Those piano lessons were not in vain

Music.  Right up there with food and drink.  As essential to life quality as a good night's sleep and the company of people with whom you share love and express affection.  I can go many a day without reading a book.  I cannot go a day without music.

I lucked out as a kid.  My parents sensed that I might take to the piano and my father went out and found an upright in a junkpile for $25.  At the age of six or seven I started piano lessons.  I believe they cost my mother $1.25.  That was back in the 1940s.  My piano teacher supplemented her living as an organist at the Second Congregational Church, complaining that the preacher got a whopping good salary for his contribution to the community and she had to supplement her meager church income by teaching tone deaf kids and telling them to keep their fingers out of their noses.

I was a dutiful student of hers, but it was clear I was never going to be a prodigy - or even anything more than somebody who could read notes and recognize key signatures. I steadfastly refused to practice my Czerny finger exercises and never acquired anything resembling virtuosity.  I did get good enough to get a job as a church organist for a time (I think they were at the point of desperation, but never mind), but I knew instinctively that, unlike my cousin Bernard, becoming a professional musician was not in the cards for me.  What I did get, though, from those early years of piano (and later organ) lessons was, if not a chance to impress the world with talent, something far more lasting - a love of music.  

My luck continued into my teenage years.  We had a music teacher who visited us once a week and taught us to sing.  She happened to be the organist at the church I attended and directed both the church choir and the high school glee club, which she sat me down in front of as accompanist. I also got jobs keeping time to the step-kick-plié efforts of the local girls' at ballet.   All small town musical activities that never quite made it as springboards to professional musical careers. 

No matter.  I am more than thankful to have had sufficient exposure to music to enable me today to fill the hours with the rich array of musical recordings available on YouTube, even now when I am confined to the house and cannot get to public concerts, the opera, or other musical events.  And I've often wondered if the same holds true for those little girls now sitting with their grandkids and snatching every opportunity to take in a ballet.

So much for trivial background information; what I'd like to put out here are some of the musical pieces that keep me going through tough times.  Let me dive in:

There are so many pianists I think one should become familiar with: Alexander Malofeev, the Jussen Brothers, Martha Argerich, Yuja Wang, Vyacheslav Gryaznov, and Garrick Ohlsson all come to mind, my favorites to listen to, and not necessarily pianists I would put at the head of the line. There is one guy I would, however, put at the head of the line, the Korean teenager Yunchan Lim.

Let me give you a couple reasons why.  Liszt and Chopin, as you probably know, were not only performers; they were also teachers and wrote pieces they called "practice studies" for their students. Liszt, I am convinced, was a sadist at heart.  Some of his "Etudes" as they are called, are not so much suitable for developing skills at fingering as they are exercises to show off your inadequacies.  He started out in 1826 with a dozen and went on to develop them into twice that many a decade later, although today the core of these etudes are known as the "Transcendental Etudes," and reflect the entirety of Liszt's career as a composer.  Here is Yunchan playing all twelve at the Cliburn Competition in 2022.

If you don't have the time or the interest to listen to them all - a little cake goes a long way - listen at least to Number Five, known as "Feux follets."  And remember, at this performance this kid is just eighteen years old!   

But as good as he is in this Cliburn Competition, I think he outdoes himself playing Rachmaninoff's 3rd Concerto with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, directed by Marin Alsop.  How often does a soloist bring a conductor to tears?  [a brief aside here: if you want to hear a good analysis of this performance and of the chemistry between Yunchan and Marin Alsop, there's this piece by Chopin expert Ben Laude.]

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Much as I am regularly captivated by piano music, I am equally enamored of the human voice. Here, for example, are two of my favorite tenors: Jonas Kaufmann and Dmitri Hvorostovski (the latter, alas, no longer with us), singing the famous duet from George Bizet's opera, "The Pearl Fishers."

Where I want to end up in this blog entry is not with arbitrarily selected pieces of music but with the observation that music enriches in all its many forms.

Not just classical, but simple melodies, and sometimes accompanied by plain everyday emotions as well.  Longing, for example. Consider these pieces which, although quite simple, have stood the test of time. I'm talking about Judy Garland's rendition in the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  And a second piece from Weimar Germany, the 1920s tune, with an analogous sentiment, Somewhere in the World, sung by the Comedian Harmonists, a group which had to disband because of nazi persecution.  The music lives on in Weimar nostalgia.  Here's Max Raabe singing it.  And here it is again, with a chorus of lovely young voices.  And again, sung by Jonas Kaufmann.  

I find musical joy and satisfaction in almost all of its several forms (short of hard rock): instrumentally, or through the human voice, in complex classical forms, jazz, gospel, blues, choral, folk songs and simple harmonies.  I love it when it lifts me out of my seat and makes my arms and legs move, and I've listened to "Sleep my little prince, sleep" at least 1000 times. 

Guilt vs. Shame

My niece, Amy, and I got into a strong difference of opinion this morning over the difference between shame and guilt and whether either or both were feelings that one should encourage or reject.  Our differences reflected the vastly different ways we were defining those terms.  Amy maintained that she was not speaking so much out of personal experience as she was reflecting the views of an author she had just read, but I sensed (possibly mistakenly) that she had internalized the author's perspective, so that in effect I was arguing with her.  What follows is a kind of p.s. to our discussion this morning.  I hope she realizes how very much I value having her around to talk about serious topics with.

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The point, I repeat, should not get lost that our argument was entirely dependent on how the terms guilt and shame were being defined.  Your author, you said, claimed that while guilt had utility, because it could lead to action-to-repair, shame is a destructive term because it involves assuming the person feeling the emotion is motivated to translate shame into self-loathing.  In other words, guilt is tied to action, while shame is a function of being.

But that's putting the cart before the horse.  Guilt is to doing what shame is to being only if you choose to define the two terms that way.  I have never defined them that way.

Way back when I first began my quest to understand the difference between Japanese and American national cultures, I encountered the claim that Japan was a shame-based culture while the U.S. was a guilt-based culture.  The reason, so the theory went, was that Japanese were inherently collectivist, that the individual Japanese was subjected (or subjected themselves) to the collective. The Japanese way of expressing this phenomenon is to say "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down."  The saying is so familiar that one need not say the whole thing.  Just mentioning deru kugi - the nail that sticks out - is enough.  Mothers teach their children not to be a deru kugi.)

In contrast, so the theory goes, the individualistic American culture reflects the Protestant view that each individual has a personal responsibility to God and to no one else.  Right and wrong are therefore not determined so much by community standards as by individual conscience.

Never mind that this social theory is oversimplified, reductionist and overgeneralized and should not be considered anything more than suggestive; for a time I internalized it because it was widespread and could be found in almost any book you might pick up on the subject of Japanese culture. And to this day, I still believe there is more truth in the cultural analysis than overgeneralization.  And this affects the way I define both guilt and shame.  Except that (possibly because I have never completely shed my Protestant cultural values) I see guilt as useful because it is at the heart of one's conscience and the motivator for doing the right thing in the end, once you have awakened to responsibility.  And I see shame as a useful tool for making someone else want to straighten up and fly right.  

In the end, neither guilt nor shame are ends in themselves.  You need to shed guilt the moment you sense it rising up within you and replace it with a sense of responsibility, by which I mean a resolve to "fix" the harm or damage you've done. As quickly and as cleanly as you possibly can.  Shame is a form of embarrassment, the feeling you get when you get caught with your pants down. It usually passes with time and you don't need to do anything about it.  Just make sure you're not mixing it up with guilt.

The author you cited who claims that guilt is good and shame is bad has it completely backwards.  Consider how these words are used in public.  When we are outraged at a crooked politician, we don't shout "Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!"  We shout "Shame! Shame! Shame!"  That's because we instinctively understand guilt to be something for an individual to work through in their own time, and shame to be something to shed light on.  In that sense, you don't shame yourself; you shame others who do wrong.

Bottom line: Neither guilt nor shame are positive notions.  Shame others if they've done something wrong and you have half a chance of tweaking their conscience.  Never take it on yourself if you can help it, and if you feel it, wait and let time take care of it.  And don't waste a single moment on guilt.  Move directly to responsibility.  It's the adult thing to do.

