800 Words: The American Lycee - A Syllabus - Grades 7-9 - American Stories

Submitted without comment or explanation.

Grade 7 - The Television Era: 1999-

The Sopranos

Freaks and Geeks

The West Wing
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Malcolm in the Middle
Monk

Futurama

24

The Daily Show
Six Feet Under

Family Guy (second incarnation)

The Shield

South Park

The Wire

Arrested Development

Deadwood

The Office (British and American)

Lost
The Colbert Report

Friday Night Lights

How I Met Your Mother

Mad Men

Breaking Bad
True Blood
John Adams

Louie

Game of Thrones

Homeland

Girls

Additional Texts:

Movies:

Three Kings

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Social Network

Elephant

The Dark Knight

WALL-E

United 93

Juno

Little Miss Sunshine

Thank You For Smoking

Up In The Air

There Will Be Blood

Brokeback Mountain

Gran Torino

Books (to be studied either complete or in excerpts):

Non-Fiction:

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Freakonomics by Steven D Leavitt and Steven J Dubner & Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Outsourced Self by Arlie Russell Hochschild 

Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

“A Problem from Hell” America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals by David Halberstam

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer & Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10th, 2001 by Steve Coll

The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

The Closing of the American Mind by Alan Bloom

How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer

The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington

Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman & The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria

Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Journalism by Paul Krugman
The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren

Republic, Lost: by Lawrence Lessig

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips

House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger 

Fiction:

The Koran

Atlas Shrugged & The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Anne Proulx

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Plays:

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

Avenue Q

In the Heights

Grade 8 - The TV Era: 1983-1999

Cheers
Frasier
Late Night with David Letterman
St. Elsewhere
The Golden Girls
Moonlighting
NYPD Blue
The Cosby Show
A Different World
Picket Fences LA Law
Law & Order
Star Trek The Next Generation
Family Ties
Murphy Brown
Saturday Night Live
Married With Children

The Simpsons

Seinfeld

Twin Peaks

The Larry Sanders Show

Homicide: Life on the Streets

The X-Files
3rd Rock from the Sun
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Beavis and Butthead
King of the Hill

Animaniacs
Daria

The Drew Carey Show

Everybody Loves Raymond

Friends

Ellen
Will and Grace
Spin City
Ally McBeal

Sex and the City

Additional texts:

Movies

Jaws & Star Wars

Close Encounters of the Third Kind & ET

Blue Velvet & American Beauty

The Breakfast Club

Do The Right Thing

Hoop Dreams

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Forrest Gump

Glengarry Glen Ross

Hotel Rwanda

Wag the Dog & Primary Colors

Dazed and Confused

Books:

Non-Fiction:

Speeches and Letters by Martin Luther King Jr.

Autobiography of Malcolm X

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed Along With Our Families: by Philip Gourevitch

Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

The End of History by Francis Fukuyama

The Age of Reagan 1974-2008: A History by Sean Wilentz 

The Starr Report by Kenneth Starr

Power and the Idealists by Paul Berman

What's The Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank 

Capital by Karl Marx

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater

The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

Twilight of the Common Dream by Todd Gitlin

The Big Con by Jonathan Chait


The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stieglitz

America: The Book by Jon Stewart

Ashes to Ashes: America’s Cigarette War, The Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

Fiction:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Watchmen by Alan Moore

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Rabbit is Rich & Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Plays:

Angels in America by Tony Kushner

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

Fences by August Wilson

Speed-the-plow by David Mamet

Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim

Assassins by Stephen Sondheim

Grade 9 - 1962-1983: The Film Era

The Manchurian Candidate

Dr. Strangelove

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Graduate

In the Heat of the Night

The Dirty Dozen

Bonnie and Clyde

The Producers  
Blazing Saddles

2001: A Space Odyssey

Easy Rider

Midnight Cowboy

M*A*S*H
Five Easy Pieces
A Clockwork Orange
Dirty Harry
Patton
Serpico

The Last Picture Show
McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Little Big Man

The French Connection

The Godfather Epic

Mean Streets

Badlands

The Conversation

Chinatown
The Long Goodbye

Nashville

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Rocky 
Taxi Driver 
All the President's Men

