Sparkly, Glittery Patriotism

Ah, the 4th of July. Whether you celebrate it by attending a barbeque or singing a song about America or going to the fireworks display on the Mall like I do, Independence Day is usually the time for some shallow, platitudinous soul-searching on what is means to be American.

It's rather too easy to say that those who claim the loudest to support the US through thick and thin, especially when it comes to the war currently being fought in Iraq ought, to go over there and fight (I trap I admit to having fallen in to on previous occasions}. After all, there are different ways to express support of a cause and to give aid and comfort to the US fighting forces, whether you approve of this war or not.

But that doesn't serve to blink the fact that there are plenty of able-bodied young hawks who, for purely selfish reasons, take no responsibility for the war they so ardently support, and do all they can to avoid coming into contact with the suffering and loss that war has caused, filling their time with menaingless feel-good gestures. Journalist Max Blumenthal recently attended a meeting of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) to report on this phenomenon:

In interviews, more than a dozen conventiongoers explained why it is important that they stay on campus while other, less fortunate people their age wage a bloody war in Iraq. They strongly support the war, they told me, but they also want to enjoy college life and pursue interesting careers. Being a College Republican allows them to do both. It is warfare by other, much safer means.

Means such as what?

I chatted for a while with Collin Kelley, a senior at Washington State with a vague resemblance to the studly actor Orlando Bloom. Kelley told me he's "sick and tired of people saying our troops are dying in vain" and added, "This isn't an invasion of Iraq, it's a liberation--as David Horowitz said." When I asked him why he was staying on campus rather than fighting the good fight, he rubbed his shoulder and described a nagging football injury from high school. Plus, his parents didn't want him to go. "They're old hippies," Kelley said.

Plenty of people with worse problems than old footbal injuries are being sent into combat. But never mind...

Munching on a chicken quesadilla at a table nearby was Edward Hauser, a senior at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas--a liberal school in a liberal town in the ultimate red state of Texas. "Austin is ninety square miles insulated from reality," Hauser said. When I broached the issue of Iraq, he replied, "I support our country. I support our troops." So why isn't he there?

"I know that I'm going to be better staying here and working to convince people why we're there [in Iraq]," Hauser explained, pausing in thought. "I'm a fighter, but with words."

At a table by the buffet was Justin Palmer, vice chairman of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, America's largest chapter of College Republicans. In 1984 the group gained prominence in conservative circles when its chairman, Ralph Reed, formed a political action committee credited with helping to re-elect Senator Jesse Helms. Palmer's future as a right-wing operative looked bright; he batted away my question about his decision to avoid fighting the war he supported with the closest thing I heard to a talking point all afternoon. "The country is like a body," Palmer explained, "and each part of the body has a different function. Certain people do certain things better than others." He said his "function" was planning a "Support Our Troops" day on campus this year in which students honored military recruiters from all four branches of the service.

Standing by Palmer's side and sipping a glass of rose wine, University of Georgia Republican member Kiera Ranke said she played her part as well. She and her sorority sisters sent care packages to troops in Iraq along with letters and pictures of themselves. "They wrote back and told us we boosted their morale," she said.

By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. "The people opposed to the war aren't putting their asses on the line," Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn't he putting his ass on the line? "I'm not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country," he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, "and I wasn't going to pass that up."

And besides, being a College Republican is so much more fun than counterinsurgency warfare. Bray recounted the pride he and his buddies had felt walking through the center of campus last fall waving a giant American flag, wearing cowboy boots and hats with the letters B-U-S-H painted on their bare chests. "We're the big guys," he said. "We're the ones who stand up for what we believe in. The College Democrats just sit around talking about how much they hate Bush. We actually do shit."

They urged on this war loudly and in public, but refused to have anything to do with the fighting itself. And so, a group of people whose opinions were never asked have to go instead. Naturally, they feel somewhat guilty that others are fighting and dying for their beliefs while they sit comfortably at home. This is an emotion that must be smothered immediately, in this case by waving the flag, singing 'God Bless America', and hoping fervently that nothing is asked of you.

Proles, Comrades, and Tenors

It seems that famed conductor Lorin Maazel has written an opera based on George Orwell's signature novel 1984.

A new opera is always time to rejoice, especially considering how few are written these days. I have great esteem for singing in general and the operatic medium in particular. You see, I've always thought of singing as a kind of vocal pornography - everything gets revealed. And opera is the hardcore variety. But unlike porn, opera can't be faked.

Anyway, this opera was dogged by controversy completely unrelated to its source material; Maazel was a compositional novice who has never written an opera before, yet he was being given a lavish premiere at the Royl Opera House at Covent Garden in London. The critical buzz was mostly negative, as these excerpts from the latest issue of OperaNews will demonstrate:

[T]he only proof of an operatic pudding is in the eating. It was with considerable interest that the capacity audience assembled to experience this new work, with a debut performance by widely acclaimed Canadian director Robert LePage and a cast including several admired singers.

A good cast is essential, of course. We wouldn't want another Traviata premiere on our hands.

