Music - the antidote to despair

The latest murder of American schoolchildren, 600 of them since 1970, by guns in a country too stupid to recognize it has the solution to the senseless slaughter to the problem right under its nose, is so profoundly outrageous and depressing that I feel close to despair. Every day 32 are shot, and 12 die. And before that was the news of the Putin invasion of Ukraine where the choice is between risking nuclear war and asking the heroic Ukrainians to surrender their culture and their nation to the bully next door. And the wildfires and the latest impending drought in California. Not to mention the every increasing numbers of homeless people. And evidence that we're losing the race against world-wide climate disaster. And the once-again increase in Covid-19 numbers and probably a return to lockdowns, which drives everybody mad. And evidence galore that the grossly unbalanced American political system in which rural white supremacists have the upper hand, and self-serving super-wealthy corporatists buy senators and representatives, and democracy seems to be on the verge of going under. And on and on. There is so much temptation to avoid the news.

But I am committed to not turning away. I want to be ready to join forces with others who want to keep democracy alive if the opportunity presents itself, however powerless I feel as a single individual...

Holding off despair and not surrendering to hopelessness means I need a steady influx of love and friendship and humor, good food, witty conversation, healthy images of young people actively engaged in life. And, the biggie, my personal antidote to despair - music.

Somebody asked me recently to list my favorite pieces, the ones I return to with regularity. I listen to lots of music, try to get in at least an hour or two a day, and am always looking for new pieces. I have a great love of opera and instrumental music, especially piano, but also violin, cello. Love Yo Yo Ma.

Here are ten of my favorites. I have no desire to rank them. I don't see performance as competition, as much as I like watching competitions like the Tchaikovsky Competition held every year in Moscow and St. Petersburg and the Chopin Competition in Warsaw which I watched in its entirety this year. I like popular music as well as opera and Broadway musicals, folk music, bluegrass, and even country, provided its sung by Dolly Parton - anything in which the performer is obviously having a good time and not holding back.

I list these pieces in no particular order. And I repeat, these are not my idea of the best things available on YouTube, but pieces I happen to have discovered over the past few years that I return to with regularity. The selection is completely arbitrary and purely subjective. And it represents only where I happen to be at this moment. I expect not to remove any of these from my list of favorites, but there is no end of pieces I will want to add as time goes by.

But here's my answer to the question a dear friend asked recently, "What are your favorite musicians, performances, composers, and pieces of music?"

1. Two from Puccini’s operas - “O, mio babbino caro” from the opera Gianni Schicchi. So very many beautiful versions of this. Every soprano takes this one on. If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the performance of Renée Fleming with the Berlin Philharmonic. She draws it out, the better to show off her powerful voice control - and the conductor, Ion Marin, is right with her making it happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf-tjXevlyQ
2. And “Nessun dorma” from the opera Turandot, sung by Luciano Pavarotti https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_hLh4qCqpg
3. A third operatic piece, this one by George Bizet: “Pearl Fishers’ duet” from the opera by that name, The Pearl Fishers - sung by Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Jonas Kaufmann https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2MwnHpLV48
4. And one from a musical showpiece, Schönberg and Kretzmer’s Les Misérables, “Bring him home” - Alfie Boe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX7PYCWzH9I
5. Then come several of my favorite pieces and performances by piano greats. These include Tchaikovsky’s “Pas de deux” from The Nutcracker Suite, performed by Alexander Malofeev https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZtqjelW_nA. Credit should also go to the arranger of this piece, composer and pianist Mikhail Pletnev. And you might also enjoy watching Alexander play this same piece when he was only eleven years old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU9xprajIJU
6. There are so many superb Russian pianists. My all-time favorite is Vladimir Horowitz, but I won’t list his many brilliant performances here, because I’m limiting myself to pieces I currently play over and over again. One I do have to include, though is Rachmaninoff’s "Italian Polka," performed by Vyacheslav Gryaznov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj8vzloRKQ0
7. And then there is virtually anything and everything by the Jussen Brothers. If I had to reduce it to a single piece, the performance that I return to the most, it’s Arthur Jussen’s version of one of Brahms’ fourteen Intermezzos, many say his best, Opus 118, No. 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wo4IPNMzWQ
8. Then there are two pieces that are sort of outliers - not the stuff of top rate opera and concert pieces, but rather music in a more popular vein which nonetheless I find touching and comforting in the extreme: one is “The Lonely Shepherd” on the panflute by Gheorghe Zamfir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orL-w2QBiN8, performing with the populist conductor André Rieu and his orchestra.
9. And the wonderful German lullaby, “Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, schlaf ein" (Sleep my little prince, sleep), sung by the Regensberger Domspatzen (which translates to “Sparrows of the Cathedral”) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLwbdfINnU
10. I want to stop with ten, so this list doesn’t get out of hand. There are more than ten, though, so I’m going to split the number ten position between Paul Robeson’s Ol’ Man River https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh9WayN7R-s and Jeanette MacDonald’s San Francisco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttJMkuaclso

In a perfect world, there would be no incompetent policemen, no hypocritical politicians, and no citizens too lazy to go to the polls and vote them out of office. There would be no child-killers, no racism, no greed, no manipulators of the uninformed enabling the mess America is in today. But this isn't a perfect world. And in, with and under the imperfection, at least we have music. I hope some of these pieces do it for you as they do it for me.

Whistling in the face of grief

Each time anybody says something like "These are trying times," it's hard not to slap them with "What about..." and remind them of famines and floods, droughts and revolutions galore. Nobody gets to claim things have "never been bad as this!"

OK. Got that out of the way. Now I'm going to claim we're going through some rotten times. Trump's gone, but I'm saving the champagne for when his ass gets sent to jail. The Supremes are about to turn us into a theocracy and force poor girls in Alabama and Mississippi who get impregnated by their father's fishing buddy to give birth. Putin, who claims all he wants is to bring the Slavic people of Eastern Europe into his warm embrace, has earned the title of Slav-Slayer instead.

I'll stop while I'm ahead. (Too late! I know.)

On a more personal level, I've now passed the average life span for men in the United States by over four years (pft! pft!), but I'm dealing with the passing of one friend or colleague after another. There is lots to get down about. 

And that brings up an interesting philosophical question. Is it possible to remain smiley-faced, or at least not sad, without being a Pollyanna, without turning your back on reality, without pretending?

I sent around a link yesterday to a benefit Cateen (Hayato Sumino), one of the most talented pianists I know, gave back in March for the victims of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. In it he played the Ukrainian national anthem and also a wonderful piece of music written for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima called Hana wa saku (The flowers will bloom again).

That prompted me to start thinking about the many ways people have used music to deal with grief. I have no use for denial - I'm sympathetic to people who need it to survive mentally, but I am convinced burying grief only allows it to come at you when you least expect it and tear you apart further down the line. I think the way to go is to face it, look it square in the face, and spit in its eye.

The Japanese are good at that. We in the English-speaking world have "Singing in the Rain," that magnificent song and dance number by Gene Kelly, where the words go:

I'm laughing at clouds

So dark up above

The sun's in my heart

And I'm ready for love

Let the stormy clouds chase

Everyone from the place

Come on with the rain

I've a smile on my face

I walk down the lane

With a happy refrain

Just singin',

Singin' in the rain.

But even those lyrics get a bit too close to denial.

I relate much more readily to the Japanese song "Ue o muite arukou," a song which came out in 1963 and made its way to the States under the bizarre title of "Sukiyaki." Laughable now, but it made sense, since the world I grew up in (I was 23 in 1963) knew precious little about things East Asian. Chinese food was pretty much limited to "chop suey" and Japanese food to "sukiyaki" and so the producer who brought it here decided to use one of the small handful of Japanese words Americans could connect with. Never mind that the food cooked at the table had absolutely nothing to do with the song about loss and pain and suffering.

Here are the opening Japanese words with my rather loose translation:

Ue o muite arukou

I walk with my face uplifted

Namida ga koborenai you ni

So that my tears won't fall

Omoidasu haru no hi...

Remembering those spring days...

I won't do the whole thing. If you're interested you can find the original with an English translation here.  Or use the link down at the bottom.

The singer who made it famous was a handsome guy named Kyu-chan (Kyu Sakamoto). He met a tragic end in a plane crash at the age of 43.

What's so remarkable about it is that many students of Japanese have committed this song to memory and only afterwards come to realize how the finger-snapping jolly delivery completely masks the harsh reality. The music is upbeat, even jolly. A Japanese way of singing in the rain.

There must be a million versions of it.