Network

Annie Hall & Manhattan

The Deer Hunter & Apocalypse Now
The Shining
Blowout
Raging Bull

The Right Stuff

TV

The Andy Griffith Show

Bonanza

The Brady Bunch

Dragnet

Get Smart

Hogan's Heroes

Mission: Impossible

Star Trek

All in the Family

Mary Tyler Moore

Taxi

The Carrol Burnett Show

The Jeffersons

Good Times

Books:

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan

The Making of a President by Theodore H. White

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson

Ghandi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Non-Violence by Erik Ericksen

Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History by Norman Mailer

Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

So Human an Animal by Rene J. Dubos

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan

On Human Nature by E. O. Wilson

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

The Imperial Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

Fiction:

Herzog by Saul Bellow

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth and Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

Theater:

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George by Stephen Sondheim

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

800 Words: The American Utopia: Part 1 - The American Soul

Over and over again, we hear that America is a country without a history - that America’s still making and writing its history books. The experiment isn’t over or conclusive, how can we learn anything about a history we don’t yet know or understand? So who cares if we’re 17th in global education?

But look at us - the declining power with declining cities, declining law enforcement, declining industry, declining political systems, declining schools, and declining press (yes, I based that list on the seasons of The Wire...). How do we now look so close to the edge of a permanent fall? And if we’re at the edge of such a fall, then how did we rise so high? Perhaps America won’t fall at all, but if we don’t, it’s because there will be reforms in place which completely change the nature of this country, and if the nature of this country is completely changed, then there is quite a bit of history to study and understand.

If there’s one country in the last two hundred years that has a lot of history to study... maybe it’s Germany or Russia, but after them it’s us. Some of us do pay attention to little bits of that history. Anybody who can quote Bob Dylan lyrics or lines from The Godfather has their little bits of history which shape their knowledge of the human heart. Some people even know enough of American history (though not enough..) that their souls feel tired of an American culture that’s clearly not working, and therefore fill their cultural life to the brim with the Europe of critical theory, or the East Asia of action movies and anime and video games. But I can’t help thinking that they latch onto such things because they need an explanation of the exhausted culture from which they hail in which they can no longer believe. Critical theory gives them the required armament to explain why we can no longer believe in our institutions. Meanwhile, the stupefyingly complex technology of Asian culture is still very young, with pyrotechnics that well exceed its emotional maturity so far (with a number of obvious exceptions... for just one, rent Grave of the Fireflies...) But unlike so much prominent American content (never mind the underground stuff), Asian culture is exciting - it’s young, it’s exuberant, and it feels completely new. The recent past belongs to America, but the future clearly belongs to Asia.

But when you stay with American content long enough to get past the current tiredness, you see its entire history laid out before you as it never could be in the past - there is a lifetime of soul-sustenance for those willing to find it: classic rock and R&B and country and bluegrass and jazz, classic Hollywood movies and classic TV, classic theater and classic musicals, classic poetry and novels, classic art and classic architecture, even some classic sports games and classical music. At this point, America has its classical canon - every educated American knows what it is, and every American has to either have experienced it or want to experience it in order to be considered an educated American. Once upon a time, Americans were blank slates onto which education from older cultures formed their awareness of their souls. But there should be no doubt, there is now a fully American Soul - educated and seasoned almost exclusively (much too exclusively) by American culture, and possessed of a wisdom that comes from America having grown a culture so large that it obliterated whole swaths of other cultures from around the world.

Furthermore, American comfort is so widespread, and for the moment its responsibilities for earning this comfort so minimal in comparison to most of the world, that there is ample time to immerse ourselves in this culture, to appreciate and love it, to to discuss and debate it, and to cultivate it still further. The ability of Americans to accrue debt may end tomorrow, but until it does, we are at the point of grand summation - the time to understand what it means to be an American at the zenith of world power is right now, because it can’t last forever, and it’s already amazing that it’s lasted this long. Americans are highly motivated people no longer, and if any of us remain highly motivated, we’re fighting an uphill battle to achieve anything that resembles our dreams. So in the meantime, what else is there to do but amble through this glorious museum of the recent past?

