The Real Conspiracy

Today's N.Y. Times Magazine should have ripped the scales from anyone's eyes as to who the bad guys are and how they are trying to effect total corporate takeover in the U.S. through heavy lobbying and heavy lifting with Republicans everywhere. The story showed how the big corporate money is flowing into the Wisconsin recall race at a 25-1 ratio to what the Democratic candidate is able to raise. 

Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann put out a book recently upending the media's even-handed approach to blaming both parties for Washington gridlock. Not only is it the economy, stupid, but it's the Republicans, intent on obtaining through stealth in every state legislature weakening of regulation and promotion of giveaways to corporations.

The Democrats are handicapped, of course, by their dependence in recent years on Wall Street, which now acts like an abandoned bride despite having avoided any and all sanctions for causing the economic disaster and continuing--see the Facebook IPO debacle--to play its favorite game of trading on inside information and violating what once was and always should be derided as "the morals of the marketplace" as in, there aren't any.

Many may be disappointed by Obama, who is certainly no leftist. I despair at his refusal--he clearly possesses the oratorical skills but chooses not to use them--to lay out for the American people what he stands for and what he's done. Had he done this, probably against the advice of his advisers, people would see what they will be getting--a lot--in the Affordable Care Act. Instead we hear the malevolent voices of the right declaim against Obamacare. 

The ridiculous campaign of Ralph Nader--all he did was defeat the Democrats and give us Bush Jr.--should make us realize that yes, we have no choice but to support Obama and support him with fervor. All of the corporate heavies are in for Romney big-time and have opened their endless spigots of cash. We are reaping the whirlwind of those who couldn't be bothered to support the unions. Now we're up against the real bad guys--all closely resembling Edward Arnold in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Institutional Censorship

One of the inevitable results of continuing to have the New York Times delivered every day--as I've done for the past 30+ years we've lived in D.C.--is getting cranked about happenings in New York. Two current incidents involve major cultural institutions there as to which I remain most interested: the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Public Library.  Both are behaving like the large institutions they are and have sought to control their public image by stamping out any opinions differing from those propounded by management.

In the case of the Met, they tried to stop the quasi-in-house publication, Opera News, from reviewing Met productions because the magazine dared to criticize some of them. The Library has made departing employees who took buyouts sign nondisparagement agreements to keep them from expressing opinions questioning or criticizing the half-baked plan management has put out to move a circulating library into the great 42nd Street building and consequently needing to move half the stacks of the research library, or more, to Southern New Jersey, where it will take at least a day or more to retrieve them for users.

This is the way corporations and government agencies behave. They naturally gravitate toward censorship. They want to control everything said about them. They employ high-priced PR types (known, much to their dislike, in the trade as "flacks") to sweet-talk reporters into buying their line or even better, ignoring the institution entirely.

It ill behooves the New York Public Library, often out there as a fighter against censorship, especially of library holdings, to restrict its former employees. A woman from an anti-censorship group was quoted in the Times as asking what the Library was afraid of. I can tell her. They don't want knowledgeable people, such as high-level former employees, to show how unhelpful the proposed renovation will be to those who use the library for serious research as opposed to those who will spend money in the various cafes that will be added.

I did read a reasonable defense of the plan by the librarian of Harvard in the New York Review of Books. He did pose some decent arguments about the need for the new scheme but in the end, he didn't convince me that you save the circulating library by essentially reducing the useability of the research library. There are so few resources available to the public of the quality of the New York Public Library. That is the ultimate reason for protecting rather than destroying the ability to conduct serious research.

The Met has retreated and now Opera News, which I decided to subscribe to this year for the first time in ages, partly because of the good coverage it now gives to opera houses worldwide, will continue to review Met operas, and can even say  critical things about them.   I was bothered by this current issue, not at all by the negative reviews of productions like the new Lepage Goetterdaemerung, which I liked (at least seeing it in the movie theater) and the Opera News critic didn't, because the managing editor wrote a treacly column reminiscing about the movie, The Sound of Music, which I resisted seeing for years because it is so schmaltzy. I can accept including operetta in the magazine's coverage but sappy Broadway musicals? (I probably wouldn't have objected to something about West Side Story or My Fair Lady, or Rent, for that matter, which borrowed its plot from La Boheme, to name three classic musicals.)

Over the Sierra Nevada

This was going to be the ultimate train trip, even if it only would last for about 17 hours.  That part was because my darling wife would only agree to spending 17 hours--as it turns out, the final segment of what is a 50-hour train journey--on a train, even if that train was the celebrated California Zephyr.  You have to understand what a big deal the Zephyr is, even when operated by Amtrak, which means we are not talking about the grand days of crack or luxury trains as chronicled by the likes of "Luscious Lucius" Beebe.