Here's one of my favorites, a purely instrumental version done in the kind of serious fashion I think only Japanese can pull off. Makes you want to get up and move your arms and legs and snap your fingers. Whistle, even.

And here's the original, performed by Kyu Sakamoto.

I call this looking grief in the face.

And maybe not spitting. But dancing.

photo of Kyu Sakamoto 

Streets of Berkeley

Just watched a video of somebody trashing Berkeley while cruising through its streets, running one red light after another.

Watch it if you're interested in seeing what the city looks like. Dull, basically. It's by no means something a Chamber of Commerce would put out. Quite to the contrary, it's another of the many YouTube pieces this guy Nick Johnson comes up with, catering to the folk who get off on evidence that the world has gone to hell. One hit piece after another.

There's more than one doctoral dissertation to be had on this phenomenon, part of the dumbing-down of America. Remember all that optimism about how our lives were going to improve with the advent of the internet? How we'd all be so much better informed, our democracy would be so much better because we'd no longer be at the mercy of a few conglomerates in control of the media, etc. etc.?  What many missed was the downside - the fact that every idiot and his uncle Dufus would now have a pulpit to spew half-baked opinions from and tips from porn stars with lessons on how to douche properly, macaroni and cheese recipes, and shows like Jim Bakker's in which he instructs you on how to prepare large quantities of food for the Apocalypse (how did he reach the conclusion that there would be survivors?)  And shows like these Nick Johnson videos on the worst places on the planet to spend your days and nights.

The trouble with commenting on this phenomenon, rather than just leaving it to fade away, is that you become an enabler of the trash. In this case, though, since we're talking about a video of the city of Berkeley, I can't let it go without comment. It's a hatchet job that, as the many comments demonstrate, rings true to many viewers. It does include lots of accurate information; it is not a misrepresentation of the state of affairs in Berkeley; it does provide factual information which it's important we be reminded of regularly. 

The problem with it is that it passes for social commentary when it is a collection of anecdotal evidence by a blind man - in this case, a woman - describing an elephant. She's got her hands on one of the elephant's legs and insists Berkeley is like a tree trunk. The woman that Nick interviews falls into the trap most people who try to describe something as broad as culture fall into - they reveal a great deal more about their own limited experience than they provide a balanced picture of a culture as a whole. Where one would hope for an enlightened study of a social problem, one gets little more than a set of observations at the level of gossip. You don't doubt what she says; you just have to recognize that another person sitting in her chair would describe things differently. As the years go by we learn more and more about the universe through astronomy. Here we see the world at the level of astrology.

It begins on the freeway coming in from the south and the west, then comes up Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. When it crosses the Berkeley line you can see the Campanile in the distance. Note the biased orientation from the start: Nick says to the woman, "You didn't grow up there so you're not jaded with, like 'old Berkeley'..."  Really stupid commentary. Makes me want to turn the volume off and just watch the street views.

So elitist, she says... People go off to their apartments in Paris... Hate you if you play tennis... Hate you if you don't do yoga... One silly false generalization after another. What saddens me is that it touches on a genuine flaw in American society, the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the fact that we've become a country of super rich and poor with fewer and fewer folks in the middle class with each passing year. But instead of any kind of social analysis which might lead to addressing the problem, they simply sneer. The observation that unless, like me, you got into the housing market while that was still possible for the average person, you pretty much have to have big bucks to buy in these days, is accurate, and that's a tragedy. But it's an American tragedy, not a local one. 

Such a missed opportunity. Things need fixing, and we really ought to be shining the light in the right places, instead of making these snear jobs.

I'll stop the kvetching with that. And urge my friends who might like to see what the streets look like where I walk the dogs every day to take a little ride - I assume on a bicycle, for the most part, occasionally in a car - through the streets of Berkeley, California. Up Telegraph Avenue (twice), through the UC Berkeley Campus, past People's Park (twice), round and round.

I watched it hoping to see Taku or me walking the dogs. No luck.

I've lived in some marvelous places. I love Berlin and when I go there I still feel the ache of "a history that never happened."  I feel at home in the grand city of Tokyo and in the small town of Oiso, down the coast from Tokyo. I'll always be grateful to San Francisco for giving me a place to start my adult life. But these days, there's nowhere I'd rather live than in Berkeley, California.  

Warts and all.