The most important year in American history was, of course, 1945 - when we officially ended the Second World War with the Atomic Bomb. It was the defining American triumph, the defining American achievement, and will perhaps become the defining American tragedy. But I think most people would agree that the most important cultural year was 1968. It was the summit of all the American energy generated by the Allies’ triumph. During the Cold War’s height, education and motivation to learn was considered paramount to the species’ survival. The GI Bill made education widespread, and federal grants made education cheap. But all children develop minds of their own, and by the time the GIs' kids went to college, they demanded to follow the paths on which their minds set them. They not only questioned the foundation of America’s moral triumph, they also questioned the foundation of America’s intellectual triumph. They no longer wanted to read ‘great books’ or set themselves up for scientific careers that would advance human knowledge. Instead, they went that most American of ways - they did their own thing, and did so on a scale never seen before. Before the Baby Boomers, Americans upheld a very particular (and slightly authoritarian) social contract based on the continual enforcement of a community’s shared values of tolerance. The contradiction there should be completely obvious - previous generations may have believed in tolerance, but the community obligation was at very least as important as the individual right. If a community felt that the individual right had stretched too far and negated its responsibility to the community, the community felt completely justified in repressing those ‘deviants.’ The result of this was the unity of purpose which saw us through reconstruction after the Civil War and overcame the Great Depression, but it also looked the other way at racial violence and discrimination, economic exploitation, and imperial subjugation abroad. It was not until the Baby Boom generation that the idea of individual rights as more important than community obligation became widespread. In doing so, they caused enormous, and long overdue, gains in freedom for minorities. And yet they may have simultaneously undone the social contract (hardly a beneficent one) which enabled America’s rise. It was a Faustian pact. We are now a freer country than ever before. We’re also a more stymied, dysfunctional one than we’ve been since The Great Depression. The Baby Boomers changed the definition of American culture into the most American possible conceit - the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest number of people. And by changing it, they probably defined the meaning of American culture for all time.

Just a few years before 1968, Cold War-era universities were places of highly disciplined learning and bastions of what used to be called ‘value-free scholarship’ (scholarship for its own sake). The idea of value-free scholarship is probably a myth - the US government would never have funded it if it hadn’t felt the need for top-quality scientists in the Cold War so direly. But it was the rebellion against the University, not the University itself, that gave America it’s identity.

Just briefly look at the most eminent figures in American culture. No novelist has had anything like the impact on America which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have had on the Russians. We have a national poet in Walt Whitman, but does he count as our National Writer the way Shakespeare does for the English or Goethe does for the Germans? We probably don’t have a National Writer. Hell, we probably don’t even have a National Book unless you count The Constitution. But if we don’t have a National Writer, we certainly have a National Songwriter. I think a much better case could be made that Bob Dylan already had a larger impact on American society in a half-century than even Walt Whitman has in a century-and-a-half. We have great artists, but no National Artist. However, we have a National Photographer in Ansel Adams, and the impact which Steven Spielberg and Orson Welles have on America dwarves any other visual artist in any medium. We have a number of good playwrights, but not a single one among them ever had the impact of musical theater creators like Rodgers and Hammerstein or Stephen Sondheim.

The most important American art, of nearly all genres, was made in recent generations; created to be consumed by either the WWII generation or the Baby Boomers. We have national poets, but we have no national novelist, or artist, or composer, or playwright. Except Whitman, our national cultural figures are all very recent. And even Whitman seems almost completely contemporary in the way that he insisted on a colloquial, simple language. Had he lived a century later, you could easily see him learning the guitar to travel the open road with Woody Guthrie or headlining a Beatnik poetry slam with Allen Ginsberg.

But it is this colloquial, simple language, which defines our cultural contribution. We’re like small children playing with enormous toys. On this new continent, we have created technology which so outstrips anything that comes before it that we barely know how to use it. There is 4,000 years of written poetry and roughly 1,000 years of written music, but there are roughly 110 years of movies and only a bit more of sound recording and photography. Education in math and science and medicine is defined by its exclusivity. If you want to study these subjects meaningfully, you have to learn at an extraordinary level over a period of a decade. But the arts are currently defined by their populism. Anybody can write or sing a song, anybody can make a movie, anybody can write a story. No extraordinary ability is asked of our cultural figures, and it’s possible that the most extraordinary thing about American culture is the technology with which it’s transmitted. Don't misunderstand, simplicity is not a byword for mediocrity, but the fact that there is no reward for craftsmanship in the arts in the manner there is for the sciences necessarily means that nearly half of the artistic glories we’re capable of producing go unrealized.