Long live the king

I'm sure there are some Americans who don't like the British Royal Family, and far more who couldn't care less one way or the other, but most Americans I know are pretty gaga over this undemocratic institution. Queen Elizabeth's popularity took a brief dip when she fumbled that flag-lowering decision when Princess Diana was killed, but it's back up now to where it was most of the time: she was viewed favorably by more than eight in ten Americans. And her son's visit to the U.S. recently shows that a surprising amount of that affection has been passed on to him.

I could be wrong about this, obviously.  I'm not coming from a neutral place. I grew up partly in Nova Scotia and slept in a bedroom with Queen Victoria's portrait hanging on the wall.  And even in Connecticut, when Elizabeth married Philip, our school shut down classes, and we all went to the auditorium where a TV set was placed on the stage for us to watch the wedding live. And I don't remember anybody finding that out of order because she was not our queen.

The next thing about the Windsors I remember was when Prince Charles was born.  His birth was the feature story in our Weekly Reader when I was in the fourth grade, and that event too was taken as a matter of course.

It was only many years later, after I had developed a socialist consciousness, that I began making snarky remarks about the royals. I took it a step further, not so much making fun of their elite status as feeling sorry that they had no say in how their birth had sealed their fate and made them give up any hope of having a private life or eating a normal meal in a restaurant.  I still hold that view, even more firmly now that I have lived so many years in Japan and got to watch the women of the imperial family have nervous breakdowns.  There is something inherently wrong about giving somebody status and wealth they didn't ask for just so you could have a bunch of living dolls to play with.

I just listened to Prince Charles deliver a speech before the German Bundestag.  And before that, last week, I listened to him address the U.S. Congress.  Brilliant address!  Just brilliant.  And I thrilled at his reminder of the importance of NATO and of helping Ukraine get out from under the Russian invasion; I loved watching Trump sitting behind him applauding away and pretending Charles was not making a fool of him.

There is something we could do right away to lessen the chances of a repeat of this ugly Trump phenomenon.  We could separate the role of head-of-state from head-of-government, the way most modern nations do it. Much as I want to feel sorry for King Charles and other members of the British royal family, I understand that they provide a place for Brits to locate their love of country.  Whether you do this by establishing a constitutional monarchy, as in Holland or Norway or Britain and give up expecting politicians to behave in their personal lives, or do something similar to what Germany does by having a president and a prime minister, both elected, the country's name gets to keep its dignity unsullied and out of politics entirely - more or less.

Maybe it's not Charles that's bringing all this credit and prestige to the British crown these days; maybe it's his speech writer.  He still deserves the credit, in my book, for knowing how to pick his speech writers.  And admit it: once upon a time he came across like a goofball, but these days he's showing a lot of class.

They don't all have it - class.  Prince Andrew (correction: ex-Prince Andrew) blew it by playing around with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.  But most of them do.

Before you need to show some class, you can be adorable - Check out Prince Louis, William and Kate's youngest, and grandson of Charles (now there's some serious future shock!). Makes even the most dyed-in-the-wool advocate of abolishing the monarchy think twice.

Charles the First lost his head; Charles the Second might have done likewise if he had had more success bringing governance of the English church back to the Bishop of Rome, and if he had not had the great misfortune of being king during the Plague (1665) and the Great Fire (1666).  But Charles III - at least so far - seems to have turned all that bad luck around.

God save the King, I say.

Flossing the nose and ears

A sure sign that the American Empire is on the way out is the rise of China's political and economic power.  We are losing the convenience of having the United States run the world. The dollar ain't what she used to be.  And President Asshole has taken the country to war and now we are having trouble filling our gas tanks.  But what is bugging me the most at the present time is the evidence that China has caught up with Japan's ("please use the toilet finely") way of using English without worrying about accuracy or style.

Case in point:  I have been planning for about forty years to buy an electric toothbrush.  At  my last trip to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned they found and filled a cavity.  A cavity!  I'm 86 years old!  How the hell can I have cavities?  I brush and floss after every meal and twice before bedtime!

Anyway, now that I'm accustomed to spending money like it's going out of style after the thousands of dollars Taku and I have spent recovering from my broken hip, I went online and googled "Water-Pik" and went straight to the most expensive model. Why not?  It's only seventy dollars.

The package finally comes.  Direct from 301, No. 2, Hualangjia Industrial Park, No. 28 Tongfuyu Area, Kukeng Community, Guanlang Street, Longhua District, Shenzhen Yuxinyuan Electronic Technology Co., Ltd.

It comes in a box labeled "Tragebare Munddusche", which is (not quite correct) German for "Portable Mouth Douche" (or "shower," which is less funny, but equally mysterious for something that sprays water inside your mouth) - and the first e (after the g) in tragbar isn't supposed to be there.  The side of the box indicates that the product is for a "mündliche Situation" (an oral situation) (sic).

There is mention of a warranty, but no warranty form was included with the product.  Sloppy, sloppy.

Also nowhere does it tell you how to charge the damn thing.  But that's not their fault.  They included a USB port and according to my younger-generation husband, "USB plugs have pretty much replaced regular plugs these days - plug it into your computer."  Done.  Now to wait six hours for the damn thing to charge.

Meanwhile I'm reading the user manual in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. Interesting stuff.  For example, in Italian, Warning #6 reads "Non dirigere il getto sotto la lingua, nelle orecchie, nel naso o altre parti sensibili."  In English, that is "Do not inject water into the bottom of tongues, ears, noses, or other sensitive body parts."

Now I'll freely admit I ought to be ashamed of myself poking fun at non-English-speaking people's use of my native tongue, especially after decades of encouraging English-learners to eschew any inclination to apologize for non-native things that come out of their mouth while they are still learners.  Errors go with learning. But it's not just the lack of English "Sprachgefühl" (feeling for the language) that's giving me the giggles; it's the thought that they think people need to be told not to stick this water-pik into their ears.

Theme park in Shenzhen, China

It's not as if Shenzhen couldn't find native speakers of English when they need them.  It's the third largest city in China, after Beijing and Shanghai, with a population of thirteen million people, and it's not far from Hong Kong. It's that the mouth douche manufacturer has taken the attitude that the boss's nephew needed a job so they left the English translation of the manual to him.  Makes me think of my friend Norm's saying, "close enough for government work!"

A very trivial issue, this.  But I couldn't get past the water-pik in the ears image and just had to comment.

The red light has turned green.  Time to water-floss the teefs and see how well this thing works.  In addition to steering clear of the nose and ears, I'm starting on "child" setting.  Not sure how much pressure my gums can take.

Some passing thoughts of a May-baby

"Never apologize, never explain."  I heard somebody say that once and took it on as not a half-bad maxim for going through life.  For a while.  Eventually I decided it was not the best rule to live by and there were times when flexibility made a lot more sense than following rigid principles. Nuanced thinking beats ideological commitment.  

I turn 86 in a few weeks. That means I am now closer to 90 years of age than I am to the already-really-old age of 80, and I find that a seriously sobering thought. And I am aware that the corrolary to "never apologize, never explain" also needs to go: that is, "live life without regrets."  Much as I would like to think I played my cards to the best of my ability as I faced one challenge after another, as I look back now I find myself overwhelmed by the realization that if I could live life over again I would do a whole lot of things differently.

Right off the top, if I had known I was going to live twenty-four years of my life in Japan, I would have studied Japanese far more seriously right from the start.  I would have practiced my Czerny finger exercises on the piano, I would have learned to play soccer and spent a whole lot more time getting physical exercise.

I had a friend - her name was Gretchen - who said to me once, when I asked her if she had any regrets in life, "No.  There's nothing I would do over again because I like who I am today and if I had lived life differently I wouldn't be that person."  Then she added, "Of course, I would have spent less time doing some of those things."

I woke up with an ear-worm this morning of a song from the Weimar Republic days.  Don't know why it should show up out of nowhere; it just did.  It's one of my favorite pieces of music.  It begins, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once),  [English lyrics; Seven language version]  and is a pitch for enjoying things while you can, while they still are there to enjoy.  It has the wonderful line in it, "...denn jeder Frühling hat nur einen Mai (because every springtime has only one month of May)."

