Tales from the Old New Land: Episode 1 - Just War - More of the Beginning

(Sound of reaching for chips in a plastic bag, a match being lit, and a smoker taking puffs. Son opens door, home from a vacation, the Dad doesn't getting up to greet him.)

Son: Hey Dad! (Dad coughs on the weed from startlement) Are you OK?

Dad: (recovered but out of breath) I'm fine, I just didn't think you'd be home so early.

Son: Wait, are you?... You're just eating falafel balls out of a bag!

Dad: Anything wrong with that?

Son: No... But can you open a window at least? The house wreaks of pot!

Dad: This is the fourth century, there are no windows.

Son: Oh...

Dad: I know we talked about my not smoking weed in the house, but I thought you wouldn't be home until prima noctis hora, so I figured there was time to air out the house. Besides, don't you Christians preach all that forgiveness shit?

Son: Father Theodosius says I need to work on forgiving you more.

Dad: That idiot is absolutely right!

Son: Don't you want to hear about my vacation?!

Dad: You'd tell me all about it anyway.

Son: It was so amazing!

Dad: Of course it was!

Son: Our youth group leader took us to the oldest baptistry chapel in the Byzantine Empire! It was, like, fifty years old!

Dad: (bored) Sounds amazing.

Son: It had a painting of Jesus healing the paralytic at Capaernum.

Dad: Healing the what?

Son: I told you about that! Jesus made a crippled man walk!

Dad: Oh! That's right...

Son: And a painting of the Three Marys at the Tomb of Jesus!

Dad: Three what?

Son: Three Mary's!

Dad: Three Mary's?

Son: Yeah?

Dad: Three women? All named Mary?

Son: Yeah.

Dad: (interrupting) You told me about two Mary's, the one who's the mother and the one who's the whore.

Son: She's not a whore!

Dad: Yeah but in a thousand year's they're gonna think so...

Son: What?!?!?!

Dad: Never mind. Anyway, you told me there are two Marys, and now you're telling me there's three?

Son: Well,... actually there's five.

Dad: FIVE?!?

Son: The Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus...

Dad: (quasi-interrupting) Yeah, that's not weird....

Son: Mary Magdalene, who you think is a whore, Mary of Jacob, mother of James the Less...

Dad: That's not a distinction you wanna have....

Son: What is?

Dad: Who wants to be known as the less of something.

Son: Well, the other James was the brother of Jesus.

Dad: Wait, so the virgin had another child?

Son: She had at least four more: James, Joses, Jude, and Simon.

Dad: So she didn't stay a virgin...

Son: DAD!

Dad: I'm just saying, you'd think that mothering the son of God would be a full time job. And he wasn't even the son of God until pretty recently. Your avus (grandfather) remembered when it happened! Three hundred years, he might be the son of God, he might just be the Messiah, isn't it enough to be the Messiah? Then, the Nicean Council happens, two months, boom! Christ the Messiah!

Son: Is it too much to ask to be a little respectful?

Dad: I'm just telling you how good things used to be! Anyway, I want to hear more about these Marys.

Son: OK. There's the Virgin Mary, there's Mary Magdalene who you think is a whore, there's Mary of Jacob, mother of James the Less, there's Mary of Cleopas.

Dad: ...That's a stupid name.

Son: Dad!

Dad: Is Cleopas the town she's from?

Son: No. Cleophas was either her husband or her father.

Dad: Probably both. Those fucking Jews, they're all goddamn hicks.

Son: Dad! Don't swear!

Dad: Whatever. And what's the venerable Mary of Cleopas's claim to fame?

Son: She doesn't really have one. She might just be Mary of Jacob.

Dad: Oh, what a surprise.

Son: What do you mean?

Dad: Go on, I want to know who the fifth Mary is.

Son: Mary of Bethany.

Dad: Was she married to Bethany?

Son: Dad! Stop!

Dad: It can happen! You heard about those two wives who went to Lesbos!

Son: Women shouldn't be marrying other women!

Dad: And I suppose my Christian son doesn't think men should lie with other men either. Typical progressive nonsense. Next thing you know, revolutionaries like you are telling us that monogamy is what human beings are biologically programmed for.

Son: Look, Dad, I just think you should respect my choices.

Dad: I didn't throw you out. So my son only wants to marry one woman and thinks that sexuality and gender is not fluid, it's not the end of the world, it's just that the world is changing and I'm too old to understand it. So back to this Mary of Bethany thing.

Son: I told you about Mary of Bethany!

Dad: You didn't tell me what she did! That is, if this religion of yours lets women do anything at all.

Son: She's the sister of Lazerus.

Dad: That guy who rises from the dead.

Son: The one which Jesus... (annoyed) Yeah that's the one....

Dad: (a little insistently) And what did she do?

Son: She washed Jesus's feet with nard.

Dad: The perfume???

Son: Yeah.

Dad: That's the most expensive perfume there is! She could have lived on that for a year!

Son: (Angry) Alright that's enough Dad, that's exactly what Judas said!

Dad: He must have had a good head for business.

Son: This is what I'm talking about! You always do this!

Dad: Do what?











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Dad: You ever get to thinking that there's a slight chance that there was only one Mary, and people got confused because the story got told so many times?






Dad: This whole Jesus thing of yours is really obnoxious.

Son: Well we can't all get satisfaction out of going a million pedes (Latin for footsteps) out of our way to every music festival from us! Didn't you go to one last year where they burned some guy alive?

Dad: Come on. I had to go to Burning Man at least once.