And it’s not just the artistic culture that suffers from this lack of critical complexity. It’s the civic culture too. Since about 1968, so many of us have come to assume automatically that the nation’s founding was cynical, based on economic interests, the exploitation of Africans, and the murder of Indians. Never mind that America is a country with one of the longest democratic traditions in human history, with freedoms that have never stopped growing (however incrementally), and done because of a founding constitutional document which is so simple that anybody can understand and interpret it for themselves. Furthermore, not a single movement which attempted to move the country away from republican democracy ever gained significant traction in the country’s entire history. American democracy is extremely imperfect, but thus far, it’s always been well-supported by its citizens, continually expanded its freedoms, and demonstrated the feasibility of democracy for the modern age. Any person who does not reflect on these facts in awe shouldn’t be taken seriously when they criticize anything about this country.

American values, such as they are, are no longer commonly shared. We no longer agree about what’s good and evil, and virtually all quarters of America are despondent over the fact that this disagreement exists. Half the country seems to hold to traditional definitions of the sacred, and the other half searches for a new definition on which no two members seem to agree. The American Soul is divided, with one half clinging to past - old world - models, and one half searching uncomfortably since 1968 for a new model which no American has definitively found. One side prizes unity, the other, individual expression. In a conflict between the two sides, do the individuals have a 1% chance of winning?

And because no American has established a commonly accepted new model, the half of America which sees the need for one is adrift. Its members are discontent without realizing the basis of their dissatisfaction. Their native intelligence is enough to show them that something has become deeply rotten in the American Soul, but they don’t have the tools to understand why. More than ever before, America is a nation of individuals. No two people critical of America share the same values, and because they lack the same values, they can’t pool their critical thinking together to effectively criticize the country - incompetent in defining the country’s problems, and ineffectual in creating change.

America needs new definitions. New definitions of good and evil, new definitions of the sacred and the sublime which demonstrate the struggle between the two ethical poles, and new arguments for why it’s important to choose between them. The old values of what is good and what is evil, tied up with old notions of God and retribution, clearly don’t have much hold on Americans anymore. Such notions predate America by thousands of years, and even if they were invented in America, they are un-American in every sense. If we don’t provide a new set of values, if good and evil simply no longer exist, what then is worth fighting for?

The Most Extraordinary Recording of Beethoven 9

Click here

Truly extraordinary, but far from perfect. No recording is perfect. But this is the recording, for all its bizarre touches, which comes closest to my own conception. But the fact that I prefer this recording to just about all others troubles me very deeply. It comes from Nazi-era Netherlands, and the one quality, the only important quality, which this recording lacks is perhaps the most important quality of all - that final humanist glow which makes the 9th feel like a statement of love rather than coercion. I have no idea if the politics of a performance matter matter, there are Nazi-era recordings which have that glow in spades (for one, Furtwangler's famous 1942 performance of the Ninth, a conductor with far more conflicted feelings about the Nazi party than Mengelberg). The first three movements are beyond compare, and so is the last movement, but the tone of the performance is so utterly regimented, so commanding and dynamic, that it feels like a Beethoven 9 for Nuremberg, not humanity. 

800 Words and Friday Playlist: Towards a Canon for the Rock Era Part 1

Skinner: Reverend, this is Principal Skinner. I'm facing a crisis, and I didn't know to whom to turn …

Lovejoy: Well, maybe you should read your Bible.

Skinner: Um, any particular passage?

Lovejoy: Oh, it's all good.


"Canon" means many things to many people, but it literally means 'rule' in the sense of a measuring stick. The term, allegedly, comes from the end of the biblical era (New Testament), and it means a closed, authoritative collection. The canon is the yardstick by which the religious authorities and redactors measured closeness to God.

Those of us who have trouble with the idea of God nevertheless have our own canons. We may not believe in the Bible, but it's almost inevitable that there are moments in our lives when we turn to it for consolation, for wisdom, for transcendence, and for catharsis. The Bible has many, many passages that are just plain dull, and others that are downright offensive. Fortunately, we live in an era when we can ignore them...

