"Toto, Do We Want to Live in Kansas Any More?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/opinion/kansas-anti-trans-laws-drivers-license.html

Nationalism: Here and in the Middle East

Some “unkempt thoughts” departing from music:

It was in high school that I first encountered the concept of “nationalism.” My American History teacher distilled it to a single sentence: “My country, right or wrong; but always my country.” I used to think back on those days during the Watergate hearings, wondering if my teacher’s commitment to nationalism was as strong as it was a few decades earlier.

I was reminded about that myopic commitment this morning when I encountered the following headline on a BBC Web page: “Biden says ICC war crimes arrest warrant 'outrageous’.” Apparently, our President’s “right or wrong” commitment to Israel is as strong his commitment to his own country. As the BBC article observes, that commitment isolates our country not only from the International Criminal Court (ICC) but also from a fair number of European countries.

My first job after leaving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with my doctoral degree took me to the Technion in Haifa, whose “secondary” name was “Israel Institute of Technology.” From an academic point of view, it was a smooth move; and I had no trouble preparing material for the classes I taught. (My knowledge of Hebrew never came up to snuff, but none of my students minded my lecturing in English while my teaching assistants provided hand-outs in Hebrew!) Nevertheless, my encounters with both Israelis and ex-pats, not only in Haifa but also in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, were, to put it politely, “mixed.”

The fact is that, even before borders were finalized, Israel would do what Israel wanted to do. Mind you, this a time when (too) many Americans stereotyped Arabs as terrorists, even if they could not support their bias with evidence. Since my own efforts to promote a more balanced view tended to provoke most of the Israelis I worked with and knew socially, I kept my ideas to myself for the two years of my tenure with Technion.

My second job was at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was only then that I bought my first television and started to watch the news, rather than just reading the papers. During the last few decades of the last century, Benjamin Netanyahu was already ingratiating himself with the broadcast media in the United States. Whenever a conflict was being reported from the Middle East, he always seemed to be there to offer his perspective. The American newscasters never seemed to mind whether or not that perspective was consistent with that of Israel itself.

As a result, I am now not surprised that, when I hear Netanyahu, I have no trouble wondering if he is speaking for himself or for his country. Unfortunately, it seems that our President is not given to such wondering. It’s bad enough when an allegiance to nationalism blinds us to hard truths about our own country. However, when it also blinds us to hard truths presented by the ICC, I have to worry about whether we shall ever be capable of a broader perspective that will afford a less pleasant point of view.

Jon Jang Presents Final Shenson Faculty Concert

Last night at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, the Community Music Center (CMC) presented the last of its four free concerts. (The venue was selected because the CMC Mission Branch is currently undergoing alterations.) When this series was announced at the end of last June, the final offering was described as a program entitled Civil Wrongs: Music about Black American & Japanese American Incarceration, performed by Chinese-American composer and pianist Jon Jang. Fortunately, any intimations of agitprop were, for the most part, casually dismissed in favor of a performance that was almost entirely about the music.

Furthermore, for most of the evening, Jang did not perform as a soloist. Instead, he led a jazz quartet, whose other members were Erika Oba on flute with rhythm provided by Gary Brown on bass and percussionist Deszon Claiborne. In that setting Jang kept his politics to a relative minimum, acknowledged primarily by a performance of his composition “Reparations Now 1987.”

On the other hand he opened the evening with a medley of tunes by Charles Mingus, beginning with “Meditations on Integration.” My knowledge of the Mingus book is not as thorough as I would like it to be. As a result, I am not sure how many other tunes were in the set. The one that certainly registered with me was “Fables of Faubus,” also listed as “Original Faubus Fables” on the Candid recording. I suspect that Jang is a bit too young to have been around Arkansas in the late Fifties; but that was a time when Governor Orval Faubus was as much a factor in “civil wrongs” as were the incarcerations that took place during World War II.

