Rendell 'still a little nervous' about Penn., asks Obama to return (CNN: Political Ticker, 10/21/08)
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell has sent two separate memos to the Obama campaign in the past five days requesting that the Democratic Presidential candidate—as well as Hillary and Bill Clinton—return to campaign in Pennsylvania, Rendell told CNN's Gloria Borger.Rendell said the McCain campaign is clearly making a push to win Pennsylvania, given the recent visits by the Arizona senator, his wife and his running mate. As a result, he wants Obama to appear in western Pennsylvania, Harrisburg and one more “large rally” in Philadelphia. Democrats generally worry that the race is significantly closer than what recent polls have suggested. According to Rendell, there is also worry among Democrats the McCain campaign has successfully raised the enthusiasm level among Republicans in the state.
Shame on McCain and Palin for using an old code word for black (Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star)
The "socialist" label that Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate Sarah Palin are trying to attach to Sen. Barack Obama actually has long and very ugly historical roots.J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality.
Those freedom fighters included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the Civil Rights Movement; W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization; Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice; and A. Philip Randolph, who founded and was the longtime head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leading advocate for civil rights for African Americans.
The FBI and Martin Luther King: Martin Luther King was never himself a Communist—far from it. But the FBI's wiretapping of King was precipitated by his association with Stanley Levison, a man with reported ties to the Communist Party. Newly available documents reveal what the FBI actually knew—the vast extent of Levinson's Party activities (David J. Garrow, July/August 2002, The Atlantic)
The crucial figure was Stanley David Levison, a white New York lawyer and businessman who first met Martin Luther King in 1956, just as the young minister was being catapulted to national fame as a result of his role in the remarkable bus boycott against racially segregated seating in Montgomery, Alabama. The FBI knew, in copious firsthand detail from the Childs brothers, that Levison had secretly served as one of the top two financiers for the Communist Party USA in the years just before he met King. The Childs brothers' direct, personal contact with Levison from the mid-1940s to 1956 was sufficient to leave no doubt whatsoever that their reports about his role were accurate and truthful. Their proximity to Levison also gave them direct knowledge of his disappearance from CPUSA financial affairs in the years after 1956.In the months immediately following Levison's visible departure from CPUSA activities, his selfless assistance to King soon established him as the young minister's most influential white counselor. But when the FBI tardily learned of Levison's closeness to King in early 1962, the Bureau understandably hypothesized that someone with Levison's secret (though thoroughly documented) record of invaluable service to the CPUSA might very well not have turned up at Martin Luther King's elbow by happenstance. With the FBI suggesting that Levison's seeming departure from the CPUSA was in all likelihood a ruse, Robert Kennedy and his aides felt they had little choice but to assume the worst and act as defensively as possible.
Today in Korea - in Southeast Asia - in Latin America and the West Indies, in the Middle East - in Africa, one sees tens of millions of long oppressed colonial peoples surging toward freedom. What courage - what sacrifice - what determination never to rest until victory!And arrayed against them, the combined powers of the so-called Free West, headed by the greedy, profit-hungry, war-minded industrialists and financial barons of our America. The illusion of an "American Century" blinds them for the immediate present to the clear fact that civilization has passed them by - that we now live in a people's century - that the star shines brightly in the East of Europe and of the world. Colonial peoples today look to the Soviet Socialist Republics. They see how under the great Stalin millions like themselves have found a new life. They see that aided and guided by the example of the Soviet Union, led by their Mao Tse-tung, a new China adds its mighty power to the true and expanding socialist way of life. They see formerly semi-colonial Eastern European nations building new People's Democracies, based upon the people's power with the people shaping their own destinies. So much of this progress stems from the magnificent leadership, theoretical and practical, given by their friend Joseph Stalin.
They have sung - sing now and will sing his praise - in song and story. Slava - slava - slava - Stalin, Glory to Stalin. Forever will his name be honored and beloved in all lands.
In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, back through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin - the shapers of humanity's richest present and future.
Yes, through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage. Most importantly - he has charted the direction of our present and future struggles. He has pointed the way to peace - to friendly co-existence - to the exchange of mutual scientific and cultural contributions - to the end of war and destruction. How consistently, how patiently, he labored for peace and ever increasing abundance, with what deep kindliness and wisdom. He leaves tens of millions all over the earth bowed in heart-aching grief.