But the truly glorious biblical excerpts - Exodus (at least chapters 1-24) and Genesis (just about all of it), Jonah and Isaiah (heavily edited), Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Jonah and the Song of Deborah, the Psalms and the Proverbs, Joel and Amos, Micah and Jonah, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs (let it never be said that the Hebrews didn't know how to have a good time...), and the St. Mark Gospel... for obvious reasons, I never read as much of the New Testament, and what I read seemed to be not quite as interesting - are still some of the greatest literature we yet have. Even for a non-believer (especially?), these writings are every bit as moving, as challenging, and as beautiful as anything in Shakespeare or Beethoven. In the same way that I can hear Beethoven's Eroica Symphony in my head and know that obstacles can be overcome, or read Sonnet 29 (hopefully one day I can quote it from memory) to remember better days, so too could I turn to Psalm 23 or 27, and know hope and comfort, even if God won't be the one to provide it. Everyone has their own personal canon, comprised of works as close to our hearts as any family or close friend, and after sampling something from that canon, we can only hope that our demons can be purged, and life becomes that much easier to live.

(Text continued in Part 2...)

John Lennon: Imagine

Marvin Gaye: What's Going On

Aretha Franklin: Respect

Chuck Berry: Johnny B Goode

The Beatles: Hey Jude

Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come

Bob Dylan: Blowin' in the Wind

The Beatles: Let It Be

The Beatles: In My Life

Curtis Mayfield: People Get Ready

The Beach Boys: God Only Knows

Tina Turner: River Deep, Mountain High

U2: One (under protest, and only when Johnny Cash sings it)

Martha & The Vandellas: Dancing in the Street

The Band: The Weight

Ray Charles: Georgia On My Mind

Simon & Garfunkel: Bridge Over Troubled Water

Percy Sledge: When a Man Loves a Woman

Bob Dylan: The Times They Are a-Changin'

Buffalo Springfield: For What It's Worth

Bob Marley: Redemption Song

Bob Dylan: Tangled Up in Blue

Dionne Warwick: Walk On By

Stevie Wonder: Superstition

Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man

Bruce Springstein: Thunder Road

Johnny Cash: Ring of Fire

The Mamas & The Papas: California Dreamin'

U2: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (goddamnit...)

Al Green: Love and Happiness

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Fortunate Son

Rolling Stones: You Can't Always Get What You Want

Stevie Wonder: Living For The City

Simon & Garfunkel: The Boxer

Van Morrison: Brown-Eyed Girl

Otis Redding: I've Been Loving You Too Long

The Drifters: Up On The Roof

Al Green: Take Me To The River

Ben E. King: Stand By Me

James Brown: It's a Man's World

Rolling Stones: Jumpin' Jack Flash

The Shirelles: Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

(along with more songs...)

800 Words: Pity the Dictator...

It is said that no matter what other works of art he banned, Stalin never missed a performance of Boris Godunov. You would think that The Great Russian Opera would be the first to be censured by the Soviet Union - an opera about Russian tyrant who murdered his way to the throne, causes untold suffering to his people, and lives in perpetual terror of being held to account for his crimes. Even if this opera was about Czarist Russia, nobody could mistake the parallels to the Stalinist era. But at every performance, there was Stalin in his box, apparently listening quite intently. Even the stoniest heart of the century was moved to pity by the sight of his own soul’s reflection. So invested was he in Boris Godunov that he barred the Bolshoi’s music director, Nikolai Golovanov, from ever conducting again because Golovanov preferred a different bass for the role than Stalin’s favorite.

Brecht (rarely...) summed it up quite well: “How exhausting it is to be evil.” It is difficult to imagine that Stalin, the former seminary student who nearly became an Orthodox priest, could shed every last vestige of his former religious belief. Perhaps his psychopathy was untroubled, but it’s also possible to imagine him in his private gloom, awaiting the tumultuous hellfire which he knew was his ripe desert.

But historical figures like Stalin and Mao, as they existed in the twentieth century, are no longer possible. For the moment, there’s simply too much information and not enough means to collate it to gather useable dossier files after the manner of 20th century totalitarian states. In place of the totalitarian leader returns a creature both less and more lethal than the absolute monarch/dictator - the warlord. The warlord has no true power over his subjects in life, he only has power over them in death; and should the apparatus of war fall to pieces, so will he. Such is the lot of Bashar al-Assad, who has ceased to be an authoritarian dictator, he is now a warlord whose power is only demonstrable by the number of people he can kill.

Those of us who supported the Arab Spring have little to show for our beliefs thus far but an endless list of war crimes which will probably grow far more endless before the war ends. In the Syrian Civil War, there are as many as 120,000 dead, 130,000 missing, 1,500 foreign civilians killed, 1.2 million refugees, and 3 million internally displaced. The Syrian dictatorship as it existed before The Arab Spring exists no longer, nor could it ever. Syria is not an authoritarian state, it is chaos. And into that chaos was thrown a fifth of that country’s people, and who knows how many more millions will be thrown in before the chaos subsides?

