repatriot

Hamlet, Fortenbras and the Border

2005-10-25T06:05:00.000-07:00

A Note to My Readers: this blog is shifting operations soon to:

bardseyeviewblog.blogspot.com

We face on our border with Mexico much of what Hamlet's royal family faced with Norway.Borders are never easy to maintain. The news reports following Katrina included a brief mention that our border guards had been pulled from the Mexican border to assist with the recovery. Congressional authorization for increased guard strength has only partially been executed by our president. Since he's from Texas, President Bush is undoubtedly familiar with the personal virtues of our Mexican neighbors – by all accounts hard-working, religious and family-oriented - and so he may be reluctant to force their removal. Presidente Fox of Mexico, and the Mexican nation at large, are certain to follow American policy closely, measuring options. After all, Mexico cannot look on so much territory which was once Mexican without a wistful sense of longing. A longing that Fortenbras, the young and headstrong leader of Norway, understood.

In Hamlet, Fortenbras seeks to reclaim the lands lost to Denmark in an earlier war, occurring before the play begins. King Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, step-father and king, summarizes:

"Now follows that you know, young Fortenbras,
Holding a weak supposal of our worth,
Or thinking by our late dear brother's death
Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,
Colleagued with the dream of his advantage,
He hath not failed to pester us with message,
Importing the surrender of those lands
Lost by his father…".

For Fortenbras, let's substitute the broad stream of Mexican society as it regards our society from across a thin strip of neighborly fencing. Nor is there lacking the sense of resentment over lands thought taken and sought to be restored. Horatio explains Mexican, I mean Norwegian, sentiment in Act I, Scene I:

"…Our last king,
Whose image even but now appear'd to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortenbras of Norway,
Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride,
Dar'd to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet, -
For so this side of our known world esteem'd him, -
Did slay this Fortenbras;"

It's easy to forget that Hamlet killed Fortenbras' father in a prior war. It's easy to forget how the swath of land from Texas to California was once listed on maps as part of Mexico. And it's easy to forget that no matter how virtuous individual Mexicans may be, they remain saturated in a broad culture of poverty and corruption that we cannot expect them to leave behind as they import themselves into America, and that this culture has led them to a fully understandable desperation. Horatio explains:

"…Now sir, young Fortenbras,
of unimproved mettle hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway, here and there,
Shark'd up a list of landless resolutes,
For food and diet, to some enterprise
That has a stomach in't..."

These "landless resolutes, for food and diet" travel thousands of miles to Denmark, I mean America, because their own government over centuries has preferred corruption to growth. These are the most ambitious and most misused of Mexicans, the ones paying graft rather than receiving it, the ones who would push for change within Mexico if they couldn't get out.Even under Claudius, Denmark's response was better than ours. Horatio's speech about Norway is in answer to Marcellus' question about why he and Bernardo and Francisco have been assigned additional watch duties:

"Why this same strict and most observant watch,
So nightly toils the subject of the land…?"

Things break down later, of course. Denmark's government becomes distracted over domestic, indeed very domestic, concerns. Gertrude's fecklessness, Hamlet's doomed but good faith attempts to confirm his suspicions of his father's murder, the Miers nomination, the leaking of a possibly covert CIA agent's name. The list goes on.

Decades of distraction have opened portions, in fact all, of our country to essentially uncontrolled entry. Our past allegiance to the concept of assimilation, for ourselves and other new Americans, has been weakened by concepts of multi-culturalism. And even though our constitution does not require it, our laws generously permit the children of illegal immigrants automatic citizenship.

Our imaginations flee from the prospect of a Trail-of-Tears forced march back to Mexico. But what will the social reaction be during the next economic downturn, when the labor of these non-citizens becomes not only unneeded, but unwelcome? We are responsible today if we fail to avoid such a predictable reactionary surge before it happens.Fortenbras found himself in charge at the end of the play, having sensed such weakness, represented by Hamlet's collapse of will:

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew…"

That's not exactly leadership.

The Bard on Brad (and Jen and Angelina)

2005-10-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple.
If the ill spirit have so fair a house,
Good things will strive to dwell with 't."

That's Miranda's opinion about Ferdinand, offered in The Tempest. Do we agree? Do people like Brad, Jennifer and Angelina find good things striving to dwell within the fair houses of their fair bodies? Do their arresting bone structures and pleasant wrappings of flesh compel what is ill to flee from entry?

Well, Miranda, we should remember, was abandoned from the age of three with her dispossessed father on a desert island. Ferdinand was the first normal guy that she encountered.

"You are the cruelest she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave
And leave the world no copy."

Viola says this to Olivia in Twelfth Night. It is a favorite theme of Shakespeare's, the obligation to perpetuate one's graces through reproduction. Infertility is a tragedy or at least a challenge for many married couples, who have with solemn dignity pledged themselves to each other in marriage, hopeful of children, and have then met with this difficult fate. For many adoption follows. But Brad can't adopt unless he marries someone, or unless someone marries him. Meanwhile Angelina is effectively cuckolding Brad with the children of other men (if of other women as well), right before our eyes:

"...On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did."

A description of Cleopatra offered by Enobarbus. The smiling cupids are hers, not Brad's. Yup, Brad is starting to look a wee bit foolish, with aspirations toward love, marriage and fatherhood - all pleasantly mired in a swamp of sex. While exceptions need to be made for a woman like Angelina, it's all just a bit unbecoming in a forty year-old man. He might've kept his mouth shut about his conflicting desires.

"To you your father should be as a god;
One that composed your beauties, yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in waxBy him imprinted..."

Theseus in Midsummer's Night Dream. I thought I'd be writing about the catfight between the two women, but I find myself focusing on Brad, a strangly passive figure being publicly eaten alive by Angelina, as his child-rearing years dwindle away, the woman he might find to realize this happy ambition (if Angelina won't permit him to jump on the runaway train of her own single-mothered family) still unsought, unfound, their relationship unforged.

But I have my objections to Jen and Angelina as well. Ordinarily it would be none of our business as to why these two ladies don't or didn't want to bear children. But if indeed they don't, then as public figures I think a certain deference is owed the millions of couples who do marry, and who stay married, who do render society more orderly and dignified by removing their volatile sexual desires from the public sphere, who do desire to bear children, and who are unable to have them. Theirs are serious lives, and they should not be lived under the checkout line shadow of such frivilous ones.

"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime."

(NOTE: please recall that I am shifting all blogging to my new blog at;

bardseyeviewblog.blogspot.com

Thanks!

Reminder

2005-10-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

Just to remind everyone, I'll soon be moving all blogging operations to my new address at http://bardseyeviewblog.blogspot.com/ where future posts will be more of the same along with a Shakespearean tilt.

Regards!

Shakespeare on the Miers Nomination

2005-10-20T17:36:00.000-07:00

"Thou seek'st the greatness that will overwhelm thee."

I had a few choices for this one, just like President Bush did, but I've decided to go with Henry IV, Act 4 scene 4. I know what you're thinking - was this Henry IV Part One or Henry IV Part Two?. Can't get much past you, can I? It was Part Two, le sequel.King Henry says the above line to his son Prince Henry, also known as Hal, and later to be known as Henry V. Hal has been struggling with his youthful spirits, constantly led astray by the larger-than-life Falstaff. He will eventually undergo a profound tranformation into the wise ruler we see in Henry V, the next play in Shakespeare's history series.

Miers too, as we know, has undergone profound transformations, changing religions and political parties, struggling we all hope successfully to come into a full maturity.Hal walks in on his father when he's asleep. Thinking him dead, Hal takes the crown into the next room and weeps over it. His father awakens and suspects his son of ambition. They argue, but at last Henry is assured of his son's great love, and reciprocates it. We see the same sort of bond, forged over time and shared adversity, now existing between President Bush and his personal attorney.

"...God knows, my son,By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head..."

Our democratic party-affiliated readers will savor this passage. Miers, but of course I mean Hal, assures her client, I mean his father, of the legitimacy of his rule:

"...My gracious liege,You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;
Then plain and right must my possession be..."

And so too would Miers' rule, in a judicial position in many ways co-extensive with the presidency, extend beyond her father's, I mean the President's.

"Thou seek's the greatness that will overwhelm thee."

Henry says this earlier, before he is won over to full confidence in his son. Miers of course oversaw the selection process for Bush's previous judicial picks, including the strict vetting of candidates. Though she did decline once the crown of nomination, she accepted the second offer, and when she did she exempted herself from the same vetting process. Only a personal friendship could support such an exemption, which is now getting her nomination into trouble and harming her client's - the President's - interests. But then I suppose he is now her former client.

Thus it is that I feel an accusation of ambition is justified against Miers. And when I refer to ambition I mean the wrong kind, the kind Brutus killed Caesar over, not the good kind, that led let's say Roberts to devote himself for over 30 years to developing an expertise that rendered him at last deserving of his nomination. Like Hal.

Yes, I think Henry IV Part Deux will do quite well for Miers. This will now leave me free to move onto something lighter, like Brad, Jen and Angelina. Actually Falstaff, in this same play, has an eventful dinner with two competing women, Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly. One of them has sued him over a proposal he denies making while the other applauds everything he does. That may well do for Brad's triangle. I'll be thinking it through.

A Slight Adjustment

2005-10-20T15:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Repatriots, you few, you happy few:

During my trip to Scotland, and aside from enjoying the stately cities and stunning countryside, I reflected on the experiment of this blog. When I was younger, I could never have dreamed something like this was possible, to present to as broad a readership as found itself interested the full range of my desired expression. And I find myself wholly involved, committed and encompassed in the project.

Still, my desired expression will only take me so far. What happens when I've expressed pretty much all I have to express? I want to create something that grows and ramifies over time, reflects my interests, and serves or responds to (some) people's needs and interests as well.

On our return from the well named Isle of Skye, where the heavens themselves seem closer, our train took us past Burnam Wood, the one Macbeth felt sure would stay put, guaranteeing that he would not be murdered, as per the witches' fortune-telling. An idea occurred to me.

