Umberto Giordano’s Music of Irony

It is difficult to imagine any narrative of the French Revolution that would be void of irony. Indeed, I have to admire Simon Schama’s restraint. In his 900-page Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, he seems to have resisted the urge to paraphrase Winston Churchill and declare that the whole story of the French Revolution comes down to one damned irony after another. It is therefore no surprise that irony is rife throughout the libretto that Luigi Illica prepared for Umberto Giordano’s opera Andrea Chénier. Watching the San Francisco Opera (SFO) production of this opera for the second time this afternoon, I could not help but marvel at the barrage of ironies that unfold over the course of the opera’s four acts. Indeed, Illica even went so far as to have Carlo Gérard (the servant who rises to political power after the Revolution) quote the journalist (and Royalist sympathizer) Jacques Mallet du Pan with the phrase that, in the spirit of Saturn, “the Revolution devours its children.”

This afternoon, however, I had the advantage of a seat that afforded an excellent view of both the SFO Orchestra and its conductor, Music Director Nicola Luisotti. I tend to be consistently impressed with the effectiveness of the chemistry that Luisotti establishes with the vocalists up on the stage. It is one thing to make sure that the musicians capture all of the rhetorical turns that support the narrative, even when the narrative is at its most preposterous (which it is not in this particular opera). Aligning the expressiveness of the musicians with that of the vocalists is quite another matter, particular when those vocalists also have to be taking marching orders from the stage director.

However, in this particular opera, one would be justified in asking whether or not Giordano appreciated just how much irony was in Illica’s text; and, if he did, what did he do about it? After this afternoon’s performance, I concluded that, for the most part, Giordano was busy frying other fish, meaning that he was willing to cede almost all conveyance of irony solely to the words. Nevertheless, there is at least one moment in which Giordano seems to have reinforced the irony established by the text. It concerns the spy known only as “The Incredible,” the sort of character that would provide the perfect model for a librettist committed to working on an opera about Joseph Stalin in which Lavrentiy Beria (Chief of the NKVD) would be one of the characters. There is an episode in which The Incredible (sung by tenor Joel Sorensen) explains to Gérard (baritone George Gagnidze) that Chénier (tenor Yonghoon Lee) can be used as “bait” to attract Maddalena di Coigny (soprano Anna Pirozzi), whom Gérard has loved since he was a servant in her mother’s château. This is the closest The Incredible comes to an extended aria; and it is a delicate little ditty (absent of all sinister intent) that bears a “family resemblance” to the gavotte danced at that château during the first act (which is interrupted by a chorus of starving peasants). In other words The Incredible’s aria has strong connotations of what-goes-around-comes-around; and capturing those connotations is music suggests that Giordano’s one attempt at irony succeeded admirably. Sadly, Stage Director David McVicar decided that the memory of the gavotte needed to be reinforced by having The Incredible prance around while singing. Fortunately, the music retained its sense of irony in spite of any visual interference!

Blinded by Rose-Colored Glasses

Last night Jason Hiner filed a story on ZDNet that served up enough Kool-Aid to last the entire month. His title was "When robots eliminate jobs, humans will find better things to do;" I suppose the best way to describe it is that excessive focus on work as little more than a schedule of tasks has led to a complete disregard of the many roles that the workers play, regardless of the area in which they are earning a living (or trying to do so). Probably because his own reading never extends beyond the Web pages of ZDNet, there are clear signs that he has never read any analyses about the role that work, simply as an activity, plays is establishing human well-being.

On the other hand, it is hard to pick up a newspaper these days and avoid reports of a rise in sociopathic behavior that can be traced back to not only desperate economic straits but an absence of both gainful and meaningful employment for those hit hardest by that economic meltdown we continue to bowdlerize as a "recession." Without flaunting a bias for rhyme, I would suggest that, rather than an economic recovery, we have entered an "Age of Rage." That rage found an ironic means of expression recently when a robot deployed on a project of hitchhiking across the United States was assaulted, meaning that most of the structure was trashed and the head was removed. (Think of the conclusion of Easy Rider happening shortly into the first reel.) According to Trent Moore's account on blastr this morning, the perpetrators have not yet been found. Once they are identified, I suggest that Hiner have a meeting with them in a small room with the doors locked!

