1) A work that musically defines you. - 2 works: The Marriage of Figaro/Don Giovanni
The Marriage of Figaro is everything opera should be. It's a comedy that makes you laugh. It's also a sad consideration of ordinary people's resentments, limitations and their deepest fears. There are ten principle characters, none of whom obscures the others. It is a piece of work in which each character evolves at light speed. At the end, we see no one above blame, yet no one is to be blamed. The subject of The Marriage of Figaro is life itself, a condition that is impossible without forgiveness. Just as Don Giovanni is a tragedy that never stops reminding you how wonderful life can be, The Marriage of Figaro is a comedy that never stops reminding you of its bitterness.
On the surface, Don Giovanni is as misanthropic and morbid as The Marriage of Figaro is life-affirming. We might hate everything about the protagonist, yet beneath the surface, we must all admit that he's everything we want to be. All those around him suffer for his presence in their lives. They curse him and wish him badly, yet none would have found themselves so the worse were they not attracted to everything about him. Don Giovanni doesn’t just seduce bodies, he seduces minds. Therefore, Don Giovanni should remind us of every sociopath we’ve ever met. The person who promises unattainable things, manipulates you into acts you never thought yourself capable - and all for nothing but his pleasure. In allowing ourselves to be taken for a ride, we see our own desires for a better, more exciting life reflected back through Don Giovanni. There has never been a tragedy that reminds us more about everything that's wonderful about life.
So many people complain that all Mozart sounds the same; that the limitations of the period constricted Mozart. To these people, Mozart can never express emotion with the eloquence of later composers. But to look for personal expression of the type we find in Beethoven and Shostakovich would be to limit what Mozart is capable of expressing. The singular greatness of Mozart music lies in its ability to express all emotions simultaneously. We don't know whether or not Mozart empathizes with or mocks his characters. The music seems to indicate that he does both, simultaneously. This is the kind of multi-dimensional expression that we only find in the very greatest masters. We have no idea whether Shakespeare thinks Hamlet is crazy. We don't know if Tolstoy meant Anna Karenina to be sympathetic. We don't know if Rembrandt meant his self-portraits to be unflattering. We have no idea if Jean Renoir loved or hated the party in The Rules of the Game. And we have no idea if Homer Simpson is supposed to be a good guy at heart. This is what the greatest art does, rather than provide answers as to what life is, it merely asks the question and lets us draw our own conclusion.
2) Your very first classical music memory: The Academic Festival Overture
I have no idea how I heard who Leonard Bernstein was. All I know is that he was my hero even from the time of my first memories. As a child, my parents would drop me off at my grandparents’ house every Saturday night while they tried to have some semblance of a social life while raising children. I was three years old and, without knowing why, I was utterly spellbound by watching Leonard Bernstein unravel the mysteries of Brahms and Tchaikovsky. But what I remember best about it was Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, which was more exciting than anything my three year old mind could comprehend. I don’t know if I understood a word of what Lenny said, and I certainly don’t remember any of it. But even then, I was in love with the music. When the fourth week came along and Leonard Bernstein was not on television, I screamed and tantrumed like the three-year-old I was.
Shortly thereafter, my parents bought me a cassette of Bruno Walter and the CBS Symphony performing the Academic Festival Orchestra along with Brahms’s Third Symphony. And thereafter, every day of my childhood included my routine in conducting our den rug in a blazing performance of the Academic Festival Overture (with a straw, in case you were curious). Twenty-five years later, I realize that one couldn’t possibly have a better introduction to Brahms than a recording from Bruno Walter. To this day, Brahms is probably my favorite composer.
3) Last classical music work you’ve seen in a live performance. - Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra by the Baltimore Symphony
It wasn’t a very good performance. But by the end I teared up all the same. This is another work that I committed to memory by the time I was five or six. And here was the Baltimore Symphony, the orchestra of my youth and whose every face I’ve watched grow older since I was four, playing a piece from the soundtrack of my childhood.
I unfortunately had to leave at intermission before Manny Ax’s performance of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. The reason was because I had to conduct a performance of my own. The fact that I get the privilege of conducting, however little I do it or small the group, never ceases to amaze me.
4) Your favorite orchestral work. - Mahler Symphony no. 3
If Brahms is my favorite composer, then Mahler is #2. And his Third Symphony is the great, grand summation of 19th century music. Mahler once said ‘A Symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.” And the very peaks and valleys of creation resound in this 100 minute monsterpiece. There is not a single human emotion missing - everything from the highest awe to the lowest vulgarity, the highest joy to the lowest agony, is here. This is the young Mahler, before he acquired the gloomy fatalism of his later work. Rather dwell in an obsession with death, the young Gustav Mahler seemed obsessed with life. And in his greatest symphonies: the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 7th, nothing about life was alien to him.
5) Your favorite conductor. - (tie)Leonard Bernstein/Rafael Kubelik
Nobody could supplant Leonard Bernstein in my heart. There has never been a musician more committed to reaching the listener by any means necessary. If a conductor is merely a figurehead who corrects wrong notes and makes the orchestra play with precision, he is worthless. Given today’s professional standards, any of the world’s third-rate orchestras could give a competent performance without a conductor - and there are thousands of third-rate orchestras. The purpose of having a conductor is to have a leader who inspires; who makes devotees out of inexperienced listeners with the enthusiasm he inspires in his players, and who equally impresses experienced music-lovers with the greatness of his conceptions in music they know from memory. No conductor, whether through music or with words or with deeds, better embodies everything a conductor is supposed to be. Lenny was not just a truly great conductor, he was also a composer, teacher, writer, pianist and all-around communicative musician who brought greatness to every aspect of his calling.
But..........if we were to take this question purely on musical terms. I have to confess a slight preference for Rafael Kubelik. This is not to say that Lenny was anything but one of the great interpreters of music there has ever been. But Kubelik is even better. In my experience, nobody who has ever wrung so much expression, so much detail, or so much inspiration out of so much music. Regardless of nationality, era or size, there is no conductor who has more access to the composer’s private hotline than this disheveled-looking Czech with no discernible stage presence and a barely discernible conducting technique.
6) Your favorite orchestra. - (tie) Staatskapelle Dresden/Boston Symphony/Leningrad Philharmonic
Perhaps the toughest question on this list. The truth is that to most music-lovers, all orchestras will sound alike, even great ones. It’s hard enough to learn how appreciate the qualities of the music, let alone appreciate how the musicians play it. What makes this question still harder is that compared to a century ago, all orchestras do sound alike. The recording has globalized music making. In nineteenth century Germany, a person of means could go from town to town and hear 20 performances of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony over the span of a year - each of which sound entirely different.
But gone are the days when the make of woodwind instruments differs from town to town. Gone are the days when conductors would have to create their interpretation straight from the score rather than listen to a recording. Gone are the days when it was expected that classical musicians would bring the same emotional commitment to music making as any great rock band. In place of emotional involvement has descended an antiseptic, dessicated philosophy of perfection. A true musician who plays with feeling but flubs notes would never get into music school. Today’s classical musician is coerced from cradle to grave into playing all the notes correctly. Whether the listener gets a raw, emotional experience is of no consequence. The result is that classical music exists today as a cultural backwater, while intelligent music lovers look to other genres for the raw experience which all musicmaking should provide.
But there are still some orchestras which have preserved the old ways. Of the orchestras whose playing I love, I’ll pick three favorites.
Firstly, the Boston Symphony - which I will always think of as America’s greatest orchestra. I do not have the secret to the BSO sound, and I’m not sure they do either. But since the dawn of the recorded era, there has always a special sheen to their music-making. Except to say that it’s beautiful, their sound is impossible to describe. Yet even when tuning into the radio, it’s impossible to mistaken the BSO for any other orchestra. They’ve maintained this sound for at least eighty years, through fat and fallow periods. For me, their sound is one of the most purely beautiful things in the world, and it is the perfect orchestra for French music, for which beauty is everything.
Another orchestra impossible to mistaken is the Staatskapelle Dresden - the world’s oldest orchestra and the favorite orchestra of Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven. I would be no more capable of describing the Dresden Sound than I would the Boston Sound. Fortunately, some critic once described their sound as ‘Old Gold,’ which captures it perfectly. A dark sound, weighty but mellow, that is perfect for the profundities of German music.
Finally, I couldn’t possibly leave out the most individual sounding orchestra in the world - The St. Petersburg Philharmonic. If ever there was a sound that is the exact opposite of Old Gold, it’s the virtuoso wall of sound which this greatest of Russian orchestras produces. The great Russian conductor, Yevgeny Mravinsky, honed this orchestra for 50 years and created one of the rawest, most expressively emotional instruments of the 20th century - perfect for the flashy emotionalism of Russian music.
7) A guilty pleasure. - John Williams
I admit it, I love John Williams (you have no idea how hard this admission is...). His music may not stand very well on its own. But watch these clips from ET above and below. The second clip is in Spanish. But even if you don’t speak Spanish, that doesn’t matter at all since there is barely any talking in either clip. The secrets to how well ET works is great camerawork, excellent editing and John Williams’s music. Together, these three elements create one of the most extraordinary sequences ever put to film. Case closed.
8) Your favorite opera. - Verdi - Otello/Falstaff
Verdi was a melodist and dramatist of genius. He could write a melody as easily as we eat lunch. He could inject a scene with enough drama to leave the audience feel as though run over by a Mac truck. But when it came to craftsmanship, his genius deserted him. The search for an opera’s proper pacing took him half a century. The twenty-four operas before Otello are full of fantastic melodies, memorable scenes, and moments to make you wish opera had a fast-forward button.
But at the age of seventy-four, Verdi nailed it. Otello is the most perfect operatic tragedy there has ever been - far better paced than the Shakespeare original. A great performance of Otello is like a black hole which sucks us in and spits us out a different person. Not even Shakespeare could not make us feel the horror to which Verdi subjects us.
But greater still is Falstaff, Verdi’s final opera. Verdi wrote twenty-six operas, twenty-four of which are tragedies. At the age of seventy-nine, he set upon a completely new path. If Otello is an image of perfection, then Falstaff is pure imagination. The elderly Verdi had mastered his craft and shaped music to his designs like silly putty - the way Mozart or Haydn would. And the sheer barrage of those original designs is staggering. But what’s most amazing is that gloomy Verdi, composer of such laugh riots as Don Carlo and Simon Boccanegra, could also write with all the lightness and bellylaughs of Haydn and Mozart. Otello is arguably better than Othello. But there is no doubt that Falstaff is better than The Merry Wives of Windsor - usually considered Shakespeare’s worst play. Together, the two form a cornerstone of opera second only to the finest of Mozart.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Quote of the Day:
The Manning: Evan tucker is the conductor of the leading prog-rock classical chorus featuring an all monk ensemble (In the pacific northwest)
Saturday, August 6, 2011
800 Words: The Weekend America was Young - Interruption 1: The Destruction of Delaware
Jacopo: So which Civil War would you like to tackle now?
Esteban: It doesn’t matter to me. I could go on at length about all of them.
Jacopo: Well, we have nothing but time...
Esteban: I’m not sure I do, but that’s the great thing about working in stocks and real estate, isn’t it?
Jacopo: Indeed. I can see why our family’s kept this job.
Esteban: If you can live with the thought of getting fat on other people’s labor, it can be a rather enjoyable life. Other people have no time to remember what they’ve lived. You have the time to live everything you remember.
Jacopo: That can be quite a curse.
Esteban: Indeed it can. Which is why I’m coming to love doing these interviews.
Jacopo: Well, now that you and Bubbie are fully settled in Buenos Aires, I honestly wouldn’t mind doing a lot more of these.
Esteban: I have from now until whenever my time comes.
Jacopo: We can do a lot more. You’re in astonishingly good health.
Esteban: No worse than I was at 30.
Jacopo: And probably better than you were at 25. I can’t believe those pictures of you.
Esteban: I was quite the chazzer at that point.
Jacopo: What changed?
Esteban: I spent the second half of my twenties thinking I was doomed to an early grave. I don’t doubt I’d have ended up there had I continued in music.
Jacopo: What did your music-making sound like?
Esteban: Given the amount of talent I had, pretty abysmal.
Jacopo: Why abysmal?
Esteban: The usual reason. I hated practicing.
Jacopo: Why did you give it up?
Esteban: Because I was abysmal.
Jacopo: Why do you think you were abysmal?
Esteban: Because I didn’t practice.
Jacopo: No, really....
Esteban: Really. As a violinist I would never have been able to hold my own in a fourth-rate professional orchestra.
Jacopo: But you could have conducted it.
Esteban: Not after they heard me play violin.
Jacopo: Does that matter?
Esteban: After a certain point, it certainly does. I could write out most of the great music of the nineteenth century in full score by memory, I probably still can. But I couldn’t memorize the names of their root chords, I could never understand a Schenkerian analysis chart, and I could never play more than a single line at a time on the piano.
Jacopo: How about as a singer?
Esteban: I might have been decent had I not smoked for seven years.
Jacopo: You smoked???
Esteban: So did your Bubbie.
Jacopo: ….I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
Esteban: We were young.
Jacopo: It wasn’t like today when cigarettes are just tea leaves ingested through steam.
Esteban: Shreklekh! Who would ever want to smoke that?
Jacopo: Wait, so you weren’t just addicted? You enjoyed nicotine cigarettes?
Esteban: I loved them. If I wasn’t worried that I’d drop dead of a heart attack at the age of 26, I’d have probably kept going until something real killed me.
Jacopo: How could you be worried about dying of a heart attack at 26?
Esteban: I was a fat smoker who had chest pains. What would you have done?
Jacopo: Not have started smoking.
Esteban: Well, let’s say you were as dumb as I was.
Jacopo: Gone to the doctor?
Esteban: That’s what I did. I went to two different cardiologists who told me that my heart was completely fine.
Jacopo: So you kept smoking?
Esteban: Hell no. That just made me more certain I’d drop dead.
Jacopo: So that was when you lost weight?
Esteban: No. What happened then was that your cousin David Cordova diagnosed me with an ulcer over instant messenger.
Jacopo: Was he even a medical student yet?
Esteban: No.
Jacopo: Was he right?
Esteban: He must have been. I stopped drinking seltzer water for a few months and I was fine.
Jacopo: It’s difficult to imagine you without a bottle of seltzer.
Esteban: Then imagine how difficult it must have been for me.
Jacopo: So how did you lose the weight?
Esteban: My father bought us a house in Bethany Beach, Delaware.
Jacopo: Isn’t Delaware the state that Pennsylvania nuked over a dispute about toll fees?
Esteban: Exactly. But this was still in the period when Delaware was in the peak of its influence.
Jacopo: Delaware was an influential state?
Esteban: Oh, very. In fact, from a certain vantage point, one might be able to blame the entire fall of America on Delaware. Delaware had hardly any usury laws.
Jacopo: What’s usury?
Esteban: The lending of money at a rate of interest.
Jacopo: I should have known that.
Esteban: That’s alright. At your age I was at least as incompetent with money. You’ll do fine....So anyway, Delaware was the only state in the union that would allow banks and credit card companies no limit in the amount of interest it could charge on its loans. As a result, tens of millions of Americans had to file for personal bankruptcy because they could not pay for loans on houses which banks operating out of Delaware would grant them.
Jacopo: If the borrowers couldn’t pay back the banks, what would the banks do to get the money back?
Esteban: The only thing they could do. They would simply instruct their customers to take out a larger loan.
Jacopo: But if the borrowers couldn’t pay back the smaller loan, how could they pay back the larger one.
Esteban: That’s precisely the point. These banks knew that they couldn’t be paid back, so they would simply wait for the United States Federal Government to bail them out.
Jacopo: So this was all one big scheme to extort money from the Federal Government?
Esteban: Not quite, though that might make for a more entertaining story. What it really was was just another humdrum society-gone-wrong story. At every level, the bank employees had to prove their worth, so at no point was there an incentive for any worker to say “These are terrible loans.”
Jacopo: So it’s a bit like a dictatorship in the corporate sphere.
Esteban: Only a bit. You’d get fired instead of incinerated. But yes, it’s the same basic idea.
Jacopo: Was there any way to break this cycle without the banks being destroyed completely?
Esteban: Well, no. Not without the banks being regulated.
Jacopo: That doesn’t sound hard at all. Why couldn’t the United States government simply have done that?
Esteban: Because the United States government was regulated by the banks. Every congressman who lost an election would become either a Wall Street banker or lawyer, where they could make more money. Most every congressional staffer would be expected to spend as much of their career in a Washington DC lobbying firm as in a congressional office, so they could make more money. Every Secretary of the Treasury from Bill Clinton’s second - Robert Rubin - until Michelle Bachmann’s only Secretary - David H. Koch - was an appointment made because he came with extraordinarily deep Wall Street connections, so the President could raise more money. It was only when Barack Obama was re-elected in 2020 that any president attempted to brake this cycle. Within three months of taking office, Obama had banned congressional staffers from working at lobbying firms, banned all private financing of political campaigns, and appointed Robert Reich - a former secretary of Labor and Brandeis professor who avoided all Wall Street connections - as Secretary of the Treasury. And just in case there was any doubt as to Obama’s intention to do things differently, it was the leaked private memo to Reich from Obama’s Chief of Staff, David Axelrod, which contained that now-famous maxim:“Rule them like a Czar.”
Jacopo: How did Delaware fare in all those economic collapses?
Esteban: They were the last state in the union to be hit. But when they were, they were hit with a vengeance. There were far less people in Delaware than most states. But a far larger portion of them were corporate executives.
Jacopo: So while normal Americans were getting poorer by the month, the government would be writing checks to the executives in the form of corporate bailouts?
Esteban: Not exactly. After the debt crisis of August 2011, it became clear that the bailouts of 2009 failed to keep the United States economy from depression, or from bad credit and a debt crisis. So President Obama decided that he must stop the bailouts and put all of his efforts into paying the United States debt. And then came the most daring act, by degrees of magnitude, which a President had ever attempted. To describe it as the largest austerity measure in the history of the world would be to understate it terribly. Based the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Obama bypassed congress to freeze the assets of every major bank in the country and used 20% of the money in the coffers of banks like Bank of America, J.P.Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs to pay off as much of the debt as the United States could handle with that. He then raised the age of Social Security to 75, raised the gas tax to 25 cents per gallon, raised every income tax bracket by no less than 8%, raised the marginal tax rate - tax on every dollar over $250,000 - to 90% and included all capital gains as marginal income. He banned all off-shore accounts and banned all state loopholes for corporate tax havens. And just when the world thought he was done, he issued the most radical decrees of all. He cut the military budget by 30%, closed more than half of the US military’s international bases; banned earmarks on all bills, laid off 20% of the US Federal Government’s employees; put a cap of $15,000 per 5 years on how much government would subsidize per capita health care, and charged the rest to insurance companies; cut future student loan subsidies by 75%, eliminated 50% of all farm subsidies, issued a mandatory minimum in local and state income taxes and cut all federal pensions by 30%. He did all this knowing that the entire world would have to undergo a severe depression simply to correct the balance of the World Economy. But also knowing that such a reckoning could happen either in a controlled environment or in a chaotic one.
Jacopo: How could he have made all this take effect once the emergency powers lifted?
Esteban: He couldn’t. And he knew it. But he also knew that the very fact of his declaring all this legislation meant that Republicans would have to practice triage with all their priorities.
Jacopo: What did the Republicans manage to save?
Esteban: Take one guess...
Jacopo: Marginal tax rates?
