Citizen of the Galaxy

I don’t know why Robert Heinlein built his novel Citizen of the Galaxy around slavery. As far as I know, he never commented publicly on it. On the surface it would have seemed a problem that no longer existed. Hadn’t we ended slavery with the Civil War? He may have looked deeper at practices that weren’t part of an institution anymore, but were still part of that oppressive pattern. But we have no evidence that he did. The novel doesn’t portray that.

What it DOES portray is people looking the other way if not actively abetting slavers. In a future of interstellar travel with many worlds colonized by Earth there are too many without functioning legal systems, and also numerous that are attracted to slavery for the reason people always have been: it’s profitable.

The novel begins with a slave auction just after a slave ship has landed. One boy (about six years old) is very small, malnourished, dirty, and rebellious. Not what slave owners look for. He is bought, though, for a ridiculously small price by a beggar. The beggar takes him home, and we get hints that this is no ordinary beggar.

He lives under a ruined coliseum, where lot of others also live. But where he stays is different: it has a door that locks, electric lights, and furniture. And the man, who is missing a leg and an eye, has a prosthetic leg and artificial eye. We don’t learn much more about this aspect of his life at first. The focus is on his relationship with the boy.

As might be expected, the boy is troubled, as most would be after having been a slave and having been punished like one. There’s more to it than that, but we don’t learn about that for awhile.

Another aspect of the man’s difference from other beggars is then exhibited. Somewhere in the past he’s learned hypnotism. He hypnotizes the boy to find out the roots of his trauma, and gives him suggestions to help him heal emotionally as well as physically. Of course his physical healing is easier, but the hypnotism takes, and he grows up for about 10 years.

Then the authorities come for the beggar. The boy hasn’t really thought about what his stepfather does, though he assists him somewhat, delivering messages, etc. So it’s not a total surprise, but certainly a shock when the boy finds their home broken into and trashed. Then he finds out that HE’S wanted by the police, and has to go on the run.

Fortunately, his stepfather has foreseen this, and has arranged for him to be picked up by several Free Traders, and one just happens to be in port. It takes some hocus-pocus, but the captain of the Free Trader ship manages to get him into the ship, which takes off, leaving his major troubles behind.

The Free Traders, as portrayed in the novel, are a fascinating subculture. The ship Thorby lands on is a family enterprise that travels from one world to another, trading. The easiest way for them to fulfill the first part of what the old beggar has asked of them is to adopt Thorby, and after some adjustments he finds himself happy in his environment.

But the old beggar has asked more of his new family: to deliver him to the Hegemonic Guard (the Hegemony is the government centered on Earth which includes a number of other worlds. When he arrives to the Guard he becomes a recruit, which makes him feel like he’s part of something again. A sort of family.

We now discover that Thorby’s adoptive father (however informally) was part of the Guard, and that the reason he can ask favors of Free Traders is that he had rescued traders from a ship captured by slavers, during which he had lost an eye and a leg. Rather than sit at a desk for the rest of his career, he decides to become a spy, and sends messages to his superiors through Free Traders.

He has landed on the world where he and Thorby meet because slavery is legal there, which makes it a big center of the trade. He picks the city where the spaceport is so he can work out which ships are bringing slaves. In an interstellar culture slavers need ships to transport slaves. They not only need a place to buy them, but places to get equipment and supplies.

Thorby’s stepfather has prepared him by giving him coded messages to memorize under hypnosis. He tells his superior in his new “family” this, and they begin debriefing him. While he doesn’t know the information the beggar discovered, he does know various ships, and can tell the Guard what they brought. It appears that there are people in the Hegemony actively helping the slavers.

Then comes the big plot twist: Thorby turns out to be the heir to a vast fortune on earth.

He has already endured several abrupt changes in fortune. At first, becoming rich doesn’t seem so bad, but that doesn’t last. First, he’s invited to party and vacation all the time, which is fun at first, but gets boring. And he’s used to working, so he wants to find out what his new responsibilities are and begin picking them up. But the CEO who has been running the financial empire Thorby will be inheriting asks him to sign a document telling him to continue doing the same job he’s been doing. Thorby demurs. He doesn’t want to sign anything until he understands what it means, his trader experience coming out. The CEO gives him some time, but when he still doesn’t feel he understands sufficiently, becomes impatient with him, and snows him under with obscure paperwork almost impossible to understand.

But Thorby has an ally in the CEO’s daughter (who tells him her father is hoping he’ll marry her). She points him to a high-powered lawyer who helps him get free of the CEO, and to take over his company. But that just brings new problems. His empire is vast, and it’s nearly impossible to oversee much of it at all. Thorby is particularly concerned about one corner of it that produces spaceships. It’s left as an open question whether slavers coincidentally attacked the ship his father and mother were in, but somebody observes that it wouldn’t be the first time that underlings became upset at bosses paying too much attention to something they want to hide.

And he thinks his spaceship company may be producing ships for slavers. He visits the headquarters of the Patrol and shows the person interviewing him that much of the business of slavery is conducted in one sector of the galaxy. He wants to work at eradicating slavery, but can’t do so until he can get his vast inheritance under some kind of control.

At the end of the novel he’s apologizing to the CEO’s daughter that he can’t come to a dinner party. He’s much too busy. He tells the lawyer about his problem, and the lawyer tells him he’s trying to do too much at once, and will only burn out that way. He has to take time for himself, the lawyer tells him, and says he needs to go out, instead of eating at his desk, and look at pretty girls.

Thorby decides he’s right, and then feels that his stepfather approves of the task he’s taken on, and how he’s approaching it.

