a single trumpet on a microphone loud enough, it can blow a 100 piece orchestra away. Whether the best pop music is great music as traditional poetics understand it, it is perfect like the great folk art, perhaps the greatest folk art we will ever know. And Louis Armstrong is greater than nearly anything that comes later. Like Mozart and Sondheim, all the comedy and tragedy of the world is in it, often compressed into two minute perfection, along with a type of rhythmic vitality that was almost entirely new to music. But as great as those 1920s recordings are, they only give a dim idea of what Satchmo sounded like live. The Symphony Hall Concert is doubtless a little grander than how dance hall and bar audiences were accustomed to hearing him, but this is him at his best in sound vivid enough for three dimensions. 

Golden Age Disney: Leave aside the universality of stories, simultaneously leave aside any 'problematic' elements in their archetypal narratives, look at any drawing from Pinocchio, Bambi, Snow White, even Dumbo, and ask yourself if there is any less art that goes into it than the greatest art. Then ask yourself how the lightest elements in the human experience can exist next to forces that are so oppressively dark. There may be terrible holes in their storytelling, but narratives as absorbing as any there have ever been are told with art from the ages. 

The Muppet Show - original run 1976-1981: Like The Simpsons, you could not explain the Muppets without watching them. I don't know what else to say. 

The Gershwin Songbook: We tend to remember George Gershwin for his few orchestral pieces, and if people are lucky they get to hear Porgy and Bess, but the best Gershwin, the most perfect, the most vital, is isolated from any show, it's simply the songs themselves with lyrics by brother Ira. Like Sondheim, they perfectly straddle that line between high and low, comedy and tragedy. But if Sondheim exceeds Gershwin, it's because while Sondheim is interested in the hard work of relationships, Gershwin is interested in beginnings, the allure of possibility, particularly sexual possibility, which is the allure of so much sophistication personified by early 20th century Hollywood and Broadway. And yet, like Sondheim, the songs have meanings so much deeper than their surface. Just think of that famous line, 'who could ask for anything more?', when you think about it, he's got rhythm, he's got music, he's got sunshine, he could ask for a shitload more... Start with Ella Fitzgerald, but find as many of the great jazz singers doing Gershwin as you can: Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and crown it all with  Nina Simone doing her towering, tragic cover of I Loves You Porgy. 

Rags by Scott Joplin: The mysterious double life of Joplin. Play it fast and it's a barroom brawl, play it slow and it's Chopin. It fits just as appropriately in the parlor as it does in the whorehouse. Everybody knows The Entertainer and the Maple Leaf Rag, even if they think they don't, but find especially The Entertainer done by Henry Butler (just this once I'll provide a link)), then Maple Leaf Rag done by Sidney Bechet and Solace played by Marvin Hamlisch (as heard in the soundtrack to The Sting). So much of American popular music is in the interpretation rather than the creation, and only jazz has scratched the surface of how you can transform standards you think you know. If you want to hear more originals by Joplin, hear the Cascades Rag and the Elite Syncopations Rag.

Citizen Kane: It's almost impossible to talk about Kane without talking about technique, and literally impossible to talk about it without talking about its making. I'm going to try the former, won't even touch the latter. There were movies before Kane, but there were not Movies, and Kane is more than a movie, it's proof that if the work is great enough, it's dangerous. It's a work so good that it proved dangerous to its makers. So damning seemed this antihero who resembled a newspaper tycoon to an actual newspaper tycoon that the movie was almost destroyed unseen, while its director barely ever worked in Hollywood again, its screenwriter never did, and the studio which bankrolled it went bankrupt. Kane is proof that movies are often as much an artform as anything in Beethoven or Dante, and just as visceral as those two. Two hours go by in a flash of lightning, and so alchemically did Kane tap into the American spirit that it can be interpreted as a prophecy of Donald Trump.

Plenty more if I finish this...

Henry Butler 'The Entertainer' (youtube.com). 

Artists, get ready

Artists, get ready. If America is beginning to look like what we fear it might, it's the artists who get us through the dark periods and help us endure what we can't endure.

We don't like artists in the USA, we don't understand them, we never had all that much use for 'art' rather than 'entertainment.' Sure, we honor a few, but so often we've treated our artists like shit, particularly the good ones. We make it impossible to work at their best because they're too busy having to get an audience interested in their stuff to do the damn work. And so often, even if they get an audience interested, it's by pandering to their very fickle tastes and never doing the work they want to do. Even if you count rock stars and movie directors among our greatest artists, and if they're good enough there's no reason not to, how many of them created cosmically great art their whole lives long the way Michelangelo and Rembrandt did?