But, as he well knew, the struggle continues. So, inspired by his noble example, let us lift our heads slowly but proudly high and march forward in the fight for peace - for a rich and rewarding life for all.
In the inspired words of Lewis Allan, our progressive lyricist -
To you Beloved Comrade, we make this solemn vow
The fight will go on - the fight will still go on.
Sleep well, Beloved Comrade, our work will just begin.
The fight will go on - till we win - until we win.
There is a new leadership for Negro workers. It is a leadership of uncompromising manhood. It is not asking for a half loaf but for the whole loaf. It is insistent upon the Negro workers exacting justice, both from the white labor unions and from the capitalists or employers.The Negroes who will benefit from this decision are indebted first to themselves and their organized power, which made them dangerous. Second, to the radical agitation carried on by The Messenger; and third, to the fine spirit of welcome shown by the Industrial Workers of the World, whose rapid growth and increasing power the American Federation of Labor fears. These old line Negro political fossils know nothing of the Labor Movement, do not believe in labor unions at all, and have never taken any active steps to encourage such organizations. We make this statement calmly, coolly and with a reasonable reserve. The very thing which they are fighting is one of the chief factors in securing for Negroes their rights. That is Bolshevism. The capitalists of this country are so afraid that Negroes will become Bolshevists that they are willing to offer them almost anything to hold them away from the radical movement. Nobody buys pebbles which may be picked up on the beach, but diamonds sell high. The old line Negro leaders have no power to bargain, because it is known that they are Republicans politically and job-hunting, me-too-boss-hat-in-hand-Negroes, industrially. Booker Washington and all of them have simply advocated the Negroes get more work. The editors of The Messenger are not interested in Negroes getting more work. Negroes have too much work already. What we want Negroes to get is less work and more wages, with more leisure for study and recreation.
Our type of agitation has really won for Negroes such as concessions as were granted by the American Federation of Labor and we are by no means too sanguine over the possibilities of the sop which was granted. It may be like the Constitution of the United States-good in parts, but badly executed. We shall have to await the logic of events. In the meantime, we urge the Negro labor unions to increase their radicalism, to speed up their organization, to steer clear of the Negro leaders and to thank nobody but themselves for what they have gained.
A co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Dr. Du Bois long ago split with that organization. Since 1948 he has been associated with a number of left-wing causes.His Leftist Ties
From 1949 to 1955 he was vice chairman of the now-defunct Council on African Affairs, cited by the Attorney General as subversive and Communist. In 1951, as chairman of the Peace Information Center here, he was acquitted of a charge of failing to register as a foreign agent. In 1959 he received a Soviet Lenin Prize "for strengthening peace."
A Communist party spokesman said Dr. Du Bois had sent his application to join on Oct. 1 from his Brooklyn home. Since then he has been in Ghana, the spokesman said, as head of a Ghana secretariat planning a new Negro encyclopedia.
In the application Dr. Du Bois wrote that he had been "long and slow" in deciding to apply for part membership, "but at last my mind is settled." He said he had joined the Socialist party in 1911, but had resigned to support Woodrow Wilson for President.
For the next twenty years, he said, he attacked the Democrats, Republicans and Socialists. He said he had "praised the racial attitudes of the Communists but opposed their tactics in the case of the Scottsboro boys and their advocacy of a Negro state." In 1926, he said, he began a "new effort," visiting Communist lands.
Dr. Du Bois said he had concluded that "capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction."
"No universal selfishness can bring social good to all," he said. "Communism -- the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute -- this is the only way of human life."
