More Political Digressions

The philanderer beat the businessman. The Constitution came in fourth. Maybe the Republicans ARE as confused as the Democrats.

Now we are being set up to hear the President of the United States say, “He turned me into a Newt.

Meanwhile, Congress is ineffectual, even invisible, except when its members are posturing. I mean, has anyone seen or heard from Al Franken?

Daniel Bartle

It is with great sadness that I have to report the loss of a fine young man, Daniel Bartle. USMC Csptain Bartle died in a helicopter crash along with five fellow Marines in Afghanistan. Mechanical failure is suspected as the cause of the crash. Daniel was 27 years old.

He was a fine person, a proud American, and an accomplished pilot. Diane and I remember him as a young boy, around the same age as our grandson is now, as one of our day care kids. Our memories of young Daniel are filled with smiles, but today our hearts are heavy.

John and Sandy, we cannot know the depth of your loss, but we share in it. War is tragedy, we all know that, but today that tragedy has come home to us. It makes all the rest seem unimportant.

W. H. Auden wrote:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song:
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the word;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

At least, that’s how it feels. God Bless you, Daniel, and bring you Peace, and may you be there to guide us home when our turns come.

And this one, from me to you:

Life goes on.
The living prepare
Their Sunday snacks
For armchair football
Unaware.
The snow needs plowing,
My grandson needs my help
Building Duplo towers
Just to knock them down.
The trees drop wet burdens
Like small avalanches
Right where I need to be,
And all I can think about
Is a helicopter crashing
A million miles away
That took from us a young man
I’ve known since he was
My grandson’s age.
The game has lost its thrill today,
The score is unimportant.
The film is not that funny;
The comedy falls flat.
I cannot taste the food;
Even odes to joy ring bitter
For a while life will have to go on
With me on the sidelines, sobbing.

Digressing Into Politics

Is it any wonder that Americans increasingly don’t want to vote? Looking at the Republican circus, it would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. One of these guys is going to be their choice to run for President. Romney was a shoe-in a few days ago. Now he hasn’t even won the first test that he won. Gingrich is moving up on the outside – depending on how voters view his alleged open marriage proposal. Santorum – who exactly is this guy? And Ron Paul is simply too set in his Constitutional ways to appeal in a general election.

There people are running to be the leader of the Free World, still the most powerful position in the world. All too often the voter has been left with choosing the lesser of two evils – and all too often, we choose wrong.

Maybe the convention will be deadlocked and the Party will draft Chris Christie.

The irony in Washington today is that our government works by gridlock. Checks and balances assure that nothing outlandish is done, at least not before it is watered down or explained to death and is no longer outlandish – or helpful. Gridlock protects our democracy, but there comes a point when, as one observer suggested over two centuries ago: revolutions happen when nations move forward but governments stand still. Gridlock may work when the country needs as little interference as possible, but is deadly when we need help. FDR saw that and acted on it, letting the dust settled after. Everyone in Washington today seems to be in love with gridlock and non-performance, from the White House on down, and we the people are stuck watching individuals with money and power run against each other.

We decide. Sure. Give me one candidate who doesn’t want the job. Oh, yeah, I think one name came up in there someplace, but he’s a Republican . . .

My First Book Leads to My Next

In 1975 I completed a biography of the man whom I considered to be one of the greatest musical geniuses of the Twentieth Century, Dmitri Shostakovich. The book was more than a biography. It was a fun trip through the world of modern symphonic music, written for laymen, like myself.

Soon after I finished the book Shostakovich died. I sold the manuscript, but to fit into the publisher’s series format, the book had to be changed. And changed. The fun went out. What was left was a valuable (of course) biography and musical discussion of Shostakovich’s symphonies, critically well received.

Between sale and publication, four years elapsed. Shostakovich’s own Memoirs came out at the same time as my book, adding vistas to my understanding g of Shostakovich the Man and the Artist. After a lifetime of devotion to this man and his music, now I make of him a character in a novel. A ghost, if you will, who wrote music, although it is the ghosts who spoke to him that you will meet.

Ghost Music - The Plot

Two men meet in a park, in Dresden, in 1960. One is the conscience of a brutalized generation playing back fear and hope in equal measures. The other is a warrior whose life and deeds condemned that generation to its hell. One is Russian, the other German. For that one brief moment, they reach, remembering the tragedy of Dresden a mere fifteen years before, that seemed a mere microcosm of the tragedy of Man at War.

Ghosts sing to them, many shared between them, yet until this moment they had never met, and, alive, they would never meet again.

Odes to Joy

One of my characters in my new project is going to say the following: Does music have to say anything more than, “I’m glad to be alive”? Or, more simply, Let’s dance!

I struggled for a long time to understand just that aspect of music. So much is tied to a program, or lyrics, or a subtitle, or even the moment in the life of the composer during which the piece was written. We look for meaning. Sometimes there is none, and in music that is just fine..

Music is the only medium I know that does not have to be about anything and still reach you. Even poetry, which supposedly is about the words and their sounds and how they interplay, has to have a subject or object to draw us in. And abstract art is the exception that proves the rule. You look at a Pollack and somehow it moves you, or possibly nauseates you, but it does something –- without reference points. That would not work for a Rembrandt or Vermeer; trust me on this.

Poetry, and anything using words, creates imahes to follow. Music, when it is not anout anything specific, allows us to create our own images from the influence of the notes. It has been said the observer brings his or her preconceptions and expectations to the table when viewing a work of art. But the art always gives you directions, hints. In music those hints are more emotional, more visceral, and the observer’s reaction more complete.

Take for example the coda at the end of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. After all that has preceded it – a funeral waltz, a crushing march, a playful contest and a declaration of Self – this last outburst explodes in the joy of being alive, against any logic. It says everything words cannot.

A song without words, a symphony without subtitles, a joyous celebration or a desperately sad sound, all touch us profoundly, often to tears. And I have to ask: does music have to say something to say something?

Knowledge is Power, or Have We Forgotten?

Dealing with the histories of so many ghosts whose only choice in liberty was between living under tyranny or being killed by the tyrant, I am mindful of how precious liberty is. If you don’t use it, you lose it. But if you don’t know you have it, you won’t think to use it.
"Knowledge itself is power." -- Francis Bacon

Knowledge is power. When this phrase was coined, the concept meant that, in order to navigate through the realities of the world, you had to understand them first. The more you knew, the more you understood, and the farther you would go. Modern society has lost this key interpretation.

Knowledge as power does not mean better knowing an App. It is inclusive knowledge of the whole world: history, literature, mathematics, philosophy, politics, morality, religion, science, art and music. It is not good enough to know where to find answers -- without the curiosity to ask questions or the foundation of knowledge to drive that curiosity.

Knowledge as power belongs to the individual: equally to a postman as to a university dean or a king. Do not surrender your knowledge or your equality. Your liberty will follow, and with it your sense of individuality.

I leave you with this final quote:

"Knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or sound good or even do good. It is good by just being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge bis that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having." -- Tom Stoppard