We barely let our entertainers be more than one-hit wonders, but think of how many of our great American artists did one great work, or had one great period of a few years, then sauntered on as a shell of what they were, sapped of the ability to create as they used to because they encountered so much resistance along the way. Now imagine how many artists you've never heard of. Many of them did some great works that you'll never experience, even more of them were deprived of the ability to work with their best selves. How many American artists can you think of that got the opportunity to do a whole lifetime of work that fulfills their potential and continually evolves with new influences, new techniques, new insights? I know more about this subject than most people I know and my list would probably be around a dozen; maybe two dozen if I'm being charitable.

But, paradoxical as it seems, great art thrives in times of troubles because that's when audiences are most receptive to it. Art thrives on ambiguity like double meanings and subtle implications that audiences can spend a lifetime parsing and never fully understand. If the audience is receptive enough, they pick up on every implication in the work then add a few of their own.

Obviously, art can't much thrive in a totalitarian state where everyone is in danger of going to jail for treason (though it did in the Soviet Union until they all were killed off), but art can and has thrived in dysfunctional, repressive states where censorship is rife and we are desperate for people to tell the truth about what's happening, even if the truth has to be told slant. If art thrived anywhere in American history, it was in the African-American community. Why? Precisely because they were limited in the truths they could speak, and had to find creative ways to say the unsayable.

When politics ceases to work, that's when art has to.All reactions

Chronic Illness

My forties are likely defined by it: bloating, burping, nausea, and other details of which I will spare you. I no longer eat dairy, gluten, garlic, onion, chocolate, more than half the world's fruits and vegetables, and every restaurant outing is a gamble that can lead to two weeks' illness. Whatever mental capacity I had to concentrate, to work hard, is pretty well gone. Concentration on mental problems becomes minimal. The ability to be spontaneously facile with words begins to dry up, along with the ability to write more than one essay a week. The concentration for reading can feel colossal and comprehension is certainly not what it was. Travel? Well, one can only pray that eventually you...

It's the result of a twenties and thirties of ravenous appetites. One mood medication induced a massive appetite for food, another slowed my colon like a tortoise. I knew the inevitable result would be something like this or still worse, yet I felt completely powerless to stop. I take the most minimal amount now of the former medication, but for the latter there is no antidepressant that will not induce something similar, and potentially a bit worse.

The kingdom of the perpetually mad is a tough enough place, but to be a dual citizen with the kingdom of the perpetually sick is another level of madness. To bear it forces you, however mad, to find strength you didn't know you had as you descend into still new realms of suffering.

And yet the perspective one gains is helpful as well. It instills a new hunger to discover those available bits of life. The concentration on the physical means that there is less mental energy that feeds into mental suffering. Physical suffering forces you to hope in precisely the way that mental suffering takes hope away from you. The two become locked in a battle and one begins to realize that hope is not a state so much as a practice. If one 'performs' hope enough, one can convince oneself to become the performance.

A conclusion later, if I can concentrate...All reactions

I didn't watch the debate

I didn't watch the debate. I won't watch the debate. The moment Biden entered, I switched it off. Whether due to a cold,, or laryngitis, or whether he simply had a bad makeup job, or just that he was tired, the moment he stepped on that stage, Biden looked like that foolish fond old man in Republican wet dreams. Dearest Joe looked older than old, he looked like the increasingly wax likeness of a person in the weeks before their passing. From that moment, I knew that even if Biden were full of life for the last hour of the debate, something so shallow as a debate would be decided by the first impression, and the first impression was that Biden is close to the end.

Joe Biden may come back, even from this. Debates are stupid. Debating Trump is stupider. Barely a single American hasn't made up their mind for whom they're going to vote, and many swing voters are even stupider than they look. If you haven't made up your mind by now, a blow of the wind will make you change your mind again, and again, and again, until your mind shows itself unable to hold anything at all.

The problem isn't Biden, the problem isn't even Trump, the problem is us. The problem is the whole system we've refused to reform for a half-century after reform's necessity was clear. Biden is just the personification of that system.