An Unfortunate Acronym

Does the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which Al Jazeera describes as the "Philippine largest Muslim rebel group," realize that its acronym is also used for a phrase that devout Muslim's are likely to find profoundly offensive?

The Best and the Brightest May Not Be

Yesterday afternoon Tracy Seipel put up an article on the Web site for the San Jose Mercury News reporting that Stanford University is investigating allegations of cheating. This was apparently announced by University Provost John Etchemendy last Tuesday, but I assume that Seipel article was delayed to allow time to research conditions at other schools. Sure enough, the article also provides data points for Dartmouth College, the University of North Carolina, and Harvard University. It also includes an account of a study by a Stanford Professor of Statistics showing that between 40% and 86% of students reported having cheated while at college. Personally, I find that a rather wide window for a statistical inference; but there may still be cause to believe that something is rotten in the groves of academe.

Two Etchemendy quotes are worth considering:

In violating academic integrity, they are cheating themselves of the very core of our mission -- the process of learning and discovery -- as well as risking severe consequences.

…

But with the ease of technology and widespread sharing that is now part of a collaborative culture, students need to recognize and be reminded that it is dishonest to appropriate the work of others.

Regarding the first, I can only repeat what I have previously observed, that ours has become a culture that no longer includes the word "consequences" in its working vocabulary. As to the second, I would argue that technology has not fostered a "collaborative culture." Rather, it has fostered a culture of appropriation. This is a culture that involves little more than instant gratification for the individual. It used to be that begging, borrowing, and stealing were the alternatives to hard work in achieving such gratification. Now we can add searching with Google to the list, since the prevailing mantra seems to be that it is not stealing if you can find it on the Internet.

As a sidebar I have to say that reading Etchemendy's name tweaked some memories, but I could not bring them into focus. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to my rescue. His entry there reminded me that, with Jon Barwise (who died in 2000), he wrote the book, The Liar: An Essay in Truth and Circularity. That seems to color the current situation with just the right shade of irony.

Pardoning Alan Turing

There has been a fair amount of tongue waving over the Royal pardoning of Alan Turing for "gross indecency." Given that Turing died in 1954, it is not hard to see the absurdity in the act. On the other hand, it puts his spirit in good company, right there with Galileo, who received a retroactive pardon from the Vatican.

The Iron Lady is Stronger than Iron Man (even in death)

This morning BBC News announced that the premiere screening of Iron Man 3 would be pushed back by one day, since the scheduled premiere on Wednesday would overlap with the funeral ceremony for Margaret Thatcher.

Confused by a Homonym

I heard the news about the award for Pussy Riot before reading it. As a result my reflexes kicked in with a homonymic reading before mind had time to clarify. When I heard that the award was given through the LennonOno Grant for Peace, my initial assumption was that it came from a sympathetic Russian group who still appreciated Vladimir Lenin.

Ignoring the Social Reality of the Library Building

Zadie Smith’s “North West London Blues” says more about the role of the library building in the social world than just about any other source I have encountered. True, she is talking about a library in the relatively remote neighborhood of London in which she was raised; but she could just as easily have been writing about the libraries I used to frequent before I want off to become an undergraduate. What is important is that she appreciates the library as a social construct rather than a book repository; and, by doing so, she blows a lot of Internet mythology out of the water.

She makes her most important point about the social world of libraries near the beginning of the final section of her piece:

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. 

She then follows through on this point with a nicely elaborating paragraph:

In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep restating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’s definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three-dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

This sets her up for the final punch line:

But they are still a significant part of our social reality, the only thing left on the high street that doesn’t want either your soul or your wallet.

