Designing the narrative

My friend Barbara is a retired medical doctor in Berlin. We have been sharing our frustration, she as a German, me as an American, at the high number of anti-vaxxers in our two presumed-to-be "advanced" democracies, where we are faced with the astonishing and almost unbearably frustrating fact that a significant portion of our populations continue to ignore scientific research and fall for misinformation from any number of toxic sources.

In response to an article I forwarded to her and other friends on the frustrations at a Houston hospital of the very thing we were going round and round about, she sent me this observation and question in an e-mail this morning: 

Just this morning I read in the Tagesspiegel there’s a big problem in certain districts of Berlin convincing migrants, mostly of Arab origin, to get vaccinated. (The same is obviously true for many Palestinians, so I hear, from Israeli sources). They claim the vaccine will make them sterile.

In Berlin, they have called for “district mothers,” educated Arab women, to try and convince them otherwise. These women claim it’s literally impossible. Many of the antivaxxers are illiterate and only capable of YouTubing or watching  Al Jazeera. 

Now you’ve been teaching young adults all your life. How would you go about this? It’s not enough telling them “that’s not true!”

I want to share my response with you here. I apologize if it sounds patronizing - I'm not telling her anything she doesn't already know - but that's what this blog is for - a chance to think out loud and say things that, besides being often obvious, may need to be said all the same, and I'm aiming my response at a broader audience.

So, for what it's worth...

Ah, Barbara, you have asked what we may call the "sixty-four-thousand-dollar" question - the question that stumps people, makes them shake their heads and mutter something about the need to move on to other, more attainable goals.

It's the kind of question that makes you instinctively want to respond, "How the hell should I know?" A defensive response, rather than admit that one may have to face the reality of powerlessness.

It's now part of our regular daily response to the news to say to each other, always preaching to the choir, "I can't believe people can be this fucking stupid!" The evidence, day after day, of people unwilling or unable to allow reality to enter their consciousness, to recognize how thoroughly they have been indoctrinated by misinformation, how stunted they are in the power of critical thinking.

I think if there is an answer to your question, it's a long drawn-out one. And that means you see the difficulty right away, the fact that most people do not have long attention spans, and listening to a long lecture, filled with ambiguity and complexity, is something many, maybe most people instinctively resist. You're almost defeated before you've even started.

The place I always want to start is with my own experience, Back in 2008, after Gavin Newsom had authorized the right for LGBT people to marry in San Francisco, and the idea caught on, and the state of California extended that right to the entire state, the right wing, people we have come in more recent times to identify as "Christian nationalists," swung into action. Led by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco who had previously served as Archbishop of Salt Lake City and had made lots of close connections with Mormon leaders, a movement arose to overturn that right, with Catholics and Mormons joining forces* to put their religious common ground into a law that would apply even to people not of their faiths. It went on the ballot as Proposition 8.

Taku and I immediately joined the resistance, the "anti-Prop. 8 campaign." and for the first time since Vietnam War days I got politically active again. We would go over regularly to the campaign headquarters on Market St. in San Francisco, a block up from Castro, and volunteer to do whatever was asked of us. The campaign leaders decided on a telephone campaign. They had put together a list of likely democratic voters, voters most likely to vote against Prop. 8 and the push to overturn marriage rights, and our job was to urge them to get out and vote.

It was a huge uphill climb. Most people don't answer their phones anymore because of robo-calls and people who, like us, annoyed you with pitches you didn't want to stop to listen to. For hours on end we'd make call after call, most of the time only to get an answering machine." When we got a real person on the line, we'd get a variety of answers including, "I'm already on your side. I'll vote against Prop. 8," and we'd feel good. But soon we'd start asking the obvious question, "Why are we asking so many volunteers to call people who are likely on our side anyway?" The answer we got was: because Republicans are far more likely to vote, and we need to remind Democrats to get to the ballot box.

It made sense. Frustrating as hell, this drop-in-the-ocean approach, but it was better than sitting home and doing nothing.

Despite what seemed to us volunteers like a herculean effort, we lost. Prop. 8 passed, and the right for LGBT people to marry got taken away.

The good news is this defeat shocked people - not just gay and lesbians - but the average fair-minded Californian - and after a couple of years that defeat was put right and the Obama administration succeeded in getting same-sex marriage rights put into law on a national level. A couple of years after that, Taku and I were able to marry, and the story had, at least for us and many like us, a happy ending.

What came out of this was a pretty deep analysis of what had gone wrong. How could we have failed, when it was so clear that so many Californians, a clear majority of the population, were in favor of same-sex marriage? How could we possibly have lost?"

With the answer that emerged came the awareness that the world is divided into people who respond to reason, logic and sound argument, and people who don't, people who can only be reached, if at all, through their emotions. And here we were up against another serious disadvantage, our own ingrained bias, the belief that smart people think and are persuaded by reason and dumb people don't. To bypass a chance to make a reasonable argument in favor of an appeal to emotions (i.e., in our culture, something less worthy than reason) felt for all the world like reducing oneself to a lower level of being. You were getting down on the ground to play with children, not acting like an adult. It felt beneath your dignity to behave like that.

Politicians and used-car salesmen, we sneered, surrender to that low level of interaction; we don't. It was, and remains, particularly difficult for intellectuals and academics, not to see this through the lens of smart vs. dumb.

After Prop. 8 succeeded, we began to see ads on television and on billboards of gay couples, smiling faces, "people like us" images, often with children, speaking of how happy they were living with each other: "This could be your son, or daughter" messages, all designed to speak to the fact that by now everybody seemed to know gay people personally and had long ago shed the view that, as the religious right was still trying to persuade the population, we were child molesters, or people with "sexual disfunction disorders," unduly focused on sex at the expense of all else. Images, often without words, of two elderly women who revealed that they had shared lives for half a century. The challenge was to reframe the consciousness, persuade people to realize through images and uplifting narratives that homosexually inclined people cared as much about loving, caring relationships as they did about sex, just as heterosexually inclined people did.

