Friday Big-Ass Halloween Playlist

Warren Zevon: Werewolves of London

Weber: Der Freischutz - the Wolf's Glen Scene (in the masturbating rabbit production)

Michael Jackson: Thriller  (sigh...I can't leave it off, can I?)

Mussorgsky: Night on Bald Mountain

Ray Parker Jr.: Ghostbusters Theme Song (still as awesome as it was when I was six)

Berg: Wozzeck - act III scenes 2 and 3

R.E.M: I Walked with a Zombie

Tom Lehrer: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park

Siouxsie and the Banshies: Halloween 

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire (45 min.)

Kanye West: Monster (in case you didn't know...NSFW)

Berlioz: Dream of a Witches Sabbath

Rocky Horror: Time Warp

Mahler: Symphony no. 7 - third movement

Bollock Brothers: Horror Movies

Cole Porter: Miss Otis Regrets

Annie Lennox: Love Song for a Vampire

Verdi: Rigoletto - storm scene

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising

Saint-Saens: Danse Macabre

Bobby 'Boris' Pickett: Monster Mash (I don't care what anybody says...it's an amazing song)

Bach: Toccata and Fugue in d-Minor

Marilyn Manson: This is Halloween

Schubert: Die Erlkonig

Eels: Fresh Blood

Flanders and Swann: Have Some Madeira M'Dear

Ramones: Pet Sematary

Liszt: Totentanz

Alice Cooper: Welcome To My Nightmare

Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta - third movement (as heard in The Shining).

White Zombie: I'm Your Boogie Man

Ligeti: Requiem - 26 min. (as heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Alan Parsons Project: The Raven

Gesualdo: Moro Lasso

Ozzy Osbourne: Bark at the Moon

Rachmaninov: Isle of the Dead (25 min.)

AC/DC: Highway to Hell

Ravel: La Valse

Johnny Cash: Ghost Riders in the Sky

Candide: What a Day for an Auto-da-fe

16 Horsepower: Black Soul Choir

Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini (24 1/2 min.)

Will Smith: A Nightmare on My Street

Richard Strauss: Salome Final Scene

Charlie Daniels Band: Devil Went Down to Georgia (on principle I've never learned this song because it's the only song people ever request from a fiddler. So I might as well include it on the playlist. Also, has anybody ever noticed that Charlie Daniels can't fiddle, I mean, seriously, he's bad.)

800 Words: Dreams from My Mother Part II

When my father would introduce his father-in-law he would invariably say “This is my father-in-law, Morris Witow. He killed millions.” Or so he claims…

For twenty-seven years, my grandfather was an engineer for the United States Department of Defense. During World War II, he was on the team that built the Smart Bomb, and apparently made a discovery that led to its successful invention. After spending World War II at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, my grandmother wanted to live nearer to her parents. As a result, my grandfather lived in Silver Spring during the week so he could work at the Pentagon, and would return to Baltimore on weekends to the house where my mother lived with her mother, younger brother, her Bubbie and Zaydie and her great aunt (Tante) Miriam.

It is said of Zaydie Witow that he was the perfect gentleman except when three issues came up: Richard Nixon, Chicken Chow Mein, and Liberals. I’ll deal with chicken chow mein in another post, but according to my father, the moment somebody said the L-word, this meek and mild man grew red with the beastliness of a wild animal, his fury unable to be assuaged until somebody reminded him that Richard Nixon was still president. My father also claims that when he first started dating my mother, there was a picture of President Nixon in every room of her parents' house, whereas in his parents’ house, there were pictures of Nixon on the toilet paper.

Zaydie’s father, Henry Witow, was a Socialist. He was an intellectual with red hair and a fiery temper in whose apartment you had to be careful not to trip over piles of books (sounds familiar…). When the factory he worked for offered him a job as a foreman, he turned it down on principle.  He apparently got into a long standing family feud with his Communist cousins about whether Stalin’s Soviet Union was the socialist utopia. He died in 1941 and did not live to see his two sons enlist in the army. My great-uncle Nathan served in the Navy for the war’s duration and apparently survived a sunken battleship, whereas Zaydie was called into the engineering corps after six months and never saw real action.

My Zaydie was always to the right of his father, but as a young man that meant that he was a New Deal Liberal. I don’t know precisely when or why it is that my grandfather decided to abandon New Deal Liberalism to become a member of neoconservatism’s charter generation. All I know is that it was sometime in the mid-50’s, and that during the McCarthy era, my grandmother was questioned because she was on a mailing list at a bookstore that was known to house Communist meetings, or employees, or something... My grandfather, hired by the federal government after he learned no private engineering firm would hire a Jew if they could help it, doubtless feared for his job’s security – perhaps doubly so in light of his father’s activities.

At the center of the story of my father’s family is money. At the center of the story of my mother’s family is politics. Both sides can accuse the other of rampant hypocrisy in their beliefs (and do). My father, like his father, has always voted resolutely Democrat, and for as long as I can remember has railed against a system of government that would allow the undeserving wealthy to claim rewards made possible by their hard-working employees. But as my mother likes to point out, he rails against the very system that allowed his businesses to prosper just as his father’s did before him. For years, his main source of income has been investments, on which there is a 14% capital gains tax, which means he pays half in taxes what he would pay if he made most of his money through income. For just as long in my memory, my mother and uncle, like their father before them, have always railed against the inefficiencies, corruption, and mendacity of government wastefulness at the expense of the taxpayer and the self-sufficient entrepreneur. And yet for seventy years, my mother’s family has made its career in government. My grandfather was defense department engineer, my mother used to be an economist for the State of Maryland, and my uncle is a State Department officer in the Foreign Service. For forty years, my Bubbie has lived like a queen on Zaydie’s pension – which has allowed her to take trips by the dozen to six of the world’s seven continents. Like my father, my mother’s family benefited enormously from the very system they claim to hate.

Is it simply hypocrisy in both cases? Or is there any deeper motive at play? I suppose that in both cases, the two sides of my family grew an understandable but unhappy contempt for the frustrations of their jobs – perhaps resentment at how undeserving colleagues benefited, or an exaggerated sense of the importance of the wrongs they saw every day at their jobs. The personal is always political, and like so many millions of people in America, both my parents seem to vote against their own interests. Every evil we see done will linger in our minds more than any five acts of good (that’s actually a statistic), and in the journey to self-improvement, it is very easy to get distracted by all of life’s impediments.

Friday Playlist: The Arrested Development of James Levine

Note: This is easily my most viewed post, and because of that, I have long feared to keep this post up because for Levine to hide in plain sight as he has, he must have a very fearsome legal team at his disposal. Below I say that Levine must be considered innocent until proven guilty, but the legal standard of proof is different than public opinion, the trial goes on in people's minds. The rumors were so all-pervasive that while I did not believe in my mind that Levine was innocent, I thought the truth could not have been as bad as the rumors. The truth now seems even worse. In the wake of these horrifying revelations, worse even than my worst fears of what might be true about Levine, I suppose a small further comment ought to be made. This should be considered the entirety of any comment I have about the matter to any press. About two years ago I got a call on my cell from a blocked number of a person claiming to have been abused by Levine. Twice, people have left anonymous comments on this blogpost to the same, horrifying, effect. All three may well have been from the same person, there was never a name involved so while I believed the person, I did not keep the comments up for fear that I was inviting legal involvement larger than an amateur music critic who makes no money from music journalism except an occasional Washington Post review five and more years ago could ever afford to face. It was to my great regret that I could not further assist people in such terrible need, but by even writing this post, I believe I've done at least a small bit more to give this story some small public than anyone in the mainstream music press did. The last time a person left a comment about being abused was roughly two weeks ago. I left a comment afterwards saying that I would regrettably delete their comment after a short time, but if ever was the right time to go to the press, this is it. A few days later, I deleted the exchange as I had once before. I have no idea if the person who left the comment was the same person whose story is now told or if it is the same one who called me two years ago from an unidentifiable number, but if it is, please be assured that it is a great regret of mine that I could not be of more assistance. What you have endured is so exponentially far beyond any small fear I've had of legal action, and while I did what I thought good judgement told me to do, my heart disagreed with my brain. I hope most sincerely you can find peace in having your story told in a way I could not provide. I hope that you and any other musician abused in such a manner find a way to heal from all this horror and that none suffer in the future as you have already.