Esteban: Surprise! Obama was counting on the power of his office to be the one reassurance against the chaos that followed. And that chaos served him extremely well. In the span of a month, the Dow Jones plummeted to five thousand. The banks were 20% poorer. Military contractors had 30% less influence. Oil companies had 25% more initiative to speed up their alternative energy research and that Health Insurance companies now had an initiative to keep their clients in good health. All it took was one terrifying month, and the entire ability for business to control government had been kneecapped. Once they no longer had the money to pay Republicans to do their bidding, what point was there in Republicans opposing him on policies which most of them knew would guarantee them electoral victory and ultimately improve the country?
Jacopo: But he must have known that this would cost him the election.
Esteban: Most Americans were surprised it didn’t cost him his life. He was being called a dictator in every organ of the press - equated with Hitler not just by far-right demagogues but also by the left. The only people who approved were old-school centrist journalists like Thomas Friedman and David Brooks who claimed that Obama saved the country from itself. There were riots all across the South: Houston, Virginia Beach, Memphis, Phoenix, Wichita, San Antonio, Tulsa, Dallas, Jacksonville, Louisville, Nashville. And every time the President called in another division of the National Guard to patrol a different city, we had to be afraid that the National Guard would either shoot the rioters or join them. Fortunately, few did either. But even so, President Obama’s plan managed to reduce the United States’s debt by $10 trillion in five years. Had Michelle Bachmann not become president, the United States might have been bought another hundred years of life, perhaps even of domination. All of this was done in the span of a month. After it was finished, he lifted his emergency powers and stood against the winds that blew. And boy, did they blow.
Jacopo: But since so many corporate executives lived in Delaware, it was the state that made the most money on the Obama plan.
Esteban: Exactly.
Jacopo: Even with fighting back on Marginal Tax Rates.
Esteban: Obama knew that Marginal Tax Rates would be the ideal red herring. In the years that followed, the economy was so bad that hardly anyone was making more than $250,000 dollars a year. So he allowed the Republicans a Pyrrhic victory while they still managed not to put a dent in his plan. Even if the Republicans got marginal tax rates down to 45%, the State of Delaware was still getting more per-capita income on marginal taxes than any other state in the country.
Jacopo: So even as most of the banks were falling, Delaware was still doing very well.
Esteban: Indeed it was. And continued to do well for nearly another twenty years.
Jacopo: What stopped their success?
Esteban: Death.
Jacopo: Death how?
Esteban: Most of the executives who worked in Delaware stayed there for retirement. Southern Delaware had extremely pleasant beach communities with lots of restaurants, outlet stores and all the other amenities for which a rich retiree could possibly wish. But since Obama had banned all state tax loopholes for corporate residency - twice - corporations no longer had any reason to stay in Delaware. Not even the “Ryan Restoration Plan” could induce corporations to move back.
Jacopo: So eventually all the retired executives just died?
Esteban: Precisely. And when they did, the state had no income left to support itself.
Jacopo: Couldn’t they have simply raised taxes?
Esteban: Yes, they could have. But Delaware would then have to support itself for the first time in over two-hundred years.
Jacopo: What did they do instead?
Esteban: They raised the toll on the Delaware Memorial Bridge to 25 dollars. The rest, as they say, is history.
Jacopo: You still haven’t explained how Pennsylvania nuked Delaware.
Esteban: All in good time boychik. I think your bubbie has lunch ready.
Jacopo: So why don’t we take a break. But you never did tell me how you lost the weight.
Esteban: Oh....Yeah. I bought a bike.
Jacopo: Oh.
Esteban: It doesn’t matter to me. I could go on at length about all of them.
Jacopo: Well, we have nothing but time...
Esteban: I’m not sure I do, but that’s the great thing about working in stocks and real estate, isn’t it?
Jacopo: Indeed. I can see why our family’s kept this job.
Esteban: If you can live with the thought of getting fat on other people’s labor, it can be a rather enjoyable life. Other people have no time to remember what they’ve lived. You have the time to live everything you remember.
Jacopo: That can be quite a curse.
Esteban: Indeed it can. Which is why I’m coming to love doing these interviews.
Jacopo: Well, now that you and Bubbie are fully settled in Buenos Aires, I honestly wouldn’t mind doing a lot more of these.
Esteban: I have from now until whenever my time comes.
Jacopo: We can do a lot more. You’re in astonishingly good health.
Esteban: No worse than I was at 30.
Jacopo: And probably better than you were at 25. I can’t believe those pictures of you.
Esteban: I was quite the chazzer at that point.
Jacopo: What changed?
Esteban: I spent the second half of my twenties thinking I was doomed to an early grave. I don’t doubt I’d have ended up there had I continued in music.
Jacopo: What did your music-making sound like?
Esteban: Given the amount of talent I had, pretty abysmal.
Jacopo: Why abysmal?
Esteban: The usual reason. I hated practicing.
Jacopo: Why did you give it up?
Esteban: Because I was abysmal.
Jacopo: Why do you think you were abysmal?
Esteban: Because I didn’t practice.
Jacopo: No, really....
Esteban: Really. As a violinist I would never have been able to hold my own in a fourth-rate professional orchestra.
Jacopo: But you could have conducted it.
Esteban: Not after they heard me play violin.
Jacopo: Does that matter?
Esteban: After a certain point, it certainly does. I could write out most of the great music of the nineteenth century in full score by memory, I probably still can. But I couldn’t memorize the names of their root chords, I could never understand a Schenkerian analysis chart, and I could never play more than a single line at a time on the piano.
Jacopo: How about as a singer?
Esteban: I might have been decent had I not smoked for seven years.
Jacopo: You smoked???
Esteban: So did your Bubbie.
Jacopo: ….I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
Esteban: We were young.
Jacopo: It wasn’t like today when cigarettes are just tea leaves ingested through steam.
Esteban: Shreklekh! Who would ever want to smoke that?
Jacopo: Wait, so you weren’t just addicted? You enjoyed nicotine cigarettes?
Esteban: I loved them. If I wasn’t worried that I’d drop dead of a heart attack at the age of 26, I’d have probably kept going until something real killed me.
Jacopo: How could you be worried about dying of a heart attack at 26?
Esteban: I was a fat smoker who had chest pains. What would you have done?
Jacopo: Not have started smoking.
Esteban: Well, let’s say you were as dumb as I was.
Jacopo: Gone to the doctor?
Esteban: That’s what I did. I went to two different cardiologists who told me that my heart was completely fine.
Jacopo: So you kept smoking?
Esteban: Hell no. That just made me more certain I’d drop dead.
Jacopo: So that was when you lost weight?
Esteban: No. What happened then was that your cousin David Cordova diagnosed me with an ulcer over instant messenger.
Jacopo: Was he even a medical student yet?
Esteban: No.
Jacopo: Was he right?
Esteban: He must have been. I stopped drinking seltzer water for a few months and I was fine.
Jacopo: It’s difficult to imagine you without a bottle of seltzer.
Esteban: Then imagine how difficult it must have been for me.
Jacopo: So how did you lose the weight?
Esteban: My father bought us a house in Bethany Beach, Delaware.
Jacopo: Isn’t Delaware the state that Pennsylvania nuked over a dispute about toll fees?
Esteban: Exactly. But this was still in the period when Delaware was in the peak of its influence.
Jacopo: Delaware was an influential state?
Esteban: Oh, very. In fact, from a certain vantage point, one might be able to blame the entire fall of America on Delaware. Delaware had hardly any usury laws.
Jacopo: What’s usury?
Esteban: The lending of money at a rate of interest.
Jacopo: I should have known that.
Esteban: That’s alright. At your age I was at least as incompetent with money. You’ll do fine....So anyway, Delaware was the only state in the union that would allow banks and credit card companies no limit in the amount of interest it could charge on its loans. As a result, tens of millions of Americans had to file for personal bankruptcy because they could not pay for loans on houses which banks operating out of Delaware would grant them.
Jacopo: If the borrowers couldn’t pay back the banks, what would the banks do to get the money back?
Esteban: The only thing they could do. They would simply instruct their customers to take out a larger loan.
Jacopo: But if the borrowers couldn’t pay back the smaller loan, how could they pay back the larger one.
Esteban: That’s precisely the point. These banks knew that they couldn’t be paid back, so they would simply wait for the United States Federal Government to bail them out.
Jacopo: So this was all one big scheme to extort money from the Federal Government?
Esteban: Not quite, though that might make for a more entertaining story. What it really was was just another humdrum society-gone-wrong story. At every level, the bank employees had to prove their worth, so at no point was there an incentive for any worker to say “These are terrible loans.”
Jacopo: So it’s a bit like a dictatorship in the corporate sphere.
Esteban: Only a bit. You’d get fired instead of incinerated. But yes, it’s the same basic idea.
Jacopo: Was there any way to break this cycle without the banks being destroyed completely?
Esteban: Well, no. Not without the banks being regulated.
Jacopo: That doesn’t sound hard at all. Why couldn’t the United States government simply have done that?
Esteban: Because the United States government was regulated by the banks. Every congressman who lost an election would become either a Wall Street banker or lawyer, where they could make more money. Most every congressional staffer would be expected to spend as much of their career in a Washington DC lobbying firm as in a congressional office, so they could make more money. Every Secretary of the Treasury from Bill Clinton’s second - Robert Rubin - until Michelle Bachmann’s only Secretary - David H. Koch - was an appointment made because he came with extraordinarily deep Wall Street connections, so the President could raise more money. It was only when Barack Obama was re-elected in 2020 that any president attempted to brake this cycle. Within three months of taking office, Obama had banned congressional staffers from working at lobbying firms, banned all private financing of political campaigns, and appointed Robert Reich - a former secretary of Labor and Brandeis professor who avoided all Wall Street connections - as Secretary of the Treasury. And just in case there was any doubt as to Obama’s intention to do things differently, it was the leaked private memo to Reich from Obama’s Chief of Staff, David Axelrod, which contained that now-famous maxim:“Rule them like a Czar.”
Jacopo: How did Delaware fare in all those economic collapses?
Esteban: They were the last state in the union to be hit. But when they were, they were hit with a vengeance. There were far less people in Delaware than most states. But a far larger portion of them were corporate executives.
Jacopo: So while normal Americans were getting poorer by the month, the government would be writing checks to the executives in the form of corporate bailouts?
Esteban: Not exactly. After the debt crisis of August 2011, it became clear that the bailouts of 2009 failed to keep the United States economy from depression, or from bad credit and a debt crisis. So President Obama decided that he must stop the bailouts and put all of his efforts into paying the United States debt. And then came the most daring act, by degrees of magnitude, which a President had ever attempted. To describe it as the largest austerity measure in the history of the world would be to understate it terribly. Based the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Obama bypassed congress to freeze the assets of every major bank in the country and used 20% of the money in the coffers of banks like Bank of America, J.P.Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs to pay off as much of the debt as the United States could handle with that. He then raised the age of Social Security to 75, raised the gas tax to 25 cents per gallon, raised every income tax bracket by no less than 8%, raised the marginal tax rate - tax on every dollar over $250,000 - to 90% and included all capital gains as marginal income. He banned all off-shore accounts and banned all state loopholes for corporate tax havens. And just when the world thought he was done, he issued the most radical decrees of all. He cut the military budget by 30%, closed more than half of the US military’s international bases; banned earmarks on all bills, laid off 20% of the US Federal Government’s employees; put a cap of $15,000 per 5 years on how much government would subsidize per capita health care, and charged the rest to insurance companies; cut future student loan subsidies by 75%, eliminated 50% of all farm subsidies, issued a mandatory minimum in local and state income taxes and cut all federal pensions by 30%. He did all this knowing that the entire world would have to undergo a severe depression simply to correct the balance of the World Economy. But also knowing that such a reckoning could happen either in a controlled environment or in a chaotic one.
Jacopo: How could he have made all this take effect once the emergency powers lifted?
Esteban: He couldn’t. And he knew it. But he also knew that the very fact of his declaring all this legislation meant that Republicans would have to practice triage with all their priorities.
Jacopo: What did the Republicans manage to save?
Esteban: Take one guess...
Jacopo: Marginal tax rates?
Esteban: Surprise! Obama was counting on the power of his office to be the one reassurance against the chaos that followed. And that chaos served him extremely well. In the span of a month, the Dow Jones plummeted to five thousand. The banks were 20% poorer. Military contractors had 30% less influence. Oil companies had 25% more initiative to speed up their alternative energy research and that Health Insurance companies now had an initiative to keep their clients in good health. All it took was one terrifying month, and the entire ability for business to control government had been kneecapped. Once they no longer had the money to pay Republicans to do their bidding, what point was there in Republicans opposing him on policies which most of them knew would guarantee them electoral victory and ultimately improve the country?
Jacopo: But he must have known that this would cost him the election.
Esteban: Most Americans were surprised it didn’t cost him his life. He was being called a dictator in every organ of the press - equated with Hitler not just by far-right demagogues but also by the left. The only people who approved were old-school centrist journalists like Thomas Friedman and David Brooks who claimed that Obama saved the country from itself. There were riots all across the South: Houston, Virginia Beach, Memphis, Phoenix, Wichita, San Antonio, Tulsa, Dallas, Jacksonville, Louisville, Nashville. And every time the President called in another division of the National Guard to patrol a different city, we had to be afraid that the National Guard would either shoot the rioters or join them. Fortunately, few did either. But even so, President Obama’s plan managed to reduce the United States’s debt by $10 trillion in five years. Had Michelle Bachmann not become president, the United States might have been bought another hundred years of life, perhaps even of domination. All of this was done in the span of a month. After it was finished, he lifted his emergency powers and stood against the winds that blew. And boy, did they blow.
Jacopo: But since so many corporate executives lived in Delaware, it was the state that made the most money on the Obama plan.
Esteban: Exactly.
Jacopo: Even with fighting back on Marginal Tax Rates.
Esteban: Obama knew that Marginal Tax Rates would be the ideal red herring. In the years that followed, the economy was so bad that hardly anyone was making more than $250,000 dollars a year. So he allowed the Republicans a Pyrrhic victory while they still managed not to put a dent in his plan. Even if the Republicans got marginal tax rates down to 45%, the State of Delaware was still getting more per-capita income on marginal taxes than any other state in the country.
Jacopo: So even as most of the banks were falling, Delaware was still doing very well.
Esteban: Indeed it was. And continued to do well for nearly another twenty years.
Jacopo: What stopped their success?
Esteban: Death.
Jacopo: Death how?
Esteban: Most of the executives who worked in Delaware stayed there for retirement. Southern Delaware had extremely pleasant beach communities with lots of restaurants, outlet stores and all the other amenities for which a rich retiree could possibly wish. But since Obama had banned all state tax loopholes for corporate residency - twice - corporations no longer had any reason to stay in Delaware. Not even the “Ryan Restoration Plan” could induce corporations to move back.
Jacopo: So eventually all the retired executives just died?
Esteban: Precisely. And when they did, the state had no income left to support itself.
Jacopo: Couldn’t they have simply raised taxes?
Esteban: Yes, they could have. But Delaware would then have to support itself for the first time in over two-hundred years.
Jacopo: What did they do instead?
Esteban: They raised the toll on the Delaware Memorial Bridge to 25 dollars. The rest, as they say, is history.
Jacopo: You still haven’t explained how Pennsylvania nuked Delaware.
Esteban: All in good time boychik. I think your bubbie has lunch ready.
Jacopo: So why don’t we take a break. But you never did tell me how you lost the weight.
Esteban: Oh....Yeah. I bought a bike.
Jacopo: Oh.
Friday, August 5, 2011
800 Words: The Weekend America was Young - Part 5
Jacopo: I’d like to get back to the question of America’s fall.
Esteban: Not so fast. First we have to cover the conditions that lead up to it. And you can’t do that without talking about the Four Civil Wars of 2013.
Jacopo: Oh yes, didn’t you ask Bubbie to marry you while watching the Pakistani massacres on television?
Esteban: I was a true romantic.
Jacopo: Must have been an exciting day for everybody.
Esteban: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
Jacopo: But weren’t there other civil wars going on already?
Esteban: Yes there were. But those were, at least in retrospect, much slower conflicts. They took longer to erupt, longer to fight and longer to resolve. The Libyan civil war dragged on for twenty years. Neither Sarkozy, nor Le Pen nor Blair could effectively withdraw from France's Libyan strongholds without inviting Mutassim Qaddafi to invade all of Southern France.
Jacopo: I thought Qaddafi fils had only conquered the French coast.
Esteban: Indeed he had. Marseilles, Montpellier, Antibes, Cannes, Arles, Nice, Perpignan, Lourdes, Toulon and Toulouse had all fallen. And all non-Muslim residents of those cities were confined to ghettos. But Lyon, Aix-en-Provence and Saint Etienne were thought to be next and were completely evacuated. But the masterstroke was to arrange a deal with Parisian mullahs to bus rioters in from Paris with the express purpose of torching France’s entire Southern countryside to the ground. And with that, half of France’s wine industry was gone forever.
Jacopo: Neither I nor my kids will never know what real Champagne tastes like.
Esteban: Or Armagnac, or Beaujolais, or Chablis, or Chateau, or Cremant de Limoux, or Cotes du Gascogne, or Premier Cru.
Jacopo: I thought you didn’t care for wine.
Esteban: I like to have the option.
Jacopo: But most of this was already in the later part of the decade.
Esteban: Exactly. The Libyan conflict simmered while the conflicts of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Mexico exploded. And with them the stage was set for the larger conflicts which soon engulfed us all.
Jacopo: How did they set the stage?
Esteban: The Chinese conflict slowed manufacturing across the world to a crawl. The Pakistani conflict set loose nuclear weapons to any country who wanted one. The Saudi conflict set the price of oil at unimagined levels. The Mexico conflict set the United States on an irreversable path toward authoritarianism.
Jacopo: Why don’t you take us through the fundamentals of each.
Esteban: Sounds great. Why don’t we take this in chronological order. We’ll begin in the Saudi Civil War, which began with the attempt on Prince Abdullah bin Miteb’s life in February of 2013.
Jacopo: This was right in the middle of the Arab Spring. Was it not?
Esteban: Absolutely. The dictatorships of Tunisia and Egypt fell in 2010, and Yemen’s had fallen in September of the next year. By February 2012, the Hariri-Jumblatt alliance had succeeded temporarily in ridding itself of Hezbollah and Syrian influence. We thought it was permanent at the time, but the revolution was stopped in its tracks by a Saudi Prince who was very popular in the West for a brief period.
Jacopo: Abdullah bin Miteb. If I’m not mistaken he’s still the Saudi king.
Esteban: He’s completely senile now and the whole kingdom is waiting for him to die so that the Saudi Central Committee can govern openly.
Jacopo: How did he come to power?
Esteban: During my childhood, Saudi Arabia may have been the very worst of the world’s dictatorships. Even worse than North Korea. The educated population of Saudis consisted almost entirely of its Royal Family, which numbered roughly 7,000 people who divided the spoils of Saudi oil wells between them. Until all too recently, if you were not a member of the Royal Family, your only hope for advancement was to join the army. The other twenty-million Saudis were kept in the most abject squalor imaginable, often tortured, maimed and killed for the slightest possible offenses. Furthermore, the succession issues in Saudi Arabia were always a terrible burden. Most kingdoms are inherited through patrilineal descent. Meaning that the oldest son inherits the thrown from a King who was himself an oldest son. But Saudi succession is fratrilineal - meaning brother to brother. Which makes the succession far more confusing and the kings - who inherit the throne at a far older age - far more prone to conservatism. Since the original Saudi King, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, had 45 sons, questions of succession were always strife-filled affairs. But never moreso than the succession from Abdullah to Abdullah bin Miteb.