There is something painfully ironic about a society that seems to care only about consumerism and fundamentalist faith. It is almost as if there really is a God, who finally figured out how to get even with the flowering of the Age of Reason. (I might actually believe in a God with that kind of sense of humor, dark as it may be.) Even more ironic is that, for all we hear about benefits to science, the Internet has become the tool of choice for both religious fundamentalists and those dedicated to selling anything and everything to anyone and everyone. Ray Bradbury may not have been the first to conceive of the library as a refuge from such sinister forces, but he probably was the most artful of those trying to make the point. Now we are in a world where reading Bradbury means paying for the opportunity to do so, one way or another.

History Moves in Mysterious Ways

As one whose scope of history extends beyond the current decade, I found myself drawn to R. J. W. Evans article in the current issue of The New York Review, “In the Lost World of East Prussia.” Perhaps the best known city in East Prussia is Königsberg, which was renamed to Kaliningrad when the Soviets took over the territory after the Second World War. Königsberg’s most famous citizen is probably Immanuel Kant, who lived to the ripe old age of 79 and never ventured more than ten miles from his home town. Those who prefer mathematics to philosophy, on the other hand, know Königsberg for its configuration of seven bridges and their role in the birth of what we now call graph theory.

Evans saved recognition of this problem for the final paragraph of his article:

In 1735 the mathematician Leonhard Euler tackled the famous problem of the “Seven Bridges of Königsberg,” which crossed onto its two islands in the river Pregel (an aspect not mentioned by Egremont [the author of the book Evans was reviewing], although it mirrors his own deft interweaving of the evidence). In a theorem that initiated the study of topology and graph theory, Euler elegantly demonstrated that no route could be found whereby a walker crossed each of the bridges only once. In 1944–1945 all the bridges were destroyed. Only five have been rebuilt. Ironically, Stunde Null [“zero hour” for the Nazis] made that Eulerian path possible.

History has a reputation for the dispassionate destruction of icons. Carl Sandburg captured that objectivity best in his World War One poem “Grass” with the line:

I am the grass; I cover all.

Königsberg no longer has seven bridges, but graph theory has progressed far beyond the puzzle that inspired Euler. There is, indeed, irony behind the bombing of those two problematic bridges; but neither history nor mathematics (nor Sandburg) cares very much about that irony.

Did YouTube Change?

I had to read the report on the BBC News Web site in order to learn that YouTube (or I suppose it would be more accurate to say “Google”) had redesigned its Web site.  I also got to read the BBC account of how the change was received:

Around 17 hours after an official "Get More Into YouTube" clip explaining the move went live, 6,703 members had clicked the "dislike" button compared to 2,280 who had clicked "like".

Well, I never knew the clip existed;  and any changes I experienced seemed like minor cosmetic ones.  Why?  Because almost everything I want from YouTube I find through search, either my Firefox search bar or for a Google search where I decide to view Videos.

The BBC story also included the following sentence:

The site's owner, Google, has posted a blog saying that the new design was "focused on helping you discover a broader range of entertainment", but said there might be "further tweaks" depending on members' feedback.

Anyone who follows me either here or on Examiner.com should know by now that I really do not need “a broader range of entertainment.”  I can barely manage my current range!  My guess is that this is part of Google’s designs on taking over television viewing habits and ruling the roost with their own television service.  Given the current like-dislike vote, I would think that they may need to reexamine their long-range plans!  At least I can appreciate the irony that Google’s own search tool may be the greatest enemy of the new YouTube design.

Birthday Coincidences

You really have to wonder just what Patrick Buchanan thinks of sharing his birthday with both Kinky Friedman and Larry Flynt.

James Joyce in Real Time

For those unfamiliar with the proper noun “Bloomsday,” June 16 is the date on which the entire plot of James Joyce’s monumental novel Ulysses unfolds.  More specifically, the action begins at the dawn on June 16, 1904 and concludes around the following midnight.  With this as context, Julie Bloom’s post to the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times is worth reproducing in its entirety:

“—Warily walking went Bloom, unconquered hero. Jingle a tinkle jaunted. Not yet. At four. What is he doing at the Ormond? Let’s hear the time.” The words may not be exactly Joycean, but they’re pretty close for 140 characters. At approximately 10:45 a.m. Eastern time this entry was the latest added to @11ysses twitter account. It’s part of the marathon project, known as “Ulysses Meets Twitter 2011,” conceived by “Stephen from Baltimore,” which invited readers of “Ulysses” to retell the great, lengthy work through tweets from start to finish within the 24-hour period that the novel’s odyssey through Dublin (on June 16, 1904) takes place.