Jang wrapped up the evening with his one solo performance. He selected “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which Richard Rogers composed for the musical Carousel. Once he moved from the tune to improvisation, he played out a thoroughly engaging deconstruction of one of the most familiar tunes in the American Song Book. It almost seemed as if he saw “Broadway optimism” as an attempt to sugar-coat a “social order” that had no trouble dismissing communities of Blacks and Japanese as non-PLU (people like us). To his credit, Jang never lapsed into soapbox rhetoric; but he certainly knew how to harness his music to express his opinions.

M. Lamar’s Spirituals for Our Time

Late yesterday afternoon I decided to take my own advice and view the PROTOTYPE streaming of M. Lamar’s “Funeral Doom Spiritual.” PROTOTYPE calls this series of free streams Opera | Theatre | X. “Funeral Doom Spiritual” was more of a song cycle than an opera with male soprano Lamar providing his own piano accompaniment. “Doom Spiritual” is a phrase that Lamar himself coined. It amounts to a more contemporary genre of Negro Spirituals with apocalyptic connotations.

The assimilation of musical performance and video projection in “Funeral Doom Spiritual” (screen shot courtesy of PROTOTYPE)

Those connotations were realized through a rich context of accompanying video. On the basis of the overall camera work, these videos appear to have been projected on either side (in front or behind) the performers; but, in the streamed version, they were assimilated into an overall viewing experience alternating between the world of the projected images and the world of the concert hall. In addition to Lamar, the performers consisted of a violinist, a cellist, two bassists, and electronics provided by composer Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. All of these musicians were hooded with black robes, suggesting connotations of both the Spanish Inquisition and the Ku Klux Klan.

It would be fair to say that Lamar’s sense of apocalypse is tightly coupled to the many events of recent years that have made it clear that, for all of the progress made in civil rights movements, race-based segregation is back on the rise. The prevailing images are those of a Negro in his coffin and another Negro carrying the coffin on his own back without any assistance from others. (Possibly both of these roles were taken by Lamar himself. Also, it is worth noting that, in the advance material I received, Lamar seems to prefer “Negro” to “African American.”) Presumably, this is a journey to a graveyard; but, within the scope of “Funeral Doom Spiritual,” that journey is never completed. This may have been a contemporary reflection of early Civil Rights songs, which also talked about the “journey to freedom” with little, if any, indication of that journey arriving at a conclusion.

However, “Funeral Doom Spiritual” is structured around a narrative that is more enigmatic than the narratives of any of those Civil Rights songs. Indeed, given that this is an entirely different genre of music (not to mention theater), the overall sense seems to be one of an enigma far too challenging to be resolved. Even the fact than much of Lamar’s vocal work comes across as idiomatic phrases repeated too many times seems to suggest that resolving that enigma is going to require more than merely groping at possible solutions. Thus, if the listener/viewer begins to feel some strain from an excess of repetition in both what is heard and what is seen, this may simply be a matter of reflecting the sense of helplessness arising from the current retrogression of attitudes towards civil rights.

PROTOTYPE to Stream Musical Monodrama

Yesterday morning PROTOTYPE once again announced its latest free digital stream in its Opera | Theatre | X series. The Web page for this live-stream has already been created. Viewing will be available at no charge for one showing only. No registration will be required.

M. Lamar at the piano and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix controlling the electronic from his computer (screen shot courtesy of PROTOTYPE)

The work to be presented will be “Funeral Doom Spiritual,” a song composed by male soprano M. Lamar, who will provide his own piano accompaniment. He composed the score working with Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, who also provided both electronics and arrangements for strings. Additional arrangements have been prepared by James Ilgenfritz and the Anagram Ensemble. The libretto is also the product of a partnership, this time Lamar working with Tucker Culbertson. The entire production will be staged as a monodrama, coordinated by Tori Sheehan.

Lamar describes his work as “a song of mourning for what Anthony Paul Farley calls ‘the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation, and neo-segregation.’” The music draws on themes of apocalypse, end times, and rapture found in Negro Spirituals, what Lamar calls “Doom Spirituals.” The libretto explores radical historical expressions and futuristic longings for destruction of the white supremacist world order. Voice and piano are accompanied by two basses, two contrabasses, and electronics, enveloped in immersive light and video.