One of the best things I ever did was to take my junior year of college in Germany.  I went to Munich, one of the world's best cities, I'm convinced, and got, at the age of twenty, my first taste of the big city, the theaters, the opera and concert halls, museums, all manner of types of people, endless intellectual challenges. At the university I got to take a course in the history of the Third Reich taught by Germans who had lived through it and could give perspective I could not have gotten in my own country.  One thing that has stuck with me was that it gave me a lens through which to understand the dangers of MAGA authoritarianism.  It helped me see our manipulator-in-chief, Donald Trump, as an "out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the fire" solution to the failure of American capitalism and its toxic Ayn Rand-like worship of individual rights at the expense of communal welfare.

Americans, I am convinced, routinely fail to prioritize equity. We have built a national cultural structure in which some of us have been able to become super rich while so many others of us get left behind. We (a critical mass of us) have persuaded ourselves that working collectively for the common welfare is socialist - and we have made that a bad word.  Isn't wealth the sign of God's favor?  Aren't rich people smarter than poor people?  Trump and his opportunistic enablers are the outcome of this folly.

I know that even hinting at a comparison between Trump and Hitler is a good way to make a fool of yourself - Hitler's Germany lacked the institutional strength that America is beginning to show at long last. But the parallels - the scapegoating, trolling, ghosting, blatant lying - are there and they are sobering to consider even in their paler versions.

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On Christmas Eve I fell getting out of the car in front of my house and broke my hip.  More precisely, I broke the femur in my left leg. I have mentioned elsewhere that they sent an ambulance (and two fire engines, of course) to haul me off to the hospital where on Christmas Day they put a rod through the marrow in the bone from hip to knee, setting me off on the journey of learning to walk again.  And the challenge of learning how not to burn my supremely dutiful husband out from exhaustion.  He's already totally transformed the house by putting in a chair lift and grab bars everywhere and he hounds me to follow the exercise plan the physical therapists have set out for me. There's a bit of friction there.  He, unlike me, still lives in the future and wants me to repair sooner rather than later. I'm content to go into rest mode and let the body take the time it needs. I am now working on getting up and down the stairs (strong leg up first going up, weak leg down first going down) and am already getting quite efficient at frying eggs and making toast without assistance.  It only took me a week to figure out that I could avoid spilling the tea if I brought the cup, the milk and the teapot to the table separately instead of carrying the full cup on the tray on the walker across the kitchen.

To return to that song, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once),  for a minute...  It has an illustrious history.  Originally from the 1931 German film Der Kongreß tanzt  - Congress Dances - the song became wildly popular and was translated into many languages.  It  was outlawed by the Nazis and became a form of resistance to the Third Reich.  I love the fact that I was born in May - the merry merry month of May, April showers bring May flowers and all that. And all the folks - I'm thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh, the "master of mindfulness" and Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.  All sorts of people have stressed the wisdom of seizing the present moment.  Every springtime has only one month of May!  Don't blow it.  Enjoy it to the fullest.

My leg still pains me; it will be some time before that pain is no more.  Donald Trump's enablers pain me; it will be some time before the pain is no more. But the month of May is almost here, and that's cause for rejoicing.

Both/and - not either/or.  I spoke earlier of living by nuanced flexibility rather than by rigid principles. Flooded as I am these days with memories of the past and sadness over loved ones who have passed on before me, I am working pretty much full time trying to both live every present moment to the fullest and at the same time allowing myself to surrender to the nostalgia of treasured memories.

So this is what it's like to be old!?  Not all that bad.

I'm with Leo these days

I've been thinking about Jesus.  People argue over whether it was Aristotle or St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, who said, "Give me the child until he is 7 and I will give you the man."  I'm now more than seven decades removed from my first Sunday School class, and my ears still perk up when the conversation turns to religion.  For some reason I had a brain-fart this morning that made me ask myself, "Did the Gare St. Lazare, Paris' oldest train station, get its name from the same Lazarus that Jesus raised from the dead?" It didn't take much digging to learn that Lazarus and Jesus were best buds, and Jesus used Lazarus' digs as a place for him and his twelve disciples to hang out.  (Or maybe Mary and Martha, Lazarus' sisters, were the attraction.) At least one website makes the case the Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead as a way of proving he was the son of God. 

Lazarus

The website provides us with a picture of the dude (on the right), and maybe it's Lazarus' good looks we should be investigating.  

If it were not for all that virgin birthing, raising your friends after death, and walking-on-water shit, I could get my head around identifying as a Christian. My grandmother gifted me as a kid with one of those Bibles that had all the words attributed to Christ himself printed in red, so I became aware early on that if you stuck to the red and ignored the parts where you bash the brains of the kids of your enemies on the rocks, you'll get a pretty cool image of this guy Jesus.  No way I'm going to sell all that I have and hand the cash over to the homeless, but I think his heart is at least pointing in the right direction.

It's not hard to separate the real Christians from those faking it. Big on the agenda of America's Christian Nationalists is making sure the many thousands of folk who are in the U.S. illegally get deported, whether to Mexico or to their countries they were fleeing for fear of persecution.  Which raises the question, did red-letter Christ's "Love Thy Neighbor" pitch deliberately leave out the adjective "American" or did those failing to protect asylum seekers from real risk simply turn their backs and say "Not my problem!?"

Since I'm not a card-carrying Christian, I have no theological obligation to stand by America's asylum seekers.  But I don't get my moral code from the Bible.  I find the Bible morally depraved in large part (It's not just those kids' brains, there's the fact that God is said to have seen the Amalekites as enemies for all time of the Israelis, and thus worthy of being wiped out (1 Samuel 15:2–3, NKJ) to the last toddler.  I prefer a secular code that begins and ends with an injunction against violence and deceit (I know, I know, the devil is in the details).

My beef with Christians began with my awareness that so much that is wrong with American society, the racism and centuries of anti-semitism, the Calvinistic failure to recognize how much their values open the door to greed and self-righteousness, and probably most of all, the homophobia so strong it led author and scholar,  Eric E. Rofes, to title his book on gay suicide, I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves.

I gave up church-bashing, some years ago now when I learned to stop lumping together a group that shares a set of beliefs that are harmful from a similar group whose beliefs are benign, and to put my efforts into seeking common ground. It was my friendship with Jews whose "religion" was less about theocracy than about simply "being Jewish" that led me to understand my upbringing imprinted on me a cultural Christianity that won't let go was no different. Brahms' German Requiem and the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral resonate in my bones and I care not one wit whether the artists whose legacy I share with millions over the years were motivated by a firm belief only adults should be baptised or a simple understanding that they possessed a talent for making beautiful things; we share common ground.

I was taught that prayer only counted when your were talking from the heart with God and in total sincerity - which meant that all the canned prayers were suspect and done so that you could get to be seen to be praying - going through the motions.  That led to the conviction that Catholic (and any other rote) prayer was insincere and to be avoided as not real prayer.  Somewhere along the line, though, I got hooked by the beauty of the Elizabethan English in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer.  I mean really.  What's not to love about the public confession that goes:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.

I mean "no health in us" is a bit over the top, for sure, but the rest of it is a pretty good turn of phrase, don't you think?

On the Catholic front, I had a thing for Pope John XXIII and will treasure forever the opportunity I had to watch him celebrate mass at St. Peter's in Rome on Easter Sunday up close (just to the left of the main altar). I had a thing for the Argentine pope, Jorge Bergoglio, despite his arguably conservative leanings, because I saw him as a warm-hearted grandfather.  And these days I'm quite taken with Leo, the American pope currently on the throne of St. Peter.  He and I speak a similar form of American English, so he's easy to listen to, especially when he takes on Donald Trump for his hostility toward immigrants - which is, I guess, another way of saying I see him as an authentic, not-fake, Christian.  

One nice thing about growing old.  I've lived long enough already to recognize that just because it has taken years to find common ground, it doesn't mean it isn't there...

Old Dogs

 The other day I came across a YouTube video which appeared to have been made by George Will.  I found the message inspiring and immediately forwarded the link to friends.