Steve is spending today making sure the story of Stephen Dedalus develops on time. In an e-mail he wrote: “My job as ringleader was to get the Cast on stage on time, and that is happening nicely so far (as long as my home wireless doesn’t give out). I still have many more hours of cut & pasting ahead of me. So my Bloomsday will be spent largely chained to this laptop.”

We’ll check back in with him Friday to see how he thought his experiment panned out, but in the meantime, take a look at @11ysses and tell us what you think of the project.

My personal feeling is that, even if the results are not entirely up to snuff, this use of a new medium to translate Joyce’s “literary real-time” into the real-time of the physical world is admirable enough to impact our thoughts about both Joyce and the characters of his novel.

Supportive as I may be of the project, however, I see once again the stamp of slovenly disregard for accuracy that is arising with disturbing frequency on New York Times pages (physical as well as virtual).  To call Ulysses “the story of Stephen Dedalus” is tantamount to calling Homer’s Odyssey “the story of Telemachus.”  The figure of Joyce’s title is Leopold Bloom (after whom today is named);  and his is the perilous journey that parallels that of Homer’s hero.  True, in both epics we encounter the son before the father;  and, in many respects the narrative line is about how their paths converge.  Nevertheless, it seems a bit ironic that this basic fact should be ignored in a report on a new approach to Bloomsday celebration, particularly coming from a writer named Bloom!

Losing What Remains of the Meaning of History

I am no fan of the History Channel.  My attitude towards it is, at best, suspect;  but, when we consider just how averse our culture has become to the very concept of history, I cannot say that I blame them for trying to reverse the course, even if their results tend to be on the slipshod side.  In this context when I first saw a Yahoo! News headline about the History Channel undertaking a Bible series, my initial reaction was to give the producers the benefit of the doubt.  (After all, Yahoo! News has pretty much knocked itself out of the running as a trusted source for what others would take to be news.)

Well, I guess the History Channel does not deserve that benefit.  According to Bill Carter’s story in this morning’s New York Times, the producer for this series will be Mark Burnett.  For those unfamiliar with the name, his previous production credits include the “reality television” series Survivor, The Apprentice, and The Voice.  In the annals of the deterioration brought on by loss of meaning, these programs will probably stand out for depriving the noun “reality” of just about all of its past semantic associations.  Now it is history’s turn to suffer similar loss of meaning.  While there may be no end of fascinating accounts of how different versions of that text document called “The Bible” came to be, the History Channel is not interested in such an explicitly historic take on that document.  According to Carter’s report, the project will be “a 10-hour series based on the stories of the Bible.”  In other words the series will present the Bible as history, rather than literature.  While this is definitely a controversial position, it is certainly consistent with those intent on maintaining a faith-based mentality.

From a literary point of view, however, the greatest shortcoming of faith may be that it does not allow for irony.  Thus, the History Channel will probably not realize that Carter’s report has them stepping on a big steaming pile of irony, perhaps even with both feet.  Having established that this series will be scripted drama, rather than a narrative based on documented historical record, Carter inserted the following sentence into his account:

History’s most recent experience with a scripted drama based on fact was “The Kennedys,” which it dropped in January, saying the mini-series did not live up to its standards of accuracy.

Is this supposed to imply that there will be “standards of accuracy” when it comes to dramatizing Bible stories?  More likely the History Channel will turn its attention from the loss of meaning of “history” to sucking the semantic life out of the phrase “standards of accuracy!”