All best wishes in what must be a harrowing process of healing,

Evan Tucker 12/3/17

Apparently conductors are well known enough in Japan that comics can make a living on conductor humor. Well in any event, this cheery Levine impression (4:50) is about thirty years dated. The once boyish and enthusiastic wunderkind of the Met has gradually morphed into something vaguely resembling Verdi’s Grand Inquisitor, or at least Pagliacci’s Tonio. As late as twenty years ago, James Levine still looked like a kid in love with opera who couldn’t believe his good luck to be running America’s greatest opera house, but he’s long since come to look forlorn; as though he’s fighting against the bulk of his baggage, physical and emotional, to give the best possible performance.

You’ve all seen James Levine, whether you realize it or not. Every time you’ve flipped past PBS you may have caught a bit of a Metropolitan Opera broadcast. If you flip past during the overture, you’ll see a man fat enough to burst through his white tie, with a huge jewfro that went out of style in 1978, and the same aviator glasses he wore 40 years ago that look creepier with every new ailment. With his right hand he beats time with a baton so large that you wonder how he hasn’t impaled himself with it on his protruding gut. His left hand shapes the phrases, and he it out in the air as though he can feel the texture of the sound with his hand like a piece of silk. He used to conduct with a perpetual 1000 watt shit-eating grin on his face, as though he couldn’t believe anyone could have so much fun. In recent years, he looks as though he’s undergoing an endurance test, full of downcast looks, concealed panting, and painful grimaces.

Other conductors build their reputations on photogenic grandstanding. They go from city to city, charm and inspire orchestras into doing their bidding, and leave before the orchestras tire of them with $30,000 in their pockets for a week’s work.  But James Levine tried to work with the same few ensembles for the entirety of his career and came amazingly close to fulfilling that goal. In this way as in so many others, James Levine is the uncoolest great musician in America. A truly gifted conductor so completely cut off from any new influence that he is the Great American Conductor of 1953. For forty years, Levine seems to have followed an inner voice which tells him he can bring the Met ever closer to his ideal operatic performance. It’s a luxury available to only one musician in America, made possible only by the fact that his opera house sits on a $240 million endowment.  

Opera, once the most populist of all art-forms, is New York’s ultimate elitist pursuit - where Upper-East Side bad plastic surgery and combover cases take shelter against the ruffians whom they fear will mug them on the way back to their Mercedes, a Koch brother gets a whole Lincoln Center theater named after him, and a production of an opera written after the beginning of the Great Depression is considered dangerously edgy. Opera, once the most dangerous artform in the world for which imperial censors guarded like hawks against implications of treason, became a safe relic of a culture so alien to us that no one but those with vast quantities of money and leisure time can possibly hope to appreciate it.

Surely Levine must notice that the distance between the sort of opera he loves and the opera his audiences crave grows larger year by year. It was already beginning when he took over in 1973, and it’s only become more true as the decades wore on. The Italian immigrants who grew up on this music died out decades ago. Their middle-class children who grew up playing piano and watching Beverly Sills on Ed Sullivan have long since been priced out of everything but the Met’s cheapest seats. New York’s gay community, a faithful bedrock to so many opera houses, was depleted by AIDS, and younger gay people have other enthusiasms. Opera in America is now beholden to the high-professional class: financial analysts, lawyers, industrialists, stockbrokers, with maybe a few doctors here and there. Most of them are looking for ways to dress up and appear classy to their dates. What better place to go than to the opera?

And these new audiences demand things which previous generations would never think to demand. They don’t know the plots of the great operas, and they don’t want to have to read up on them. So these new audiences need subtitles over the stage. They neither understand why people would express themselves through singing the same line over and over again, nor what makes the thrill of opera singing any different than the thrill of a Broadway show. So they need an involving theatrical experience in which the characters look plausible. If that means great singers who are wooden actors and physically unfit for the parts can’t sing the roles, that’s a sacrifice which apparently must be made. Opera is theater now, not music.



So as the years went on, the Great Compromise was struck. The Metropolitan Opera would spew its money onto the stage with theatrical productions lavish enough that not even Broadway could compete. Whereas European opera houses would mount radical productions which rethought (and sometimes didn’t) every aspect of the staging, the Met would only hire directors like Franco Zefferelli and Otto Schenk, who truly know and love the operatic tradition, and would sooner retire than ever stray outside the boundaries of what conventional operatic taste would deem acceptable. The Metropolitan Opera became “conventional opera +,” nothing new, nothing shocking, but all the comforting old operatic paradigms rethought and replenished in newly vibrant productions and performances that teach you more about what you already knew.

It can’t be denied that for a time, this approach worked rather brilliantly. Levine’s Met was opera’s great conservative organization (the two terms are not mutually exclusive). The American singers Levine trained may not have the charisma or distinctiveness of Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi, they may not speak fantastic Italian or German; but they always sing and act competently well at a time when not even that can be guaranteed at the opera house. The singers at the Met rarely sounded as though they had much understanding or passion for what they sang, but they were consummate professionals who tried to fulfill Levine’s gentle requests and Zefferelli’s searing demands to the dotted i. Those who didn’t, like Kathleen Battle, were shown the door. Opera in New York may not have been the place to expect conceptions of the world to be turned upside down, but at least the artform was taken seriously.

And at least there still was enough of an audience to appreciate what Levine was doing. It wasn’t just the ABC’s of opera that were selling out (Aida, La Boheme, Carmen), it was performances of Don Carlo and La Forza Del Destino, Idomeneo and Cosi fan Tutte, The Italian Girl in Algiers and L’Elisir d’Amore, Elektra and Ariadne auf Naxos. Levine may have stuck to opera’s tried and true composers, but he gave every one of them their full due with lavish productions featuring the best possible singers and America’s greatest orchestra in the pit - most of them preserved for posterity through PBS’s series: Great Performances, a federally-funded (at least partially) series meant to cover the best of opera, theater, music, and dance in America - one which like Levine’s Met, justified its grandiosity and pomp by never feeding audiences fare that’s too challenging.

By the standards of yesterday, Levine is as close to the ideal opera conductor as the world has ever seen. Unlike the podium tyrants of the mid-20th century, Levine never browbeats singers, he works with them, mentors them, persuades them of his conceptions. He’s become the most sought after mentor to half-a-dozen generations of opera stars. He’s even trained the pit orchestra, historically the bane of every opera house in the world, to the highest standard of any orchestra in America - often playing six first-class performances every week.

But unfortunately, the world no longer needs James Levine, and it’s hard to think he doesn’t know that. He was the perfect conductor for the era in which he began his career, but opera today demands something very different from what Levine gives... assuming that it demands anything from us at all. The 20th century has passed Levine by, and while like all dutifully musicians of his age he voices a passion for high atonality, the greatness in of 20th century operas after Turandot and Wozzeck completely seems to elude him. Janacek, Schrecker  Prokofiev, Hindemith, Martinu, Britten, Stockhausen, Henze, Carlisle Floyd, Philip Glass, John Adams, all pass him by. One can’t completely blame him, the greatness in many of these composers eludes me too. But to find so little of value as to avoid all of them is unacceptable for the world’s great opera conductor. Furthermore, to venture so little into opera before Mozart and Gluck is a concept just as dated. The world of opera, indeed, the whole world of classical music, is no longer music from 1720 to 1910. It’s now music from 1200 to the present day. Much of that new/old music sucks, but we have to sift through the bad stuff to find the good ones.  

He is one of the world’s truly great Mozart conductors. Levine’s is a never fashionable conception, beholden neither to the arid dogmas of period performance nor to the super-smooth Dresden Doll delicacies of the old school. Under Levine, Mozart never loses his smile, but can also be as dramatically involving as Beethoven. It was a similarly winning combination in Richard Strauss, where the mix of delicacy and violent drama is perfect for Levine’s temperment. He is far from the world’s greatest Wagner conductor, and has given lots of wooden, lumbering performances over the years of a composer he never sounded as though he could conduct with 100% conviction. I don’t blame him. But he was always competent in Wagner and even if he couldn’t always make Wagner sound interesting, at least he did the best he could. Ditto Puccini, a composer which Levine always tried to ‘help’ by downplaying its vulgar elements at the expense of all the reasons people love Puccini.  