Jacopo: Wasn’t there once a close relationship between them?
Esteban: Clearly. Abdullah bin Miteb was the grandson of King Abdullah. His father was Miteb bin Abdullah, the commander of the Saudi National Guard, which was the Saudi secret police. The King saw potential for his grandson to become the Western face of Saudi Arabia. He was articulate, handsome, intelligent and English-educated. He was a public relations dream and his grandfather quickly saw that bin Miteb was the best possible spokesman for the Saudi family in the international press.
Jacopo: And not realizing that he was raising a rival.
Esteban: Being a dictator requires living in a bubble. People are too scared to tell you obvious truths because if a person displeases you, you can simply have him killed or his family tortured. Abdullah thought his grandson would be loyal to him simply because he had plucked him out of relative obscurity for an important role. But what the King failed to realize that featuring one grandson so prominently in the international press might arouse the suspicion of his brothers and cousins.
Jacopo: Was it simply a question of jealousy?
Esteban: Not at all, though I don’t doubt that envy was an important contributor. But the most important factor was that many Saudi princes resented one of their own being so lauded in the West for so many untraditional practices. He’d be featured on American television claiming that the United States is a great friend to Islam, in style section photographs with beautiful film stars, on film at Women’s Tennis matches and shaking hands with Israeli ministers. This was too much for many of his more traditional relatives. In a sense, he may have been forced into rebellion because he came to represent Western Decadence to so many reactionary elements. Even with his father heading the secret police, there was simply no way he could have felt safe.
Jacopo: Which of course led to that famous assassination attempt in Paris.
Esteban: Yes, but what was incredible was that he survived at all. He was in the penthouse at L’Hotel de Crillon with some rich French girl whose name escapes me. They were apparently drunk and the Prince’s guards were outside the door. The assassin was hiding in the closet with a shotgun. The poor girl apparently spotted the assassin from the creak in the door, and screamed right before she was shot - killed instantly with one bullet. The guards were quick enough to knock down the assassin before he got to the Prince, who immediately hit the ground and hid underneath his bed.
Jacopo: Does anyone know who ordered the hit?
Esteban: It probably doesn’t matter. It honestly could have been one of a dozen relatives. In any event, King Abdullah wanted to hush the matter up entirely. But I think the Prince correctly interpreted the coverup as a death sentence. So he had a press contact report to al-Jezeera that he was dead, and for about nine months went into hiding.
Jacopo: Where did he hide?
Esteban: Rural Texas apparently. Some oil buddies gave him security. There’s a statue to him in a town called Hannover which claims he hid there for the entirety of the nine months he disappeared. He used that time to build up a power base among oil excutives, negotiating with them in secret for better deals than his grandfather offered.
Jacopo: Did his grandfather know about him going into hiding?
Esteban: He must have figured it out. He certainly would have known that his grandson survived the attack. My guess is that he welcomed the development of the Prince going into hiding. The world would think he was dead, and he could keep his more conservative relatives at bay.
Jacopo: So how did he return?
Esteban: Nobody’s quite sure. In March, he suddenly marched into Mecca on the day before the Hajj with an army of his own that numbered a hundred-thousand - mostly various African soldiers of fortune recruited by the CIA at orders that came directly from President Romney. The Prince denounced his grandfather as a tyrant and an offender against Allah. He announced in the that on the day after the Hajj’s completion, he would begin a pilgrimage by foot to Medina, and that all able-bodied Muslims were invited to join him. Five-hundred thousand Muslims, most of them Saudis, did exactly that.
Jacopo: Hold on. Wasn’t the CIA virtually blood brothers with King Abdullah?
Esteban: Yes. But the US Government also realized three things: Firstly, that the Prince could give them cover for more leverage over the price of oil. Secondly, that the Prince could be a voice of reform within Saudi Arabia who would remain friends with the US rather than an Islamic dictator who would undermine American interests. Lastly, that the Prince’s Western-Friendly image could give them a far better public relations cover for doing business with a totalitarian dictatorship than King Abdullah ever could.
Jacopo: So the Prince just stayed in Mecca during the Hajj? How could he do that without getting himself killed?
Esteban: So long as the Hajj was still going, he was protected. There was no way that King Abdullah would start a war in Islam’s holiest city during its most sacred pilgrimage.
Jacopo: But even afterward, wouldn’t King Abdullah be able to shoot the pilgrims on the way?
Esteban: That was precisely the point. The people who followed the Prince gave his forces cover. The Prince had given his army half-a-million human shields. Many families would send their disabled, their retarded and their dishonored children on this pilgrimage, assuring them that it would be the highest honor to die on a sacred pilgrimage.
Jacopo: What was the point of the pilgrimage?
Esteban: It gave the Prince time to win over as much of the Army as he could. And during that pilgrimage, 40,000 Saudi troops defected.
Jacopo: Where was the Prince’s father during all this?
Esteban: I'm sure he knew perfectly well that his son had silently been given a death sentence. But even as chief of the secret police, he was as vulnerable to the displeasure of his father as any other Saudi. King Abdullah, who feared divided loyalty, imprisoned him. He probably would have had Prince Miteb killed had Prince Abdullah bin Miteb not immediately taken to the airwaves to broadcast his father’s imprisonment to the world and publicly called for his father’s release.
Jacopo: How was Saudi oil production affected?
Esteban: Ground to a halt. Oil prices skyrocketed around the world. So long as the war continued, the price of oil went up to 450 dollars a barrel. It was yet another problem America could not easily solve. The exorbitant price of oil was one of the four factors, and certainly the most forseeable, that contributed to the United States's fall.
Jacopo: So how did the price of oil stay so high even after the war was over?
Esteban: Realizing that his grandson was advancing, King Abdullah gave orders to torch every single oil well from which his forces had to retreat. Following the first round of burned rigs, President Romney immediately diverted forces from Iraq into Saudi Arabia, who would invade Riyadh from the South while the Prince advanced from the North. Just as it had in Iraq, the illusion of immediate victory was far too powerful to resist. Rather than immediately overtaking the oil rigs, the King ordered a full retreat from the South and burned all the oil in that side of the country as well. The war ended in five months, but in that time a million Saudi’s died and its oil reserves went from 70 years to only 30.
Jacopo: Did this have remifications in the Middle East?
Esteban: Oh yes. The primary legacy of the Saudi Civil War was that it killed all hope for democracy taking hold in the Middle East. This was a revolution of elite against elite, with only the most marginal changes taking place. Every bloody-minded adviser to an Arab ruler now saw a way to manipulate the Western press. They would simply denounce the human rights violations of the current president and promise better. The Western Media would trumpet these aspiring butchers as the savior of their country. And since the most young Arabs wanted a leader that would emulate the Western governments, they would be swindled into supporting a more ruthess leader than they could ever dream. And these new rulers would invariably consolidate far more power than their predecessors ever did. Anyway, that is the story of the Saudi Civil War.
Jacopo: You told it very thoroughly.
Esteban: I know. Old men like telling long stories. And I think all this detail is important. Without it, it’s just a series of events with no real consequence.
Jacopo: I see what you mean. Would you like to break for dinner?
Esteban: Certainly, we can resume later tonight or perhaps tomorrow.
Esteban: Not so fast. First we have to cover the conditions that lead up to it. And you can’t do that without talking about the Four Civil Wars of 2013.
Jacopo: Oh yes, didn’t you ask Bubbie to marry you while watching the Pakistani massacres on television?
Esteban: I was a true romantic.
Jacopo: Must have been an exciting day for everybody.
Esteban: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
Jacopo: But weren’t there other civil wars going on already?
Esteban: Yes there were. But those were, at least in retrospect, much slower conflicts. They took longer to erupt, longer to fight and longer to resolve. The Libyan civil war dragged on for twenty years. Neither Sarkozy, nor Le Pen nor Blair could effectively withdraw from France's Libyan strongholds without inviting Mutassim Qaddafi to invade all of Southern France.
Jacopo: I thought Qaddafi fils had only conquered the French coast.
Esteban: Indeed he had. Marseilles, Montpellier, Antibes, Cannes, Arles, Nice, Perpignan, Lourdes, Toulon and Toulouse had all fallen. And all non-Muslim residents of those cities were confined to ghettos. But Lyon, Aix-en-Provence and Saint Etienne were thought to be next and were completely evacuated. But the masterstroke was to arrange a deal with Parisian mullahs to bus rioters in from Paris with the express purpose of torching France’s entire Southern countryside to the ground. And with that, half of France’s wine industry was gone forever.
Jacopo: Neither I nor my kids will never know what real Champagne tastes like.
Esteban: Or Armagnac, or Beaujolais, or Chablis, or Chateau, or Cremant de Limoux, or Cotes du Gascogne, or Premier Cru.
Jacopo: I thought you didn’t care for wine.
Esteban: I like to have the option.
Jacopo: But most of this was already in the later part of the decade.
Esteban: Exactly. The Libyan conflict simmered while the conflicts of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Mexico exploded. And with them the stage was set for the larger conflicts which soon engulfed us all.
Jacopo: How did they set the stage?
Esteban: The Chinese conflict slowed manufacturing across the world to a crawl. The Pakistani conflict set loose nuclear weapons to any country who wanted one. The Saudi conflict set the price of oil at unimagined levels. The Mexico conflict set the United States on an irreversable path toward authoritarianism.
Jacopo: Why don’t you take us through the fundamentals of each.
Esteban: Sounds great. Why don’t we take this in chronological order. We’ll begin in the Saudi Civil War, which began with the attempt on Prince Abdullah bin Miteb’s life in February of 2013.
Jacopo: This was right in the middle of the Arab Spring. Was it not?
Esteban: Absolutely. The dictatorships of Tunisia and Egypt fell in 2010, and Yemen’s had fallen in September of the next year. By February 2012, the Hariri-Jumblatt alliance had succeeded temporarily in ridding itself of Hezbollah and Syrian influence. We thought it was permanent at the time, but the revolution was stopped in its tracks by a Saudi Prince who was very popular in the West for a brief period.
Jacopo: Abdullah bin Miteb. If I’m not mistaken he’s still the Saudi king.
Esteban: He’s completely senile now and the whole kingdom is waiting for him to die so that the Saudi Central Committee can govern openly.
Jacopo: How did he come to power?
Esteban: During my childhood, Saudi Arabia may have been the very worst of the world’s dictatorships. Even worse than North Korea. The educated population of Saudis consisted almost entirely of its Royal Family, which numbered roughly 7,000 people who divided the spoils of Saudi oil wells between them. Until all too recently, if you were not a member of the Royal Family, your only hope for advancement was to join the army. The other twenty-million Saudis were kept in the most abject squalor imaginable, often tortured, maimed and killed for the slightest possible offenses. Furthermore, the succession issues in Saudi Arabia were always a terrible burden. Most kingdoms are inherited through patrilineal descent. Meaning that the oldest son inherits the thrown from a King who was himself an oldest son. But Saudi succession is fratrilineal - meaning brother to brother. Which makes the succession far more confusing and the kings - who inherit the throne at a far older age - far more prone to conservatism. Since the original Saudi King, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, had 45 sons, questions of succession were always strife-filled affairs. But never moreso than the succession from Abdullah to Abdullah bin Miteb.
Jacopo: Wasn’t there once a close relationship between them?
Esteban: Clearly. Abdullah bin Miteb was the grandson of King Abdullah. His father was Miteb bin Abdullah, the commander of the Saudi National Guard, which was the Saudi secret police. The King saw potential for his grandson to become the Western face of Saudi Arabia. He was articulate, handsome, intelligent and English-educated. He was a public relations dream and his grandfather quickly saw that bin Miteb was the best possible spokesman for the Saudi family in the international press.
Jacopo: And not realizing that he was raising a rival.
Esteban: Being a dictator requires living in a bubble. People are too scared to tell you obvious truths because if a person displeases you, you can simply have him killed or his family tortured. Abdullah thought his grandson would be loyal to him simply because he had plucked him out of relative obscurity for an important role. But what the King failed to realize that featuring one grandson so prominently in the international press might arouse the suspicion of his brothers and cousins.
Jacopo: Was it simply a question of jealousy?
Esteban: Not at all, though I don’t doubt that envy was an important contributor. But the most important factor was that many Saudi princes resented one of their own being so lauded in the West for so many untraditional practices. He’d be featured on American television claiming that the United States is a great friend to Islam, in style section photographs with beautiful film stars, on film at Women’s Tennis matches and shaking hands with Israeli ministers. This was too much for many of his more traditional relatives. In a sense, he may have been forced into rebellion because he came to represent Western Decadence to so many reactionary elements. Even with his father heading the secret police, there was simply no way he could have felt safe.
Jacopo: Which of course led to that famous assassination attempt in Paris.
Esteban: Yes, but what was incredible was that he survived at all. He was in the penthouse at L’Hotel de Crillon with some rich French girl whose name escapes me. They were apparently drunk and the Prince’s guards were outside the door. The assassin was hiding in the closet with a shotgun. The poor girl apparently spotted the assassin from the creak in the door, and screamed right before she was shot - killed instantly with one bullet. The guards were quick enough to knock down the assassin before he got to the Prince, who immediately hit the ground and hid underneath his bed.
Jacopo: Does anyone know who ordered the hit?
Esteban: It probably doesn’t matter. It honestly could have been one of a dozen relatives. In any event, King Abdullah wanted to hush the matter up entirely. But I think the Prince correctly interpreted the coverup as a death sentence. So he had a press contact report to al-Jezeera that he was dead, and for about nine months went into hiding.
Jacopo: Where did he hide?
Esteban: Rural Texas apparently. Some oil buddies gave him security. There’s a statue to him in a town called Hannover which claims he hid there for the entirety of the nine months he disappeared. He used that time to build up a power base among oil excutives, negotiating with them in secret for better deals than his grandfather offered.
Jacopo: Did his grandfather know about him going into hiding?
Esteban: He must have figured it out. He certainly would have known that his grandson survived the attack. My guess is that he welcomed the development of the Prince going into hiding. The world would think he was dead, and he could keep his more conservative relatives at bay.
Jacopo: So how did he return?
Esteban: Nobody’s quite sure. In March, he suddenly marched into Mecca on the day before the Hajj with an army of his own that numbered a hundred-thousand - mostly various African soldiers of fortune recruited by the CIA at orders that came directly from President Romney. The Prince denounced his grandfather as a tyrant and an offender against Allah. He announced in the that on the day after the Hajj’s completion, he would begin a pilgrimage by foot to Medina, and that all able-bodied Muslims were invited to join him. Five-hundred thousand Muslims, most of them Saudis, did exactly that.
Jacopo: Hold on. Wasn’t the CIA virtually blood brothers with King Abdullah?
Esteban: Yes. But the US Government also realized three things: Firstly, that the Prince could give them cover for more leverage over the price of oil. Secondly, that the Prince could be a voice of reform within Saudi Arabia who would remain friends with the US rather than an Islamic dictator who would undermine American interests. Lastly, that the Prince’s Western-Friendly image could give them a far better public relations cover for doing business with a totalitarian dictatorship than King Abdullah ever could.
Jacopo: So the Prince just stayed in Mecca during the Hajj? How could he do that without getting himself killed?
Esteban: So long as the Hajj was still going, he was protected. There was no way that King Abdullah would start a war in Islam’s holiest city during its most sacred pilgrimage.
Jacopo: But even afterward, wouldn’t King Abdullah be able to shoot the pilgrims on the way?
Esteban: That was precisely the point. The people who followed the Prince gave his forces cover. The Prince had given his army half-a-million human shields. Many families would send their disabled, their retarded and their dishonored children on this pilgrimage, assuring them that it would be the highest honor to die on a sacred pilgrimage.
Jacopo: What was the point of the pilgrimage?
Esteban: It gave the Prince time to win over as much of the Army as he could. And during that pilgrimage, 40,000 Saudi troops defected.
Jacopo: Where was the Prince’s father during all this?
Esteban: I'm sure he knew perfectly well that his son had silently been given a death sentence. But even as chief of the secret police, he was as vulnerable to the displeasure of his father as any other Saudi. King Abdullah, who feared divided loyalty, imprisoned him. He probably would have had Prince Miteb killed had Prince Abdullah bin Miteb not immediately taken to the airwaves to broadcast his father’s imprisonment to the world and publicly called for his father’s release.
Jacopo: How was Saudi oil production affected?
Esteban: Ground to a halt. Oil prices skyrocketed around the world. So long as the war continued, the price of oil went up to 450 dollars a barrel. It was yet another problem America could not easily solve. The exorbitant price of oil was one of the four factors, and certainly the most forseeable, that contributed to the United States's fall.
Jacopo: So how did the price of oil stay so high even after the war was over?
Esteban: Realizing that his grandson was advancing, King Abdullah gave orders to torch every single oil well from which his forces had to retreat. Following the first round of burned rigs, President Romney immediately diverted forces from Iraq into Saudi Arabia, who would invade Riyadh from the South while the Prince advanced from the North. Just as it had in Iraq, the illusion of immediate victory was far too powerful to resist. Rather than immediately overtaking the oil rigs, the King ordered a full retreat from the South and burned all the oil in that side of the country as well. The war ended in five months, but in that time a million Saudi’s died and its oil reserves went from 70 years to only 30.
Jacopo: Did this have remifications in the Middle East?
Esteban: Oh yes. The primary legacy of the Saudi Civil War was that it killed all hope for democracy taking hold in the Middle East. This was a revolution of elite against elite, with only the most marginal changes taking place. Every bloody-minded adviser to an Arab ruler now saw a way to manipulate the Western press. They would simply denounce the human rights violations of the current president and promise better. The Western Media would trumpet these aspiring butchers as the savior of their country. And since the most young Arabs wanted a leader that would emulate the Western governments, they would be swindled into supporting a more ruthess leader than they could ever dream. And these new rulers would invariably consolidate far more power than their predecessors ever did. Anyway, that is the story of the Saudi Civil War.
Jacopo: You told it very thoroughly.
Esteban: I know. Old men like telling long stories. And I think all this detail is important. Without it, it’s just a series of events with no real consequence.
Jacopo: I see what you mean. Would you like to break for dinner?
Esteban: Certainly, we can resume later tonight or perhaps tomorrow.
Quote of the Day:
HaZmora: this last part of your ongoing dialectic with yourself/your grandson
is not as awesomely futuristic
i want the end of the 25th hour
nay, demand it!
is not as awesomely futuristic
i want the end of the 25th hour
nay, demand it!
800 Words: The Weekend America was Young - Interlude 1
Jacopo: So I’m going to ask the question now that everybody always asks - was there any way America‘s fall could have been avoided?
Esteban: The older I get and the more I think about it, the more inclined I am to think it was inevitable. By the end of the Bush era, America’s deficit spending was such that there was simply no way to evade a great reckoning. Even if the debt ceiling raise had not been filibustered, the bill that came through the Senate was so unsatisfactory, such a hollow shell of what was necessary to fix America‘s problems, that there was simply no way for it to inspire anything but terror in the markets.
Jacopo: At the time, a lot of liberals howled about how spineless Obama was that he’d capitulate on so many social programs.
Esteban: What in god’s name was he supposed to do? Even after having made enormous concessions on every single aspect of the bill, it still arrived in congress with less than 48 hours to spare, and it was still not enough for the Tea Party.
Jacopo: What was your feeling about Obama in those years?