This performance will begin at 4:30 p.m. (Pacific time) tomorrow, Thursday, August 19, streamed by Vimeo at no charge through the aforementioned Web page.

“Strange Fruit” for Our Times from Koh and Tines

This past Friday Voices of Hope presented a new music film conceived to distill the history of Asian American oppression and highlight the untold story of solidarity between Asian Americans and the Black community. The film has been uploaded to YouTube, where it will be available for viewing through this coming May 31. The music is provided by the duo of violinist Jennifer Koh and operatic bass-baritone Davoné Tines with electronics provided by Berkeley-based composer Ken Ueno.

The score for the film is basically an arrangement of the song “Strange Fruit,” first recorded by Billie Holiday for the Commodore label on April 20, 1939. Ueno composed the arrangement, preceding it with a solo violin introduction. The lyrics were taken from a poem by Abel Meeropol that provided an uncompromising depiction of the lynching of Black Americans. The poem was published under Meeropol’s pseudonym, Lewis Allan. He then worked with his wife, Laura Duncan, to compose music for his text, which Holiday then recorded (with Commodore crediting the song to Allan).

The visual content of the film was conceived by dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm. It is definitely not for the faint of heart. The images basically interleave photographs of the lynchings that inspired Meeropol’s poem with both photographs and video of brutal acts of violence against Asian Americans. The sound track is limited entirely to Ueno’s score, serving to provide a context for images that could not be more blunt in speaking for themselves.

In Ueno’s setting neither Koh and Tines ever deliver a straightforward account of either the music or the words for the original “Strange Fruit” setting. To some extent Ueno’s arrangement appeals to those already familiar with Holiday’s recording. However, those lacking that familiarity will still “get the message” of the parallel between past treatment of the Black community and the current acts of violence against Asian Americans. As one with that familiarity, I have to note that I was impressed with how Tines’ delivery of Ueno’s arrangement begins with a subtle “insinuation” of Meeropol’s music, with the words becoming clearer as, more and more, they underscore the impact of the visual content.

The introduction to this film on Koh’s Facebook page notes that the “program contains graphic images that some viewers may find disturbing;” but, when it comes to putting out the word about this film, I have to side with Albert Einstein, who said about conditions in Nazi Germany, “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity.”

A Personal View of Count Basie

Count Basie at the piano accompanying vocalist Ethel Waters with his band in the 1943 film Stage Door Canteen (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

A little over a week ago KQED broadcast a repeat screening of Jeremy Marre’s 2018 documentary Count Basie: Through his own eyes, which was first broadcast on December 1, 2019. The film is a rather unique achievement, since, during his lifetime, Basie did his best to keep his “public persona” to himself. As far as he was concerned, his public should only care about the music he made; and the rest of his time he kept to himself.

That privacy was understandable, since his only child, Diane, was born with cerebral palsy. In spite of influences to turn her over for care from an institution, Basie and his wife Vivian were determined to keep her at home. They all defied physicians’ expectations in getting her to learn how to walk, after which she also learned to swim. She also outlived both of her parents.

Basie was also private about his politics. He was a strong supporter of Martin Luther King and participated in the March on Washington. However, he kept his profile low, never trying to seize the spotlight from King or the reason for the march. Marre’s film includes interviews with musicians that played for Basie, and there are plenty of anecdotes of the trials that a colored band had to endure with a concert tour that took them through southern states.

As a result, the public side of Basie was all about the music. He was more interested in maintaining good work relations with everyone in his band, rather than cultivating the sort of public persona that one encountered in, for example, Duke Ellington. Ultimately, Basie’s largest audiences were probably those that traveled to Las Vegas to listen to Frank Sinatra sing. Basie had no trouble letting Sinatra take the spotlight, but Basie was still the one with the last word on arrangements.

That said, there is no shortage of music and footage of the Basie band in Marre’s film. However, the music is there to supplement our appreciation of not only Basie the family man and Basie the leader of a band but also Basie the father in a colored family that, in the interest of his profession, would suppress his personal feelings about racism in the interest of providing gainful employment for all of his players (as well as himself).

