Month: April 2009

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Rita Dove, Beethoven, and Bridgetower

This is another story I would have missed except for reading the print edition of the New York Times.

Haydn almost certainly encountered him as a child in a Hungarian castle, where the boy’s father was a servant and Haydn was the director of music, and Thomas Jefferson saw him performing in Paris in 1789: a 9-year-old biracial violin prodigy with a cascade of dark curls. While the boy would go on to inspire Beethoven and help shape the development of classical music, he ended up relegated to a footnote in Beethoven’s life.

Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States poet laureate, has now breathed life into the story of that virtuoso, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, in her new book, “Sonata Mulattica” (W. W. Norton). The narrative, a collection of poems subtitled “A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play,” intertwines fact and fiction to flesh out Bridgetower, the son of a Polish-German mother and an Afro-Caribbean father.

Beethoven wrote what we now know as the Kreutzer Sonata for Bridgetower.  Originally titled Sonata Mullatica, Beetoven changed the name

…apparently in a fit of pique after a quarrel over a woman, Beethoven removed Bridgetower’s name from a sonata the composer had dedicated to him, Bridgetower being the mulatto of “Sonata Mulattica.” The two men had performed it publicly for the first time in Vienna in 1803, with Beethoven on piano and Bridgetower on violin.

By the time it was published, in 1805, it had morphed into the “Kreutzer” Sonata, dedicated to the French violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer, who disliked it, however, saying it was unplayable, and never performed it.

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Bridgetower’s story is a corrective to the notion that certain cultural forms are somehow the province of particular groups, said Mike Phillips, a historian, novelist and former museum curator who contributed a series of essays to part of the British Library’s Web site (at www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro) that profiles five 19th-century figures of mixed European and African heritage, including Bridgetower, Alexandre Dumas and Pushkin. He also wrote the libretto for “Bridgetower: A Fable of London in 1807,” an opera in jazz and classical musica performed by the English Touring Opera, which had its premiere in 2007 in London.

“Bridgetower flourished in a time when the world outside Africa was like a huge concentration camp for black people,” Dr. Phillips said in an e-mail message. He noted that while Bridgetower got a music degree at Cambridge and managed to earn a living as a musician, for much of his life the trans-Atlantic slave trade was at full throttle.

 I find it fascinating that Bridgetower, a mulatto, and Beethoven also presumed to be mulatto performed together.  Add to the mix Thomas Jefferson who was in Paris with Sally Hemmings and it becomes even more interesting.  It seems that we have long been able to hold contradictory ideas about race.  The “all [insert race or ethnicity] are scum except you and you aren’t because you are [my friend, superior, different, etc.] syndrome at work.  Is that, I wonder, how many feel about our President?  That he is an exception.

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Final Four and Opening Day

Last week Amalie Benjamin wrote in the Boston Globe

FORT MYERS, Fla. — It’s almost six weeks into spring training, and already one member of the Red Sox has had surgery, pitchers are headed toward five innings at a clip, and my bracket is shredded beyond recognition. (No, I’m not bitter at all.)

That’s where I am this morning.  My bracket is shredded but for North Carolina (Go Heels!) and it’s gonna rain on opening day at Fenway.  So let’s look at this picture of the grounds crew on a perfect April Saturday two days before opening day.

The season opener at Fenway Park might be a washout on Monday, but groundscrew members John Driscoll pounds down the dirt around homeplate while Jeremy Fuller smooths the gravel in the the area on Saturday morning.

This is also from the Globe.

And about the men’s championship game no matter what happens kids can admire Tyler Hansboough.  He’s called the “player you love to hate” because of his agressive play but he stayed in school for four years and whether you are a North Carolina fan or a Michigan State fan you have to love that. 

There will be two Hall of Famers watching tonights finals (no rainouts in basketball).  This from the New York Times

Magic Johnson will be in attendance at Ford Field on Monday, pulling for Michigan State, which he led to a national title in 1979. Michael Jordan, he hit the game winning shot in North Carolina’s 1982 title-game victory, is expected to be in the crowd, too.

And in my one minute of fame, I was there in New Orleans when Carolina beat Georgetown on the last second errant pass by Brown and the shot by Jordan.  It was a blur, but I believe that James Worthy was in there somehow. Great game and great result.