Tales from the Old New Land Reboot - Tale 1 - Just War - A Very Little More

(Sound of reaching for chips in a plastic bag, a match being lit, and a smoker taking puffs. Son opens door, home from a vacation, the Dad doesn't getting up to greet him.)

Son: Hey Dad! (Dad coughs on the weed from startlement) Are you OK?

Dad: (recovered but out of breath) I'm fine, I just didn't think you'd be home so early.

Son: Wait, are you?... You're just eating falafel balls out of a bag!

Dad: Anything wrong with that?

Son: No... But can you open a window at least? The house wreaks of pot!

Dad: This is the fourth century, there are no windows.

Son: Oh...

Dad: I know we talked about my not smoking weed in the house, but I thought you wouldn't be home until prima noctis hora, so I figured there was time to air out the house. Besides, don't you Christians preach all that forgiveness shit?

Son: It's OK. Father Theodosius says I need to work on forgiving you more.

Dad: That idiot is absolutely right!

Son: Don't you want to hear about my vacation?!

Dad: You'll tell me all about it anyway.

Son: Oh it was so amazing! Our youth group leader took us to the oldest baptistry chapel in the Byzantine Empire! It was fifty years old!

Dad: (bored) Sounds amazing.

Son: It had a painting of Jesus healing the paralytic at Capaernum.

Dad: Healing the what?

Son: I told you about that! Jesus made a crippled man walk!

Dad: Oh, that's right!

Son: And a painting of the three Marys at the tomb of Jesus!

Dad: Three what?

Son: Three Mary's!

Dad: Three women? All named Mary?

Son: Yeah.

Dad: I mean... don't you think it's a little weird?

Son: What?

Dad: ...That they all had the same name?

Son: No... (considering) Not really... (faith comes back to him) No!

Dad: You ever get to thinking that there's a slight chance that there was only one Mary, and people got confused because the story got told so many times?

Son: I have no idea what you're talking about.

Dad: Who were these Mary's?

Son: Mary, mother of Jesus.

Dad: OK, so far, so good.

Son: Mary Magdalene, the


--------------------------------------



Dad: This whole Jesus thing of yours is really obnoxious.

Son: Well we can't all get satisfaction out of going a million pedes (Latin for footsteps) out of our way to every music festival from us! Didn't you go to one last year where they burned some guy alive?

Dad: Come on. I had to go to Burning Man at least once.

Tales from the Old New Land (Reboot) - Episode 1 - Just War - Very Beginning

(Son opens door, home from a vacation, the Dad doesn't getting up to greet him.)

Son: Hey Dad! (no response) Aren't you going to give me a hug?

Dad: You're not going anywhere...

Son: Wait, are you?... You're just eating falafel balls out of a bag!

Dad: Anything wrong with that?

Son: No... But can you open a window at least? The house wreaks of pot!

Dad: This is the fourth century, there are no windows.

Son: Oh... Aren't you going to ask me about my vacation?

Dad: You'll tell me all about it anyway.

Son: Oh it was amazing! We went to





--------------------------------------



Dad: This whole Jesus thing of yours is really obnoxious.

Son: Well we can't all get satisfaction out of going a million pedes (Latin for footsteps) out of our way to every music festival from us! Didn't you go to one last year where they burned some guy alive?

Dad: Come on. I had to go to Burning Man at least once.

My Third Post for the Times of Israel

Daniel Barenboim's Orchestra

My Second Post at Times of Israel

The Imminent Decline of Pikesville

My First Post at Times of Israel

Really just a rerun from here. 

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I may be the only person in the world personally affected by this who is not involved in it (and I suppose that's the reason it's happening), but this labor dispute at the BSO is a tragedy. The management is saying that there isn't enough money to keep the Baltimore Symphony a full-time orchestra. At the end of this, the BSO may be demoted from a 'major American orchestra', a term used to mean a full-time one, to a 'minor', part time one. The best musicians will start applying elsewhere where they can make more money and work more, and that will push off more potential donors.

In a few years, anybody else who cares will have died. If you explained to anybody under the age of 70 that classical music was literally the soundtrack of daily life for everybody who is now over seventy, hardly anyone would believe you. It seems so completely distant from today's life that it must have disappeared overnight. But how have all these symphony orchestras kept going for so long? When I was a kid, it was three orchestral concerts in Baltimore every week, nearly all of them sold out. 50% of the people who went back then are clearly dead now, and a good half of the ones left seem barely able to walk. Twenty years before I was born, the Philadelphia Orchestra would come to Baltimore and do an entire mini-season of concerts at the Lyric Opera House.

If the musicmaking weren't so great, the BSO would be the most depressing place in Baltimore. But the BSO is not the most depressing place in Baltimore, it is the best thing about living in Baltimore. I'm single and eccentric, so I go out of my way to go to a lot of orchestral concerts far afield. And I often wonder why I do, because on any given week, the BSO may outplay every orchestra until you get as far afield as Pittsburgh. But i's the BSO who gave me the passion for this music. Perhaps its a paradox, but the very fact of the precariousness of the arts in second-tier cities like Baltimore and Pittsburgh and Cleveland means that the practitioners have to bring their A-game every week or else there will be no audience at all. And, of course, there may be no audience even so.