No sooner did that link make the rounds when the smell of a rat reached the nose of my friend Bill, who for the nth time pointed out to me that I had been suckered.  I'd like to say that I've learned my lesson, but the sheer number of times I've been taken in by these faux reports indicates that that remains to be seen.  Meanwhile, all I can do is hope my friends have a greater capacity for checking for veracity than I do and a greater inclination to do so.  To my chagrin, I have to conclude that my e-mail messages should carry the warning: DO NOT TAKE THIS POST SERIOUSLY UNTIL YOU HAVE VERIFIED THIS INFORMATION.  With that, of course, I need to accept responsibility to be less quick at the draw when it comes to passing on "information."

In my naiveté, I wondered aloud to Bill why anyone would want to milk the progressive left like that. Why make the effort to provide hope and encouragement for your opponents?  Bill wrote back immediately that it must be that YouTube financially rewards those who get the most viewers, and they know that we on the side of resistance to the trump phenomenon are easy pickins.

Which raises a number of questions. I'm a huge fan of YouTube, I've watched hundreds of hours of entertainment videos, piano concertos and the like, and can't imagine life without this great source of information and enrichment coming into my life. I've sung YouTube's praises any number of times. Now it appears even monkeys fall from trees, even YouTube is part of the great American willingness to sell out for big bucks.

That's all I want to say here. Tread softly.  Never mind the big stick; just tread cautiously.  Tomorrow may be another day, hopefully a better one (here you'll pardon me if I talk to myself for a minute).

But keep the lights on.

And this old dog will work harder at learning new tricks.

Diapers

 I hate wearing diapers.

I know from a caretaker’s perspective, whether we’re talking about taking care of babies or incontinent geezers like me, disposable diapers are a godsend. Arguably, a sign of advanced civilization maybe even.

But I challenge you to try and salvage even an ounce of dignity after pissing yourself and having somebody take off the wet and put on the  dry, Especially if this is all happening in one of America’s elder care institutions where they tell you to go ahead and piss your diaper in the night so they don’t have to  come and change you. 

Not much better (OK a little better) is having to Train Percy to point himself into a plastic bottle instead of at the porcelain. My nights recently have been a duel between my chronic cough and a bad case of dry mouth which require me to drink tons of water. Which require me to then pee into a diaper or a bottle (much preferred, as I said. You have more than gotten the picture I’m sure.

For those of you who have not followed this gripping tale from the start, I slipped getting out of the car at home on Christmas Eve, fell flat on my ass and broke my hip. Two fire engines and an ambulance later, I was in Kaiser Hospital, having a rod placed down the marrow of my left tibia from hip to knee and three days after that I was sent to purgatory to recover from the operation. Purgatory left me with such memories as lying on the floor after falling out of the bed in a soaking wet diaper for three hours in the middle of the night because nobody responded to the calls for help. And a face rash from hell due to the application of the wrong medicine that took me to the ER. Anybody want me to testify in Congress on the wretched state of healthcare in America? My calendar is free. 

OK, enough time on the dark side. I got out of that place and ended up in a much better place with much better people and much better care so it’s not entirely a tale of woe. I’m now focused on getting out of here and getting home, which has been transformed from top to bottom, with every square inch covered by a grab bar or a chairlift or some other accommodation to the new reality by my beloved better half.

Taku has earned triple credits toward his sainthood degree in taking care of me. Between him and my “other beloved,” my chosen niece Amy, I have been bathed in love and affection. I wish everybody could enjoy such care and affection (without having to break a hip, I mean).  And it goes beyond that.  

 Also earning credits towards sainthood are my friends, Takashi and Chiha, my friends Sandy and Norm, my friends Arvind and Ashok and Kei Matsuda, all of whom have stopped by.  And my sister and my dearest of old friends, Sally, and my extended family in Argentina and all the other kind souls who have sent best wishes. I’m feeling super grateful. 

Now to get the hell out of here.

Queen of the Night - Mozart Staccato and Upside Down

 I have a weakness for the razz-matazz.  Much as I'd like to think of myself as a sophisticated listener of classical music, lyrical pieces like Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words or Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, I'm more often drawn to pieces that require technical virtuosity - fingers that "fly across the keyboard."

My go-to music is instrumental, chiefly piano, and also violin.  But I have no trouble defining the human voice as an instrument, as well, and this especially holds true, it seems to me, for singers with exceptional talent and well harnessed raw powers - singers like Pavarotti or Joan Sutherland, to name just a couple of my favorites.

When it comes to showing off at the piano, Liszt comes first to my mind.  But there are many others: Chopin, Prokofiev, Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit.  

But I want to focus here on what I think must be the most difficult piece ever writtten for a coloratura  soprano, credit going for Mr. Mozart himself.  I'm talking about that challenge not only to the voice box but to the lips and tongue and cheeks as well: "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen (The Vengeance of Hell boils in my heart)" from The Magic Flute. It's kind of a rite of passage for coloratura sopranos to attempt it, so there is no shortage of performances to listen to.  For me, the leader of the pack has got to be Diana Damrau.  Here she is all gussied up on a costume that does justice to her magical vocal skills, a gown suggestive of a bonfire and a wig that looks like she's wearing a Victorian sofa nestled in an electric fan.  Pure theatricality to give form to what's going on here on stage: a mother, known as "The Queen of the Night" telling her daughter, Pamina, that she has to put a dagger in the heart of Sarastro. Not because he has been holding Pamina hostage, but because he has robbed her, the queen, of her powers.  "Do it," says the queen, or "you will be my daughter nevermore!"  A heavy trip to lay on an innocent kid.

Opera is by nature histrionic, but nowhere more excessively dramatic than in this aria, which is part of opera lore, and not just in German-speaking countries, where they call German operas like The Magic Flute not by their Italian name, but by a German name, a "Singspiel" - a song play.

An example of how much fun German speakers can get out of this over-the-top piece of music can be seen in the jazz takedown by Bodo Wartke, Germany's cabaret artist and musical satirist par excellence.   To help you follow along (and why wouldn't you?), here are the lyrics in English translation and in the original German:

[I hope I haven't crossed the copyright lines here.  If so, I will take this down immediately, of course.  But just so you can follow Bodo's performance... 

Hell's Vengeance Boils in My Heart,
Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen,

death and despair,
Tod und Verzweiflung,

Death and despair flames around me!
Tod und Verzweiflung flammet um mich her!

Doesn't Sarastro feel the pain of death because of you,
Fühlt nicht durch dich Sarastro Todesschmerzen,

Sarastro's death pains,
Sarastro Todesschmerzen,

Don't you, my daughter, ever again.
Sot du meine Tochter nimmermehr.

You never do that to me, my daughter.
Sot du mei, meine Tochter nimmermehr.

Aaaaaah...
Aaaaah...

my daughter never again.
meine Tochter nimmermehr.

Aaaaaah...
Aaaaah...

My daughter will never do that again.
Sot meine Tochter nimmermehr.

Be cast out forever and forsaken forever,
Verstossen sei auf ewig und verlassen sei auf ewig,

May all bonds of nature be shattered forever,
Zertrümmert sei auf ewig alle Bande der Natur,

Abandoned, abandoned, and shattered
Verstossen, verlassen, und zertrümmert

all the bonds of nature, all the Baaaa...
alle Bande der Natur, alle Baaaa...

Aaaaah..., gang, all the bonds of nature,
Aaaaah..., Bande, alle Bande der Natur,

If not for you Sarastro will turn pale!
Wenn nicht durch dich Sarastro wird erblassen!

Hear, hear, hear revenge, - gods!
Hört, hört, hört Rache, - Götter!

And lest you think he's the only one making silly of this Queen of the Night aria, here's a lady doing it upside down.

So much for attending the opera in a black suit and a starched collar.

Bounce's Yahrzeit

Bounce and Miki

 Sometime in the early 1950s I found myself in Temple Beth Israel, the synagogue in my home town of Winsted, Connecticut.  I can't remember how or why I got there; possibly it was the time our youth group at the First Church, which was directly across the street from the synagogue, got invited to services in a move to bridge the space between our religious faiths - my home town was good that way.