I don’t know if Heinlein wrote this novel because he was aware that though slavery seems superficially to be over since the American Civil War, it continues beneath the radar. The legal institution is no more, but the state of mind that approves of slavery remains. The subject seems to move him, so I think that may be a good assumption.

Slavery is still common in the Middle East, where “agents” arrange for young people from Africa or the Philippines to come and work for families who often abuse them, withholding salary or physically punishing them, according to a PBS documentary. One woman from Kenya who decided to work in order to help support her family is sent back to Kenya burnt so badly that she doesn’t survive long. A woman lawyer in the country is trying to get the country to demand restrictions on how Middle Eastern families treat the young people they “hire”, but the Kenyan government benefits from the workers, so that doesn’t seem likely.

In India there are laws against slavery, but the police aren’t necessarily very interested in enforcing them. Many of the slaves come from Bengal, in the far east of the country, and when young people from rural areas are taken to large cities like Delhi or Mumbai in the far west of the country it’s not easy to track them down, assuming anyone is trying very hard.

North Korea has a different sort of slavery. One could probably count all of the lower classes as slaves, more or less, but there are quite a number of people who work in other countries “patriotically” bringing the country hard currency. Some work in Russia in areas not far from the Korean peninsula. Others in China, and some even in such distant countries as Poland. The usual reason applies: they work more cheaply than native workers. One such worker tells us the only way they can stand what they do is to drink on their infrequent days off.

Not that the USA can afford to feel very superior. Once the institution of slavery was over and the Southern states made it perfectly clear that they weren’t going to treat the former slaves humanely, Jim Crow ensued. Besides Jim Crow there were enterprises like the mining and the clothing industries that tied workers to their jobs by paying them in scrip only redeemable at company stores. Workers in other parts of the country had little job security, were paid very little, and worked long hours in unsafe conditions. And such conditions aren’t a thing of the past, either. Fast food restaurants make workers sign promises not to apply to any other similar restaurants. The free market in that case is only free for the owners of the businesses.

Slavery is a very old bad habit for the human race. Heinlein’s point is the same many of today’s progressives make: we can’t expect to immediately eradicate the practice and its near relatives, but we have to keep opposing the forces that over and over find the temptation too much to resist.

The Dark Side of Capitalism

It’s ironic that capitalism has been extolled, especially by conservatives, as being the system that has lifted the most people from poverty. As far as it goes, that is true, but it doesn’t express the totality of the capitalist system. The system that lifts from poverty also has the power to deprive people of wealth. Over the past forty years at least, capitalism in the United States made wealthy people wealthier, but has also often sent ordinary people into poverty.

Early in the 1980s leveraged buyouts became popular. Corporate raiders would buy companies (frequently against the company’s will), loot the company of any assets, load it with debt, and then declare it bankrupt. Its employees would be left to fend for themselves, and towns in which there was only one viable industry, loss of that industry would cause the town to devolve into poverty, crime, and drug addiction. By the 1980s there were few farming communities left, and farming could no longer support many people. In the past farming had been a way to make a living independent of industry–most people were farmers until well into the 20th century– but that was no longer possible. Only industry could support people anymore, and when industry refused there was little anyone could do.

In the 1990s came downsizing. The theory behind it was a company could be made more efficient by firing unproductive employees, and thus more profitable. Actually, according to an article I read in that decade, that rationale was only for public consumption. What the companies were actually doing was firing employees who had been with them a long time, had worked their way up into middle management, and knew best how their companies did business. They were really fired so the companies could hire younger people whom they could pay less, and when the fired people looked for other jobs nobody would hire them because they were “overqualified”.

I gather this meant that the former employees were desperate, and willing to take jobs that would pay them a lot less than they were used to. It showed that capitalism’s power didn’t make it ethical. It could indeed be very cruel, but that was especially popular then. Michael Douglas, in a movie of the eighties, enunciated it: Greed is good. And the immediate reason for the firings was that they made those companies more profitable for the shareholders, whom Milton Friedman had assured industries were the only people they needed to make happy.

This mode of operations seems to have been especially popular with true believers in capitalism who had been offended by the distrust and dislike many had had for the system earlier in the 20th century. So when they were given more freedom and less regulation, they confirmed many of the stereotypes that had grown up about how capitalists operated. Perhaps they were punishing people who denigrated capitalism for their opinions.

Nor were they done. Later in the 1990s came the export of jobs from the United States. Companies had earlier moved their manufacturing plants from northern and midwestern cities into the south, where unions were much weaker, and they could make profits by paying workers less. Now they moved their manufacturing out of the country entirely, to Mexico, China, and other south Asian countries in particular. That forced many American workers to compete with Third World countries, which began to turn the United States into a Third World country itself.

Oh, there were still particularly favored workers, software developers, for instance, who made plenty of money, but a majority of workers no longer were able to earn the salaries their parents had in the 1950s, when the economy in America was better than ever before or since, and the corporate ethic was also different.

After World War II soldiers and sailors came back to fill jobs in this country. The government passed the GI bill which enabled veterans to go to college more cheaply than before, and gave them highly desirable skills. American companies of that era valued loyalty, and understood that loyalty was a two-way street. For awhile it wasn’t unusual for someone to spend their whole working life with one company. But in the 1980s that changed.

Although there was a tradition of loyalty and fairness among some American employers, there was also a tradition of slavery in America. Slavery had been a very profitable system, and a lot of people didn’t want to give it up, even if they hadn’t actually practiced it. Southerners accused the northern manufacturers of practicing “wage slavery”, and they had a point. Labor problems didn’t become a serious matter until after the Civil War, when they coincided with what became known as the “Gilded Age”.