Meanwhile, Egypt continues its dance upon an even deadlier volcano. Egypt’s elected president, Mohammed Morsi, was worse than a dictator, he was an incompetent would-be-dictator who attempted power seizures in the clumsiest possible manner. Even if he was elected, only way in which he could not be deposed by the Egyptian military was to entice the liberals to remain on his side - and yet he insisted on near-absolute constitutional power, and secular liberals left the Constituent Assembly (charged with drafting the new constitution) in disgust. No doubt, Morsi saw the example of Ayatollah Khomeini and thought that liberals could be casually brushed aside with a simple declaration the way Khomeini did in Iran. But the Egyptian revolution was built on far less solid ground than the Iranian one. The Iranian protests against the Shah involved as many as nine million people, whereas the protests against Mubarak were 2 million strong. Such was the hold of Khomeini’s charisma that upon his return to Iran, he was greeted by more than five million followers. Khomeini inspired so much devotion in his following that he could brush a liberal government aside with a wave of his hand, and no other Iranian had anything like the power to stop him.

Mohammed Morsi was never supposed to be president. He only became a candidate because the Egyptian military banned the candidacy of the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy chairman - Khairad El-Shater. No one knows how any Islamist in Egypt could believe that an Islamic president could get away with giving himself dictatorial powers, but there should be no doubt that any Islamist President would have done the same. There are still more extreme Islamic parties in Egypt, powerful ones like the Salafist al-Nour party which got 28% of the vote. As much pressure as there was on Morsi to stay within the limits of constitutional law, there may have been still more pressure on him to become an Islamic dictator.

Meanwhile, the protests in Turkey have become so common that, in comparison to Egypt, the media has barely reported on them - seeing little difference in what’s happening in Turkey to what happened all over the Arab world. But what’s happened in Turkey is, in some ways, even more dramatic. Turkey’s protests against Prime Minister Erdogan have attracted at least 640,000 people. And when Erdogan definitively took violent action against the protests, it was the reverse of Mubarak. When Mubarak took action, it showed that he was a dictator no longer in control of the country he ruled with an iron fist. But when Erdogan took violent action against those who protested him, he officially was no longer a mere democratically elected leader - he became a would-be-dictator who rules by force. Mubarak is the authoritarianism of the past, Erdogan is the authoritarianism of the future. He was once the great hope for all of us who believed that political Islam needn’t be compatible with tyranny, but there can be no mistaking that Erdogan has opted for despotism. Over Erdogan’s time, Turkey has censored over a million websites, the country’s imprisoned over a hundred journalists, has bomed Iran and Iraq in violation of international law and continually threatens to bomb Syria, and killed as many as 60,000 Kurds (though probably half that). It’s possible, however unlikely, that Erdogan has plans to exploit the instability of the Islamic world to be its imperial overseer. No one has more to gain from the Arab Spring’s plunge into chaos than Erdogan. But how can Erdogan rule over all Islam he can’t even control his own country?

And finally, there’s the Israel/Palestine conflict. The third and definitive piece in the tic-tac-toe board of regional war. Where this perennial cause celebre goes, there will the world go. Syria is already in catastrophic Civil War, Egypt seems on the verge of it. All that’s required to become a regional conflict is for Civil War to occur in Israel/Palestine. One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, I’ll go into all the reasons why war between Israelis and Palestinians, or even war between Palestinian factions, remains the most lethal danger for the entire area - the difference between contained conflicts, or a war that could metastasize to literally any corner of the globe.

But even if it doesn’t, barely lower levels of instability circle the governments of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia, and Bahrain. The entire Middle East is operating at a simmer, waiting for a match to strike the powder keg that will ignite it into the twenty-first century’s first grand conflict. If the rest of the world is wise, it won’t get too entangled. It’s the twenty-first century, but The Middle East looks very much like the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, because no matter how militant and extreme a warlord gets, there is always someone whispering in his ear that he must become still more extreme, still more violent - or risk violence being done to him.