Missing the Point

There was a really clever tax-related photograph on “The Back Page” of the Insight section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle.  It did not show up on the Web version, because the source of the photograph was The New York Times.  Ironically, neither the Chronicle caption nor the Times story seems to have grasped the significant of the photograph.  One suspects there is something tongue-in-cheek about a story from Lawrence, Kansas filed by A. G. Sulzberger;  but the basic content presented straightforwardly:

Every year, on tax day, residents of this college town gather in the lobby of a local post office for an upbeat, circus-like celebration as procrastinators rush to meet the deadline to mail off their tax returns.

As a string band played, a crowd formed a gantlet to the door, clapping and cheering to the galloping tune of the William Tell Overture for the last-minute filers.

“It makes you feel a little less guilty about not getting your taxes out until the last minute,” said Bob Dunlap, an auditor, as he made his ritual right-on-deadline filing.

Raquel Alexander, a tax professor at the University of Kansas, had her daughter drop her returns in the collection bin. “I don’t know if we’re more tax compliant than the rest of the country, but we certainly celebrate it more,” Ms. Alexander said.

Across the country, there were numerous anti-tax rallies on Monday, making this event a decided anomaly.

The tradition started 25 years ago by members of the Alferd Packer Memorial String Band, who were looking for a novel place to busk. They were encouraged by the post office workers and supported by community members who, just to add to the theater, sometimes wait to file until the last minute.

This does not really explain the cleverness factor, though.  That resides in the name under which the buskers perform.  Fortunately, they present that explanation on their own Web page with the good humor it deserves:

The Alferd Packer Memorial String Band is named after the gold prospector/guide turned cannibal Alferd Packer. Packer was the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. In the fall of 1870, five miners in Alfred's charge headed for the Colorado gold fields. They ended up in Alfred's stomach! At the conclusion of the trial, the judge's exact words were, "Alferd Packer, you voracious man-eater, there were only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you done et five of 'em."

So, is there a connection between taxation and cannibalism?  Draw your own conclusions.  However, my guess is that there is a Tea Party contingent that delights in the political persuasion of those seven victims.

Rational Government?

Elizabeth Drew had a post ready for NYRBlog almost as soon as an agreement on the budget had been reached to prevent the shutdown of the United States Government.  As usual, she did an excellent job in providing a “post-game” analysis, with both recent and historical context to put the week’s antics in their proper perspective.  I find it ironic that Donald Trump seems to have taken the closure of these follies as a cue to start testing the waters for his own run for the Presidency, and I can only imagine that Drew is warming up her fingers for her next assault on her keyboard.

Nevertheless, that irony is also a reflection of one of the key assertions in Drew’s Friday post.  Reviewing the who production of political theater over the budget, she concludes that it raises the question of “whether in the current political circumstances, this country can be governed in any rational way.”  That appeal to rationality strikes me as a bit naïve, coming from someone with so much experience in watching politicians at work.  One would have thought that Drew would have recognized Max Weber’s precept that politics is ultimately all about power and who gets to exercise how much of it.  Furthermore, issues of power are situated along the “dimension of domination” in Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, which Giddens identified as “orthogonal” (my word, not his) to the dimension of “signification,” along which we engage rational thinking to make sense of the world.  To play with words a bit, there may be a rationale behind actions taken over matters of power;  but the motives behind those actions need not necessarily be rational!

Even our Founding Fathers realized that the new country that had just emerged would not (and probably could not) be “governed in any rational way.”  This is why separation of powers and the need for checks and balances played such a significant role in the Constitution that was drafted.  It was also why “selling” those concepts was a major “selling point” in The Federalist, those papers published and circulated to encourage the ratification of that Constitution by all thirteen newly-formed states.  Even Peanuts recognized the inadequacy of rationality in the face of power.  In the words of Lucy van Pelt:

He was beginning to make sense, so I hit him.

Taxation with Representation Should be Representative

Once again, Michael Moore may have hit upon the right diagnosis,  As BBC News reported yesterday, he addressed a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, both opposing the efforts of the state government to undermine the collective bargaining rights of state employees and providing moral support to the AWOL Democrats whose absence has blocked a quorum for a State Senate vote on a measure already approved by the other house of the State Legislature.  Moore’s bon mot for the occasion was:

The rich have overplayed their hand.