I believe Joe Biden is the best President of my lifetime. Obama was like Jefferson: an intellectual with words more inspiring than any action; but he proved willing to ditch lofty ideals when the reality of governing set in. Like Jefferson, Obama was truly great when he was great, but sometimes he was hidebound by his own abstract ideals, and when he was the results were scarcely mediocre. George HW Bush might have been up to it, but he governed like an Adams: a patrician who might have been great had he not given his bully pulpit to a mob movement he plainly despised. So Biden is the only President I've ever seen equal to the task of governing, but even if he's equal to the presidency, he's not equal to THIS presidency. This increasingly seems a moment that demands a Washington, a Lincoln, an FDR, who throws out the blueprint and redraws the country from scratch; so even a semi-giant like Eisenhower with enormous pre-Presidential experience and achievements won't cut it. Eisenhower presided over America after a great crisis: a period when the country knew best what it was and what its mission should be, because the world had no choice but look to America for answers they couldn't provide themselves.

Biden is a President for the mid-20th century presiding in the 21st. It is astonishing how much of the old formulas of Eisenhower, Truman and Johnson translate to our own time. Compare the first four years of Obama to the first four years of Biden: Obama did a lot, Biden did more. Yet even so, Biden is the dogmas of the quiet past unequal to our Stormy Daniels present. He's solving 2020s problems with 1950s solutions: they still work pretty well because they were good solutions, but they're old solutions near the end of their shelf life: incapable of solving anything for more than a couple years. Biden is demonstrably unequal to the enormity of an unprecedented crisis, not because he's old, but because our whole era is old. Any infirmities he exhibits are just a metaphor for the bigger problem. Biden does not see a way forward except through frameworks of a past which hardly anyone lived through but him. Obama was unequal to these problems too, but Obama saw that new ways forward were needed, and he spoke to that need for a new, cleaner air which every American intuited.

Obama bet on the light of our common humanity, and that bet allowed inhumanity to slither into the sunlight unashamed. He believed that given the objective truth, America would embrace truth. But few people want the truth, they want a truth told slant to flatter them.

The problem is not Biden or Trump, the problem is the way we process information. There is so much information to process now, an infinity of statistics most find too difficult to interpret except through a filter of ideological theories. There is hardly any news anymore, there is only news that's framed through commentary. Whether these ideological framers mean good or ill, it's impossible for objectivity to get through them. News is no longer news, it's just theories about what's going on. In most people's minds, these theories are either proved by statistics, or the statistics are lies. Artificial intelligence will only make this reality more acute as we have to doubt the veracity of everything we ever see on a screen - screens which are now the way we process the world.

Biden and Trump are just symptoms of this problem. Biden is old truths, old reliabilities, the certainties we've always known, the institutions that keep us together - but these institutions are falling apart, and if they're to be renewed, they need assurance that someone can keep them going through the next four years. Biden, God protect him, can't give that. Trump is a perfect incarnation of the doubts, the worm that eats through plants and certainties, trying to convince us the institutions that kept us together never did, never worked, and should be shed as a snake does its skin.

The problem is that Biden is the old guarantees: NATO, an impartial Supreme Court, legislatures without gridlock, lawmakers who vote their individual beliefs rather than party line. So effective were these old certainties that over of a half-century they made way for new possibilities: Civil Rights, The Great Society, Roe vs. Wade, the Kyoto Protocol, Obergefell vs. Hodges, and, most importantly, the Paris climate Agreement. The story of these victories is not the victories themselves but the lives they make better; but this improvement is temporary, we all know that now. New generations will be forced to watch as these possibilities turn into kindling little different than forest fires. Their challenge, our challenge, is to preserve or resurrect these possibilities for a better life, and to turn them into ironclad certainties.

Obama was wrong, change does not happen from the bottom up. It happens in synergy from the bottom to the top: a sturdy foundation of community activity is what creates a great leader, but change without a presiding leader is anarchy: only with a great leader is lasting change implemented without billions of unforeseen problems along the way. Leaders will come who are able to do it, but we don't know who they are yet, and we may not for a terribly long while. New problems need to be understood before they can be solved, and great as Biden is, he was never the leader to understand them. Great leaders will only come to help us after we take the lead in our own small spaces. We have to vote, we have to volunteer, we have to phonebank, knock on doors, go to town halls, sit on schoolboards, attend those PTA and HOA meetings, clean the local parks, get the crossing guards hired and more stop signs on the roads. Obama was right in the sense that we are the ones we've been waiting for. We are all our own little leaders, and there's no point in larger leadership if there's no leadership beneath them. To a certain extent, we get the leaders we deserve, so if most of us are not willing to demonstrate how leaders should lead, we get bad leaders.