The Theresienstadt Children’s Opera

screen shot from the video being discussed

This week (through July 12) Music of Remembrance (MOR) is presenting a streamed video of Hans Krása’s one-act children’s opera “Brundibár.” MOR is an organization with the mission of remembering the Holocaust through music with concert performances, educational programs, recordings, and commissions of new works. Krása originally composed “Brundibár” in 1938; but he took the score with him when he was interned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The opera had been written explicitly to be performed by children, and the authorities allowed Krása to teach the music to the children held at that camp. Through this medium he was able to present an allegorical tale of a town in which the children are bullied by Brundibár, who is the local organ grinder. They succeed with assistance from a dog, a cat, and a bird (all vocal roles). It would have been clear to everyone in the camp that Brundibár was basically a thinly-veiled evocation of Adolf Hitler, who was actively extending the German borders when “Brundibár” was composed.

The opera was performed 55 times at Theresienstadt. The bitter irony behind this number is that the production kept needing recasting. Theresienstadt was a “transit center,” where Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Austria were held temporarily until they were delivered to the so-called “death camps.” Those assignments involved children, as well as their parents; so, as a result, there was an ongoing need to change the cast, bringing “children coming in” to replace “children going out.”

MOR first performed “Brundibár” in 2006, using an English-language libretto written by Tony Kushner. Kushner had originally provided the text for a children’s picture book based on the opera. The illustrations were provided by Maurice Sendak, and it was recognized by the Book Review section of The New York Times as one of the best illustrated books of 2003. That same year the Chicago Opera Theater performed the opera with Kushner’s libretto and staging and set designs by Sendak.

MOR revived its 2006 performance in 2014 with the Seattle Children’s Theater. That production was captured on the video that is currently being streamed through its own Web page. This occasion was particularly distinguished since, during the final chorus, the cast was joined by Ela Stein Weissberger, who sang the original role of the cat in Theresienstadt, participating in all 55 performances at the age of eleven. (Weissberger died in 2018 at the age of 87.)

This all made for a historically significant occasion, which could not have better served MOR intentions. Sadly, that old saw about good intentions applies to the finished product. By all rights Kushner’s English should have been able to manage more than satisfactorily without the aid of subtitles. However, between diction and vocal quality, many of the more critical lines in the plot development were garbled by either the soloists or the chorus. Similarly, there were too many incidents in the staging that tended to confuse, rather than advance, the overall flow of the narrative.

I suspect that some readers may accuse me of being a sourpuss unwilling to cut the kids some slack. I would direct those readers to my account of the opening of Chris Pratorius’ one-act opera “Xochitl and the Flowers,” which took place in November of 2016. Produced by Opera Parallèle through their Hands on Opera project with third graders in the Alvarado Elementary School Spanish Immersion Program, this was the perfect example of children’s opera as it was meant to be. Between just the right amount of staging by Brendan Hartnett and serious vocal preparation, no one in the audience had any trouble figuring out what was happening and what words were being sung by both the chorus and the soloists.

If MOR is to pursue its “mission of remembering the Holocaust through music,” it owe it to audiences to bring more attentive discipline to the music being performed.

You Can’t Heal What You Can’t Diagnose

I feel a bit sorry for mayors and governors currently trying to deal with a growing pandemic that has nothing to do with medicine. Rather, it is the pandemic of outrage aimed at a prevailing social context that is more obsessed with economic value, rather than the productivity and well-being of the overall population. The outrage may have been triggered by what appears to be deliberate brutality motivated by racism, but that trigger may be part of a larger context in which the very idea of a healthy society has gone by the wayside. I would like to suggest that there are two key aspects of this malady, which are unlikely to be addressed under the current conditions of governance.

One of these is poverty. When one considers how much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the one percent of the one percent, it should be no surprise at the intimidating magnitude of the number of those than cannot earn a wage sufficient to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Indeed, wealth resides with those that do not have to worry about those three factors. To them productivity is simply a matter of manipulating instruments whose only design is to transform wealth into more wealth. Associating productivity with any particular “product” is irrelevant when the health of an enterprise is measured only by the value of the stock it issues on a major exchange. Until attention is redirected towards both productive workers and satisfied consumers, those that are not part of the one percent of the one percent will be ignored by any excuse for a social contract.