The Zephyr gets its name from a predecessor long-distance rail special called the Denver Zephyr, which ran "Through the Rockies--Not Around Them" (the train's motto, provided by its railroad, the Denver, Rio Grande & Western, to emphasize its superiority to the competing Union Pacific, which headed due north from Denver and then west across the Wyoming plains, skirting the mighty Rockies) from Denver each morning to Salt Lake City by supper time.  

I once rode the Denver Zephyr back when the DRG&W still ran it as the last privately-operated, long-haul passenger train in the U.S. It was a wonderful experience riding through the red-rocked canyons of the upper Colorado River for about 200 miles after switchbacking up into the Rockies from Denver and finally racing across the comparatively flat  and often desert-like terrain west of Grand Junction and up through Utah. It had a dome car and a good dining car, which would offer pan-fried local trout for lunch.

Having had that experience of the second-most scenic part of the Chicago-to-Emeryville, CA run, I offered little resistance when it seemed that my wife would agree to meet me in Salt Lake City and catch the Zephyr at 11:00 P.M. that night when it pulled into Salt Lake City's all-too-standard, non-descript cinder-block station. 

This was going to be my first experience spending a night on a U.S. train and in a sleeping car, no less.  Before the station opened--more or lesson time at 10:00 P.M. when we, and it turned out, quite a few others, picked up our previously-reserved-and-paid-for tickets, we chatted with a fellow passenger--this was not a tough call to make because the Zephyr, running in both directions, is the only train Amtrak sends through Salt Lake City--bound for Winnemucca, Nevada.  This was not a place with which I am familiar, and now having seen it in person--albeit from the window of our room in the sleeping car--I still don't have too much of a feel as to what goes on in Winnemucca.

But the agents behind the glass window at the station were pleasant in that way that you get used to when west of the Mississippi.  We boarded the train, having hiked down the platform to the train's last car--I know, it was only about an eight-car train.  When I was a kid, we dropped someone off at Harmon, up the Hudson where all the New York Central crack trains stopped to change engines, who boarded the Ohio State Limited, and that probably had about 20 cars--at least.

Our "bedroom" was tight, when we managed to figure out where to stow the rollerboard suitcases and other paraphernalia.  I was ceded the lower bed which was also wider and we had paid to get this "larger" room which contained a separate toilet, in which area you could also take a shower--a set-up I had last encountered in a hotel room in Volgograd, Russia.  This time we didn't even fool around trying out the "shower"--hey, 17 hours isn't all that long and we'd arrive at Emeryville by 4:30 P.M. the next day anyway.

We both managed to sleep despite the last night of what had been that rare "super moon" outside--making the early dawn scene totally reminiscent, with the Nevada mountains in the background, of Ansel Adams's fantastic photo, Moonrise: Hernandez, New Mexico.  Nevada was largely flat and either desert country or other badland--still fascinating to this East Coaster after my many flights over the arid West.  By breakfast-time in the diner, we were following the Truckee River, which runs, I believe, into Lake Tahoe, about 10 miles off our route. I would have loved to have seen the more fascinating Humboldt River, which after flowing in a mighty stream disappears into Carson Sink.

We had the benefit of both a guidebook and Park Service commentary on board between Reno and Sacramento, the heart of the run.  You climb up into the Sierras after Reno, following mostly the track first laid by the Central Pacific as the western leg of America's first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s.  The mountain scenery is spectacular--flowing streams, endless conifers, rock formations, snow-capped peaks and snow on the ground in May--and then there are the snow sheds built to cover the tracks when huge storms or avalanches threatened to cut off the right-of-way.

The train slows and after a while, you look out over Donner Lake, where that ill-fated party spent the winter of 1846-47 with many bad outcomes, including death and cannibalism, having been stopped in its covered-wagon ascent of the Sierras by early winter snows.  We passed Boca, where they once had ice farms because it got as cold as 45 degrees below zero in the winter of 1937.  Finally, we passed the top of the ascent and began riding down toward Auburn and finally Sacramento.

The train had been ahead of schedule--it arrived about a half hour early in Salt Lake City and even though it left there late, it still maintained its on-time performance until it came back into civilization and found itself behind other trains coming into Sacramento, a station with insufficient tracks and platforms to accommodate the still-significant numbers of both Amtrak and local trains.  We sped across the Sacramento River delta to Martinez, where we also were delayed and finally were put solidly behind schedule--oh, only 15 minutes or so--before Richmond and thence terminated at Emeryville, which is between Berkeley and Oakland.  Unlike New York, where the Pennsylvania Railroad built the first tunnels under the Hudson to get direct access to Manhattan in 1910, no railroad ever has tunnelled under San Francisco Bay until the BART turned that trick about 30+ years ago or so.