The Punch Brothers: Desolation Booth In The Grassy Hills (Sean Moeller , 21 October 2008, Daytrotter)
The three-game sweep at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers, despite owning the best record in the National League, might have destroyed this man of nimble fingers and tender voice. It’s what the Cubbies will do to any man who probably considers few places as idyllic as Wrigley Field on a clear June afternoon with some supreme nachos, a couple dogs and two-fisting lukewarm Old Styles. It’s the man he raised himself to become and it’s what makes the demise of this once promising baseball season – on the 100-year anniversary of the last time the team had won the World Series – so paralyzing. He’s a wreck of a man, unshaven and mumbling something foul about Kosuke Fukudome and a punchless Alfonzo Soriano talking about being built for a marathon, not a sprint. It’s this subject that has Thile, one of the three founding members of the genre-crossing/mostly bluegrass group Nickel Creek, tongue-tied and dejected. Don’t expect it to turn into the kind of luxurious and sprawling suite of songs that he organized for his new band’s latest record, Punch, an ambitious foray into dimensions of bluegrass and country that have no business being called either and that essentially is what makes the record so ambitious. For that lengthy piece of music, chopped into four movements, totaling up to nearly 43 minutes in whole, he tapped into something that was much more intimate and saddening, but ultimately something that needed to be worked out verbally and artistically. When it comes to getting one’s hopes up over a five or seven-game series during the fall nights and days when most fans have no one left to cheer for in comparison with the permanent end of a sacred promise to another person, there’s really nothing to compare.
Lieberman’s Partisan Switch: Political Resurrection or Downward Spiral? (Brett Lieberman, Oct 15, 2008, The Forward)
Lieberman’s decision to support McCain — and not just support him, but to campaign with him, and to speak at the Republican National Convention — infuriated many fellow Democrats, not to mention many Jews, who were elated just eight years ago when Lieberman became the first Jew on a major political party’s presidential ticket.
Patio Man Revisited (DAVID BROOKS, 10/21/08, NY Times)
On one level, the changes are surprisingly modest. There have been no big changes in how Americans describe their political philosophies. Somewhere between 40 percent and 49 percent still call themselves conservative, and about half as many call themselves liberal. Distrust of government is still high. Ronald Brownstein of the National Journal compared today’s poll results, group by group, with past election results. Especially for those over 30, the stability of the preferences is more striking than the changes.But deeper down, there are some shifts in values. Americans, including suburban Americans, are less socially conservative. They are more aware of the gap between rich and poor. They are more open to government action to reduce poverty.
But, most of all, there is a tropism toward order and stability.
Some liberals think they are headed for an age of liberal dominance and government expansion. “If Obama offers a big, budget-busting program next year, it will more likely be seen as fair than irresponsible,” Jonathan Alter writes in Newsweek.
But the shift in public opinion is not from right to left, or from anti-government to pro-government, it’s from risk to caution, from disorder to consolidation.
There is a deep current of bourgeois culture running through American suburbia. It is not right wing, but it is conservative: a distrust of those far away; a belief in convention and respectability; and a strong reaction against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order.
Costco selling Starbucks gift cards at 20% off (Nancy Luna, 10/21/08, OC Register)
Costco, known for offering deals on top brands, is now selling Starbucks gift cards at a 20 percent markdown.For the first-time ever, Costco is selling five, $20 gift cards for $79.99.
Is McCain Coming Back? (Chris Cillizza, 10/21/08, Washington Post: The Fix)
Don't trust the McCain internal poll numbers? Look to a series of tracking surveys over the last week, the campaign argues.Among the surveys they cite:
• An Oct. 19 Gallup tracking poll that shows Obama leading McCain 49 percent to 46 percent according to a "traditional likely voter model" it has employed for past elections which, Gallup's Web site explains, "factors in prior voting behavior as well as current voting intention." It's worth noting that among registered voters in the Gallup survey, Obama held a 10-point edge, and in the other (broader) likely voter model presented by Gallup the Illinois senator led 51 percent to 44 percent.
• A Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby tracking poll that on Oct. 11 showed Obama ahead 49 percent to 43 percent and, one week later, had Obama's lead at narrower 48 percent to 45 percent. Zogby, a favorite of Matt Drudge, is looked at somewhat more skeptically by some within the polling establishment.
• A poll jointly conducted by Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, and Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, for George Washington University that had Obama at 49 percent and McCain at 45 percent. That survey was in the field Oct. 12 to Oct. 16, however, meaning that only one day of polling for it was conducted after the Oct. 15 debate at Hofstra University.