I will be amending the focus of my modest blog in a way that will guarantee a lifetime of content and, if done well, I hope may of interest to others as well. I've started a new blog entitled bardseyeview, at http://bardseyeviewblog.blogspot.com Bardeyeview will present a Shakespearean parallels on the people and issues of the day, leaving plenty of room for my own ideas as well. I'll be posting simultaneously on both blogs for a while, to alert existing readers, and will then transfer to bardseyeviewblog.com only.

I look forward to a shared learning experience as I delve deeply into Shakespeare each day to find how he would or might have looked at Brad, Jen and Angelina, or Saddam, or the Miers nomination. And I hope you'll stop by.

King John, As Portrayed By Saddam Hussein

2005-10-19T16:05:00.000-07:00

"There is no sure foundation set on blood."

Shakespeare doesn't have King John announce his villainy like Richard the Third. His evil choices are borne of weakness, and if this makes him less satisfying as a villain, it makes him probably more believable. Watching Saddam in court as he vacillates between denying the proceedings and practicing amateur legal maneuvers, you see someone who has made a successful career out of lying to himself about his true nature, or what his nature has truly become. John is much the same.

King John's nephew Arthur is a young boy with a rival claim to the throne. We'll let Arthur be a stand-in for democracy, accountability, legitimacy. Like Saddam, John's against it. John takes Andrew's keeper, Hubert, aside:

""I had a thing to say, - but let it go;
The sun is in the heaven, and the proud day,
attended with the pleasures of the world,
Is all too wanton and too full of gawds
To give me audience;"

He has a little trouble getting to the point. Daytime is not his idiom, and he knows enough to admit it. Saddam certainly spent his share of time avoiding the light of day. And just this morning he objected to sunlight being brought to bear on audiotapes which apparently will incriminate him.

" - If the midnight bell
Did, with his iron tongue and brazen mouth,
Sound one unto the drowsy ear of night;
If this same were a churchyard where we stand,
And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs;"

Hubert's virtue, even as it guarantees his loyalty, is abrasive to John as well. And when will he be able to get to the point?

"Or if that surly spirit, melancholy,
Had baked thy blood, and made it heavy, thick, -
Which else runs tickling up and down the veins,
Making that idiot, laughter, keep men's eyes,
And strain their cheeks to idle merriment -
A passion hateful to my purposes, -"

Human as he looks on stage (or in Saddam's case, weilding a rifle before a dutiful rent-a-crowd while wearing a suit and what I believe was a bowler hat), the guy's starting to seem not just non-human, but defined by whatever being human isn't. It's laughter that's grating on him this time. Meanwhile Hubert's waiting for his orders.

"Or if that thou couldst see me without eyes,
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply
Without a tongue, using conceit alone,
Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words,
Thin, in despite of brooded watchful day,
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts."

Let's have those sensory organs removed Hubert, they make me uncomfortable. We see the plastic shredders into which victims were fed, the surgical removal of the hands of those Saddam felt might oppose him.

"Oh Hubert, Hubert, Hubert, throw thine eye
On yon young boy; I'll tell thee what, my friend,
He is a very serpent in my way."

Hubert gets the point. "Death," says John. "He shall not live," Hubert replies. Hubert escorts Arthur onto a ship which will take Arthur to his place of imprisonment. During the voyage, Hubert opens a letter from King John. It commands him to put out Arthur's eyes with a hot iron.

"Oh Hubert, if you will, cut out my tongue,
So I may keep mine eyes: O spare mine eyes;
Though to no use but still to look on you!"

Hubert loses his nerve, or gains his nerve, and relents. Arthur is spared and hidden. He will die later while trying to escape from the tower Hubert hides him in. Ironically, this occurs after John has lost his nobles' support when they hear that Arthur is dead and suspect John of the crime. Hubert, at that future time, tells John Arthur is alive and John runs to collect him in order to win his nobles back. But the boy's body is found at the foot of the tower, by the nobles, the people of Iraq, who by now have had enough.

Repatriot on Hiatus

2005-10-11T17:51:00.000-07:00

My wife and I are taking off for Scotland tomorrow and will be back in a week, so there will be a break in blogging.

Please stop back after the 18th when I will resume my daily essay-like inquiries in the nature of things.

I realize most blogs are faster paced, but I prefer things stately and sedate.

Until then, please consider browsing through some of Repatriot's Posts of Enduring Value, linked at the left.

A Look at Oil Shale

2005-10-10T16:09:00.000-07:00

Three dollars a gallon is a lot if you've already linked your fortunes to an SUV, and it's no picnic for my Nissan Sentra either. But the real nightmare question lurking in the back of a lot of minds is - can it go to six?

As big and rudely muscular as the US economy is, three-fourths of the world's oil demand is non-American. And good luck standing in the way of Mr. Lee and Mr. Cho as they gain the chance to drive and air condition themselves. So the question of whether we'll be paying six dollars at some point is going to hinge on supply. Saudi princes have recently been acting as coy about their reserves as debutantes about their chastity, and so we in the general public, incluidng bloggers like myself, have begun wondering about alternatives. And you can dream all you want to, but the realistic short to medium-term alternatives all involve alternatives that you can still pour into your tank.

Hence oil shale.

I know what you're going to say. What about thermal depolymerization? Whereby they process garbage and animal biproducts in a manner similar to how crude oil itself is treated - they heat and pressurize it, and then depressurize it at differing rates to produce different oil grades. I'm all for it. It's going to be a welcome, small-scale contributor to our solution. But there's just not going to be enough feedstock to affect the big picture.

Ethanol? Please. How much corn do you want to plant? And like tar sands and coal and gas conversion, the low net energy output means you're running ever faster to produce only marginally more. That didn't work for Alice in Wonderland and it won't for us.

Now, probably around when our children are older than we are, in my inquiring but admittedly layman's opinion, hydrogen produced with excess nuclear capacity may kick in, but until then oil shale is the real trump card for the next generation in terms of large scale production of stuff you can put in your gas tank.

Oil shale is bituminous material containing kerogen that can be heated to 450-500° C in the absence of air to distill it into petroleum. The US Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale reserves places world supply at 1662 billion barrels. 1200 billion barrels of that is in the US.

Point one: We've got 3/4's of it. With apologies to my non-American readers, but that puts the same big fat smile on my face that I trust good news about your nation would put on yours.

And no, you don't have to strip-mine it using West Virginian child labor in a sardonic reprise of a Dickens horror scene. You can convert it in-situ. You lower a heating element into a mineshaft and heat it up. It converts into oil right there in the ground. Then you pump it up. Any non-idiotic regulatory policy would further allow refineries to be built within pipeline range of the shale fields. Are there any retired military bases along oil shale's major Uinta, Green River, Washakie and Piceance basins which runs across Wyoming, Utah and Colorado?

Environmental? The strip mining form of extraction is indeed problematic, because the extracted rock expands after heating and must be disposed, plus a lot of water is involved.

But there's far less footprint with in-situ production. CO2 emissions from the energy used in extraction and refining (oil shale is 4.5% sulphur, double or more heavy crude but less than tar sands) have to be considered and the groundwater exposed to the in-situ heating has to be cooled or managed in some other way. From this standpoint, it is indeed not a sexy, forward-looking solution, but it buys time for technology to advance. Time that we can hope won't be squandered the way the last 30 years - following the wake up call of the 1970's oil shocks - was squandered.

Economical? Royal Dutch/Shell (they've all merged, haven't they?) proclaimed this year that oil shale could be extracted at $30 a barrel. So long as the oil companies are sure it won't drop below that price, and republicans - real republicans - are in office to cut prohibitive regulation that extreme enviros use to circumvent the popular will (when they're nto using the courts to do the same), it will be produced.

For further reading, let me direct you to this post and succeeding comments at futurepundit where energy-savvy experts offer greater expertise than my amateur survey can provide.

Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and literary critic, describes Americans as doom-eager. He says nice things about us at times as well, but I see his point about our willingness to read today's bad news as signs of the end times. I wrote in opposition to that idea yesterday and in a sense I tried to do the same today.

There is no cause for real alarm, so long as we do not shrink from confidence in our own system, which has brought prosperity to hundreds of millions (simultaneously with a cleaner environment than Old Europe's). No doom awaits us without our consent. With oil shale and other potential sources out there, second-or third best solutions though they are, there is broadly speaking a ceiling on the price of oil.

Just as there is none on human ingenuity.

The Horror in Pakistan and India

2005-10-09T16:32:00.000-07:00

Thirty thousand people were crushed to death in an avalanche of stone and cement yesterday. The number is beyond imagining, even as it is dwarfed by other disasters like the 1918 flu pandemic and a baker's dozen of man-made holocausts. Either we've had a lot of these disasters lately or the new news media has become more efficient at hyping, but I should just say reporting, them. (Amber alert murders and blondes missing in the Caribbean are hyped; these stories require repetition).

Still, it is worth wondering if too unrelenting a series of disasters will cause our modern world to lose its already precarious hold on reason and begin regarding these calamities as signs – presumably signs of a divine hand that is either benevolent and displeased or not benevolent in the first place.

As far as divine hands go, I raise mine in favor of the theology presented in the Simpsons, whose characters all have three fingers and a thumb. G-d, who does make cameo appearances, is depicted as a hand in the sky with five fingers. I know this doubles as the cartoon drawers' inside joke that they are the five-fingered (ok, four plus a thumbed) collective god who create their characters, but it also suggests the image of a six-fingered (five plus a thumbed) G-d who has drawn us.

"…There is one within,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets;
And graves have yawn'd and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fight upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war.
Which drizzled blood upon the Capital;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan;
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
Oh Caesar,…".

If you prefer something more contemporary to Shakespeare's depiction of a freaked-out wife of Caesar describing calamity below brought upon us by displeasure above, there is always Bill Murray in the first Ghostbusters describing to an incredulous mayor of New York what would happen if the Keyholder were to successfully contact the Gatekeeper, releasing thereby the malevolent god Zuul:

"Dogs and cat living together…".

To me, all of this goes back to the distinction between godly religion and paganism, a distinction that is not between mono- and poly- as to theism. The pagan Greeks and Romans acknowledged a unitary force behind the distracted and adolescent three-ring circus playing around on top of Mount Olympus. The true difference is not between many and one but between (a) listening intently for what G-d or the gods want of you, known as prayer, and perhaps modestly asking for something, and (b) not asking the gods at all but trying to order them around. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter, in focusing on the incantations and spells which order the gods to do our bidding, both get paganism right. Under Judeo-Christianity, who does whose bidding is reversed. You can also ask if you want, but you can only ask.