It was clear the leaders of the movement had learned from their mistaken dependence on reason and were using a new strategy of speaking directly to people's emotions, often bypassing those reasoning faculties. Showing, demonstrating through images and personal narratives, that the impulse to exclude LGBT people from the rights non-LGBT people enjoyed was based on a false assumption that they were, in the words of the Catholic Church, "inherently disordered." And in the end reason did come largely to be replaced by images, emotions, and feelings. Even the best cut-to-the-chase, bottom-line arguments were replaced with smiles and a minimum of words, maybe something like "love is love," or "love is all you need," if that.

That experience, the shock of losing the battle against Prop. 8, left me with the lasting conviction that - to use academic language here for a minute - "narrative" is more powerful, in the end, than reason, narrative meaning story-telling. Just get out there and tell your story, the new strategy went. Make sure you stick to the real, speak sincerely from personal experience, and don't back down. Keep talking, keep telling your story. Look people in the eye. Make them see (as opposed to understand) that you are not all they thought you were. That’s all, ultimately, anyone can do. We need to accept our limitations, recognize that this battle will not be won by individuals, but by collective action. We need to convince each other, those of us who are persuadable by reason, to just keep talking, and not surrender to despair or the view that you are too small to count. You are small. But the collective isn’t. And the collective depends on every individual example. Consciousness raising, that old Marxist strategy of persuasion, was still the way to go. Just not by brute force, but by attractive imaging and appeal to commonality and one's best instincts.

When you bring up the examples of immigrants from Arab countries in Berlin or Palestinians in Israel who are led by their own particular sources of misinformation, it seems to me that you are underlining the importance of a variable approach - different strokes for different folks, not a one-size-fits all solution to problems. And just as the response to argument should be counter-argument, the response to narrative needs to be counter-narrative.

I’m thinking of my friend Pierre, whose story I shared with you, and of all the people who are afraid to get the Covid vaccination because they believe it will hurt them somehow. And the people who say that the breakthrough cases, like Pierre’s, of people who got the two shots but got Covid anyway prove that the vaccine is ineffective. They need to hear Pierre tell his story. He is anxious to tell you he is convinced the vaccination saved his life. Without the two shots, he says, his case of Covid would likely have been far worse. As it was, it caused a couple weeks of intense discomfort, but today he is singing the praises of the beautiful Florida landscape, the birds, and wildlife. If you tell him, “Aha, you got vaccinated, but you got Covid anyway, you fool,” he will respond with a very good answer. His sincerity is palpable. It is, “You’ve looking at this wrong. The vaccination was not to prevent Covid; it was to make sure I got only a mild, survivable case of it, if and when I did.”

I think the answer to your question may lie in organizing some sort of plan that matches doubters with story-tellers. Maybe a registry of people willing to tell their stories - in person, ideally, but on video at least, and a system of matching like the dating apps, where somebody filters through all the information and puts the right people together.

I realize how inadequate I am as a responder to the anti-vaxxers. When I realized that my erstwhile friend in Munich was not responding to my counter-arguments, I decided he was an idiot and shut down the communication. While that makes a lot of sense for me personally, who has better things to do than bang my head against a wall, it was not the right response to give to an anti-vaxxer. I still feel I should have hung in there. The problem is all I had to offer him was facts and statistical information. He insists Dr. Bhakdi was onto something because he's a microbiologist with years of experience and loads of publications. My insistence that all around the world the people filling hospitals these days are anti-vaxxers like himself, was not going to work. He had made his mind up and came back with, "They’re all telling lies because Dr. Fauci is in thrall to the for-profit corporations trying to push the vaccine to make money.”

We were not the right pair to engage in this debate. I should not be the one trying to persuade him to change his mind. What my friend needs is a walk through intensive care wards in a hospital where people are dying from Covid and are willing to tell you they were once like him in denying the effectiveness of the vaccine but had learned through painful personal experience that they were mistaken. If I knew how, I would put anti-vaxxers into direct personal contact with people suffering and dying from Covid.

I know, as that video about the hospital in Little Rock shows so vividly, that even when people are dying from Covid, some people insist to their last dying breath that Covid is a hoax. But we should not be deterred by such stupidity - if that’s what it is - it’s more fear than stupidity, I suspect. We should recognize that these people are a small sliver of the population, that many more people will respond either to reason or to facts staring them in the face, up close and personal.

I’m not the one to do it, but I would hope there are people organizing something we might call “testimony banks.” Face-to-face encounters with people anti-vaxxers can most easily identify with.

And then, when you’ve exhausted the last effort to make that kind of match, and argued your best argument with those who listen to reason, recognize your limitations and look out for yourself. Don’t exhaust yourself, but live to fight another day, in a battle you have a better chance of winning than the present one.

That may not be the best of all possible approaches, but it's the only one that comes to mind at the moment.

In my next life I plan to be king of the world and will have a better one.

Maybe.

*today, it's important to note in passing, I think, that the Roman Catholic Church has divided into retrograde (pre-Vatican II) clericalists on the one hand and largely post-Vatican II "people in the pews" on the other hand, with the latter in the majority who do not fall under the rubric of "Christian nationalists." And the Mormons, while still staunchly conservative, are more likely also to show more diversity of opinion, many following the views of Mitt Romney, a more independent conservative, less hostile to the extension of rights to more and more citizens and also less likely to fit the description of "Christian nationalist."  Today, it's the Evangelicals, many of whom have tied their wagon to the Trump camp, that are at the heart of the source of anti-vaxxer enthusiasm in the U.S. But that's another story for another time. I want the focus to stay on solutions, rather than an analysis of the problem.

David Chen

David Chen

Imagine you’re a 13-year-old boy and your name is David Chen. You wake up ready to start your day. You’re in your home town, Geneva, Switzerland, so the thoughts that run through your mind are in your first language, which is French. They involve your father, who is a famous Russian pianist named Vladimir Ashkenazy. 

No, not the famous Swiss pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy from Russia, the guy with the Icelandic wife and the five kids, one of whom is also named Vladimir Ashkenazy and is also a pianist. That’s Vladimir Davidovich Ashkenazy. He lives in Meggen, near Lucerne, about three and a half hours away. That Vladimir Davidovich Ashkenazy is your great uncle, the brother of your grandmother Elena Ashkenazy, teacher at the Moscow Central Music School, and sometime visiting professor of music in Tokyo. She and her brother are children of David Ashkenazy, your great-grandfather, after whom I presume you were named.