Esteban: Always improving. I was about the only person who was not at all impressed with Obama during his primary campaign. I voted for him, but I feared the movement of change at his back. Fortunately, these were all the same people who shouted bloody murder when Obama seemed to be up to the practical compromises which every great leader must make to govern. Obama showed no remorse about leaving the progressive left at the altar. Whatever it took to win, Obama showed the stomach to follow through .The battles he did not win could not have been won by anyone else. As his presdiency became more bedraggled, the enormity of opposition to him became ever more clear. I couldn’t help but admire him more and more.
Jacopo: Do you think Obama was not a man of the left in those years?
Esteban: Oh I very much think he was. But he was not a man of the pseudo-left. It’s one of the great ironies of American History that Franklin Roosevelt’s name would be invoked so often as a stick to beat Obama. Seventy years before all this, the hard-line social progressives would batter Franklin Roosevelt with Abraham Lincoln’s name in precisely the same way. And seventy years before Roosevelt, abolitionists would batter Lincoln’s name with…I have no idea who. But unlike Jimmy Carter, both Roosevelt and Obama were far more interested in the realities of what government requires than in losing battles to demonstrate a show of principle.
Jacopo: Was there any way he could have prevented the slow-motion economic collapse that followed?
Esteban: I never saw the way. You cannot move the world out of an economic depression without trillions of dollars of deficit spending. You cannot pay off trillions of dollars in debt without incurring an economic depression, let alone tens of trillions. After two-and-a-half years in which Obama opted for saving the economy over paying the debt, our country was teetering on the edge of the exact same depression. He had to try the other option.
Jacopo: How did our family do in those years.
Esteban: I was, as always, the Cassandra of the familly- warning them that America was on the verge of something very grave. But I remember the exact moment when they came over to my point of view. Immediately upon returning from Rhode Island, we went on a Real Estate trip to Florida, It was in the airport that we found out about Rand Paul’s filibuster. Still, we hoped, there was a chance that Paul might relent if offered a better deal. Obama probably offered him one. But he was not interested in fixing the problem. On August 4th, the day after America lost its credit rating, we heard over the car radio that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had sunk 20% in two days in addition to the 11% in the eight days before. This meant that the market had already fallen 31% in ten days. All four of us immediately realized the consequences. America had a choice that could only have happened in a world that takes pleasure in dancing on a volcano: Either America pays off the debt, or spend all the money from the raised debt ceiling at once. The former would certainly ruin the world economy. The latter might also ruin the world economy, and it would also put America another 2 trillion dollars in debt.
Jacopo: Was this choice the Paul family’s goal?
Esteban: Absolutely. For Sodom to burn. And to replace it with a purer state.
Jacopo: Did the Paul family have any larger goals than the destruction of the financial markets?
Esteban: Of course they had goals. But their goals were impossible. The Paul family was as devoutly religious a family as American politics had ever produced. But rather than Christ they worshipped the free market. They believed that Gold was the only durable asset, and that the worth of all paper money would eventually collapse to nothing. They believed that lower taxes would cause larger revenues from the government because people would have more incentive to work harder. They believed that once America was forced to deal immediately with its debt, the world would learn to live within its means and economic recessions would be a thing of the past. They believed that once government would stop trying to regulate industry, businesses would police themselves far more effectively from excess. Because if they didn’t, the free market would simply provide a new company which kept its worst excesses in check.
Jacopo: It’s difficult to believe that these beliefs were widespread just 60 years ago.
Esteban: I wish I could say that people have evolved past the libertarian sensibility. But human nature never changes. If a person wants to be stupid, he will find a way. There are beliefs today that are easily as dumb and dangerous as the Libertarian mindset. And before the rise of the Tea Party, Libertarianism had a certain cache. There was even a movement that emerged in the late Bush years to merge liberalism and libertarianism.
Jacopo: One would think they’d be mutually exclusive.
Esteban: Over the years, a lot of dumb movements have allied themselves with liberalism. But every one of them has fizzled out. The meaning of liberalism itself has mutated all throughout its history, because it absorbs the best lessons from more rigid ideologies as it goes. The reason it’s so mutable is because it doesn’t believe much of anything. It’s only belief is ‘whatever works.’ Any true liberal has only one belief when it comes to politics: the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number of people. So far, most of the evidence points to political freedom, programs for social welfare, regulated capitalism, democratic governance and sound functions of government. But if truly compelling evidence demonstrated that a corrupt authoritarian system provided the greatest possible happiness, we’d probably support that too.
Jacopo: Well, from the way you describe it, you’d think that all the same things could be said of conservatism.
Esteban: How do you mean?
Jacopo: Hasn’t conservatism gone through hundreds of years, maybe thousands, of even faster mutations? Conservatism never means the same thing from decade to decade, yet from year to year it always stays a consistent force.
Esteban: Well, yes that’s absolutely true. But conservatism isn’t concerned with practical applications of solutions. It is concerned with preserving solutions that already worked. If ‘Whatever Works’ is the motto of liberalism, ‘Whatever Worked’ is conservatism’s equivalent motto. This makes conservatism a far easier ideology, because it never has to concern itself with new solutions that might work better. But a great society still has a place for principled conservatism.
Jacopo: You almost sound like you approve of them.
Esteban: I’ve always respected a certain kind of conservative. There should always be respect the preservation of tradition, the reverence of responsibility and the obligation they feel to serve their great institutions. That’s the conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Adenauer, Lech Walesa, and John McCain. For my own taste, they are the ideal opposition voice in a great society.
Jacopo: It’s amazing to me that in his 80’s, John McCain became Obama’s most effective advocate.
Esteban: History out-ironizes every hipster.
Jacopo: What’s a hipster?
Esteban: Never mind.
Jacopo: So.... in your view there are two conservative strains?
Esteban: Well, if you’re going to divide conservatism, then there are at least two. But if you would bifurcate conservatism, then you would have to do the same with liberalism. There’s the liberalism strain which is concerned solely with the practical solutions of government. I’ll use some strictly twentieth century examples to illustrate this. You’d find leaders like Roosevelt, Truman, Clinton, Blair, Lloyd George, Mandela, Ben-Gurion, Atlee, Nehru, Rabin, and Rathenau. These are leaders who would try anything at all to get the best possible solution. Then there’s the progressive strain, which is more concerned with adhering to moral absolutes than the practical compromises you have to make while governing. In this camp you’d find leaders like Gandhi, Jimmy Carter, Allende, Ehud Barak, Willy Brandt, Harold Wilson, and in their own weird ways, Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson. And in the same way that liberalism can curdle into progressivism, conservatism can curdle into a kind of religion.
Jacopo: What kind of religion?
Esteban: Any kind of religion to which they can latch on: the religion of the free market, the religion of monarchy, the religion of family values, the religion of pre-emptive war. In this way, Libertarians, monarchists, Christianists and neo-conservatives were all various types of the same kind of conservative. Whereas progressives view institutions as something that should be blown up, religious conservatives view their institutions as something that should control all of our lives and that must always be defended from being moved an inch.
Jacopo: Does this make conservatism more predisposed towards authoritarianism than liberalism?
Esteban: Maybe a little bit, but only a little. And if ideology makes conservatives more predisposed to authoritarianism, then it also makes liberals more predisposed to terrorism. One of the ironies of American history is that in spite of so many people identifying themselves as progressive, an American progressive movement never got off the ground for more than a few years at a time. Whereas no matter how many times religious conservativism is discredited, the cohesion of their movements never seems to go away. After the McCarthy hearings, it was rightly thought that hard-right conservativism was finished for good. But two years later, William F. Buckley founded a hard-right-wing magazine called The National Review, and it became easily the most influential political journal of the twentieth century. Y’know...we’ve gotten very far off-topic.
Jacopo: I know. Would you like a late lunch?
Esteban: I’d be delighted.
Esteban: The older I get and the more I think about it, the more inclined I am to think it was inevitable. By the end of the Bush era, America’s deficit spending was such that there was simply no way to evade a great reckoning. Even if the debt ceiling raise had not been filibustered, the bill that came through the Senate was so unsatisfactory, such a hollow shell of what was necessary to fix America‘s problems, that there was simply no way for it to inspire anything but terror in the markets.
Jacopo: At the time, a lot of liberals howled about how spineless Obama was that he’d capitulate on so many social programs.
Esteban: What in god’s name was he supposed to do? Even after having made enormous concessions on every single aspect of the bill, it still arrived in congress with less than 48 hours to spare, and it was still not enough for the Tea Party.
Jacopo: What was your feeling about Obama in those years?
Esteban: Always improving. I was about the only person who was not at all impressed with Obama during his primary campaign. I voted for him, but I feared the movement of change at his back. Fortunately, these were all the same people who shouted bloody murder when Obama seemed to be up to the practical compromises which every great leader must make to govern. Obama showed no remorse about leaving the progressive left at the altar. Whatever it took to win, Obama showed the stomach to follow through .The battles he did not win could not have been won by anyone else. As his presdiency became more bedraggled, the enormity of opposition to him became ever more clear. I couldn’t help but admire him more and more.
Jacopo: Do you think Obama was not a man of the left in those years?
Esteban: Oh I very much think he was. But he was not a man of the pseudo-left. It’s one of the great ironies of American History that Franklin Roosevelt’s name would be invoked so often as a stick to beat Obama. Seventy years before all this, the hard-line social progressives would batter Franklin Roosevelt with Abraham Lincoln’s name in precisely the same way. And seventy years before Roosevelt, abolitionists would batter Lincoln’s name with…I have no idea who. But unlike Jimmy Carter, both Roosevelt and Obama were far more interested in the realities of what government requires than in losing battles to demonstrate a show of principle.
Jacopo: Was there any way he could have prevented the slow-motion economic collapse that followed?
Esteban: I never saw the way. You cannot move the world out of an economic depression without trillions of dollars of deficit spending. You cannot pay off trillions of dollars in debt without incurring an economic depression, let alone tens of trillions. After two-and-a-half years in which Obama opted for saving the economy over paying the debt, our country was teetering on the edge of the exact same depression. He had to try the other option.
Jacopo: How did our family do in those years.
Esteban: I was, as always, the Cassandra of the familly- warning them that America was on the verge of something very grave. But I remember the exact moment when they came over to my point of view. Immediately upon returning from Rhode Island, we went on a Real Estate trip to Florida, It was in the airport that we found out about Rand Paul’s filibuster. Still, we hoped, there was a chance that Paul might relent if offered a better deal. Obama probably offered him one. But he was not interested in fixing the problem. On August 4th, the day after America lost its credit rating, we heard over the car radio that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had sunk 20% in two days in addition to the 11% in the eight days before. This meant that the market had already fallen 31% in ten days. All four of us immediately realized the consequences. America had a choice that could only have happened in a world that takes pleasure in dancing on a volcano: Either America pays off the debt, or spend all the money from the raised debt ceiling at once. The former would certainly ruin the world economy. The latter might also ruin the world economy, and it would also put America another 2 trillion dollars in debt.
Jacopo: Was this choice the Paul family’s goal?
Esteban: Absolutely. For Sodom to burn. And to replace it with a purer state.
Jacopo: Did the Paul family have any larger goals than the destruction of the financial markets?
Esteban: Of course they had goals. But their goals were impossible. The Paul family was as devoutly religious a family as American politics had ever produced. But rather than Christ they worshipped the free market. They believed that Gold was the only durable asset, and that the worth of all paper money would eventually collapse to nothing. They believed that lower taxes would cause larger revenues from the government because people would have more incentive to work harder. They believed that once America was forced to deal immediately with its debt, the world would learn to live within its means and economic recessions would be a thing of the past. They believed that once government would stop trying to regulate industry, businesses would police themselves far more effectively from excess. Because if they didn’t, the free market would simply provide a new company which kept its worst excesses in check.
Jacopo: It’s difficult to believe that these beliefs were widespread just 60 years ago.
Esteban: I wish I could say that people have evolved past the libertarian sensibility. But human nature never changes. If a person wants to be stupid, he will find a way. There are beliefs today that are easily as dumb and dangerous as the Libertarian mindset. And before the rise of the Tea Party, Libertarianism had a certain cache. There was even a movement that emerged in the late Bush years to merge liberalism and libertarianism.
Jacopo: One would think they’d be mutually exclusive.
Esteban: Over the years, a lot of dumb movements have allied themselves with liberalism. But every one of them has fizzled out. The meaning of liberalism itself has mutated all throughout its history, because it absorbs the best lessons from more rigid ideologies as it goes. The reason it’s so mutable is because it doesn’t believe much of anything. It’s only belief is ‘whatever works.’ Any true liberal has only one belief when it comes to politics: the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number of people. So far, most of the evidence points to political freedom, programs for social welfare, regulated capitalism, democratic governance and sound functions of government. But if truly compelling evidence demonstrated that a corrupt authoritarian system provided the greatest possible happiness, we’d probably support that too.
Jacopo: Well, from the way you describe it, you’d think that all the same things could be said of conservatism.
Esteban: How do you mean?
Jacopo: Hasn’t conservatism gone through hundreds of years, maybe thousands, of even faster mutations? Conservatism never means the same thing from decade to decade, yet from year to year it always stays a consistent force.
Esteban: Well, yes that’s absolutely true. But conservatism isn’t concerned with practical applications of solutions. It is concerned with preserving solutions that already worked. If ‘Whatever Works’ is the motto of liberalism, ‘Whatever Worked’ is conservatism’s equivalent motto. This makes conservatism a far easier ideology, because it never has to concern itself with new solutions that might work better. But a great society still has a place for principled conservatism.
Jacopo: You almost sound like you approve of them.
Esteban: I’ve always respected a certain kind of conservative. There should always be respect the preservation of tradition, the reverence of responsibility and the obligation they feel to serve their great institutions. That’s the conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Adenauer, Lech Walesa, and John McCain. For my own taste, they are the ideal opposition voice in a great society.
Jacopo: It’s amazing to me that in his 80’s, John McCain became Obama’s most effective advocate.
Esteban: History out-ironizes every hipster.
Jacopo: What’s a hipster?
Esteban: Never mind.
Jacopo: So.... in your view there are two conservative strains?
Esteban: Well, if you’re going to divide conservatism, then there are at least two. But if you would bifurcate conservatism, then you would have to do the same with liberalism. There’s the liberalism strain which is concerned solely with the practical solutions of government. I’ll use some strictly twentieth century examples to illustrate this. You’d find leaders like Roosevelt, Truman, Clinton, Blair, Lloyd George, Mandela, Ben-Gurion, Atlee, Nehru, Rabin, and Rathenau. These are leaders who would try anything at all to get the best possible solution. Then there’s the progressive strain, which is more concerned with adhering to moral absolutes than the practical compromises you have to make while governing. In this camp you’d find leaders like Gandhi, Jimmy Carter, Allende, Ehud Barak, Willy Brandt, Harold Wilson, and in their own weird ways, Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson. And in the same way that liberalism can curdle into progressivism, conservatism can curdle into a kind of religion.
Jacopo: What kind of religion?
Esteban: Any kind of religion to which they can latch on: the religion of the free market, the religion of monarchy, the religion of family values, the religion of pre-emptive war. In this way, Libertarians, monarchists, Christianists and neo-conservatives were all various types of the same kind of conservative. Whereas progressives view institutions as something that should be blown up, religious conservatives view their institutions as something that should control all of our lives and that must always be defended from being moved an inch.
Jacopo: Does this make conservatism more predisposed towards authoritarianism than liberalism?
Esteban: Maybe a little bit, but only a little. And if ideology makes conservatives more predisposed to authoritarianism, then it also makes liberals more predisposed to terrorism. One of the ironies of American history is that in spite of so many people identifying themselves as progressive, an American progressive movement never got off the ground for more than a few years at a time. Whereas no matter how many times religious conservativism is discredited, the cohesion of their movements never seems to go away. After the McCarthy hearings, it was rightly thought that hard-right conservativism was finished for good. But two years later, William F. Buckley founded a hard-right-wing magazine called The National Review, and it became easily the most influential political journal of the twentieth century. Y’know...we’ve gotten very far off-topic.
Jacopo: I know. Would you like a late lunch?
Esteban: I’d be delighted.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
ET: Almanac
I have in mind another human being who will understand me. I count on this. Not on perfect understanding, which is Cartesian, but on approximate understanding, which is Jewish. And on a meeting of sympathies, which is human. But I have no ideal reader in my head, no. Let me just say this, too. I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.
- Saul Bellow
- Saul Bellow
The Weekend America Was Young - Part 4
Jacopo: One of the problems with World War III was that it was truly a World War in a way which the first two were not. It wasn’t simply one side pitted against another. There were no clear sides to it.
Esteban: Absolutely. In order to understand this war, you can’t look at any of the other major conflicts of the modern era. There were no definite sides to this war, there were just a bunch of regional conflicts between powerful regional heads who were constantly shifting alliances for short-term gain. If anything, the conflicts they most resembled were the wars of the Late Middle Ages. If you wanted to find a closer parallel, you’d either have to look at medieval conflicts like the War of the Roses and the Hundred Years War or you’d have to look at minor conflicts like the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980’s and the Mexican Civil War of the early 2010’s.
Jacopo: I’m sure that no one would have called those conflicts minor at the time.
Esteban: They probably wouldn’t have. But one of the effects of a truly global village is that wars become truly global. All throughout history, wars were constantly erupting between neighbors. That old phrase, “the narcissism of small differences,” really meant something because you were living next to people who occupied the same space as you, yet had a completely different perception of the same events. But how much larger do those small differences seem in a world in which everybody becomes one another’s neighbor?
Jacopo: I’m still not sure I understand.
Esteban: OK. Here’s an example. With the famine and draught caused worldwide by radiation poisoning, control of water resources was as important as oil. Back in 2030, Saudi Arabia and the West Chinese territory of Gobi both wanted control of Lake Volta, which is still the world’s largest fresh water reservoir. They realized that the water helped their own countries to prosper, but what they really wanted was the steady stream of income that came from controlling the world’s largest reservoir. So King Abdullah bin Meteb and Governor Chen Yu issued a joint declaration of war on Ghana, whom they claimed denied them requests for assistance. There were reports of Gobi and Saudi Arabia recruiting soldiers at gunpoint. But I never believed them because that wasn’t even necessary. Most dictators had long realized that internet access gave their propaganda ministries the opportunity to install unlimited popups on people’s computers. And since neither Arabians or Gobias had ever met anyone from Ghana, their citizens might be willing to believe anything about Ghanans.
Jacopo: And once they defeated Ghana, they declared war on each other.
Esteban: Precisely. But it gets weirder. After a while, both countries had bombed most of their major cities to smithereens. But other countries still needed their water supply and were worried about one of them poisoning the reservoir. So in 2036, Haiti quietly made an offer to both countries to fight the remainder war on their territory.
Jacopo: Outsourcing battlefields?
Esteban: Exactly. If a dictator didn’t care about his people getting in the way, it was a fantastic money-maker. So for two years, both Gobians and Arabians would be flown into Haiti to fight the war on a completely unrelated battleground.
Jacopo: And things like this happened all around the globe.
Esteban: Yes they did.
Jacopo: Where was Europe during all this?
Esteban: Europe was comparatively safe during all this meshuggas. There was plenty of brutality in Europe too, but it was on a far smaller scale. Fundamentally, Europe had two problems. One was the same demographic realities they’d been dealing with since the end of the Second World War. Only the problems were far more pronounced. By 2016, the birthrates of so-called ‘Natives’ in Western Europe dipped below one child-per-family. Meanwhile, Muslims were reproducing an average well above five to a family. Furthermore, Europe had the added pressure of the Arab Spring going horribly awry. By 2015, Egyptian democracy had fallen and given way to a Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship. After America’s full withdrawal from Iraq in 2012, Iraqi democracy fell within three months to an Islamic sharia state run by Ayatollah al-Hakim. The Libyan Civil War continued for ten years after Qaddafi’s assassination by his own son and spread to the southern French coast. Turkey embroiled itself in a 40-year-long civil war that spread to Greece, Kurdistan and most of the Balkan States. But the key event to the whole Middle East came after the fall of Israel. Bashar al-Assad attempted to claim the entire state for Syria, and that finally proved his undoing.