American capitalists had seized on new technology, which suddenly came in a torrent, and became very wealthy from it. But many of their workers were dissatisfied with both their pay and working conditions. By the 1890s many people were demanding reform, and government slowly began to respond. But it wasn’t until the Great Depression that there were many thorough reforms. Many people liked those reforms, but capitalists didn’t, and worked to reverse them. A not very dynamic economy in the 1970s abetted them, and capitalism became popular again–for awhile.

Now it’s become less popular, but it’s so embedded in our lives that it’s difficult to draw back from it. Most people need cars, need heat or air conditioning in their houses (though I remember lots of hot days without it), need money to buy things necessary for survival. I remember being impressed with one of the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder in which she described how her father built their house in the territory they’d just moved to without nails. Instead he whittled pegs and used them to hold the boards and beams together. Some people might enjoy doing things that way, but most of us prefer to do things in easier ways, which would be very difficult without capitalism.

And now that I think of it, maybe that’s one of the reasons capitalists like to punish us: to remind us how dependent we are on them, and discourage us from trying to become independent again.

But to some extent I have to be sorry for a lot of these capitalists who are so desperate to become wealthy. No doubt they equate wealth with security, but it’s difficult to imagine how having billions of dollars makes one much more secure than thousands or millions. Ultimately we die anyway, and the possessions we put so much effort into acquiring are left behind. I have a car, a bicycle, a stereo, and lots of books, cds, and cassettes, and I doubt the people I leave them to will have a lot of use for them. And although I live comfortably, I don’t have guaranteed financial security. If I contracted a catastrophic illness my money would disappear quickly. So chances are there will be very little of my money left for anyone I might leave it to.

It certainly appears that wealthy people are terribly distressed about things in general. They seem to have been very unhappy that they weren’t loved for being wealthy, and that their employees weren’t universally happy to work for them. They were often unhappy enough to resort to violence when their workers went on strike, and in many cases it took federal legislation to force them to pay their employees a living wage, to make sure their products were safe, and to have their workers work only an 8 hour day and 40 hour week. Then, when the industries were deregulated, they decided to punish their workers, apparently, as noted above. That doesn’t seem to indicate that wealth brings happiness.

By chance I picked up a novel to read last night, The Mozart Season, by Virginia Euwer Wolff. Its narrator is a 12-year-old girl who has been playing violin for 7 years, and has a chance to play in a competition for young musicians. Of course she has to practice hard to do so, but playing a Mozart violin concerto at the age of 12 is already an achievement.

The thing I began to notice about the novel as I got into it was that the narrator’s family was happy. Both parents were musicians, professional musicians, but not wealthy, The vast majority of musicians are not. The parents play in symphonies and string quartets around Portland, Oregon, which sounds like a pleasant place to live, and a pleasant WAY to live.

In every novel there must be some conflict, but the conflict in this one is relatively subtle. The girl narrator doesn’t mind practicing (which was my downfall when taking piano lessons), and nothing really terrible happens to her in the book. She doesn’t win the competition, unsurprisingly; she’s the youngest of the competitors, but she also acquits herself well when she plays. She’s a little upset at not winning, but not too much.

The character who DOES seem upset is a 16-year-old who says when interviewed that he can only imagine being a performer in Carnegie Hall in his future. So it appears that anything less than achieving that goal won’t satisfy him.

The narrator doesn’t look so far ahead. She reflects that playing the concerto well won’t heal the brain-damaged man who dances at concerts in the area (classical music concerts, no less), nor will it bring back the victims of Treblinka, where her great-grandmother died. But that’s no reason not to do it well and enjoy it.

After the competition she has to play in the Youth Orchestra, and discovers that the piece the orchestra is playing is the piece the brain-damaged man told her he wanted to hear again, Valse Triste, by Jean Sibelius. She didn’t exactly heal him, but maybe he did experience some healing, and maybe it happened partly through her, though not directly. And that night she hears one of the other violinists request a song on a radio show and dedicate it to her. It looks like she has a happy future.

And at the end of the book is an interview with the author, and one thing she says is to thank her parents for giving her music.

I think that the world of capitalism is a cruel world. No doubt it can be exhilarating if you’re successful in it, but being a loser in that kind of game can be devastating. And many have been drawn into that game unknowingly and unwillingly and have had it take over their whole world.

Robertson Davies, in the Deptford Trilogy, had a character who had inherited money from his father and then turned it into a fortune. He and his capitalist friends often talked about how ordinary unrealistic people misunderstood money, which was no doubt true, but Davies commented through his narrator that the capitalists weren’t giving themselves appropriate credit. It wasn’t that they were more realistic in the region of finance, but that they were engaged in a high art-form, for which they weren’t giving themselves credit. Of course the problem with their art-form was that ordinary people often didn’t know how to defend themselves from it.

But if they could have enjoyed it simply for the pleasure of doing it, the way many musicians enjoy making music, how much better that might have been. Capitalism could be turned to righteous ends, as it was in the 1950s, when corporations were closely regulated and owners of corporations were heavily taxed, and motivated to do research and development to avoid the highest tax brackets. If we were able to go back to that vision of society we could give everyone opportunities and prevent everyone from being homeless–unless they really wanted to be. I don’t think many people think homelessness is very romantic, though.

From Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones I got the notion that being a musician is a very exclusive club. Of course Richards has been one of the most successful musicians of his era, but one has the impression he’d be playing even if he weren’t successful.