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Making Sense of the G-20

OK.  All the leaders of all these countries got together in London.   Before the meeting it looked like the bad boy from Dick Cheney’s “old Europe”, Mr. Sarkozy of France, would walk out, leave the meeting in a huff.  Never happened.  Instead, President Obama, the new kid, got France and China to agree on some critical language on tax havens.  The world seemed astonished that a president of the United States of America could actually walk and chew gum. 

I first saw this in Friday’s print addition of the New York Times (yes, I still love that newsprint and reading without staring into a lit screen.) and after some searching found the online link and it turns out it is actually a blog turned into print.  Go figure.  Anyway, this story was titled “On a Scale of 1-10, G-20 scores a 7.” 

For someone like me who is struggling to understand the details of the economic crisis it helped decode the G-20 meeting by lisiting the 10 issues which needed to be addressed and how they did in addressing them.   The authors are Edward Hadas and Christopher Hughes.

The G-20 deserves a mark of seven out of 10. The London summit meeting, which concluded Thursday, hasn’t solved everything. But it has made important strides in both battling the current crisis and preventing future ones.

The score comes by grading the world’s leaders on the top 10 issues the G-20 faced. Each issue was scored with a zero, half a point or a whole point. But note that this is not a finely calibrated exercise. Zero doesn’t mean the G-20 achieved absolutely nothing; equally, a whole point doesn’t mean perfection.

The high scores went to fiscal stimulus, trade finance, preventing financial crisis, tax havens and confidence.  I think this last one is important because the part of the global fiscal crisis is created by uncertainty and fear.

The zero went to trade imbalances, while the rest got half points: making banks healthy, fighting protectionism, increasing the International Monetary Fund, and exit strategy.

In his Friday column about China and the dollar, Paul Krugman ended with this

The bottom line is that China hasn’t yet faced up to the wrenching changes that will be needed to deal with this global crisis. The same could, of course, be said of the Japanese, the Europeans — and us.

And that failure to face up to new realities is the main reason that, despite some glimmers of good news — the G-20 summit accomplished more than I thought it would — this crisis probably still has years to run.

I think the sticking point is that pesky financial regulation issue never mind stimulus money.  Jordan Stancil put it this way in the Nation

Abelshauser [Werner Abelshauser, an economic historian at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and a leading expert on differences in transatlantic economic cultures] argued that it’s hard to change these deeply rooted practices; therefore, Europe can’t succeed under deregulated finance, since it destroys the stability on which Europe’s economy relies. Abelshauser thought a positive outcome of the crisis would be that Europe would return to its proven model of finance.

This is an important point, because it underscores the extent to which the crisis for Europeans is fundamentally about re-establishing a financial system they think serves their interests. Thus the Euro- American debate isn’t really about whether to do stimulus or regulation first–it’s about whether the United States is going to do regulation at all.

America lacks credibility on this count, partly because Obama has not taken a strong stand against the power of finance in the United States. On the contrary, he plans to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize purchases of “toxic assets”–now renamed “legacy assets.” Against that background, the newly stern rhetoric of erstwhile deregulators like Larry Summers is not convincing because it’s clear that the Obama administration is not using the collapse to reorganize American banking along healthier lines. Instead, the US position calls to mind a line from Rousseau’s Confessions: “I pretended to reproach myself for what I had done, in order to excuse what I was going to do.”

The significance of this has not been missed in Europe. Jacques Attali, a key economic wise man in France who has advised both Socialist and conservative governments, told a business daily, “The bankers [in the United States] are going to accept a minimum of regulation. Not more. We see this clearly with the Geithner plan, which reinforces the mechanisms that led to the crisis…. Besides, do you think it’s normal to have taxpayers loaning money to investors so the investors can make profits?” According to Attali, there will be no fundamental change in US behavior on questions like leverage, securitization and debt because “the Anglo-Saxon world lives off that.”

I think this is the big problem.  Will the Obama administration listen only to people like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner who believe in the  American Capitalism free for all or will we move on to a more regulated system that protects the middle class and creates more equality?  Or will he also isten to France and Germany and Paul Krugman?  I thought a hallmark of the Obama administration was to be the ability to listen to opposing points of view before making a decision.

The compromise between France and China on tax havens negotiated by President Obama shows that we could compromise also.  Regulation in the United States could land closer to Europe without us becoming, to the horror of Republicans, just like Europe.  I’m not sure this is an either or situation, but we do need more regulation of the financial industry.  Congress and the President just need to act soon.