(The Grand Inquisitor Scene from Verdi's Don Carlo)

Friday Playlist: Benny Goodman (part 1)

King Porter Stomp

Bartok: Contrasts (with the composer on piano and the great Joseph Szigeti on violin)

How High The Moon

Coconut Grove

The Man I Love

When the Sun Comes Out

Fable of the Rose

Shake Down the Stairs

Madhouse

House Hop

Swingtime in the Rockies

Jam Session

Goodbye

The Hour of Parting

Peckin'

Life Goes to a Party

Ridin' High

It's Always You

Darn That Dream

Down South Camp Meeting

Smoke Dreams

If Dreams Come True

Organ Grinder's Swing

Don't Be That Way

Yeah, Man

Music Hall Rag

Nitwit Serenade

Bugle Call Rag

Downhome Rag

Blue Moon

Limehouse Blues

I've Found a New Baby

800 Words: 30 Mini-Essays - 9. The American Carnival, 10. This IS The American Century

9. The American Carnival

“… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses”

- Juvenal, Satire X

"...migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wanderings,
Placard "Removed" and "To Let' on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus, ...
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections
For you know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you."

- Walt Whitman, Song of the Exposition

I have no idea what it means to be the ‘Greatest Country on Earth.’ I know that I’ve written that about America before, and having lived in only three countries (the other two for not very long), I have no real expertise on the subject, so I very much regret writing that. But I do know what excitement is, and I feel pretty safe in saying that even if America is not the best country on Earth, it’s certainly the most exciting. It should never cease to amaze how wrongly we Americans do many things, but we provide easily the best bread and circus show in the world.

The older I get, the dimmer grow my fantasies of living some kind of obscenely cultured life of daily concerts, theater, galleries, and symposia with the learned of the European continent which would turn George Steiner green with envy. The Europe of my imagination, indeed the Europe of most educated Americans’ imagination, ceased to exist a century ago when the lamps went out all over that continent, and we have not seen them lit again. But what those lamps illuminated was nothing but the European bread and circus show - perhaps still the greatest show the Earth has ever known. The working class was foundering in terrible factory conditions, the rural population starved terribly, but it was a non-stop party for the educated of Europe with ever new delights. The world was an endless place of discovery; new foods, new books, new music and art, new science. Life for an educated European was an endless profusion of new things to talk about.

But the pleasures innate to Europe have not changed much for a hundred years. In its place, Europe has become ever more Americanized. The Marshall Plan was not only a second chance for Europe, it was a second chance for America as well to get right all those things which wise American statesmen learned about proper governance over the course of 175 years. As a result of The Marshall Plan’s generosity, Europe was able to grow the kind of social safety net which America still desperately needs, and most Western European countries possess systems of government which are far more functional than America’s endless gridlock. If the EU ever succeeds (and the last few years proved that it clearly hasn’t yet...), it will have officially beaten America at its own game. Europe doesn’t need lamps, they have solar power.

But if the EU is a better place to live than America, then it has correspondingly less need for a great bread and circus show. European entertainment is certainly very good, and

I should know because I’m an endless consumer of much of it. The BBC gave us wonderful comedians like John Cleese and the Python crew, Ricky Gervais, Rowan Atkinson, and Fry & Laurie - all comedians influenced by the work of American forerunners - and endless wonderful documentaries about past European achievements; British theater gave us the more intelligent theater of Stoppard and Frayn and Bennett and David Hare and Peter Shaffer, as often as not about old subjects from European history; I adore lots of postwar European movies by Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Fassbinder, Polanski, Almodovar, Rohmer, Kieslowski and many others - usually either based on historical European subjects or heavily influenced by the work of American directors; I love cabaret Chaussoniers like Jacques Brel, Edith Piaff, Charles Aznavour, and Ute Lemper, who learned much of their craft by listening to American jazz crooners; like the rest of the world I love lots of British bands, most of whom would have not even thought to start a band if they hadn’t heard records by American bands first….. It’s all wonderful stuff, but it is either grounded in the paradigms of Old Europe, or it borrows from the American model. Like the pre-WWII generations of American popular culture, it is almost impossible to speak of European popular culture without taking account of the models they borrowed from across the Ocean. Even the professional sports leagues of Europe are marketed on models they borrowed from America.