Jacopo: You’d think that nobody would want to touch Israel with so much radiation.
Esteban: Even in irradiated form, Israel was still a disputed territory. After so much struggle and insurrection, religious Muslims could not stand the thought of a secular tyrant in Jerusalem. Assad was accused by Muslims across the world as betraying the Palestinian cause. Within six months of Assad taking Israel, Egypt bombed a palace where they knew Assad would stay.
Jacopo: Were there any Palestinians left?
Esteban: More than there were Israelis. But the Palstinians were in more horrible shape than ever. Most of the survivors of Shoah Bet were infected with radiation poisoning. And the United Nations already had far too many other worries to contribute much to the relief effort.
Jacopo: Did anyone at all come to their aid?
Esteban: Yes, actually. King Abdullah the Second of Jordan offered amnesty and care for all the people of Israel and Palestine - be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim. But in 2019, he was shot dead on national television.
Jacopo: Like an execution?
Esteban: Strangely enough, no. He was in the middle of a speech, and someone from behind the camera yelled ‘Allahu Ackbar!’ and fired three bullets before being tackled. The entire world saw footage of King Abdullah hit in the left side of his chest cavity three times.
Jacopo: He died on camera?
Esteban: No, he died three days later.
Jacopo: How did Europe avoid the brunt of all this?
Esteban: Ironically, it was mostly religion. The people of Europe did what they’ve always done and turned to God in times of fear. The European Union declared itself a single country, instituted a policy of mandatory conscription and by 2020 the pews of the churches were full again. Birthrates among families of Christian descent tripled in the years that followed. By 2050, Europe was fully 85% Christian. And after the fall of America, a full three percent Europe became Jewish again.
Jacopo: But the EU still had to deal with the issue of Russia.
Esteban: Indeed. Of all the conflicts of this period, this was the only one which resembled a 20th century stalemate. The EU and Russia fought mostly on the battlegrounds of economics. The only nuclear bomb detonation was in 2023 in the Croatian town of Dubrovnik. It was fundamentally a warning shot from Vladimir Putin over a border dispute in the Ukraine. Fortunately, Tony Blair was wise enough not to mount a retaliatory attack. One of the results of this conflict was that Blair, gave the most famous speech of our century. Every school child now memorizes the “blood begets blood” speech.
Jacopo: “For though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God has not, nor shall not refuse any who come to Him. Our collective grief lies all without, and these internal matters of lament are merely shadows to the all-too-forseen grief that howls from the graveyard unto the ears of our living souls....” I forget the rest.
Esteban: I still have no idea what that means, but there was not a dry eye in the entire world. The truth remains that after Obama’s death, Blair was the closest thing the world had to a conscience.
Jacopo: A thought most English would have laughed at when Blair was their Prime Minister.
Esteban: The truth is that neither side should be at all proud of their conduct during the conflict. Both Russia and the EU intentionally created blockades in Africa to create famines that might weaken the other side. But war is murder, and there is no such thing as a conflict waged by half-measures.
Jacopo: So I hesitate to ask, can you tell Alicia the story of America’s breakup and the Tacomas’s flight to America?
Esteban: Of course. But what you have to remember is that we were lucky.
Jacopo: You had foresight.
Esteban: I had lunacy.
Jacopo: You left America when no-one else would.
Esteban: It’s not foresight when you predict eight of every three democides.
Jacopo: You saved our family.
Esteban: I was a Cassandra. It was pure luck that I saw what other people didn’t. And it was purer luck that we had contacts who could get your relatives safely out of the country. I will always have guilt that I didn’t stay and try to fight when so many people I knew knew just as well what was coming.
Jacopo: And yet they stayed?
Esteban: They absolutely did. To fight a battle I should have fought with them. I offered as many people as I could to do what I could to get them out of the US before things got too rough, but they refused almost to a man. We were blessed by chance, not foresight.
Jacopo: The rest of the family was not happy with you at the time.
Esteban: Why wouldn’t they be? I dissolved a partnership with my brothers to buy Real Estate in Brazil. From the vantage point of March 2016, it seemed like a decision made on another planet.
Jacopo: Brazil was a boom economy.
Esteban: By the standards of the time, it was a still a violent, unpredictable country. My mother warned me that I would get my family killed trying to deal with Brazillian contractors.
Jacopo: How did the business succeed?
Esteban: Your Bubbie, who is much smarter than I.
Jacopo: She knew the language?
Esteban: Most educated Latin Americans of the time knew English. But she smoothed over a lot of potential conflicts with difficult business partners. I was rather hot-headed and awkward in my younger years, and could usually be counted on to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. In America I would let our family use me as the principle negotiator when we wanted the other party to dislike us.
Jacopo: (laughs awkwardly) So ultimately, what was the reason you insisted on moving to Latin America in 2016?
Esteban: After the beginning of Shoah Bet, we were all afraid that war would spread. I’d like to say that it was due to my fears about what was coming in America. But the truth is that what kept me up at night was the “Extended Bank Holiday,” as it was then called. Like the rest of America, our assets were virtually frozen, and there was no guarantee that we would ever get them back. And if we ever did, we’d have lost most of our earnings. Our bread-and-butter was China, which had not had a single recession in the 35 years before its collapse.
Jacopo: With what money did you start in Brazil?
Esteban: At the beginning, we had only the money for airfare and the cash my father had insisted we bury in our back yard. I told my father and brothers that I was moving and that I would ask them to send me money whenever they could. As all family partnerships sometimes do, we all said words we didn’t mean. I knew that if they ever sent me a nickel, I’d be a lucky man indeed. But even when the holiday lifted and things were at their worst, they sent me whatever was left of my share. And that’s to their eternal credit. For about ten months I worked as a busboy in an Irish pub. Fortunately, Bubbie Tacomas had a few relatives down there and made contacts far more easily than I. She was the reason that we were able to start building in Rio. Y’know Jacopo, I’m tired again...let’s continue this in the morning.
Jacopo: No problem.
Esteban: Absolutely. In order to understand this war, you can’t look at any of the other major conflicts of the modern era. There were no definite sides to this war, there were just a bunch of regional conflicts between powerful regional heads who were constantly shifting alliances for short-term gain. If anything, the conflicts they most resembled were the wars of the Late Middle Ages. If you wanted to find a closer parallel, you’d either have to look at medieval conflicts like the War of the Roses and the Hundred Years War or you’d have to look at minor conflicts like the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980’s and the Mexican Civil War of the early 2010’s.
Jacopo: I’m sure that no one would have called those conflicts minor at the time.
Esteban: They probably wouldn’t have. But one of the effects of a truly global village is that wars become truly global. All throughout history, wars were constantly erupting between neighbors. That old phrase, “the narcissism of small differences,” really meant something because you were living next to people who occupied the same space as you, yet had a completely different perception of the same events. But how much larger do those small differences seem in a world in which everybody becomes one another’s neighbor?
Jacopo: I’m still not sure I understand.
Esteban: OK. Here’s an example. With the famine and draught caused worldwide by radiation poisoning, control of water resources was as important as oil. Back in 2030, Saudi Arabia and the West Chinese territory of Gobi both wanted control of Lake Volta, which is still the world’s largest fresh water reservoir. They realized that the water helped their own countries to prosper, but what they really wanted was the steady stream of income that came from controlling the world’s largest reservoir. So King Abdullah bin Meteb and Governor Chen Yu issued a joint declaration of war on Ghana, whom they claimed denied them requests for assistance. There were reports of Gobi and Saudi Arabia recruiting soldiers at gunpoint. But I never believed them because that wasn’t even necessary. Most dictators had long realized that internet access gave their propaganda ministries the opportunity to install unlimited popups on people’s computers. And since neither Arabians or Gobias had ever met anyone from Ghana, their citizens might be willing to believe anything about Ghanans.
Jacopo: And once they defeated Ghana, they declared war on each other.
Esteban: Precisely. But it gets weirder. After a while, both countries had bombed most of their major cities to smithereens. But other countries still needed their water supply and were worried about one of them poisoning the reservoir. So in 2036, Haiti quietly made an offer to both countries to fight the remainder war on their territory.
Jacopo: Outsourcing battlefields?
Esteban: Exactly. If a dictator didn’t care about his people getting in the way, it was a fantastic money-maker. So for two years, both Gobians and Arabians would be flown into Haiti to fight the war on a completely unrelated battleground.
Jacopo: And things like this happened all around the globe.
Esteban: Yes they did.
Jacopo: Where was Europe during all this?
Esteban: Europe was comparatively safe during all this meshuggas. There was plenty of brutality in Europe too, but it was on a far smaller scale. Fundamentally, Europe had two problems. One was the same demographic realities they’d been dealing with since the end of the Second World War. Only the problems were far more pronounced. By 2016, the birthrates of so-called ‘Natives’ in Western Europe dipped below one child-per-family. Meanwhile, Muslims were reproducing an average well above five to a family. Furthermore, Europe had the added pressure of the Arab Spring going horribly awry. By 2015, Egyptian democracy had fallen and given way to a Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship. After America’s full withdrawal from Iraq in 2012, Iraqi democracy fell within three months to an Islamic sharia state run by Ayatollah al-Hakim. The Libyan Civil War continued for ten years after Qaddafi’s assassination by his own son and spread to the southern French coast. Turkey embroiled itself in a 40-year-long civil war that spread to Greece, Kurdistan and most of the Balkan States. But the key event to the whole Middle East came after the fall of Israel. Bashar al-Assad attempted to claim the entire state for Syria, and that finally proved his undoing.
Jacopo: You’d think that nobody would want to touch Israel with so much radiation.
Esteban: Even in irradiated form, Israel was still a disputed territory. After so much struggle and insurrection, religious Muslims could not stand the thought of a secular tyrant in Jerusalem. Assad was accused by Muslims across the world as betraying the Palestinian cause. Within six months of Assad taking Israel, Egypt bombed a palace where they knew Assad would stay.
Jacopo: Were there any Palestinians left?
Esteban: More than there were Israelis. But the Palstinians were in more horrible shape than ever. Most of the survivors of Shoah Bet were infected with radiation poisoning. And the United Nations already had far too many other worries to contribute much to the relief effort.
Jacopo: Did anyone at all come to their aid?
Esteban: Yes, actually. King Abdullah the Second of Jordan offered amnesty and care for all the people of Israel and Palestine - be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim. But in 2019, he was shot dead on national television.
Jacopo: Like an execution?
Esteban: Strangely enough, no. He was in the middle of a speech, and someone from behind the camera yelled ‘Allahu Ackbar!’ and fired three bullets before being tackled. The entire world saw footage of King Abdullah hit in the left side of his chest cavity three times.
Jacopo: He died on camera?
Esteban: No, he died three days later.
Jacopo: How did Europe avoid the brunt of all this?
Esteban: Ironically, it was mostly religion. The people of Europe did what they’ve always done and turned to God in times of fear. The European Union declared itself a single country, instituted a policy of mandatory conscription and by 2020 the pews of the churches were full again. Birthrates among families of Christian descent tripled in the years that followed. By 2050, Europe was fully 85% Christian. And after the fall of America, a full three percent Europe became Jewish again.
Jacopo: But the EU still had to deal with the issue of Russia.
Esteban: Indeed. Of all the conflicts of this period, this was the only one which resembled a 20th century stalemate. The EU and Russia fought mostly on the battlegrounds of economics. The only nuclear bomb detonation was in 2023 in the Croatian town of Dubrovnik. It was fundamentally a warning shot from Vladimir Putin over a border dispute in the Ukraine. Fortunately, Tony Blair was wise enough not to mount a retaliatory attack. One of the results of this conflict was that Blair, gave the most famous speech of our century. Every school child now memorizes the “blood begets blood” speech.
Jacopo: “For though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God has not, nor shall not refuse any who come to Him. Our collective grief lies all without, and these internal matters of lament are merely shadows to the all-too-forseen grief that howls from the graveyard unto the ears of our living souls....” I forget the rest.
Esteban: I still have no idea what that means, but there was not a dry eye in the entire world. The truth remains that after Obama’s death, Blair was the closest thing the world had to a conscience.
Jacopo: A thought most English would have laughed at when Blair was their Prime Minister.
Esteban: The truth is that neither side should be at all proud of their conduct during the conflict. Both Russia and the EU intentionally created blockades in Africa to create famines that might weaken the other side. But war is murder, and there is no such thing as a conflict waged by half-measures.
Jacopo: So I hesitate to ask, can you tell Alicia the story of America’s breakup and the Tacomas’s flight to America?
Esteban: Of course. But what you have to remember is that we were lucky.
Jacopo: You had foresight.
Esteban: I had lunacy.
Jacopo: You left America when no-one else would.
Esteban: It’s not foresight when you predict eight of every three democides.
Jacopo: You saved our family.
Esteban: I was a Cassandra. It was pure luck that I saw what other people didn’t. And it was purer luck that we had contacts who could get your relatives safely out of the country. I will always have guilt that I didn’t stay and try to fight when so many people I knew knew just as well what was coming.
Jacopo: And yet they stayed?
Esteban: They absolutely did. To fight a battle I should have fought with them. I offered as many people as I could to do what I could to get them out of the US before things got too rough, but they refused almost to a man. We were blessed by chance, not foresight.
Jacopo: The rest of the family was not happy with you at the time.
Esteban: Why wouldn’t they be? I dissolved a partnership with my brothers to buy Real Estate in Brazil. From the vantage point of March 2016, it seemed like a decision made on another planet.
Jacopo: Brazil was a boom economy.
Esteban: By the standards of the time, it was a still a violent, unpredictable country. My mother warned me that I would get my family killed trying to deal with Brazillian contractors.
Jacopo: How did the business succeed?
Esteban: Your Bubbie, who is much smarter than I.
Jacopo: She knew the language?
Esteban: Most educated Latin Americans of the time knew English. But she smoothed over a lot of potential conflicts with difficult business partners. I was rather hot-headed and awkward in my younger years, and could usually be counted on to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. In America I would let our family use me as the principle negotiator when we wanted the other party to dislike us.
Jacopo: (laughs awkwardly) So ultimately, what was the reason you insisted on moving to Latin America in 2016?
Esteban: After the beginning of Shoah Bet, we were all afraid that war would spread. I’d like to say that it was due to my fears about what was coming in America. But the truth is that what kept me up at night was the “Extended Bank Holiday,” as it was then called. Like the rest of America, our assets were virtually frozen, and there was no guarantee that we would ever get them back. And if we ever did, we’d have lost most of our earnings. Our bread-and-butter was China, which had not had a single recession in the 35 years before its collapse.
Jacopo: With what money did you start in Brazil?
Esteban: At the beginning, we had only the money for airfare and the cash my father had insisted we bury in our back yard. I told my father and brothers that I was moving and that I would ask them to send me money whenever they could. As all family partnerships sometimes do, we all said words we didn’t mean. I knew that if they ever sent me a nickel, I’d be a lucky man indeed. But even when the holiday lifted and things were at their worst, they sent me whatever was left of my share. And that’s to their eternal credit. For about ten months I worked as a busboy in an Irish pub. Fortunately, Bubbie Tacomas had a few relatives down there and made contacts far more easily than I. She was the reason that we were able to start building in Rio. Y’know Jacopo, I’m tired again...let’s continue this in the morning.
Jacopo: No problem.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Quote of the Day:
Der Fersko: I'm getting fewer opportunities to call Pete Seeger a hipster to his face
Only 20 or so more years
Only 20 or so more years
800 Words: The Weekend America Was Young - Part 3
Jacopo: So all that murder happened in the span of a year?
Esteban: The events of 2016 shaped our century, just as 1914 did for the century before.
Jacopo: Except the violence was much more unremitting.
Esteban: Absolutely. What was shocking about 2016 is that we were simply unaccustomed to forty million people pointlessly slaughtered in the span of a year. But one gets desensitized when just as many people are slaughtered every year for three decades. Life goes on regardless of if the dead are still alive. How can you claim a special right for grievance when everybody else is grieving too? I’m certain that there wasn’t a single person in the entire world who did not bury some close friend or family member in those years.
Jacopo: How did the death toll stay at such a high level for so long?
Esteban: Because the system broke. My parents’ generation had to worry about the Soviet Union and the United States beginning a nuclear war and destroying the world between them. But it was precisely that worry which caused a half-century of peace. It used to be that the United States and the Soviet Union were able to keep world peace by dividing the world between them. The United States ran the Western Hemisphere like an empire, and the Soviet Union did the same in the East. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, America was the only nation left who conceivably had the ability to control the world. But the world is far too large a place for one nation to control it. There was a popular movie when I was a kid called Jurassic Park, and it had a wonderful saying: “Mother Nature Always Finds a Way.” It’s exactly when the problems of the world seem within reach of solving that the world becomes most dangerous. Back in 1909, a guy named Norman Angell wrote a book that was ironically called “The Great Illusion.” He argued that the world had become so interconnected that war had ceased to be a rational option. Yet the fact that countries were so interconnected made the war much more lethal, because each country had to destroy the productivity that their former alliances created.
Jacopo: And with the advent of....
Esteban: ….Exactly, the Internet. The Internet was supposed to make repression that much more difficult. It was supposed to open the lines of communication and make secret-keeping impossible for governments. And events in the internet’s early days seemed to bear this out. The 2010-14 revolutions of the Middle East were made possible by websites like Twitter and Facebook, which allowed demonstrators to coordinate with each other online. The old Arab-Nationalist dictatorships didn’t undertand the first thing about how to use the internet, but later dictators did not repeat their mistake.
Jacopo: What did later dictators learn?
Esteban: They simply used the internet as we did, but for their own purposes. No intelligence service in the history of the world could gather dossiers as thorough as what people put about themselves on Facebook. No propaganda machine could be as effective at manipulating public opinion as they became from anonymous wikipedia edits. No amount of wiretapping could equal the information people would gather in chatrooms. All it took was a little money to informants, and they could find out whatever they wished about whomever they wished. The world had become dependent on the Internet so quickly that once governments mastered how to control the flow of information online, there was still no superior means of communication.
Jacopo: Was there any chance at all to resist? Couldn't people just not post things about themselves?
Esteban: Not much. The information people had already posted was there. If you had ever made a statement about politics, it was known, and if it was against the government, people knew that you were an enemy. As a result, you would have to post an unremitting diet of propaganda if you hoped to avoid the suspicion of the authorities. And since the government became so good at monitoring online activity, organized resistance became just as lethal and futile during the Third World War as it had been during the Second.
Jacopo: Couldn’t the corporations have refused to collaborate?
Esteban: Actually, many executives tried. But if they didn’t do what they could to maximize profit-margins, they were simply fired and replaced by less scrupulous administrators. That’s precisely what happened at Google. Larry Page refused to comply with the law President Ryan passed in 2025. According to the law, internet companies must hand over all personal information to the government. It looked as though they might win until Google’s stockholders held a meeting at which they voted to fire Page and install Mark Zuckerberg as Google’s CEO. Many people defended the board’s decision as the legitimate right of stockholders to maximize their profits, but the result was that the government attained access to 20 years of facebook archives, including the deleted posts.
Jacopo: A lot of people feel that the hiring of Zuckerberg at Google was the beginning of the end for America.