What I do remember is that at some point in the service a man got up to speak of his father.  It was his father's "yahrzeit" I learned, the anniversary of his death. It was the moment, if I were to pick one, when my lifelong respect, not just for things Jewish but for the Jewish religion in particular, began.  A profoundly human community thing to do, to stop for a moment and give an individual a chance to speak publicly of the grief they felt over the loss of a loved one.

I know there are people who see my assertion that one can love an animal as fiercely as one can a fellow human being as disrespectful, somehow.  Even folly.  But I have lived these last 365 days in sadness since we took the life of my beloved canine daughter, Bounce, because she had a growth in her belly and, at age fourteen, the pain and confusion of an operation, I decided, would take her too far below the quality of life line to justify keeping her alive. 

It's one thing to define dilemma as a philosophical concept. It's quite another to feel it in your bones. I had long since recognized that the capacity to love and care for another was actually more important to the soul than the gift of being loved, so it didn't surprise me that I was facing some serious grief.  In no small part because Miki had died just a short year and a half earlier. But I wasn't ready for what it would do to me to be the one to pull the plug, to give the order for the vet to put Bounce to sleep and then administer a second medication to stop her heart.  As I watched this beautiful little creature close her eyes and relax into a face at peace, I had what it takes to convince myself I was doing the right thing.  I wanted selfishly to keep her alive at all costs, but chose to put her comfort and freedom from pain ahead of my own desires. Why then, was I feeling like I had failed at one of life's greatest challenges, to love and care for another, to be the guardian and protector of another life.  

It has been a year today. The ache is not as acute, but it won't go away. I can speak of it, and I spend a great deal of time dealing with death and dying now that I've lived beyond the normal lifespan of an American male.  I trust I will process this grief eventually. 

Just not yet.

Boots - a review of the TV series

It's easy these days to succumb to dismay or even depression over the efforts of the oafish Pied Piper in the White House to dismantle democracy in the U.S.A.  Two hundred and fifty years we've been at this project, trying to include more and more of the American populace into our sometimes hit sometimes miss effort to make the Enlightenment ideals in our founding documents a reality.  We are in an era where our steps forward seem to be wiped out by steps backwards.  But... but... I'm writing this on October 18 and the images are coming in of millions in the streets of all fifty states on No Kings Day, so the fat lady ain't sung yet.

It's always useful to be reminded of how far we've come.  It's for that reason I just sat through the eight Netflix episodes of Boots, a series inspired by The Pink Marine, a book by Greg Cope White, about his experiences as a gay man in the Marines in the days before "Don't Ask Don't Tell."  Normally I don't take a lot of pleasure in beating my head against the wall, but I read somewhere that the fact that it was spread over eight episodes meant it was able to track the progress of gay liberation in the military that paralleled the progress in society at large, and who doesn't like happy endings?

There were times when I thought I'd wandered into enemy territory.  Boots is gay history and ultimately a coming out story with a happy ending.  But it is also a full-throated endorsement of the world of macho men and the U.S. Marines.  The story takes place at a basic training camp where "boys are made into men" - i.e., where they learn to shout "kill" at every opportunity and grit their teeth against pain.  I wanted to turn it off at times.  The reason I didn't was that the acting was superb and the gay characters were complex personalities.  There are multiple sub-plots, all shedding light on contemporary American minority groups.  The lead character, Cameron, and his best friend, Ray, join the Marines to get away from home. Cameron is running from his mother's neglect, Ray from his father's pitiless machismo.  They wonder at times if they haven't moved from the frying pan into the fire when Cam gets bullied for being gay and Ray for being a mixed-race kid.  There's a lot of bullying, in fact.  The recruits are not the most enlightened of folk.

I discovered, once I got far enough into it, that one of Boots' producers was Norman Lear. The company is headed by a female captain, there are twin brothers working out family dynamics, a suicide, masochistic leadership, and plenty of examples of selfish kids learning to care for their fellow recruits.The characters grow and mature over time, and that is probably the reason why I couldn't put it down.  It's a superb sociological study of America's difficulty in handling its diversity.  

And lots of jingoism and chauvinism.  You have to take the less appealing with the more appealing.

Semper fi!

Coughing in Warsaw

Part I: All about me.

Polish audiences seem to have a wonderful capacity for holding in a cough.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's 2025 and I am once again in thrall to the performances of some of the world's best pianists at the 2025 Warsaw Chopin Competition.  It's also October and there's lots of flu and colds in the air, apparently.

The contestants come up the stairs, down onto the stage, bow, sit at the keyboard, adjust their chair, get out their handkerchief, wipe their hands and sometimes the keyboard, and stare nervously at it, lift their arms, and begin.

Out comes some of the most beautiful music ever written and the world is effectively shut outside my door.

They play a number of pieces, sometimes, as with preludes, moving from one to the next without delay.  When they do delay, as if to gather strength to move on in another direction, we are suddenly presented with a barrage of coughing. It's clear people need to cough, but have been holding it in until it is socially acceptable to let it out.  After a number of these displays of respectful silences followed by loud hacking, the whole thing becomes quite funny.  And distracting.  I'd almost prefer it if the audience would just let loose when they need to.

Maybe I'm overly focused on coughing.  I have a lung disease and that means I also have a chronic cough and I'm more than a bit pissed that I can't go to public performances anymore for that reason.  Except that actually I can as long as I get seated early enough to calm my breathing.  I don't cough if I don't exert myself.

Part II: All about Western Civilization and racism - and me again

When asked about my race, I check the Caucasian box. Both my parents go all the way back to fade-out as Europeans in origin. And I am profoundly disgusted when I encounter MAGA folk who are white supremacists. I have loyalty to my LGBT brothers and sisters, to my fellow German-Americans, to both Germany and Japan, countries whose cultures I have had the luxury of playing around in and who have offered me great benefits: Germany gave me a year of university education and an introduction to the joys of urban living.  Japan gave me a good living for 24 years and enough money to buy a house in the San Francisco Bay Area.  It also gave me a husband I'm terribly fond of.  But I have no loyalty whatsoever - zero - to the Caucasian race.  If two men could make a baby, I'd be more than happy to have a mixed-race Asian-Caucasian baby to love and to raise as much as I love my dogs and cheerfully pick up their poop off the sidewalk when we go on walks. I don't understand why one would give credit to accidents of birth.

At the same time, maybe because I lived those 24 years in Japan and because my first lover was a black American, and my last one, my husband, and the one before were Asians, I am race-conscious and totally committed politically to the notion that racism needs to be eradicated all over the world.

When I first went to Japan, back in the 1970s, I remember watching a TV program where they were teaching Japanese how to applaud. How much was too much, how much was not enough. It was hilarious.  So very Japanese, I thought, in focusing on doing the right thing rather than allowing for spontaneity.  All they succeeded in doing, I thought at the time, was stressing that western music was alien.

That's the thing.  "Western" music - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - do not belong to Germany, or to Europe, or to "Western civilization." They are world composers and belong to us all.  When I still had legs that could go all night long, I used to dance in a kolo folk dance group. I'm not a Yugoslav.

And that takes me to make the observation that now, when the contestants at the Chopinowski competition (to give this a Polish slant) have more Asian names and faces than you can shake a stick at (if you're a white supremacist and into shaking sticks) I feel obliged to mention that not only does the list of contestants contain several Lees from Korea and four Lis from China, but there is also Kevin Chen and Ryan Wang from Canada, Eric Lu and another Wang, William, from the United States. And if that doesn't make my point, you've got to include the Polish speaking Viêt Trung Nguyên from Poland and Yuanfan Yang from Edinburgh.

Part III: Sweet mysteries of life...

How the judges make their decisions continues to baffle me.  I know I'm just showing my limitations here, but when I began listening to the first round all I could hear was perfection. Then I listened to the second round and had to admit I thought the performances as a whole were actually somehow better than they were in the first round.  Obviously the judges were onto something.  But what?  How could I be so out of it?  I had good musical training as a youth, was a church organist for a while and accompanied choruses and ballet lessons.  I wasn't good enough to go on to a career in piano or in music, but I thought I had a well-trained ear. But the judges are miles ahead of me.  This is one serious bunch of musicians, and that probably explains why I'm inclined to use words like "thrill" and "joy" when reacting to the competition.