But it is under Verdi’s name that Levine has lodged his legacy. Since Arturo Toscanini, no superstar conductors have been so completely devoted to Verdi as Riccardo Muti and James Levine. Neither is Toscanini’s equal in this composer (has any conductor ever performed a composer so well as Toscanini did Verdi?), but both have rendered their services for him, for better or worse. Muti is perhaps the one conductor since Toscanini who demands the utmost fire and brimstone from Verdi performances, but he does not have Toscanini’s naturalness of pacing and drives the music to the limit of human possibility with very little repose in between. He is well-known for insisting on Verdi’s urtext: under Muti, singers are prohibited from interpolating notes that Verdi didn’t write, substituting louder dynamics, or bending rhythms. Yet Muti consistently permits himself all those things he disallows from others (not for nothing is he nicknamed Mutollini). Levine’s Verdi, while certainly dramatic, is more understated.  Under Toscanini, Verdi took on all the power of a Shakespearean drama. Not a single moment was milked, and every detail of the piece was in its perfect place to make the whole work. Listening to Toscanini in Aida the Requiem or Otello or Falstaff is like listening to perfection itself in which every detail sounds precisely the way it was meant to sound. Other Verdi performances are better as opera, but only Toscanini can make you understand why Verdi is one of the world’s greatest dramatists. No one since Toscanini got closer to that level of understanding than Levine, but Levine’s Verdi is not quite so insistent on following the score to the absolute letter of the law (though closer than virtually everybody else). If Toscanini is classical drama, then Levine’s Verdi is a classical epic - exciting in spite of its dry passages and with an increasing  tendency to be too slow going.

Indeed, slowness has come to be Levine’s most definable quality as a musician. At the beginning of his career, James Levine was known as a fleet, ultra-dramatic conductor who went for clean linear interpretations with razor-sharp ensemble. Today, he’s known for ultra-slow, ultra-lush performances that critics charitably call ‘massive.’

He is the perfect conductor for the era in which he began his career. But even Leonard Bernstein, dead for 22 years, is still a more current,  meaningful figure to music today than James Levine. Lenny showed today’s musicians how to talk to audiences, how to engage other genres, how to hold off routine, and how to stay in love with music you’ve played a hundred times. The old Lenny became a sad figure himself on the podium, equally if not more prone to massively slow tempos and painful grimacing in his dotage. But Lenny grew old, fat, and sad because the times were so clearly behind him. Jimmy’s grown sad because he stood still while the world clearly moved on.


There is something about Levine that refuses to move on from things as they once were. I don’t know what it is, and I think very few people do. When he began his career, he was known as the most loquacious interviewee in classical music, happily chatting up journalists for hours at a time. Today, he rarely ever gives interviews, and even other musicians say that he will rarely if ever discuss anything non-musical.

Clearly, things changed with him, probably sometime around the early-to-mid 90’s. We finally learned that Levine’s hand-tremors were in fact what everybody had assumed and what Levine had denied for years and years: Parkinson’s Disease beginning in 1994. But why wait so long to tell everybody? Why the secrecy? As has clearly been proven in the last few years, they’ll keep him as music director of the Met until they need to shovel him in the ground. It should certainly strike people as odd that  an admittance was so long coming, but not half as odd as the fact of the particular week it happened. Just a few days before, Kurt Masur disclosed that he had Parkinson’s Disease. Masur, sixteen years older than Levine, is a defiantly old school German conductor without Levine’s singular talent. His performances, particularly in recent years, can be quite generic. But as has been seen so dramatically in the past when Masur was one of the heroes of East Germany’s fall, Masur is a much braver man than Levine. After Masur released his secret to the acclaim of many in the music world for his bravery, Levine announced just a few days later that yes indeed, he has Parkinson’s too, has since at least 1994, will never walk again, and must now use an electric wheelchair to get around. And oh, by the way, he’s planning to return again to conduct at the Met after three years absence.

And then, there are the ‘dark secrets.’ I don’t know when the rumors began surfacing of Levine’s sexual peculiarities, but I first read them in Norman Lebrecht’s 1997 book, Who Killed Classical Music, in which a barely disguised pseudonym was used that could clearly not have been anybody else. The book contained a blatant allegation that Levine was molesting younger musicians  of both sexes - not children, perhaps not even teenagers, but certainly far younger than him and without consent. Anyone would become sad after hearing allegations about themselves like those, because even if the allegations aren’t true, the damage to his reputation is automatically done. Other rumors started popping up, of the Met board hushing up his arrest in a public men’s room, of aides cruising to procure him male lovers, of chamber music sessions in the nude. I used to frequent a music shop in DC where the owner claimed that he got a creepily suspicious leer from James Levine when he was younger and working as a Lincoln Center Intern. From the beginning of his career, Levine has had a live-in girlfriend whom he never married, (and now refers to, simply, as his ‘closest friend’). It always felt like a ruse which gay men use to conceal their real sexuality, probably for potential wealthy donors in this case. Even so, rumors like these are dangerous (I’m almost uncomfortable discussing them) and have a way of doubling in on themselves. Until definitive proof is brought, James Levine must be considered innocent until proven guilty, and even if even one of these rumors is true, surely all of them can’t be - the nude chamber music one is actually kind of charming...

But whatever the truth about his emotional life, his physical decline got more and more pronounced, perhaps sadder too. The happy-go-lucky kid seemed all too beset by worries. He began to branch into orchestral life, but the branching out was all too late. Levine was always a talented conductor of orchestral concerts with whose abilities seemed to center around late-Viennese composers like Mahler and Schoenberg. But by the time he took over Sergiu Celibidache’s Munich Philharmonic in 1999, he seemed nearly as immobile as Celibidache was in the years before he died. By the time Levine became director of the Boston Symphony, something was clearly wrong - James Levine was looking dumpy and frail even by James Levine standards. Sixty-year-old men are not supposed to look like that, and if they do, they should not be holding down two full-time jobs. Levine’s tenure with the Boston Symphony began in a shower of praise - a great American orchestra was finally being revived and a great American conductor was finally getting his due as a star. But then came injury after injury, it became difficult to watch Levine do anything on the podium. It was clear that when he could even make it to the concert, he was in terrible pain.  The cancellations became more and more frequent, and the Boston Symphony was left without even a good guest conductor, as often as not leaving their most important concerts of the year in the hands of an unproven assistant - and not every thirty-year-old is James Levine.

This is a man whose entire life has been music from beginning to end. He began life as a child prodigy pianist, mentored by a who’s who of mid-century American musical life. As many child prodigy families do, his family made enormous sacrifices to bring Levine to where he is now,  and his brother still sometimes acts as his assistant. He was George Szell’s assistant at the Cleveland Orchestra for six years (and if being George Szell’s assistant doesn’t screw up a person’s psyche, nothing would). Three years after he left Cleveland, when he was not yet thirty, he was running the world’s biggest opera house. How does a person continue growing when he was already born with everything? How does a person virtually born at the top of his profession experience the world outside of it?

Rather, people like that cling to things they already know. They obsessively savor every new detail they can find of the familiar, and they make themselves ever more at home in their home. James Levine may not have much life outside music, and whatever life he has may be extraordinarily dysfunctional, but within his little sliver of music, he is the master of all that he surveys. We should be happy he’s returning to the stage. But we should also understand why James Levine is so reluctant to give up his positions, even after he hasn’t been able to conduct a concert in over two years. If he didn’t have a baton in his hand, would James Levine be anybody at all?

800 Words: A Post-Wedding Brunch Fight About Barbara Jordan Part 2

….never mind that Roosevelt barely lifted a finger for black civil rights so as to appease his Dixiecrat constituency; never mind that Roosevelt turned a blind eye to the heinous war crimes of the Soviet Union’s troops, never mind that Roosevelt aided military dictators sympathetic to American interests from Duvalier to Trujillo to Chiang Kai-Shek to even Franco, never mind that Roosevelt was perfectly prepared to collaborate with Mao in order to subdue Japan, never mind that Roosevelt approved the firebombing of civilian areas in Dresden and Tokyo that killed half-a-million people, never mind that Roosevelt refused to find a place to grant immigration asylum to millions of Jews who couldn’t get out of Europe, never mind that all Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and fireside chats could not put eight million Americans back to work.

And yet Roosevelt remains one of history’s most beneficent leaders. If modern world history has a single Great Man (in both influence and morality), it must be Franklin Roosevelt. In spite of all these awful compromises, and occasionally because of them, he is still perhaps the greatest of all presidents in American history. Being such a towering historical figure, his mistakes are correspondingly grander than those of lesser leaders. But insofar as we live in a world greater than that which existed in Roosevelt’s era, it is the world of this particular Great Man’s creation.

When John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, was asked if there had ever been anything like the Great Depression, he replied, “It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.” We currently live in the worst recession since the Great Depression, but this recession is a mere pebble in the pool compared to the Great Depression’s tidal waves. Like Barack Obama after him, Roosevelt used the bully pulpit to advocate for necessary reforms, but he never, never, NEVER advocated for a single policy before he felt the public was ready to find it acceptable. If Roosevelt was able to advocate for more than Barack Obama currently does, it was because the American public – and the world – was correspondingly more desperate. Roosevelt realized that like military surgeons, a world leader must play triage with matters of life-or-death in order to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  Along the way to saving as many lives as possible, many people – perhaps just as many if not more – will be left to die.