No, your father is Vladimir Sverdlov-Ashkenazy, Elena’s son. He’s not only a brilliant composer, but a virtuoso pianist, as well. Winner at age 14 in 1990 of the Central Music School’s First Prize in a piano Competition, and (lest you think he simply rode in on his mother’s coattails) at 16 toured Germany with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and three years later performed Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto with the Israel Symphony Orchestra. Two years after that, in 1997 now, he gave a solo performance at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo and from there went on to become the world-class virtuoso he is today. One Russian journalist even gushed that he is "the new Horowitz!” 

Your mother, Lyda was born to Chinese composer and conductor, Robert Chen (Chinese: : 陈亮声; pinyin: Chén Liàngshēng). She is a lawyer and also performs professionally on the viola.

And Lyda’s mother, your other grandmother (besides Elena Ashkenazy, that is) is often referred to as the best-known, most accomplished concert pianist alive today, the Argentine of Catalan Jewish heritage, Martha Argerich.

The question is, “What do you want for breakfast?”

Have a look at some of the things David has been up to:

1. Performing a rap number with his cousin, Rafael Milan, on their abuela Martha, aka "Moo-Moo"; 

2. Playing Ravel with abuela/moo-moo;

3. Playing Rachmaninoff with mama and Vincent Boccadoro.

photo credit

M.A.S.H. ahead of its time

Loretta Swit, who played "Hot Lips" Houlihan
then, with Alan Alda, and at 80, with Jamie
Farr, who played cross-dresser Corporal Klinger.
Loretta will turn 84 in November.

For those of you interested in the history of the LGBT movement, I just came across a marvelous contribution to that important evolution in thinking and change in social attitudes, a video by a journalist/blogger/pop culture critic named Matt Baume:  Watch it even if LGBT history isn't your thing for a jolt of nostalgia for the years when M.A.S.H. was the most popular thing on television.

I was in the army before M.A.S.H. came out.

In applying for the Army Security Agency, I had to fill out a form. Question #15, I believe it was, was "Are you a communist, fascist or homosexual?"

I used to joke that I answered "no" because I thought two out of three was "close enough for government work." But at the time I genuinely believed I could honestly say no to that question, because nobody would ever be able to prove otherwise. And besides, I wasn't all that sure. I might have ever so slight an inclination to be a communist sympathizer.

When I first got assigned to the Russian barracks at the Army Language School, everybody was reading a new best-seller that had just come out, Joseph Heller's Catch 22. Another story of the absurdity of military life.

We were an unusually unorthodox bunch, given to exposing hypocrisy and mindless bureaucracy and arbitrary cruelty. A popular expression was "RF". It expressed the cynicism of the day. RF would one day come to mean"rat fuck," after Woodward and Bernstein popularized it in connection with the Watergate Affair. But in those days it stood for "random fuck," the possibility that bad things could come down on you at any moment and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. It was the early 60s, still, and the anti-Vietnam War protests were several years in the future, as was fleeing to Canada to protest the draft. I simply went into the army without any awareness that I had an alternative.

The whole time I was at the Army Language School, I never came to terms with being gay. That had to wait until I got to Berlin and started having nightmares, which forced me to come to terms with the fact that I was keeping a terrible secret, even from myself.

It would be many more years before M.A.S.H. would come out, and many many more yet before Stonewall and the beginning of the American LGBT movement.

So this example of resistance to homophobia, which Baume describes as an image of the 50s seen from the 70s with an eye to the 90s, would probably have embarrassed me if I had seen it in 1962. Instead of saying, "How progressive!" I might well have come out with, "I wish they wouldn't make such a big deal of such things."

But that's before I got to live through the era of Harvey Milk in San Francisco, and way before I got to watch Obama publicly acknowledge the contribution of Frank Kameny, one of my true heroes.

In any case, have a look at the video.

And if the photo above whetted your appetite, have a look at this video of the characters, then and now here

photo credit

The Air That I Breathe

Jordan Windle

I have been focused a lot recently on Tom Daley, who won a gold medal in diving at the Tokyo Olympics. I got hooked on this guy way back when he first met Dustin Lance Black, the author of Milk, and the two of them hit it off. Milk is about Harvey Milk, the San Francisco gay rights leader assassinated by a former cop back in 1978. I lived that experience up close and personal, and all the events that followed, so when Dustin Lance Black began raising consciousness through his writing about Milk's contribution to gay rights, he became an instant hero of mine. Tom Daley has tremendous personal appeal as well, and when the couple's child, Robbie, came into the world by surrogacy, I tuned in regularly to Tom Daley's YouTube channel and shared their very public lives.

The other day another gay dad came across my radar. This time it was a news item about another Olympic Diver, whose name is Jordan Windle. Jordan's father adopted him from the same orphanage in Cambodia where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie found their son, Maddox. In Jordan's case, his adoptive father was a single gay man named Jerry.

I'm not the People Magazine type. I don't follow the gossip stories, but I did note in passing that Brad and Angelina's relationship ended in a mess and I got this sour feeling when I thought about the six kids they adopted and what they must be going through. Maddox, for example, wants nothing to do with his adoptive father.

Fortunately, that's not the case with the Windle father-and-son pair. Jerry speaks of his son as the air he breathes. Who knows how much is hype, but it's uplifting as all get-out to read about how he has nurtured his son's interest and talent all the way to the Tokyo Olympics. When Jordan was seven, Jerry enrolled him in an aquatics camp in South Florida, where he caught the eye of Tim O'Brien, the man who coached Greg Louganis. It's been a great success story so far ever since.

While most people will no doubt focus on this remarkable kid - with very good reason - it's the gay dad who captures my attention. I've known a number of gay men who have wanted kids so badly. Many of them, like Jerry Windle, ran into barriers against gay people adopting in the U.S., and had to go abroad to make it happen, and I'm happy to say the ones I know are also success stories. The quotation from Martin Luther King comes to mind, "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." For so many years the self-righteous hypocrites of the Christian right, Catholic and Protestant both, have set themselves up as would-be defenders of marriage and the family, cruelly slandering gay people as enemies of the American family. Today it's becoming increasingly clear what an injustice it has been to assume gay people don't love children, when so many have even turned their whole lives around to raise their own. A very outspoken gay liberation advocate once admitted to me, after adopting a son, "I now seem to have much more in common with straight parents than I do with most other gay people."