Esteban: The beginning of the end was probably when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. But it was certainly a crucial turning point.
Jacopo: Something I never understood was how the political views of most Americans stayed roughly the same for a hundred years yet its government kept advancing rightward.
Esteban: Apathy. Apathy. Apathy. There has never been any poll that accurately measures the intensity of people’s opinions. The people who believe in their causes most fervently are willing to do much more to see their dreams a reality. And the more fervently they believe, the more they inspire contempt and despair in non-believers. This was eventually how every major world power collapsed. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Jacopo: Would Paul Ryan’s presidency have been possible without the assassination of Barack Obama?
Esteban: Absolutely not. By 2020, it was a major question as to whether or not there would even be an election. There were reports that President Bachmann was readying the military to block entrance to all polling booths. Barack Obama had announced his candidacy back in February of 2018, and it was immediately clear that he would trounce President Bachmann. The President accused Barack Obama of inciting riots in poor black areas, but it was clear that he was trying to do precisely the opposite. He made speeches pointing out the plight of the poor all throughout the country. Perhaps the empowerment they derived caused the 2019 Midwest Riots, and I think it’s clear that Obama was far too slow to call for people to stop rioting. But if you read the text of his Restore Hope speeches, there is absolutely no inflammatory language in what Obama said. But as a result, there were orders in place for the East Coast Riots of 2020 for the army to fire indiscriminately: not only on rioters but also on peaceful protestors. In New York, that’s exactly what they did, and 15,000 people died, mostly black but some white as well. But in Philadelphia, the commading officer refused to obey the order. This triggered a chain reaction all up and down the East Coast. The rioting ceased to be violent, and there were peaceful demonstrations all across the country for the resignation of President Bachmann. Some say that there were as many as 140 million people attending, but my guess is that it was closer to 80 million. President Bachmann resigned in October, and her Vice-President, Louie Gohmert, had no chance against Obama in an election. In 2020, Barack Obama became the first presidential candidate to receive a unanimous electoral vote since George Washington.
Jacopo: A lot of people say that President Obama might have been able to hold the United States together had he lived through his term.
Esteban: He might have, but history is mysterious. If Obama had managed to save the United States, there might have been another reckoning still further in the future. And that might have been still more lethal.
Jacopo: Was there any indication of Obama being such a great leader in his first term?
Esteban: Plenty. Believe it or not, Obama’s first term was far more difficult in many ways. The Tea Party was not yet a force which had clearly established itself as anti-democratic. So Obama had to pretend they were rational. The fact that he managed to pass health-care, raise taxes, ferment the Arab revolutions and prevent two depressions in the face of such opposition is a staggering achievement....In any event, I’m getting tired again.
Jacopo: I can imagine, it was such a wonderful party yesterday.
Esteban: Let’s join everybody for some leftovers.
Esteban: The events of 2016 shaped our century, just as 1914 did for the century before.
Jacopo: Except the violence was much more unremitting.
Esteban: Absolutely. What was shocking about 2016 is that we were simply unaccustomed to forty million people pointlessly slaughtered in the span of a year. But one gets desensitized when just as many people are slaughtered every year for three decades. Life goes on regardless of if the dead are still alive. How can you claim a special right for grievance when everybody else is grieving too? I’m certain that there wasn’t a single person in the entire world who did not bury some close friend or family member in those years.
Jacopo: How did the death toll stay at such a high level for so long?
Esteban: Because the system broke. My parents’ generation had to worry about the Soviet Union and the United States beginning a nuclear war and destroying the world between them. But it was precisely that worry which caused a half-century of peace. It used to be that the United States and the Soviet Union were able to keep world peace by dividing the world between them. The United States ran the Western Hemisphere like an empire, and the Soviet Union did the same in the East. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, America was the only nation left who conceivably had the ability to control the world. But the world is far too large a place for one nation to control it. There was a popular movie when I was a kid called Jurassic Park, and it had a wonderful saying: “Mother Nature Always Finds a Way.” It’s exactly when the problems of the world seem within reach of solving that the world becomes most dangerous. Back in 1909, a guy named Norman Angell wrote a book that was ironically called “The Great Illusion.” He argued that the world had become so interconnected that war had ceased to be a rational option. Yet the fact that countries were so interconnected made the war much more lethal, because each country had to destroy the productivity that their former alliances created.
Jacopo: And with the advent of....
Esteban: ….Exactly, the Internet. The Internet was supposed to make repression that much more difficult. It was supposed to open the lines of communication and make secret-keeping impossible for governments. And events in the internet’s early days seemed to bear this out. The 2010-14 revolutions of the Middle East were made possible by websites like Twitter and Facebook, which allowed demonstrators to coordinate with each other online. The old Arab-Nationalist dictatorships didn’t undertand the first thing about how to use the internet, but later dictators did not repeat their mistake.
Jacopo: What did later dictators learn?
Esteban: They simply used the internet as we did, but for their own purposes. No intelligence service in the history of the world could gather dossiers as thorough as what people put about themselves on Facebook. No propaganda machine could be as effective at manipulating public opinion as they became from anonymous wikipedia edits. No amount of wiretapping could equal the information people would gather in chatrooms. All it took was a little money to informants, and they could find out whatever they wished about whomever they wished. The world had become dependent on the Internet so quickly that once governments mastered how to control the flow of information online, there was still no superior means of communication.
Jacopo: Was there any chance at all to resist? Couldn't people just not post things about themselves?
Esteban: Not much. The information people had already posted was there. If you had ever made a statement about politics, it was known, and if it was against the government, people knew that you were an enemy. As a result, you would have to post an unremitting diet of propaganda if you hoped to avoid the suspicion of the authorities. And since the government became so good at monitoring online activity, organized resistance became just as lethal and futile during the Third World War as it had been during the Second.
Jacopo: Couldn’t the corporations have refused to collaborate?
Esteban: Actually, many executives tried. But if they didn’t do what they could to maximize profit-margins, they were simply fired and replaced by less scrupulous administrators. That’s precisely what happened at Google. Larry Page refused to comply with the law President Ryan passed in 2025. According to the law, internet companies must hand over all personal information to the government. It looked as though they might win until Google’s stockholders held a meeting at which they voted to fire Page and install Mark Zuckerberg as Google’s CEO. Many people defended the board’s decision as the legitimate right of stockholders to maximize their profits, but the result was that the government attained access to 20 years of facebook archives, including the deleted posts.
Jacopo: A lot of people feel that the hiring of Zuckerberg at Google was the beginning of the end for America.
Esteban: The beginning of the end was probably when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. But it was certainly a crucial turning point.
Jacopo: Something I never understood was how the political views of most Americans stayed roughly the same for a hundred years yet its government kept advancing rightward.
Esteban: Apathy. Apathy. Apathy. There has never been any poll that accurately measures the intensity of people’s opinions. The people who believe in their causes most fervently are willing to do much more to see their dreams a reality. And the more fervently they believe, the more they inspire contempt and despair in non-believers. This was eventually how every major world power collapsed. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Jacopo: Would Paul Ryan’s presidency have been possible without the assassination of Barack Obama?
Esteban: Absolutely not. By 2020, it was a major question as to whether or not there would even be an election. There were reports that President Bachmann was readying the military to block entrance to all polling booths. Barack Obama had announced his candidacy back in February of 2018, and it was immediately clear that he would trounce President Bachmann. The President accused Barack Obama of inciting riots in poor black areas, but it was clear that he was trying to do precisely the opposite. He made speeches pointing out the plight of the poor all throughout the country. Perhaps the empowerment they derived caused the 2019 Midwest Riots, and I think it’s clear that Obama was far too slow to call for people to stop rioting. But if you read the text of his Restore Hope speeches, there is absolutely no inflammatory language in what Obama said. But as a result, there were orders in place for the East Coast Riots of 2020 for the army to fire indiscriminately: not only on rioters but also on peaceful protestors. In New York, that’s exactly what they did, and 15,000 people died, mostly black but some white as well. But in Philadelphia, the commading officer refused to obey the order. This triggered a chain reaction all up and down the East Coast. The rioting ceased to be violent, and there were peaceful demonstrations all across the country for the resignation of President Bachmann. Some say that there were as many as 140 million people attending, but my guess is that it was closer to 80 million. President Bachmann resigned in October, and her Vice-President, Louie Gohmert, had no chance against Obama in an election. In 2020, Barack Obama became the first presidential candidate to receive a unanimous electoral vote since George Washington.
Jacopo: A lot of people say that President Obama might have been able to hold the United States together had he lived through his term.
Esteban: He might have, but history is mysterious. If Obama had managed to save the United States, there might have been another reckoning still further in the future. And that might have been still more lethal.
Jacopo: Was there any indication of Obama being such a great leader in his first term?
Esteban: Plenty. Believe it or not, Obama’s first term was far more difficult in many ways. The Tea Party was not yet a force which had clearly established itself as anti-democratic. So Obama had to pretend they were rational. The fact that he managed to pass health-care, raise taxes, ferment the Arab revolutions and prevent two depressions in the face of such opposition is a staggering achievement....In any event, I’m getting tired again.
Jacopo: I can imagine, it was such a wonderful party yesterday.
Esteban: Let’s join everybody for some leftovers.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Ben-Hur Parade Played by Hundreds of Brass
This should not be taken as an endorsement of anything about Andre Rieu. That said, this is pretty awesome.
800 Words: The Weekend America Was Young - Part 2
For Part III: Read Here
For Part IV: Read Here
For Interlude I: Read Here
For Part V: Read Here
Jacopo: So one day the people of the United States simply woke up to find that their culture was over?
Esteban: Not exactly. All the signs of our culture dying were there. And on some level, we all knew it.
Jacopo: How did you know that your culture was dying? How can anyone know?
Esteban: Because things are too good. Nobody can live so well for so long the way we Americans did.
Jacopo: I still don’t understand.
Esteban: We were too busy enjoying ourselves to notice how the fun was destroying everything we built. It wasn’t simply a matter of us all spending too much money, though that was a symptom. We expected too much of life.
Jacopo: What did you expect?
Esteban: That all society’s problems could be ended. We wanted to end racism, end poverty, end illness, end crime, end abortion, end inequality, end sexism, end war, end child abuse, end homosexuality, end dictatorships, end drug addiction, end drugs, end taxation, end government. And what was amazing about the America of my youth is that there were times when every one of those things seemed possible to the majority of us. Our country had come so far already that all our most desired dreams seemed attainable. We were a civilization risen so high that all our great accomplishments seemed like failures because they fell so short of ideal.
Jacopo: And the citizens of the United States could never agree on what their ideals were.
Esteban: If 90 years of living has taught me anything at all, it is that people have no ideals. The only thing people think about is what situation will work best for them. And once they achieve the situation that works best, they will wish for something that works still better. The United States of the 20th century was easily the greatest society the world had ever seen. Sure, by the late-20th century the standard of living was higher in Western Europe, but Western Europe’s high life was only made possible by the fact that America had loaned hundreds of billions of dollars to repair countries which they managed to destroy with little help from America.
Jacopo: Europeans still don’t like to be reminded of that.
Esteban: Europe has too much history to be reminded of anything about it
Jacopo: So does America now. But how did everybody in the United States of your time know that the end was coming?
Esteban: Because nobody’s ideals were being met. Everyone either had ‘issues’ which never concerned them in any meaningful way, or they didn’t care one bit for anything that happened in the world.
Jacopo: Which were you?
Esteban: Most definitely in the first camp. If there was a cause, I probably used it as a reason not to do work in high schoool. Then in college, I was convinced that I’d matured, so I decided that all these causeheads who were exactly like me three years before were directly responsible for the ruination of liberty and freedom in the world. So when I was a college student I supported causes like the Second Iraq War and warrentless wire-tapping - both were notions which many of us believed was the only pragmatic option int he face of a mad world. I was disabused of both notions quickly by much of the American history that followed.
Jacopo: How did you come to believe in either of those?
Esteban: After the September 11th attacks on New York City and Washington DC - as they were then called - the United States was a paranoid nation. It is difficult after the World War we’d later experience to imagine the searing impact of 9/11. 3,000 deaths and a couple buildings collapsing seems like a pretty good day during a world war that costs two billion lives. But this was the beginning of the 21st century. The world was hardly worry-free, but world peace had fundamentally been kept since 1945. The Soviet Union was the America’s only lethal rival, and it no longer existed. America seemed more dominant at the beginning of the 21st century than the combined forces of early-twentieth-century England, France, Austria, Germany and Russia. The only people who could destroy us were ourselves. We were so dominant that we’d convinced ourselves that the rest of the world hated us because we were so dominant, and there was absolutely nothing we could do that would make non-Americans stop resenting us. And because we’d convinced ourselves of that, we also convinced ourselves that we had to govern the world with an iron fist. Because if we didn’t, we’d become be the most vulnerable nation on Earth.
Jacopo: The logic is a little circular.
Esteban: Indeed it is. But I suspect that underneath all our fear was a piece of knowledge which we all in some way had. We were a decadent society on the verge of collapse. Our every whim was catered too, our vision for what was possible had atrophied. We had simply risen too high, and it was past time for us to fall to Earth. And like all decadent places, no enemy could ruin us as effectively as we could ruin ourselves.
Jacopo: For Alicia’s sake, and mine frankly, can you give us a basic history of World War Three?
Esteban: Surely. I’ve always said that the war began five years before it’s usually said to have begun: on August 3rd, 2011 at exactly midnight.
What happened was this: A bill to extend America’s debt ceiling, or credit limit, had passed through the House and almost through the Senate. But a young senator named Rand Paul decided to implement what’s called a Filibuster - continuous talking - so that the United States Senate would not be able to pass the debt limit increase. The reason Senator Paul did this was because he believed with the passion of any religion that a government should never force its citizens to pay taxes. As a result, the United States was stuck with 14.3 trillion dollars of debt which it had to pay off before it could borrow any more money.
Our President, Barack Obama, tried to order an increase in the debt limit. But the United States Supreme Court struck down his order, saying that a president could order the government. By September, it was clear that America was stuck in debt and that there was no way to borrow more money without paying it off.
People doubted it at the time, but Barack Obama was a very great man, as great a leader as Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. So he did what any great leader would do, and asked the American people for an enormous sacrifice. The United States would have to raise taxes to the highest rates in their history, meanwhile shrinking their spending to less than it had been in 50 years - including the complete elimination of the Universal Health Care which he fought so hard to establish in the first two years of his tenure. He knew that this would easily cost him his re-election, but he also knew that it was the right thing to do.
In 2012, Obama was defeated by a Republican named Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney was not a great leader, but he was a fine politician, and managed to get a lot of the credit for Obama’s achievement. He spent the entire campaign railing against Obama’s requests for sacrifice. But when he was elected, he enforced all of Obama’s plans. Romney knew that it was the right thing to do, but he also realized that he’d get credit for the rebound which Obama instated.
Romney’s problem was that he had to appease the right-wing base of his party, which we then called the Tea Party, who never trusted him. The American right wing believed, like Senator Paul, that a government should never force their citizens to pay taxes. Romney knew that he had to do his best to appear as one of them, or else they would form a separate party of their own. So he told Americans that their country could pay off their debts without raising taxes. And Americans wanted to believe him, so they did.
To show the right-wing that he was really one of them, he picked his principle rival in the party - a congresswoman named Michelle Bachmann - as his running mate. Bachmann was a person who believed not only in low taxes, but also that abortion is murder, homosexuality is a disease, and that God had told her to run for President. Romney was not a great leader, but he was a competent administrator who understood what needed to be done to fix America’s debt. He may have campaigned against Obama’s plan, but he did not change it an iota.
The Tea Party cried foul betrayal at Romney. It became a point of faith for them that Romney was a liberal who had clothed himself as a conservative to get elected. Complicating this further was the fact that Vice-President Bachmann was ignored, it was widely thought that she would be dumped in 2016 for a more pliant Vice-President. But the ever-cautious Romney kept her, knowing that he still needed the Tea Party’s support if he wanted to be sure to beat Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary in the 2016 election. He needn’t have worried, President Romney carried all fifty states, with a completely Republican congress. The sole electoral votes to go for Hillary Clinton were the District of Columbia, which was not even a state.
President Romney was assassinated three weeks after that election, so Vice-President Bachmann immediately became President. Within a month, she had passed a bill to repeal the Obama plan. Taxes would be lowered to the lowest rate in American history, half of what they were under George W. Bush. In order to pay for this, she then demanded that China release America of its debt obligations. China refused, and talk of an war between the two largest world powers was imminent. It was only under the threat of nuclear war that President Bachmann ceased her demands for China cancelling America’s debt.
As a result of President Bachmann’s tax decrease, every credit agency in the world lowered America’s credit rating to junk bond status. American banks could not borrow money, and the government had no way to stimulate the economy. Nearly every person in the country attempted to take their money out of banks, and President Bachmann prevented it, declaring a bank holiday which she extended from week to week - even going so far as to send the US Army to patrol the bank vaults.
The American people had no access to money, and before long, that didn’t matter either. Because of America’s credit crisis, the Chinese government went into hyper-inflation. With trillions of dollars in America’s debt outstanding, the Yuan’s purchasing power was more meaningless than ever, and its value went into free-fall. Anarchy spread around China and the government was powerless. The Chinese nation, which the Central Committee had built so carefully over fifty years, became untenable. Regional governors had to use their local armies to maintain order. Not long after that, order was restored, brutally. So many regional governors then decided to defect from China and declare themselves rulers of their own nation states. Not long after that, the separate nation states of China were warring amongst each other for control over key resources.
Meanwhile, President Bachmann gave the sanction for an operation which every president from Clinton until Romney had denied. She told Israeli Prime Minister, Benny Begin, that she would support Israel in its bombing of the Iranian nuclear program. Begin wasted no time, and within two months Israel had dismantled the program with a series of tactical nuclear weapons designed to destroy material far below ground.
Iran’s response was swift. Since it no longer had nuclear weapons of its own. Within two weeks of the bombing, there was an air war with Qassam rockets launched from Southern Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai Dessert. Dirty bomb devices were attached to an untold number. The loss of life from these dirty bombs (including Arab life) numbered nearly a million. Prime Minister Begin responded with tactical nuclear attacks in all the regions where Qossam rockets were fired, which resulted in the lost of hundreds-of-thousands of Arab lives in addition to thousands of Israelis living in border towns who were unable to get to safe areas. Within a year, the apparatus of Israeli security had been dismantled and demoralized. All Iran had to do was arrange a series of nuclear weapons to be smuggled into the various border territories from Pakistan. The weapons would be attached to Qossam rockets, and rockets would detonate in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Rishon Le’Zion, Ramat-Gan, Rehovot, Netanya, Bat-Yam, Be’er Sheva, Dimona and Ashdod. The first wave of these casualties was estimated at 1.5 million. Another 2.4 million Israelis later died from radiation poisoning.
Prime Minister Begin responded from Jerusalem, the only remaining outpost, by detonating nuclear devices in every major Iranian city: Tehran, Mashhad, Esfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz, Ahvaz, Qom, Kermanshah, Zahedan, Orumiyeh. Because the destruction was unremitting, because Israel would not respond to petitions for a cease-fire, because of the certain death which threatened other major Iranian cities, President Vladimir Putin of Russia ordered a nuclear attack on Jerusalem. Russian atomic bombs are far larger than those manufactured in Pakistan. So another seven-hundred thousand people lost their lives in the attack, followed by a million across the West Bank dead from radiation complications. Though the majority of the fallen in these attacks were not Jews, we Jews now refer to this entire series of atrocities as Shoah Bet. Jacopo, I hope this isn’t too dark for Alicia.