We probably live in a climate closer to the damaged spirit of the 1930’s and 40s than the world has ever since come, but the level of danger is far, far lower than it then was. Merely in America, Roosevelt faced challenges from demagogues left and right (literally), any one of which could have wrested the reins of power from a less able leader than FDR. Consider just one of them:

Father Charles Coughlin preached to tens of millions every Sunday on the radio waves to broadcast that the New Deal was not nearly extreme enough in its social programs, and that the United States needed a government friendly to Hitler and Mussolini to stop the Communist/Jewish influence pervading American society. In 1935 he began to organize support for a candidacy for Huey Long that would unite the poor of the South (of all races) with Catholics. When Long was assassinated, he attempted to form a coalition with Dr. Francis Townsend (the pioneer of social security) to unite senior citizens, nativists, and Catholics against Roosevelt. When that coalition didn’t materialize, he promoted an organization on-air called the Christian Front, an org devoted primarily to anti-semitism and the violent overthrow of the United States government.

Many feel that Franklin Roosevelt did much more to sell his revolutionary policies than Barack Obama has. Perhaps they’re right, but if they are, it is because the desperation of his era enabled Roosevelt to have much more leeway in his time to advocate for positions than Obama does in ours. For their time, Roosevelt’s policies were far more revolutionary than Obama’s are in our own day. The New Deal was a revolution, Obamacare is merely a restoration. Modern liberalism and modern prosperity did not exist until Roosevelt created it, Obama is merely trying to create its resurgence.. And because our era, for all its problems, is so much less desperate, Obama has far less leeway to ram his programs through than Roosevelt did without a major backlash in the voting booth.

Furthermore, no matter how forcefully Roosevelt sold the New Deal, there were millions of people who felt that The New Deal did not go nearly far enough. Many millions were quite bitter that Roosevelt did not nationalize the banks. Many of them talked of abandoning the Democratic party for a Socialist government. Father Coughlin spoke for many millions of those people when he said that America should make an alliance with Hitler and adapt policies similar to those of National Socialism. But it would only be a few years later that Roosevelt’s own Vice-President, Henry Wallace, broke with the Roosevelt administration and said that the United States should have a strong and completely friendly alliance with the Soviet Union. Many in America agreed with Wallace, and felt that a Socialist government was not nearly enough. We often forget that the Communist party in America was taken extremely seriously in the 1930’s. At their height, the American Communist Party numbered 200,000 members, and millions more attended their meetings. At a time when 8 million Americans were unemployed, the Soviet Union was the one country in the world that could guarantee full employment and their staggering record of human rights abuses was barely known to outsiders. Even those who believed in Roosevelt’s vision greatly feared that Roosevelt did not speak out forcefully enough against those who wished him ill. Roosevelt never took on Coughlin’s criticisms publicly, nor did he Huey Long, or Henry Wallace. And yet it’s Roosevelt’s vision of the future that created our world, not theirs’.

The extent of Roosevelt’s greatness is still underestimated. For all his faults, the modern prosperity of North America, Europe, and East Asia is his creation. And he created the foundation for that prosperity at a time when the whole world could have easily fallen prey to Stalin or Hitler’s designs, even America. Compared to how forcefully Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco, even Churchill, DeGaulle and Ben-Gurion pursued their agendas, Roosevelt was as unautocratic as could be. One might even argue that he was only as much an autocrat as was necessary for America to resist the autocratic temptation. Compared to what could have been, Roosevelt was a model of restraint. Roosevelt may have been more forceful in his advocacy than Obama, but only because the public demanded it. Never, never, NEVER in Roosevelt’s career did he stray an inch past the threshold which the plurality of Americans were ready to accept.

Like Obama, Franklin Roosevelt was an utterly undistinguished politician a mere four years before his election. For seven years, he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He was chosen by Democrats as Vice-Presidential candidate in 1924 because his cousin was the most popular President of recent history (who was also a Republican). He was chosen to give Al Smith’s nomination speech in 1928 because he was by then a Polio case whom many rivals thought would be dead by 1932. Roosevelt was attractive to an American public deperate for new air. He was unknown and charismatic, but luck brought him to the forefront of history. Had there been no Roosevelt, there might have been others who enacted similar reforms. As strange as it seems today to suggest that the irreplaceable giant of the 20^th century was replaceable, it’s still possible that another Roosevelt could have arisen. Perhaps it would have been Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull who designed the United Nations, or Ohio governor James M. Cox who chose Roosevelt as his running mate in 1924 and had a long record of progressive reform, or former Secretary of War Newton Baker whom Woodrow Wilson handpicked as his preferred successor, or Wendell Willkie who campaigned as the Republican nominee in 1940 on a platform of National Unity in the face of international crisis, or President of First Union Trust and Savings Bank Melvin Alvah Traylor who spoke out against the greed of Wall Street, or Truman’s Vice President Alban Barkley who managed for decades to be a Liberal Democratic senator from Kentucky. Did Roosevelt truly have the potential to be a greater man than these other figures? Did History choose Roosevelt to be the Great Man of the 20^th century for any other reason than a whim?

Roosevelt’s speeches were certainly important to his presidency, but in no way were they the heart of his presidency’s success. At the heart of the Roosevelt presidency’s success were reforms like the Glass-Steagal Act which created a buffer between commercial and savings banks and made balance sheets from transactions a matter of public record; or creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission which could insure bank deposits, or taking America off the Gold Standard; or the Securities Act which required acts of interstate commerce (virtually every act…) to be registered with the government, or the Wagner Act which guaranteed unions the right to collective bargaining, or the Social Security Act which guaranteed people retirement pensions. At its heart was also the social programs that provided relief to citizens like the Public Works Administration which built the majority of the infrastructure which America uses to this day; or the Federal Housing Administration which regulated the standards by which homes were built; or the Resettlement Administration, or the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the Rural Electrification Administration, or the Tennessee Valley Authority, all of which did their part to bring modern amenities into impoverished rural areas. 

At the heart of the Roosevelt Presidency was a country so desperately sick of Republican governance that they elected 70 Democratic Senators (and 1 Progressive) in 1935 to 23 Republicans and 322 Democratic congressmen to the Republicans’ 103. Roosevelt’s speeches certainly helped, but what mattered far more was that the country was ready to follow him. And Roosevelt did not need to force the country to adapt his reforms by one iota. Had he tried, his Presidency would have turned out very differently.

Is Obama as significant a world leader as Roosevelt? Thankfully, no. We should be extraordinarily grateful that we don’t yet need a leader as great as Roosevelt. But we may yet. If Obama is not a world leader of Rooseveltian greatness, it’s probable that at very least the greatest president since Roosevelt. Even the very best presidents before Obama – certainly Truman, Eisenhower too, perhaps Kennedy or Clinton or Johnson or even George H. W. Bush, merely had to act as stewards. No president before Obama had to re-establish Roosevelt’s reforms; the best among them merely had to know enough to keep them in place. Only Truman and George W. Bush had to negotiate the problems of a world whose conflicts were as fraught with outcomes just as uncertain as in the Obama era, and Obama, like Truman, has been light-years more successful than Bush.

But had the Barack Obama we know not existed, could there have been others who could have risen to meet the challenges of our time with similar aplomb? Could Hilary Clinton have done it? Or Al Gore? Or Bill Bradley? Or Gary Hart? Or George Mitchell? Or Bob Graham? Or Wesley Clark? Or Joe Biden? Or Chris Dodd? Or Bill Richardson? Or Tim Kaine? Or Jim Webb? Or Harold Ford? Or Andrew Cuomo? Or Elizabeth Warren? Or Deval Patrick? Or even Jon Huntsman? Or Colin Powell? Or Christine Todd Whitman? Or hell, even John Edwards, John Kerry or John McCain? Looking at their current records, virtually all of these people seem unlikely to have leadership capability on par with President Obama. But what if history had happened differently? Would we look at them differently? Would we look at Barack Obama differently?

(A speech to impeach Nixon. Try telling me this woman did not have the charisma to move the world.)

To me, history has one obvious example of a person who had Barack Obama’s charisma, drive, intelligence, practical know-how, moral fortitude, and then some. It should seem unbelievable to us that a black woman from Texas whose lesbianism was an open secret could have been short-listed as a Vice-Presidential candidate in 1976, but that’s precisely what happened to Barbara Jordan. It’s possible that all which prevented her from being offered the post was the fact that she’d been diagnosed with MS in 1973, a year after being elected from congress.