Whether or not this is strictly true, it should serve to remind us about what is really at stake in all the budget battles taking place at both state and federal levels.

Let us begin by recalling that the “Tea” in “Tea Party” is actually an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already.”  There is nothing new about populist uprisings over taxation.  Were is not for such uprisings, we might now be part of the British Commonwealth.  However, it is one thing for people struggling to make ends meet to complain about being overtaxed.  It is quite another for the rich to make similar complaints, particularly that sector of the financial elite whose “nimbleness of mind” led to extraordinary levels of personal gain while fomenting an economic crisis that came close to crippling the entire industrialized world.  (That quote comes from Plato, by the way, when he makes the case that those who make our laws should be selected for the quality of their values, rather than their “nimbleness of mind.”  Unfortunately, such texts have been readily embraced by neoconservatives, whose own “quality of values” do not necessarily align with those of either Plato or their contemporary compatriots.)

“Taxed Enough Already” is not the formula that will lead to economic recovery or restore jobs to those who have given up looking for them.  Rather, we need a formula under which individuals are taxed according to the resources they have to pay them, otherwise known as a fairly graduated income tax.  (This happens to be that part of Karl Marx' "Critique of the Gotha Program" that is most consistent with the motives behind the American Revolution, the part about “From each according to his abilities.”)  The irony, of course, is that the rich will throw all sorts of lobbying money to prevent such a formula ever progressing to the point of legislation, when that money might have been better spent (for the rich, as well as for the rest of us) paying the taxes they are so desperate to avoid.  However, since this formula does not have a snappy acronym, it is unlikely to receive much attention from the media, which means that, for the American public at large, it will be kept safely “out of sight, out of mind.”

Artistic CHUTZPAH

Yes, I know it is really early in the week;  and thinking about the Chutzpah of the Week award runs the risk of being premature.  However, this one is too good to resist for a variety of reasons.  It concerns a recent decision made by Mike Leigh to decline an invitation to teach at the Sam Spiegel Film & TV School in Jerusalem.  Dave Itzkoff documented Leigh’s justification on his ArtsBeat blog for The New York Times as follows:

Mr. Leigh wrote that he “always had serious misgivings about coming,” adding that he almost canceled after an incident in May in which Israeli commandos raided a Gaza-bound flotilla. The “last straw,” Mr. Leigh wrote, was the proposal of legislation by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, requiring that Israeli citizens pledge a loyalty oath to the “nation-state of the Jewish people.”

Mr. Leigh added that these and other actions by the Israeli government had left him “in an untenable position, which I must confront according to my conscience.”

Under most circumstances this could simply be accepted as an act of conscience;  but what makes this particular episode interesting is the way in which Israeli filmmaker Renen Schorr, director of the Spiegel School, chose to respond to Leigh’s statement:

Mr. Schorr wrote to Mr. Leigh in a letter dated Oct. 15, “I am certain that the decision is sincere and that it reflects your detailed, legitimate political views,” but added, “Boycotts and ostracism are the antithesis of dialogue.”

Mr. Schorr wrote that “the public will interpret your decision as indicating an irrevocable rift between us, a boycott of Israel, and a rebuke of its current and future artists.”

“To me,” he said, “this is a red line. Thus, I cannot justify your decision.”

Schorr basically escalated Leigh’s rather simple statement of conscience into an insult that required riposte, oblivious to the extent to which this intuitive reflex to counterattack would be fraught with irony.  At the simplest level we have the “surface” reading of Schorr’s motive in his final sentence.  If Leigh was following the dictates of his own conscience, Schorr’s “justification” is at least irrelevant and at most intrusive.  However, the strongest irony lurks in that sentence about dialogue.  Schorr is perfectly correct in asserting that ostracism is antithetical to dialogue, but his own ideological blinders prevent him from recognizing the extent to which that same spirit of ostracism by Israelis continues to undermine any substantive dialogue taking place between them and Palestinians.