1984 has a libretto by Yale English professor J.D. Mclatchy, working on this occassion in tandem with Tony Award-winning author Thomas Meehan (who also wrote such successful musicals as Annie and The Producers)

Very nice, but remember: prima la musica e poi le parole.

Orwell's political satire describes a future totalitarian state (modeled on Stalin's Soviet Union) set in a reconstituted England, its capital now reffered to as Airstrip One. War is perennial, denunciationas and executions are rife, and the presence of the great leader Big Brother is constant on television screens in every room that allow the authorities to watch what everyone is doing. The hero, Winston Smith, rebels first in thought and then in deed. He has an affair with a fellow dissident, Julia, but they are denounced, and under torture they ebtray each other. Winston ends up by declaring his sincee love for Big Brother.

Gee, thanks. I didn't know OperaNews also doubled as Cliffs Notes for Retards.

It’s a dark story with few contrasting moments, and Maazel’s first problem was to come up with some variety in the mood. He included a couple of numbers, one for Syme, Winston’s fellow-worker in the Ministry of Truth, who sings of the Newspeak, the language of political deception that has replaced English. American tenor Lawrence Brownlee shone in this punchy, cruelly high-lying piece, and won a round of applause. So did high-flying German soprano Diana Damrau, with a similarly flamboyant, off-the-peg coloratura aria for the Gym Instructress who gets the people exercising on her morning TV spot.

People are always fascinated by the difficult; though I'm inclined to think Big Brother would clamp down on such displays of individuality.

Elsewhere there are big choral scenes for the mass party rallies, relentlessly orchestrated. These are the better parts of the score, though their material, couched in a vaguely post-Britten to post-Shostakovich idiom, has none of the distinction or one-heard, never-forgotten quality of its models. The rest are largely solo vocal or dialogue scenes, with some surprisingly ineffective word settings, utterly nondescript in style and completely undistinguished in content. This made for a seriously tedious evening, leavened only by a love duet that might be pinned down as a collaboration between Puccini and Stephen Sondheim, only without their talent (let alone genius). This was one of the dreariest new operas in a while, and there’s quite some competition for that award.

Ouch. But that paragraph is revealing; it shows both Maazel's inability to write music that isn't mired in the past, as well as the critic's inability to conceive of anything new in musical style, forcing him to judge all he hears as compared to other, deader composers.

The cast did everything that could be expected of them. Simon Keelyside (Winston), Nancy Gustafson (Julia), and Richard Margison (O’Brien) engaged as much as possible with Maazel’s cold recreation of the characters, singing big and bold throughout. LePage’s production also did its best, but with such deadly musical material it must’ve been hard to generate what dramatic tension there was. Enthusiasm dissipated throughout the evening. There was the usual world premiere razzmatazz at the close. But there were also a couple of boos for Maazel, unprecedented in my experience for any other composer’s appearance on this venerable stage.

But what of those two arias you mentioned earlier? A single good number is enough to support a composer's reputation for the rest of his life and beyond.

I persoanlly haven't heard a single note of this work, so I can't say whether it's a surprise masterpiece or as bad as they say. Still, I think too much is being asked of poor Signor Maazel; this is, after all, his first opera. Classical music isn't the same as pop music; not every piece has to be a hit for a composer to maintain his reputation. Rossini, after all, wrote 70 operas, Handel at least 50, and Scarlatti over 100. Even Verdi and Wagner needed three operas to hit their stride. Agonizing endlesly over your first opera is a bad idea; best to shut your eyes and get it over with.

Besides, 1984 isn't the most obvious choice for an operatic setting. Orwell was a fantastic writer who was masterful in creating characters and atmosphere, but he had an admitted weakness, which he described as the tendency "[to] take a good story and turn it into journalism or political science." Fitting something like 1984 into the structure of an opera is no mean feat. It would mean extreme truncation of the story, for the ultra-oppressive world of 1984 is not just a distopia; it is a distopia with a purpose, a history, and a philosophy. It would take a certain kind of genuis to turn 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' into a singable aria.

This is not to say, of course, that complex political and social protest cannot be articulated through opera; Nabucco and Fidelio should be proof enough for that. Yet the limitations of opera as an art form are of detail, and not of expression. Also, most kinds of theatrical performance require a 'personal' focus of the story, diverting attention onto a one person's thoughts and emotions instead of the universal subject at hand. Even so, the effects of the various forms of music or literature are undeniable in that they are not frozen in the same way that other kinds of art are; the notes and words have a way of entering into people's consciousness in a way that would be impossible using any other artistic genre. It is for these reason that I believe words and music will always stand above visual art forms such as sculpture and painting. A picture is worth a thousand words? Then paint me the Gettysburg Adress.


P.S. Oh, and Bush's speech last night? A tepid pep talk from a mediocre coach. Nothing new; not even a sound bite.