But I wouldn't waste any breath in asking for the mud huts in Pakistan to be raised by divine hand. In this world, as JFK said, G-d's work truly must be our own.

And as each part of the world grows more acutely aware of every other part, our sense of responsibility over what we can no longer pretend not to know about must grow. If a divine hand provides anything, it provides not disasters, but the urge and impulse to alleviate them. Ultimately that urge and impulse should impel us equally toward charity, volunteerism and as well toward good citizenship. The last because every dollar wasted to bad government or bad policy is another dollar not available for relief, and every percent hike in the tax rate above what's necessary squeezes more charitable giving out of existence. And that would be a calamity indeed.

Another Sonnet?

2005-10-08T18:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a Keats sonnet:

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's – he takes the lead
In summer luxury – he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never;
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

"The poetry of earth is never…" As opposed to the poetry of man, which succumbs occasionally. But like the messiah (to Christians), we live in the hope of its return.

For a reason I'll reveal later, Keats selects a grasshopper to represent the poetry of earth, whose voice runs "from hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead." Keats next asserts that the grasshopper takes "the lead in summer luxury," and is "never done with his delights." "When tired out with fun," he rests "at ease beneath some pleasant weed."

What we have here is an anthropomorphized grasshopper imagined as frolicsome, with circumstantial evidence given in support. I can no longer hide that this is not a deep poem, but I found it too pleasant to ignore. Besides, is it better that our insects go unimagined?

This is an Italian-style sonnet, the first eight lines for one idea, the last six for a responding thought. The English sonnet – three fours rounded off with a couplet (think Shakespeare) – is more argumentative and single-minded. Keats's responding six starts out by reprising his theme:

"The poetry of earth is ceasing never;"

Way cool. His proof is that even in winter you will hear a cricket chirping in the stove, and as it does so you will drowsily hear the echo of the summer grasshopper.

It may be childlike to ascribe purely human impulses to nature, and to think that the highest compliment we can pay to flowers and insects is to imagine them to be like ourselves. But what else but ourselves are we likely to start out with as a basis for comparison? Wordsworth in another poem writes:

"And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breaths."

The romantics cared and thought a lot about our connection to nature, which true to their label they romanticized. But it is possible to include more than nature and humanity in the equation, and find a higher purpose in this intimation we feel of emotion or at least of some shared sense of yearning between ourselves and the trees. Here's Wordsworth again:

"If this belief from heaven be sent
If such be nature's holy plan
Have I not reason to lament
What man has done to man?"

Well, I started out with Keats and wound up 20 years earlier with Wordsworth, but it's all good. Wordsworth asserts that the intimation of a connection to nature is a divine gift, not to be taken for granted. And his argument is that it is because of this divine gift that we "lament what man has done to man." Presumably, if this belief were not from heaven sent, humans would not have reason to lament such inhumanity. And so it is that our childlike, imagined identification with nature - really our identification of nature with ourselves - has a moral role to play.

I start our reading Keats and Wordsworth and end up asking myself questions about how we're treating our farm animals, and the moral effect that turning our heads from the plight of chickens and pigs (those two especially) in chicken and pig factories is having on ourselves.

Keats wrote his poem on a bet, or as a parlor game, a sonnet competition with Leigh Hunt, who suggested the bug-based title. Mozart and Haydn played a game like that, each trying to write a piano composition the other couldn't play, reducing each other to hitting treble keys with their noses as their hands remained occupied at the far ends of the keyboard.

How do our parlor games compare?

An Encounter with the Subcontinent

2005-10-07T13:41:00.000-07:00

I don't know as much as I would like about India. The only updates I've had to my basic, fallacy-filled high school and college instruction has been the articles on India in my faithfully read Economist and certain novels of V.S. Naipaul and Salmon Rushdie (and both writers may be problematic as presenters of Indian culture).

I mention this because of a recent blog exchange I enjoyed over at sepiamutiny.com, a blog devoted to things subcontinent. It started when I posted a comment to an article about a very thin Indian man who painted himself to look like an emaciated ghost and hired himself out for events. I suggested that India's dietary rejection of beef removed "the major source" of protein from their diet, and that this represented a decision to "legislate asceticism." Whoops.

Actually, most of the responses from the obviously more knowledgeable Indian posters were judicious, restrained, informative and offered with goodwill. "The" major source, I was asked? Had I never had Chicken Marsala? And "legislate"? Moreover, whence comes this broad-brush assumption about asceticism, and the implied imputation that a vegetarian military could not be the equal of a meat-filled one?

I should've known better. Still, my interlocutors were probably gentler than Jewish bloggers might have been to a non-Jewish blogger questioning kosher practice. Negotiating these cross-cultural borders is a chancy thing. I may have lived in Japan for 17 years and made friends throughout East Asia, but as far as Indians are concerned, it's hardly enough for me to say, "Honest, I'm not dumb - I'm just dumb about you."

But I do at least have questions. How is the relatively recent Indian expatriate or diaspora culture faring in America, beyond its striking economic success? How are expatriate Indians viewed back in India? What reverse-osmotic influence, if any, are they having there? Why does Gujarat generate such a great percentage of Indian Americans (60% according to one sepiamutineer)? How does the caste system translate outside India, or even within it under the pressure of post-industrial society? (For example, how does a Brahmin employee manage reporting to his lower caste superior?) What are the rates of intermarriage and how is it viewed? And how are each of these questions answered differently for different Indian regions? If an Indian American marries an American Indian, what do you call their children?

I reserve for the future the question I also ask myself of Judaism, and of every civilization and tradition worth preserving. What vision do Hindu Americans have of an enduring American Hindu culture?

Christianity, with its universalist appeal, was well-placed to prosper in America. Of course it also helped that the country started out Christian, but universalism is an advantage in a free society where people are offered a lot to choose from. I think an American Judaism, without becoming evangelical, needs to find the confidence to assert its own universalist message, a message of ethical humanism based on a covenant, a set of mutual obligations, with G-d.

As for Hinduism, I suspect that in an America riven by competing ideologies, a culture that de-emphasizes ideology in favor of non-authoritarian moral guidance and life within a tradition will find an enduring place in a country where, over time (whether due to intermarriage, the secularization of parents or the lure of the new) people must periodically adopt or readopt their traditions.

The Corners of thy Tents

2005-10-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

Though I did descend into politics in yesterday's entry, I consciously resist doing so too often. The political blogosphere is well developed and hardly needs my mewling voice added to it. At the same time, I am an avid reader of political blogs, in fact I am hooked, and happily so, and wonder at who would not enjoy the flint strike of clashing arguments which sharpens reasoning even as it heats the blood in the midst of battle.

But after all, the reason a free people engages in politics at all is to preserve their culture and perpetuate their civilization. And that suggests to me that a certain amount of energy should be expended in describing, debating, defining or disseminating that culture and that civilization. Not that I can or should be any arbiter of taste like the critics in the major media are; Pauline Kael in cinema, Michiko Kakutani still in literature, pronouncing from on high and presuming to direct our sensibilities. Today, with a million voices able to be heard, I am content just to be an arbiter of my own tastes, and do so publicly for fun and to interact with people a bit more.

And so I choose to stick usually to culture and ideas. And I find that if I spend most of my time sharpening my own reason on subjects like bike trails, Korean movies, Balinese tradition, Solzhenitsyn's nobel speech,dance classes and fine poetry, then when a political subject comes along I find I know my views quite clearly. Participating and reflecting on things of cultural value nourishes the spirit. If I then find I cannot resist commenting on Iraq or Katrina, at least I'll be able to do so with, you know, a nourished spirit.

So that's why I prefer to write about Japanese candidates for the US CPA exam, such as Miyoko, a family friend from Japan has been staying with us over the last month. She was here to take portions of that exam, which is only administered within the US. (By staying a month she could take two bites out of the test center apple). Japanese accountants are lining up to take the US CPA in order to manage their US-based subsidiaries, and because in short order Japan will make its accounting rules compliant with the US GAAP style.

I had particular reasons to be happy to host Miyoko, even beyond the fact that hospitality is prized in the Torah. Indeed, Lot if anything was a bit too hospitable in offering his daughters to the men who had surrounded his tent, the rough men of Sodom who were threatening mayhem if Lot didn't submit their real target, the male strangers who were Lot'sguests, to be raped. And gee, I wonder where this depiction in the Torah of an entire culture of homosexual rape, set in the middle east among the pagan neighbors of the emerging Hebrews, could have come from? After all the Torah, inspired by G-d or not (and I vote yes) could only describe the local color of its time. Digression.

So we did take her kayaking in a salt marsh in Wilmington, NC, to our Thursday dance classes where she broke a few Southern hearts, to the high street at NC State for shopping and middle eastern food. Her favorite activity was to sit by our local river and eat Krispy Kreme donuts and jabber in Japanese with my wife. And here's the additional reason I had, beyond the pleasure of friendship, for wanting to do all I could for Miyoko.

Two and a half years ago, Miyoko had been barred from entry into the US at the airport in Seattle. She had flown in to attend our wedding, but because she had already traveled to the US twice within the preceding six months, her travel activities raised a flag with Homeland Security. This excessively frequent flying by a 4 foot 10 inch Japanese woman represented too great a potential terrorist threat for our country to absorb, and she was ushered onto the next available plane back to Japan.

A real-world effect our unwillingness to profile is having on our nation's reputation for hospitality.

In spite of what I wrote before, there is a need to engage in politics – in this case to fight against the political correctness that led to a policy that has inconvenienced millions, jeopardized our collective security and caused me this personal embarrassment. And so there now stands revealed the source of my own possibly excessive eagerness to show Miyoko the sights of Greenville, North Carolina. What Homeland Security tooketh, my wife and I did our besteth to giveth back.

Says Who?