Coming Out Colton - a film review

To start with, let me put my cards on the table: I think Colton is an incredible hunk. There's no way I can say what I'm going to say without admitting that even the vaguest traces of lust still left in the far reaches of my imagination are enough to disqualify me from expressing any sort of objective opinion on this Netflix series, Coming Out Colton.

I want to write this film review all the same. It was a powerful experience learning even at this stage of LGBTQ liberation, when we think and act as if we've won the fight, that homophobia still has the power to rip your soul out of your body and stamp on it till it's dead. I am among the flock of gay people who roll their eyes at every new coming out story. "Good God, not another one! Talk about a story that's been done before. A million times. Can't we get on to more interesting stuff!?"

This one's really different.

This is the coming out story of Colton Underwood. Colton made a name for himself playing defensive end for the NFL. He was born in Indianapolis to a white middle class family of athletes and everything about him screams middle class white privilege. As his story unfolds, though, it becomes obvious how his status backfired. Raised a religious Catholic by loving parents, he inherited a desire to please and a belief in the importance of heterosexual normativity. Privilege, it turns out, was just another way of saying the higher up you are on the totem pole, the farther you have to fall.

His masculine looks (6'3" and 250 pounds of muscle) and charm got him a spot on reality TV. He was a contestant on the 14th season of The Bachelorette in May 2018, and then the star of the show in The Bachelor the following January. Which only meant that he would live even more in the public eye than he did as a football player, and therefore feel he had even more to lose by coming out. He says he knew from the age of six that there was something that set him apart from those around him; he became aware at a very early age that he was sexually attracted to men.

Coming Out Colton brings home in spades how entrenched homophobia is in mainstream American culture. I don't want to make too much of the two-culture theory of American social life, but Colin is clearly a product of the midwest, and not bicoastal America, despite time spent in New York and Los Angeles. LGBTQ folks from New York, Hollywood or San Francisco may have a tough time understanding how this story needs to be told now, so many years post Stonewall and Harvey Milk, but that's the whole point. That's the reason this series got under my skin. As familiar as I am with how deep-seated American homophobia can get, I still find myself being surprised at how far the struggle still has to go for a whole lot of folks, and I attribute my lack of knowledge to a lack of intimate familiarity with America's midwestern culture.

Coming out is still stressful for probably most LGBTQ folks, even those with strong constitutions, and I still need reminding that the gap is still wide between people like Colton, who can remain in the closet well into his adult life and many young people today - take the story of the boys in Heartstoppers, for example - who find lots of support as their quest to understand their sexual feelings unfolds in a way unthinkable a couple decades ago.  We're a big country, with room enough for two subcultures to exist side-by-side, and I tend to forget that, living as I do in a place where I don't have to think twice about identifying my same-sex life partner as my husband. I'm a Bay Area snob who refers to the environment Colton grew up in as "a thousand miles away and thirty years back in time." If Coming Out Colton were less effectively constructed as a story I would have moved on to another Netflix offering, but I was glued to the screen from the start.

Most of us who come out as gay follow the same pattern, coming out first to ourselves, then usually to a best friend, eventually to parents and others in authority. But because reality star Colton had flaunted his claim to heterosexuality on television to the whole world, he had a much greater task ahead of him. And because he had made a complete fool of himself, stalking one of his Bachelorette girlfriends in the mistaken conviction that she was his last chance of becoming straight, he had to pick his coming out venue carefully. He chose Good Morning America. And don't miss the irony here in the label "reality star." His story is also a story of how readily we give our lives over to fantasy versions of reality.

Probably the best feature of this coming out story of a big football star and model of masculinity surrounded by adoring women is not the shock and surprise to friends and family that there is a gay man hiding in their lives. It is the point made that in coming out Colin has far more to do than tell people he's gay. He has to peel away the layers of inauthenticity he has covered himself with for nearly thirty years. "Finding oneself" is a cliché. But clichés begin with real meaning, and there's something quite moving about watching a fully-grown man undergo the discovery process.

The reviews of his appearance on Good Morning America were mixed. He got his full share of public support, but he also encountered a whole lot of cynicism. Many thought he was just another miserable attention-getter, doing it for the publicity. Who the hell are you to think you're so damned important? Who are you to make so much of yourself? Those messages came through in twitter comments, and as much as he thought he was prepared for all the publicity, he wasn't. There was still some distance to go before he hit bottom.