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Iowa Joins the Marriage Equality States

With today’s unanimous decision, the Iowa Supreme Court made Iowa the third state to approve of same sex marriage joining Massachusetts and Connecticut.  According to the story in the Washington Post

The decision will be considered final in 21 days unless a rehearing is formally requested. The county that challenged the lower court’s ruling indicated today that it would not file such a request, meaning that same-sex couples likely will be able to obtain marriage licenses in Iowa in three weeks, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.

So what do the defense of marriage folks do now?  Richard Kim has a long post on The Nation.com in which he outlines the options and discusses some of the larger political implications. 

So now that the Iowa Supreme Court has essentially legalized gay marriage, what’s next? Some right-wingers (like Iowa Congressman Steve King and William Duncan of the Marriage Law Foundation) are already promising to put a defense of marriage amendment in front of Iowa voters. But they have a long road ahead of them. Iowa law says that a constitutional ammendment must pass TWO consecutive sessions of the state legislature before it appears on a ballot. So the earliest one could see a DOMA on the ballot is 2011, but with Democrats in control of both houses and with both the House speaker and the Senate majority leader on record supporting the decision–there’s virtually no chance that such an amendment would even come up for a vote this session.

That leaves the right-wing with a daunting task: defeat enough Democrats to take control of both houses (Dems currently enjoy a 56-44 and 32-18 advantage), replace them with Christian right Republicans who are willing to champion a marriage amendement and peel off enough remaining Democrats (to offset any moderate GOP defectors) to squeeze through four rounds of yes votes. Only then will they even have the chance to put the issue in front of voters–sometime in 2013 or 2014 if all the stars align. Then, they still have to win that campaign in a political climate in which increasing numbers of voters support gay rights. Oh yeah, and the vote will take place after Iowans have witnessed 5-6 years of ho-hum same-sex nuptials of which the most radical, earth-shaking element is that one of the grooms is a 50-year old church organist named Otter Dreaming (one of the named appellees in the Iowa decision). As Ari Berman points out, Iowa isn’t exactly the hotbed of culture war antagonism–despite being square one for GOP presidential wrangling–so my strong hunch is that Mr. Dreaming’s marriage will endure at least any legal and political challenges.

It doesn’t seem very likely that Iowa will amend it’s Constitution.  Here in Massachusetts it didn’t take long for gay marriage to just become marriage.  Just read Andrew Sullivans story about his Massachusetts wedding.

Born in a different era, I reached that conclusion through more pain and fear and self-loathing than my 20-something fellow homosexuals do today. But it was always clear to me nonetheless. It just never fully came home to me until I too got married.

It happened first when we told our families and friends of our intentions. Suddenly, they had a vocabulary to describe and understand our relationship. I was no longer my partner’s “friend” or “boyfriend”; I was his fiancé. Suddenly, everyone involved themselves in our love. They asked how I had proposed; they inquired when the wedding would be; my straight friends made jokes about marriage that simply included me as one of them. At that first post-engagement Christmas with my in-laws, I felt something shift. They had always been welcoming and supportive. But now I was family. I felt an end—a sudden, fateful end—to an emotional displacement I had experienced since childhood.

The wedding occurred last August in Massachusetts in front of a small group of family and close friends. And in that group, I suddenly realized, it was the heterosexuals who knew what to do, who guided the gay couple and our friends into the rituals and rites of family. Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my sister’s wedding and we were the same as my sister and brother-in-law. The strange, bewildering emotions of the moment, the cake and reception, the distracted children and weeping mothers, the morning’s butterflies and the night’s drunkenness: this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage.

And our families instantly and for the first time since our early childhood became not just institutions in which we were included, but institutions that we too owned and perpetuated. My sister spoke of her marriage as if it were interchangeable with my own, and my niece and nephew had no qualms in referring to my husband as their new uncle. The embossed invitations and the floral bouquets and the fear of fluffing our vows: in these tiny, bonding gestures of integration, we all came to see an alienating distinction become a unifying difference.

It was a moment that shifted a sense of our own identity within our psyches and even our souls. Once this happens, the law eventually follows. In California this spring, it did.

So I think Richard Kim is right.  Iowans are soon going to find gay marriages just as ordinary as straight ones.  So what is left for the opposition?  Here’s Richard Kim again

So, here’s my guess as to what the right can and will do. They’ll move to amend Iowa’s marriage law so that it requires in-state residency. Currently, Iowa (like California and unlike Massachusetts) does not have any such restriction (prompting claims that Iowa will become the Mecca of gay marriage). Of course, because of the court’s equal protection ruling, any such change will have to apply to both gay and straight couples, but the collateral benefit for the right would be in limiting the number of gay couples who can marry in Iowa and then sue in other states. But after thousands of out-of-state couples got married in CA and will likely stay married no matter how the CA Supreme Court rules on Prop 8’s broader legality–there’s not much use in raising this hurdle.