(1976 Democratic Convention Keynote Address, Part 1. Listed by a poll of American historians as the 5^th greatest speech in modern American history, right behind MLK, JFK, and FDR)

One of Lyndon Johnson’s final political acts before his death was to secure Barbara Jordan’s nomination for the Democratic Party in Texas’s 5^th district congressional seat. Even after 20 years of suffering from MS, Bill Clinton still wanted to nominate her to the Supreme Court and only refrained from doing so because she’d also developed leukemia. Barbara Jordan is perhaps the greatest ‘What if’ in modern American electoral history. Had Jordan been healthy, would the election of a Black president have happened 25 years earlier? Would the election of a woman president have happened an untold number of decades before it will? Would the election of a gay president have been possible the full century it now seems that the American public will seem ready for it? It seems absolutely impossible on its face. Yet why were the last three Democratic presidents before Obama all eager to put her as far into the public eye as possible? She was a southern Democrat, black and a moderate on fiscal and immigration issues. As ridiculous as it seems to us today, it is nevertheless possible that Barbara Jordan could have been elected President by carrying the South. Is it any more ridiculous than the fact that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama whose father was a Muslim polygamist could be elected President of the United States seven years after 9/11?

(Same convention, same slot, even the same place – Madison Square Garden, but 16 years later. Now an elder statesman with a body wracked by illness.)

Obviously, Barbara Jordan never became president. But make no mistake, she most definitely could have, and it would have sent precisely the same inspirational message across the world which Obama’s election did. But the very qualities which could have propelled her to the presidency would also have required a delicate balancing act against a Republican party who could have blandished her to a gullible public as a black racist hellbent on revenge against white people, as a woman weak-willed against our enemies abroad, and as a lesbian intent on pushing through a militant agenda against traditional family values. Barbara Jordan could also have been the greatest president since Roosvelt, but it would have required precisely the same delicate dance which Roosevelt used to perform so brilliantly, and which Obama performs today nearly as well. She’d have been accused by the left of selling out Democratic causes, and by tens of millions of Americans from across the spectrum as being weak in opposition to the arguments her opponents made.

In case anybody didn’t see tonight’s debate and doubts that Obama can’t fight when he needs or wants to…

Today, Barack Obama stands accused of precisely the same weaknesses which of which Franklin Roosevelt was once accused. Roosevelt’s name (along with Lyndon Johnson’s) is now used as a blunt instrument with which Obama is constantly hit over the head for not advocating his policies forcefully enough. Apparently, what’s needed is yet another assemblage of Sorkinian rhetoric, and this time the world will be convinced of the moral rightness of his vision in precisely the way they were not by his last gaggle of transcendent oratory.

What matters is results, not salesmanship. If there is no record of good policy, there is no speech worth giving. Ultimately, Obama’s record must speak for itself, just as Roosevelt’s did. Over time, we will see that the Affordable Care act will enable us to reduce the national debt. We will see that the Dodd-Frank bill will begin the dirty work of forcing banks manage their risks. The stimulus package, the largest in history, will start remaking America’s energy sources and improve the quality of our public schools, and unemployment is finally beneath 8%. Al-Qaeda is virtually obliterated, the Iraq War is over, half-a-dozen Middle Eastern dictators have been deposed, the region has not erupted into explosive war, nor does it show obvious signs yet of doing so. Not a single one of these accomplishments is as much as I or President Obama or any other liberal would like to see, but it is the absolute most that could have been gotten in the circumstances, and creates the bedrock upon which future reforms are possible.

In addition to results, there is one other quality which matters – something without which results are not possible. Organization is what matters. As one friend recently put it to me most convincingly, the most important work a candidate does is not what he does on the pulpit, but what he does when he shakes hands. It’s what his volunteers do when they knock on doors and call people. Obama, an organizer from his earliest adulthood, understands the importance of organization as perhaps no presidential candidate ever has. 

If last night’s debate, already called the most brutal in modern American history, proved anything, it is that Obama is perfectly capable of advocating his positions with as much force as he requires. I firmly believe that of all Obama’s accomplishments, his very greatest…the very heart of his administration, is his very reluctance to stoop to the level of those in the American government who would do their country ill. Even if Washington is still partisan, Obama has clung to the post-partisan mantle from the beginning to the end of his first term. No matter how hard Republicans hit, no matter how much liberal Democrats clamor for him to strike back with full force, Obama keeps the force of his office in check. He does this because he realizes something which no modern American president before him seemed to realize – it is the bully pulpit which has destroyed the US government’s ability to function. For forty-five years, Democrats and Republicans have fought a veritable arms-race for to see whom can stoop the lowest in partisan rancor. The race was long-since already won, the Republicans won it with the Gingrich Revolution in 1994 and since then have resorted to increasingly authoritarian behavior with every passing year. The Democrats could not possibly keep up. The only hope for their vision to recapture American imaginations is to find a way to drain the country of the partisan poison. If the poison is not drained, then the hatred will only increase. If the hatred increases much more than it already has, democratic means will no longer seem like a viable option to keep the other side from achieving power. We’ve already seen undemocratic means dictate a presidential election when the Supreme Court voted on partisan lines to stop the Bush v. Gore recount in Florida. How much more partisan can things get before we begin seeing still more authoritarian means of resolving conflicts? If Obama is a great man who bestrides history, he has become one not by thumping his chest after the manner of an historical mover, but by holding the power of his office, and of his person, in unbreakable reserve.

It is only by one side forswearing the arms-race that this track can be avoided. It may not be avoided anyway, but it is the best hope we have. We can only hope that there are enough rational people to see that one side is unprincipled and will do anything to be elected, while the other has lain down there arms. If we do, then rationality will push the most unprincipled demagogues in America to the fringes where they belong. If the American public is not rational enough to realize this, then the 236-year-old American experiment is once again on the verge of failing. 

800 Words: A Fight About Barbara Jordan Part 1

This morning, as is my penchant, I single-handedly attempted the demolition of three friends’ self-esteem at a post-wedding brunch. As is the extent of my self-delusion, I think I succeeded. The reason these friends have lost their right to self-esteem? Their evil, malevolent, disgusting love for Aaron Sorkin.

To the half-dozen readers of this blog, my belief in the eternal evil of Aaron Sorkin is well-documented. I firmly believe that insofar as a single television writer is capable of corrupting American discourse, Aaron Sorkin has established that over and above what any other writer could ever have done. To this day, he is the only verifiable evidence conservatives have to demonstrate that liberalism and fascism go hand in hand. For his genius, I shall always revere him. For what he does with his genius, I declare open, attritional, total, and eternal war against that vile messenger of Satan.

Of course, this is (mostly) hyperbole. No artist, perhaps no single historical  actor, can move the forces of history to the extent which I claimed above. But it says something about my friends’ view of the world that they took what I said even 1% seriously. History is an inexorable state of flux. Surely people can affect history, but only History can put people in the proper position to affect it.

For over a hundred years, the modern study of History was dominated by the ‘Great Man Theory’, which posits that only people at the top can truly affect change. According to this theory, men like Augustus Caesar, Mohammed, or Martin Luther created history, and in no way were they created by history – and the same goes for great aesthetic creators like Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo, or great scientific minds like Newton, Darwin, and Pauling. And yet by writing history as though all that matters is the lives and ideas of such people, all historians managed to prove was that there were many external factors involved in the creation of Great Men. The experiences which formed these great men mattered as much as their inborn talent, and there are many, many potentially great men (and many more potentially great women) who did not accumulate the necessary experiences to achieve their world-changing potential.

 There was a long while when this theory was regarded as the summit of informed opinion. It was endorsed by thinkers as diverse as Gibbon, Carlyle, Emerson, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Spengler, Keynes, Barzun, Arthur Schlesinger, Harold Bloom, Egon Friedell, and many lesser-known thinkers. According to these thinkers, we lesser people are all the creation of greater beings whose thoughts create the world as we currently understand it. It should go without saying that, at least to an uncomfortable extent, they are right.