I may be alone in my generation in believing that high culture is at all important. It is obviously far from what's most important in the world; and there are hundreds of issues at stake right now which are far more important than events like this. And long before the crises of the last few years emerged, there were millions of Americans who believed that high culture is just a more pompous form of what popular culture gives us much more directly. Even a lot of classical musicians believe that today, and I suppose there was a time when even I believed that myself, or at least tried to convince myself that it was true. But whatever you believe about it, classical music is an unbroken tradition which has existed for hundreds of years and it is dying out. Dying is the most inevitable part of nature, and eventually comes for everybody and everything, but the greatest reason to immerse yourself in the arts is that it's the only proof we have that anything at all defies the cycle of nature. It takes you to places and eras and worlds which you never would be able to imagine yourself without them. The loss of something like this is like a fire at the BMA or the Walters - hundreds of paintings and architectural artifacts that are completely unique and reach to us across centuries and let us commune with the ambitions and yearnings of people and places long dead. It only takes an instant to destroy all that uniqueness which has lived for centuries, and once erased, you can never get it back.

All artists have ever wanted to do is make your lives more joyful, more meaningful, more beautiful. It's almost a cliche that Americans don't like the high arts, which we perceive as something elitist, and that Americans don't like history, the lessons of which we perceive as not applying to us. But it would seem of late that we're drawing closer and closer to learning that the lessons of history still very much apply here. If America lets things this beautiful die, how much else can it allow to die?

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I often come to shul late. There's nothing in the Shmoneh Esrei or Ashrei that Hashem hadn't heard from me last week. One eighty-something friend of my Bubbie's has gossiped on more than one occasion about how disrespectful she finds it. But unfortunately my tendency to come late to shul paid off this morning. Nobody at my synagogue knew yet. When I got there, the Rabbi was nearing the end of a sermon that was already about political violence. I whispered what happened to the Rabbi's wife (a Rabbi herself), and she went up to the pulpit to tell him. When he broke the news I watched as a number of congregants dissolved into tears.

At its core, Judaism is not a religion of belief. Faith, or 'emunah' as we call it, certainly exists in Judaism, but Judaism was formed before the Classical era from the best scientific knowledge anybody had in 1000 BC, so there isn't as much of a leap of faith Jews need to make. The Tanakh, or the "Old Testament" has very little to say about the transcendent realms of Hashem and his celestial dominion. The core of Judaism is not in belief but tactile, about rituals and customs. One of the most well-known aphorisms of the religion is 'na'aseh v'nishma.' "Do first, understand later." I go to shul because it's as inborn as a bird flying south. It's just what Jews do. Needing a critical justification for your worldview is a very Western concept. Jewish theological texts are as voluminous as Christian and generated by a tiny people, but the bulk of it is not theological justifications or mystical speculations, it's simple legalistic rulings about the best way to properly interpret our oh so many weird laws and customs.

Had I not played music, I wouldn't have ever known a single gentile remotely well until I was sixteen. I spent my twenties trying to be as secular as I could, only to find myself changing the subject at every opportunity to the bizarre tales of what it was like to grow up in the most uniformly Jewish town in America. What else did I ever have to talk about? Eventually, I just decided it was better to just 'eat the bagels.' Meet some Jews again who were Jewish in more than just extraction, and talk the ins and outs of this strange faith into which fate deposited us with people who already knew what it was.

I do remain a God-skeptic, and even were I a believer, how can anybody love a god that allows the world to come to this? But my father always put his creed like this: "There is no God, and He gave us the Torah at Mt. Sinai." I didn't quite understand it growing up, but as I got a bit older, and hopefully a bit wiser, I watched over and over again as friends who had renounced religion fell into religions of their own, sometimes actual traditional religions, more often political religions, and because they had no experience of growing up in a system of beliefs from which they had no critical distance, they fell into their beliefs with such fervor that when their pet causes came up, it was as though their personalities had left them and they answered with pre-programmed responses that were not their own thoughts. Seventy-two years ago, my father was the first Jewish baby born after the Holocaust in the city of Bialystok, possibly in all of Poland. My grandparents survived both Stalin and Hitler, they knew very well what happens when people take leave of their critical faculties, and yet they elected to remain Jewish. When my father was born, other Jews told them not to give him a bris because God had abandoned them. But they gave a bris anyway, and every remaining Jew showed up in the entire region.

Who am I to turn my back on all that and so many other stories of family members who lost, sacrificed, and fought for, everything for the right to survive as a Jew? And even were I tempted anymore, Judaism, as weird as it is, is the best way I've found so far to make sense of our bizarre world. Other religions, spiritual, political, social, demand of us transcendent possibilities in a world where there is so clearly no transcendence to be had. The technology may get better, but the 'yetzers' of human nature seem unchanging, every virtue balanced by vice, and both locked in an eternal struggle where good can only ever win 50% of the time while the stakes grow ever higher.

Judaism is a religion of caution. It does what it can to accommodate the practical necessities of guarding against evil while still promoting active virtue. It is the only Western religion that does not believe stake its entire system of belief on there being a transcendent life after death, and is therefore the easiest of scapegoats for anybody who needs a reason that the world has not achieved a celestial kingdom on earth. It neither gives into the sensual as most of the ancient pagan religions do, nor does it demand renunciation of sin, as Christianity does (and yes, of course it's more complicated than that). It simply asks for a balance, instructing us to not give into either our urges to the narcissism of unceasing pleasure or the self-absorption of fanatical self-renunciation. "To everything, there is a season," the poet of Ecclesiastes writes (said to be King Solomon but probably a court scribe), and Judaism is a pre-proscribed series of customs and holidays and commandments to regulate the human spirit into something more balanced than it would be were it adrift in the chaos of some moments not meaning something cosmic.