But the show in Europe simply can’t compare to the show in America. Life is very dull when you run little risk of failure, and for those of us too restless to ever know inner peace, we require simply a better, longer, more diverse show to take our minds off our all-too-real problems. America simply has a more diverse offering of entertainment - an endless twenty-four hour cycle of frivolity in which the brain is in constant stimulation and needn’t be troubled by anything too burdensome. Some of these diversions even have the added benefit of having an intelligence which even a European could admire!

The profusion of American offerings, both intelligent and not so, is almost literally infinite. The celebrity culture known so well to the rest of the world is only the surface layer of American entertainment. Unlike in Europe, the dream of a centralized, national media is something of a joke. PBS and NPR receive a small fraction of the funding which the BBC or Deutschlandradio get, and even if they received the same funding, dollar for pound/euro, they could not do nearly as good a job at promoting all the best in American entertainment, because there is so much more in America than there is in Europe. As a result, no truly great musician or writer or artist in America can or ever again will be promoted with the firepower which their equivalents in Europe can be marketed. But as a result, and nobody likes to hear this, the brutality of the competition makes American artists more hungry and battle-tested. They have more to say thanks to the struggles they underwent to make it. But even if that isn’t true, it remains startlingly clear that there are far more great entertainers and artists working in America than in any one European country - because America is not a country, it is its own continent. Every scene, however small, has its stars; every consumer, however ignorant, has his favorites whom no one she knows has yet heard. No matter what your aesthetic taste, no matter what the shade of your political leanings, no matter how high or low your level of intelligence, there will be an astoundingly large number of people across the country who share your ethos and cater to it.

But there is no way to experience the extraordinary depth and diversity of this carnival without living here. No one would know how to cue you into everything which happens. You could never assimilate even a sliver of it if you didn’t. The dreams of Old Europe are merely dreams. But every damn city in America has its own small version of Old Vienna and and Old Paris and all the attendant cities of the fin de siecle. The music, the art, the writing, may be completely unrecognizable from its European forerunners, but as America streams headlong into second half of middle-age, it's finally carved out a distinct identity of its own - with each city having its own distinct and utterly individual identity-within-the-identity. No two communities, no two scenes in a single community, could ever be mistaken for one another. THIS is the American Carnival. It goes twenty-four hours a day, it has more stations than any carnival the world has ever seen, it contains endless other people to talk with about everything you just saw with, and it’s not going to close any time soon.  

10. This IS The American Century!

Welcome to the American Century. What did you expect it to be?

The twentieth century was not The American Century, it was The American Comedy. It began in 1914 with the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand, and ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It had the happiest possible ending: The Soviet Union fell, America was the unquestioned world superpower, prosperous beyond the dreams of any country in world history, and America learned precisely the wrong lessons from their victory. We are now an an overstretched neo-imperial power, which believes it can tax minimally and spend maximally without being called to account for its debts. We believed that Reagan’s military bluster is what caused the downfall of the Soviet Union, when it was Harry Truman’s slow, patient policy of containment which brought it down over a period of forty years. It was a comedy because it left the country of perfect fools at the top of food chain, and like all fools, we now stand ready to get our comeuppance.

It is only in the twenty-first century that America bestrides the world like a colossus. Every country, every politically and intellectually active person, can be measured by one question before every other: What do you think of America? The story of the twenty-first century is how other countries accomodated the overwhelming influence of America on world policy and culture.

In the eyes of the world, America now stands for a caricature of what it is. To the eyes of foreigners who only have experience dealing with America’s spoiled privileged class and the hicks they see on TV, America is an imperial oligarchy which deliberately keeps its citizens dumb. Well... there’s no sense in denying that America is precisely that, but it’s also so much more. The majority of us Americans don’t deserve the fall which is coming to us. But fortunately, we may not be alive to see it happen. It very well might be a problem for when our grandchildren are old and grey. For the meantime, most Americans live in mountains of debt which don’t have to be paid, and privileges they haven’t earned. But that could all end tomorrow, in which the world will be plunged into chaos, in which case The Twenty-First Century will be defined as The American-Made Disaster. But it’s more likely to be a gradual fall, in which other countries have vested interests in keeping this fat middle-aged country propped up and barely alive for another hundred years, their economies growing in relation to America until these countries feel no need to prop up their ‘parent’ any longer, at which point there could be an Oedipal war in which America is soundly defeated, now merely a de-facto colony of a greater world power the way Europe in so many ways still is to America.

Welcome to The American Century! Did you expect it to be fun?