There is something about this series that keeps me from showing unalloyed enthusiasm for the story, and that is the strong suspicion that all this coming out was staged. Did Colton actually get the people he comes out to to agree to be filmed before he confronted them with the shocking information? If so, shame on them for not telling us that the reactions are not authentic. 

Because the quality of the production is so high and because it's basically about Colton's search for personal authenticity, I have to assume Colton's years in reality television gave him the wherewithal he needed to get his family and friends to sit with cameras running. In which case, bravo! But I'm still not convinced this quest for authenticity is authentic. They hold back. They don't tell us, for example, as Colton's Wikipedia page does, that he attributed his recovery from Covid to hydroxychloroquine, which makes me wonder if the producers felt a need to pretty things up a bit. They also don't give us any details about his sex life after coming out, but that may be because it would be a distraction, something you'd expect more from a reality show than from a serious study of a quest for authenticity. And the aspects of the personalities we get to see of his mother, father, friends and coaches make them all out to be almost heroic. Why, one has to wonder, would Colton find it so necessary to go back to his high school coach and relive the agonies of the locker room, for example, if these people were all the warm and supporting characters we see today. Something has been touched up.

At least one reviewer was more put off by the staginess of the production. Read Justin Kirkland's review in Esquire for a much harsher take on this show.  Kirkland thinks Colton is not so much seeking authenticity as grabbing a money-making opportunity. To my surprise, I'm not that cynical. But his review reminded me to ask myself who the intended audience for this series is. Is it just another piece of didactic American television? A how-to for LGBT kids out of reach of bi-coastal culture? A bit of balance against the overwhelmingly straight world of reality TV?  Or, as Kirkland suggests, a phony taking an ordinary coming out story and blowing it out of proportion? I'm going to argue it's a story worth watching of a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time American, one who says things like "between you and I" and misses the boat on a number of fronts, an imperfect being, and if he makes a few bucks on the deal, that doesn't make him a monster; it makes him an American entrepreneur.

One of the episodes stood out, for me, as more powerful - head and shoulders more - than the others, precisely because it was not touched up (unless it's not his real priest talking - which is, admittedly, possible) and that was the one in which Colton comes out to his parish priest. Colton makes clear that he wants to keep a strong connection with his church and that he sees coming out as something he would not have been able to accomplish without God's help. Watching Colton's face as the priest tells him he cannot be gay and Catholic brought me to tears. I won't go into what happens next - you'll have to watch the series for that. But it's a poignant part of the story.

Watch it. And tell me: Is this all a grand put-on? Or the best coming-out story you've seen in a long time.

photo credit:

And pass the ammunition - P.S.

My friend Hasi just sent me a message reminding me that my goal of getting Putin to the negotiating table was not meaningful. It's not that we're "negotiating" how much of Ukraine Putin gets to keep; the Ukrainian starting position is pretty much, "Stop the killing. Stop the destruction of our cities and get out of our country - now!"

Ukraine is not going to want to say you can keep the Dombass and the Crimea. It's going to say "You invaded us back in 2014 and we didn't get any help from our European or American friends to kick your ass back to Moscow.  But now you've shown just what a rotten bastard you are and the world has begun to take notice and help us out." Ukraine is not really in a mood to negotiate, in other words. To pretend they are is not an honest place to start.

Putin is even less willing to negotiate. He wants it all and he has shown he'd rather burn the place to the ground and kill every last Ukrainian if he has to to get his way. He wants the entire territory to be part of Russia, he wants Ukrainians to call themselves Russians, and he wants the name "Ukraine" to disappear from history. He has said as much. If he were to negotiate, he might be willing to go as far as to allow Ukraine to be used as a name for the region where the cities of Kiev and Lviv and Odessa and Mariupol and Kharkov are located. Maybe Lviv can go back to being Lvov.

So we're not really talking about a negotiation; we're talking about an armistice. A cease-fire as a first step only to total independence from Russian occupation. What Ukraine wants is for Russians to stop killing Ukrainians. And that's the reason why they want Germany and other friends to send them heavy weapons: so that they can bring home to Putin the realization that he has no other option but to lay down his weapons and withdraw from the borders of Ukraine. That's the goal. Nothing short of that will do.

Whether the Ukrainians will ultimately be willing to surrender part of their territory is one question, and whether that will satisfy Putin is another. At present there appears to be no basis to even start the negotiation I was talking about and the answer to both questions appears to be no.