With numbers like 6 million from the Germans, 1.7 million from the Romans, 320,000 in Pogroms, with the tales of slavery in Egypt, expulsion by the Babylonians, imperial rule, discrimination, and persecution from the Persians and Selucid Greeks and Byzantines, the betrayal by the Sanassid Emperor, the forced conversion and massacres and humiliations of the Islamic Caliphates, after the medieval blood libels and forced exiles and conversions in England and France and Germany and all the resulting murders that resulted in only 250-400 Ashkenazic Jews remaining in the entire world during the 13th century, after all the forced exiles of Sicily and Genoa and Portugal, after the deaths of the Spanish Inquisition and the Grenada massacre and the forced exile of the Alhambra Decree, after the Venetian Ghetto and all the ghettos they inspired, after discrimination in Poland, the massacres of Khmielnitsky, the destruction of Tzfat, after both waves of Russian pogroms, after the trials of Alfred Dreyfus and Manechem Mendel Bellis, the forced exile of 700,000 Sephardic Jews from Arab lands when the State of Israel is declared, after seventy years of an encircled Israel from which our forced expulsion and death is demanded by so many millions nearby; after all that and so much more, what's another eleven martyrs? We have had it so good here in America. Thousands more Jews could have died today and the American rule of the world would still be the Goldenest of Golden Ages in Jewish history. This country gave us everything. We love it here, your good fortune is our good fortune, and whether or not our contributions are properly appreciated, we will fight and die to keep this country as far from tyranny as we can, because nobody knows better what tyranny does to people than Jews. Even if America takes everything away from us someday as everyone else has, this will be remembered as the happiest period of Jewish history, and therefore, perhaps the happiest period in the history of the world.

Because the fact is, everywhere we've gone, we are the barometer of your civilization. We have never been parasites, as antisemites inevitably say, but we have been the yeast that makes your society rise. When we are your honored guests, your civilization prospers, when you do us dishonor, your civilization declines. It's probably not because God is watching over us, it's because a civilization well-disposed to its guests is a civilization that values tolerance and progress and liberty and justice, and is therefore destined to improve. Feel bad for us, sure, we deserve it, but feel just as bad for yourselves. Every Jew is taught that any moment we're not being persecuted is a lucky one. It's you who don't know how to deal with moments like this, not us. Why are Jews seen to be disproportionately successful? It's because we have practice. We are a whole religion based on how to be practical and accommodate the reality of every situation. When you don't know how to deal with a people whose entire religion is based on practical accommodation of reality, it means that you yourselves don't know how to deal with reality anymore. Whatever happens, we will survive this with the core of culture intact. Even if many of us don't survive, the memory of us, our world, our customs, lives on in those who come after. But should America fall, the essence of America falls with it, everything about American culture will be as foreign to those who come after as the culture of the Byzantines.

But as we say on every Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, 'Repentance, prayer, and charity, avert the evil decree.' There is still hope, perhaps plenty of hope, to avert the evil that may come to us. But it involves a careful accounting for all the wrongs we've all done, collectively and personally, right and left, and enacting corrections to right them. Endless debate, and not debating civilly, but through nuance - endless immersion in the precise details of how our world went wrong, agonizing examination of our own actions well as examining the faults and virtues of others. And by better understanding our world, by better understanding people different from us, by seeing the world through their views as well as ours, we better understand ourselves, and we each see where and when we've gone wrong. And from there, we can apologize for when and where we've erred, we can forgive when and where others have erred, and most importantly among causes, we can understand where we have enabled evil. And then we can proceed to solutions: we can understand how to create a better society, and we wage the fight against the worst enemy of all, ourselves, and hold out faith and hope that through the most Samsonian effort, the tactile actions we take on ourselves every day can change the most powerful country on earth.

We must think differently, look at things in a different way. Peace requires a world of new concepts, new definitions. You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change we seek. We need you to help us prove that together, ordinary people can still do extraordinary things in the United States of America.

Amen.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

This post goes out to the Upper East Side sixtyish divorcee with immaculate dyed blonde hair and impeccable plastic surgery and an enormous payout from her real estate lawyer ex-husband who was seated at Carnegie Hall tonight in the box just to the right the stage.

Look, we all got it, you love the Rite of Spring. It's a great piece of music. But you literally danced in your seat, and not a little bit, you were doing wave motions for the entire thirty-three-and-change minutes that looked like Tai Bo moves which were probably introduced to you along with The Rite of Spring by your failed musician yoga instructor who's twenty years younger than you with whom you're having a fling that's turning serious but you haven't realized yet that he loves you for your money, not for you; and then, as you talk non-stop to your daughter while you're dancing, literally non-stop, and you pretend to be embarrassed but are obviously proud every time a loud part ends and she yells out 'WOOOOOO!', you become the performance, not Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. At first I was amused, but eventually I was enraged. 2000 people paid serious money for this, and believe me, for most of us, it's very serious money. And yet when we arrived, the star was not the orchestra, it wasn't MTT or Leonidas Kavakos, it wasn't even Stravinsky, it was you.

Now that you've reached your venerable age, I'm sure you've come to that unfortunate realization that money doesn't buy happiness. Music comes closer to making you and me and everybody else happy than nearly anything else can, but a large part of why music gives happiness is that it can be enjoyed not as an individual, but as a community. You may think you couldn't love this music more, but at least one of us rode eight hours in a bus to attend a performance of by performers who do legendarily well a piece this busrider can write a halfway impressive facsimile in full score. And I guarantee I'm far from the only person in the audience for whom that's true - we just care that much! If you expressly wanted to dance, you could have bought any number of boxes further back and not attracted the attention of thousands. If your daughter wanted to 'WOOO' at The Rite of Spring, either one of you could clearly have sponsored a performance in a much less formal setting. A much more secure key to happiness than music is knowing that you've done good for other people. There are so many ways to make other people happy, and tonight, you chose none of them.