In other words Schorr’s primary refutation actually serves to reinforce Leigh’s conscience-based motives.  Leigh turned his rejection letter into a judo-like act of disarming his opponent through his opponent’s own weakness.  In the context of the current volatility of the Middle East, such an act may be appreciated as an act of chutzpah, even if it was not initially conceived as such,.  So, while there is always the possibility that a stronger case will arise later in the week, I am going to stick my neck out and name Leigh as the holder of this week’s Chutzpah of the Week award.

Behind the Comic Mask

I have spent enough time in New York to have a lot of respect for the 92nd Street Y.  There were times when I would attend several concerts there in the course of a single week, and that would involve taking the train down from where I lived in Stamford, Connecticut.  I knew that the stage of the Y was also a major platform for leading intellects of the world;  and my only reason for not attending those events was that my schedule was already packed to the gills with work and my interest in music.

With this as context I was more than a little curious when Jon Stewart was invited to that venue for an on-stage interview;  and I found it more than a little ironic that my curiosity was satisfied by a report filed by Georg Szalai for The Hollywood Reporter.  However, in light of how open Stewart was in talking about how he sees what he does, I suspect that this paper may have provided the most accurate and dispassionate account of his appearance.  Most important is the punch line that it is all about the satire, which was nicely captured by Szalai in a single sentence:

Asked about the real reasons for Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" at the end of October, Stewart explained that they are not a reaction to Beck specifically, but just another way to poke fun at the political process and news coverage of it.

Indeed, Stewart was more interested in ridiculing the current state of news coverage by the media than he was in taking on what they cover.  Here is how Szalai addressed this point:

But discussing what he sees as his main job, he said it is holding the media accountable. "I'm less upset about politicians than the media," he said, explaining that the former can be expected to behave a certain way, like a monkey, but the latter should play zookeeper and say "bad monkey."

This throws a new light on my own interest in Stewart's use of that noun "sanity."  First of all, when I cited Reuters for calling the rally "an apparent spoof of the recent Tea Party rally in Washington," I no longer have to accuse their establishment of using "weasel words."  It is clear that there is no need to fudge with "apparent;"  but the target of the spoof is flat-out wrong.  On the other hand my opinion that Stewart's sense of sanity was aimed primarily at our government's lack of productivity was also off the mark.  The question of sanity has more to do with both producers and consumers of news being so deluded that the Comedy Channel is often selected as the most reliable source of news.  This is a world turned on its head where the gag writers are more trusted than the policy makers.  From this point of view, it is worth noting that Stewart emphasized that fact-checking is an important part of his work, not because the Comedy Channel is committed to "journalistic integrity" but because "jokes don't work if they are lies."

Stewart thus shifted his target from Fox to his own establishment.  Doing this was certainly true to the "mission" of the Comedy Channel;  but it was also a bold act of biting the hand that feeds him.  Indeed, reducing the whole process to the question of whether or not a joke works amounts to an act of chutzpah when you are in the business of telling those jokes.  So, while the Stewart/Colbert plans for Washington might not have escalated to Chutzpah of the Week status, the approach Stewart took to disclosing his motive is more worthy.  Using the 92nd Street Y as the platform for the disclosure adds a bit of emphasis to the chutzpah, so it is a pleasure to give him the Chutzpah of the Week award for his efforts!

Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Different Approach to Nietzsche?

It would appear that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger shares at least some of my interested in reading Friedrich Nietzsche, although there seems to be a clear disagreement over both choice of sources and how they are read.  Consider this report by Marisa Lagos from the Sacramento Bureau of the San Francisco Chronicle:

Children will not have to wear helmets when they hit the ski slopes in California after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a piece of legislation Friday.

The measure by state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, would have imposed a $25 fine on parents of minors caught skiing or snowboarding without a helmet, though supporters acknowledged the rule would be unlikely to be enforced. The language of the measure mirrors bicycle helmet laws already in place.

Schwarzenegger actually signed that bill, but vetoed a companion bill that would have required ski resorts to develop and publish safety plans and submit reports to state safety officials. The veto of that measure, AB1652 by Assemblyman Dave Jones, D-Sacramento, means that Yee's bill will not go into effect.