Walter Klein

 I'd heard the name Walter Klein before yesterday, but somehow I'd never listened to him. I think I've happened on another of those artists whom your life changes when you hear them for the first time.

I don't think K. 457 is my favorite Mozart sonata, that will always be K. 533/494 after hearing Alfred Brendel do it live at his final American recital, but K. 457 is almost beyond a doubt the best, the most complex, the most elusive. Mozart's piano sonatas were generally not among the crown jewels of his output, but K. 457 is a crown jewel, and Beethoven's Pathetique would never be conceived without it - hell, at certain points the Pathetique sounds as though Beethoven should have paid Mozart for fair use. Many harmonic sequences in K. 457 are so chromatic that they can almost sound like 1910 Schoenberg.

Even in minor-key Mozart, he is forever skirting the line between happiness and sadness, and K. 457 is one of those works where the harmonies are grim, but the rhythms smile. Just as Mozart created a d-minor opera for Don Giovanni, maybe he had a c-minor opera up his sleeve: imagine Mozart's Hamlet or Candide, comic even amid the grim fatalism.

But some of the most complex chromaticism is right amid that sublime slow movement, which could be sung by Figaro's Contessa, yet imagine the Contessa singing some of those chromatic or six-three harmonies. I don't know if they ache with eros or with agony, but for a few seconds at a time, the most sublime Mozart sounds more like a prefiguration of composers a century later, not just Schoenberg but also Debussy.

The VOX sound is unfortunately somewhat brittle and treble heavy, but in spite of it, I have never been carried away by the slow movement like this. Here is yet another major pianist in the Viennese tradition. Where are they now? Instead of 'the grand tradition' we have an international allotment of 'very serious pianists' who play 'very serious music' that seems completely unconcerned with that oral tradition passed from Beethoven to Czerny to Leschititzky. Even the best of them like Brendel and Schiff are hidebound by their denial that the grand tradition has none of their horror of the bravura. The same tradition that produced Schnabel and Horoszowski produced Friedman and Moisewitsch. It is all connected, and disconnecting the intellectual from the popular does a deep disservice to both.

Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Minor KV 457 - Walter Klien, 1959 - VOX SVBX 5429 (youtube.com)

Two Small Words on What's Going With 'The Situation'

When you're part of a group who chants 'Intifada Revolution/There is only one solution,' whether or not you realize that that's deliberately channeling Hitler's final solution, that's what literally hundreds of millions of antisemites hear. So if you're part of a group which does that, you might or might not be an antisemite, but if you don't dissociate yourselves from the group that organizes the protest, you're at very least an idiot.

All reactions

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If there ever were a ceasefire with Hamas (and there won't be, and if there is, not one that isn't broken a hundred times...), the more chance there is of full scale war with Hezbollah, an organization that created a dictatorship in south of Lebanon in all but name with weaponry that makes Hamas look like slingshots. That's what it means to work together in the 'Axis of Resistance.' The quieter one front gets, the louder the other gets. The more numb people grow to Gaza, the more fresh outrage can be generated by anything that happens in South Lebanon. The whole point of this operation is to keep Israel at war perpetually until world public opinion hemorrhages totally, Israel loses its economic opportunities, its sponsors lose their credibility, and their dictatorial backers gain the prestige lost by democracies like the US and EU. The whole point is to paint the entirety of the Israeli populace, and the US populace, as one monolithic block of imperialism, thereby driving a billion progressive idealists around the world into the arms of political Islamists that would set their allies on fire the moment they gain power over them.

Stay liberal, but do not be naive.

All reaction

A Few Points about Otello

 I just heard Otello performed in concert tonight at the National Symphony in DC. If it weren't already three in the morning I'd write a long post about Otello.