Just as you clearly are, I am all for less informality in the concert hall, I even started a performing arts organization in my twenties devoted to exactly that. If other people felt as strongly about it as you and I clearly do, maybe it would have succeeded. But since you were the performance tonight, I think you are worthy of being reviewed, and I wasn't impressed.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

We are living in an era when everything about democracy's basic building blocks: its apparatus of intelligence gathering, economic capital, economic regulation, government departments, and most importantly, intellectual debate, have worn very thin and decadent. We've grown so democratic that we apply democracy to facts themselves, to giving the option to both right and left to reject statistical findings that hundreds of thousands of experts, even millions, have collected with greater knowledge and accuracy than ever before in human history. Companies are no longer properly regulated and grow as powerful as nation states themselves, governments are controlled by prosperous minorities who feel they have no need to provide for people who don't benefit from the system, intelligence agencies and political ministries and cabinets are increasingly subordinated to political agendas rather than the welfare of those they govern, and political debate is locked away in ideological certainties that exclude the possibility of reasoned disagreement because those who disagree are simply unable to understand because of the innate evil in their character rather than being simply and tragically misinformed.

Like every political system before it, liberal democracy failed to evolve flexibly enough to fit its times, just as Great Power Monarchies did in the 1880s and 90s, and thus we increasingly stand teetering on a precipice of a collapse, and in a generation that's exactly what we might have in a rain of blood just as the imperial powers collapsed into World War I, or absolute monarchy collapsed into the French Revolution. The centrally planned technocratic authoritarianism of China will be shielded from it just as democratic America was shielded from World War I, and the liberal monarchy of England was basically shielded from the French Revolution and Napoleon.

But just as happened in the generation before World War I and the French Revolution, part of a system's dismantlement is that as the Right increasingly consolidates its power, the Left becomes increasingly unmoored with all kinds of un-thought through radical notions that do nothing to liberate people but plenty to kill them. There is no point to the increase of liberty if you're already dead.

When I see Jeremy Corbyn, I see where America is soon headed. The English government, European governments generally, provide all the social services that turn American liberals green with envy. All the social services that, if Western Europe were operating with America's purchasing power, could keep the world stable in near-perpetuity. Even after Thatcher and Blair, even after all the French Gaulleists, both of whom tried to dismantle its achievement, none of them could do it. It's called falsely called Social Democracy, but is really just how a liberal democracy should properly function as Roosevelt and Keynes envisioned it. But for some people, it's never enough. They see that some people want to dismantle it, they panic, and they'd sooner blow up the whole thing to start over rather than accept that no achievement is a utopia and no achievement can ever be completely stable. There will be plenty of Americans who fall for that viciously dangerous lie just as lots of Brits and French have, and among people I know, I feel as though I can identify which will fall for it right down to person to person.

Jeremy Corbyn is not Bernie Sanders. The Bernie Sanderses (and Jim Callaghans) of the world make leaders like Corbyn possible, but Corbyn may well be an English Hugo Chavez. Somebody whom in better circumstances would be dismissed as a small town mediocre political agitator, there are thousands of them, and in less stable times, dumb luck deposits one those mediocrities into a leadership role. Capitalism teeters on the verge of a collapse from the hubris of people who exploit it and governments who fail to maintain it properly, and rather than blame it on the evil in human beings, it's inevitably alleged to be the fault of the system itself.

Ever since 2008, we've been on the brink of a depression still worse than The Great Recession. It's coming. The world is increasingly dominated by just a few companies, the collapse of any one of could cause it. With the ever larger specter of automation, with the ever advancing specter of ecological catastrophe, this is all possible very soon. The far left will crow that they saw it coming a mile away. Otherwise sensible people will marvel at their prescience; just as their parents and grandparents marveled at conservatives’ prescience that Reagan’s weapons buildup would end communism, and that accelerated civil rights legislation would cause urban decline. In one dimension, they all have a kind of truth to them, yet they egregiously ignore the entire context. The pendulum always swings, and whichever fanatic’s side it favors at the moment get to say they were always right without the world laughing them out of debate forever.

In the coming years, leaders like Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Melanchon, or whatever their updated American equivalents turn out to be, will seem like an ever more appealing alternative to the Trumps and Pences and Putins and Netanyahus and Orbans and Erdogans and Dutertes's. Just as a hundred and two hundred years previously, people with even the slightest intellectual or radical bent will sign onto their agendas, and the conflict between the two immovable sides will probably sign the death warrants of millions. Every debate we're now having will seem completely insignificant.

You'll all do what you do regardless of what I say, but you don't get to say you weren't warned.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Every detail of the McCain funeral was fascinating. It was like that first scene in The Guns of August in which the all the Kings of Europe came together in an imperial parade right before World War I. It felt like a final gathering of the Old Washington and showed both why we're going to really miss it when shit hits the fan and also why it had to die. Lots of talk about patriotism and the importance of bipartisanship at the same time that Henry Kissinger, looking more and more like a reflection of his soul, was somehow up there talking about honor and wasted lives and missing those who've left us and nobody took his cane to whip him with it. Joe Lieberman, his jowls six inches still lower than when he left the Senate, interrupting a personal reflection on his BFF to natter on for five minutes about McCain's commitment to Israel. W. still looking like he couldn't believe he got through the speech, and a quietly but unmistakably withering Obama cutting through the bullshit to deliver a message that this establishment dug its own grave.