2005-10-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

The Iraqis will hold their referendum on their new draft constitution two days after Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holiday. The ex-British colonies from which America emerged did a far poorer job, since our constitutional convention was blatantly illegal. It had been called for the strictly limited purpose of amending the benighted Articles of Confederation, but the process was hijacked by those who are today our most celebrated founding fathers, with Madison acting as the lead writer. The ratification process was also profoundly flawed for a number of states and so on two different bases, the enactment of our constitution was improper, undemocratic, unauthorized, and the best we could do at the time.

Will we be bearing that in mind as we witness the unfolding of democracy in Iraq? I doubt it. Though already the Shiite representatives have shown real wisdom and restraint. Even in the midst of attacks targeting them, they have pulled back from a proposal that would have ensured ratification but at the cost of limiting the electoral clout of the Sunnis.

Meanwhile, in California, Governor Schwarzenegger struggles to enact, also by referendum, a law that would end the gerrymandering that has turned seats in the statehouse into sinecures. And in New Orleans Katrina has knocked over the rock covering up a rat's nest of corruption, including police officers with felony convictions, ex-cons who began plundering drugstores as soon as the security guards were gone.

So who exactly are Californians and Louisianans to judge Iraq?

Note I don't say "Who are we to judge?" Because someone has to judge, at least temporarily, now that we are embarked on nation building; someone has to (and here comes a beautiful phrase from a William Carlos Williams poem) drive the car. And while a dose of self-criticism is one thing, the paralyzing overdose that today's liberalism has taken is quite another.

It's a simple fact that most of us live in better-run states than California or Louisiana. And why? Well, it's because we have better ideas than Californians and Louisianans have. And yes, I do think the quality of local governments can undercut the general flavor of opinion coming from the people who have instituted such governments. To translate, blue states have crummier government than red states; more corruption, more crime, higher taxes. It's perfectly fair to include that in assessing blue and red opinions on the issues of the day.

Note also my reference to today's liberalism. Not every era's liberalism has been like this. The democratic party used to be in favor of "engagement", an active foreign policy. But the beating heart of today's democratic party is anti-war (at least).

I understand the superficially appealing argument in favor of neutrality. You see two boys fighting in the schoolyard. You tell them to break it up, or you go to the UN and petition that they break it up. You feel great. You feel, basically, like you're better than either of them.

But you carefully never check on or talk about, or talk honestly about, how the fight started. Did one boy hit the other, insult his mother, abuse his sister? Was there any history of unprovoked attacks, dating back to the U.S.S. Cole perhaps, or the first World Trade Center bombing or the Lebanon barracks massacre or beyond? Ask not!

It's almost a misguided religious impulse, a desire to enter heaven early, before your time, by pretending you're an angel, angelic, removed, and certainly superior. If you got your hands dirty, that would be too much like being alive.

But you do have to choose sides in wartime. Bush's early statement that you're with us or against us really means that if you're neutral, you're against us. Although that looks a little ugly, I agree. Switzerland wasn't able to maintain its neutrality in WWII, the Big One. It shipped escaped Jews back and, having no army, could conveniently say it had little choice.

The argument from the right goes that it's racist to assume Arabs do not share the universal human hunger for freedom. The argument from the left goes that it's ethnocentric and hegemonic to assert that hunger on behalf of Arabs.

I prefer the argument from the right. We really are not fighting for land or for political control, we're fighting for polling places. That's why we merely felt relieved when our original assault on Baghdad succeeded, while we felt truly thrilled when we saw those inky fingers held aloft. And we're doing all of this, at a great cost of blood and treasure, on behalf of distant, uneducated foreigners.

Who cannot find that noble?

We Will Glide, Starry-Eyed

2005-10-04T17:05:00.000-07:00

Most of the local railroad lines that scale the Appalachians have fallen into disuse. it is worth recalling the massive effort, relying on comparatively primitive technology, that was involved in constructing the gently graded path on which they rested. Ravines were filled in, chasms bridged and peaks rounded before gravel was laid as a bed for all the lumbering ties and rails. And all performed on the hopeful proposition that once you build it, they will come.

The former C&O train line, that crosses that little corner of the map where Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina meet with Kentucky not far away, was closed in 1977. Trucks now transported to market the Christmas trees for which the region was famous, and the tracks became idle.

Twenty years would pass among the impressive local Baptists churches and not always so impressive local homes before someone had an idea. Others listened and agreed, and soon another large, strenuous, hopeful, multi-year endeavor was launched, as yard by yard the tracks and ties were, this time, pried from their gravel bed, the gravel itself scooped out and the dirt beneath patted to a smooth dirt trail.

And so it is that today tourists like my wife and I flock there from distances great and small, unified by what they have strapped to the backs of their cars.

Mountain bikes.

Five different shops in Damascus, Virginia will for around ten dollars slide your mountain bike into a bike rack bolted to the bed of an open trailer, and usher you yourself into the converted special-ed style school bus towing it, for a winding ride past kudzu-coated forest to the top of Cold Mountain, a high point in the converted railroad's path.

The ride down is three to four hours of breezy pleasure, a steady glide along a narrow strip cut through plain nature, punctuated by the sudden vistas that arise with each of over 30 bridges, before one is plunged back into the shade-dappled glade.

The builders of the original trackbed could never have foreseen this, especially if they had been asked during the what must have been dispiriting interregnum between the shutdown of the trains and the opening of the trail. But a door closes and a window opens, and only faith will allow you to perceive the winding trail formed by the progress of a free people.

Anti-Modernist Poetry

2005-10-03T20:13:00.000-07:00

I think there is such a thing, and Auden's poetry would qualify. Below is his poem "We Too Had Known Golden Hours." (Escoffier refers to August Escoffier, 1946-1935, Frech chef of grand hotels such as the Savoy and Carlton in London):

We, too, had known golden hours
When body and soul were in tune,
Had danced with our true loves
By the light of a full moon
And sat with the wise and the good,
As tongues grew merry and gay
Over some noble dish
Out of Escoffier;
Had felt the intrusive glory
Which tears reserve apart,
And would in the old grand manner
Have sung from a resonant heart.
But, pawed-at and gossiped-over
By the promiscuous crowd,
Concocted by editors
Into spells to befuddle the crowd,
All words like Peace and Love,
All sane affirmative speech,
Had been soiled, profaned, debased,
To a horrid mechanical screech.
No civil style survived
That pandaemoneum.
But the wry, the sotto-voce,
Ironic and monochrome:
And where should we find shelter
For joy or mere content
When little was left standing
But the suburb of dissent?

"We, too..." The speaker speaks for a group. They are slightly past it now, but he wishes to remind the reader that they weren't always. They had danced with their true loves. They had sat and chatted memorably, though not with just any partying friends but with "the wise and the good." And under the influence of such friendship they -

had felt the intrusive glory
which tears reserve apart.

A bit British, the idea that you start out reserved. The larger point of course is that it isn't drugs, alcohol, loud music, sex or any combination of those that had opened their hearts, but "an intrusive glory."

I can't get past that phrase, the dignity it lends to this opening of the spirit, which occurs to sane and sober people whose only influences are good food, wise and good friends and their youth.

Moreover, these old fogeys who once were young, recalling their youthful fullness of spirit, recall also the desire to express that fullness, but not by howling at the moon or (as occurs around here in North Carolina) driving their pickups around town with the stereos blaring at an indescribable volume. No, they -

...would in the grand old manner
Have sung from a resonant heart.

From a resonant heart. Another phrase I can't get past, and don't want to. I can rest on such phrases, I know myself to be safe with them.

But we now to move to a minor key, as the old fogey, speaking for many old fogeys, recalls how, some time after those golden hours, words like Peace and Love began to be "pawed-at and gossiped-over by the promiscuous crowd." And yes, this is one of those "harder" sections in terms of poetic syntax, with the subject of the sentence, Peace and Love, being buried in the middle so that the overall meaning has to be puzzled out in a way that inexperienced poetry readers find a bit challenging. Aw, those poor overtaxed readers.

Back to the poem. Over time, misuse of the same exalted language that allowed their souls to find sublime expression has left them literally speech-less. The poem inadvertently supplies an example by innocently using the word "gay." And - a little irony drum roll please - the poet innocently using this phrase in a poem decrying the debasement of language is himself gay. Bah-dah-Boom!

Another great, painful, restful phrase: "All sane affirmative speech." Ah.

He concludes by noting that "no civil style survived / That pandeamonium." There are too many examples to choose from. Screeching talking head shows, most mau-mauing rappers, the season's sensational murder. I hardly have to make the case. As a result, sane and civil people are forced into a language that is "wry, sotto-voce, ironic and monochrome."

Here at the last Auden shows us what has been lost by this theft of language. An outlet for our souls' expression. For who among us may sing with a resonant heart as easily as we might have in a more sincere world?

Bali Remembered

2005-10-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

Bali is just a quick six hour flight from Tokyo, equivalent to a flight to the Bahamas from a northeastern US city. So when I lived in Japan I used to go there for vacation. Thailand was the first choice for most expatriates, but Bali was even less developed, more raw, a Hindu island in the middle of the Islamic ocean of Indonesia.

Most of Indonesia had at one time been Hindu of course as the ruins of Borubadur attest, and I wondered (aloud to local fast friends I made when visiting that massive structure, whose every surface is carved with Hindu gods) how it felt to look at the gods worshiped by your ancestors, even as you enter the local mosque. The inquiry was received with a polite silence. The Islamic wave has pushed the Hindu remnant back, century after century, to its last redoubt in Bali, where it long maintained its customary monarchy and aristocracy, still reflected in its social structure today.

There are not three but five different greetings given during the day, based on the time of day, "Salamat pagi," good morning, is the first. During rainstorms the locals pull palm and banana leaves to use as makeshift umbrellas. After a week there you can identify weavings by the Indonesian island that produced them, based on distinctive patterns. The Hindu mythology is reprised in six traditional plays, performed by masked dancers, including the famous young Balinese girl dancers. The locals seem to know every gesture of each play by heart and watch enthusiastically from the wings, where they all stand, allowing the seating in the main hall to be taken by the tourists.

I don't want to overly-romanticize Bali's Hindu culture, romantic as it feels to be there. It's not all flowers and fruitbowls, even if each day does begin with saronged women dropping small prepared bouquets at each doorstep, where they remain all day. They drive like maniacs. One Balinese told me of being badly injured on the street, and watching his fellow countrymen drive past him for hours. I had to bribe a taxi driver to slow down, shouting the Indonesian word (there is a Balinese language, but it is complex, and business is done in Indonesian) for slow, while showing him a fistful of rupees, and then shouting the word for fast and showing him only our agreed fare.

Still, they don't deserve to be bombed, indeed bombed again, by the same muslims who have already pushed them into an island enclave.

We perceive ourselves as strong and predominant, just as strong and predominant as I'm sure the Hindus once felt in Indonesia. But will our descendants find themselves surrounded, assailed, besieged, as the Balinese are today?

On Blogging

2005-09-29T19:06:00.000-07:00

My first week and a half of blogging has been a blast. I realize my approach of writing a long-form essay each day, along with a brief globetrotting news sampling, differs from what most blogs do, but the're's got to be room for more in the blogosphere than just the lightening fast world of opinion and controversy on the issues of the day. So I will stick with my more ponderous, pondering reflections, which is what I find most satisfying anyway.

I've discovered that the links to my first set of daily essays, listed on the left, do not work, and do not have time to correct them before a weekend trip to the mountains (blogging will be light till Monday). But the list does summarize the subjects I've posted on, and the posts are available by scrolling down or by checking the September archives.

Vessel and Spirit

2005-09-29T06:13:00.000-07:00

This article in the American Thinker, which I picked up on from Bookwormroom, details the Anglican Church's descent, alas, into anti-semitism.

Part of my cultural or even my American awakening, which I will date from 1978/9, just in time to vote for Reagan, thank goodness, included the realization that the health of Christianity is important to the safety of Jews, since we've never been safer than we are here and now, in this broadly Christian nation.

I began to see that if Christians didn't renew their faith, they'd go into default mode and become the thing humans become when they're not religious – pagan. Nazism was such a pagan anti-Christian rising in Europe that we thought was a one-off. We can now see that it was no such thing.

It never occurred to me that the problem that had earlier attacked Christianity would infest itself into (some) Christian institutions. If a number of high church Protestants were comfortably anti-semitic through the 50's and 60's and beyond, that was just the echoing of an ancient prejudice through their families, a childhood virus. It wasn't by any means their ministers who were exhorting them to it.

But now the Anglican Church, behind the fig leaf of an academic boycott, is essentially characterizing Israel as an illegitimate state. They don't say outright what should be done about this illegitimate state. That's left to the imagination.

I'm not the first to notice this slow-motion putsch that's been going on, this infiltration of the institutions that at one time presented themselves to the public as the repositories of our moral traditions. One by one they've either been hobbled or at least taken an eight-count. Academe, the Judiciary, to some extent the Catholic Church (though I foresee a great 15th round comeback following a season of spiritual upheaval and renewal), even Major League Baseball for heaven's sake (and there with no comeback in sight), and now the Anglicans.

Now does all of this give us reason to wring our hands? Not at all.

Ronald Reagan often told the extremely Jewish-sounding story of a boy whose mean father, after promising him a pony for his birthday, gives him a shoebox full of horseshit.

"Oh, great," the boy exclaims, "there must be a pony around here somewhere!"

"There must be," I will exclaim, "keepers of our moral traditions around here somewhere!"

A door closes, and a window opens, as the Yiddish proverb goes. Not only are there plenty of such moral leaders still in pulpits, quietly seething at the power grab occurring over their heads, but I sense their existence also in our companies (which are almost surrogate societies and where a lot of the true action is), and in our military, and in our better, front-line charities and NGOs, and elsewhere. There may even be a few on the net. (My own candidate for net-based moral guru is Hugh Hewitt).

If these moral leaders among men and women aren't populating the institutions they used to populate, it may be because there is now so much more scope for action in the world, indeed for moral action in the world. So we shouldn't be surprised if our moral leadership is a bit more spread out on the ground.

Let a few radicals grab the reins at this church or that college in an act of moral piracy. Nobody's going to follow them anywhere. We're not the gullible rubes we used to be. We've got each other now, and at the flick of a wrist.

Today's Globe Trot

2005-09-29T05:29:00.000-07:00

Oh. Islamic terrorists are walking up to army regulars and surrendering in India. These are Jammu and Kashmir islamic terrorists but terrorists none the less. Well, no good news is news.

Sanyo is restructuring, shutting down factories and focussing its business. Why does a relentlessly sunny blogger list this? Because the preservation of "Zombie" companies has been Japan's biggest problem for fifteen years. Banks, to hide their bad loans, would just keep doubling down with the governmetn's tacit approval. So in nothing-is-what-it-seems Japan this is good news. Hopping on the capitalist creative destruction bandwagon.

The Polish right won big in an election that, if they had lost, would have made the news in the US, I'll wager, with the papers and news shows calling it a repudiation of Poland's stalwart support of America in Iraq. In fact this looks more like an endorsement.

Enough politics and economics. The Taiwanese wonder, um, wonderingly at the willingness of Japanese to wait in line. An example of how manners as well as peace and economic growth can spread in and between open socieities.

The Pen Briefly Mightier

2005-09-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

In 1975, President Ford felt he was facing a dilemma when Alexander Solzhenitsyn was booted out of Soviet Russia for writing novels exposing the horrors of the Soviet prisons, which were primarily political prisons, which he had resided in for many years. The international community meant at least a little something in those days, and moreover Scoop Jackson, a democrat cold warrior (there used to be such people – remember Kennedy?) in Congress, had been championing Solzhenitsyn. But Ford somehow felt he had to kiss up to the commies, even though Nixon had gone to China, not Russia, and so Ford declined to meet with the exiled writer.

A media brouhaha followed. The American people wanted to see this man honored. There was a great outpouring of a freedom loving people to a man who had suffered greatly in freedom's cause. But Washington couldn't even arrange to have him address a joint session of Congress. Weirdly, the democrats were championing freedom (in a way they would never again do when governing, however) and the republicans were fulfilling their stereotype of stability uber alles.

My how things have changed, and a stark reminder of how they might change back without an avid electorate holding our officeholders' feet to the fire.

In the interest of recalling what all the fuss was about, let's look at an inspiring portion of the speech that Solzhenitsyn (and do you know how long it takes me to type that name each time?) gave upon receiving his Nobel Prize. Oh, and remember when the Nobel itself was not a discredited institution, when it wasn't given out to any fraudulent scribbler who hated the same things (usually freedom, quality writing and Jews) that the Nobel committee hated? Old times!

Anyway, here's Solzhenitsyn:

"We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride.

But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help.

But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness - and violence, decrepit, will fall."

The above is all the more inspiring if you substitute the "blog" or "internet" for the "literature." As an aside, I actually had the opportunity to teach his Nobel Prize speech to my students during my high school teaching stint. Thought I'd share it here too.

Perceptions

2005-09-28T04:29:00.000-07:00

What can the citizens of Afghanistan read in their free newspapers? They can read about how American academics are urging them to "consider the views of Al Qaida." The article goes on to list and quote a number of stalwart tenured Americans with indoor plumbing and long life spans on how the Afghans are blowing their future by opposing the terrorists who have devastated their land for over a decade.

Meanwhile in Prague an editorial explains how, even though many franchises are foreign licensed, they remain locally owned and a boon to Czech businesspeople and workers. A photo of a sassy Czech beside a McDonald's accompanies the article. There is no sign of any angry Frenchmen with tractors.

Enough politics. A play now sweeping South Korea takes one of the dwarves in Snow White, who the playwright names Bandal, or Half-Moon, as its main character. The audiences thrill to his valour and heroism:

"The youngest of the seven dwarves, Bandal, who is born mute, loves Snow White from the first time they meet. Every time Snow White fell into the evil trap, Bandal throws himself in to rescue her. And each time she kisses him lightly to thank you it makes him the happiest.

"Now no one seems to blame Kwon for the role, but she sheds tears almost everyday, whenever she becomes the dwarf on the stage, so emotionally connected with the role. 'In a sense, Bandal represents the outcasts of society,' Kwon said."

Seoullywood

2005-09-27T14:49:00.000-07:00

A family friend comes over for tea and reports on a Korean movie she saw in Tokyo last week. The movie, whose title I will translate as "Spring Blossoms and Snowfall," is wildly popular in Japan and represents something of a love letter, or at least a big-hearted missive of conciliation, from Korea to Japan. Indeed, the actor who plays the male lead offered assistance following a Japanese flood faster than any Japanese thought to do. Oh and by Korea I mean the South of course. The North is a concentration camp, not something that can be called a country.

The movie is a clear rip-off of a Harrison Ford movie about a plane crash. No, not Six Days and Seven Nights, or Seven Days and Six Nights, the other one, where his wife is on the plane with her lover when it crashes and kills them both. Random Hearts.

But in this version of Randon Asian Hearts the plot has been cleverly changed to suit an Asian audience – an audience our friend tells us was entirely middle-aged and female except for her six-foot tall American husband, who was in the theater as part of his first trip to Japan and I can just imagine his sense of wonder and bewilderment. Apparently he also could not get past the ubiquitous vending machines and the fact that those machines sold beer and a cheap form of sake.

The Korean version still starts with an affair between His wife and Her husband, and a plane crash affecting their lovers' plane. But on that side of the globe the lovers very inconveniently survive. So we are in the hospital, where He retrieves and checks out his injured wife's cell phone and She retrieves her husband's cell phone (Asian high tech and lack of privacy!). That's how they each discover the affair! And the reason He traces Her down is to ask her not to tell his father-in-law about their spouses' affair (Asian sense of duty, obligation and self-sacrifice!).

Yes, they go to bed (not Asian; decadent western influence!), but in the end her husband dies and – stroke of bad luck – his wife does not. He takes his wife home and politely informs her that "he died," referring to her lover. His wife weeps extravagantly and right in front him and he hides how grievously wounded he is by this (Asian stoicism!). He meets Her one last time, in a garden where they engage in one last round of their customarily spare and oblique dialogue:

"What do you like?"
"I like spring blossoms. What do you like?"
"I like snowfall."

The theater is filled with muted sobbing as it becomes clear that there love is not to be, and the viewers confront the impossibility of finally achieving one's heart's desire and the necessity of finally, fatalistically embracing one's, well, one's fate.

But is that specifically Asian or just a part of the human condition? Though over there they do make it into an art form.

How we look from there

2005-09-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Australian news media not only notices but is willing to criticize the overblown and inaccurate coverage that American news media gave to Katrina. The 10,000 death estimate, the incorrect reports of wide-scale murder and rape in the superdome (sixdeaths - four natural causes, one suicide and one overdose; no rapes). Want an accurate picture of America? Read an Australian newspaper.

Did you know that 1600 leftover Vietnamese boat people living in the Phillippines, but never granted permanent residence there, are on there way to permanent settlement in the US? No, you'd have to read a Taiwanese newspaper to learn that about your own country (my apologies to non-US readers - I'm complaining about US news media here, as you can see).

You can walk into a showroom in Budapest and buy a cadillac or a corvette now, and apparently so can some well-enough heeled Hungarians. "As American as apple pie," says the car dealer. Read much coverage on sales of US goods overseas lately, especially in newly free and increasingly prosperous nations?

Paglia's Big Book

2005-09-27T04:48:00.000-07:00

One of the books that woke me out of my mental slumber 15 years ago (though I've slept again often and well since then) was Camille Paglia's magnum opus, Sexual Personae. It remains challenging and stimulating and I recently revisited it. She starts out big, by rewriting the opening to the Bible:

"In the beginning," she corrects, "was nature."

I see her point. It's not G-d's point, of course, but it is a point, which she fleshes out by writing that nature is the "background against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem." Well, sure, I'll drink to that.

The way I'd put it is: While in the beginning of the West was the word (since we had a word and built what we have by following it), everybody else's beginnings began with nature. And in human terms nature translates into Paganism, which every other civilization except ours is still based on. But let's return to how Paglia puts it, as she traces our pagan, pre-biblical, pre-Western pre-beginnings:

"Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements….Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture….Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex:...purify sex roles {they say} and harmony will reign."

So far so good. Sexuality, pleasurable as it is, remains our true original sin, a raw and volatile connection with nature, tangled at its root with violence, and requiring control if civilization is to emerge and endure. I will take a moment to note that in Judaism, sin originates "from youth," (i.e., from adolescence) not from birth, somewhat in line with these ideas.

Paglia next announces her preference for both Christianity's "pessimistic view of man born unclean" which she links to – wait for it – the equally pessimistic vision of the Marquis de Sade, who is "the most unread major writer in western literature." Hm.

Well, at least she's not an idiotarian. But I could as easily describe (Judeo-) Christianity's optimistic view of man as worthy of a relationship with G-d and of redemption, a view not linked at all to Sade's essential championing of degradation. Paglia goes on to identify western civilization's attempt to integrate man's body and mind as a kind of literary project, which she spends her next 700 brilliant pages describing.

Personally I'd identify it a religious project.

Paglia's book was a seminal reading experience for me, the first time I experienced in criticism what I had previously experienced from literature. I began to see that there are times to enjoy the banquet of cultural expression (the eras of your Romantic poets, your Dutch painters, your Impressionists, your Shakespeare), and there are other eras best spent sitting back in your armchair and digesting the great waves of art that have come before, while waiting patiently for the next great wave by developing your sensibilities so that you will recognize it when it comes.

Every couple generations someone from the West's cold north rediscovers the sources of its culture in the pulsating south. Byron goes to Italy, Kenneth Clark goes to Italy. Edward de Vere, if he wrote those plays commonly attributed to an actor named Shakespeare (Warning! Pet Theory!) goes to Italy, Paglia goes to Italy. They all come back a little too besotted, forgetting that there wouldn't be much of a West at all if it were all and always Italian, Mediterranean, lush. The sort of place that's great, basically, for a vacation.

Progress and the Comics to Prove It

2005-09-26T18:14:00.000-07:00

England, from India's perspective, may be looking a little insecure, based on this article in the Times of India, reporting on a Gordon Brown speech that exhorted Britain to create more home-grown college graduates because "China and India are producing 4 million graduates a year." The rest of his speech marked a turn in policy, defending Thatcherite reforms and presenting a Blair-like vision of the Labour party. Had you heard that elsewhere about Brown, Blair's until-now reliably leftist heir-apparent? I hadn't.

And from Japan, here is Koizumi's first big speech following his triumphant election landslide. He's pledging to "boldly scale down government, and not just in the postal savings service that he ran on. It's good to know there are people out there who take these free-market reform ideas seriously, rather than just running on them and forgetting once in office.

Enough politics. Here's an innocent manga story whose drawings of urban Tokyo make me feel I'm back living there. Not that urban Tokyo is very pretty. All the more reason to applaud this drawn-from-life artistry.

Dopamine Country

2005-09-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

This is simply too interesting to pass up. To summarize, a Dr. Whybrow notes an odd side-effect of a Parkinson's medication. It causes some of the patients to begin obsessively gambling. The medicine's chemical effect is to increase dopamine, and Whybrow goes on (and on - since he's written a book on the subject) to speculate that America is a dopamine-based nation, exhibiting all the behaviors associated with dopamined-up people. Gambling, risk-taking, manic excess, need for stimulation. Going back again and again to that corner of the cage where the stimulus button is. Well, but are we risk taking because of the dopamine or are we full of dopamine because of our risk-taking?

Whichever. The good doctor also notes that in experiments, dopamine-doped subjects respond even more when the outcome is random. I can't resist pointing out how well blogging seems to fit in here, and in particular blog reading. The more randomly spaced the posts, this research suggests, the more stimulated will dopamined readers be to click for new ones.

This blog's stately, 19th century, one long-form essay per evening style doesn't seem to be taking advantage of this syndrome, but then, I do present it as a sort of blogger's respite from blogging.

Not Averse to Verse

2005-09-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

I don't always have the heart for politics and social commentary, and I don't know if the past is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awaken or if the present is. But there is always poetry, and tonight I've chosen a great sonnet from a writer I will introduce later, for reasons that will become clear.

My only preliminary comment is that staunch means stop up as in applying pressure to a wound, that sheath means a wrapping, though here it means skin or even the membrane of one's soul, assuming souls have membranes. And as a corollary sheathe means to wrap (duh). You begin to see the effects of my having taught high school English for two years before getting into legal editing - taught it at a private school, which hired me without credentials, a privilege and stroke of good luck for someone with a corporate background. Anyway, enjoy:

A Virginal

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;
As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white as their bark, so white this lady's hours.

"No, no! Go from me."

So he starts out brushing off another woman who approaches him after he has been with the woman he's writing about. A little louche, that and in that sense a man's poem. Other women now are lesser brightness, spoiling his membrane.

"For my surrounding air…" That line needs nothing more than reference and admiration.

"Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly,"

Like a strait jacket, though it doesn't look like he's complaining. The magic of a civilization, ours, where a woman's non-physical strength is acknowledged as equal or greater than a man's mere muscle.

"And left me cloaked as with a gauze of ether;"

Which they were actually using back then in surgery, the poem dating from 1912. They also had nitrous oxide rooms, laughing gas rooms, dating even further back, and attended by Victorians in formal wear all busy laughing their butts off. Digression.

"Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her."

Again, nothing to do but admire and take pleasure in the words, far more erotic than explicit language ever could be. Next come images of spring with the suggestion that it is she herself who is staunching the wound of winter.

"Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white as their bark, so white this lady's hours."

He ends by finding a similarity between the lady and birch tree bark – which his lady's hours are as white as, and I'll take hours to mean the way she spends her hours, what goes on in her head during her hours, during all her hours, which he sees as innocent, unblemished and pure.

Well, sorry now to inform you that the writer was Ezra Pound, a fine poet though not by any means a fine human. His descent into an allegiance with Mussolini's fascist regime (whoops - looks like he was a little too possessed with ideas of purity) has cast him rightly into the shadows over the last few decades, indeed near-century, and unfortunately along with some amazing poetry.

Hope you enjoyed.

Life in the Free World

2005-09-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

In Poland, they're fighting over whether to institute a 15% flat income tax for everyone, or have two brackets, 18% and 28%. True, this is on top of a 15% value added tax paid before retail sale, but either way, nobody seems to be screaming to soak the rich only.

In Ireland, another country that took the bracing plunge into cold capitalist waters, growth next year is expected to come in at 6.5%. That's a lot of opportunity, a lot of scope for people's commercial dreams to come true. Oh and gee, the murderous IRA have just turned in their weapons. Now that the country they have been trying to terrorize is growing and expanding, who has time for such adolescent acting out?

Indeed, a broad if not complete survey of the entire world shows that its "economic freedom" score, calculated by averaging each country's score and dividing, rose from 5.2 to 6.4 from 1985 to now. This is for the 109 countries that were measured in 1985, with only seven such countries going backwards. But again, how many newspapers is that information going to sell?

Freedom. Feeding, clothing and enabling the better part of a planet for the better part of a decade, with only more to come.

Livin' Large

2005-09-25T10:04:00.000-07:00

The houses and cars and jewels have been getting bigger again, and I know that's supposed to herald something about the stock market, though I can never remember if it means it will be going up or down. Plus as big as they get, you can't begin to tell when a temporary panic will set in to deflate the square footage, the horsepower (it's got a hemi!) or the karats, or if the biggification will just continue to persist beyond imagining. In the States, the road of excess leads to the palace of greater excess.

Still, I don't oppose conspicuous consumption since, short of crime, people must be left free even to make bad decisions and I can't quite see criminalizing oversized houses and private jets. But I am willing to condemn conspicuous consumption, or rather I condemn a certain form of it, even as the too-high life usually condemns itself, such as in that embarrassment of garishness that Donald Trump has created in his marital bachelor pad, or in David Geffen's $80 million dollar fort-like complex.

What's the difference between condemning and opposing? One involves wagging your finger. The other involves passing a law.

The spending isn't the problem, let me point out, or it isn't unless the spender is out preaching conservation while running up a montrous monthly energy bill. No, I will only squak if I sense that the reason the tycoon got her huge house or private island was to distance herself from the rest of us. And not distance herself physically but distance as in lording it over – what Camille Paglia has called hierarchical assertion. That's when I will grow a little saddened and disappointed (to quote ex-Senator Daschle) with the asserter.