Jacopo: We’re Jews, we love dark. Please keep going.
Esteban: Very True. What happened next was that President Bachmann began to make speeches in which she blamed the nuclear attacks on both American Muslims and Jews, whom she claimed were a fifth column responsible for the destruction of the State of Israel. At the beginning, she reserved special praise for Orthodox Jews, but when the vast majority of Orthodox Jews denounced her as a ‘Rasha’ she began to lump them in with the rest.
Jacopo: This has always mystified me. How could she blame Jews for the destruction of the Jewish State?
Esteban: Bachmann claimed that American Jews had sold out their bretheren in Israel. Both Jewish and Arab students would often be arrested at protests and then indefinitely held in prison without trial. Our family was lucky. Everyone we knew, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were worried for what was to come. But not everybody could get out. I had lots of family in Argentina and your grandmother had family in Brazil. So we came to Rio shortly after we were married and opened the Brazil branch of the family business, which we ran for thirty years before your father took it over. Your Greycer Onkles - Jordán and Etán - went to Buenos Aires, and until five years ago ran the central office from there. But most Jewish families had to stay in America. Fortunately, things never got as bad as they did in Israel. At least no worse for Jews than anybody else....Y’know Jacopo, I’m getting rather tired.
Jacopo: Why don’t you take a nap before the party. I’m sure we can finish this later.
For Part IV: Read Here
For Interlude I: Read Here
For Part V: Read Here
Jacopo: So one day the people of the United States simply woke up to find that their culture was over?
Esteban: Not exactly. All the signs of our culture dying were there. And on some level, we all knew it.
Jacopo: How did you know that your culture was dying? How can anyone know?
Esteban: Because things are too good. Nobody can live so well for so long the way we Americans did.
Jacopo: I still don’t understand.
Esteban: We were too busy enjoying ourselves to notice how the fun was destroying everything we built. It wasn’t simply a matter of us all spending too much money, though that was a symptom. We expected too much of life.
Jacopo: What did you expect?
Esteban: That all society’s problems could be ended. We wanted to end racism, end poverty, end illness, end crime, end abortion, end inequality, end sexism, end war, end child abuse, end homosexuality, end dictatorships, end drug addiction, end drugs, end taxation, end government. And what was amazing about the America of my youth is that there were times when every one of those things seemed possible to the majority of us. Our country had come so far already that all our most desired dreams seemed attainable. We were a civilization risen so high that all our great accomplishments seemed like failures because they fell so short of ideal.
Jacopo: And the citizens of the United States could never agree on what their ideals were.
Esteban: If 90 years of living has taught me anything at all, it is that people have no ideals. The only thing people think about is what situation will work best for them. And once they achieve the situation that works best, they will wish for something that works still better. The United States of the 20th century was easily the greatest society the world had ever seen. Sure, by the late-20th century the standard of living was higher in Western Europe, but Western Europe’s high life was only made possible by the fact that America had loaned hundreds of billions of dollars to repair countries which they managed to destroy with little help from America.
Jacopo: Europeans still don’t like to be reminded of that.
Esteban: Europe has too much history to be reminded of anything about it
Jacopo: So does America now. But how did everybody in the United States of your time know that the end was coming?
Esteban: Because nobody’s ideals were being met. Everyone either had ‘issues’ which never concerned them in any meaningful way, or they didn’t care one bit for anything that happened in the world.
Jacopo: Which were you?
Esteban: Most definitely in the first camp. If there was a cause, I probably used it as a reason not to do work in high schoool. Then in college, I was convinced that I’d matured, so I decided that all these causeheads who were exactly like me three years before were directly responsible for the ruination of liberty and freedom in the world. So when I was a college student I supported causes like the Second Iraq War and warrentless wire-tapping - both were notions which many of us believed was the only pragmatic option int he face of a mad world. I was disabused of both notions quickly by much of the American history that followed.
Jacopo: How did you come to believe in either of those?
Esteban: After the September 11th attacks on New York City and Washington DC - as they were then called - the United States was a paranoid nation. It is difficult after the World War we’d later experience to imagine the searing impact of 9/11. 3,000 deaths and a couple buildings collapsing seems like a pretty good day during a world war that costs two billion lives. But this was the beginning of the 21st century. The world was hardly worry-free, but world peace had fundamentally been kept since 1945. The Soviet Union was the America’s only lethal rival, and it no longer existed. America seemed more dominant at the beginning of the 21st century than the combined forces of early-twentieth-century England, France, Austria, Germany and Russia. The only people who could destroy us were ourselves. We were so dominant that we’d convinced ourselves that the rest of the world hated us because we were so dominant, and there was absolutely nothing we could do that would make non-Americans stop resenting us. And because we’d convinced ourselves of that, we also convinced ourselves that we had to govern the world with an iron fist. Because if we didn’t, we’d become be the most vulnerable nation on Earth.
Jacopo: The logic is a little circular.
Esteban: Indeed it is. But I suspect that underneath all our fear was a piece of knowledge which we all in some way had. We were a decadent society on the verge of collapse. Our every whim was catered too, our vision for what was possible had atrophied. We had simply risen too high, and it was past time for us to fall to Earth. And like all decadent places, no enemy could ruin us as effectively as we could ruin ourselves.
Jacopo: For Alicia’s sake, and mine frankly, can you give us a basic history of World War Three?
Esteban: Surely. I’ve always said that the war began five years before it’s usually said to have begun: on August 3rd, 2011 at exactly midnight.
What happened was this: A bill to extend America’s debt ceiling, or credit limit, had passed through the House and almost through the Senate. But a young senator named Rand Paul decided to implement what’s called a Filibuster - continuous talking - so that the United States Senate would not be able to pass the debt limit increase. The reason Senator Paul did this was because he believed with the passion of any religion that a government should never force its citizens to pay taxes. As a result, the United States was stuck with 14.3 trillion dollars of debt which it had to pay off before it could borrow any more money.
Our President, Barack Obama, tried to order an increase in the debt limit. But the United States Supreme Court struck down his order, saying that a president could order the government. By September, it was clear that America was stuck in debt and that there was no way to borrow more money without paying it off.
People doubted it at the time, but Barack Obama was a very great man, as great a leader as Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. So he did what any great leader would do, and asked the American people for an enormous sacrifice. The United States would have to raise taxes to the highest rates in their history, meanwhile shrinking their spending to less than it had been in 50 years - including the complete elimination of the Universal Health Care which he fought so hard to establish in the first two years of his tenure. He knew that this would easily cost him his re-election, but he also knew that it was the right thing to do.
In 2012, Obama was defeated by a Republican named Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney was not a great leader, but he was a fine politician, and managed to get a lot of the credit for Obama’s achievement. He spent the entire campaign railing against Obama’s requests for sacrifice. But when he was elected, he enforced all of Obama’s plans. Romney knew that it was the right thing to do, but he also realized that he’d get credit for the rebound which Obama instated.
Romney’s problem was that he had to appease the right-wing base of his party, which we then called the Tea Party, who never trusted him. The American right wing believed, like Senator Paul, that a government should never force their citizens to pay taxes. Romney knew that he had to do his best to appear as one of them, or else they would form a separate party of their own. So he told Americans that their country could pay off their debts without raising taxes. And Americans wanted to believe him, so they did.
To show the right-wing that he was really one of them, he picked his principle rival in the party - a congresswoman named Michelle Bachmann - as his running mate. Bachmann was a person who believed not only in low taxes, but also that abortion is murder, homosexuality is a disease, and that God had told her to run for President. Romney was not a great leader, but he was a competent administrator who understood what needed to be done to fix America’s debt. He may have campaigned against Obama’s plan, but he did not change it an iota.
The Tea Party cried foul betrayal at Romney. It became a point of faith for them that Romney was a liberal who had clothed himself as a conservative to get elected. Complicating this further was the fact that Vice-President Bachmann was ignored, it was widely thought that she would be dumped in 2016 for a more pliant Vice-President. But the ever-cautious Romney kept her, knowing that he still needed the Tea Party’s support if he wanted to be sure to beat Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary in the 2016 election. He needn’t have worried, President Romney carried all fifty states, with a completely Republican congress. The sole electoral votes to go for Hillary Clinton were the District of Columbia, which was not even a state.
President Romney was assassinated three weeks after that election, so Vice-President Bachmann immediately became President. Within a month, she had passed a bill to repeal the Obama plan. Taxes would be lowered to the lowest rate in American history, half of what they were under George W. Bush. In order to pay for this, she then demanded that China release America of its debt obligations. China refused, and talk of an war between the two largest world powers was imminent. It was only under the threat of nuclear war that President Bachmann ceased her demands for China cancelling America’s debt.
As a result of President Bachmann’s tax decrease, every credit agency in the world lowered America’s credit rating to junk bond status. American banks could not borrow money, and the government had no way to stimulate the economy. Nearly every person in the country attempted to take their money out of banks, and President Bachmann prevented it, declaring a bank holiday which she extended from week to week - even going so far as to send the US Army to patrol the bank vaults.
The American people had no access to money, and before long, that didn’t matter either. Because of America’s credit crisis, the Chinese government went into hyper-inflation. With trillions of dollars in America’s debt outstanding, the Yuan’s purchasing power was more meaningless than ever, and its value went into free-fall. Anarchy spread around China and the government was powerless. The Chinese nation, which the Central Committee had built so carefully over fifty years, became untenable. Regional governors had to use their local armies to maintain order. Not long after that, order was restored, brutally. So many regional governors then decided to defect from China and declare themselves rulers of their own nation states. Not long after that, the separate nation states of China were warring amongst each other for control over key resources.
Meanwhile, President Bachmann gave the sanction for an operation which every president from Clinton until Romney had denied. She told Israeli Prime Minister, Benny Begin, that she would support Israel in its bombing of the Iranian nuclear program. Begin wasted no time, and within two months Israel had dismantled the program with a series of tactical nuclear weapons designed to destroy material far below ground.
Iran’s response was swift. Since it no longer had nuclear weapons of its own. Within two weeks of the bombing, there was an air war with Qassam rockets launched from Southern Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai Dessert. Dirty bomb devices were attached to an untold number. The loss of life from these dirty bombs (including Arab life) numbered nearly a million. Prime Minister Begin responded with tactical nuclear attacks in all the regions where Qossam rockets were fired, which resulted in the lost of hundreds-of-thousands of Arab lives in addition to thousands of Israelis living in border towns who were unable to get to safe areas. Within a year, the apparatus of Israeli security had been dismantled and demoralized. All Iran had to do was arrange a series of nuclear weapons to be smuggled into the various border territories from Pakistan. The weapons would be attached to Qossam rockets, and rockets would detonate in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Rishon Le’Zion, Ramat-Gan, Rehovot, Netanya, Bat-Yam, Be’er Sheva, Dimona and Ashdod. The first wave of these casualties was estimated at 1.5 million. Another 2.4 million Israelis later died from radiation poisoning.
Prime Minister Begin responded from Jerusalem, the only remaining outpost, by detonating nuclear devices in every major Iranian city: Tehran, Mashhad, Esfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz, Ahvaz, Qom, Kermanshah, Zahedan, Orumiyeh. Because the destruction was unremitting, because Israel would not respond to petitions for a cease-fire, because of the certain death which threatened other major Iranian cities, President Vladimir Putin of Russia ordered a nuclear attack on Jerusalem. Russian atomic bombs are far larger than those manufactured in Pakistan. So another seven-hundred thousand people lost their lives in the attack, followed by a million across the West Bank dead from radiation complications. Though the majority of the fallen in these attacks were not Jews, we Jews now refer to this entire series of atrocities as Shoah Bet. Jacopo, I hope this isn’t too dark for Alicia.
Jacopo: We’re Jews, we love dark. Please keep going.
Esteban: Very True. What happened next was that President Bachmann began to make speeches in which she blamed the nuclear attacks on both American Muslims and Jews, whom she claimed were a fifth column responsible for the destruction of the State of Israel. At the beginning, she reserved special praise for Orthodox Jews, but when the vast majority of Orthodox Jews denounced her as a ‘Rasha’ she began to lump them in with the rest.
Jacopo: This has always mystified me. How could she blame Jews for the destruction of the Jewish State?
Esteban: Bachmann claimed that American Jews had sold out their bretheren in Israel. Both Jewish and Arab students would often be arrested at protests and then indefinitely held in prison without trial. Our family was lucky. Everyone we knew, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were worried for what was to come. But not everybody could get out. I had lots of family in Argentina and your grandmother had family in Brazil. So we came to Rio shortly after we were married and opened the Brazil branch of the family business, which we ran for thirty years before your father took it over. Your Greycer Onkles - Jordán and Etán - went to Buenos Aires, and until five years ago ran the central office from there. But most Jewish families had to stay in America. Fortunately, things never got as bad as they did in Israel. At least no worse for Jews than anybody else....Y’know Jacopo, I’m getting rather tired.
Jacopo: Why don’t you take a nap before the party. I’m sure we can finish this later.
800 Words: The Weekend America was Young - Part I
For Part II: Read Here
For Part III: Read Here
For Part IV: Read Here
Historian’s Note: The ability to ably translate this recording took a great deal of research into antique languages, but the insights it gives into the human workings of roughly 6000 Earth years ago makes it an immensely important study into the human civilization of the time. Jacopo Tacomas spoke a fully fluent Argentinian dialect of mid-21st century Spanish. His grandfather (a human term for the paternal reproductive unit of a reproductive unit), Esteban, did not seem fluent at all in any form of Spanish, and used an odd, almost unintelligible mid-21st century patois of Argentinian Spanish, American English, 20th century Hebrew, American Yiddish, and with some occasional words that were Russian and Portuguese in their antecedents. It is truly unlike any dialect yet discovered and should give many linguists pause as to how a person could be understood in a dialect so malleable, even by a family member. Given that this recording is one of the few documents left to us about the workings of the 21st Century, I felt it crucial to translate this artifact into a fluent, fully contemporary Esperanto Binary. However, in cases when the origin of a noun seemed proper, I felt compelled to render it on the page with as phonetical a spelling as Esperanto Binary is capable.
Jacopo Tacomas: Hello Alicia. This is your Papi talking. It is March 8th, 2072. You were born exactly one month and a day ago. The day you were born was an amazing coincidence, because it was one-hundred-twenty-one years to the day after the Greycer-Greycer-Bubbie for whom you were named was born, Alicia Juito Tacomas. It is 8 o’clock in the morning, and we are now sitting in the living room of your home in Buenos Aires. You’re asleep in your crib, and I’m sitting with someone whom we know you will get to know very well one day. This is your Graycer Zaydie, Esteban Tacomas. Tomorrow, he will turn 90 years old.
Esteban Tacomas: I’m as amazed as you are.
Jacopo: Our whole family will be gathering here tonight from countries like New England, Quebec, Pacifica, Chicagoland, New New York, Washingtonia, Deep Southland, Los Estados Caribbeanos de Miami, Costa Rica, Texas, Nuevos Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Portugal, England, France, Italy, Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Uruguay and of course, all around Argentina.
Esteban: Do I get their frequent fliers?
Jacopo: This is the fifth in our videos for Alicia. In the last video, we taked about Graycer Bubbie. It seems that a lot of things about your lives seemed to come back to one particular date. Would it be fair to say that the last weekend of July 2011 was a particularly important date for you both.
Esteban: No more important than it was for everyone.
Jacopo: Why was that?
Esteban: Regardless of what else happened, it was the weekend before America plunged the entire world into The Second Great Depression.
Jacopo: Oh my. I’d forgotten about that piece of history. What were you doing that weekend?
Esteban: I had driven up with some friends to the Newport Folk Festival in a state then called Rhode Island. It’s now it’s just a small province in New England.
Jacopo: What was the Festival like?
Esteban: It’s difficut to say, because in my memory, it will always be a kind of heaven.
Jacopo: You mean because of Bubbie?
Esteban: Well, maybe, but also in a way much larger than that. It was the last weekend America was the greatest civilization on Earth. And there we were, sipping frozen lemonade in its cradle.
Jacopo: What do you mean by cradle?
Esteban: Newport was a place where wealth had concentrated for three and a half centuries. It is a miniscule little town which Benedict Arnold, Commodore Matthew Perry, Cornelius Vanderbuilt, Henry and William James, Edith Wharton, Dwight Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy called home. If you walked the streets of Newport, you’d see hardly anything but ancient Victorian mansions. Every port seemed to have hundreds of yachts and thousands of motorboats. And all these super-rich people would ride their yachts to the port of Fort Adams, where the Festival took place, and they’d simply listen to all the music from the Bay. It would have been impossible to believe that in five years, there would be no boats at all and Chinese banks would foreclose on every mansion in the town.
Jacopo: What was it like inside the Festival?
Esteban: Unlike anything I’d ever seen in my life. Most concerts, then as now, are full of people who have no real passion for what they listen to. The music most people listen to is simply a code they broadcast for the lifestyle they lead. But this was a place full of people who came simply because they loved music. And what they especially loved was discovering great music. The older people came to hear their musicians and were entranced by younger bands, and the younger people came to hear their musicians and were entranced by older bands.
Jacopo: What sort of music did they play?
Esteban: This was the Newport Festival, which was one of the most significant places for American Classical Music. In 1956, this was the site where Duke Ellington gave a concert that transformed his reputation from a fine bandleader into the greatest of all American Composers. In 1965, it was the place where Bob Dylan broke the boundaries of folk music and created a new type of music which brought folk, rock, bluegrass, country, soul and R&B music together. This was the form which all the later generations of American Classical Musicians would explore.
Jacopo: It sounds like a lot of great history was there.
Esteban: You had to brush the history from your face. But it didn’t feel like history at the time, because we thought that this kind of music would last forever. You couldn’t walk a hundred feet in the grounds of the festival without bumping into a music legend. The Newport Folk Festival still exists today, and the musicians there are still playing the same songs they played 100 years ago. By the time I arrived, it was probably stale in comparison to what it had been 50 years ago. But I saw Earle Scruggs, Pete Seeger, Ramblin Jack and Mavis Staples perform in the span of three hours. It was an indescribably moving experience, perhaps all the more-so since the four of them had an average age of about 83.
Jacopo: Who else did you see?
Esteban: Oh dear. I think I also saw The Decemberists, Elvis Costello, Wanda Jackson, Amos Lee, Justin Townes Earle (who was Steve Earle’s less talented son), Emmylou Harris, Gogol Bordello, The Head and the Heart and Pokey LaFarge.
Jacopo: What stood out for you?
Esteban: Definitely Mavis Staples. You know, Jacapo, I love that you love American Rhythm and Blues. And I know you know more about Mavis Staples than I ever will. But that performance had something which will never come through a recording. She was seventy-two, but her performing style felt like a ten-thousand-watt bolt of lightening had passed through the crowd. Within twenty seconds she transformed a polite crowd of White yuppies into a Revivalist Tent.
Jacopo: Was there anyone else on that level?
Esteban: Sadly, not quite. Many of them were very good, but for me that was the most extraordinary out of only three extraordinary performances in the whole Festival.
Jacopo: What were the others?
Esteban: The other great find was a singer called Pokey Lafarge. He was an extraordinary musician who seemed to played everything: new and old music on every instrument - a true classicist. As far as I can tell, he was never heard from again. But I’m positive that had he been born even a generation later he might have been hailed as another Mozart. The final extraordinary moment was the act of watching Pete Seeger in the children’s tent. But what made that extraordinary was anything but great music. What made it so wonderful was the fact that we were watching the ninety-two-year-old Godfather of American Classical Music teach music to dozens of children.