The point is not that gays are somehow specially gifted, as artists, as sensitive human beings, or as parents, as gay boosters often claim. It's that they can create lives as rich and meaningful as anyone, and what a shame it has been that we have taken so long to get to that recognition. And I realize there are many takes on this story besides the gay angle. I don't want to detract from this kid's wonderful accomplishments as a young Olympian athlete.  

But I also don't want to miss the opportunity to celebrate this wonderful story about gay families.

Have a look at some of the news stories surrounding this remarkable young man, Jordan Windle, and his father, Jerry. If you don't have time for them all, at least watch the first two.

Watch him dive here.

Watch his father tell the world what his son has meant to him here.

Interview with Greg Louganis here.

As a 10-year old here.

2020 interview, pre-Tokyo Olympics here.

after qualifying for Tokyo Olympics here.

Photo credit

The Defeated - a film review (Netflix series)

Max und Moritz

I've been a fan of Michael C. Hall since he played the gay brother in Six Feet Under, that wonderful series about an undertaker family that had such interesting characters and plot lines.  And I liked him in Dexter, as well, where he played the crazy vigilante who seeks justice where the cops and the courts fail, chops bad guys up and dumps the pieces in the Bay. But I think he was badly miscast in The Defeated, one of Netflix's latest big productions, that bugged me no end from start to finish.

The Defeated takes place in Berlin immediately after the war, as the Russians, British, French and Americans are carving up the city into zones of occupation and trying to help the city get back on its feet. Taylor Kitsch - imagine having to go through life with that last name! - plays a Brooklyn cop - tries to; his Brooklyn accent is a total flop - who is assigned to a small Berlin police precinct - Kreuzberg, I believe.  The district's chief police officer is played by the well-known German actress, Nina Hoss, familiar to American audiences for her role in Homeland some years back. Another first-rate German actor, Sebastian Koch, plays the bad guy, the "Engelmacher" (angel-maker), who runs a stable of girls forced in this period of widespread desperation and poverty, into prostitution. Then, as if Taylor Kitsch's name wasn't noteworthy enough, there's Tuppence Middleton (no relation to Kate, the future consort of King William of England), who plays the British wife of the American Vice-Consul, a constantly falling-down drunk. Tuppence? I wonder if she has siblings named Shilling, Guinea and Ha'penny.

Sorry. I've wandered into the absurd.

Blame it on the plot of this stinker. The story line involves Brooklyn Cop Max McLaughlin (Kitsch) accepting the job of law enforcement consultant just so he can track down his brother, a U.S. soldier gone AWOL who was so freaked out by his experience at seeing what went on at Dachau that he becomes (like the Dexter character) a man driven to fix what's wrong with the world, something he does by tracking down some of the Nazis who have escaped justice, torturing and killing them - which we all get to watch in grizzly detail.

I have no problem being expected to suspend disbelief when I go to the theater or the movies. I know you have to stretch the truth sometimes to keep an audience engaged. But this thing pushes the ridiculous until it screams.  Max and his AWOL brother, Moritz, it turns out, had a German mother, who named them after Germany's best known children's story, written in verse and first published in 1865. A bit of a stretch, there, but at least conceivable. Less likely are other things, like when McLaughlin says, "Drop me off in Dahlem," and hops into the back of an army jeep and nobody questions his authority. He also dashes into a gunfight with Russian soldiers with guns ablaze. The Russians torture and manipulate, the entire city is portrayed as a giant bordello, and for some reason the AWOL brother knows the city streets in intimate detail and has access to large warehouses where he has set up elaborate torture machines, and then leaves notes for his brother and copies of Max und Moritz with addresses, which Max then hops in a car and drives directly to. Despite his role as a cop, Max cleans up after his brother's brutalities because he once swore on a copy of Max und Moritz to be ever true. Gimme a break.

It's the violence, mostly, that bothers me, even more than the absurdity of the plot, the cheap reduction to character types, and the sheer number of coincidences. Such good actors, such good staging - the rubble everywhere is pretty convincing - so much potential for a much better drama. All squandered.

I watched it to the end. The Germans speak in Berlin dialect most of the time. That's fun to listen to. But also a bit of a stretch.

I'm now asking myself if this isn't some sort of snobbery on my part. Some sort of phony sanctification of that period of history with which I feel so personally connected. I don't mind their making historical fiction (well, I do, truth be told) of this time period. But couldn't you do a better job of it?

Netflix streaming

photo of Max and Moritz from Wikipedia

Picking the good parts; leaving behind the bad

     If it ain't one thing, it's another. Now it's watching the progress of Hurricane Henri as it roars across my "kuni." That's Japanese for my homeland, country, place where if I had to go there they'd have to take me in. I'm watching the storm move from Montauk Point on Long Island across the sound to Rhode Island and Connecticut, moving west across Hartford, narrowly (hopefully) missing Northwest Connecticut (the center of my "kuni") but slamming into Western Massachusetts before winding around and ultimately blowing into Nova Scotia. Lots of friends and family in that path. When friends write sympathetically about the forest fires in Northern California - my adopted kuni since the 1960s - I appreciate their concern and hasten to assure them I'm safe. I have been, so far, although we're still cancelling coffee with friends on the patio because of the bad air. Now it's my turn to hope if their electricity goes out that it goes back on before the food rots in their freezers.

And this bit of trouble is just one more bit of ugly reality, ruining what used to be a joy - sitting down with the Sunday New York Times - but is now a challenge to my sense of balance. God, they tell me, is in his heaven, but all is definitely not right with the world.

The badly managed departure from Afghanistan, the insidious self-serving politicians like Florida's governor DeSantis, climate change, kids falling behind in schooling and child development due to Covid, all is most assuredly not right with my corner of the world.

I had an uncle who didn't hide his contempt for my interest in Germany, the homeland of my mother. And when I went and made Japan my home, he gave up on me entirely. His world was the glorious victory over fascism that I was apparently embracing. We were never going to have a meeting of the minds and I was never going to convince him that what he was sneering at I considered a gift from the gods (my use of such a phrase would drive him even deeper into a rage), the addition of Germany and Japan as cultural homes. 