So, Iowa, Massachusetts welcomes you to the club.  I don’t think it will be too long before there are more than three members.

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Touching the Queen

Did Michelle Obama make a major diplomatic mistake when she touched the Queen?  (This is much more interesting to think about than the economic agreements that came out of the G-20.)  Everyone is writing about it and talking about it.

 We start with Mika Brzezinski saying ” you don’t touch the Queen” and then today’s stories including this also from MSNBC

Mrs. Obama clearly made an impression with the 82-year-old monarch — so much that the smiling queen strayed slightly from protocol and briefly wrapped her arm around the first lady in a rare public show of affection.

It was the first time Mrs. Obama — who is nearly a foot taller — had met the queen. The first lady also wrapped her arm around the monarch’s shoulder and back.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman who asked not to be identified because of palace policy said he could not remember the last time the queen had displayed such public affection with a first lady or dignitary.

“It was a mutual and spontaneous display of affection,” he said. “We don’t issue instructions on not touching the queen.”

It was the first time Mrs. Obama — who is nearly a foot taller — had met the queen. The first lady also wrapped her arm around the monarch’s shoulder and back.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman who asked not to be identified because of palace policy said he could not remember the last time the queen had displayed such public affection with a first lady or dignitary.

“It was a mutual and spontaneous display of affection,” he said. “We don’t issue instructions on not touching the queen.”

Then the Guardian weighed in with the headline Michelle Obama’s G20 faux pas brings out Queen’s touchy-feely side.  The story continued

Whoever briefed Michelle Obama on the things one does and doesn’t do with one’s hands when one meets the Queen must be wondering what went wrong.

 

Within minutes of their first encounter at Buckingham Palace yesterday, America’s first lady broke royal protocol by doing the unthinkable: she gave the Queen a hug. The monarch, for her part, responded with equally flagrant disregard for convention by returning the gesture.

 

Proceedings had begun innocuously enough following the Obamas’ arrival at the palace – polite handshakes, a curtsey and chit chat with the Duke of Edinburgh, who asked the president how he’d managed to stay awake all day.

Then, at the “getting to know you drink”, there was an exchange of dialogue between Michelle Obama and the Queen (they seemed to compliment each other on their shoes). At this stage, with everything going so swimmingly, the first lady put her arm around the Queen. The monarch appeared awkward at first, but after this initial surprise and hesitation, she seemed to respond positively by putting her arm round Obama’s waist.

 

So it was not quite a major diplomatic incident. And does it reflect a softening of the royal protocol that forbids physical contact with the Queen beyond handshakes? The Queen is widely regarded as formal but close observers point out that a number of traditional rules for dealing with the monarch have been relaxed in recent times. Bowing, for example, is no longer required.

And the picture is priceless

Michelle Obama with her arm around the Queen during a reception at Buckingham Palace

The Queen who is tiny – around my size – and the tall Michelle.  I think Michelle was being herself and the Queen clearly appreciated her.

 

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Republican April Fool

Last week the Repbulicans released a budget with no numbers .   Today, April First, they released one with numbers.  Who stages their events and didn’t they know what day it is?

The Washington Post’s Lori Montgomary wrote

After getting blasted last week for presenting a budget plan light on details, House Republicans today unveiled a more complete proposal that would cut taxes for business and the wealthy, freeze most government spending for five years, halt spending approved in the economic stimulus package and slash federal health programs for the poor and elderly.

This seems to be back to the future.  Didn’t we already try this?  Representative Paul Ryan who presented the alternative said it offers “lower spending, lower deficits, lower debt and more jobs.”  The argument is always that lower taxes for businesses (repeat the mantra “the United States has the highest corporate tax rates in the world.”) will create jobs.  I guess that after Boehner and Cantor, the party needed to try a new face.

Here is Dan Gross on 1600 Pensylvania Avenue with David Gregory.

The White House Reaction

“If you expected a GOP alternative to the failed policies of the past that got our country into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, then I have two words for you: April Fool’s,” said Kenneth Baer, communications director for the Office of Management and Budget.