The other aspect is health; and, to some extent, it is related to the circumstances behind poverty and the consequences of those circumstances. During my lifetime I have observed the very idea of health care devolve from a public service to a network of private enterprises, all of which prioritize positions on stock exchanges over the effectiveness of all levels of practitioners and the effective treatment of those served by those practitioners. In other words health care, by virtue of having been industrialized, has become yet another puppet whose strings are pulled by the one percent of the one percent.

The idea of a social contract was originally conceived as a model for the relationship between the individual and the state. However, similar contracts must exist between an individual and those organizations with which that individual must interact. Interaction may involve provisions, employment, or ongoing relationships, such as health maintenance rather than treating maladies after they arise. For the one percent of the one percent, however, any instance of a social contract is nothing other than a fiction of convenience that will “keep the outsiders in their place.” Until countries around the world develop and maintain more equitable approaches to the management of wealth and health, those “outsiders” will continue to wallow in discontent. That discontent will continue to lead to frustration, that frustration will lead to pots that cause damage when they boil over too energetically.

Jazz Herstory Collective: More Recent Past than History

Today’s lunchtime event in the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival was a concert given by the Jazz Herstory Collective:

courtesy of the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival

This is a group that features, in its own words, “a soaring triumvirate of soul-steeped singers,” Valerie Troutt, Viveca Hawkins, and Kimiko Joy, performing with a rhythm section of Aneesa Strings (also a vocalist) on both acoustic and electric bass, Ruth Price on drums, and Sundra Manning on keyboard, often using the organ stop. The group’s description also includes the following sentence:

The Bay Area has a long and deep history of extraordinary women playing jazz, funk, rock and soul, and the Jazz Herstory Collective is a project that celebrates that legacy.

Nevertheless, on the basis of what was performed this afternoon, I came away with the impression that this “long and deep history” does not extend earlier than my undergraduate days, another sobering reminder of my own age!

Setting the scope of the past to one side, however, I would have to say that the high point of the program came when Trout sang “Love Will Never Change” to reflect on the recent resurgence in acts of hate, many of which are criminal, and the recent fixation on using a motor vehicle as a “weapon of mass destruction.” Drawing again on my own personal history, I can recall the days before the news media began to pay serious attention to Martin Luther King, when people like Orval Faubus were regarded as an insignificant sideshow. We got through those dark days arriving at significant civil rights and voting rights legislation on the other side, and this afternoon Trout was there to remind those of us willing to listen that we can get through the current darkness as long was we have the will to persist.

On the musical side each of the members of that “soaring triumvirate” had her own way of bringing a personalized style to her singing. The same could be said of Strings, but here I must confess to a  personal preference for the instrumental. Her bass work on both instruments is still ringing in my ears, with particular emphasis on her trio work with Price and Manning before the vocalists took the stage. Equally impressive was Manning’s work on “Sunny,” taking a pop hit from my college days and endowing it with the sharper edges of jazzy rhetoric. Perhaps one of these days this group will appeal to my ongoing quest for singers who can do justice to the legacy of Bessie Smith!

SFS to Give a Benefit Concert for the Bay Area LGBTQ Community

Next month the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), led by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, will be making its next East Coast tour. That tour was to have included two concerts in North Carolina. However, as was reported last December, these plans were made before the North Carolina state legislature passed into law a bill informally known as “HB2,” whose full title is “An Act to Provide for Single-sex Multiple Occupancy Bathroom and Changing Facilities in Schools and Public Agencies and to Create Statewide Consistency in Regulation of Employment and Public Accommodations.” This has come to be known more casually as the “bathroom bill,” since it dictates that the use of such facilities is determined by birth certificate, rather than any more personal sense of gender identity.