Part IV: Favorite composers

Following up on my musical limitations, I often say, when asked to identify my favorite composer that I don't like ranking world-class quality talent.  If forced to, I'd put Mozart and Chopin out beyond all the others, but I'd still list Liszt and Rachmaninoff and Bach and Tchaikovsky as gifts from the gods.  As with the Olympics, much of this probably stems from the tendency of countries to claim their heroes as national heroes.  Austria gets Mozart, Germany gets Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn and a whole bunch more, Russia gets Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and many others, and Poland says it will be damned before it lets France take Chopin away from them.  Hence this every-five-year spectacular thing in Warsaw.

Part V: Chopin, in particular    

Sitting for hours in front of the tube (or the computer) listening to 28 contestants display ways to do things with their fingers that are not humanly possible (like watching divers or pole-vaulters in the Olympics), I realize how much, even after all these years, I still have to learn about just what Chopin managed to do in writing over 250 known and numbered pieces of music, in addition to many which got lost or never got numbered. He wrote more than twenty waltzes, more than fifty mazurkas.  Of all his music, it's the nocturnes (all 22 of them) that go most directly to the soul, the etudes that blow my mind, the polonaises that make me want to get up off my chair and pretend to be the King of France, the rondos and scherzos that make me happy to be alive.  And where does that leave the four ballades - utterly beautiful pieces of music - and the impromptus and the two concertos.  And the bolero and the berceuse and the barcarole (music for boats??? - yes, I understand he got the inspiration from Venetian gondoliers).

The excitement isn't over.  They are, as I write, just beginning the third round and the winner won't be announced till the end of the month.  I've chattered on about spin-off thoughts rather than pretend I'm in the running to judge the performances.  You can find those easily; they're on YouTube.

Again, words that I reserve for things like the Warsaw Chopin Competition, if you haven't watched fingers fly in a while, go to YouTube for the thrill of it all.  Joy.  Pure joy.

What's in a word?

The war of words between those who would surrender the quest for an ever more perfect union in favor of autocratic rule in the United States and those committed to the democratic project has reached a fever pitch.  Anger and invective fly back and forth and more and more friends of the Enlightenment worry that the battle may already be lost.  I have largely held off commenting on the fracas out of a suspicion that anybody chiming in at this stage merely adds to the din.

If you're a regular reader of Hepzibah,  you probably know that my academic background is in linguistics, and I identify as a sociolinguist, sociolinguistics being the study of the way language is used as a tool for communication in society. This interest has led me to question in recent times whether or not Donald Trump deserves the label "fascist." 

The left seems quite at home calling Trump a fascist; the right fumes the left's use of the term is dirty pool, little more than an attempt to provoke them into anger.

I'd like to make an argument that this bone of contention should be seen as two separate issues: first off, is he in fact a fascist?  And secondly, even if he is, is the term so loaded that there is nothing to be gained by calling him one?

Because the terms fascist and fascism cover a broad range of notions, whether you can make a solid case that Donald Trump is a fascist depends on how you define the word, so let's start there.

The notion of fascism originates in Italy.  It was first closely associated historically with Mussolini's ruthlessly authoritarian style of governing, but was soon extended to Hitler's national socialism. Its use can be traced back to as early as the 1870s, and was extended in the 20th century to the rule of Franco in Spain.  Since World War II, the term has been expanded over the years and today often functions virtually as a synonym for any absolute dictatorship.  But, I want to focus here not on its history but on how closely trumpism reflects the five features which define it.  Those features are: 

        1. the prioritizing of might over right, and an appreciation of power and violence for their own sake;

        2. the exaltation of race, nation or other collective entity over the rights and desires of an individual;

        3. The appeal to populist illusions rather than to reason and evidence-based objectivity;

        4. economic and social control by physical suppression;

        5. the cult-like blind obedience to a leader, probably the clearest example of which was the Führer-Prinzip - the "leader principle" - in Germany under Adolf Hitler.

These five aspects of fascism apply to virtually all dictatorships to at least some degree. At one extreme, the Japanese Emperor was literally a god, even though his position was essentially symbolic and he was actually dictated to by what most people saw as lesser beings who ran the government. Stalin in Russia was arguably as ruthless as Hitler, and ruthless brutality did not end in 1945.  Ferdinand Marcos was a kleptocratic piker by comparison, but many would nonetheless include him in the lot.  Pol Pot killed more than a million of his own countrymen, as did Mao in China, although Maoists insist with considerable justification that his policies brought about improvement in the lives of the Chinese people overall after centuries of poverty and backwardness. We are left to debate whether that advance was worth the cost of millions of lives and must constantly remind ourselves that the application of these five descriptors of fascism varies in severity and in extent.

When laid out like this, Trump is small potatoes compared to his more bloody predecessors with an authoritarian bent. The reason the left wants to include him in their number probably has less to do with his resemblance to them, and more with the astonishment that any leader could capture the hearts and minds of so many of his countrymen with such fierce devotion. Although I may be placing more stress on the Führer-prinzip than on the other features, even his supporters tend to concede that his pronouncements have less truth value than self-serving utility, and the parallels to Hitler's rise to power during the waning days of the Weimar Republic are impossible to miss.  Those who choose to slap the fascist label on Donald Trump, as I am inclined to do, have to admit they may be doing so because they are shocked at evidence that fascism could, in fact, be happening here, rather than that they have an open-and-shut case for using the label.  

I'm listening to those who argue that the charge is over-the-top because the guardrails have - so far, at least - held and his moves against the DOJ and the late-night satirists Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have all fallen flat.  And because he's not so much interested in Lebensraum (Greenland and Panama notwithstanding).  I'm aware that he's way more hung up on his own ego and that"Make America Great" is not the same thing as "Amerika über alles."  He's not interested in ruling the world; he just wants love and affection - and lots more money.  But I have to ask you, is he a fascist only if he succeeds?  I think he gets points for trying, however clumsily, to replace constitutional democracy with self-serving autocracy.

Whether history will know him as a no-doubt-about-it fascist or as a tried-but-failed fascist is, in the long run, not what matters here. What does matter is the fact that the advent of trumpism has left an indelible mark on America's history.  Future students of American history will now have to add this new "-ism" to its list of other bumps in the road toward "a more perfect union:" racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, religious bigotry, anti-semitism and homophobia. (And I beg the indulgence of those who think my use of the metaphor of "bumps in the road" is unduly wishy-washy.)

I have not held back in attaching the fascist label to Trump, first of all because his rallies instantly bring to mind the Nuremberg rallies, with masses of people displaying sometimes insane levels of devotion. But news coverage as well shows his minions going out of their way to sing his praises, way beyond what once were normal levels of social interaction.  What is in the nature of his followers, one has to ask, that makes them behave in such a cult-like fashion?  And what is behind their failure to impose consequences after fact-checking his lies?  His moves against democratic institutions are right out in the open - against the media, against universities, against the justice system.  As are his recent efforts to shut down late-night television comedians who satirize him in ways that get under his skin.

I am aware that if we're ever going to close the gap between left and right, we're going to have to consider more seriously not whether what those of us holding fast to democracy say is true, but whether what we say communicates what we want to communicate.  Communication is measured not by what comes out of one's mouth but by what the listener takes in through their ears. It's a contest between being right and being effective. So having made the case for identifying Trump as a fascist, whether a real one or just a paltry wannabe, the question is still open whether or not highlighting the fascism in trumpism helps us put the country back on the road to democracy.  When most people hear the word fascism, they think of Hitler, not the whole range of tinpot autocrats, so I have to admit it probably doesn't.

But there is another battle going on, and that is how one fights the lies being fed to the public by Trumpist Enablers, including Trump himself and the Fox propaganda network that functions as a propaganda ministry for the Republicans. A liar has an inherent advantage over a truth-teller, because truth tellers are more limited by what they can say, so long as the intended audience is willing to be persuaded by untruth.