I make an exception for Mae West's fabled apartment in LA with all its rumored toys, for the Lennons' apartment in Manhattan, and even for Hugh Hefner's Grotto; these realized visions lend wit, conversational fodder and vicarious pleasure to us all. Because you can tell when a penthouse or mansion has been done up out of pure private glee. And that is something to be admired, or at least appreciated. That is the sort of effort that inspires, that builds morale among the rest of us, whereby the investment of resources, the electricity used in construction, the gold leaf, the crystal, the marble, all come to serve at least some kind of a communal purpose.

But Barbra Streisand's leaden coastline-sucking mansion, where cool-whip-on-ice-cream-sandwiches are served for dessert? Are we lifted up, even for a moment? Or do we see someone using their money to place some sort of a hedge around themselves?

The only good hedge is the ones the rabbis speak of when they speak of building a hedge around the Torah, meaning that we assume extra obligations to make sure we don't violate essential ones. But you do that to get closer to G-d, not farther away from each other. Not that I personally do very much Torah hedging – heck, I'll pluck the whiskers off a catfish and call it kosher. Hm. Digression.

Anyway, so long as you're completing the circle, one way or another, in the human community, I won't care how much oil, steel and concrete you use to do it (since the market will always find more). And living out a dream in a way that inspires others to pursue theirs is absolutely one way, one very pleasant way, to put your shoulder to the commonweal.

Quiet Progress

2005-09-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

Oh. The IMF predicts higher growth here for Chile of 5.8 and 5.9 percent over the next two years. That's jobs and businesses, realized ambitions, upward mobility and a feeling of hope, and tax revenue to support the least among them. The quiet rewards of capitalism.

The Tel Aviv stock market will be up 15% by the end of the year according to this report. In the midst of an undeclared war, well, actually a declared war in Arabic. More quiet rewards of capitalism, free movement of capital and labor (well, labor that doesn't have bombs strapped on it).

And in Singapore, where the number of cars allowed on the cramped roads is limited, so that taxis are run 24 hours a day (not by the same driver, of course), they're lowering the license fee and wising up to the value of used cars, as described here. More quiet progress.

Much of the world is not going to hell in a handbasket. It's emulating heaven through faith and steady hard work. And all of that effort worldwide, slow, hard won and easily lost, is worthy of protection from what would threaten it.

Invisible Aristocracy of Mind

2005-09-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

When I'm not here expressing my true self, I summarize appellate judicial opinions for a professional journal. They come in on Wednesday and are due back on Monday. I usually print them out and take them to MacD's or the Starbucks in our local Barnes and Ignoble, where I read them and mark them up. My gratitude to the internet for allowing me such a career is part of why I started a blog.

These are insurance cases. The appellate judges who write them are concerned with legal issues like jurisdiction and statutory authority and contract interpretation, but even so, each opinion usually starts out by reciting the facts of the case. The car insurance cases are horrific. Normal lives crushed without a moment's notice. Then there are heart attacks after you applied for insurance but before your policy was issued. Bungled arson attempts, successful bank fraud, leftover cases from the California earthquake and oncoming cases from the World Trade Center. All the world's chaos played out from the standpoint of the question: Who'll be left holding the bag? No point asking the corollary: Who will raise their hand and offer to be a glutton for responsibility? In these cases, nobody. That's why they're in court.

One theme besides horror is attorney malpractice. Tiem and again the appeals judge will run through the arguments, identify the legal path that should have been followed, and then note with rueful regret that because Party X's lawyer neglected to follow that path in front of the trial court, Party X's lawyer is barred from raising it on appeal.

Of course, we see plenty of bungling by the trial court judges as well. I'll say that one third get it right, one third try but get it wrong, and one third don't even bother to state their reasons, forcing the appeals court to search a reason that would have been sufficient to support the taciturn lower court judge's opinion, and fill it in for him like a parent retying their child's shoes the right way.

I know about the hot button issue of judicial appointments, the Roe v. Wade idiotarianism whereby we are all goaded into arguing about the substance of a case whose real error was jurisdictional. And I am happy to take a moment to contend that even principled pro-choice proponents should oppose Roe because every educated citizen of our republic knows that was a decision for a legislature, not a court. But my separate point is that appeals court judges really are smarter and better and way more diligent than trial court judges. Yes, I know that could change with the wrong people in office appointing the wrong judges but I'm interested in making a different point.

My point is that somehow, up until now at least, ability has been silently rewarded. And I think in any healthy society, which in my view ours still is, there is an unseen pyramid of ability, an always present if not always acknowledged invisible aristocracy of mind. By this I do not mean a King-Of-The-Hill type of mound, formed when a group of men with guns takes the physical high ground. But something formed freely among free people of good will (not just good intention by the way, but good will), through spontaneous generation.

The blogosphere is one such free and open ground on which such a pyramid will naturally form, is naturally forming. And America is another.

Onward to Scotland!

2005-09-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

My sister-in-law is enthusiastic about our planned trip to Scotland. "But don't, whatever you do," she advises, "talk to them about politics." Well, I'll do my best, but along with a bagpipe lesson for my wife, some obligatory castle inspecting, much-looked-forward-to landscape enjoyment and a pair of sweaters to take home, the remaining box to check off is going to be whisky drinking, indeed Scotch drinking, which is done in bars, or pubs, where an obviously not Scottish gentleman and his Asian-featured wife will not easily shrink into the woodwork.

"Where ye be from, matey?" I may be hailed.
"The United States of America," I will reply.
"Ay, that world-devouring anti-cultural maw, be it so?"
"Well, sir, our own perspective on our country is not quite that -"
"Honey," my wife here will interject, "you promised."

So we'll see. Already I see that our currency, like our relative cultural level, is a bit lower than theirs. The barriers to fortress Europe are high, and that disruptive thing called growth is held firmly in check by interest rates that, if they do not choke, certainly bind Euorpeans as tightly as the church collars they no longer wear. I know we Americans spend like drunken sailors, and that our money is looking a little down at heel as a result, but then we don't believe in money. We believe in growth.

True, this can mean that savers get punished and borrowers rewarded, as inflation melts away the real value of what those borrowers have to repay. But the solution isn't higher interest rates, certainly not now that we have such a mountain of debt, because higher rates would plunge us into deflation as debtors sell everything (and stop investing anything) in order to meet their payments.

Besides, lowering rates remains the democratic and American thing to do, letting everyone have money to invest or spend or just flash around as they like. Unfortunately it also reduces the value of our money for our vacationers to Scotland, not to mention our importers of foreign oil. By contrast, raising rates is the European and anti-democratic thing to do - it's what you do in order to preserve the value of the money that's already in the hands of the aristocratic finger-kissing elites, productivity and jobs be damned!

You'd think the side I'd be on would be clear. Shovel the coal in the engine room and full speed ahead! But no, I'm on the side of an approach that's not currently on the menu. The gold standard.

There still is a silent gold standard, sitting quietly alongside the world's overheating money economy. There's about 1.3 trillion dollars in gold sitting above ground. It used to be that dollar bills were actually gold certificates. You could trade the paper in for its face value in gold in America. Why? Because before that, any and many states and plenty of private banks issued currency that tended to rapidly devalue. In some prairie states people were reduced to using nails as money, and laws were passed to stop people who were planning on moving from burning down their barns for the nails.

So once things got a little unified and uniform we went to a gold standard. Prices were stable for over fifty years.

What happened to change all that? Europe (Yes! Back on track in my argument!) tried to commit suicide and we spent so much blood and treasure over two world wars in wresting the revolver away from its collective temple that once it was all over we could no longer afford to back our money with real money - precious metals. The rest is recent history.

And that all begins to explain why our money is weak and our "culture" is relatively low. That is, why aren't our people proficient in languages, chess and the piano, instead of merely software, business productivity and management. Three world wars (going on four) prosecuted at our expense has set back our language study and appreciation of the arts. Frankly, that's one more thing I blame Europe for, one more thing they cost us over the last 90 years.

Not that I plan sharing any of these sentiments ("Shsh! Honey, you promised") on my upcoming trip.

Learning How to Shag

2005-09-22T20:12:00.000-07:00

The Shag, Austin Power movie references aside, is a dance with a long history in the Carolinas. It's a six-step that is danced to 4/4 music, and yes that means it doesn't come out even, but somehow it seems to work out all right. Another peculiarity of the Shag is that the man's left hand and the woman's right are the only things that touch, usually. At two-month, once-a-week shag class you will learn three basic female turns and three turns for the man. You will graduate to the belly roll and the sugar foot and the eight-step pivot. Yes they throw in one eight-step move in a dance full of six-step moves, all played to 4/4 music. It still works out.

My wife and I are novice dancers, our first flailing attempts dating to our wedding preparations and an ordered video. We learned a box-step and a waltz and were able to perform a simalacrum of a wedding dance. Even now, with courses in cha cha, rumba, waltz and shag behind us, our feet get tangled and there are occasional sudden squabbles like summer squalls over who's leading and what comes next.

But the shag is the first dance that really took. It's so laid back and forgiving, you can add as many moves or forget as many as you want. The leads are simple and clear, if I can come up with one to offer before we finish whatever the last move was, and there's spinning, twirling, closed and open positions, and all with the slightest little alterations. Suddenly two people with their own separate paces in life find a meeting ground in a third pace that belongs to neither one separately but only both together. Like those twin stars whose orbits, whatever they were originally, have now come to depend on each other.

The Richard Gere dance movie was hoaky, and he's a loon anyway, if a harmless one. The Vanessa Williams dance movie was charming if implausible. There's an Australian one where the male lead seems to wince each time he's required to hold a woman in his arms. And you'll never dance the way they do in any of those movies.

But let me say that making a little room for dance will do its part in working some of the cogs out of the marital wheel (after creating a few new ones, initially). Working so closely together on something that's intended to be beautiful, with the risk of getting tangled up at any moment, and the promise of making something that is admirable and that improves over time, well -

Isn't that what the two of you have been doing anyway?

On Mozart

2005-09-21T09:50:00.000-07:00

If my wife weren't sleeping right behind me after her night shift, I'd probably have Mozart on. either a string quartet or one of the piano concertos. Plaese note that I'd be more willing to write "concerti" if Europe would be more willing to share our sacrifice in advancing the cause of peace and democracy in the Middle East. So concertos it is. I will say thanks alot to Europe for that legacy of high culture (including Worlfgang), but given what you've become, I think, you know, that we can take it from here.