"Many California ski resorts are located on U.S. Forest Service land, and are already required to compile and file safety and accident reports with USFS as well as maintain some of this information in the resort management office," Schwarzenegger wrote in his veto message. "Ski resorts in California also already mark their ski area boundaries and trails with appropriate information. This bill may place an unnecessary burden on resorts, without assurance of a significant reduction in ski and snowboard-related injuries and fatalities."

Yee's bill, SB880, was opposed by some Republicans who said it amounts to "nanny government" and infringes on parents' rights.

But Yee - a child psychologist - argued that ski resorts are one of the only places of recreation where safety standards are absent, and said that the measure would significantly reduce traumatic brain injuries and deaths.

On the surface it would appear that our Governor cannot tell the difference between compiling and filing safety and accident reports and taking active measures to enforce safety regulations.  However, if he is capitulating to Republican aversion to "nanny government," then, in this case at least, it may reflect a deeper philosophical position, which is where Nietzsche enters the picture.

Where I have been more interested in the implications of Thus Spoke Zarathustra on such matters as political behavior and economic assistance, Schwarzenegger seems more interested in the wisdom of Twilight of the Idols, specifically as it is expressed in Section 8 of the "Maxims and Arrows" section:

Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

In other words the ski slopes are just one of the classrooms of "life's school of war;"  and, having all but decimated the institutionalized classrooms in California's education system, our Governor would have kids seek classrooms in other venues.  Unfortunately, Schwarzenegger seems to have leapt over Nietzsche's preface on the way to this proposition, specifically the sentence:

Nothing succeeds if prankishness [Übermut] has no part in it.

One cannot read anything that follows the preface without accepting this premise (which may be one reason that Dennis Miller liked to draw upon that "school of war" for his monologues);  but, if in this particularly legislative decision the Governor has decided to assume his "Terminator persona," then there is clearly no room for Übermut in his reasoning.  The result is that "life's school of war" may assume a more serious role in State educational policy than either the goals or the needs of our public education system.  As Kurt Vonnegut would have said, "So it goes."

Shared CHUTZPAH over Nuclear Proliferation

Following up on my argument that you can no longer find an adequate American source of hard news, I just found a story on Al Jazeera English, which, while based entirely on wire sources, does not appear to have surfaced anywhere else.  One does not have to read far to discover why the usual mainstream American sources were not interested in distributing the content:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, has rejected an Arab-proposed resolution calling on Israel to join a global anti-atomic arms treaty.

The general assembly of the 151-member IAEA blocked the resolution at its meeting in Vienna on Friday. Fifty-one member states voted against the resolution while 46 voted in favour and 23 abstained.

Israel had warned the UN nuclear watchdog that an Arab-led push to target the Jewish state in a resolution could deal a "fatal blow" to future co-operation on boosting Middle East security.

"Adopting this resolution will be a fatal blow to any hope for future co-operative efforts towards better regional security in the Middle East," Ehud Azoulay, Israel's IAEA envoy said, shortly before the vote.

Indeed, when you read a bit further, you discover that there is an American dog in this hunt:

The United States had urged Arab states to withdraw the non-binding resolution, saying it could derail broader efforts to ban such arms in the Middle East and also send a negative signal to the relaunched Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

So here we are:  The United States can be as vocal and activist as it chooses when it comes to an Arab-based resolution on nuclear nonproliferation, but it will hold its diplomatic tongue when it comes to Israel building settlements and talking about redefining borders to accommodate those settlements.  This is beyond those "petty thoughts" that Friedrich Nietzsche declared to be worse than "evil deeds."  This is the raw and unadulterated chutzpah of intimidation, which, like many acts of chutzpah succeeds in spite of (or because of?) its very speciousness.  That a questionable position assumed jointly by Israel and the United States would be enough to defeat such a critical vote by such a reputable world body is more than adequate grounds for Israel and United State to share this week's Chutzpah of the Week award.