Buses were supposed to be waiting to ferry us over the Bay Bridge to, yes, the Ferry Terminal, where there are no ferries anymore. Just like there's no rich in the Richmond district or sun in the Sunset of S.F.  We trekked all the way up the platform--reminiscent of Washington, D.C.'s Union Station--only to find that no buses could be found, despite our having given them that extra 15 minutes top get their act together. Despite that, I still left with a good attitude toward Amtrak--even if when they informed me that they were out of the Manhattan clam chowder I had ordered for lunch because "it's the last day"--partly because the train staff unanimously displayed great attitude and made the trip that much more pleasant.

More Than Enough Austerity

I took plenty of economics way back in my college days and the econ faculty's orientation varied from a young extreme conservative who became quite well-known nationally to an older Marxist.  My major meant that I focused on the economics of employment.  The experience of the Great Depression was closer to everyone then--many on the faculty had lived through it.  Most understood that when demand, lack of, is the problem, austerity is not the solution.

How soon we forget!  Now we are starting to see that Europe, pressed by the Germans' somewhat understandable fear of inflation--understandable, even if erroneous--is realizing that austerity will not lift the continent out of the doldrums.  Yesterday, I heard part of a radio interview with Paul Krugman, one of the only columnists and commentators to understand this simple economic concept.

Amazing how the media--so often accused of catering to liberals--really is in thrall to conservative and reactionary economics.  Anyone who thinks that cutting spending and paying off the national debt will solve our unemployment and sluggish economy needs to listen to people like Krugman. But now the evidence is starting to come in from those who have really gone overboard on the deficit-reduction path and the results show that austerity is the prescription for continued poor economic performance.

America and its media are worshipful toward the private sector and corporate CEOs.  The theory must be that they must be worth something if they get paid so much.  In reality, of course, the CEOs realized that the added profit companies produced could readily be appropriated by the CEOs, aided by compliant boards. So when these "economic royalists"--to revive Franklin Roosevelt's excellent term for them--start pontificating about deficit reduction and the need for less regulation of business, we should treat it as the propaganda and b-s that it is.

The Supremes

Relying on the Supreme Court never seemed a very wise course to me, despite the exhortations with which I grew up about how various decisions, especially those of the Warren Court, defined a great forward movement toward improvement in our polity.  I always kept thinking of the fact that during most of its history, the court was reactionary and showed profoundly antidemocratic behavior one might expect of an appointive institution whose members held life tenure. 

As with the notorious court of the 1930s, the current bench has demonstrated its completely craven political affiliation with the most reactionary elements of the Republican Party, which reminds me of a recent comment that defined some troglodyte by saying that "the only office he could have been elected to was Secretary of the Nazi Party."

Anyone who retained illusions about the court after Bush v. Gore almost deserves the shock that recent behavior both in decisions and arguments that has revealed about the court's true leanings. We now have a court where every justice but one was a federal appeals court judge, many were academics, and none ever practiced law even to the extent former Justice Stevens did, much less Thurgood Marshall or Robert H. Jackson.  

From a legal point of view, the whole argument about health care is ludicrous and one columnist noted that scant attention has been given not to mandating people buying insurance but to the difficulty many have in being afforded the opportunity given the prejudice of insurance companies against both individuals and those with pre-existing conditions. That is the kind of argument that the Solicitor General fell down on the job in failing to make. He might have pointed that out in response to the idiotic "broccoli" hypothetical.

We suffer as well from a media -- leaving aside the Fox foghorns -- that feels it is necessary to treat right-wing propaganda as meriting serious consideration.  They ignore the fact that the Republicans had proposed single-payer and other progressive health-care policies some years ago but now that the hard right calls the tune, all have retreated.  

I suppose I never was as enthralled by the Supreme Court as an institution. It is profoundly anti-democratic. No other nation in the world has seen fit to emulate its role, even though we now have seen Constitutional Courts with highly limited authority sprout up in other countries.  As someone involved in international justice system improvement work, I have seen how few countries are very interested in, much less impressed by, the current Supreme Court's decisions. Only excessive chauvinism suggests much obeisance to it as an institution. The Warren Court appears to have been an aberration and in some ways, discouraged use of the more democratic routes to reform.

The Return of O'Neill

We sometimes forget that Eugene O'Neill is the only American playwright to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not that that is always the greatest distinction one may be awarded. After all, neither Sinclair Lewis nor Pearl Buck today receives the respect they may have garnered many years ago. And there are all sorts of miscellaneous writers worldwide who have been feted by the Swedish Academy despite what could fairly be described as lackluster credentials.

But O'Neill has taken his knocks, just as many of his greatest characters did. We have learned that not all of his work is great, but whose is? In New York, some of his earliest plays are being revived, with mixed reactions. Now, however, in Washington, we are having an O'Neill festival, centered at the Arena Stage, the city's pre-eminent regional theater company. Last weekend, I saw O'Neill's only comedy, the not-very-comic play of either nostalgia or recollection, Ah,Wilderness. It is a pleasant play--to employ Bernard Shaw's terminology--and it was well played at Arena.