Reaction outside of the state of North Carolina was heavily negative and included the National Basketball Association pulling the 2017 All-Star Game out of the city of Charlotte. This past December is when SFS officially decided to join the protest by cancelling the two performances scheduled to begin the tour at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. This means that SFS will be able to push back the date of its departure from San Francisco; and it will use the available time to present Symphony Pride, a benefit concert in support of the Bay Area LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) community.

The program has been prepared to acknowledge the impact of LGBTQ composers both on the Broadway stage and in the concert hall. Audra McDonald will appear as guest artist singing show tunes by Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, John Kander (working with lyricist Fred Ebb), and others. McDonald will also serve as narrator in a performance of Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait.” Other composers whose works will be performed will be Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Meredith Monk, and John Cage. The program will conclude with the concluding movement of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony, which was scheduled to be performed in its entirety at one of the Chapel Hill concerts.

This concert will take place on Tuesday, April 4, beginning at 8 p.m. Tickets are available in the Second Tier for $25, and a few seats are still available in the Orchestra for $50. They may be purchased online through the event page for this program on the SFS Web site, by calling 415-864-6000, or by visiting the Box Office in Davies Symphony Hall, whose entrance is on the south side of Grove Street between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. The Box Office is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday.

Google Responds with Half a Loaf

Readers may recall Tuesday's post documenting an account in which a post to an anti-Semitic blog received a page rank second only to a Wikipedia article. According to an article by Barbara Ortutay in the Business Report section of this mornings San Francisco Chronicle, Google plans to do something about this. They will deploy a new process under which those reviewing search results will see a flag classifying the article as "upsetting-offensive." Such a flag will also be taken into account in recalculating the ranking of the article.

It would appear that Google has also recognized that such flagging cannot, at least at present, be automated. So the search for articles that need to be flagged will be assigned to human being known as "quality raters." Admirable as this may be, all quality raters will be contractors. In other words Google does not see the work they do as significant enough to assign it to full-time staff. Mind you, we all know about how contractors have become "the new labor force;" but were quality of results is concerned, one would have thought that this would have been a core priority. If it does not, then just what is important to Google these days?

A Thought About History for Those Proud of Willfully Ignoring It

One of our most interesting historians currently is Annette Gordon-Reed, who boasts of two faculty positions at Harvard University, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the latest (January 19) issue of The New York Review of Books, she has written a thoroughly absorbing account of a major undertaking by Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. (For those who prefer numbers, “major” translates to 742 pages.)

The basic idea is that those founding fathers that we admire so much fully appreciated the wide differences in mindset across the thirteen colonies. They realized that any revolution could only succeed if there were some significant “common cause” that all of those colonies could embrace with sufficient determination to unite in resistance to British authority. This is one of the reasons why the Declaration of Independence itemizes all of the injustices levied on the colonies from the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. As Gordon-Reed observes, that sentence about the equality of all men is the one that is most quoted; but it is the laundry-list of grievances that did the trick. Any rhetoric about equality was simply there as a flourish before getting down to brass tacks.

Indeed, the question of equality was one that divided the colonies, rather than uniting them. The Declaration of Independence probably would not have been unanimously ratified had it not been for the depth to which questions of race, involving both Native Americans and slaves of African descent, had been buried in the document. Gordon-Reed’s text then delivers a particularly apposite punch line:

History has taught the sad lesson that fear and contempt are the most predictably powerful motivators for galvanizing one group to move against another.

“Fear and contempt” of the British had to take priority over the indignities suffered by those who were not, even in those days, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Apparently, Gordon-Reed wrote this piece while at a retreat for women writers in Washington State. No indication is given of when she actually wrote it. However, that sentence cited above seems to suggest that she was well aware of the strategy behind the rise of Donald Trump, if not the results of that strategy. Ironically, she does not mention the fact that the phrase “common cause” was appropriated in 1970 by a political advocacy group founded by John W. Gardner, whose mission statement included the phrase “work to create open, honest, and accountable government that serves the public interest; promote equal rights, opportunity, and representation for all; and empower all people to make their voices heard in the political process.”