I usually don't know the numbers of which concerto or quartet or other piece I may be listening to, and nothing is more intimidating to me than reading a writer who does. I just recognize the CD covers through long use. But I have read a couple biographies. And even without them I can tell a bit by listening that the first 25 piano concertos were sunnier, and the remainder more introspective. They were written without patrons, as an entrepreneurial venture among his aristocratic audience. Mozart's concertos in particular were looked forward to, and his performances of them were usually sold out.

Well, that was true for the first 25. And since he was always scrounging for money, you'd think he would've stayed on the sunny side. Seats started going empty for the later concertos, which included chords considered dissonant for their time. It's not like he disdained to please his audience, though. I don't think he saw a conflict between art and entertainment in that way. He was comfortably upwardly mobile in intention, even if he wasn't always moving up. I think he just outgrew his audience, and was impatient for a better and more serious one. He couldn't wait for us, or for the audience we could be if we developed ourselves.

Plus all he really wanted to do was write operas, but he could seldom get a patron for one. And them when he did, his great operas would fizzle out in Vienna. Interestingly, they would drive another city completely wild with delight - Prague. Like Jerry Lewis in Paris. Well, sort of.

If you've tried Mozart and didn't like him, I understand. At first those little classical frills, especially at the end of phrases ("Dum duh dum Dum dum, Dum duh dum Dum") make all classical pieces sound alike. A few centuries in the future, pop music may leave a similar impression on our wildly advanced descendants. But if you keep listening, Mozart starts to stand out from the pack. He's not trying to sell you on anything, least of all that he's this really bright composer and that you're not. Everything is as simple as possible. Each phrase if you look at it looks like nothing at all - a ditty a child could come up with, humming on the way home from school. But of course each piece includes a bunch of these phrases, and some harmony, and they have all been chosen for the way they relate to each other. As melodic as he is, melody doesn't dominate, they way it dominates pop music. The ideas are longer, and if you listen longer, you hear more. And more.

And afterward you don't want to march somewhere and bring down a government or social structure, the way you do with Beethoven or Woodie Guthrie. You just feel this response within yourself to beauty expressed for the love of beauty. Not a bad thing, in polarized times, to have available.

Dear Higon

2005-09-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

I want to thank Higon for sending my blog its first comment. Higon is Japanese and those readers who read his comment (the first one on my Koizumi post) will meet with opinions about Yasukuni that are broadly shared by many Japanese, though not all. I would like to answer Higon here.

Higon, I agree with your broad point that the Japanese people have the right and the emotional need to honor their dead, including their war dead. However, I disagree with this statement of yours:

"I strongly think I wouldn't live like I do now, I wouldn't have this much freedom as a member of international community I belong now, and I wouldn't be as wealthy as I am now *IF* my grandfathers and grandmothers didn't have their action."

Let me start with "their action." Was it entirely theirs? The Japan of that time was a military dictatorship. The Bushido and Shinto traditions were used by the non-elected government to instill a mindless love of the emperor into the Japanese people. And with no free press or free flow of information, the people had no alternative ideas available to them. Under this total situation, the Japanese army did act aggressively against its neighbors and did perform terrible and inhuman actions.

You can honor your ancestors without honoring or agreeing with their rulers, the wrongheaded men who sent them on this destructive path.

You say that Japan's actions in the 1930's and 1940's led to your current wealth and participation in the international community. Well, I see your point, but the road from there to here was not a straight one. It involved the deaths of millions of both Japanese and non-Japanese, Japan's total defeat, the collapse of its industry and economy and then occupation and reconstruction by America. Wasn't there an easier way?

In the Taisho era of the 1920's - and very similar to the Weimar era in Germany at the same time - there was an opening to new ideas and an attempt at democracy, which failed. May I suggest that the better path to wealth and international membership would have been for that opening of Taisho to have continued? Was war, mass death, defeat, occupation and reconstruction a better path or a necessary path?

Now, I agree with you that China, South and North Korea, and many other Asian nations today are using this war history to embarrass and manipulate Japan. Also, today, it is Japan that is among the most democratic of Asian nations, and among the most sincere. Today's Japan deeply wishes to contribute to the world in a positive way.

But that is today, when the people of Japan can guide the actions of its government. Yesterday was different, and while it is proper to honor your ancestors, you need not and should not honor the government of the 1930's and 1940's that sent them to their deaths, and ordered them to kill civilians throughout Asia.

Democracy is the key. Imagine that the people of Japan, in the 1930's and 1940's, could have voted each year on whether to continue or stop the war. How would they have voted? (Especially if they had been raised in an environment of free information). I think the answer is clear that they would have called it off early. So if you honor what the government did, I think you do not honor what the people would have done.

Thanks so much for your comment. I hope our exchange is as valuable for you as it is for me.

Repatriot.

Cute Koizumi-kun

2005-09-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

I used to see Koizumi bobble-head dolls in the stores. Even so, beyond his cuteness and lionesque hair, people had their doubts about him. He was divorced. As finance minister he wore a green velvet suit to a trade meeting with his US counterpart. Come to think of it, that may have given a hint to the strain of incipient nationalism we now see in him, with his annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine. Though I intend to write in praise of Koizumi, I'm not blind.

By the way, Yasukuni (Warning - Digression!) is a favorite cherry blossom viewing place in the city, and in my first year with my Japanese company, 1989, I was sent in the morning with a big blue plastic tarp to reserve a space for our department's after-work annual drinking and cherry viewing.

Once the veteran workers showed up, we drank heavily and looked at the blossoms, valued as much for their evanescence as for their beauty. That kind of transitory ripeness is a part of the Japanese aesthetic, lending poignancy and causing some Japanese men to be just a bit hung up on very inappropriately young women. A young male worker prankishly sang an old war song he'd learned from his grandfather to the near-embarrassment of my supervisor. A department head and I went looking for the bathroom and discovered that its condition had long since come to rival the superdome a week after Katrina. We followed the crowds to a group of trees that had been enlisted for the purpose, finding as we approached that our shoes were rapidly being sucked into the increasingly sodden soil.

So I'm familiar with Yasukuni, having peed on it. The interesting thing about the shrine, though (I will ultimately get back to Koizumi) is that those controversial war dead, or their enshrined spirits, were moved into the shrine from another shrine in the early 1970's by a bunch of monks with little clear authority to do so. Buddhist monks in Japan are extremely inconsequential people, it should be noted. Japan's Buddhism is merely formal, not like the living, breathing Buddhism of for example Thailand.

So whenever the subject of the shrine came up I would ask my Japanese friends why they didn't just move those war criminals' souls on out of there and fix the problem, so that the other two million soldiers who gave their lives to their country, even if at the behest of a brutal and brutalizing militaristic regime, could be honored without embarrassment by their countrymen. Nobody ever answered me. Politics wasn't something there was ever much point in talking about in Japan.

But that just may be changing. (Ah, a segue back to Koizumi! This is working out!) With this last election, for the first time I feel the Japanese people selecting a set of ideas and a direction for their future, and Koizumi is to be commended for offering them the choice. Through every election I saw over 17 years, people voted primarily for faction. Komeito was the party of a large Buddhistic sect, Jiminto (the LDP, the major Lib Dem Party) was the party of farmers and a certain set of entrenched interests, with other parties representing other interests.

Only the commies, truth be told, represented a clear set of ideas, and since they were also the only party cut completely out of graft-sharing and unlikely ever to take national power, the occasional municipality would put them in to provide temporary clean government.

Well, they won't have to vote for commies to get good government now. Koizumi stood on a platform, which was a novelty, and even sponsored his so-called "assassins," special candidates designed to take on and take out the 27 members of his own party who had voted against his reform program.

Democracies mature. More to my point, in Japan, democracy seems to have coaxed the Japanese themselves to mature. ">

Springtime for Hopkins

2005-09-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

When in doubt, anti-Fisk a poem, if the term anti-Fisk (a neologism! My own!) can be used to mean analyze for the purpose of praise.

So here's a Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet, praised in pieces:

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee, but sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? And why must
Disappointment all I endeavor end?

"If I contend with thee." I have to think poets would never come up with phrases like that if they didn't have to satisfy strict poetic forms, which force them to think of attractive and novel phrases that will fit. But then should I write in the past perfect when talking about poets.? Poets would never have come up with...if they hadn't had to....? Sigh.

"So what I plead is just." I know it just means, "so is what I am pleading." But somehow, his way is thrilling.

"Why do sinners' ways prosper?" Good question. And now that I've heard it expressed this way, I can't imagine it better expressed any other way. Though I suspect the original (the first stanza is a translation of, I believe, a Latin excerpt of Jeremiah) gives Hopkins a run for his money.

"And why...end?" When will we get to move our verbs to the end again? Continuing...

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How woulds't thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart, me. O the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
sir, life, upon thy cause....

Well, Hopkins is never better than when he's complaining, but what a complaint! You couldn't hurt me more if you were trying. I gotta start suspecting your motives. As Catholic a writer as he is, I respond to this part not only as a reader but also as a Jew. And I think anyone identifying with senseless and imcommensurate suffering would have to as well.

"The sots and thralls of lust." Now that phrase almost makes you pause, put down the slim volume, and go wash you hands before continuing. Luthor Vandross eat your heart out!

Sir, life, upon thy cause. See banks and brakes
Now leaved how thick! Laced they are again
with fretty chervil. Look, and fresh wind shakes
them. Birds build. but not I build, no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes
Mine., O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

I can't think of a better plea for inspiration, and one that starts with nature's inspiration - spring.

Imagine if we had been taught poems like this, with this attitude toward springtime and renewal (while still acknowledging deeply the sources of despair). Instead of, you know, "April is the cruelest month."

April is no such thing. And no connected person has ever thought so.

Toe in the Water

2005-09-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

Actually, there is no reason for you to read this. Would you check the serial number of one of those dollar bills posted on the wall at restaurants, that are the first custom received by their proud proprieters? Nothing to see here. Yet. Though I myself can't help enjoying this unearned achievement of a first blog post.

2005-09-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

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