If that's where the "negotiations" end up, with a carving up of Ukraine, there will likely be endless killing, endless insurrection as far into the future as anybody can see. Putin has only succeeded in bringing out a Ukrainian national consciousness that seems at the moment to be unbreakable. Putin might win this battle, but he has lost his war.

Forgive me for my lack of clarity on the subject.

Like many people, I'm learning as I go...

And pass the ammunition...

I’ve become a bit less obsessive about following events in Ukraine, as well as reading up on tons of stuff on Ukrainian history, geography, language and social analysis. Ukraine no longer occupies half my days. It’s probably down to a quarter. And because what’s going on there is much more salient in Germany and other European countries, I listen to German debate and analysis more than I do to what is available from American sources. So forgive me if I rant for a bit about something which most of you who are not Germany-centered are likely taking to heart.

What bugs the hell out of me is the debate in Germany over whether it should increase its support for Ukraine to include heavy weapons. There are a noticeable number of  “Putin-Versteher,” German for “people who understand Putin,” their way of saying “Putin supporters,” but they are a small minority.  By and large the overwhelming majority of Germans find Putin’s brutality in Ukraine something they’re willing to label as fascism, something to be resisted through sanctions, and in concert with other EU nations - up to, but not including, boots on the ground, the active intervention of NATO forces.

That means there is no conflict over whether what Putin is up to is acceptable; it is not. But there’s where the consensus stops. There is a huge debate raging over just how far Germany should go to support Ukraine in its war effort, in large part because the de-nazification process (or, if you find that concept too problematic, reflection on the misery Germany inflicted on the world) has been so successful that a critical mass of them see themselves as pacifists, and form their opinions on whether to wage war accordingly.

Just as Biden did the right thing, just in a clumsy way, in getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, has done the right thing in promising heavy weapons support for Ukraine, but took his time getting there and bungled the way he communicated his thinking to the German public. And that has led to the issue I want to talk about today in this blog entry. Two groups of folk have expressed very forcefully how they feel about this decision.

Radically opposed to the delivery of heavy weapons is Alice Schwarzer, the editor of the feminist magazine, Emma, and others who have written a letter to Scholz praising his early instincts to be “reflective” rather than “active” about getting involved in the actual war - I believe the number of signatories is now up to a couple thousand or more.

And that letter inspired another group of folk who take issue with these “hold-back” folks. Pardon that awkward adjective, but they hate being labeled as pacifists. They insist they are not against war and they are strongly critical of Putin’s aggression; it’s just that they see providing heavy weapons as spiraling up a war against a guy with atomic weapons the height of folly.

Andrij Melnyk, the very outspoken Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, immediately took to twitter: “Hi, Alice Schwarzer,” he wrote. “Your call for Ukraine to capitulate means that your celebrated feminism is only a facade, a fake. [Not to take] (t)he wholesale rape of women by soldiers is pure cynicism. Nobody with a healthy sense of reason should buy your shabby Emma.” Told you he was outspoken.

I’ve tried to stay objective in this debate. I know I’m only getting information about the war through sources which I largely select myself, anti-Putin sources almost exclusively, and I have taken pacifist positions myself for the most part ever since the Vietnam War days when I first discovered just how badly the U.S. warmongers are inclined to lead us astray - a conviction only even more firmly held since the Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz war criminals took us into Iraq. You can color me pacifist in strong bold colors.

So yes, I’m with Alice Schwarzer and company - not war, but negotiations are the way to go.

But who, I wonder, do these anti-weapons people think they are talking to. Putin? Not bloody likely. Putin has made it plain he never retreats. Not in Grozny, not in Georgia, not in Aleppo, not in the Dombass, not in the Crimea. Not once has he come to the negotiating table when he was getting away with his wars of annihilation. Not once. Why, I want to know, are the anti-weapons people writing a letter to Olaf Scholz? He has influence only with Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians. He has none with Putin. Thinking you are asking both sides to lay down their weapons is a grand illusion; you are only addressing the victims, not the attackers.

In fact, if you listen to their reasoning, it’s clear they are addressing the victims. “Don’t risk nuclear war,” they are saying. But only one side has threatened nuclear war and that is Putin. So what you are saying, in effect, is what the Ukrainian ambassador has put his finger on. You are telling the Ukrainians to surrender to the bully, because if you don’t we will all die.