A few points:

1. Otello is a greater work than Othello. Othello is towering, but it's two plays awkwardly shoehorned into one: Othello's descent into jealous madness, and the rise of Iago's evil powers. Verdi, as practical a man of the theater as the Bard, streamlines it to one story by making Iago evil personified from the first word. Othello sprawls into a hundred directions. Otello is a masterpiece of concision. You know exactly why every note is there.
2. The way Verdi cuts Othello in half is through Iago's Credo, which literally sets a trifling prose poem Boito wrote as a vent for his own domestic frustration that had nothing to do with Otello. The setting would be astonishingly modern even in Wagner, and it is one of the core glories of all opera. While Shakespeare's Iago evolves, Verdi's Iago is. Iago, like Hagen, is evil: not only is he evil, he is evil itself.
3. Race is obviously near the core of Shakespeare's conception. One of Shakespeare's many tropes is to show that a villain from a disparaged race is the way they are because circumstances forced them to be. Just as Shylock is a Jew forced into his own stereotype, Othello is a moor forced into his. They are both villains and figures of great pathos. But the primary concern of the Othello story in any form is jealousy, but whereas Shakespeare's Othello is concerned places jealousy in a racial context, Verdi's Otello places it in the context of relationships, how envy leads friends to betray each other, and how envy leads to abusive domestic relationships.
4. There are moments when what happens in the music is so violent that one can only speculate that the music expresses what the stage directions lack. After Verdi sets Shakespeare's line, 'I took thee for the cunning whore of Venice,' the wrath of the music is so terrifying that one can only infer the actions the music implies.
5. Next time you hear Otello's shout of 'a terra, e piangi!' think of Pagliacci. Note for note, Leoncavallo literally sets the same musical cell as 'ridi Pagliaccio!'
6. Much is made by musicologists the subtle ways Iago insinuates his evil machinations in Act II, at least much is made by Ernest Newman. It's important to pace Act II relatively quickly, as Gianandrea Noseda did tonight (too fast elsewhere), because Iago's insinuating chromaticism can seem like mustache twirling unless it's done at the speed of conversation. Whether in Shakespeare or Verdi, Iago has to seem plausibly normal in order to make his devestating effect.
7. Late Verdi is a master, maybe the master, at coming up with the proper onomatopoetic musical gesture for every action. Such gestures are everywhere in Falstaff, but until tonight, the extent of it in Otello didn't quite occur to me. The Act III domestic squabble proceeds like so many fights do. It starts with one partner's cutting remarks that just barely keep civility's veneer, while the other partner does everything they can to subtly imply the unpleasant thing they need, only to proceed to the place of hurt, where the lid of respect falls off. Points of aggravation are repeated over and over again. And in the worst fights, there is always a place where the unforgivable thing is said, the point from which there is no return.
8. As the composer who perfected the tropes of grand opera, Verdi is in a unique place to play around with them. At least twice, Verdi seems as though he is about to go into an aria, once with Iago in Act I, once with Otello at the end of Act III, and probably half a dozen times between them in Act II, only to interrupt what seems like an introductory melody for something far more naturalistic.
9. We always talk about the importance of key and harmony in Wagner, but barely anyone speaks of Verdi as though he has any sort of tonal plan. And yet the harmonic plan in Otello is so clearly laid out. The love of Otello and Desdemona is played out in the tonality of E. The kisses are in a blissful E-major, but the jealousy takes root in b-flat minor, the most distant key from E. The constant rebukes and insinuations are always in a much more complex E-major, like a love that is struggling to remind itself that it exists. But at the most harrowing moments of domestic strife, the music turns to E-minor. The opera ends again in E-major but the most resigned, morendo E-major.
10. But the harmonic masterstroke is that the Willow Song is in C-Sharp minor - E-major's relative minor. The very note E has become the source of Desdemona's pain, and when it comes time to sing Ave Maria, she sings it in the dominant of C-Sharp, A-flat major. It's like a harmonic signal that heaven hears her pain, and will save her for it. All of which leads us back to the low E on the double basses with which Otello makes his final entrance.

...one half-hour later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqEgG2nSCM8

Israel/Palestine 3 1/2 FAQ's

 First the half question, which I won't even put in the form of a question.

There's no reason to talk about the peace proposal Biden put forward. It's entirely political theater to appease a left which refuses be appeased. Biden issued it knowing there is no way the Netanyahu government would adapt it, and knowing that were Netanyahu somehow to change his mind, Hamas would back out at the last minute. There is no peace possible until both Netanyahu and Sinwar are out of government, and the power of both depends on the presence of perpetual war.

So where are we right now? I think the only way to talk about this is to have a bunch of isolated FAQ, or at least, what I would imagine the FAQ is if anybody asked me.

- WAS BIDEN RIGHT TO WITHHOLD WEAPONS SALES TO ISRAEL?