Kuni and Heimat are not foreign language words, but terms that provide familiarity and give comfort. A part of me feels constant melancholy that I didn't pursue my youthful dream of making Berlin my home and becoming a German citizen. Another part of me wonders why I didn't take the path of becoming a Japanese citizen after discovering a strong sense of pride in myself when my application for "permanent resident" came through and I began getting involved in local neighborhood politics, and reminding my students that I could eat with chopsticks and speak their native language since before they were born.

Some might want to call it schizophrenia; I call it a broad embrace of multiple identities. I am German. I am Japanese. I am also Canadian (more Nova Scotian than anything else, actually). And I am American. (Well Alabaman or Floridian, not so much, but definitely Californian with New England roots.)

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher asked our class to tell "where we all came from." My hometown was a mixture of people who identified themselves as descendants of the Pilgrims and people with European immigrant backgrounds, mostly Irish, Italian, Polish, but lots of others, as well. The single most common identifier in the class was Italian. I stood out by announcing I was German. Whereupon the Italians and other kids beat the hell out of me on the playground when we went out for recess. Dumb-ass teacher. How friggin' clueless. It was 1949 and much of the population shared my uncle's view that nobody in their right mind should presume to identify with the Nazis.

It was hard, as a kid, to explain to my classmates that my family were not Nazis, that the Fritzes and the Emmas I called aunt and uncle made great beer and potato salad, and that if they wanted to know what Germans were really all about they should listen to a boy's choir singing "Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, schlaf ein" (Sleep, my little prince, sleep) OK, the recording was made in the 60s, but we didn't know about such things in the 40s. Also, these boys are Austrians, but you get my meaning.

These days I'm pedaling even faster to convince myself Americans are not all imperialist assholes. It ain't easy, what with watching a repeat of the Bay of Pigs and the Fall of Saigon, to say nothing of the efforts on the part of an entire political party to disenfranchise African-American voters, and the most widely watched TV network and many of our religious preachers putting out a steady stream of advice to not get vaccinated against Covid.

I'm not simply trying to think positive, and I don't think it's a zero-sum game. But I am grateful that one of my identities, my American one, doesn't have to be associated with the likes of sleeze bags like DeSantis, Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham.

It can go with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers . And that includes the wonderful feminist observation that Ginger could do anything Fred could do - and she could do it backwards in high heels.

It can also go with Judy Garland and The Wizard of Oz.

And the song that gay people took on as their national anthem, back before the gay liberation movement was still a distant dream: Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

And I wish we could do what the Japanese do - declare human beings as national treasures.

One of the national American treasures that come immediately to mind is Bobby McFerrin.

Watch him get an audience to sing the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria, with them doing the Gounod while he accompanies them with his mouth-orchestra version of the Bach.

And then watch him with another audience doing The Wizard of Oz.

Frust und Schönheit

Frustration and Beauty

You know how things can get lodged in some corner of your mind and you can't get them out? A tune that nags at you? Or a thought that won't let go?

I've been frustrated as hell, fighting with myself. One part of me is desperate to get back into the exchange I started with that antivaxxer guy from my distant past; another part of me tells me I need to recognize my own limitations: I'm not going to persuade this guy to change his views. I can't be sure whether I'm to blame for not finding the right words or to lay it on him for his inability to see how inadequate his skills are for engaging in a serious argument. I've made a commitment to not engage further because he appears to me to be the quintessence of obstinacy and all the alarm bells are telling me to quit before I say something unkind and unproductive. But the teacher in me nags away at the thought that giving up on somebody, effectively writing him off, is surrendering to my least worthy instincts. I should keep going, fight the frustration with more action, and not run to fight another day, in another way, with a more worthy opponent. The frustration is high.

I decided to pry the nagging thought loose with another nagging thought, this one a melody that won't let go and has been spinning in my head for weeks now. It's a melody by Schubert, his Fantasie in F minor, as played by the Jussen Brothers. I never tire of it and keep coming back to it for reasons I can't explain.

The sun has gone down, and I went up to my room, which has the last rays of the sun leaking through the drawn shades, and put the piece on and let myself get into a dark and wonderful meditative place. It has not dislodged the frustration, but it has coated it with something quite beautiful.

The beauty is not of my imagination. Credit goes to the producers of a concert the Jussen Brothers gave at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, who obviously know their stuff.

The two brothers are sitting on a bare stage with just a luxurious black-lacquered Steinway, dressed in black brocade jackets and bathed in a deep blue hue mixed with a golden light on their youthful golden hair and handsome faces.

And they start in. Da-dum-da DAH da. Da-dum-da-da DAH da. Those opening notes repeat endlessly throughout the piece and are the very essence of a sound that won't let you go. Not a lyrical melody. Not bel canto. Very German, somehow. But oh, so elegant. Orderly. Constant. Reliable sounds.

It takes a while to realize there's an audience taking all this in. For the longest time all I could see was the blue light and the contrast provided by the golden yellow of the inside of the piano, the hair and faces and white hands of the two young men and the dimly lighted chandeliers around the hall. Virtually no color. No reds. No greens or purple*. Just black and gold. And that exquisite deep deep blue.

There's so much there to admire. The talent of these brilliant concert young pianists. The production person who came up with the blue lighting idea.

And the audience, which knows to delay their applause for the longest time when they finish. They let the mood run its course, withhold acclaim until they see the boys relax entirely. What a treat it must be to play before such a sophisticated audience.

I'm still frustrated.

But I'm feeling oh so much better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2WyyF_t2I

*OK, so there's a touch of purple!

Fact-checking COVID-19

I recently had a troubling encounter with an old friend who, it turns out, is an anti-vaxxer. He lives in Germany, where anti-vaxxers are quite numerous. It brought home to me the desperate need for us to check the facts we are bombarded with on a daily basis, from our usual news media and especially from social media.

I don't know this friend all that well and have not been in touch with him for years. But when I saw him endorse the views on Facebook of a former professor and medical researcher at the University of Mainz, Dr. Sucharit Bhakti, now discredited by that institution, I wrote the friend to push him for evidence of his claim. What he came back with was a mere repetition of the doctor's assertions, no attempt to counter the counter-evidence I presented, and no apparent awareness that the counter-evidence was worthy of serious attention.

