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.

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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.

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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.