O'Neill was recalling what he had wished was his adolescence in New England. Next month, we get to see what in many ways is the flip side of that play, and to many, his greatest work, Long Day's Journey Into Night.  Instead of the all-American Millers of Ah,Wilderness, which sometimes emits the scent of a Father Knows Best type of in the person of small-town editor Nat Miller, and his delightfully awkward but already inspired son Richard, we get the Tyrones.  The father has wrecked his acting career by taking the easy path (taken by O'Neill's father) of playing The Count of Monte Cristo 6,000 times and thus never hired to portray anyone else.  Elder son Jamie already shows sign of the alcoholism that will consume him. Mother Mary is fighting a relentless morphine habit. And son Edmund, possibly the part most reflecting O'Neill himself, finds out that he has contracted tuberculosis. So much fun for everyone!

Yet as the characters assail themselves and each other, this emerges as O'Neill's most wrenching and most marvelous play.  He must have felt so close to it that although he wrote it in the 1930s, it did not get produced until twenty years later, after his death, when his widow finally released it. Jason Robards came of age playing in it and two other great O'Neill works: A Moon for the Misbegotten and The Iceman Cometh. First, he was Jamie in the original production and then James Tyrone the father some decades later. 

Yes, sometimes O'Neill can feel repetitive. Sometimes you feel you can't listen to Larry Slade kvetch any more in The Iceman, but then Jason Robards (or in the movie, Lee Marvin, who was also excellent) appears as Hickey, the salesman whose entrance receives as long a build-up as does Tartuffe in Moliere's eponymous play. And then we all face dealing with our pipe dreams, whether or not we find Hickey convincing in his sales pitch to the gathered drunks to deal with theirs.

Seeing one of these three great plays is a wonderful experience. So was seeing Ah, Wilderness.  It's amazing to recall that when it debuted in the 1930s, the father's role was played by none other than the then-aged George M. Cohan. Shakespeare Theatre Company here has also been active-doing Mourning Becomes Electra previously and soon Strange Interlude. These I haven't seen, but I will not write off any O'Neill. He always manages to make you feel some new thoughts even when seeing one of his great plays a second or third time.

The Play's the Thing

Finally saw the play Red the other night; 'twas my first trip to the newly-rebuilt Arena Stage in Southwest DC. For those of you who have already seen this drama on Broadway or London, where it originated at DonmarWarehouse, or Chicago, where this production was launched at the Goodman Theater, this may be old news, but this is one fantastic evening in the theater.  This saga of the midlife crisis of painter Mark Rothko raises many perplexing conundrums and conflicts.

For us, the impact was magnified because we had just returned from seeing the Van Gogh show, focusing on his nature pictures--the plants, flowers, wheatfields, and trees--at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  That wonderful museum does have a Rothko or two, even if its modern strength lies in its Monets, Cezannes, some other Impressionists, and some Picasso and Braque but mostly from Picasso's earliest stages, ending with cubism.

I've always found Rothko's color blocks compelling although now I feel more supplied with what he was trying to accomplish. It also seem amazing that one major theme of the play was whether he would go back on his commission to provide murals for the then-avant-garde Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. The great conflicts of art brought down to one decision. I also found his fretting about the generation coming up on him--the Pop art, op art, Warhol and Stella--pushing at his group--DeKooning, Jackson Pollock, and the other abstract expressionists.

Both Van Gogh and the Philadelphia art museum remain remarkably overwhelming.  The museum has a superb collection that demands more than a  single visit; Philadelphia itself, where I once spent a summer working and many childhood visits, has many other wonderful museums, and restaurants in great profusion.  The Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Penn remains a treasure, too, and last time I was there, I enjoyed the new National Constitution Center.

The weekend before I managed to catch the Met's broadcast in theaters of Verdi's Ernani, probably the one major work of his that had eluded me until now. It was his first big success (after Nabucco, I suppose) but it's a bit like Sicilian Vespers--wonderful exciting music, good arias, but you don't leave the theater remembering any melodies. The new soprano Angela Meade was fine and did show some evidences of Sutherland's ability to make hard singing look easy; Marcel Giordani, who has been doing major tenor roles all over Europe, was more than adequate but not fine enough to make anyone forget Pavarotti, who enjoyed singing the title role. Dmitri Hvorostovsky was excellent as always in both his singing and acting of the role of Charles V, and Ferrucio Furlanetto, veteran bass-baritone, deserved the plaudits he received (especially from Charles Rosen in the New York Review of Books) for his masterful rendition of the villain's role. Rosen mentioned that after hearing the legendary Rosa Ponselle's recording of a famous soprano aria from this opera, Maria Callas ordered it never to played in her presence again!