I made the effort to explain what anybody with a basic understanding of argumentation knows - that one can counter the internal coherence of an argument or one can question the authority of the person making the argument - but one cannot - as my friend was doing - judge an argument on the strength of one's prior convictions or by looking the source in the eyes and believing they are sincere.

When, after another couple of times going back and forth, I realized I was dealing with somebody who lacked this basic education (he is a university graduate, so this came as a surprise), I shut down the exchange.

This personal encounter jolted me and brought home the difficulty in countering the very real presence of a large amount of misinformation out there on Covid. I have no trouble understanding that politicians like Florida's governor DeSantis, or Texas's governor, Greg Abbott or its Attorney General, Ken Paxton are untrustworthy sources of information and not above making decisions harmful to the public if it serves their own interest. But when a doctor with academic credentials speaks out, I want to listen much more carefully. I believe they should be given a full hearing and one should make every effort to be sure one is on the right track when listening to arguments, both pro and con.

My friend Bill just forwarded me an article from Indiana about an anti-vaxxer doctor there making his case before a school board that it should disregard the guidelines of the CDC which advise quarantining, masking and social distancing and vaccinations. The doctor's name is Dan Stock. He identifies himself as a resident of McCordsville, Indiana (about six miles from the schoolboard meeting in Fortville) and  is a family medicine specialist in Noblesville, all suburbs of Indianapolis. 

One site claimed he was affiliated with Community Hospital South, in the south of the city.  Another claims he has no hospital affiliation. A search for his name in the list of of the hospital's staff comes up empty and I have no information about his standing or reputation within the hospital or among his peer group, but I did find a posting by a Dr. Edward Nirenberg that trashes Dan Stock totally. Nirenberg sounds powerfully convincing to my layman's ears. On further investigation, however, it turns out that he is a blogger, not an official voice, so that brings us back to square one. More fog. More reflection on the relative importance of "an argument's internal logic" vs. "peer-group, or institutional authority" as a source of authenticity.

Here, if you are interested, is the position and approach of the CDC in their own words. I did find a video of Dr. Stock making the case for following the advice of one's family doctor and being suspicious of bureaucratic healthcare institutions and insurance carriers. He is a striking figure, both as a person and as a medical professional.

What brought me up short is the impression (I haven't gone through his arguments with a fine-tooth comb) that he is making virtually the same case that Dr. Bhakti, the German doctor is making, namely that vaccinations not only are not effective, but can actually trigger the immune system into furthering the disease.  It's sobering to have this claim come at me from two different directions. And while it's easy to dismiss anything a Rand Paul or a Ted Cruz or a Rick DeSantis has to say, it's another thing to get up close on the medical front and hear from the horses' mouths the claims these politicians are basing their decisions on.

The article, which is put out by Indianapolis TV Station WTHR, provides an effort to check the facts of Dr. Stock's claims. It does so, and provides a refutation by another doctor, Dr. Gabriel T. Bosslet, who charges that Dr. Stock's claims are either misleading, lacking in context, or, in some cases, downright false. Here are Dr. Bosslet's credentials.  Here, at least, we have what I take to be some serious credibility.

And here is the article, if you'd like to follow up on this news item. It's causing quite a stir.

I just listened to the entire hour and seventeen minute long school board meeting. It was packed with parents infuriated with the board's policy of contract tracing and quarantining, a policy the doctor on the board claimed was constricted by legal concerns. My impression was that the meeting illustrated the limitations of a democracy in a nutshell. Parents claimed, with considerable forcefulness, no doubt encouraged by the assertions of Dr. Stock, that the panel needed to "listen to parents" and not to the CDC and the (federal and local) institutes of health. The chief criticism of the CDC was that its recommendations were "all over the place," the implication being that inconsistency equals unreliability. Nobody brought up the obvious counterargument that the Covid pandemic is new and that agencies must of necessity make the best assessments of the situation at any given time, and that those assessments will change each time new information comes in. Much the same as science is the sum total of truth at any given point, and changes each time new information comes in to add to or correct what was once assumed to be true but plainly no longer is.

A moment's reflection leads me to the conviction that, while institutions like this school board are obligated to listen to the views of the community, particularly the views of the parents of the children they school, they must also not be swayed by passion masquerading as knowledge. Again - speaking of nutshells - this is knowledge in the era of social media and a culture of rights-over-responsibility and a lowering of critical thinking standards in favor of feel-good boosting of one another's self-confidence. Some of the parents' complaints would seem to have substance - the fact that home study materials are inadequate, for example, and the possibility that the quarantining policy may be overly cautious. But it is also very likely that these are policies that need adjusting, rather than rejection. More light is called for. More factual information.

It's tempting to just label anti-vaxxers as wackos. I'm naturally inclined to do that because the sources I follow (Anthony Fauci, who I came to trust and respect during the AIDS Crisis nearly forty years ago now comes first to mind) lead me in that direction. So that's my starting bias. But a bias should not be an impediment to investigation. It should be an impetus to commit to objectivity, reason, and sincerity - to overcome that bias, if called for.

I think there is no shortcut. We simply have to doggedly insist on fact-checking, insist on evidence, and question all sides broadly.

There are two viruses abroad in the land. No, not just "in the land" but globally.  One is called Covid-19. The other could be labelled Misinformation and Gullibility. Both appear to be wide-spread and very dangerous indeed.

Fact-check. Fact-check. Fact-check.

With a little bit of help from my friends - and mom and maybe dad, as well

Philippe Jaroussky

I've been listening to one great musical artist after another for some time now, not just making lemonade out of the lockdown, but really getting into the fact that one of the greatest of benefits of the computer age is that we now have access to the top of the line, the very best singers, dancers, instrumentalists and others of exceptional talent.

As I was listening this morning to Philippe Jaroussky whose purity of voice puts me into a meditative state, I found my mind wandering to the question of how much effort he must have put in to get where he is today. It's clearly not enough to be born with talent. That talent must be cultivated. And although I'd never want to take anything away from these people who make you wonder where they get their superhuman abilities from, I know that in most cases it takes a parent or two and in some cases a village. Whether it's a mother who ties you to the piano bench, a teacher who spots you early on and gives you the grounding you need, a good friend wise enough to give you the kind of encouragement you need to keep going when things get tough, you almost certainly can't do it on your own.