Spotted: Mark Foley < (Wilshire and Washington, 10/20/08, Variety)
I got an excited phone call yesterday from two friends, TV producer Richard Ayoub and talent manager Dolores Cantu, who were having lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Sitting the next table over was Foley, who resigned just before the midterms after the revelation that he sent inappropriate e-mail messages to a congressional page.Ayounb and Cantu didn't know immediately recognize him until he told them he had once been in Congress. [...]
What they both said was how great Foley looked, and he was particularly excited about Colin Powell's endorsement that morning of Obama. Foley said he also favors Obama.
Searching for Robert Johnson: In the seven decades since his mysterious death, bluesman Robert Johnson’s legend has grown—the tragically short life, the “crossroads” tale of supernatural talent, the genuine gift that inspired Dylan, Clapton, and other greats—but his image remains elusive: only two photos of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. In 2005, on eBay, guitar maven Zeke Schein thought he’d found a third. Schein’s quest to authenticate the picture only led to more questions, both about Johnson himself and about who controls his valuable legacy. (Frank DiGiacomo, November 2008, Vanity Fair)
As he pored over the mass of texts and thumbnail photos that the eBay search engine had pulled up on that day in 2005, one strangely worded listing caught Schein’s eye. It read, “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B. King???” He clicked on the link, then took in the sepia-toned image that opened on his monitor. Two young black men stared back at Schein from what seemed to be another time. They stood against a plain backdrop wearing snazzy suits, hats, and self-conscious smiles. The man on the left held a guitar stiffly against his lean frame.Neither man looked like B. B. King, but as Schein studied the figure with the guitar, noticing in particular the extraordinary length of his fingers and the way his left eye seemed narrower and out of sync with his right, it occurred to him that he had stumbled across something significant and rare.
If there was one thing that Schein was as passionate about as guitars, it was the blues, particularly the Delta blues, that acoustic, guitar-driven form of country blues that started in the Mississippi Delta and thrived on records from the late 1920s to almost 1940. Not long after he’d begun working at Matt Umanov, Schein’s customers and co-workers had turned him on to this powerful music form, and, once hooked, he had studied the genre—its music and its history—with the same obsessive attention to detail that he brought to his work. And the longer Schein looked at the photograph on his computer monitor, the more convinced he became that it depicted one of the most mysterious and mythologized blues artists produced by the Delta: the guitarist, singer, and songwriter whom Eric Clapton once anointed “the most important blues musician who ever lived.”
That’s not B. B. King, Schein said to himself. Because it’s Robert Johnson. [...]
The story of Robert Johnson is usually presented as a Faustian bargain, but it is really a tale of possession. Johnson was the product of an affair his mother, Julia Dodds, had with a plantation worker. Johnson had unusually long fingers and a bad left eye (that has been attributed to a cataract), and by the time he had recorded his canon, he had earned the right to sing and play the blues.
His youth was spent moving between homes in Memphis and Robinsonville, Mississippi, 30 miles south of Memphis, where he lived with his mother and her second husband on a plantation. There he was known for his interest in guitar and his reluctance to work the fields.
It was in the aftermath of his wife’s and child’s deaths—Johnson was approximately 19 at the time—that his musical education is believed to have begun in earnest. In 1930 the ferocious blues singer Son House had moved to Robinsonville to begin a fruitful musical partnership with the guitar ace Willie Brown, and Johnson became a regular presence at their performances, although the two elder bluesmen perceived him as a nuisance. House’s recollection of Johnson—as told to folklorist Julius Lester in 1965—was of a “little boy” who would commandeer either his or Brown’s guitar during their breaks and irritate the audience with his marginal skills. Perhaps Johnson sensed, too, that he was not ready for the stage, because around this time he moved back to the Hazlehurst area, his birthplace, where he began an apprenticeship with a blues guitarist named Ike Zimmerman (the spelling of his name is disputed) which would transform Johnson into the virtuoso he is known as today.
That Robert Johnson is remembered as a guitarist who could play almost any song after hearing it just once on the radio; a singer whose repertoire, like those of most itinerant bluesmen, included numbers made famous by Bing Crosby, Irish standards, and even polkas, in addition to his own songs; a performer whose travels took him as far north as New York City and even Canada in search of an audience; and an artist who could move an audience to tears and then disappear into the crowd as if he had never played at all.