It's not that Obama hated McCain or vice versa, but McCain represented the American past, and Obama still represents a potential American future. McCain represented both what was good about the past and why it has to become the past. Lots of people on the left want to call McCain a racist, probably because he once said he'd earned the right to use the G-word about the Vietnamese, but I doubt most of them even knew that. They probably don't have evidence except a reflexive belief that all Republicans are; but however McCain felt about the Vietnamese, he was still the driving force behind the normalization of relations between America and Vietnam. They say he was a warmonger, but war is an inevitable part of life, and the wars McCain backed were fought far away and with relatively small casualties. Now the wars may be fought on our shores rather than elsewhere. They say he took too hard a line with America's enemies, but Obama's refusal to treat the Russian threat seriously was a colossal blunder, and anybody who hasn't realized that yet is reflexively defending Obama from criticism rather than seriously analyzing the situation. They say he was a modern imperialist, and this charge has some weight to it, but imperialism has always existed, and eventually every attempt to eradicate it completely rather than minimize it resulted in totalitarian states.

The idea that McCain had no accomplishments is somewhere between ignorance and lunacy. If his accomplishments were not more concrete, it says far more about what he was up against than about him. McCain and Feingold were the only senators in our lifetime who ever successfully and productively reformed campaign laws. He fought a crusade to take on big tobacco and nearly won it. He's the only major Republican presidential candidate since the 60's to not kowtow to the Religious Right, and not only did he not kowtow to them, he stood up to them! He was the only major Republican to propose bills to fight climate change, and he did so multiple times. He voted against Bush tax cuts twice, he exposed Jack Abramoff's corruption, he and Ted Kennedy almost passed a bill to legalize illegal immigrants, he sponsored nearly a bill a year to end the Bush Administration's torture practices. And let's not forget, just a year ago, he stopped an attempt to kill Obamacare. Over and over again, McCain stood up for so many values progressives claim to cherish, and he did it from a place where no one else would dare. So however much left-wingers hated him, right-wingers hated him more.

McCain made compromises to keep his fights going, we all do. McCain, like everybody else, is a product of his time and place, and his time and place was in denial about the full extent of the rot. Had McCain not chosen Palin, the path to a President like Trump would have been just as clear - maybe for 2020 rather than 2016, but it would have happened, and the Trump of a different timeline might have been a would-be-dictator three times as smart. Look at America right now, there's too much hatred, too little compromise, too much anger, too much humiliation, too much evil to hold the demons back.

The old Washington, like every institution that lives more than three minutes, is built on compromises. Nobody but babies get what they want more than 30% of the time, and some of the compromises are truly terrible, like allowing members of the Nixon White House - who prolonged the Vietnam war by six years and two million lives - to be treated better than Mussolini. But it was not the compromises of the old Washington that brought us Trump, it was the 25-year refusal of conservative Republicans to allow for compromise, and the state of denial the rest of Washington has been living in the entire time that the country is fine. The only people with whom you cannot work are the people who refuse to compromise. Their utopian promises of a better world can only be built over the corpses of the people who will fight them, and they may well lose. Every movement that does not allow for dissent is a movement that we can't include. McCain, like everybody else in Washington, failed to cut off the sickness, and the cancer has now metastasized to the entire government.

Fanaticism is a drug, the more outrage you feel, the more you crave it. Supposedly, the fanaticism which fought equal rights on every front had gone away. It never went away, it just became more insidious, more easily couched in conservative phraseology, and therefore more easily distributed through mass media. You can't technically hear white superiority or male superiority in terms like small government or personal responsibility or states' rights, but somehow, both the Right and Left could smell the hatred in those terms - the only people who didn't were the Centrists. They were living too comfortably in the suburbs, making too much money, prepping their kids for colleges nobody else could afford.

We now live in the uncompromising discontents of the world which the McCains collaborated with. Meanwhile, the Obamas fought to end it so they could save it, and by doing so, save us. There is no more Obama Presidency, and no one President, not Obama, not Lincoln, can undo everything in eight years which legislators and companies have been trying to implement since Obama was just a community organizer. We are the one's we've been waiting for, and now it's up to Democrats to do the work of two parties - to do the work and make the arguments both for gradual extension of liberty and the accelerated, until such time as there are powerful Republicans again who believe in liberty at all.

INEP #25: Werther, Onegin, and Darcy - Beginning

So a few dozen of you, if you really care, might have asked where your once faithful correspondent has been. The answer is, he's been practicing violin, he's been addicted to duolingo and is trying, in his usual overly ambitious way, to learn four different languages simultaneously - and has so far progressed enough that he can at least say 'apple' in all four; and he's been searching his mind for a podcast format that would bring him and you the best possible results and satisfaction, only to draw the conclusion that he should keep doing this podcast exactly as it is without the slightest possible change.

But most of all, he's been reading, trying to learn the secrets of writers much better than he'll ever be, trying to figure out where his old fictional podcast, the podcast he was really passionate about making, perhaps mistakenly passionate, went off the rails, and trying to learn from the old masters how to make a coherent narrative and actually read the books he's always pretended he's finished, and occasionally never started.

So I want to talk in this podcast about three very similar characters from three truly cosmic masterpieces. Some books are Masterpieces with a Capital M. You approach them with awe, but it's almost impossible to approach them with love. Goethe's Faust is a great example of that.

The neglect of Goethe in our era and place is one of the great scandals of modern intellectual life, because more than any writer I can think of, Goethe is exactly what we need right now. Is Goethe as boring as his reputation? Well, the only answer I can give from personal experience that has integrity is... often. But Goethe's peaks are so high that he's worth the valleys.