If you're one of the lucky ones, born with talent into an environment that knows how to nurture it, good on you! We can only wish we were all so lucky.

Unfortunately, for all those who succeed, there are many more who don't. One way to work myself into a deep funk is to reflect on how bad parenting or bad schooling can mess up a kid. I'm furious with the American way of paying for schooling by taxing locals to pay for the schools their kids attend and then redlining and otherwise assigning poor people to poor neighborhoods where their kids have to make do with poorly funded schools. I want us to treat health and education as a national responsibility. I hate it that we can't make that happen, that a critical mass of people go along with the Republican way of keeping the wealth the nation generates in the hands of a limited few, that we cannot do right by kids and get them out of poverty by exposing them to the best schools the nation can provide.

I love excellence, and I love it each time I come across a musician who seems to have been dealt a marvelous hand of cards to play the game of life with, a child prodigy, or a musician with the personal discipline to train and bring out of the talent they were born with. 

This applies to lots of things besides music of course - I've been obsessed with the British diver Tom Daley, for example, and have shared my excitement over his winning a gold medal with his diving partner, Matty Lee, in the Tokyo Olympics this week. But music is my mainstay, and I know from personal experience what is involved in rising to the top in the world of musical performance. I had great prospects and raised a lot of expectations as a kid, as a boy soprano, and later as a church organist at the age of sixteen. I decided early on I didn't have what it takes to work the talent I had into something greater, and I have no regrets. It was the right decision and I am grateful that I at least have the ability to appreciate talent when I see it, and to feel the joy that comes from watching it grow, as I have watching Alexander Malofeev over the years. And the Jussen Brothers, to name just a couple examples.

After listening to this performance by the counter tenor Philippe Jaroussky, I looked into his background. His is a great story and he's still got miles to go and could well become even better over time, even though he's already good enough to have earned the right to the adjective "exquisite" when describing his singing.

I have a book on the Jews that managed to escape Nazi Germany who contributed their talents to the U.S. and other countries. Jaroussky's family left Russia because of its hostility to Jews, as well, and you can't help wondering how profoundly stupid and self-destructive people can be to let talent escape like this. Their loss illustrates the metaphor of shooting oneself in the foot. Not only do tyrants and genocidal killers perform horrors on their immediate victims; they remove chances of greatness from their own people as well. If their victims manage to escape, the talent is not lost and may even, ironically, get cultivated better for having been tested so severely. Not that that should be used as an argument for oppression, but it does illustrate the folly of mankind.

I just wanted to share what was going through my mind as I listened to this pure voice. It comes in a package that was roughly bounced around before it was delivered. Like Tom Daley, Jaroussky is a gay man, and it hasn't been all that long since gay people got out from under the heel of religious bigots. And not that long since Jews got out from under the boots of thugs, as well.

The battle isn't over. Tucker Carlson, the prime spokesman for America's white supremacist network supporting the destruction of American democracy, just paid a visit to Hungary to sing the praises of its authoritarian leader who is doing to Hungary what Trump tried to do to the United States. As Carlson kisses thuggish ass, the news comes that the LGBT community is out in force in the streets of Budapest protesting the recent attempt to cut back on the rights of lesbians and gays and transgender folk. So there are still many battles to be fought. 

Meanwhile, if you don't want to fuss with me over all this bad news, just sit back and enjoy the beauty of Tom Daley and Matty Lee's beautiful dive. And listen to Philippe Jaroussky singing Vivaldi with that wonderful baroque orchestra, the Ensemble Matheus.

But don't overlook how they got there. I like to wish the mothers of my friends well on my friends' birthdays, since they did all the work.

So listen to Philippe Jaroussky. And raise a toast to his mama.

Once again, that link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zQX2XqAE8c

Photo credit

Mario - a film review

Just watched Mario, a film made primarily in Switzerland. Didn't know the Swiss made movies.

It's been out a while. I believe it has made the rounds at gay film festivals. Which is appropriate, since it's the story of two star soccer players who fall in love and have to contend with the fact that their world will not permit them to be themselves and continue to expect a future as professional soccer players.

So yes, it's a "gay" movie. But to call it that is to be distracted by the obvious while missing the bigger, more consequential story. It's the story of two young men, one of whom believes he has no real choice but to live a lie, and the other who recognizes that he can't and goes on from there. A story about prioritizing, and about whether to put social recognition, money and fame ahead of authenticity. About the choice between short-term gain and long-term satisfaction. And about a kid who makes a youthful mistake that he will likely come to regret for the rest of his life.

Mario raises the question: why do people tell stories about heartbreak? Because we all need to feel pain at times? Because we like having our dark view of the world confirmed? The filmmaker's name is Marcel Gisler, and I see from his Wikipedia page that he has been making films since 1985 - I believe this is his seventh - and with considerable success. I have to admit I think this one is well done as a work of art. It's a bit slow-moving for my tastes, and about a half hour too long. But that says more about me than it does about the film or the filmmaker, and I expect the 100% rating Rotten Tomatoes gives it accurately reflects the probability that most people are willing to overlook those limitations - if that's what they are.

The lead actors are immensely appealing. I fell in love with both of them almost instantly. I also found the portrayal of their youthful confusion and of the environment they had to function in entirely believable. Switzerland is culturally more conservative than much of Western Europe, certainly when contrasted with Holland or Scandinavia, so the homophobia portrayed in the year 2018, when most modern countries are leaving it behind, also rings true. At least it comes as no surprise. So kudos on the reality front.

I've tried, probably not hard enough, not to give too many spoilers. I have not revealed how the story ends, exactly, but I'm afraid I've given away too much.  If so, shame on me. It's not what I would call a must-see. I admit part of its appeal is watching how Swiss-German speakers move up and down the scale between standard German and their local dialects, and that is of little to no interest to most people. But that bias aside, I believe it's very much worth watching. I leave it to you to decide which is its greatest draw - the Alps in the distance when you're sitting in the stands and gazing out over the playing field. Or the drop-dead gorgeous twenty-five-year-old actor, Aaron Altaras.