Clearly, Johnson was a man of some ambition, and in November of 1936 he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, for the first of two recording sessions for the American Record Corporation. Once in the makeshift studio, he played facing a corner, with his back to the technicians and other musicians who had come to record, a move that has been variously interpreted as shyness, an attempt to prevent other guitarists from seeing his unusual playing style, or a street-savvy technique for getting the most sound out of his acoustic guitar. Whatever the case, Johnson recorded approximately 16 songs over three days, most of them in two or three takes. One of those tunes, “Terraplane Blues,” a double-entendre-laden number, was issued as a 78-r.p.m. single on the Vocalion label and became a modest regional hit, selling approximately 5,000 copies. As a result, Johnson was invited back to Texas, this time, in June 1937, to Dallas, where he recorded another 13 tracks, but no more hits.
A little more than a year later, Johnson would be dead—and probably destined for obscurity had his music not already gotten the attention of a record producer who would exert a huge impact on popular music in the 20th century. By the time John H. Hammond Jr. came across Johnson’s records, he had persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band, discovered a young Billie Holiday in Harlem, and recorded Count Basie, but he was just getting started. As a talent scout for Columbia Records in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Hammond would discover Aretha Franklin and sign Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan to the label.
Hammond’s role in Johnson’s legacy is pivotal. He first championed Johnson in print in 1937 when, writing under a pseudonym for the left-wing publication New Masses, he asserted that “Johnson makes Leadbelly look like an accomplished poseur.” Then, in 1938, Hammond sought to feature Johnson in a concert he was producing at Carnegie Hall that December called “From Spirituals to Swing.” He sent an emissary into the South to track down Johnson and bring him back to New York. But as the day of the show approached, Hammond learned that Johnson was dead—possibly murdered. On the night of the concert, Big Bill Broonzy took Johnson’s place, but Hammond memorialized the late Delta artist by playing two recordings of his songs for the Carnegie Hall audience.
More than 20 years later, Hammond would expose Johnson’s music to a whole new generation of listeners. Columbia now controlled Johnson’s recordings, and in 1961, Hammond oversaw the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers, the first album-length collection of Johnson’s music, which helped spark a blues revival in America. According to the album’s producer, Frank Driggs, it sold approximately 10,000 copies upon its initial release—impressive for an obscure, dead, vernacular performer.
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Moving from Christian to Muslim democracy (JAN-WERNER MUELLER, 10/20/08, Japan Times)
While Christian democracy got nowhere politically between the world wars, momentous changes were initiated in Catholic thought. In particular, the French Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain developed arguments as to why Christians should embrace democracy and human rights.During the 1920s, Maritain was close to the far-right Action Francaise, but the pope condemned the movement in 1926 for essentially being a group of faithless Catholics more interested in authoritarian nationalism than Christianity. Maritain accepted the pope's verdict and began a remarkable ideological journey toward democracy.
He criticized France's attempts to appear as a modern crusader, incurring the wrath of Catholics in the United States in particular. More importantly, he began to recast some of Aristotle's teachings and medieval natural law doctrines to arrive at a conception of human rights. He also drew on the philosophy of "personalism" — which was highly fashionable in the 1930s as it sought a middle way between individualist liberalism and communitarian socialism — and insisted that people had a spiritual dimension that materialistic liberalism supposedly failed to acknowledge.
After the fall of France, Maritain decided to remain in the U.S., where he happened to find himself after a lecture tour (the Gestapo searched his house outside Paris in vain). He authored pamphlets on the reconciliation of Christianity and democracy, which Allied bombers dropped over Europe, and he never tired of stressing that the Christian origins of America's flourishing democracy had influenced him.
Maritain also insisted that Christians, while they should take into account religious precepts, had to act as citizens first. Acceptance of pluralism and tolerance were central to his vision and he forbade one-to-one translation of religion into political life. He was rather skeptical of exclusively Christian parties.
Maritain participated in the drafting of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, and the Second Vatican Council eventually approved many of the ideas that he had been propounding since the 1930s. He also influenced the Christian Democratic parties that governed after 1945 in Germany, Italy, the Benelux countries and, to a lesser extent, France, and which consolidated not only democracy but also built strong welfare states in line with Catholic social doctrine. By the 1970s, the parties even began to stress that one didn't have to be a believer to join.