Do capitalists feel that way? Would they be playing the capitalist game even if it didn’t lead to wealth and power? Or do they enjoy the game primarily because they get to grind the faces of the losers in the game into how pathetic they are? Kind of like the sadists who can’t enjoy an orgasm without hurting their partner?

It’s a shame the capitalists seem to be so resentful. They could be very useful citizens of this country, as they used to be before they got infatuated with revenge on the people who disliked their dark side.

Conspiracy Theory

I believe I’ve come across a conspiracy theory. The other day I saw a post by a conservative group on Facebook comparing gas prices during the Trump administration and under Biden. Of course prices were lower under Trump, at least partly because demand was down; most people weren’t traveling.

As a comment, I asked, Couldn’t be that the oil companies don’t have enough competition, could it? One of the group answered, No, and nothing else, which I considered suspicious, so I asked, Why not? And added that I thought it was Adam Smith who said competition was good, but that it was John Kenneth Galbraith who said that all industries try to suppress their competition.

One reply to that was that I had advertised that I didn’t know anything about economics. That may be true, but Robert Reich (who does know something about economics) had said that oil companies had decided they could make more money by not trying to find new oil sources. One of the group said my scenario couldn’t work because in this country the oil companies are all private companies. I asked how that would prevent them from colluding to keep prices high, and that’s where the conversation ended.

The conservative group are all capitalist true-believers, so no doubt they were offended that I had suggested the oil companies might be corrupt. And I had said things before they hadn’t appreciated, so that’s part of the story too. The fact that I don’t automatically believe that capitalist hearts are pure doesn’t make me a Communist (though one of the group called me that repeatedly). I don’t like Communism any more than I like Nazis or other varieties of fascism. Both are authoritarian, and I like the freedoms we’re guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

But capitalism can be as authoritarian as Nazis or Communists. Maybe they have better rationales, but when Congressmen are concerned about ordinary Americans getting “free” money, it behooves me to ask why they’re not just as concerned about wealthy people being given large amounts more money. Aren’t they concerned that the wealthy will begin feeling entitled, if not downright corrupt? It’s sweet of them to be so concerned about the moral fiber of ordinary Americans, but I would suggest that most of them have very little idea how ordinary Americans live, and the problems they have to solve.

I read a lot of articles saying that large corporations have continued to make high profits through the Covid pandemic, while ordinary people have had the disadvantage of not being able to work, and having to try to pay rent (already high for most people), buy groceries, and deal with sicknesses in their families. Objecting to the government helping people who can’t work and have children to take care of is adding insult to injury.

Meanwhile, the government, during the last presidency, bailed out the cruise ship industry. How is that essential? And nurses (probably doctors too) are getting tired. I’ve been watching a lot of football the past few months, and have noticed few masks on in the stands. Am I surprised that Covid is surging again? No, I’m not. I don’t know of large corporations are surprised or not, but considering that in the meat-packing industry there were reports that middle management people were betting on how many people in their plants would catch Covid, I doubt that they care.

They do care when people don’t want to work for them, though. Several business people have been quoted the past few months as saying that people don’t want to work anymore, at least implying that the government shouldn’t be helping people financially. There have been a number of posts correcting that statement to read, People don’t want to work for the pay they’ve been getting and in the workplaces they’re confined to. Having financial help from the government has given some people a chance to think about what they want to do, and at least some don’t want to return to their previous jobs.

Forty years ago, during the Reagan presidency, the country turned away from the regulation that had been imposed on business previously, and deregulated a lot of industries. Now we see that the wealthy have rigged things to put most of the profits in their pockets. They complain that raising the minimum wage will make products (fast food, for instance) more expensive, but don’t explain why CEOs being paid millions a year won’t do the same. One conservative explained to me that CEOs are worth that much pay because they have rare abilities. Which doesn’t explain why the economy was so strong in the 1950s and 60s, when CEOs made a lot less.

The unspoken explanation is that companies feel their ordinary employees can work their jobs for less, and have been forcing them into a situation in which they almost certainly HAVE to work for less than they would have had to forty or fifty years ago.

Remember when people looking for jobs were denied them because they were “overqualified?” Those were people who had worked in their companies a long time, had worked their way up to middle management, and had been fired because the company needed to become leaner and more efficient. Actually, according to an article I read in the 1990s, they were being fired so the company could hire younger people to replace them whom they wouldn’t have to pay as much. Of course they also didn’t know how to do their jobs as well, either, but when they companies were highly profitable, what did they care?

And this was after the age of leveraged buyouts, when one company would buy another, take its assets, saddle it with the debt of the price of buying it, and then shut it down. These companies didn’t care about the workers they displaced, most of whom couldn’t find jobs at which they could be paid nearly as much.

Then there’s the housing industry which was selling property to lots of people who, if they had been paying attention (and known their jobs), would probably have realized couldn’t pay their mortgages. And then compounded that by creating investment vehicles based on the questionable mortgages. I have to wonder to what extent they were just acting like they were drunk, and to what extent they actually PLANNED to throw lots of people into bankruptcy.

Whatever the truth of that, it’s clear that they didn’t care about the people they had ruined financially. I would have liked to see the big companies go bankrupt, and the government help the people unable to pay their mortgages. Instead, of course, the government bailed out the banks and mortgage companies.

One thing has become clear in this country: capitalists, when they get their own way, treat their workers like enemies. How long can that state of things persist before the country comes apart?

Pursuit of the Pankera

Robert Heinlein was one of the outstanding authors of science fiction. His career began in the 1930s when he was approximately thirty years old, and continued for about fifty years, until he died in 1987. One of his novels was The Number of the Beast, about the invention of a way to visit parallel worlds, parallel worlds being a science fiction concept. Heinlein tried most of the science fiction story ideas on for size, and this was one.