Yes, he was right. It's purely symbolic. The one thing Israel has enough of is weapons, but it's a signal to Netanyahu's government that should Israel pursue its policies aggressively, they can't necessarily count on the US for a blank check to write up everything they need. What any army can never have enough of is manufacturing parts. In war, you never know what parts of your equipment will go wrong and you sometimes need defense manufacturers to ship you parts overnight. Netanyahu's government now has to factor in whether or not they can count on the US completely for every exigent circumstance.

- IS THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT RIGHT TO PROSECUTE NETANYAHU?

I know long time readers probably expect me to go with 'no, f-ck you' and leave it there. I'm going to say 'No, f-ck you' when it comes to the warrant against Netanyahu's defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who proved one of the loudest opposition figures in Netanyahu's government, dissenting from Netanyahu in full view of the public. Regarding Netanyahu, I'm still going to answer a resounding 'no,' but not a 'morally absolute no.'

This question is not quite as simple as it seems, because for Israel, the ICC is purely symbolic. It has no enforceability, and the fact remains, it is far more likely that an exiled Hamas leader like Ismail Haniya can end up in front of the ICC than Netanyahu ever will. If Netanyahu feels trapped by the worry that he might get arrested abroad, then it's a small price to pay for making Israelis feel trapped by him.

The ICC can only prosecute within states that recognize it, and Israel does not - Israel and the US jointly announced they no longer recognize the ICC as of 2002. They are not alone among world powers who don't recognize it: neither China nor India ever recognized the ICC, and Russia withdrew their recognition in 2016.

This means that the ICC warrant is just another piece of diplomatic leverage, and it's hard for me to believe that the ICC would have issued it without Washington's secret consent. This is just the 'carrot and sticking' of normal diplomacy: do what we want, you're rewarded, go against our wishes, you will be punished. More or less, the only part of the war effort that will be hurt by the ICC ruling is people's feelings.

And 'feelings' is ultimately what the ICC question comes down to. The warrant could not have been more poorly timed. The last thing Israel needs is another way to make themselves feel hated in the international arena, and by making Netanyahu seem like a victim, all the ICC has done is to give millions of Israelis who hate Netanyahu a reason to identify with him.

I've said and written this many times, but just as the world's neglect of their concerns radicalized Arabs, so does the world's neglect of Israel's concerns radicalize Jews.

So yes, no, f-ck you.

And this leads us to our next question:

- WHY IS ISRAEL MAD AT NETANYAHU (part 234124534563457)?

There are literally hundreds of reasons stretching over thirty years, but for right now, the reason is that Israelis realize Netanyahu has no plan for the future aside from his own future. It's true, most Israelis couldn't care less what happens in Rafah - you wouldn't either if these people had wanted to kill you since 1948, but even after all this, there is evidence that Israelis do care a little bit about human rights. I forget the exact number, but the percentage of Israelis polled who do not want military rule of Gaza after this is over is somewhere in the sixties or seventies. Israelis want Gazan self-governance.

On the one hand, it's hard to deny, military rule of Gaza would be the most secure option - so long as Israel is protected by a right-wing government in the US, which, starting next year, the US might have forever. But even now, Israel doesn't value their security to the point that they're willing to countenance a true apartheid government.

From 1967 to 2006, Israel ruled the Gaza strip. Israel was desperate to not have it, but Egypt wouldn't take it back in their 1979 peace treaty (the Camp David Accords) and the Palestinian independence movement was nowhere near what it is today. Israel controlled it as a temporary security measure that became more and more permanent, and while there were settlements in Gaza, Gaza is small enough to be nearly settlement-proof. Settlements in Gaza were nowhere near so serious a threat to a lasting peace as it was in the West Bank, where the settlement movement was serious indeed. In 1990, if you asked the average Israeli whether they wanted to keep the West Bank, it would be a resounding yes. If you asked the average Israeli whether they wanted to keep Gaza, it would have been a resounding 'f-ck lo.'

In 2006, prime Minister Ariel Sharon simply disengaged from Gaza and let them break their own heads. Who knows what circumstances it would have taken to work the way we hope, but the fact remains that George W. Bush insisted on a free and fair democratic election. Hamas won the election by three percentage points, and there was never another election. Had a leader like Mahmoud Abbas simply ruled Gaza as a dictator from Day 1 of the disengagement, it would not have been the disaster it was to let Gazans elect Hamas.