And that’s what it comes down to. Who do you believe? Do you believe that surrendering Ukraine, allowing the Russians to have their way and wipe it off the map (this is not rhetorical excess; Putin put his goals into that very explicit language) is the only alternative to certain death? Or do you believe that it is precisely and only by standing up to Putin - with bigger and stronger weapons - that we can get him to the negotiating table? Negotiation is the goal for both sides, we're only arguing about how best to get there.

Heavy weapons, and maximum sanctions. Not tomorrow; today. That's the side of the fence I’ve come down on.

There are many other parts of this argument to be considered here - like when will we stop dictating to Ukraine how they need to behave? Do you really want to urge them to surrender to an army that issues condoms to its soldiers because they know rape will certainly follow the overtaking of Ukrainian cities, that bombs maternity hospitals and schools because they understand that state terrorism is the most effective tool at their disposal? And do you really not understand that what you are telling the Ukrainians is that if they want to fight to the last man, woman, teenager and pensioner, you wish them the best of luck but they've got to do it with sticks and stones?

But these are not the main issues. The main issue is what is more likely to bring Putin to the negotiating table: demonstrating that you are afraid of his nuclear weapons or showing solidarity in standing up to him with all the power you’ve got to kill the invading Russian soldiers and destroy Russian arms?

I’m greatly encouraged by the news stories indicating that the Ukrainians are quick learners, that they are learning to use these modern weapons faster than skeptics thought possible.

Slava Ukraini!

Get this war over with as quickly as possible. Save not just Ukrainian lives. Save Russian lives, too. Save lives period.

Stand up to Putin’s bullying in the language he understands - the only language he understands.

 

 

Rumspringa - a film review

Rumspringa is a movie that I'm going to suggest you may want to watch despite its many flaws. Be forewarned. As a comedy it's dumb. Clumsy. Flops between hard to believe and virtually impossible to believe. 

If you're familiar with the Pennsylvania German Amish folk, those guys who ride around in horse-drawn buggies, live in isolated self-contained communities, and associate sin with using electricity and zippers, you may be familiar with the concept of "running around" - "Rumspringa" in the Southwest German dialect the Amish use to this day. It's a time given to young men in adolescence when the rules of order (die Ordnung) are purposefully relaxed so they can get a taste of the world outside among the "English," before they are baptized and initiated into their male role as head of the family. (Amish use "English" to refer to Americans outside the community the same way Mormons use "Gentiles.")

Most Amish kids who follow the practice (not all Amish communities do), I'm given to understand, don't stray too far. They may drive a car, maybe drink a beer, but if they are in a good relationship with their parents and the community, they are not likely to stray too far. 90%, I understand, stretch the boundaries because it's expected of them, and then return to the folk. 

And that's my first bone to pick with this movie. The writers and director start with a not very original thought - "What happens when a country bumpkin goes to the big city and falls in with a wild crowd?" - and push it to the limit. The lead character, an appealing young man of about 17 or 18 - his name is Jakob - is given a Bible by his father, who then puts him on a bus to the airport, where he flies to Berlin, allegedly to track down his ancestors. Yeah, right. Like their names are in the Berlin phone book, maybe?

Germans seem to have a hard time with comedy. Where the English go for irony and sarcasm and the French go for farce, too often the Germans end up with slapstick, which is the case here.  Jakob is an appealing freckle-faced kid but the constant wide-eyed, open-mouthed shocked expression gets tiresome early on. Naive can be charming, ignorance is less appealing.

Jakob falls in with Alf and Bo, two guys who take pity on him and let him move in with them. Alf is the cool one, everything Jakob is not, and the stage is set for the two to interact with each other and draw each other from their extremes. Jakob acquires sophistication, Alf acquires responsibility and a sense of self. Like I said, not an original plot line, but if it were done well, you wouldn't mind. At least I wouldn't. I'm a sucker for stories about people who come out smarter than they went in. Unfortunately, this film is slow to develop. It's full of clichés, has a plot driven largely by coincidence, and has little to no depth. The German kids are stereotypical party animals, the Amish are depicted as religiously constipated, and relationships are started and ended for reasons we are never given to understand.

It's a film to watch when you're tired of bad news and don't want too much of a mental challenge. At least there is some heart in it, and that's its saving grace. The friendship that develops between Jakob and Alf works.  And all's well that ends well.

Netflix streaming - just out April 29.

In German, with English subtitles.

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