As usual, his heroes are physically attractive, highly intelligent, and have a variety of skills. And their explorations in “alternate” worlds (worlds similar to our own, but differing in various details–like worlds in which the American revolution didn’t succeed, for example) are highly attractive to someone like me: one of the first is the Mars portrayed by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Barsoom. Obviously, the Mars of our universe is not the same as Barsoom. It has very little atmosphere or water, and is uninhabitable without an awful lot of work. And nobody could go naked on the surface of Mars without freezing to death.

I never read Burroughs Martian books (he also created the character of Tarzan–I think I read one of those novels), and set several novels in Pellucidar, deep within the earth), but the group next lands in Oz, and I fell in love with the Oz books when I was a child. So I can see the attraction of visiting the worlds of stories one has loved. But Heinlein didn’t stop there. He also took his characters to a place in the future in which characters from his own novels mingled and interacted.

The Number of the Beast turned out to be a mediocre effort at best, as Heinlein’s later novels unfortunately often did. But it was interesting to hear that an alternative version of the novel (an alternative novel about alternative worlds) existed. I’ve been a fan of Heinlein’s for about 60 years, so when I came across it in the library I immediately borrowed it.

Heinlein is fun to read, at least for me. He doesn’t make me laugh out loud, but at least makes me chuckle frequently. I could understand his desire to write exactly what he felt like writing about twenty years into his career, and not have to change things for any editors. But unfortunately, as I said before, his later novels are a very mixed bag. Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are unequivocal masterpieces, each doing all the things Heinlein does best. But even they have details that are questionable. And others, like Farnham’s Freehold,, are not masterpieces.

Farnham’s is about a group of people who are in a bomb shelter when a nuclear attack happens, and are somehow blown into the future. The story doesn’t go into any detail about how this happens, but it’s a story, and we take it on faith. The future situation is that blacks have replaced whites as the power elite that runs the world, and don’t seem to be any nicer. That’s quite acceptable, but why does he need to make the blacks cannibals? Specifically eating white people? I don’t really think Heinlein is racist, but that’s certainly a racist idea. I doubt that he wanted to say that blacks are inherently cannibalistic (any more than any other human group–we all have cannibalism somewhere in our ancestry), but that’s how he wrote the story, deliberately or not.

The alternate version of The Number of the Beast is called The Pursuit of the Pankera, and it has a similar problem.

When one of the characters in the novel builds a continua craft (which can visit parallel worlds) he finds that some people unknown to him do not like him. They make this obvious by trying to kill him, blowing up first his car and then his home. One of them also confronts him violently, and he kills that one, thereby discovering that the person isn’t human. Green blood. That’s the impetus for the group to go exploring in the multiverse (multiple universes).

The aliens are clearly not very pleasant people, and the group in Pankera finds that many of them are living in disguise in the human universe. No doubt they’re doing some very unpleasant things to humans in general, but the book never describes that. We’re left to infer what they might be doing.

The group decides it wants revenge on the aliens. That’s understandable enough. At first the revenge takes the shape of tracking down individual aliens and killing them. To me, that’s going a step too far. The things the aliens had done and tried to do justified self-defense, but tracking unwary individuals down to murder them isn’t readily justifiable. Remember that the Nazis in particular justified killing of Jews and others by saying they were alien and not human, and were parasites (which is how the protagonists describe the aliens). In this case, the aliens really AREN”T human, but in the absence of evidence that they’re doing terrible things to the human population they live among, individual murder isn’t really justifiable (and the protagonists claim to have killed a LOT of individuals), much less mass or serial murder.

I still don’t think Heinlein was consciously racist, but allowed himself to be seduced by the human logic of the situation: how humans usually treat people they dislike, for whatever reason. But it’s telling that instead of trying in some way to confront and negotiate with the aliens, the protagonists prefer to murder them individually, and then to organize a vast operation to kill them all. And up until the very end of the book Heinlein had me sympathizing with the very attractive characters.

Maybe it’s no wonder he decided not to publish this version.

Disapproved Art

I began reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time more than 35 years ago when I was working for the Hanover Inn in Hanover, New Hampshire. I worked in the catering department of the Inn which set up and served meals in various places: sometimes in rooms in the Inn itself, sometimes in various places on the Dartmouth College campus, and sometimes other places. This suited me quite well. I had been introduced to being a waiter in a restaurant in Switzerland, which had been a very positive experience. I had worked in restaurants in this country, but those experiences had been less positive. Working for the Hanover Inn was a way of bringing that aspect of my life to an end (though I would work for two more restaurants) and reorienting it to the nursing homes to which I would henceforward be committed.

I began reading when the catering department was in a slow period. The only job I had was to set up a tea that was served in the front room of the Inn by a French woman who, as I recall, had come to this country around the time of the Second World War, probably a bit after. She still retained a strong French accent and looked as if she had been quite attractive when younger.

The tea took about two hours to serve, and I had nothing much to do during that interval, so I read Proust until it was time to break the tea down again and go home. I managed to read the first section of the book, Swann’s Way or Swann in Love, but when my work life got busy again I decided I didn’t have time to read it anymore–until recently.

While I was reading it years ago an acquaintance told me he was reading a very bourgeois novel, which I later decided had been my cue to tell him I was too, which I omitted to do. And indeed, In Search of Lost Time has a narrator from a wealthy family, and the only character who is poor is a servant. When I began reading it again I reflected on that, and it occurred to me that the era in which the novel takes place is precisely that in which some of the great artists in French writing, painting, and music were living and working. A friend reminded me that this time was known as the Belle Epoque, a time in which there was a confluence of good things in France, though France was no more perfect than any other country then or any other time.