But they’re not completely right. Ironically, the most famous critic of the Great Man Theory was himself one of history’s great men who used his greatest work to rail against it. Tolstoy devoted the last 100 pages of War and Peace to a veritable polemic against the Great Man Theory – claiming that such theories were nothing more than a medieval vestige of the need of the hyper-religious for a god to explain their destinies. Ever the follower of the 18^th century encyclopedists, Tolstoy had a fanatical opposition to any religious belief which smacked of submission to authority. Like Rousseau, his hero, and virtually all the other encyclopedists, Tolstoy primary belief was in the natural laws of nature. Since, according to Tolstoy and Rousseau, it is systems of rule which keep mankind from fulfilling his ultimate potential, it follows that no man is greater than any other. In the correct circumstances, any uneducated peasant can contribute as much to the growth of society as the best educated nobleman (like Tolstoy).

As so often happens in philosophy, both schools of thought are absolutely right, and absolutely wrong. In recent decades we have seen the virtual collapse of the Great Man theory in university teaching. In an era when the study of critical theory is so prized, how can such an old-fashioned notion of biographical ‘Great Man’ history survive in an age of Marxist history, deconstructive history, sociological history, feminist history, - all of which share a similar intention of overthrowing the top-down, Great Man theory and all of its forgetfulness of those who suffered underneath the great men.

I don’t think many historians of a generation ago would have predicted that the Great Man theory would come back with such force into today’s discourse. But even if the Great Man theory isn’t true (and it isn’t…), it’s apparent that people need the theory of ‘Great Men’ in order to make sense of today’s world. Without it, history is a dry series of micro-speculations that is far too speculative to make an over-arching narrative. Therefore, the study of history becomes an ass-backwards proposition. The paradox of history is that to properly ascertain how history happened, we need scientific reconstruction, not a narrative recreation. But if events are reconstructed with all the precision of science, history becomes a nearly useless exercise. There are far too many historical events to exhaustively analyze them all with the precision of science and data entry. If such a project were attempted, there would be no point to history. Very little could be learned from it because it would only be a dry series of speculations that has very little bearing on people’s understanding of the world. What matters in history is not the detail but the sweep. It is the narrative of history that matters, and a proper understanding history’s narrative will always involve an artfully approximate guesswork, not any precise science.

Even if we’re mindful not to, we all assign superhuman qualities to the ‘titans’ of history, qualities that have very little to do with who these people really were, what they did, and how the world made their accomplishments possible. We can’t help it. History is too large to be understood. Therefore, there is an overwhelming temptation among thinking people to ascribe all the history which we experience in our own time as paling in comparison to the accomplishments of past heroes and villains.

The example given this morning was, of course, Barack Obama, and how his refusal to use the bully pulpit for great achievements makes him pale in comparison to an historical figure like Franklin Roosevelt – who allegedly never stopped using his position as the leader of the free world to advocate for good. Never mind that Roosevelt placed 200,000 Japanese-Americans into internment camps rather than using the bully pulpit to stand up for their rights, never mind that Roosevelt refused to bomb the railroad tracks to German death camps rather than confront those who would accuse him of being controlled by a Jewish cabal; never mind that Roosevelt would never have ordered America to enter World War II without the bombing of Pearl Harbor, never mind that Roosevelt gave into to conservative clamoring to balance the budget and thus prolonged the Great Depression by four years; never mind that he thought he could make Stalin relinquish control of Eastern Europe and what would eventually become the Soviet Bloc… 

Early Friday Playlist: Music of Kentucky and Ohio

So I can pack for my Cincinnati/Louisville trip to see The Mount and La Degi tie the knot and visit La Tran/The Younger...

Kentucky:

Bill Monroe: Blue Moon of Kentucky

Merle Travis: Cannonball Rag

Rosemary Clooney: Mambo Italiano

Everly Brothers: All I Have To Do is Dream & Cathy's Clown

Lionel Hampton: Flying Home

Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner's Daughter

Crystal Gayle: Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue

Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

Will Oldham/Bonnie 'Prince' Billy: I See a Darkness


Ohio:

Dean Martin: Ain't That a Kick in the Head

Doris Day: Que Sera Sera

Isley Brothers: Between the Sheets

Marilyn Manson: The Beautiful People

Boz Scaggs: Lowdown

The Cincinnati Symphony

The Cleveland Orchestra

800 Words: Dreams from My Mother Part I

September 11^th is the cause of all sorts of odd connotations for my family. Not only did grandfather die on September 11^th 1985, but so did my aunt Debbie’s father on September 11^th, 2000. The two men were close friends dating back to their days as engineers at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio during World War II. My aunt Debbie had barely met my uncle Nochem in her life before work transferred her to Baltimore. She needed friends in the city, and her parents got in touch with my grandparents – and thus was a match made. The significance of 9/11 in our family goes down to the minute as well: my grandfather died at 2:48 AM, two years later (though on October 7th) at 2:48 PM, my brother Jordan and my Zaydie’s Hebrew namesake (Yitzhak Moshe) was born.

It’s stock and trade to recite where you were when you first heard about 9/11, rather like the Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor were for earlier generations. In each case, there’s something quite kitschy about such memories - as though remembering the mundanity of that morning marks the insignificance and invulnerability of our lives before the awful day. We were no more vulnerable after 9/11 than we were before. The difference is that after 9/11 we finally knew how vulnerable we were. But then again, my moralizing about the sanctimony that this day inspires has a selfish tint too.

The truth of where I was on 9/11 could not be more ignoble. I could sleep late on Tuesdays, and since my phone kept ringing that morning for my Japanese roommate, and not realizing why Nabuo’s parents kept calling, I took the phone off the hook. I only woke up when Nabuo came back to the room. Not realizing the significance of what happened – my first thought was “Alright! No classes!” It was only when I saw TV footage in my friends’ room that I realized it was a terrorist attack. In the room with us was a girl I’d never seen before – cute, funny, pneumatic, and very flirtatious. The chemistry was instant, and we went together to the top floor of Letts Hall, found some large chairs to stand on, and from that vantage point could see the smoke of the pentagon. By 1:30 that afternoon, we were making out in the 5^th floor Lounge of Anderson Hall as other people were watching CNN on TV. It was awesome.

The selfishness of my behavior on that most auspicious day is perhaps definitive of the selfishness that has always defined my life – neglecting studies, abandoning projects, spurning advice, wasting money like water, avoiding hard work, and too often, avoiding employment. I can only imagine what Zaydie Witow would make of me today - let alone what my other, far more indimidating Zaydie would have made. But it’s quite often said by Bubbie Witow that the death of her husband from colon cancer was a cataclysm from which our family never recovered. I can’t say she was wrong: Zaydie left me without a potentially more patient guide for my dozens of learning difficulties, he left Bubbie without a guide for how to connect to grandchildren she found less sympathetic than precociously intellectual me, he left Dad without a patient guide for how to negotiate fatherhood’s challenges, he left my uncle Nochem without his sage business advice just as he was striking out on his own as a businessman, he left Mom to negotiate our family’s volatile dynamics alone as the sole peacemaker, and he left his other five grandchildren without memories of their grandfather. Zaydie Witow lived to be nearly seventy, but in the twenty-seven years since his death, it is clear that all of our lives are worse for the fact that he was not part of them.  

Morris Witow, by all accounts I’ve ever heard, was something resembling a saint. No one who ever met him had an unkind word to say. He was kind to everyone, he was always helpful, he was brilliantly intelligent, he was handy with every possible tool, and he was unhesitantly generous as a community leader. The saintliness of my Zaydie was passed on to many members of my family, it can just as easily be seen in my mother, and scarcely less in my Uncle Nochem, or in my brother Jordan, or in Nochem’s two daughters. It was in no way passed on to me.

I am a volatile cocktail comprised in equal parts of my father and maternal grandmother. From both I inherited a relentless intellectual curiosity and passion for living life to its fullest potential. But from my father I also inherited an insatiable contrarian streak, a pathological need for attention, a dark view of human nature, a poisonous temper, and an utterly divided self that never reconciled the bifurcated loyalties of our upbringings. From Bubbie Witow I also inherited a perpetual disorganization, an inability to forgive slights, an inability to relate to people different from us, and a tendency to point fingers at others before pointing at ourselves. All three of us have led lives defined at least as much by our wounds as by our hopes. But all three of us were amazingly lucky to have found family saints who accepted and loved us as much for our weaknesses as for our strengths, perhaps more. The fact that all three of us found acceptance within a family with which we could never have provided ourselves gave our lives a lease to enjoy them which we'd have never found without our family.  

Friday Playlist: Patton Oswalt

Not particularly safe for work...