Goethe wrote 80 books, so it's not like I can give any kind of comprehensive overview of his work or define it in any truly meaningful way. But I can certainly contrast his two most famous works. One is a legendary and thin-aired Himalaya of World Literature - which, of course for those in the know, is a term Goethe invented. The other is one of Germany's most beloved books, a book whose reputation he could never live down because everyone wanted him to write another Werther, but Goethe, as genius must, was always evolving, always searching for new avenues of interest and expression to add to his storehouse of knowledge and reevaluate his wisdom. More than any more proper philosopher, he was perhaps the truest thinker the modern world ever had; the reason being that he was unencumbered by any system at all, and rather left his theories messy, half empirical, half Cartesian, and a third half metaphysical, and rather than fit them into neat proscriptions of any straightforward theory, he hedged his bets, never settling on any fixed truth as any one who values the truth ultimately must.

B. How, by embracing the spiritual world, Goethe was the central figure in neutralizing religious dogma's stranglehold, and how he did so.

C. Goethean Evolution and how we Americans have a fixed sense of identity rather than a continuously evolving one.

D. How we have to recapture some of the interconnected metaphysical outlook of the 19th century Europeans and be content to evolve or else we will not see the connection between the dots that can solve the existential crises of the 21st century: mass extinction, bioterror, nuclear proliferation, ecological catastrophe.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I finally couldn't take it anymore and I defriended a few Brit socialist Corbynistas - a few of which were genuinely eminent intellectuals - after being dared in his facebook feed by one of them for anyone to do it if I had anything at all nice to say about Jonathan Sacks. I guarantee the dude doesn't know a single other person who might have something nice to say about Rabbi Sacks, so I had no reason to wonder whom he could have ever been speaking. At least I had a few Corbynistas cramming up my feed to whom I occasionally addressed in recent days. I don't even like a lot which Sacks stands for, but Sacks is pretty much the exact locus point of modern Judaism. If a person isn't an antisemite before he says that he can't be friends with a person who has anything nice at all to say about Rabbi Sacks, he's definitely an antisemite afterward. I really unloaded on the dude and I blocked him before I could get any response. I'm sure the response I got was as blisteringly personal as I gave. I'm not sorry to have done it. It never stops being amazing how smart people can be such idiots and it wouldn't matter that the guy is a maniac but he is beginning to accumulate real prestige and power in music, much more than I ever will. I'm just a pygmy whose name shows no signs of getting any bigger, so I don't know how somebody that eminent could feel so provoked by me. I was quite fascinated by him, not just because his writing on music is better written than just about anybody's who had saner beliefs, but because he really does love classical music even if his love can be as warped as Klingsor's ( look him up...), and that's extremely rare in my generation. When you're an American of our generation, living among so many classical musicians, experts even, who seem to have such little love for it, see no value in what they do, and want to gleefully slam the door on the entire classical tradition, it's incredibly refreshing to talk to the few knowledgeable people of my generation who don't seem like they think the whole thing is completely useless. And furthermore, in spite of his Marxism he lives a kind of glamorous jet set European lifestyle full of bildung and kultur that a pointy egghead like me always dreamed of having, not filled with sailboats or paragliding, but concerts and museums and books. The hypocrisy was both kind of hilarious, and also quite reassuring that somebody, anybody in the world at all, could still do it on an academic's salary.

But what a fucking price to pay for it. The inability to relate at all to anyone not exactly like him, the surrender of every independence of mind because everybody's intimidated to voice thoughts outside the party line. As jealous as this clearly enormous ego of mine is, I also pity these people. They have more privileges than anyone would ever know what to do with, and it's never enough. They have to live with so much repression that even just a few negative words about what they believe drive them to such enormous rage that they can't even be friends with people who disagree. And for guys like that, all their outrage is purely abstract. It's not like they are ever personally affected by all the newspeak they spout; one way or the other, their position at the top of world society is completely unassailable. At least I put up with reading their crap about Corbyn for a period of years. How fragile can people be?

I'm sure I have more to say about this or related topics later, this will do for now...

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Conservatism will always be with us. It is as natural to the human condition as the urge to liberality, the urge to make all things socially just and equal, and the urge to submit one's will to an authority figure. We all have those urges somewhere within us, and we all have to live with those who choose to respond to different parts of our native selves than we do, and we have to respect those who make incorrect worldviews into something with which people can live.

McCain was the example in our time of Aristocratic Conservatism, a conservatism of duty and public service which believes that the privileges he inherited required him morally to give back to a country which gave him so much. This is the conservative tradition of Eisenhower, Adenauer, De Gaulle, Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, Bismarck, Disraeli, and Edmund Burke, which now seems to be taken up by Merkel and Macron. It's a conservatism that only opposes the extension of freedom because the extension of freedom for those who are not free may dramatically curtail hard-won freedoms of others. McCain's conservatism knew that there was no world in which the upper class could ever be threatened by those beneath them unless those beneath them were provoked to do so. It is the conservatism we need from our Republicans. When allowed to flourish, it can be of enormous welfare to the un-prosperous in already prosperous societies, when allowed to die out, the conservatism which replaces it can destroy the lives of millions.

We are all thrown into this world with people with whom we could not disagree more strongly. Our only option is to respect those people with other opinions who are not so fanatical in their beliefs that they chase an extreme version of them. Without them, there is only a liberalism that curdles into revolution, and a conservatism that desiccates into tyranny.

Idea for Podcast Series: The 'Greatest Generation' of Composers

No, it's not the actual greatest generation. Even if that existed, this might not be it, and even if it were, how can one prove it? There is no 'greatest' anything in art, one can't quantify quality, one can only talk about various kinds of greatness. Perhaps people can objectively value one kind of greatness over another as being more essential to our quality of life, but even if we could, how do we quantify an essence?

Perhaps the only way to do so is by its uniqueness. And in the sense of what is unique, this period of composition - composers born between 1855 and 1885, is in many ways the most unique for reasons which we can get further into over these dozens of episodes. The basic thesis is this: 'absolute music' was so important to the life of the middle class over the long 19th century that this music, with its definite rules of tonality and sonata form, with its millions of amateurs who mastered instruments and learned to be musically literate just as they were literate in any language, accumulated ever new ways to be complex and unique until the invention of the electronic recording, which completely changed our relationship to music. Musicians and music lovers who did not remember a time when we could listen to music without playing it thought of music differently, wrote music differently, played music differently, listened to music differently. The era from which they emerged was a long and glorious sunset. With the dawn comes the excitement and hope for ever new possibilities, but also the necessity of re-learning from scratch everything we once thought we knew. 

Each of these podcasts will be no more than an hour long, with many recorded illustrations:

Unfinished Beginnings: Mussorgsky

Unfinished Beginnings: Bizet

Elgar the Pilgrim

Imperial Elgar:

Unimperial Elgar:

Verismo:

Verismo: Cav and Pag 

Verismo in Puccini:

Modern Puccini:

Mahler: Origins

Mahler: Originality

Mahler: Vienna

Mahler: Farewells

Mahler: The Anxiety of Influence

Debussy: Musical Stasis

Debussy: Musical Color

Debussy: Musical White and Black

Debussy: The Anxiety of Influence

Strauss: The New Poem

Strauss: The New Poem II

Strauss: Operatic Radical

Strauss: Operatic Conservative

Strauss: Collaborator and Mourner

Janacek: A Different Modernity

Janacek: Folklorist

Janacek: Slavophile

Janacek: The Power of Speech

Janacek: Old Man in Love

Delius in France

Delius in Germany

Delius and Fenby

Sibelius: Voice of a Nation

Sibelius: Ainola - Retreat to the Forest

Sibelius and the Gods

Sibelius in the Theater

Sibelius: The Road to Silence

Nielsen: Psychology

Nielsen at War

Nielsen: Tonality, Clarity, Strength

Busoni: The Piano Transcriber

Busoni Goes Home

Busoni's Faust

Busoni: That Piano Concerto

Koechlin: Forgotten Genius

Koechlin: Pantheist

Koechlin: Time Becomes Space

Koechlin: The Jungle Book

Koechlin: Hollywood

Schmitt: Imperial France

Joplin: American Bach

Joplin: Treemonisha

Beach: American Women

Price: African-American Women

Taneyev: The Russia that Was

Glazunov: The Russia that Was II

Arensky and Ivanov: The Russia that Was III

Zemlinsky: The Dwarf

Zemlinsky: Viennese Eros

Schrecker: Viennese Eros II

Schmidt: Viennese Eros III

Mystic Holst

Rural Holst

Choral Holst

Vaughan Williams at Cambridge

Vaughan Williams in France

Vaughan Williams's Women

Vaughan Williams in the Home Office

Vaughan Williams: The Lion in Winter

Reger: Variations on the Classical

Reger: Variations on the Baroque

Scriabin: Divinity

Scriabin: Ecstasy

Scriabin: Fire

Scriabin: Toward the Flame

Rachmaninov: Gold Watches and Hypnosis

Rachmaninov: Voluntary Exile

Rachmaninov: Involuntary Exile 

Ives in New England

Ives in Concord

Ives in New York

Ives in the Transcendent

Ives: The Anxiety of Influence

Ravel: The Apache

Ravel at the Opera-Comique

Ravel and His Mother

Ravel at War

Ravel: Le Jazz

Falla and Albeniz

Falla: Spanish Phantoms

Falla's Musical Puppets

Schoenberg: An Irritating Young Man

Schoenberg: Free Classical

Schoenberg: Other Planets

Schoenberg: The Twelve Commandments

Schoenberg: Arnie in America

Schoenberg: Arnie and Adolph

Respighi in Rome

Respighi in History

Respighi in Concert Mode

Bartok: No Hungarian Rhapsodies

Bartok: Rejected Love

Bartok: A Little Night Music

Bartok's Children

Bartok: East Meets West

Bartok in America

Bloch: Judaism Speaks

Bloch: Time Becomes Space

Bloch and the Quartet

Foulds: Forgotten Genius

Foulds: Mystic Researcher

Foulds: The World Requiem

The Kodaly Method

The Kodaly Voice

Szymanowski in France

Szymanowski's Men

Szymanowski in Poland

Stravinsky: Firebird

Stravinsky: Petrushka

Stravinsky: The Rite

Stravinsky: Leaving Russia

Stravinsky: Here Time Becomes Space

Stravinsky and God

Stravinsky and Gods

Stravinsky vs. Schoenberg

Stravinsky: The Anxiety of Influence

Villa Lobos and Bach

Villa Lobos and Brazil

Villa Lobos and Europe

Villa Lobos and the Guitar

Bax: Englishman Gone Irish

Bax: English Institution

Berg: Old Vienna

Berg: Wozzeck

Berg: Lulu

Berg: The Memory of an Angel

Berg: The Anxiety of Influence

Webern: Here Time Becomes Space

Webern and Science

Webern: Brevity is the Soul of...

Still need places for: Magnard, Dukas*, Bridge*, Suk*, Godowsky, Enescu*, Gliere, Kalinnkov, Liadov, Medtner, Myaskovsky, Stenhammer, Alfven, Wellesz, Casella, Braunfels, Albeniz*, Granados