So I wrote a blog about that time, and published it. I was a bit surprised to get negative commentary about it from a man with whom I often vociferously disagree on political matters, because the blog didn’t contain anything overtly political, at least not about the United States. My Facebook acquaintance took the opportunity to denounce modern art, which immediately reminded me of how Hitler and Stalin had enjoyed denouncing various artists for being degenerate and censoring their art, and sometimes “canceling” them.

Osip Mandelstam was perhaps the most famous poet destroyed in Soviet Russia. He had written a poem denouncing Stalin as a murderer, prudently taking the precaution of not putting the poem on paper, but someone must have disclosed it, and Mandelstam was sent to a prison camp in the far east, where he apparently didn’t survive long. He was merely one of the artists we happen to know about. Others include (allegedly) Gorky and Isaac Babel. Poet Marina Tsevetaia committed suicide, and many others were put under tremendous pressure. Many of the names are unfamiliar to Americans, and there were plenty of others whose names we’ll never know.

Ironically, the very beginning of the Soviet regime saw a flowering of artistry often protected by important Bolsheviks like Trotsky and Lunacharsky, but when Trotsky was first exiled, then deported, and Stalin gained ascendancy, practicing art became very dangerous.

Artists weren’t especially safer in Nazi Germany, but the names of those who perished may be a bit less familiar. The Nazi government exhibited a great many paintings dubbed degenerate art and destroyed all they couldn’t sell. They sold a great many, Un-American would be the equivalent of what degeneracy meant in German, though Hitler also meant that such art works were either composed by Jews, or by people behaving like Jews.

Hitler, however, had an ulterior motive. He considered himself an artist, but had a realistic style of painting, while it was abstract art that had become more popular, especially among critics. I can’t say I particularly care for abstract art myself, but I don’t hate the people who practice it. There is a lot of art available in one form or another, and I’m not in the market for original paintings.

It’s a bit jarring, though not entirely unexpected, to find that conservatives are echoing what Hitler said about art. Not just my Facebook acquaintance, but Dennis Prager too, who is a conservative who pronounces about a variety of issues, and who my acquaintance considers an authority. He may or may not be one, but I often disagree, with him.

For instance, Prager mentions the artwork Piss Christ. I had considered that a gratuitous provocation of Christians until I spoke to a friend who is very Christian, and with a conservative point of view. He said he took that work as an expression of Christ’s suffering before and during his crucifixion. So not everyone, including conservative Christians, sees it as an affront. It’s always possible to take offense, but sometimes it’s more productive to think about the work that offended and ask one’s self why one feels that way. One of the functions of art is to probe things that many people feel uneasy about. Susan Sontag said that art is a form of liberty. Conservatives tend to idolize liberty above most other things, so conservative outrage about works of art seems not quite to fit the ideology.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with wanting art to inspire. That’s what I would prefer too. But art also echos what society is. If much of today’s art is offensive, what about the art of Bosch and Breughel, whose paintings portrayed sadistic actions? Or Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son? Although, according to Wikipedia, an earlier painting with the same title by Rubens may have been even more horrifying. Painters centuries ago weren’t necessarily apolitical. Breughel’s Triumph of Death could be construed as a comment on war, which was far from uncommon during his lifetime, and often inspired by religion.

And even if one can categorize art as “degenerate”, what is anybody supposed to do about it? Should we follow the lead of Hitler and Stalin? My acquaintance’s solution would probably be to get rid of “leftists”, something Hitler would certainly agree with, having been anti-Communist. Stalin might too, although he was a leftist himself, but having also been in respect to art a cultural conservative. But how do you persuade artists to paint “inspiring” paintings rather than “depressing” ones? You could refuse to reward them financially, of course, but great painters don’t paint just for money. They paint what they’re inspired to paint, and that’s what authoritarians object to. It’s not that they want to reform the aspects of modern life that inspire artists to create depressing works. They just want artists to shut up. Which is why it seems a bit odd for conservatives to object to artists exercising their liberty.

Henry Miller, in a book about Arthur Rimbaud, points out that many writers in the 19th century were registering the sickness of society, and includes numerous titles as examples: The Sickness Unto Death, Les Fleurs du Mal, The Light That Failed, A Season in Hell, The Serpent in Paradise, The House of the Dead, and quite a few others. Those are writers, not painters, but writers are artists just as much. As Miller notes, the things artists were warning against happened in the 20th century, beginning (in Europe) quite dramatically with the First World War. But that doesn’t count all the wars against European colonies waged during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The World Wars were when the methods practiced against colonized people were employed against fellow Europeans.

As far as I’m concerned, Impressionism remains my favorite period of painting, and I like quite a few of its descendants, too. I don’t much care for the abstract impressionism exemplified by Jackson Pollock, or the pop art of Andy Warhol, but there are other artists, even if not famous, who still paint traditional kinds of paintings–though I can’t afford to buy those either.

I used to go to art museums when I visited Europe (very little in this country in the last decades), and every now and then I would come across a painting that would absolutely thrill me. That’s what I want from any form of art. The thrill that makes me take a deep breath.

The Belle Epoque

It was in the 1860s that the Impressionist school of painting began. Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frederic Bazille met while studying painting and found they all liked painting outdoors instead of in studios, and that they didn’t care to make their paintings as much like photographs as possible, as painters of the Academy did.