Sky Cake

Christmas Shoes

Cheetos

The Insanity of Faith

Clean Filth

Nick Nolte

Patton Oswalt on Jay/Conan (hint: Nixonland is involved)

Grocery Store Robots

Rats & Orgy

Owning Talkers (Do not click on this unless you MEAN it)

The Magic of Isaiah Berlin

Everyone should listen to and read as many of his lectures as possible. This one in particular, and the book that was collected from it, The Roots of Romanticism, is of essential interest to anyone who cares about intellectual history, art, music, literature, or philosophy. For me, Berlin is the great thinker of his time. The only thinker who found a way to negotiate a path that reconciled the great philosophical problem of our time. The 'isms' of European academics -- postmodernism, deconstruction, hermeneutics, structuralism - everything from Wittgenstein to Derrida destroyed the traditional meanings of every possible way we think of reality. The entire philosophical school which runs through them is a nihlist project which destroys our way of thinking about the world and nobody ever put it back together. Nobody except for Isaiah Berlin that is.

Perhaps Berlin's great contribution to philosophy was the idea of value pluralism. To us today, the meaning of value pluralism seems as obvious as the noses on our respective faces. But perhaps it didn't before Berlin came up with the idea. Thanks to Berlin, we can now say that I'm right and you're right, even if we completely disagree with one another. Both of us feel we are right and the other person is wrong, yet truth is something on which none of us has a monopoly, therefore we ought to act as though the other person is as rational as we are. It seems obvious, yet millenia of wars prove that it's not.

800 Words: Jewish Intolerance - Part IV - Conclusion

Let’s start with a particularly long, 850-word quote in itself from Isaiah Berlin:

The history not only of thought, but of consciousness, opinion, action too, of morals, politics, aesthetics, is to a large degree a history of dominant models. Whenever you look at any particular civilization, you will find that its most characteristic writings and other cultural products reflect a particular pattern of life which those who are responsible for these writings – or paint these paintings, or produce these particular pieces of music – are dominated by. And in order to identify a civilization, in order to explain what kind of civilization it is, in order to understand the world in which men of this sort thought and felt and acted, it is important to try, so far as possible, to isolate the dominant pattern which that culture obeys. Consider, for instance, Greek philosophy or Greek literature of the classical age. If you read, say, the philosophy of Plato, you will find that he is dominated by a geometrical or mathematical model. It is clear that his thought operates on lines which are conditioned by the idea that there are certain axiomatic truths, adamantine, unbreakable, from which it is possible by severe logic to deduce certain absolutely infallible wisdom by a special method which he recommends; that there is such a thing as absolute knowledge to be obtained in the world, and if only we can attain to this absolute knowledge, of which geometry, indeed mathematics in general, is the nearest example, this knowledge, in terms of these truths, once and for all, in a static manner, needing no further change; and then all suffering, all doubt, all ignorance, all forms of human vice and folly can be expected to disappear from the earth.

This notion that there is somewhere a perfect vision and that it needs only a certain kind of severe discipline, or a certain kind of method, to attain to this truth, which is analogous, at any rate, to the cold and isolated truths of mathematics – this notion then affects a great many other thinkers in the post-Platonic age: certainly the Renaissance, which had similar ideas, certainly thinkers like Spinoza, thinkers in the eighteenth century, thinkers in the nineteenth century too, who believed it possible to attain some kind of, if not absolute, at any rate nearly absolute knowledge, and in terms of this to tidy the world up, to create some kind of rational order, in which tragedy, vice and stupidity, which have caused so much destruction in the past, can at last be avoided by the use of carefully acquired information and the application to it of universally intelligible reason.

This is one kind of model – I offer it simply as an example. These models invariably begin by liberating people from error, from confusion, from some kind of unintelligible world which they seek to explain to themselves by means of a model; but they almost invariably end by enslaving those very same people, by failing to explain the whole world of experience. They begin as liberators and end in some sort of despotism.

Let us look at another example – a parallel culture, that of the Bible, that of the Jews at a comparable period. You will find a totally different model dominating, a totally different set of ideas, which would have been unintelligible to the Greeks. The notion from which both Judaism and Chrstianity to a large degree sprang is the notion of family life, the relations of father and son, perhaps the relations of members of a tribe to one another. Such fundamental relationships – in terms of which nature and life are explained – as the love of children for their father, the brotherhood of man,, forgiveness, commands issued by a superior to an inferior, the sense of duty, transgression, sin and therefore the need to atone for it – this whole complex of qualities, in terms of which the whole of the universe is explained by those who created the Bible, and by those who were to a large extent influenced by it, would have been totally unintelligible to the Greeks.

Consider a perfectly familiar psalm, where the psalmist says that ‘When Israel went out of Egypt . . . the Sea saw it and fled: Jordan was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs’, and the earth is ordered to ‘Tremble . . . at the presence of the Lord.’ This would have been totally unintelligible to Plato or to Aristotle, because the whole notion of a world which reacts personally to the orders of the Lord, the idea that all relationships, both animate and inanimate, must be interpreted in terms of the relations of human beings, or at any rate in terms of the relations of personalities, in one case divine, in the other case human, is very remote from the Greek conception of what God was and what his relations were to mankind. Hence the absence among the Greeks of the notion of obligation, hence the absence of the notion of duty, which it is so difficult for people to grasp who read the Greeks through spectacles partly affected by the Jews.

For seventeen-hundred years, the majority of the Western World has attempted to read Greek through Jewish spectacles. Before Classical Greece, consideration and skepticism were not often considered virtues. And before the Davidic court, the idea of sublimating one’s will a singular godhead was considered far too indirect. In a world before monotheism and scientific inquiry, there could be no explanation grounded in verifiable fact. One civilization had certain gods, its neighbors had others, and since no God was omnipotent, people generally worshipped whatever gods they wished whenever they wished to at whatever moment they wished to – an historical fact on which Christianity would later capitalize by creating patron saints out of local pagan gods.

By establishing science and the accumulation of knowledge as the goal of a society, the Greeks instilled a universal standard for truth. By doing so, they created the foundation stone of all societies which anteceded them. By establishing God (or Yahweh) as a final authority to which all people must answer, the Israelites created the bricks on which all societies could enforce those universal truths the Greeks insisted upon. In our age, the idea of singular universal truths may be considered constricting, perhaps even authoritarian. But the idea that there is a universal truth which must be enforced is precisely what spurred civilizations to greater achievement. It may have created Holy War, but it also created the entire basis for all the verifiable knowledge we hold unto this day.

Athens and Jerusalem are as fundamental to what we perceive as our right and left eyes. The Greek part of us, the scientific self, tells us that knowledge and truth will guide us – and all means which we must employ to arrive at greater reserves of knowledge are necessary and justifiable. When taken to an extreme, it results in a rationalist tyranny of knowledge. It stifles free inquiry with its dogmas and insists upon pseudo-truths that would easily be disproven in a free society. Such is the world one finds under Communism and Fascism. The Hebrew part of us, the irrational (and perhaps creative) self, tells us that knowledge will never suffice to create an understanding of the world, and we therefore must put our trust in the fact that the forces which guide the world will always be beyond our understanding. All that matters, therefore, is the immediate concerns of the world before us, and faith that all authorities from our family patriarchs to our God know what is best for us. When taken to an extreme, this worldview results in an autocracy of the mysterious, in which only a priestly class who swears fealty to the One True God is allowed the privilege of the World’s knowledge and is therefore prohibited from increasing it. Such was the source of Christendom’s Middle Ages, and continues to this day to be the tyranny in place for Radical Islam.

In the world of bestial tyranny, the root of tyrannical belief is irrelevant. It is not the belief itself but the fervor of belief that causes people to act as they do. But when these two sides of contemporary thought are considered together – the rationalist with the romantic, or the stoic and the ecstatic – they represent the divided self that keeps us in check; allowing us both an unquenchable desire to improve our understanding the world, and the humility to realize that our understanding is never good enough. At humanity’s best moments, these two poles of civilization mingle with one another in reasonably consonant harmony. It is in those moments that we fitfully begin the work of reconciling what we believe with what we know. And when we finally turn a belief into a verifiable fact, humanity finally achieves another step toward progress.

The Jewish world is the contemporary world in its original division. It was the first (perhaps the only) civilization to be destroyed by the Roman Empire yet survive. It survived in a manner very different from its previous incarnation, but survive it did. And it survived by being the first civilization to combine the rational and the mysterious as a means of self-improvement. From Talmudic times onward, the Jewish world was maintained by a series of irresolvable contradictions. Among themselves, Jews deferred to rabbinical authority, but no rabbinical authority was ever final. In matters of the larger world, Jews differed to their country’s rule of law, but in matters between Jews they did everything they could to keep their affairs in Jewish courts. In matters of God, they were the first religion to believe in a God whose laws were final and absolute. Yet it was man’s duty, not God’s, to interpret these laws for practical application.