Available on Amazon Prime

photo credit

No need to steal it if they're giving it away

The two-party political system in the U.S. goes all the way back to 1776.  Political agendas have come and gone and both parties - each by nature a coalition of extremes and centrists - have evolved over time. Republicans date back to 1854, when they were formed to oppose the expansion of slavery into American territories. In 2020, Republicans were known not only as the party of corporate wealth, but of white supremacy. If you doubt that, explain to me why 90% of African-American voters who voted voted Democrat in 2020. 

Back in the dark ages, when American kids still had to take civics classes in middle or high school, I was inspired by the notion that political elections were about the best man winning (there were precious few women in politics in the 1950s), and that once a senator or a congressman went to Washington, they got up in front of the Senate or the House and debated policy. When the time allotted for debate was over, they voted and everybody abided by the vote. If you didn't like it, you "voted the bums out of office." Another aspect of this elegant narrative was that we could expect gentlemen to "agree to disagree."

My father and his two brothers were all Republicans and it was from Republicans like them that I absorbed the values of independence and responsibility and the importance of dignity and fair play. My best friend in high school befriended and went to work for Lowell Weicker, the Republican Senator and later Governor of Connecticut who eventually got pushed out of the Republican Party for being too liberal. New England, or "Rockefeller," Republicans were my people back in the day before I had time to get serious about developing a more extensive understanding of American politics, and to this day I mourn the destruction of this once noble party.

That image of American government and a battle between two worthy opponents who shared the best in American values and differed only on how to use them to guide policy decisions is now a hopelessly quaint memory. These days, with very few exceptions, only the rich have a say in who gets elected in either party. And since the election of Barack Obama, the Republicans have stated openly that their goal is to gain power again by any means necessary and to keep it. Nowadays the zeitgeist is cultural war, and hostility seems to have been ratcheted up to white hot hatred between the two sides in the war.

But despite all those people of good will calling for compromise, and for "listening to the other side," I am struck with the philosophical dilemma of how honesty compromises with dishonesty, how malicious misrepresentation is supposed to work hand in hand with empirical truth. George Orwell predicted it. We are now living in fascist times, and two of the more characteristic features of fascism is the willful misrepresentation of truth, and the embrace of power for power's sake.

We're slipping off the edge. We're surrendering democracy because the will to keep it alive as a dream seems to have waned. We're remarkably close to the edge. Republicans have come out of the closet as white supremacists and Democrats continue to act as if they have the god-given right not to involve themselves in politics.

Jon Favreau, Barack Obama's former speech writer, now runs a podcast company called Crooked Media and a podcast, which he runs with Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor. Dan Pfeiffer co-hosts "Pod Save America" with them. All are former Obama employees. In a recent podcast, Favreau brought up the upcoming attempt to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom.

At the risk of sounding alarmist as hell, consider this: We all know how Republicans have given themselves over to keeping black people from voting, particularly in key states where electoral college votes will decide the presidency. And how they have managed to work their way, while Democrats were not looking or caring, into school boards and other ways to control politics locally, including especially grabbing the right to establish gerrymandered election districts to gain and maintain Republican hegemony in regions where they are in fact the minority. But now they've gone for New York and California. Not to let Andrew Cuomo off the hook for his part in being a male chauvinist pig - if that's in fact what he is - I claim no insider knowledge here. But Biden has just asked him to step down. Not exactly a good move for the Democratic Party.

But what's happening in California is even more dramatic. Governor Gavin Newsom is on the fall ballot to be recalled. If Democrats turn out and vote no, that's not a problem. But polls show 90% of Republicans intend to vote in this election, while only 58% of Democrats expressed a similar interest. An old old story by now.

The way the system works is this: There are two questions on the ballot. No. 1 is "Should Gavin Newsom be recalled?" If a majority of voters votes yes, the governorship will go to the next candidate with the highest number of votes. And that means a Republican, since they're the ones working hardest to line up a replacement.

A Republican, remember, is likely to work to impose the following policies:

1. repeal the minimum wage
2. microchip undocumented immigrants
3. restrict access to abortion
4. limit restrictions on guns
5. support oil exploration
6. replace Senator Diane Feinstein, who just turned 88, with a Republican if she dies or retires

And that's how Republicans are within range of getting to run the show, even in a state where Democrats outnumber them by double-digit leads.

There are lies of commission when the bad guys grab the floor and spread them abroad. And lies of omission, when people fail to speak the truth and sit back when lies of commission are told, and say nothing.

In politics, there is a similar thing going on when it comes to voting.

Check out Jon Favreau's podcast in its entirety here.

Alan Turing on the fifty pound note

When's the last time you opened a piece of mail and found a fifty-pound note in it?

Well that happened to me this morning. A good friend who lives in the UK just mailed me one. I wrote him back and labeled him a "megapeach," since "a peach of a fellow" doesn't quite do it for this marvelous an act of generosity.

The value of the gift goes way beyond the currency. Fifty pounds is a good sum of money, to be sure. The first time I went to London was in 1962 and I stayed in the German YMCA for a pound a night. Granted that was a very long time ago, but I can't help marveling at the changes. But the real reason for the gift was to put into my hands this wonderful bill with Alan Turing on it - the Queen still gets the front, of course. And it's not on banknote paper. The Brits have switched to polymer, which, if you don't know what that is, is a flexible plastic. So it has a silky feel to it.

Even more remarkable, it has three areas that have see-through windows. And foil which comes in two colors. It's quite a piece of art. I think it's quite beautiful, and I know how ridiculous that sounds when describing a banknote. Counterfeiters will have their work cut out for them.

Alan Turing, as my friend reminded me, is deserving of a hero's status. The Brits drove him to an early grave for being a gay man, and let's hope that cruelty is not soon forgotten. But this generation is putting that right and recognizing how many lives he saved with his Turing machine, the precursor to the computer. On his Wikipedia page you'll find the comment that "official war historian Harry Hinselsy estimated that his work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives." 

No way I'm going to spend this money gift, even if I do get back to the UK one day soon.

But it's nonetheless a gift I greatly appreciate.

photo credit