Maritain's example disproves the claim that the analogy between Christian and Muslim democracy fails.
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Hamastan Is Here to Stay (David Bedein, October 22, 2008, FrontPageMagazine.com)
Since taking over the Gaza Strip in June 2007, Hamas has ruled the territory like a personal kingdom, bolstering its own authority, ruthlessly crushing its opposition, and generally undermining the notion that Palestinians are ready to inherit a single, unified state alongside Israel. According to a September report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based think tank, none of these factors are likely change any time soon.Warning that “in Gaza, new realities are taking hold,” the ICG report, titled “Round Two in Gaza,” concluded that “reversing the drift toward greater Palestinian separation, both political and geographic, will be a difficult and, at this point, almost hopeless task.” Because Hamas has spent the past few years consolidating its rule, moreover, there is little reason to believe that the terror group will be dislodged from the Gaza Strip.
Party Like It's 1964 (Richard Cohen, October 21, 2008, Washington Post)
A column, like a good movie, should have an arc -- start here, end there and somehow connect the two points. So this column will begin with the speech Condi Rice made to the Republican National Convention in 2000 in praise of George W. Bush and end with Colin Powell's appearance Sunday on "Meet the Press" in praise of Barack Obama. Between the first and the second lie the ruins of the GOP, a party gone very, very wrong.
Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 election landslide, big Democratic gains in Congress, and the subsequent flood of liberal legislation flowing from Washington persuaded many observers that the Republican Party was nearly defunct. At best, they reasoned, it would take years for the GOP to reconstitute itself and regain relevance in the American system.Two years later, Republicans were revivified and on the brink of an era of increasing political success, including near-domination of presidential elections that Democrats have occasionally overcome but have not yet ended four decades later.
It is understandable that voters might want to hit the pause button after a presidency as revolutionary and event-filled as George W. Bush's, the trick for the Left is grasping that pause isn't reverse. Color us skeptical that they can learn that lesson in the absence of yet another electoral drubbing in 2010 and a one term ride on the unicorn.
The Terror and Attraction of Science, Put to Song (DENNIS OVERBYE, 10/21/08, NY Times)
The tug of war between beauty and horror is the theme of “Doctor Atomic,” the opera by John Adams and Peter Sellars about the building of the atomic bomb, which opened last week at the Metropolitan Opera. It stars Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant philosopher-king of the secret society of scientists and engineers who were plucked from academia and assembled on a New Mexico mesa during World War II and told to make a bomb before the Germans did — a man as sung by Mr. Finley equally in love with the Bomb and his own inscrutability.The opera follows events on two nights — one in June and then on the eve of July 16 during the countdown to the first test explosion at Alamogordo amid lightning and rain — as the scientists wrestle with doubts about whether “the Gadget,” as they refer to the bomb, will work, or work too well, setting the atmosphere on fire, and whether it should be dropped on humans.
As a love-starved Kitty Oppenheimer, sung by Sasha Cooke, sings, “Those who most long for peace now pour their lives on war.”
“Doctor Atomic” was surely born on the dark side of science mythology. Pam Rosenberg, then director of the San Francisco Opera, wanted to do an opera about an American Faust, namely Oppenheimer, whose life certainly seemed to follow a tragic trajectory. Wealthy, articulate and effortlessly fluent in far-flung domains of learning and culture, he was the young American prince of the new science of quantum mechanics as well as a bohemian and a pal of communists (his brother Frank and his ex-lover Jean Tatlock). Less than a decade after he was hailed as the deliverer of Promethean fire and the symbol of American science, Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance and banished from government circles.
But whether this story really ends badly depends on your point of view. Oppenheimer, who resisted building the hydrogen bomb, lived out his life hobnobbing with geniuses at the Institute for Advanced Study, living in a house full of Van Goghs in Princeton, sailing in St. Johns and wearing custom-made suits.
Yes, the bomb worked. Yes, it was dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite the qualms of some of the scientists who had helped build it, killing hundreds of thousands. Yes, the war ended abruptly after that, sparing everybody an Iwo Jima-style invasion of Japan, but historians and scientists still argue about whether bombing those cities was necessary.