Given what happened during 2016, many would be justified in wondering whether Common Cause still existed (assuming they knew about it in the first place). The answer is that, as of this writing, the group has not yet folded its tent. Indeed, Common Cause is one of the organizations that George Soros funds through his Open Society Institute. Whether we shall be able to say the same thing a year from now is left as an exercise for the reader, preferably one who is not proud of his/her ignorance of history!

San Francisco Symphony Takes a Stand on Discrimination in North Carolina

The full title of the bill informally known as “HB2,” which was passed into law by the North Carolina state legislature this past March, is “An Act to Provide for Single-sex Multiple Occupancy Bathroom and Changing Facilities in Schools and Public Agencies and to Create Statewide Consistency in Regulation of Employment and Public Accommodations.” This is a relatively long-winded way of stating that the use of such facilities is determined by birth certificate, rather than any more general and subjective criteria for gender identity. Those who supported the bill call it “common sense;” but the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) community sees it as the epitome of the very kind of discrimination they have been opposing for decades.

An impressive amount of support has rallied behind that community, at least outside the state of North Carolina. The NBA, NCAA, and NFL, as well as ESPN, have all spoken out against it. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver took his case directly to the state’s governor; and, when it was clear that no changes to the law were in its future, Silver officially pulled the 2017 NBA All-Star Game out of Charlotte. Along similar lines, many film production companies have cancelled plans to shoot films in North Carolina, and documentary producer Michael Moore even announced that his next movie, Where to Invade Next, would not be licensed to theaters in North Carolina. Cancellations of performances have cut across all the different genres of music. The act of cancellation may be one of the few things that Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, and Itzhak Perlman all have in common.

Today the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) officially joined those voices of opposition. This coming April SFS has scheduled a tour to the East Coast, which will include two performances at Carnegie Hall on April 7 and 8. This was to be preceded by two concerts at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill on April 5 and 6, but those two planned performances have now been cancelled. Executive Director Brent Assink made the case for the cancellation as follows:

This decision is not a reflection of our regard for Carolina Performing Arts, which is a valued artistic partner, but a response to the North Carolina state legislature’s decision to enact HB2.  We would have loved to perform at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a community that in many ways is consonant with our own San Francisco Bay Area.  But we also feel we must join our city, our state, the NBA, NCAA, and the many artists, organizations, and businesses who have chosen to not visit or contribute economically to North Carolina until legislation denying protection for the LGBT community has been overturned. The San Francisco Symphony, its Board of Governors, and Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas wholeheartedly support this decision, as they support all those striving for equality and inclusiveness in their community and beyond.

Ironically, the university has never enforced HB2 as a matter of policy; but this amounts to their being an enclave of civil rights in a state that has escalated discrimination from a personal matter to a state law. While the response from outside the state has been one of economic boycott, the impact has yet to make much difference. Perhaps the legislators of North Carolina have decided that, if South Africa could hang tough on apartheid in the face of such boycotts for many decades, they can follow the same model. If they do so, they can always fall back on the argument that they are acting on the will of those who voted them into office. Sadly, those voters probably do not care very much if SFS decides not to visit the state; but, for what it is worth, they probably feel the same way about Springsteen.

Freudian Slip?

This morning while we were discussing the latest round of entertainment passing for a debate among Republicans, my wife happened to call the absent candidate "Crump." When she said, "I don't know why I said that," I replied, "It comes from trying to say 'crap' and 'Trump' at the same time." That struck me as a rather innocent language game, compared with Marco Rubio. In response to Time proclaiming him "The Republican Savior," he declared that there was only one "Savior." I honor the capitalization implied in his used of the word, because his punch line was that the only true "Savior" was Jesus. It may be that the November election will be a signal to those of us that are not Christian (or, perhaps, even Rubio's idea of what Christian should be) to start living with packed suitcases.