If there is no postwar plan, all that would be left is for Israel to simply retake Gazan territory. Last time, the territory was taken with the intent of getting rid of it, this time, the territory would be taken with the intent of holding it. The intent would be the opposite of what it was from 1967 to 2006. Gaza would be ruled with the intent to rule it permanently, and that, therefore, would very much be an apartheid situation.

Whether for moral, humanitarian, or practical reasons, this is the precise situation most Israelis don't want. 100,000 protest it every week. Whatever is going on Israel vs. the world, Israel is at an internal boiling point over the issue of controlling Gaza again, a notion that, for the vast majority of Israelis, is an unacceptable trauma.

More tomorrow, I mean it this time. I'll start working on it now.

A Liberal Israel

Look, I've said this many many times already, I'll probably say it many times again, but I feel stretched on a cross, and I think most liberal Jews feel the same way. It takes no great insight to see the direction Israeli policy is trending, and our blind insistence on a rubber stamp for Israel aid has lead to the blind arrogance of a now permanently ensconced Israeli government. Even if Ganz leaves Netanyahu's government, there is still a conservative majority until 2026, and I think not even Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are stupid enough to give that up, and no liberal government will ever give the orthodox what the conservatives will.

We live in the real world, and there is no world in which the beginning of this war wasn't justified but fantasy, but going after Rafah is the red line past which this becomes a war of choice, and all the casualties are no longer on Hamas. But whether it's Netanyahu, Netanyahu-lite, or Netanyahu-extreme, we are stuck with some version of his policies for a while yet, and if impartial arbiters eventually confirmed that a few more ten-thousand Gazan civilians died, how would it not be justified to call it an ethnic cleansing? How would it not be justified to call it ethnic cleansing in the most brutal scale and manner?

Hamas is estimated to have 30,000 troops, but ask yourselves, what would happen after they're all gone? Knowing that ending the war ends his chances for keeping his job and possibly avoiding jailtime, would Netanyahu ever end the war willingly? So long as Netanyahu is Prime Minister, he will find new threats. If not Hamas then Hezbollah, if not Hezbollah then Fatah, if not Fatah then god knows what else.

It's one thing for Zionists to turn our backs on anti-Zionist Jews, it's another to turn our backs on the few Jews brave enough to say more than once that these policies can kill us. If Israel is endangered again, there's no decent insurance policy for when things get hairy abroad, and it's difficult to conceive of a future when things aren't about to get hairier.

A large part of being Jewish is dealing with ambiguities that would drive the rest of the world insane, and at the same time as we're endangered in the longer term, we're temporarily more secure than ever. We're heading towards a potential future where Trump is the President again, and it's naive to expect that Netanyahu or whatever sheol replaces him won't have blank checks. Not even Netanyahu or anyone short of a Ben-Gvir is dumb enough to wage a genocide, and were a genocide to happen, it wouldn't be a war like what's waged now, but the real thing where Palestinians are killed with the impunity with which China may have annihilated the Muslim Uighurs. But eventually, Netanyahu will almost certainly try everything he can to deport Palestinians from territories he very much views as Israel's, I'm sure he's tried already, but he will almost certainly fail. And yet, if an Israeli PM of the future offers some nearby country in crisis a price astronomical enough, some country can buy them.

So some form of ethnic cleansing is a very likely future. The worst of it wouldn't be in 2024, but by 2050 after global warming and AI can hit with the force of dozens of atom bombs. No country will get through it without the stink of their shit clinging to them for the next hundred years, but no people is punished for their sins as frequently as Jews are. After war, ethnic cleansing that goes well beyond 1948, that is a very real potential future, but god knows what would follow it for Jews.