That's not the whole story, not the main event when discussing the state of American democracy. Willingness to be duped is not what I consider America's weakest link.  I would reserve that term for America's lack of equity, a problem exacerbated  by the Supreme Court's decision in "Citizens United": too much money and power in the hands of too few. Until we fix that problem we on the left are going to be held responsible for putting Trump in power in the first place. How many democratic administrations have made even a feeble attempt to address the inequity problem?  Democrats, as much as their Republican counterparts, have been wary of Bernie Sanders and his urging that we pay closer attention to unions and the working class. And afraid of being labeled as socialists.  Those who blame the Democratic Party elites for the rise of Trump have a case. The fact that they're having trouble getting back on their feet is not a mystery to most Americans anymore.

Republicans have long been the power brokers for the wealthy and for corporate control of wealth - the "I got mine!" crowd. They have been quick to dismiss opponents as socialists or communists, words carrying the weight of House on Un-American Activity days and the efforts of J, Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn to root out enemies of the people, another term that Trump has brought back to life. Since those days there has been no way to even begin proposing a better way to distribute the national wealth without getting tarred with one of those labels, socialist or communist.  Republicans have tied their fate to a 21st century pied-piper and become an unabashed trumpist party of single-issue voters, whether that issue is the price of lettuce, the goals of Christian nationalism, or turning the clock back on the rights of women and gay people.

Self-interest is not the worst thing in the world unless it comes at the expense of others, as it does with Trump's Enablers, many of whom have no interest in ethical government and have climbed aboard the Trump bandwagon not because they believe it is just but because it happens to be in the lead.

In the end, I throw in my lot with those favoring democracy, which I understand the way Winston Churchill did when he made that memorable statement in a speech to the British House of Commons in 1947: "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."   Its weakness lies in the fact that it doesn't care whether people are their best selves or their worst selves; the people have to be careful what they ask for because in a working democracy they get what they ask for.  Hitler, Trump, Orbán, Marcos, Erdoğan and many other anti-democratic leaders were, at least initially, democratically elected.

For reasons I've never adequately explained, even to myself, while I'm very light in the faith department, I do have faith in the human race.  I believe, in the long run, given enough time to think things through, people will come to their senses.  And if they put bums in office, they can and will ultimately throw them out again.

I have a sign on my wall which reads "My kids have paws."  I've lived longer than both my mother and my father did and I don't have kids whom I want to watch get their diplomas.  I just hope I live long enough to see my country throw this fascist bum out.

Remembering German grandmothers

A friend of mine, now approaching his 80s, just lost a friend of fifty years who was 88. I sent him that standard but woefully inadequate ¨Sorry for your loss¨ message. When death comes lofty language is easily mistaken for insincerity, so experience teaches us to settle for silence, and hope that those suffering loss will understand that this is a time when less equals more.

This friend of mine responded with a wonderful history of his fifty years of relationship with the deceased, essentially turning the death into an opportunity to count his blessings.  Now that I have reached an age where death is routine, I have a keen respect for such skill.  It becomes evident that there is more than ¨sorry for your loss¨that one can say.  

One can of course retreat to the reminder that grief is invariably a reflection of love and affection.  At least that has been my experience - that the greater the love the greater the grief. But that doesn't guarantee that grief will be any easier to process.

I was raised in a German family, largely by a German grandmother named Bertha who mistook me for a prince.  Everybody should be so lucky.  Her affection gave me the confidence all children should be granted to go out into the world unafraid and prepared for the slings and arrows and the hostility we all have to face.  I have been the beneficiary of not just a mother's love, but the love of aunts and grandmothers - plural - as well.  I got more than a fair allotment; in addition to my grandmother - meine Großmutter,  I got to establish a close relationship with Großmutter's sister-in-law, my great aunt Frieda, when I established a second home in Berlin. Frieda and her life-partner went through life as the German equivalent of John Smith and Mary Jones.  He was Otto Schmidt and she was Frieda Müller.  Special people despite their "ordinary" names.

I'm going on about Tante Frieda because today is her birthday.  She died back in the early 1980s at the age of 94, so you can't say she didn't live a full life.  How happy it was is another question.  She lived through the Second World War in Berlin, forced to work through the night and the bombing because her work as a pharmacist made her too valuable to be given time off.  Because she refused to join the Nazi party she had to work nights, as well, as a guard in a bomb shelter, and crawling from one bombed-out shelter to the next in the pitch black one night she fell and suffered from a loss of hearing as a result. 

She looked back on those days with remarkable equanimity. The one and only time I saw her vulnerable was when we were having coffee at a cafe on the top floor of the KaDeWe Department store in downtown West Berlin and had to endure the roar of Russian planes flying by close enough that you could see the pilots.  Soviet/Western Power hostility had been ongoing since the Soviet Blockade of West Berlin had resulted in the Berlin Airlift in 1948-9 and the Russians were protesting the latest quarrel - if I remember right, it was the decision of the Bundestag to hold a session in Berlin. 

"Take me out of here," she said, and as we finished our Kaffee und Kuchen at home I got her to talk about her war experiences for the first time ever. My admiration for her powers of endurance, already high, went through the roof.

I googled "Frieda Müller" Sachsenwaldstraße - her address - just now on the wildly improbable chance something about her might show up.  What did come up was another "Mary Jones," Gertrud this time instead of Frieda, living in the same Steglitz district of Berlin, a woman born around the same time as Tante Frieda, who was deported to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt in 1943 before being transferred to Auschwitz and murdered a year later. An unknown grandmother worth remembering for a far more earnest reason.

Gertrud's name appears on a "stumbling block" (Stolperstein) - one of those more than 100,000 brass plates now memorializing the victims of the Nazis that have been placed around the country to mark the residences of the victims carried away in the Holocaust. 

I'm reminded of Jesus and the thieves on a cross in Monty Python's Life of Brian singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," that wonderful satire of the the pollyanna "Today shalt Thou be with me in Paradise" insistence on avoiding the harsh realities of life - death, for example. But I have to admit there are multiple ways of processing grief and remembering the good parts while downplaying the not-so-good parts. That's the mood I'm in today, thinking back on my grandmother's practice of sneaking a shot of Liebfraumilch - we kept it a secret from my mother - when I would come home from school and celebrate a good test result.  And on the insistence that the grandmothers of the Holocaust, like Gertrud, not be forgotten. And on the good fortune Tante Frieda, one of the cheeriest people I have ever known, experienced of making it through the war more-or-less in one piece.

I don't want to "sum things up" by pretending we can will ourselves to focus on the bright side of things. And I don't want to downplay the difference between the two grandmothers who loomed large in in my personal life and the unknown victim of the Holocaust who died in the most grotesque of circumstances when I was only four years old.

But I also don't want to miss a chance to celebrate the richness of lives lived to the fullest while remembering our commitment to never letting the authoritarians ever ready to take advantage of our limitations to keep us from that goal.

Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda.

The Penguin Lessons - a film review

 I went to live in Argentina for several months in 2007 when friends of mine decided to accompany their daughter there for a gap year before she started college. I had been there before to visit them in Bariloche, a town in Patagonia known for harboring both Nazis fleeing arrest after World War II and Argentines being chased by the military dictatorship which held the country in its grip from 1976 to 1983. That incongruity - the town is famous for its chocolates and its Swiss chalets - led me to dig into the history of the "dirty war,"  in which opponents were snatched off the street and stuffed into Ford Falcons and dropped into the ocean from helicopters, and where children were stolen from their families and given to military families to raise as their own.  I had grown up in a German-heritage family and knew a lot about evil in theory, but here now in Argentina I got to see it and feel it up close.

An old friend recommended a 2024 movie just out on Netflix called The Penguin Lessons.  It's based on a memoir of an English teacher in Buenos Aires who encounters a penguin covered in oil slick while on a vacation trip to Uruguay, cleans the penguin up and smuggles it back to Buenos Aires. The lead actor is English comedian Steve Coogan.  I began this review with the political background - the story takes place in the early days of the dictadura - because it's the elephant in the room.  A better metaphor would be to call it the weak link. The story is sweet and almost impossibly endearing - what's not to love about a penguin paddling around the house - but the fascists get let off lightly, and that keeps the film from succeeding, in my opinion.  It's still a lovely experience when you're in need of a feel-good evening in front of the screen, but it does require you to leave your conscience in check a bit.  Perhaps more than just a bit.