The ability to establish this balance between two irreconcilable worldviews was hard-earned.  For three-hundred-fifty years, Judeans raged against the encroaching influence of classical civilization. The Maccabees (or Hasmoneans) waged and won a war to throw out the Seleucids (the Syrian Greek Empire) from Judea. The Seleucids were much like modern imperialists – some of what they tried to achieve for their subjects was quite progressive for its time, but they often went about trying to do it in the most tyrannical way imaginable. Much like 20^th century Zionism, the Hasmonean Kingdom began as a movement that combined militancy with idealism – but the idealism with which it achieved its birth quickly soured into the realities of the present. Much like modern Israel, the Judea of the Hasmonean dynasty was a country like any other country, whose good and bad qualities were brought to the forefront by the fact of its existence in a very dangerous neighborhood. Like Israel, its very existence seemed like a miracle, but the reality of government was earned through gumption and blood. The kingdom went through decades of constant threats to their survival, in which towns were continually massacred and soldiers continually ambushed. Throughout their existence the Hasmonean Kingdom required a military apparatus that would equal enemies with far larger population and resources. Just as Israel clung to the leaders of their founding generation, the Hasmoneans went through three brothers from the family that led the Maccabean Revolt – first Judah Maccabee, then his brother Jonathan, then their brother Simon.

I have no idea what the future of Israel holds. But when their enemies declined, the first King of their new generation – John (Yochanan) Hyrcanus, seized the opportunity to conquer much of the Middle East and force his new subjects to convert by the sword. Over the next century, Judea would begin a slouching decay from political intrigue. As the intrigues worsened, the ideological conflicts grew exponentially between two parties: the Pharisees (those who believed in the authority of modern-day prophets to reveal Jewish law to the masses) and Saducees (those who believed in the authority of the High Priest and the priestly class to interpret Jewish law for the masses). Soon thereafter, Judea was torn apart completely by Civil War and the Pompey the Great (Julius Caesar’s rival) invaded the country to restore order. Within twenty years, Hasmoneans were duly replaced with the Herodians, who ruled Judea as a Roman puppet. Many times, Judeans attempted to resurrect the miracle of the Maccabean Revolt by casting off the mantle of Roman (and Herodian) tyranny, only to be crushed by Rome in every attempt. By 70 AD, the Romans considered the Judeans so troublesome that they removed the Herodians, destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and installed a Roman authority who had no autonomy from the Roman Emperor. Indeed, the only time the Judeans successfully overthrew Rome was during the Bar-Kokhba Rebellion around 132 AD. For three years, Judea was ruled as an independent Jewish state. But Rome returned, and its slaughter is estimated by some to be roughly 580,000 Judeans, and that does not include those citizens of Judea who were deported to Babylon as slaves.

There was no telling how Judaism was to survive past this apocalyptic ending of life in Israel. There was already a thousand years of religious tradition and scripture, but never were Jews so scattered that they required any interpretation but those which authorities could recite orally to their followers.  A new age required a new body of law. By 220 AD, the first book appeared in which a council of Rabbis interpreted law in a binding way for the lay public – called the Mishna (literally meaning: from secondary – as in sources). Much like Supreme Court decisions, each tractate in the Mishna is written about a case that appears in front of a Rabbinical court in which the problem is described and why the Rabbi ruled in the way he did.

The Mishna is a rather terse book, with not much more elaboration than in the Torah. Even at the time of its publication, Rabbis felt the need to issue a second book, the Tosefta, which was a compilation of the oral traditions of Jewish law. However, during the next three-hundred years, many Rabbis from both Judea and Babylon felt that as far as practical application went, the Mishna was incomplete. These Rabbis therefore wrote their own commentaries and clarifications for the book. These commentaries became known as the Gemara. Together, these two books comprise the Talmud – which to this day is the foundation for how Jewish law is interpreted. However, there are two Gemaras, filled with writings separately collected – one from Jerusalem around 400 AD, and the other from Babylon around 500 AD. So there are in fact two Talmuds – the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud – both of which contain much content that is completely different from one another.  

And then came seven-hundred more years of Talmudic commentary, Rabbinic homilies, and general Jewish wisdom literature – collected from Rabbis around the Jewish world who consulted and published in Aramaic in much the same way that theologians from around Christendom published in Latin. Around 1170 came the Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides, published in Egypt. The Mishneh Torah attempted to tell its readers what the best Rabbinic interpretation was of every theological issue on which Rabbis have ever had to rule. After Maimonides’s achievement, Rabbinic literature was revolutionized; Rabbis thought bigger. A century-and-a-half later came the Four Rows (Arbah Turim) of Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher which attempted to trace the entire history of Rabbinic law from the oral tradition down to the present day. Two-hundred years later came the Beth Yosef and Shulkhan Arukh by Rabbi Yosef Karo. For the Beth Yosef, Karo operated like Yaakov-ben-Asher and exhaustively examined all the known Rabbinical literature from antiquity until his own time. For the Shulkhan Arukh, Karo operated as a later-day Maimonides, and codified the best interpretations until his own time. In the late eighteenth century  came the ‘Life of Man’ (Chayei Adam) in which Rabbi Avraham Danzig dealt with Jewish conduct on the holidays. And none of this even begins to cover the parallel and controversial world of Jewish mysticism provided in the Zohar and the Kabbalah, or the special commentaries directly about the Torah or Halakhic Law (laws given from the Torah); or the compilations of Rabbinic commentary made throughout the ages, or the entirely separate books Rabbis wrote on Jewish philosophy and ethics; or how the Jewish prayer book (Siddur) was made, or the Responsa literature which comprises more than two-thousand years of Rabbinic debates.

There is no religion which takes theology more seriously than Judaism. In Catholicism, the need to answer theological questions is not particularly paramount, because God commands Catholics through his chosen vicar on Earth in order to have a final interpretation. But in the entire history of Judaism, no Rabbi’s authority has been so central that his ruling holds up as the definitive one against all arguments – even in his own time. Judaism has survived for so long because it never takes anything but the hardest conceivable road. It is much easier to live one’s life through a monist view – in which one explanation suffices to explain the existence of the entire world. It is much, much more difficult to reconcile practical thought with irrational belief. This is the great achievement of the Jewish people. It is also why being Jewish, frankly, sucks.

It is not uncommon to feel as though growing up Jewish is a prison from which there is no escape. When given the chance to assimilate, many Jews throughout history tried so hard to do so that they abandoned their Jewish identities completely – renouncing everything from culture to friends to family. To many Jews, Judaism is a pernicious mixture of a community in which the rules are truly suffocating, and a worldwide community who views Jews as a demonic force hellbent on world destruction that must be stopped by all means necessary. What sane person would not shake off this inheritance if given the chance? How insane would a person have to be in order to convert and take on this inheritance themselves? What lack of conscience must we Jews have in order to bring children into a world with such a terrible inheritance in store for them?

But the irony is that in precisely this way, Jews are like every successful community the world has ever seen, thus far at least. Every functional community is a community of laws that cannot be broken, and every great civilization has people within it – rational and irrational – who view their society as a terrible prison whose walls must come down at all costs. It was true for the Romantics against the 18^th century society of the Enlightenment, it was true for liberals and totalitarians alike against the aristocratic rule of the great European powers in the early-20^th century, and it was true for the hippies against the liberal American society of the mid-20^th century. All great societies enable people to pursue their personal vision of happiness, but none of them guarantee that the vision may come to fruition – and all too often, these non-mainstream personal visions of happiness are viewed by others who live in great societies as threats to their fragile security, however rightly or wrongly. The difference between the 2000-year Rabbinic society of Judaism and the great secular societies is that the great societies of the world are open societies, privy to a great panoply of forces, secular and religious, any one or combination of which can break their fragile social contract all too easily. There is far more latitude allowed within secular society for following one’s bliss, but just as far more latitude is allowed, far more damage can be done by the misunderstandings inherent in a diverse culture. But Jewish societies are closed societies, privy to only as many forces as they allow into their communities. The freedom to follow a personal vision of bliss is far, far narrower for anyone who wants to live as a Jew. It is an unbreakable society in which mystery and rationality have been held in near-equal balance for thousands of years. But it demands a near-total subordination of a person’s free will to its many, many laws. It demands that its people exist at the tolerance of larger societies, and if necessary, endure all taunts, assaults, and murder at the larger society’s hands. To be a Jew is to be the custodian of a long prestigious inheritance, but to do what it takes to uphold that inheritance is more than any person should ever be asked to do in this life.

And still, Judaism will remain.