Trump's Damage has Already been Done

It would appear that, regardless of whether Donald Trump becomes the Republican candidate for President next year, his divisive rhetoric has taken hold of the general population of the United States in more ways than we might imagine. His latest victim is Riverheads High School in Augusta County in the state of Virgina, a state that tends to be sympathetic to Republicans and seems to translating that sympathy into enthusiasm for Trump. Riverheads' mistake was to encourage an appreciation of cultural differences by exploring the role of calligraphy in sacred Islamic texts. This included an assignment to reproduce the calligraphy of the Islamic declaration of faith, known as the Shahada.

Copying is often a valuable pedagogical tool. An excellent example can be found in Bernard Greenhouse's description of his cello lessons with Pablo Casals, which began with a prolonged exercise during which Casals instructed Greenhouse to produce "an absolute copy" of his way of performing Johann Sebastian Bach's BWV 1008 solo cello suite in D minor. Similarly, there used to be a counterpoint teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music whose only student assignments involved copying out the music of Giovanni Pierlugi da Palestrina.

However, as far as the good citizens of Augusta County are concerned (perhaps only the Republicans among them) there is a big difference between reproducing music, written or heard, a reproducing an Islamic declaration of faith. As a result of the hysteria stirred up by Trump, one by think that citizens were afraid that mere exposure to a significant element of that faith (one might compare it to the representation of the cross in Christianity) might turn their children into terrorists. Sober-minded students of the life and practices of Adolf Hitler know that creating a mass feeling of fear is often the key to winning popular support; and Augusta County seems to provided a powerful data point in support of this proposition. Indeed, according to the report on the Al Jazeera Web site, the school decided to close early for the Christmas break after receiving threats of violence.

Perhaps we should credit Trump for knowing more about Islamic terrorist strategies than we might have guessed, since there seems to be a clear parallel in his strategy for winning the American public to his cause.

What Would Will Rogers Say?

My favorite Will Rogers quote would have to be the following:

I do not support any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

These days it seems as if the Republicans are setting the bar for a "disorganized political party" and seem to just keep raising it. Could it be that the Internet has turned us into a culture that prefers anarchy to governance, even if the side-effects of anarchy include the laundry list of social abuses that now take place regularly on pages of the World Wide Web? Once upon a time the "futurists" were predicting that, by giving every individual his or her own voice, we would finally achieve a "true" democracy. Ironically, those futurists seemed blithely ignorant on how Athenian democracy was first conceived and how it actually worked. Rather than democracy, we have abundant opportunities for the unbridled execution of power, leading to the detriment of many for the sake of those who can shout louder than anyone else. At least the Democrats can take comfort that Will Rogers no longer can make fun of them.

Can Clear Writing be Dangerous?

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

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

Daniel Barenboim Gets Enemies to Agree

Had Daniel Barenboim checked in with Jimmy Carter, he probably would have gotten an earful about how the course of true peacemaking never runs smooth. His plans to bring the Berlin Staastskapelle to Tehran has apparently been met with rejection from both Iran and Israel. Israel felt they had grounds to object because Barenboim is Israeli, conveniently overlooking the fact that he also has Palestinian citizenship. Ironically, Iran is also objecting because Barenboim is Israeli. Carter would probably tell Barenboim to look on the bright side: At least he managed to get Iran and Israel to agree on something.

What Price Exercising Free Speech for the Sake of Giving Offense?

If the American Freedom Defense Initiative wanted the world to pay attention to them, they certainly got their wish. By arranging an event that would focus heavily on an exhibit of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, this organization may have established one of the most extreme cases of exercising free speech solely for the purpose of giving offense. However, while the speech may have been free, the exercise came with a price. According to an ABC News report by Emily Shapiro, that price amounted to $10,000. This is the amount of money that the organization paid out of its own budget for security. According to Shapiro's report:

Security included security officers, uniformed officers, SWAT, FBI and ATF, Joe Harn of the Garland Police Department said at a news conference.

Now, I am not a constitutional scholar and/or expert; but I have tended to assume that the right to free speech does not include the right to incite violence. Thus, the question arises as to whether or not the American Freedom Defense Initiative expected violence and expected it because they knew that the images they were exhibiting would incite it. If that were, indeed, the case, why were federal, state, and local authorities taking fee-for-services to allow such provocative behavior?