Jacopo: I just want to interrupt you right there Zaydie. No matter how many times you tell me, I still have a hard time believing this. Just so Alicia can hear it for herself, just repeat for her. This means that there was a time when American Classical Music was considered music for young people?
Esteban: Oh yes. It was our music. Every one of us. Opinions on what was great about American Classical might have differed with every age group, every social class and ethnic group. But regardless of what we thought of it, we all knew the same music and had opinions on it. There was a time when Public Enemy and George Jones were considered so far apart that nobody who listened to one could possibly like the other. Today, that seems utterly ridiculous because they’re both products of the same era.
Jacopo: So this is the music you grew up with?
Esteban: Well, (ahem) not exactly. I certainly grew up with this music, but not in the way other people did. The music I loved was European Classical Music. It was my way of rebelling.
Jacopo: What did you need to rebel against?
Esteban: I hated the laziness of it. Until I was twenty, I didn’t just ignore American Classical, I despised it. To me, it was everything that was wrong about America.
Jacopo: What was wrong?
Esteban: In the America of my childhood, American Classical Music was rigidly ghettoized, at least among adolescents. There were separate ghettos for the music of every region, and even more ghettos for every social class within those regions. You could never be fully accepted into a group of people unless you fully proclaimed your allegiance to their music over any other.
Jacopo: Were adults more accepting?
Esteban: Somewhat, but there was not much curiosity to find out other music. It was difficult because the music industry was controlled by people who cared far more for bottom line profits than individuality. And so they could charge 18 dollars for a Compact Disc they could manufacture for 3 cents.
Jacopo: It’s difficult to believe that was ever possible since the advent of file-sharing.
Esteban: Well, file-sharing only began when I was fifteen. Until then, there was simply no way during my childhood to experiment with music that was not familiar. People did not want to spend the price of both breakfast and lunch to buy an album by a musician whom they did not know if they liked. So they simply bought what was marketed heavily. The Music Industry of the time would take a malleable singer with no real individuality, tell him or her how to play music, and then tell the public that they should like this singer. Because the public didn’t have opportunity to hear music of which the Industry didn’t approve, they had no way of knowing that music could be better than Madonna or Michael Jackson.
Jacopo: I love Madonna and Michael Jackson!
Esteban: You’re the only person in the world who still does.
Jacopo: People who love American Classical Music just have a problem with any music that’s fun.
Esteban: That is the problem of all Classical Music. Every generation will have an excess of fine musicians who want to make fun music. It’s just as hard to make fun music as serious music, but the people who only listen to fun music always seem to think that old music won’t be any fun.
Jacopo: Is this why you don’t like MJ and Madonna?
Esteban: I have no problem with the quality of either of them. I think they’re superb virtuosos with amazing techniques. My only problem with them was that there was nothing behind their technique -- just empty mechanics. European Classical Music had composers like that too: Paganini and Franz Liszt being obvious examples. They cast shadows so large that genuine artists who had deeper messages were unable to communicate, because both MJ and Paganini created a whole generation of music lovers only interested in empty music. And the world of Michael Jackson was the world I was born into.
Jacopo: So what then appealed to you about European Classical Music?
Esteban: European Classical Music seemed to demand more of people than American Classical. It was a terrible misnomer, but it seemed true at the time because the bad European Classical Music had long since been forgotten. But as I was growing up, we were surrounded with bad American Classical Music. It was on television and radio constantly, there was no escape from it and no-one of my generation seemed to know that there was a thousand years of great classical music that existed before American Classical.
Jacopo: That seems quite different from today.
Esteban: Yes it is. Since so much of Latin American Popular Music has deep roots in European Classical Music, the world has taken notice of it again.
Jacopo: When and how did this change for you?
Esteban: It wasn’t until I became a college student when it began to dawn on me that just as much great music exists in American Classical as does in European. I was a terrible student, and I wasn’t in much of a situation to socialize with people who had real curiosity until then. Most of my college friends didn’t know any more about European Classical than I knew about American, but we took to each other’s music like fish to water.
Jacopo: Did you try to ignore American Classical Music before then?
Esteban: Hardly. I actually played the fiddle in American Classical long before I became interested in the music itself?
Jacopo: Why did you play music you didn’t like?
Esteban: It was a way to make friends. I probably hoped to make money with it too, but that never really happened.
Jacopo: So how were your college friends able to sort the great American Classical Music from the bad?
Esteban: Simple good taste was the only guiding principle. They had more desire to sit through the bad to find the good than I ever did. American Classical Music back then was not classical at all. It was a living culture from which we all picked what we liked, and it was expected that you had even heard what you didn’t like.
Jacopo: That makes it seem like it was a chore.
Esteban: Perhaps it was, but the good music made it worth our time. It was our music. It would never have occurred to us to call it ‘Classical Music’ because the music was so much a part of us. The culture which produced it was still very much alive. European Classical Music was the real classical music, part of an aristocratic culture that was completely disconnected from everything we were.
Jacopo: What made American Classical Music so different from European?
Esteban: This was the first time in a thousand years when music had to completely reinvent itself from the ground up. Just Chuck Berry’s guitar alone could make a larger, more visceral sound than a 100-piece orchestra from Richard Strauss. Louis Armstrong’s voice was as ugly as Nellie Melba’s was beautiful, but the recording microphone made Louis Armstrong a much more expressive singer.The rules of music had to be completely rewritten. And the result was the least sophisticated-sounding canon of great music created since the era of the Troubadours in the 14th century. The same musicians would be expected to write their music, write their lyrics, produce their shows, and sometimes even handle the recordings themselves. The result was that American Classical Music has a trove of great songs with no more three chords or a thirty-word vocabulary. And yet, the limitations of this music made it that much greater. Since the means were so limited, every moment had to have an extreme visceral immediacy. 19th century European Classical Music was the most complex music ever devised. Composers would divide labor between hundreds of musicians, and each of them would have hundreds of thousands of instructions which they were expected to fulfill to the letter. Compared to that, American Classical Music was simplicity itself.
Jacopo: How do you think that sea change came to pass so quickly?
Esteban: It was the invention of electronic equipment - particularly recordings and amplifiers - that changed everything we thought we knew about music. This was the first art music that was ever truly created for mass consumption. Even in their wildest dreams, Beethoven and Mahler could never have imagined their music performed for more than twenty, thirty thousand people at a time. But James Brown and Bob Dylan could create their music for a a live audience of hundreds of thousands and a recorded audience of tens of millions....you know, I'm getting tired.
Jacopo: Let’s break for lunch. If you're feeling up to it we’ll record video #6 when we get back.
For Part III: Read Here
For Part IV: Read Here
Historian’s Note: The ability to ably translate this recording took a great deal of research into antique languages, but the insights it gives into the human workings of roughly 6000 Earth years ago makes it an immensely important study into the human civilization of the time. Jacopo Tacomas spoke a fully fluent Argentinian dialect of mid-21st century Spanish. His grandfather (a human term for the paternal reproductive unit of a reproductive unit), Esteban, did not seem fluent at all in any form of Spanish, and used an odd, almost unintelligible mid-21st century patois of Argentinian Spanish, American English, 20th century Hebrew, American Yiddish, and with some occasional words that were Russian and Portuguese in their antecedents. It is truly unlike any dialect yet discovered and should give many linguists pause as to how a person could be understood in a dialect so malleable, even by a family member. Given that this recording is one of the few documents left to us about the workings of the 21st Century, I felt it crucial to translate this artifact into a fluent, fully contemporary Esperanto Binary. However, in cases when the origin of a noun seemed proper, I felt compelled to render it on the page with as phonetical a spelling as Esperanto Binary is capable.
Jacopo Tacomas: Hello Alicia. This is your Papi talking. It is March 8th, 2072. You were born exactly one month and a day ago. The day you were born was an amazing coincidence, because it was one-hundred-twenty-one years to the day after the Greycer-Greycer-Bubbie for whom you were named was born, Alicia Juito Tacomas. It is 8 o’clock in the morning, and we are now sitting in the living room of your home in Buenos Aires. You’re asleep in your crib, and I’m sitting with someone whom we know you will get to know very well one day. This is your Graycer Zaydie, Esteban Tacomas. Tomorrow, he will turn 90 years old.
Esteban Tacomas: I’m as amazed as you are.
Jacopo: Our whole family will be gathering here tonight from countries like New England, Quebec, Pacifica, Chicagoland, New New York, Washingtonia, Deep Southland, Los Estados Caribbeanos de Miami, Costa Rica, Texas, Nuevos Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Portugal, England, France, Italy, Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Uruguay and of course, all around Argentina.
Esteban: Do I get their frequent fliers?
Jacopo: This is the fifth in our videos for Alicia. In the last video, we taked about Graycer Bubbie. It seems that a lot of things about your lives seemed to come back to one particular date. Would it be fair to say that the last weekend of July 2011 was a particularly important date for you both.
Esteban: No more important than it was for everyone.
Jacopo: Why was that?
Esteban: Regardless of what else happened, it was the weekend before America plunged the entire world into The Second Great Depression.
Jacopo: Oh my. I’d forgotten about that piece of history. What were you doing that weekend?
Esteban: I had driven up with some friends to the Newport Folk Festival in a state then called Rhode Island. It’s now it’s just a small province in New England.
Jacopo: What was the Festival like?
Esteban: It’s difficut to say, because in my memory, it will always be a kind of heaven.
Jacopo: You mean because of Bubbie?
Esteban: Well, maybe, but also in a way much larger than that. It was the last weekend America was the greatest civilization on Earth. And there we were, sipping frozen lemonade in its cradle.
Jacopo: What do you mean by cradle?
Esteban: Newport was a place where wealth had concentrated for three and a half centuries. It is a miniscule little town which Benedict Arnold, Commodore Matthew Perry, Cornelius Vanderbuilt, Henry and William James, Edith Wharton, Dwight Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy called home. If you walked the streets of Newport, you’d see hardly anything but ancient Victorian mansions. Every port seemed to have hundreds of yachts and thousands of motorboats. And all these super-rich people would ride their yachts to the port of Fort Adams, where the Festival took place, and they’d simply listen to all the music from the Bay. It would have been impossible to believe that in five years, there would be no boats at all and Chinese banks would foreclose on every mansion in the town.
Jacopo: What was it like inside the Festival?
Esteban: Unlike anything I’d ever seen in my life. Most concerts, then as now, are full of people who have no real passion for what they listen to. The music most people listen to is simply a code they broadcast for the lifestyle they lead. But this was a place full of people who came simply because they loved music. And what they especially loved was discovering great music. The older people came to hear their musicians and were entranced by younger bands, and the younger people came to hear their musicians and were entranced by older bands.
Jacopo: What sort of music did they play?
Esteban: This was the Newport Festival, which was one of the most significant places for American Classical Music. In 1956, this was the site where Duke Ellington gave a concert that transformed his reputation from a fine bandleader into the greatest of all American Composers. In 1965, it was the place where Bob Dylan broke the boundaries of folk music and created a new type of music which brought folk, rock, bluegrass, country, soul and R&B music together. This was the form which all the later generations of American Classical Musicians would explore.
Jacopo: It sounds like a lot of great history was there.
Esteban: You had to brush the history from your face. But it didn’t feel like history at the time, because we thought that this kind of music would last forever. You couldn’t walk a hundred feet in the grounds of the festival without bumping into a music legend. The Newport Folk Festival still exists today, and the musicians there are still playing the same songs they played 100 years ago. By the time I arrived, it was probably stale in comparison to what it had been 50 years ago. But I saw Earle Scruggs, Pete Seeger, Ramblin Jack and Mavis Staples perform in the span of three hours. It was an indescribably moving experience, perhaps all the more-so since the four of them had an average age of about 83.
Jacopo: Who else did you see?
Esteban: Oh dear. I think I also saw The Decemberists, Elvis Costello, Wanda Jackson, Amos Lee, Justin Townes Earle (who was Steve Earle’s less talented son), Emmylou Harris, Gogol Bordello, The Head and the Heart and Pokey LaFarge.
Jacopo: What stood out for you?
Esteban: Definitely Mavis Staples. You know, Jacapo, I love that you love American Rhythm and Blues. And I know you know more about Mavis Staples than I ever will. But that performance had something which will never come through a recording. She was seventy-two, but her performing style felt like a ten-thousand-watt bolt of lightening had passed through the crowd. Within twenty seconds she transformed a polite crowd of White yuppies into a Revivalist Tent.
Jacopo: Was there anyone else on that level?
Esteban: Sadly, not quite. Many of them were very good, but for me that was the most extraordinary out of only three extraordinary performances in the whole Festival.
Jacopo: What were the others?
Esteban: The other great find was a singer called Pokey Lafarge. He was an extraordinary musician who seemed to played everything: new and old music on every instrument - a true classicist. As far as I can tell, he was never heard from again. But I’m positive that had he been born even a generation later he might have been hailed as another Mozart. The final extraordinary moment was the act of watching Pete Seeger in the children’s tent. But what made that extraordinary was anything but great music. What made it so wonderful was the fact that we were watching the ninety-two-year-old Godfather of American Classical Music teach music to dozens of children.
Jacopo: I just want to interrupt you right there Zaydie. No matter how many times you tell me, I still have a hard time believing this. Just so Alicia can hear it for herself, just repeat for her. This means that there was a time when American Classical Music was considered music for young people?
Esteban: Oh yes. It was our music. Every one of us. Opinions on what was great about American Classical might have differed with every age group, every social class and ethnic group. But regardless of what we thought of it, we all knew the same music and had opinions on it. There was a time when Public Enemy and George Jones were considered so far apart that nobody who listened to one could possibly like the other. Today, that seems utterly ridiculous because they’re both products of the same era.
Jacopo: So this is the music you grew up with?
Esteban: Well, (ahem) not exactly. I certainly grew up with this music, but not in the way other people did. The music I loved was European Classical Music. It was my way of rebelling.
Jacopo: What did you need to rebel against?
Esteban: I hated the laziness of it. Until I was twenty, I didn’t just ignore American Classical, I despised it. To me, it was everything that was wrong about America.
Jacopo: What was wrong?
Esteban: In the America of my childhood, American Classical Music was rigidly ghettoized, at least among adolescents. There were separate ghettos for the music of every region, and even more ghettos for every social class within those regions. You could never be fully accepted into a group of people unless you fully proclaimed your allegiance to their music over any other.
Jacopo: Were adults more accepting?
Esteban: Somewhat, but there was not much curiosity to find out other music. It was difficult because the music industry was controlled by people who cared far more for bottom line profits than individuality. And so they could charge 18 dollars for a Compact Disc they could manufacture for 3 cents.
Jacopo: It’s difficult to believe that was ever possible since the advent of file-sharing.
Esteban: Well, file-sharing only began when I was fifteen. Until then, there was simply no way during my childhood to experiment with music that was not familiar. People did not want to spend the price of both breakfast and lunch to buy an album by a musician whom they did not know if they liked. So they simply bought what was marketed heavily. The Music Industry of the time would take a malleable singer with no real individuality, tell him or her how to play music, and then tell the public that they should like this singer. Because the public didn’t have opportunity to hear music of which the Industry didn’t approve, they had no way of knowing that music could be better than Madonna or Michael Jackson.
Jacopo: I love Madonna and Michael Jackson!
Esteban: You’re the only person in the world who still does.
Jacopo: People who love American Classical Music just have a problem with any music that’s fun.
Esteban: That is the problem of all Classical Music. Every generation will have an excess of fine musicians who want to make fun music. It’s just as hard to make fun music as serious music, but the people who only listen to fun music always seem to think that old music won’t be any fun.
Jacopo: Is this why you don’t like MJ and Madonna?
Esteban: I have no problem with the quality of either of them. I think they’re superb virtuosos with amazing techniques. My only problem with them was that there was nothing behind their technique -- just empty mechanics. European Classical Music had composers like that too: Paganini and Franz Liszt being obvious examples. They cast shadows so large that genuine artists who had deeper messages were unable to communicate, because both MJ and Paganini created a whole generation of music lovers only interested in empty music. And the world of Michael Jackson was the world I was born into.
Jacopo: So what then appealed to you about European Classical Music?
Esteban: European Classical Music seemed to demand more of people than American Classical. It was a terrible misnomer, but it seemed true at the time because the bad European Classical Music had long since been forgotten. But as I was growing up, we were surrounded with bad American Classical Music. It was on television and radio constantly, there was no escape from it and no-one of my generation seemed to know that there was a thousand years of great classical music that existed before American Classical.
Jacopo: That seems quite different from today.
Esteban: Yes it is. Since so much of Latin American Popular Music has deep roots in European Classical Music, the world has taken notice of it again.
Jacopo: When and how did this change for you?
Esteban: It wasn’t until I became a college student when it began to dawn on me that just as much great music exists in American Classical as does in European. I was a terrible student, and I wasn’t in much of a situation to socialize with people who had real curiosity until then. Most of my college friends didn’t know any more about European Classical than I knew about American, but we took to each other’s music like fish to water.
Jacopo: Did you try to ignore American Classical Music before then?
Esteban: Hardly. I actually played the fiddle in American Classical long before I became interested in the music itself?
Jacopo: Why did you play music you didn’t like?
Esteban: It was a way to make friends. I probably hoped to make money with it too, but that never really happened.
Jacopo: So how were your college friends able to sort the great American Classical Music from the bad?
Esteban: Simple good taste was the only guiding principle. They had more desire to sit through the bad to find the good than I ever did. American Classical Music back then was not classical at all. It was a living culture from which we all picked what we liked, and it was expected that you had even heard what you didn’t like.
Jacopo: That makes it seem like it was a chore.
Esteban: Perhaps it was, but the good music made it worth our time. It was our music. It would never have occurred to us to call it ‘Classical Music’ because the music was so much a part of us. The culture which produced it was still very much alive. European Classical Music was the real classical music, part of an aristocratic culture that was completely disconnected from everything we were.
Jacopo: What made American Classical Music so different from European?
Esteban: This was the first time in a thousand years when music had to completely reinvent itself from the ground up. Just Chuck Berry’s guitar alone could make a larger, more visceral sound than a 100-piece orchestra from Richard Strauss. Louis Armstrong’s voice was as ugly as Nellie Melba’s was beautiful, but the recording microphone made Louis Armstrong a much more expressive singer.The rules of music had to be completely rewritten. And the result was the least sophisticated-sounding canon of great music created since the era of the Troubadours in the 14th century. The same musicians would be expected to write their music, write their lyrics, produce their shows, and sometimes even handle the recordings themselves. The result was that American Classical Music has a trove of great songs with no more three chords or a thirty-word vocabulary. And yet, the limitations of this music made it that much greater. Since the means were so limited, every moment had to have an extreme visceral immediacy. 19th century European Classical Music was the most complex music ever devised. Composers would divide labor between hundreds of musicians, and each of them would have hundreds of thousands of instructions which they were expected to fulfill to the letter. Compared to that, American Classical Music was simplicity itself.
Jacopo: How do you think that sea change came to pass so quickly?
Esteban: It was the invention of electronic equipment - particularly recordings and amplifiers - that changed everything we thought we knew about music. This was the first art music that was ever truly created for mass consumption. Even in their wildest dreams, Beethoven and Mahler could never have imagined their music performed for more than twenty, thirty thousand people at a time. But James Brown and Bob Dylan could create their music for a a live audience of hundreds of thousands and a recorded audience of tens of millions....you know, I'm getting tired.
Jacopo: Let’s break for lunch. If you're feeling up to it we’ll record video #6 when we get back.
Monday, August 1, 2011
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