On the Value of Symbols

At some point in the fairly distant past, I recall reading a philosophical parable which impressed me greatly. As best I can remember, it went like this:

The Devil has convened a meeting in Hell of all the lesser demons. He demands that all of them come forward and explain what progress is being made for the corruption of mankind. All his minions talk excitedly of the wars that have been started, the unnatural acts committed, the cruelties, the injustices of man against man. The The Devil finds this all unsatisfactory; this is the same tired routine he's been hearing since the dawn of time. Finally, the last demon stands up and says "My lord, i believe we have failed to dehumanize people because we have focused so much on crimes against God and Nature. We have failed to alienate Man against things."

The Devil is confused. "But in a modern society, Man has more things than ever. Are you suggesting we deprive him of them?"

The demon shakes his head. "No, sir. What I mean is that we should replace his things with a series of abstractions, outlines, and spirituality. Man must see objects as symbols; he must learn to use them for effect. They should never be given value in themselves. And, of course, the door to joy must always be firmly shut."

At that, Satan leaned back and smiled. "Brilliant." He said. "Let the work go foreward."


This little story has stayed with me for some time. Ever since reading it, I've been increasingly aware of the way people latch on to tiny, significance-laden fragments of larger beliefs and enlarge these fragments beyond anything reasonable or healthy.

I don't mean worthles slogans that are repeated over and over again; I mean when a 'slogan' of any type becomes more important in people's minds than what that slogan was originally supposed to embody.

Take the recent House approval of a bill to ban flag-burning. To those who support it, the American flag is supposed to represent the freedom and promise of America. Maybe it does, but in the end it's still only a piece of cloth. To sacrifice our civil liberties for the sake of a cloth is lunacy, no matter what mystical properties you ascribe to it.

In the furor over Mel Gibson's 'The Passion', the line was drawn with liberals protesting anti-Semitism and religious conservatives denying it, while neither side at all understood the concerns of the other. The reason is that, to the film's detractors, the murderous, jeering, vile Jews of the 'The Passion' were just who they appeared to be, and this translated to a certain hostility against Jews today. To Gibson's devotees, nobody in the film was a real person and it didn't matter if what was shown in the movie never happened. It was all symbolic, showing the cruelty suffered by Jesus before his death. Quite possibly that's how it was intended, but it never even occurred to them how anyone could be upset at the sight of hook-nosed Pharisees mingling with the Devil or little curly-haired Jerusalem boys suddenly becoming red-eyed vampires. The disconnect between symbolism and reality was complete.

The examples of this type of thing are endless, whether one uses icons (the cross, the flag), verbal or written mantras (the Ten Commandments), honorifics ('Greetings, Comrade'), pieces of clothing (headscarves) or even political systems ('democracy' or 'communism' as the answer to all ills).

What we end up with is a society where nothing matters in itself. I think we're all poorer for it, and should endeavor as best we can to rid ourselves of attachments to things that cloud our ability to see the country behind the flag, or the meaning behind the chants.

Edit: I remember now that I came across that fable in an essay entitled Enjoying this So-Called Iced Cream: Mr. Burns, Satan, and Happiness. Don't ask.

This Just Made Me Laugh

There are doubtless very few people who be seriously amused by these comics . I'm proud to be one of them.

You're A Better Chairman Than I Am, Howard Dean

In most right-wing forums, DNC chairman Howard Dean is rarely, if ever taken seriously. This isn’t something for Democrats to worry about; when tapping into a major political movement, it is sometimes better to start off as a bit of a joke. Reagan and Clinton certainly did, to name just two.

Still, the flippant dismissal of the strength of Dean’s message rather annoys. The people who are so casual to label Dean a ‘nut’ haven’t spent days, weeks, and months talking to members of the Democratic Party in an effort to determine where they stand. I have, and I can tell you that the core of the party feels furious and betrayed over the endless efforts to compromise towards a ‘center’ that seems much further toward the right than should be possible for anyone calling him or herself a Democrat. This ‘core is bigger than you’d think; I’ve met plenty of people who described themselves as ‘not interested in politics’ who began fuming when asked if the Dems were moving to far to the right. For ten years, we tried to fight the GOP slime machine by seeking solutions to make everyone happy. We should’ve known that the more we offered, they greater the demands.

Now and then, Dean says a number of things that are impolitic, in that they are true, but it would be embarrassing for people to admit it. Take his statement about the GOP being a ‘white, Christian party’. Well, is he wrong? The most stunning development in non-white voting in 2004 – much touted in conservative circles – was that Bush managed to gain a majority of the Hispanic vote in one state, while still losing the Latino vote by 9 points nationally. By ‘Christian’, it can be assumed that dean is referring to hard-line evangelicals, who have more or less total control of the GOP at all levels.

Following his ‘gaffes’, some foolish Democrats (say, Lieberman and Biden) will try and earn points among their Republican buddies by condemning Dean. Silly rabbit, Republicans aren’t going to vote for you. Attacking your own party just makes it weaker.

Of course, Dean isn’t perfect; he recently announced that we ought to ‘stay into Iraq until the job is done’, whenever that is. I wish he hadn’t embraced the spectacularly unpopular and defeatist attitude shared by the White House. But that’s a different story…