No, the bombs have not been used since, except to terrify us.
MORE:
False Dawn: The Met’s take on John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic.” (Alex Ross, 10/27/08, The New Yorker)
I first heard John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”—an opera set in the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear test, on July 16, 1945—while driving toward the patch of New Mexico desert where the detonation took place. In the course of chronicling the first production of “Atomic,” at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, I had arranged to visit the Trinity site, and brought with me the composer’s computer realization of his score. An eerie trip ensued. Even as the hot gleam of the highway gave way to desolate roads and fenced-off military zones, Adams’s characteristic musical gestures—the rich-hued harmonies and bopping rhythms that have made repertory items of “Harmonielehre,” “Nixon in China,” and “Short Ride in a Fast Machine”—disintegrated into broken clockwork rhythms, acid harmonies, and electronic noise.Rehearsals for the première revealed “Atomic” to be not only an ominous score but also an uncommonly beautiful one. Scene after scene glows with strange energy. There is an inexplicably lovely choral ode to the bomb’s thirty-two-pointed explosive shell, with unison female voices floating above lush string-and-wind chords and glitterings of chimes and celesta. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the atomic project, and Kitty, his brilliant, alcoholic wife, sing sumptuous duets over an orchestra steeped in the decadent glamour of Wagner and Debussy. Oppenheimer’s central aria, a setting of the John Donne sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” has a stark Renaissance eloquence, its melody a single taut wire. The night of the countdown is taken up with a hallucinatory sequence of convulsive choruses, lurching dances, and truncated lyric flights. After the first run-through with singers and orchestra, it seemed clear that “Doctor Atomic” was Adams’s most formidable achievement to date.
Staging the opera, though, has proved a challenge.
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Obama is playing with fire on trade (ANDRES OPPENHEIMER, October 21, 2008, THE MIAMI HERALD)
If Obama is a closet protectionist, as the McCain camp claims, that would entail huge risks for the global economy.The Great Depression of the 1930s was sparked by a 1929 stock market collapse, but really turned into a global depression after the United States passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act on June 17, 1930, which raised U.S. customs duties for imports by up to 50 percent.
The tariff increases were aimed at helping domestic companies and generating jobs at home. Instead, other countries responded in kind, international trade plummeted by 33 percent over the next three years, U.S. exports collapsed and U.S. unemployment rose at record levels.
The lesson is clear: Adopting protectionist measures in a recession is playing with fire, McCain supporters (and many Obama fans, too) say.
My opinion: I don't think Obama is a protectionist. The two times I interviewed him, he almost jumped from his seat when I asked him if he's anti-free trade. Like Bill Clinton before him, he would most likely switch to a more pro free-trade stance once in office.
What worries me is whether Obama would have the guts to go against the growing protectionist mood in the country at a time when America needs to open new export markets more than ever. A new Zogby poll shows that 59 percent of Americans support either revising or withdrawing from NAFTA.
And I wonder whether Obama would spend his political capital trying to persuade a Democratic-controlled Congress to support free trade.
Qantas brings Airbus A380 to LAX: The world's largest jet arrives from Australia with about 450 people aboard. A380 flights are expected to provide an economic boost to the region. (Peter Pae, October 21, 2008, LA Times)
The world's largest airliner landed at Los Angeles International Airport on Monday with about 450 people aboard, kicking off Southern California's first A380 passenger service and providing a welcome economic boost for the slumping airport. [...]The Qantas flights also will provide a boost to LAX, which is seeing flights dwindle as airlines slash service amid high fuel costs and low demand.
Total weekly departures at LAX are expected to fall nearly 20% in November compared with a year earlier. The deepest cuts have come from U.S. carriers such as United Airlines and Delta Air Lines.
But foreign carriers are mitigating some of the falloff. Next week, Emirates Airlines is scheduled to begin nonstop service from LAX to Dubai, and carriers based in South Korea are likely to increase flights to LAX after President Bush last week approved a visa waiver program for that country.
Under the program, which had been mostly confined to Western European allies, South Korean visitors will no longer need a visa if they stay in the U.S. for less than 90 days. It is intended to boost travel by friends and family of South Korean immigrants in the region, which has the largest concentration of South Koreans outside of the Asian country.
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