Instead, they especially liked the use of bright colors–theirs was the first generation in which paint was being manufactured, so that painters didn’t have to fabricate their own–and to allow plenty of light into their paintings. This (at least in my opinion) was a welcome change from previous paintings, which used a great deal of black and brown. Not in every case, but in many. The Impressionists changed that. They also laid the groundwork for future innovations, such as Cubism, Surrealism, abstract, and conceptual art. I have little affection for the latter two of these, but great liking for the two former.

From the 1860s to the First World War was a particularly good time for France, in a number of ways. Not only were French painters arguably the best in the world at the time, but French composers were innovative in ways others weren’t. Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel had found a different sense of harmony and orchestral color than the predominantly German music of 19th century Europe. France also had other notable composers in that period, like Camille Saint-Saens, Gabriel Faure, and Emmanuel Chabrier, but I’m less familiar with them.

France was also very prosperous, probably largely due to new technologies, as in England, Germany, and the USA, and they were in an unprecedentedly long period of peace in most of Europe. A friend reminds me that this era was known as the “belle epoque”, though it may not have been so beautiful for all of the French.

At the same time, France had a literary renaissance: Victor Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Stendhal in prose, and Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, and others in poetry. This was particularly the case in the years after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. There was an almost total lack of war in Europe between then and the First World War, though it would be inaccurate to say there was peace. Many of the above poets were referred to as “Poetes Maudits”–accursed poets. These were poets living in contention against society, many of them alcoholics or drug addicts. This category of poets (and artists in general) spread from France to other countries as well. All sorts of artists became vulnerable to addiction of one sort or another, and so eventually did large numbers of ordinary people. Artists, being more sensitive and susceptible, may have reacted in this way to the problems of modern life earlier than others.

One of the things that initiated the modern world was the entrance of Europe and the Americas into the age of revolution. The American revolution came first, and was arguably the most successful, but it was followed by the French, the Haitian, the Greek, and eventually the Russian. Other European nations rebelled, especially in 1848, but those revolutions were put down. Karl Marx took the revolutionary view that history is determined by economics, while Charles Darwin took a different revolutionary view: that humans, animals, and plants had all evolved from much simpler antecedents. And Sigmund Freud became a pioneer in the study of psychology, which changed perceptions throughout Europe and the USA, if not other parts of the world. With the modern age came a variety of new ideas that weren’t always well-received.

There was a religious revival in the 19th century, but it was largely fundamentalist and advocated faith more than wisdom. It tended to deny scientific ideas, and specifically those relating to the Bible, the origins of Man, and the history of both the planet and the human race. This led to odd ideas like dinosaurs coexisting with humans in the Old Testament and that the day of Creation was sometime in the fifth millenium BC in accordance with an interpretation of the Biblical record by an English clergyman in the 18th century, which seems to stretch the idea of the inerrancy of Scripture further than it can validly go. Many were uncomfortable with the idea of history stretching back millions of years, and that the world and humanity had been created gradually instead of all at once, and–not least–that humans were most closely related to apes. But it’s noticeable that the behavior of chimpanzees is very similar to human behavior, though in a less than flattering way.

So some people were inspired as the 19th century began, while others were appalled and intimidated. Scientists and industrialists were inspired, and there were suddenly a variety of inventions that transformed life sometimes, but not always, for the better.

Nor were all the transformations from inventions. Opposition to slavery doesn’t seem to have begun earlier than the late 17th century, but it was abolished relatively quickly. The American Civil War abolished the institution of slavery in the United States, while Brazil abolished it in 1888. Russia abolished serfdom (not greatly different from slavery) just before the American Civil War. And the vote in the United States was extended from white male property owners first to less wealthy white men, then to black men (though that remained theoretical for most of a century), and then to women. Changes came so fast that many people didn’t know how to adapt.

Some changes weren’t so very positive. Military technology, for instance, advanced rapidly from the American Civil War on, and made it almost hideously easy to kill great numbers of people very quickly. Soldiers entering World War I believed the war would be over quickly and easily. They soon found out otherwise. Machine guns were one of the new inventions that few were familiar with before the war began. So were bombs, explosive shells, and poison gas. Tanks were another innovation, and so was the use of airplanes and balloons. We hear little about what came to be called PTSD before the 20th century, but it’s a common part of the war experience from World War I on. Magazines decided not to publish many battlefield pictures because too many separated body parts were included in the photographs. It’s unlikely that war was less brutal before these inventions, but war became impersonal with them. Maybe that’s what soldiers found so demoralizing.

But not all the innovations of the 19th century were so obviously negative. The characters in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, set in the later 19th century, don’t seem to be very conscious of these conflicts. They’re conscious primarily social distinctions. One character spends time with a group who seem to be of a somewhat lower class than his, and persuades himself that he enjoys their company, at least until the woman he had become involved with in relation to the group begins to be untrue to him. But almost all the characters are relatively well off if not wealthy, not because nobody in France was poor, but because the wealthy and well off preferred not to pay attention to them. The only poor person appearing in the novel so far (I haven’t penetrated too far into it yet) is a servant working for the narrator’s aunt. An account by George Orwell some fifty to sixty years later in Down and Out in Paris and London of a job he held in a Paris restaurant shows that a person on that social level had to work extremely hard to survive. I doubt that lower class employees had a much easier time 50 to 60 years earlier.

And most, though not all, the Impressionist painters painted middle or upper class people at the beach or having a picnic in a park. Lower class people are relatively invisible. That’s less the case with the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, who I guess is classified as a post-Impressionist. One of his early paintings was of a family eating potatoes, presumably because they couldn’t obtain anything else. And they’re not a very pretty group, which is common in poverty. A later painting is of a billiard hall at night, obviously not a venue for the upper class. He also painted a postman and a doctor, both living in southern provincial and rural France where the elite are unlikely to go. The poor and other members of the lower classes usually inspire the more fortunate to avert their faces, if not actively blame these people for their situations. Not many are willing to try to change the circumstances of poor people to any extent, at least in a positive way.