Ethnic cleansing is not just Israel's likely future, it's the likely future of the entire world. In the years after World War II, Palestine was just another ethnic cleansing among dozens: German speakers from every Eastern European country, 12-14 million of them, along with 3 million displaced Poles in the Polish Civil War that followed WWII (including my grandparents). India and Pakistan, 11 to 14 million displaced in the partition, as many as 2 million killed. Stalin ordered 3 and a half million ethnic minorities resettled all around the USSR to break them of their national identities - the expulsion of 300,000 Italian speakers from Yugoslavia, the expulsion of 150,000 Turks from Bulgaria, 100,000 Greeks from Turkey, 300,000 Indians from Burma. By the 70s, another 300,000 Rohingya from Burma, 425,000 Chinese from Cambodia, 140,000 Kurds from Syria. By the 90s, another 360,000 Turks from Bulgaria, 60,000 Turks from Uzbekistan, 100,000 Bhutanese from Nepal, another 150,000 Rohingya from Burma, 125,000 in a population transfer between Ossetia and the rest of Georgia, roughly 4 million former Yugoslavians displaced in the wars that followed the country's collapse, roughly 800,000 from the Kashmir province on the India-Pakistan border, untold smaller expulsions, and, don't forget, 270,000 to 400,000 Palestinians from Kuwait! And, nobody cares off course, but 1 million Sephardic Jews expelled from all around the Middle East to Israel by 1970. And yet it's all Palestine, Palestine, Palestine as though the world itself didn't commit the same sin. After war comes, ethnic cleansing is the sin of every peace that follows, and in the whirlwind that follows the worst of it, it won't just be Palestinians that are expelled.

We liberal Jews are neither leftists nor conservatives, and we're reminded every day of how far we are from both camps. We know that there is no Jewish future worth having without Israel. We also know that there is no Jewish future without Israel taking so much more care. We are at an impasse, and there may be no fix for it. Israel must survive, but it must survive as a country worth fighting for.

Yes, it's true, Jewish loyalties are dual to the US and Israel. Get over it. This accusation of 'dual loyalty' usually comes from people who find the US a force for evil and feel no loyalty to the country at all. And yes, it's true, we conspire to make the US pursue Israeli interests. Not in the way people think, but yeah, I guess it has to be seen as some kind of conspiracy, even if compared to most political conspiring, it's relatively benign. We've partaken in a conspiracy to make the US pursue interests which, until recently, were in the interests of both the US, and of human rights. Oh how evil we are. Damn us all to the cross again.

Please try to understand, for Jews - not Israelis, Jews - it is still October 7th. The writing is on the wall again. It's not just about October 7th, it's about the 2000 years of October 7ths which might follow. We had a lifetime off from history's melee, but we are right back to where we were. Some Jews have to be forgiven for not seeing that peace is the only way out. Jews are subject to the same historical forces everybody else is, and if you put the backs of Jews up against the sea, they will radicalize and fight just like any Islamist would. But read Jewish history, not just the highlight reel but the unflattering stuff they didn't teach us in day school. We usually lose, and there were times we probably deserved to lose. We're like any country or peoplehood, we get complacent and arrogant, and we demonize the people who point that out. But there's a reason we remember Jeremiah and Isaiah: they denounced the ways of the Israelites, but it turned out they were right, and we paid the price sevenfold for not minding our sins.

So f*ck human rights. We need to pursue peace to save ourselves. No god would let us win forever.

Ten reasons I haven't written about the campus protests so far.

 

1. I think they're incredibly silly.

2. I think the counterprotests are incredibly silly.

3. Academia is the last place to encounter meaningful thought

4. This might be the most complex issue on Earth and everybody involved in this silly flareup reduces the issue to something that fits on a fortune cookie.

5. There's not a single person involved in any capacity of these college conflicts who is not willfully toxifying discourse on a scale far more massive than a social media feed.

6. Whether the ideal is justice, security, liberty, equality, halacha, or sharia, idealism untempered by realism about human capabilities is what gets people killed, as untethered idealists inevitably come into lethal conflict with idealists of other stripes.

7. Academia is not only the node of where ideas are created, but of where bad ideas are created. The vast majority of academic ideas are unusably bad. That's fine, because the point of academia is to create ideas, but there is no place in the world more disconnected from praxis than the modern university, so they have no way of knowing that their ideas are bad until they can prove so in practice. Which at this rate they eventually will.

8. All through modern history, from the original Protestants to the original socialists, the academic disconnect from real life has been a reliable unwitting incubator of revolutionary death.

9. What began with a revolution of liberals in 1848 seeking self-determination became the Marxist pre-war revolutionaries of the years around 1900 in which social democrats collaborated with the most violent Marxists and anarchists. And now, the basically liberal precepts of the sixties turn into the illiberal left-wing revolts of the 2020s, in which intersectional social democrats collaborate in real time with a number of actors brutal enough to make Israel look like Switzerland.

10. The funding of these protests by hostile states is comically obvious. So is Israel's funding of counterprotests.

Probably more later.

Grrr....