I wanted to find a way to tell you I'd come across a delightful film I'd like to recommend to you, but I find the encounter with fascism that we find ourselves in at present contextualizes much of how I see the world these days, and certainly makes it impossible to avoid mentioning the fascism of Argentina half a century ago that has left a permanent mark on my conscience. Like the protagonist Steve Coogan character, who fails to come to the aid of a friend as she is being arrested, I stumble around looking for a place to start, and find myself stumped over what action I can take, other than to call out what I see happening right in front of us, as a bare minimum.

Watch the film.  Enjoy the warm embrace of the characters.  Let yourself be delighted by an animal who mates for life and let your mind run free over reflections on loyalty, living with evil and deciding when to lie low and when to speak up.

Netflix.

The Responsibility of Surviving

I remember well a conversation I had with one of my heroes - my aunt Frieda in Berlin - about thirty years ago when she revealed to me that she had already outlived all of her family and most of her friends. I couldn't get the thought out of my mind that "surviving" was perhaps not the greatest thing in the world one could aspire to.  Intellectually, I understood the term "survivor's guilt" and was profoundly moved by the 1980 movie, Ordinary People, about a family of two sons in which one son dies in a boating accident and the other son goes mad with guilt about not being able to save him. But simply outliving everybody is a different story: there should be no guilt, in the normal course of things, about being lucky.

Trouble is, when you outlive everybody - or even most people - who mean anything you, it's not the guilt that plagues you; it's simple loneliness. You think of something, encounter something, that makes you want to share it with somebody - only to re-remember that they're not there anymore.

Bounce (left); Miki (right)

I have a dozen images of old friends on my computer desktop, following my conviction that the best way to approach bad news is to stare it down, and not run and hide from it.  I hear something new about Switzerland and want to contact Doris to confirm it.  She's there, a big broad smile on her face, among the dozen. And the same goes for all the others. I spend most of my time alone in my room at the computer, and chatting with these friends-gone-by happens a whole lot.  Twelve of these images are of people; one is of the all-time loves of my life, our dogs Miki and Bounce.  They lived to fourteen - not a bad age for chihuahuas, but their deaths are up there with the worst things I have ever experienced.

I learned many years ago that when people reported the death of a loved one that the very worst thing you could do is try to cheer them up, or try to make sense of the death.  Instead, the clichéd "Sorry for your loss," insincere as it sounds, was probably the best thing to say.  And then shut up and say no more.  But it has always been hard for me to keep my mouth shut. I live by and for words. I use language to explain, to work out dilemmas, to comfort, to provoke, to uplift.  I want terribly to say something like, "You know that pain that you are feeling tends to come in direct proportion to the love you feel for that person."  It sounds true, and most probably is.

I am now 85 and people are dropping all around me. I now get to experience what Tante Frieda went through on a daily basis. And it's not just that I miss those who have died; I worry about being a drag with others in my life still here because talking about death and dying is, if not an outright taboo, at least a terrible downer.  

I remember hearing the Dalai Lama, when asked what he intended to do now that he was retiring, answer, calmly and with his usual warm charm, "I intend to spend the rest of my time preparing for my death."

Bravo, DL, I said.  Not afraid to demonstrate how one brings death into one's life and takes it in stride.  I joined a group called Death Café that meets every couple of months to talk about death and dying to break down this hypersensitivity around the topic.  It's not for everybody, and I fully sympathize with young people who want to avoid thoughts of end times before it would appear to be a useful thing to do, but I find it enriching to share with total strangers something this intimate.

Speaking of the Dalai Lama...  He's another hero of mine, right up there with Tante Frieda.  You know the couplet saying, "There are only two rules you need to follow in life.  One is 'Don't sweat the small stuff" and the other is 'Remember, it's all small stuff.'"  Well, the Dalai Lama has one I think is as wise: "Be kind whenever possible." and "It's always possible."

So why am I talking about death and dying suddenly? Well, one reason is it's on my mind a lot. Another is it disciplines and focuses the mind, helps you get your priorities straight.  Shows you how temporary the reward is for being able to score a good put-down and how much value there is in being kind.

A third reason is a video I just came across which I found quite moving.  Of someone reading a love letter a man writes to his dead wife. I want to share it with you here.

May you live long and prosper.  And may you live among kind folk.

James Talarico

Earlier today I posted a blog on George Takei, who has taken up the fight against homophobia and racism very late in life.  I took interest because I'm always looking for a way to get engaged in the struggle against injustice now that the U.S. seems to have taken a giant step backwards. I no longer have the mobility to get out into the street and bang pots and pans which, all things being equal, I would probably find the most satisfying. And I worry about losing friends when I go at them for their very understandable decision to prioritize their own mental health by tuning out on the news.  I don't have a lot of money to send to political candidates, and every time I do I feel like a heel for not sending it instead to Doctors Without Borders, the Southern Poverty Law Center or Planned Parenthood - to name but three really worthy causes.

The very least I can do, I think, is to stay focused on people I hope have at least half a chance of taking down the billionaire oligarchs we are now at the mercy of, and encourage others to throw their support behind them.  That's what I'm trying to do here, by calling attention to, of all things - and can you believe it? - a Christian pastor.  His name is James Talarico, and he's from Texas.

I'm a huge Pete Buttigieg fan.  What's not to love?  A gay man who, when he talks, tends to say all the things I'd like to say, only he says them better. I love it that he's not only smart as they come, but appears to be a great husband and father, as well as an effective politician. I wish him success in running the race to the top political offices in the land, including, let's hope, even the presidency.  "Slow and steady," I want to urge him; "Don't burn out too fast."

Now I've found another guy - not a gay man this time, but, of all mind-blowing things, a Christian pastor - who I am inclined to want to put out there as a second Pete Buttigieg, somebody very smart and very articulate who inspires trust and models humility, dignity and decency.  The complete antithesis of what comes to mind with the word politician.

James Talarico is still young.  He was born just a year and three days before I turned fifty.  I know; at 85 everybody looks young, but although I don't apologize for being what the world sees as a geezer, I also don't want to make the mistake of being an ageist. I trust my body into the hands of doctors and dentists in their thirties; I can do the same for politicians, if I try.

Because I came to know that homophobia, especially in America, tends to find its primary support in organized religion, especially in clerical hierarchy-centered Roman Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, I have spent many years of my life bashing religion.  It has taken me a lot of time to listen to my own advice and see Christians in a more nuanced way. But just as I have been able to reduce the complexity of ethical systems to a simple commitment to avoid violence and deceit, I'm with James Talarico in being able to see true and good Christianity as a commitment to the commandments to love one's God and one's neighbors. I remain a non-theist, but I admire nobody more than I do Christians who dedicate their lives to putting these two principles into practice.

I became a fan of Gavin Newsom the day I heard him speak in a church in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco when he was still mayor. He earned my everlasting gratitude for the work he did in making same-sex marriage a reality, a move which launched what would eventually become national policy.  I also connect with Kamala Harris on a personal level because of a shared local identity - I know the schools she went to as a child.  And when Bernie Sanders speaks, I am happy that the last time somebody asked me where my political affiliations lay, I responded "with the Democratic Socialists." I also feel good (usually with some reservations here and there) about Kentucky's Governor Andy Beshear, New Jersey's Cory Booker, Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar, Connecticut's Chris Murphy and Georgia's Jon Ossoff. I think if the Democratic Party ever finds a way to circle the wagons on an agreed-upon agenda, we may rescue the country yet. And there are more. There's Tim Walz and Josh Shapiro and JB Pritzker and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others standing in the wings just off stage.

But as these guys jostle for positions in the executive or legislative branches of government on the Democratic ticket in the next presidential election, let's not lose sight of others with leadership qualities who may take some time yet to make themselves better known and gain the right kind of experience to be the kind of leaders we've been missing.

Like Pete Buttigieg and James Talarico.  I know you know Pete Buttigieg.  But if you are not familiar with James Talarico, have a look at this: