Make America Sick Again?

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SFO to Continue Mozart Trilogy This Month

In exactly two weeks the San Francisco Opera (SFO) will continue its cycle of the three operas that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed in partnership with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. In the order in which the cycle was planned, those operas are The Marriage of Figaro (K. 492), Così fan tutte (thus do all women, K. 588), and Don Giovanni (K. 527). The plan also involved introducing the operas on a season-by-season basis; and the cycle began with performances of K. 492 in the fall of 2019.

As we all know, the original schedule was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in the cancelation of the 2020–21 season. With the reopening of the War Memorial Opera House, SFO will not only resume but also complete the cycle as it had originally been planned. This month will see the production of K. 588, and K. 527 will be performed in June of next year.

The “Great American House” as a country club setting for Così fan tutte (rendering by Set Designer Erhard Rom, courtesy of SFO)

Director Michael Cavanagh planned this cycle around staging all three operas in a common setting, which he calls “the Great American House of Mozart and Da Ponte.” Each opera would take place in a different historical era, which would be reflected by the overall design of the setting. Thus the cycle began in the early years of the newly-constituted United States of America, suggesting that the house itself may have been designed by and for Thomas Jefferson. K. 588 will be set in the Thirties, when the building has become the primary structure of a country club.

If I may be allowed a bit of personal editorializing, I have to say that I find it interesting that Cavanagh decided that the action would take place during the Great Depression. I am reminded of that “Spanish peasant’s proverb” that Philip Barry worked into his script for The Philadelphia Story:

With the Rich and Mighty always a little Patience.

The play by Pierre Beaumarchais that Da Ponte adapted for Mozart’s K. 492 libretto basically involved the servant class “getting even” with their “Rich and Mighty” master; and, in many respects, Figaro’s character is anything but patient with Count Almaviva’s designs on Susanna (soon to be Figaro’s bride).

These days our take on history has become similarly critical of Jefferson and his relations with at least one of his servants. As Cavanagh’s trilogy advances, we now find ourselves again in a setting for the “Rich and Mighty” while most of the country is reeling from the Great Depression. Thus, we have a diversion of “girlfriend-swapping” taking place among a pair of sisters and a pair of young men who seem to have nothing but leisure time on their hands.

In this coming production, those sisters will be performed by soprano Nicole Cabell (Fiordiligi) and mezzo Irene Roberts (Dorabella). The roles of the young men will be taken by tenor Ben Bliss (Ferrando), making his SFO debut, and baritone John Brancy (Guglielmo). The girlfriend-swapping is conceived in order to settle a bet proposed by the aging cynic Don Alfonso (sung by Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto), abetted by the sisters’ maid Despina (soprano Nicole Heaston). The conductor will be Henrik Nánási, who had previously conducted K. 492.

Così fan tutte will be given five performances, the first at 2 p.m. on November 21, and the remaining four at 7:30 p.m. on November 23 and 27 and December 1 and 3. The approximate running time will be three hours and ten minutes, including one intermission. To provide a touchless experience, tickets will be electronic for either printing at home or display on a mobile device. Similarly, there will be no printed program books; and patrons will be provided with a hyperlink to a digital version that, again, may be printed or displayed on a mobile device.

Ticket prices range from $26 to $398. They may be purchased by calling (but not, as of this writing, visiting) the SFO Box Office at 415-864-3330. There is also a Web page with hyperlinks for purchasing tickets for all six of the performances. To ensure flexibility for patrons during this transitional season, no-fee exchanges and refunds will be provided up to two hours before performances. In particular, refunds will be available to patrons that must miss a performance due to COVID. In addition, the three performances in November will be live-streamed. Virtual tickets are available for $25. SFO has created a Web page for these tickets. Information about viewing the performance will then be provided after the ticket purchase has been finalized.

On the Virtue of Raising Hell

Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinema, which happens to be almost directly below where I live, started showing Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins this past Friday. There are very few films that I seek out as soon as they open, and even fewer of them that have nothing to do with either music or dance. However, there was no doubt in my mind that Janice Engel’s effort to chronicle the life and works of Molly Ivins in a documentary that runs a little over 90 minutes would be one of those films. Having now seen it, the first thing I can say is that my instincts were right on target.

I am not sure when I took my first hit of Ivins’ insight and the wit she engaged to seize and hold my attention. I am pretty sure that it was when she was being interviewed by Jim Lehrer, back when his television program was called The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Her sense of humor was so outrageous that I could catch Lehrer himself squirming from time to time; but that was a time when Ronald Regan was the 40th President of the United States, making jokes about “We begin bombing in five minutes” during a sound check, not knowing that the microphone was going out over the air.

Ivins seemed to live by the mantra of never taking anything too seriously. To the contrary, she knew how to tease humor out of any number of dire situations. Many took offense at her style, but most of those had been responsible for getting our country into those situations. For the rest of us, her humor provided a release value and possibly the reassurance that there were clearer heads who could tell a naked emperor from one that could be taken seriously as a leader.

My one concern is the risk that the generations that have followed mine may not pick up on what this account of Ivins opinions signifies. Those who read this site regularly know my mantra that the prevailing culture is one that is “ignorant of history and proud of that ignorance.” Engel’s documentary reminded me that such a perspective was around long before we became a nation of zombies aware only of the screen on a cell phone. Ivins certainly knew about that culture. However, hers was an age when people still read text in print, rather than reading from screens; and, while her words may have offended some, they flashed on light bulbs for others.

Will Engel’s film flash on any more light bulbs? Damned if I know. I do know that Ivins mastered a sense of presence, both in her writing and when addressing an audience; and the nature of that presence reverberates, at least to some extent, in “new media” figures such as Jon Stewart and John Oliver. Indeed, I suspect that, were she alive today, Ivins would be impressed that someone like Oliver can deliver persuasive argumentation on the scale of a written essay and still, by interjecting just the right jokes at just the right time, command an attentive real-time audience. So I would like to believe that there was always a foundation of optimism supporting the plethora of razor-sharp barbs coming out of Ivins’ writing; and, if I can believe that, I can also hope that those now following Oliver will get around to realizing that “getting the message” should never be a passive response.

Why They Still Hate Us

Today's Al Jazeera Web site has a Talk to Al Jazeera article that is positively cringe-inducing, if not worse. It amounts to a transcript of an interview with Secretary of State John Kerrry and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. The ostensible topic concerned current conditions in Syria and the impact of ISIL. However, as the old cliché goes, context is everything. In this case the context was defined by the seventh Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which was recently held in Silicon Valley and included a visit by President Barack Obama almost exactly a week ago.

The interview quickly devolved into a sort of cheer-leading session around the premise that entrepreneurship was the key to solving all of Syria's problems, as well as the threats of expansion by ISIL. Here we had two men with pasts rich in the domain of foreign relations; and the only message that seemed to matter was that what was good for business would naturally be good for Syria and the well-being of the Middle East. Back when posts occurred more regularly on this site, one of those posts included the phrase "innovation propaganda" in its title. Back then Jonestown Kool-Aid was one of my favorite metaphors. I knew that we have yet to get over that poison, but I had not anticipated that anyone with the serious responsibilities of Secretary of State would be drinking the stuff.

Another favorite trope from the past on this site was Max Weber's proposition that too much attention to market values and consumerism can lead to loss of meaning. When our country has lost the capacity to establish a dispassionately clear-eyed view of what is going on in the rest of the world, particularly when it involves violent hostilities and refugees, that should be taken as a sure sign that not only has meaning been lost but it is not even missed. Is it any wonder then that so much of the rest of the world now views us with suspicion, if not fear and loathing?

Can Clear Writing be Dangerous?

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has an essay by Timothy Snyder entitled "Hitler's World." It may be one of the best efforts to distill the basic principles of Mein Kampf without getting bogged down in the inflammatory rhetoric. It goes without saying that Snyder also does an excellent job of pointing out the abundance of flaws in Hitler's approach to argumentation.

In many respects it is probably about time that someone gave such a serious and dispassionate reading of a document that had such a strong impact on the twentieth century. However, do we need to ask whether or not there is a risk in summarizing that document in readily accessible language, even if that language also explains the many instances of faulty reasoning? We know from institutions such as Fox News that selective reading and attention has become the order of the day for those who try to promote personal ideologies. Do we have to worry that Snyder's clarity might fuel the fires of current and future generations of neo-Nazi thinking? When we live in a world in which willful irrationality seems to be "the new normal," we have to worry about such matters!

The Company We Keep

A Better Balance is a legal advocacy group that promotes workplace fairness for families. They seem to have timed their latest report, "Investing in Our Families: The Case for Paid Family Leave in New York and the Nation," to come out in time for Mother's Day. Susanna Kim reported for ABC News that the United States is only one of three countries that does not have a statute for paid maternity leave. The other two are Papua New Guinea and Suriname. I suspect that the reason this comparison was stressed is that the United States is the only one of those three countries that would be called "economically developed." That being the case, whatever Republican conservatives may try to tell us, the United States is the only country that places economic development above family values, which is probably just a neutral way of saying that the United States is the only country that thinks in terms of keeping wealth, rather than applying it to the overall well-being of its population.

Conferring on Extremism

As a refugee from the world of high technology research, I must confess that I have a rather jaundiced view of conferences. It has struck me that such events have always been, first and foremost, an excuse for travel. When the excuse was to parade recent activities, I came to accept it as tolerable and even set the standard that if, over the course of half a week away from my desk, I had encountered one result worthy of attention, then the trip was a good one.

More insidious, however, are those conferences that are concerned more with policy than with results. These are an excuse for little more than jawboning. They may conclude with an agenda of action items, but action rarely emerges from such an agenda. As a result I was far more than a little skeptical when I read about the White House hosting a special conference on terrorism.

Having read Marwan Bishara's editorial this morning on the Al Jazeera English Web site, I was glad to see that I was not alone in my thoughts. Bishara was perceptive enough to look beyond all the usual gratuitous observations that were uttered and turn, instead, to what was not said. Furthermore, I chose to concentrate his enumeration of "sins of omission" on the conference's host, President Barack Obama. Here is the basic summary of that enumeration:

Obama said nothing about how proxy and other western wars have created the fertile grounds for the type of extremism that has been evolving and spreading in the Arab and Muslim world.

How the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan coupled with US/Saudi intervention on the side of the mujahideen led to the creation of al-Qaeda.

Or, how the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, coupled with Iran's interference, prepared the ground for the creation and expansion of ISIL.

Nevertheless, I think there is a broader view, which first came on my radar during the early heady days of the Arab Spring. It is not enough to observe that the world, as a whole, has lapsed into a "forever war" mentality. We need to home in on how that mentality is being sustained.

What we learned from the protests that arose during the Arab Spring (protests that, it is important to observe, extended to include the educated young citizens of Israel) was that the current generation of youth, particularly those who have enjoyed a rich education, is desperately concerned that they have no future in the world as it is being run by its current leaders. While Corita Kent believed that war was not healthy for children and other living beings, that slender minority that controls the lion's share of the world's wealth sees great value in war, particularly as a solution to providing for those of the "other class," condemning them to be little more than "cannon fodder" for the many new generations of cannons that provide a major chuck of revenue to the moneyed class.

In also is amusing to see how, through control of the consciousness industry, that class has tried to cloak its elite status with a smoke screen. The recent report about the top 1% controlling more wealth than the remaining 99% overlooked just how much of that top 1% has almost no control at all. That upper tier needs to be narrowed down to 0.1%, if not 0.01% before we can really appreciate just how unevenly wealth has been distributed.

In my "other life" of writing about music, I have recently been listening to a new recording of the songs composed by Claude Debussy. This last of these songs, for a single unaccompanied voice, is a Christmas carol for homeless children. Debussy wrote this in 1915 when Europe was being torn apart by war. Who speaks for the homeless today?

Patrick Leahy Tells It Like It Is

It is hard to believe that John Boehner's motivation behind inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of the Congress involved anything other than giving offense to the White House and the Democratic Party. The act was wrong on so many grounds that the only thing that surprised me was how long it took those offended by the act to respond. However, the snowball of a boycott by Congressional Democrats now seems to be growing, and this morning the DC Dispatches blog maintained on the Al Jazeera English Web site put up a post that Patrick Leahy has joined the boycott. Furthermore, while Leahy is known for keeping a cool head while persisting in his personal convictions even in the face of outrageous offense, he decided to make an exception in this case, calling the Netanyahu's invitation "a tawdry and high-handed stunt that has embarrassed not only Israel, but the Congress itself." The only problem is that both Netanyahu and Boehner are so steeped in the slime of their respective ideologies that it is hard to imagine either of them knowing what embarrassment is, let alone experiencing it!

Republicans Want You to Get Sick

As we already know, the Republicans are seizing every opportunity to demonstrate their majority advantage in both house of Congress, even if it means trumping basic common sense with extreme ideology. The latest Republican senator to take up the banner seems to have been Thom Tillis from North Carolina, who has decided to oppose the regulation requiring food workers to wash their hands after having used the bathroom. the BBC News account of this story included the following Tillis statement reported by Associated Press:

Sometimes there are regulations that maybe we want to set a direction, but then let those who are regulated decide whether or not it makes sense.

From this we can at least conclude that Tillis' understanding of personal hygeine is somewhere at the same level as his command of English grammar. Presumably, he is also a member of the Republican camp that has been opposing vaccine regulations in response to the return of measles. I guess Republicans just want us all to get sick; and, considering their policy approach towards health care, we can assume they want us to stay sick (or, perhaps, leave it to illness to get us out of their way).

Discovering My Own Point of View

As I continue to work my way through the new Library of America collection of Herald Tribune articles by Virgil Thomson, I encountered a paragraph that really resonated with me:

The intellectual audience wants culture with its music, wants information, historical perspectives, enlarged horizons. It demands of program makers constant experiment and a huge variety. It is far more interested in repertory, as a matter of fact, than in execution. It tends to envisage the whole of music as a vast library in which everything is available, or should be. The strictly musical audience and the mass public are more easily satisfied. They think of the concert life as a sort of boarding house where you take what is offered and don’t reach. Their good nature is easily abused by managements and other organizing agencies. The intellectuals are more demanding and refuse to be spoon fed. That is why, as a musician, I value the intellectual element in audiences.

Every now and then I encounter some push-back over the fact that I do not spend enough time writing about execution because I tend to dwell heavily on the music itself, usually in terms of its relation to the overall repertoire. I suppose that makes me an intellectual in Thomson's book; but that means that I value his punch line. I also think that the distinction that Thomson draws is the one I have previously tried to make between examining and criticism.

If I am to read him correctly, Thomson seems to work from the point of view that critical judgement is, and should be, grounded in evidence of execution, which may explain why, as I have previously observed, his own judgment tends to take its departure from what is printed on the score pages and, whenever possible, nothing else. However, he also seems to suggest that, even without recourse to score pages, the mass public has a basic toolbox to facilitate exercising their own judgement. I might suggest that those who are skillful at using their own tools might constitute that particular class that I have previously called the "enthusiasts." The problem is that those managements about which Thomson writes tend to know both the assets and the limitations of those tools, which is why Thomson raises the problem of abuse.

Thomson wrote the above paragraph for publication on January 22, 1950. I state that date because the article itself deserves a bit of historical perspective. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938; but it was originally created to root out uncover Nazis, rather than undercover Communists. After the Second World War, however, the target shifted.

One result was that many keen intellects, particularly those studying the history of the United States, were writing about the many ways in which our country did not live up to the ideals it had set for itself. These articles were not necessarily accusatory, since many of the writers made no secret that the real world never lives up to the ideal world. Unfortunately, the nature of this critical thinking tended to be associated with advocating Communism; and, to be fair, there certainly was a contingent of writers who had been Party members. However HUAC went after the whole body of those intellectuals with the four-legs-good-two-legs-bad logic of George Orwell's Animal Farm, leading to a rise in anti-intellectualism that would ultimately be studied by Richard Hofstadter.

That rise was already in progress when Thomson wrote the above paragraph. However, those thoughts were simply a continuation of precepts he had been writing about half a decade earlier. My guess is that in 1950 he could not foresee just how much damage HUAC would do; and, since we have never really recovered from that damage, I have to wonder how many of today's readers would prefer to bite Thomson's finger of such regards, rather than looking where he is pointing.

Disorder Rules

Anne Applebaum's review of Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, a recent book by Karen Dawisha, in the latest issue of The New York Review is a must read for anyone who takes a look at BBC Diplomatic Correspondent Jonathan Marcus' analysis posted on the BBC News Web site today under the title "Putin problem gives Nato headache." On the surface it would seem as if Marcus and Dawisha are examining different aspects of Putin's career advancements; but this would be dangerous silo-based thinking. Consider what may be Marcus' key "punch line" observation:

Nonetheless, the Ukraine crisis has shown Mr Putin to be a master of making policy on the hoof, exploiting weaknesses; setting many hares running and following up those that seem to make the most headway.

As Applebaum's article makes clear, Dawisha is not interested in how Putin makes policy. On the contrary, Putin's actions can only be considered in terms of the acquisition of power and the use of power to manage and acquire resources. If Putin is a master of anything, it is his ability to sow disorder, thereby throwing just about every institution of governance (established or otherwise) into dithering helplessness. Applebaum provides several vivid examples of how Putin has put this talent into practice, including channeling resources to both left-wing and right-wing extremists in our own country, creating, for his own purposes, a legislative body incapable of making any decision.

Applebaum also notes that Dawisha is not the first to write about this dark side of Putin's behavior. Indeed, Dawisha is credited for recognizing all the sources that provided support for the points she makes in her book. Unfortunately, those who believe that the end of the Cold War provided circumstances for a "new world order" must now recognize just how deluded they were and come up with a better belief system before it is too late.

Who is Thankful for What?

Only a poet like Charles Simic could come up with a celebration of our annual holiday of gluttony with a piece entitled "A Thieves' Thanksgiving," his latest post to NYRBlog. His punch line definitely deserves reflection:

It ought to be obvious by now that if we ever become a genuine police state, it will not arise from an authoritarian ideology necessarily, but as the end result of that insatiable greed for profit that has already affected every aspect of American life from health care to the way college students are forced into debt. Huge fortunes are also made from spying on us and coming to regard every American as a potential enemy. They are right to think that way. If we ever as a nation grasped that criminality on such an immense scale is bound to lead the country into ruin, there might be serious consequences for the perpetrators. At the present time, the only ones likely to get in trouble are the leakers who want to let the rest of us know what goes on behind our backs. No doubt about it, in the coming holiday season our crooks will have a lot to be thankful for and a lot to celebrate.

The irony is that the "insatiable greed for profit" has wrought such havoc on our economy (and probably the world economy as well), that it is hard to imagine our having a police state with an effective police force. Whether the matter is investigating "white crime" or dealing with homicide, police resources at just about every level are so reduced that it is hard to imagine anyone doing anything right, particularly when the price for incompetence is so much greater than the price for negligence. Rather than facing the possibility of a police state, we are more likely to encounter anarchy at its most brutal, where those with the best survival value will be those criminals with just the right mix of street smarts and ruthlessness. Think about that after having overindulged in the day's feast.

A Telling Choice of Words

It was hard to avoid reacting to this lead sentence from an article on the BBC News Web site about the free trade agreement that Australia has signed with China:

Australia's international education industry will benefit hugely from a major trade deal sealed on Monday with China, experts say.

Regular readers probably know that I continue to voice upset over how our country has come to call health care an industry in which market share is more important than the physical well-being of our citizens. I suspect that the shift to the computer-based delivery of course material has already established a similar industrialziation of education. However, it seems as if we deal with the sorry state of education in this country by ignoring it, while health care has become the favored battlefield for conflicts between extreme ideologies.

To be fair, the story about Australia seems to involved the fact that it will be easier for Chinese students to go to Australia to study at the universities there. In other words it does not appear as if the fundamental work practices of education are going to suffer as a result of this agreement. Nevertheless, the article is about market share, addressing the numbers of Chinese students coming into Australia in comparison with the number of Australian students choosing to get their education in another country. Like it or not, the bean-counters are in charge of the future of Australian universities, just as they are here; but here nobody seems particularly interested in paying attention to the state of affairs.

Same-Sex Marriage is Still a Hot Button

Those who saw the documentary The Case Against 8, finally made available to a wide viewing audience through HBO, may have come away thinking that there would be smooth sailing towards the acceptance of same-sex marriage by every state in the country. Unfortunately, yesterday's news brought word that bans on same-sex marriages in four states were upheld at the national Appeals Court level, albeit by a 2-1 decision. If nothing else, this setback is a sobering reminder of just how contentious this is. Indeed, in writing the dissenting option, Judge Martha Craig Daugherty wrote that "the author of the majority opinion has drafted what would make an engrossing TED Talk or, possibly, an introductory lecture in political philosophy." Unfortunately, like our President, Judge Daugherty has yet to come to terms with a culture in which ideology trumps getting things done according the the job description and the prevailing standards of what that description entails.

Does Money Buy Happiness?

Hannah Gregg, of ABC7 News, decided to revisit the 2009 study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Denton, which established that income of $75,000 was the threshold of emotional well-being. Granting the fact that the study was controversial, she decided to see what would happen if she tried to adjust this so-called "Happiness Benchmark" to account for economic factors, such as inflation. Her conclusion was that the benchmark had, indeed, risen and was now at $83,000. She also prepared a state-by-state breakdown, applying her calculations to individual states to determine what it would take to be happy there. As might be guessed, California clocked in above the average at $95,325.

Idle curiosity drove me to look back on my tax forms for last year. Since my wife and I are both in retirement, I figured that, at the very least, it might tell me something about how effective our "wealth management" practices were. I discovered that our household was above the national figure and below that for California.

Needless to say, I do not take any of this particularly seriously. Obviously, when revenue shifts to a stock portfolio, you start thinking more about income than growth. In 2006, I decided to set up a spreadsheet through which I could track the difference between income and expenses on a month-by-month basis. It turns out that, while, at this fine monthly level, that difference fluctuates between positive and negative, over the long term we have been pretty successful at keeping it positive. We refer to the cumulative difference as a "cushion."

One result is that we tend to think of large expenses in terms of their impact on that cushion, bearing in mind that it has become sort of a rainy-day resource. This means that we tend to spend less than we did when household income was significantly higher than the benchmark. However, I do not think that either my wife or I would say that we are less happy because we are spending less. To the contrary, I think that one of the results of moving over to retirement income is that we are more likely to be happy with what we have, rather than what we want.

I wanted to report on this exercise because I believe that emotional well-being is an important factor. However, I have to worry about the reasoning behind the effort of Kahneman and Denton to reduce it to a single number. Indeed, I have argued in the past that such "bottom-line thinking" is responsible for a lot of really bad social decisions, the most serious being those concerned with health care. Even worse is when that bottom line is a dollar figure, rather than some other quantitative measurement.

Then I realized that I was flying in the face of nature. A consumerist society is all about having what you want and having a bottom-line dollar figure that will allow you to get it. It is a bit like a casino in which the tables are rigged against you. You can never have enough money to be happy; but, as John Oliver noted on his HBO program last Sunday, you are manipulated (by what is sometimes called "consciousness industry") into such an unrealistic state of optimism that you prefer the remote chance of breaking the casino's bank to the dangers of the more likely outcome that the casino will break you. The possibility that happiness can be found by walking away from the casino, rather than walking into it, never really arises, simply because those who have the wealth can spent it on propaganda to convince us that no alternative is even remotely thinkable.

Thoughts about Anna E. Crouse

Today the Web site for The New York Times ran an obituary by Bruce Weber for Anna E. Crouse. I knew about her only as the widow the of playwright Russel Crouse and, on a more personal level, the mother of the actress Lindsay Crouse. That "personal level" came from my having written one of my first "serious" dance reviews about the piece that Lindsay had created for her Senior Thesis at Radcliffe. What I did not know until I read Weber's piece was that Anna Crouse had be instrumental in creating the TKTS booth in Duffy Square, a major institution for those of us who could only enjoy New York theater on the cheap. Weber also observed that she "was a central figure in the resuscitation of Lincoln Center Theater," which, on the basis of some of the productions I saw after that "resuscitation" definitely makes her worth remembering. Anna Crouse was clearly someone who believed that the performing arts should be for everyone; and, with everyone so locked in to market-based thinking, I have to wonder whether anyone with her mindset remains to carry on her visions.

In a Democracy, You Make Your Decisions Your Way, Not Ours!

Having just finished Mark Danner's "Rumsfeld's War and Its Consequences Now" in the latest issue of The New York Review, I suspect I am a bit overly sensitive to the delusions of those who think that the United States has some kind of "manifest destiny" to spread its way of life around the world, whether it involves the prioritization of consumerism or our particular approach to a "democratic government." (That latter actually reminds me over Voltaire's witty observation about the Holy Roman Empire. In the current state of affairs, one might say that what we have right now is far from democratic and probably just as far from being a government!) It will therefore be interesting to see how our philosophy of our-way-is-the-only-way will fare now that the Libyan National Assembly has voted that the foundation of all legislation and state institutions will be Sharia Law. The impact of this decision on the rights of those who do not necessarily embrace the faith of Islam remains to be seen, as is the question of whether or not the United States will decide that interference in a decision made by the National Assembly is none of our business.

A Serious Category Error

There was an interview on BBC World Service radio a couple of days ago, which seems to have been conceived to provide some enlightenment over what seems to be a monotonically increasing number of instances of public unrest over discontent with government decisions and actions. I was unable to catch the name of the interviewee, but he made one casual remark about the fact that most countries in the developing world did not really "get" the idea of democracy or the concept of free markets. By lumping these two concepts in a single sentence, he seemed to be implying that the two were related.

I would argue the opposite, which is that they are at cross-purposes. The ideal of participatory democracy is one in which all voices are equal, which means that all decisions are subjected to "the wisdom of the crowd." Cooler heads going all the way back to Socrates (at least as he was depicted by Plato) recognized that this system has some key flaws, which is why most successful efforts at a constitutional government have tried to address those flaws without abandoning the concept of general public participation.

On the other hand, the free market mentality is not about a level playing field. Rather, it is about a worldview that equates wealth with power and encourages a brutal Hobbesian approach to the acquisition of wealth. Within this model, the power of wealth may then be applied to manipulate the public, thus undermining the principles that motivated the formation of a constitutional government. The current state of affairs in our own country would suggest that the power of wealth has succeeded in rendering just about every aspect of government ineffectual to the point of irrelevance.

When we try to tell the rest of the world that we live in a democracy, we are really only talking about a flimsy cardboard stage prop erected to conceal that we now live under a plutocracy.

Profiles in Cowardice

This past Wednesday, Gary Wills put up a particularly caustic post on NYRBlog entitle "Back Door Secession." By taking a historical point of view, he could compare current TEA Party activities, which I have previously called "politics by terrorism," to those of the secessionists in Congress prior to secession itself and the Civil War that followed. His point was that, in both cases, an extremist minority could hold the more moderate majority in check. He further claimed that the minority had such power because of the cowardice of the majority.

I think he has a good point, but it is not a particularly novel one. Politics is not about governance. It is about acquiring and keeping power, and that is not achieved through courageous acts. That is that made John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage book so interesting (and, at the time, so inspiring). We cannot expect any elected official, regardless of position, to be anything other than an abject coward. After all, if "get elected" is the most important rule of politics, the second most important rule is "stay elected." When that is all that matter, the office-holder will yield meekly to all sorts of threatening situations.

Politics by Terrorism?

One of the more interesting issues raised by HBO's The Newsroom involved the decision of the news anchor character to refer to the TEA Party as the "American Taliban." This was his way of venting his disgust at the way in which a well-financed minority had succeeded in hijacking what had previously been a rather wide class of values embraced by those who called themselves Republicans. The script for The Newsroom made it clear that the financing is in the hands of a few individuals who cared little for the values of TEA Party constituents themselves but simply (and selfishly) realized that those individual would be the perfect pawns for the large game they wished to play. Indeed, as has been recently observed, the best way to get the pawns to move is to exploit their feelings of "racial resentment."

There was thus some justification to that Taliban metaphor. The implication was that power was all that matters, not only having it but also exercising it for self-interest "by any means necessary." As I write this, the shutdown of the United States Government has pretty much been written off as inevitable. However, by following this story through the BBC, I realized that such terrorist tactics were also jeopardizing basic principles of representative government on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in Italy. There we have Silvio Berlusconi, convicted guilty of tax-fraud, about to bring down the current government because, regardless of his criminal status, he still maintains control over what had been the ruling coalition.

Is it any wonder that there are so many people out there struggling to make ends meet who are now doubting whether or not the public good is really being served by the principles of government itself?