Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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July 26, 2010Can You Tell Me Where We're Headin'?
Okay, we've all heard about the black woman, Shirley Sherrod, Georgia director of rural development for the Department of Agriculture, who was fired last week for making a racist speech to the NAACP that was not racist, but the very opposite of racist. All sides of the American debate agree that this was a disaster: Peggy Noonan wrote about it on Saturday in the Wall Street Journal (here), and both Frank Rich (here) and Maureen Dowd (here) wrote about it on Sunday in the New York Times. The ironies and failures multiply every time you look at it.
It was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack who fired her: I met Governor Vilsack a couple of times in Des Moines (it's a small town), and I will never forget the ovation he got when he entered the State Senate to make a State of the State speech about five years ago: everybody on both sides of the aisle liked this guy. But now he has screwed up big time in firing Sherrod, and of course the pressure came from the White House, and the irony there is that we have a black president, yet as Dowd points out, there was apparently nobody in the White House who recognised the name "Sherrod": Shirley's husband was a genuine hero, one of the original Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights Era. Some racists.
The NAACP itself was blindsided and did not defend Sherrod at first. Sherrod had been speaking on the 45th anniversary of her father's murder by a racist thug, and telling the wonderful story of the development of her own consciousness; fortunately the elderly white couple at the center of the speech, Roger and Eloise Spooner, are still alive and came forward to tell how Sherrod had not abandoned them, but had saved their farm almost 25 years ago.
You couldn't have made this up, and it would be hilarious if it were not tragic, but the whole story pales, for me, alongside one simple fact. The United States government was stampeded by one of those talk-radio people, an ignorant racist blimp called Blankpart or Brightfart of whom I had never heard, and who YouTubed a small section of Sherrod's speech taken out of context and misrepresented it on the air.
Who the hell do we have to vote for to stand up to these morons?
July 26, 2010...Lincoln County Road, or Armageddon?
In the Times Literary Supplement for July 9, David Coward reviews four books about 18th-century French publishing, with an emphasis on scurrilious politics. In France, authors needed government permission to publish, while the English had abolished pre-publication censorship in 1695. Scoundrels and bare-faced pamphleteers published their stuff in London, where nobody cared what was written in French anyway. Two of the books are A King's Ransom: The life of Charles Théveneau de Morande, blackmailer, scandalmonger and master-spy, by Simon Burrows, and Robert Darnton's The Devil In The Holy Water: On the art of slander from Louis XVI to Napoleon. The long review is a rollicking good time. In France itself, where the free discussion of religion or politics was outlawed, pornography was one of the few means of self-expression, and the filthy stories about the famous reached fever pitch.
Darnton is intrigued by the broader implications of the phenomenon, by the way the scandals give ordinary people reductive images, as though they were folk myths. Coward writes:
By turning Richelieu into a bogeyman or by making Marie Antoinette a Wicked Queen, the scandalmongers pushed history and literature into anthropological territory. It was, of course, a denial of the truth and reason and the defeat of the Enlightenment, and Napoleon finally turned the tide only by reimposing strict censorship. But we would at our peril ignore Darnton's modestly expressed reminder that, in our world of instant, global communication, where scandal is circulated at the speed of light, the personalization of politics has become more insidious, more reductive and more dangerous than ever.
July 26, 2010Music: A Stylistic and Aesthetic Pluralism Emerging?Guy Dammann, in the Times Literary Supplement for July 16, writes about the 63rd Aldeburgh Festival. Pierre Boulez came this year. Benjamin Britten is still seen as Aldeburgh's guiding spirit, while he and Boulez were a world apart; as Dammann puts it, "They didn't so much consider each other's music as beneath contempt as not consider it at all." But the polarization of contemorary music is yielding.
This is not to say that musicians aren't stilll capable of politicizing their listening, or of being made angry by a composer's perceived "selling out". It is simply that the idea of artistic progress has moved far beyond its once narrowly policed borders, just as the idea of the past--an awareness of which is always keenest in those anxious to leave it behind--has relaxed its grip on the present.
I think the same thing is true in all the other musics, Jazz, Americana, what you will. The finest artists are not intimidated by the past or the future nowadays, but draw their inspiration wherever they must. There is always good music out there, but you won't hear it in the shopping malls.
Some of Boulez's music was played at Aldeburgh this year, and some of Elliott Carter's, too. Dammann makes an interesting distinction. Carter, who will soon be 102 years old, has set five poems by Marrianne Moore, in "What Are Years?" for chamber orchestra and voice. "Sung with mouth-watering precision and feeling by Clair Booth, Carter's music seemed as glorious at that of Bach's Mass [in B Minor], heard the night before."
...couched in a weekend of performances of Boulez's works, the brief Carter interlude also served as a reminder of the key differences between the European and North American experiences of modernity. The former's heavy gaze on the imploded certainties of history is shot through with barely concealed agonies, whereas the latter is often suffused with quiet delight, as if the moderns' great crisis of subjectivity might, and should, be looked on as an opportunity rather than an occasion for terrible doubt.
July 26, 2010Gimme Everything on a Plate! I Want It! It's Mine!
On Highway 22 between Whitehall and Allentown in Pennsylvania there is a billboard paid for by a personal injury lawyer who promises to "work hard to get you the settlement you deserve." Bill Phillips, author of fiteness books, has a new one called Transformation, on the cover of which he promises "the life you deserve". Countless snake-oil salesmen in mega-churches, insurance companies and banks (ha!), car dealers, etc offer us the life, happiness, security, whatever, that we "deserve".
Is not life itself the greatest blessing of all? How many of us get through it without making plenty of mistakes? Am I the only one who thinks that if most of us got what we had coming, we might be in deep trouble? But we think we are entitled; indeed, we live in the age of the entitlement.
There is no such thing as an entitlement. My insurance coverage, whether on my car, my health care or whatever, is what I have contracted for. A nationwide single-payer health care system would have the potential of being the fairest and most economical; if we do not have it, that is because the politicians we have elected cannot or will not deliver it. Social Security is not an entitlement: it is a deal we have made with ourselves, the most successful, popular and cost-efficient government scheme ever devised: we pay in, and later we get a pension back out. (I am getting a reduced Social Security because I was out of the country for many years, and not paying in. I am not complaining.) It is not the fault of the people taking part in the Social Security system that governments both Democratic and Republican have been stealing the money for generations.
I don't know where the word "entitlement" came from, but it would be a good thing if we all stopped using it. Fat chance. It's a handy word for ideologues of every stripe to throw around, even if it doesn't mean anything. Epecially if it doesn't mean anything.