What Debussy and Ravel seem to be portraying in the late 19th and early 20th century is dreams. One of Debussy’s early successes was Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (somehow fitting because as a young man he looked very much like a faun as portrayed by ancient Greek statues). It is an orchestral piece which immediately struck me when I heard it because it was so different from the mostly German pieces I’d been listening to, which usually are developed in ways that sound very different. Woodwinds were the spotlighted instruments rather than pianos or violins, and it sounded very much like a hot quiet summer afternoon. His later La Mer gave a great impression of the sea (which he probably never saw), again very different from German orchestral music. I remember reading that he was influenced by jazz, and that later jazz musicians were influenced by him.

Ravel started out very influenced by Debussy, but took his music in a somewhat different direction. Debussy frequently gives the impression of being sloppy and arbitrary in his compositions, especially in his solo piano music, even when this is not so; Ravel is much more obviously interested in form. One of his suites, composed first for piano, and then for orchestra, Le Tombeau de Couperin, is a set of compositions in the style of various dance forms of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when the composer Francois Couperin lived. Each segment of the suite is dedicated to one of his friends who died in World War I, and the atmosphere of the suite is generally melancholy, even when musically lively. But one of the points of the piece is taking forms the past and making something new of them. So are the moods of Pavane for a Dead Princess and Ma Mere l’Oye (My Mother Goose). Ma Mere l’Oye recalls the poem by Arthur Rimbaud in which he assigns a color to each letter of the alphabet, colors which correspond to a those in a book he had as a child. They seem to be portraying childhood, as a nostalgic time, but not as a particularly happy time. The people in Impressionist paintings seem happy, but that may be only their surfaces. We are asked to believe that wealth will make us happy, but many people testify that it won’t alone. Was Ravel unhappy? I don’t think anybody knows for sure, but his music suggests it, though it doesn’t seem angry or bitter. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time begins with the narrator telling how much he desired his mother to come upstairs and kiss him goodnight. The above pieces by Ravel seem to have a similar feeling.

I don’t know where Proust goes after the beginning of the work, but things I’ve read about it suggest it may be a long soliloquy on various forms of love. Love of the child for its parents, boy for girl, man for woman, and man for man. I’ll find out if that’s accurate later.

But being part of the wealthy class then, as later, provided a degree of safety that may have included more then than previously. The world portrayed by the Impressionists is a largely bourgeois one, and looks quite attractive in paintings of Sunday picnics. But humans are always insecure, and French people of that time were as concerned about finding love and about their social status as anyone today. Remember that near the end of the 19th century the Dreyfus case caused great upset in France.

Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish French soldier accused of betraying military secrets to an enemy nation. It took much time for the facts to emerge, and was a problem of great contention. It turned out that the guilty party was a Christian, but this result was initially suppressed by the army, and that didn’t prevent some from blaming Jewish people in general and Dreyfus in particular. I didn’t realize until recent years that Dreyfus’s granddaughter, Madeleine, served in the French Resistance during World War II, and was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where she died. Nor had I realized that, after his exoneration in 1906, a right-wing journalist had attempted to murder Dreyfus in 1908. One can’t say that all France was harmonious during and after the late 19th century. Marcel Proust was a supporter of Dreyfus, as was Author Emil Zola, and painters Claude Monet, Degas, and Cassatt. Cezanne, Renoir, Rodin, Degas, and the poet Paul Valery were against him.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries may have been idyllic in France especially, but the period was also a peaceful and prosperous time for much of the rest of Europe, though Europe had been free of war for much of the early 19th century too, as the countries who had defeated Napoleon came together in 1815 to arrange things to prevent further warfare, and especially revolutions. They weren’t entirely successful in the latter attempt: the French rebelled in 1830, installing a new regime after the one established after Napoleon, and there was a general wave of revolution across Europe in 1848, though most of those failed. But there was very little war during that period. Just the Crimean war, war between Austria and Germany, and the Franco-Prussian war. Then nothing except the Serbian wars before 1914. In Europe, that is.

Elsewhere, European countries were fighting battles (often unequal ones) in their colonies in Africa and Asia. Germans conducted genocide in Namibia in southwest Africa, the Belgians are reported to have killed some 8 million in the Congo, the French were less than peaceful in their colonies in west Africa and Southeast Asia, while the English fought wars in Africa and India and reportedly destroyed 100 cities in Africa. The violence these countries refrained from imposing in Europe they practiced in their colonies. By the time of World War I they were very good at it.

Most of the Impressionist painters (Monet was the exception) had died by 1920. Few of the famous French poets of the 19th century lived into the 20th, but Proust did, dying in 1921. By that time the prewar world had been destroyed by war, and what Gertrude Stein characterized as the “Lost Generation” had begun to become famous, though I’m not sure she meant the French as much as the Americans. There were still notable French authors, poets, and musicians, but the time after 1920 was a good deal less peaceful. The Belle Epoque is a period for which many people probably still feel nostalgia, though many of the problems of the modern age had begun by that time, even if they weren’t as obvious as now.

But as beautiful as the epoque may have been on the surface, there were many writers testifying to a great lack of ease in the 19th century. Henry Miller, in a book about poet Arthur Rimbaud, lists titles of books of that century: The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard), Dreams and Life (Gerard de Nerval), Le Fleurs de Mal (Baudelaire), The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), The Conquest of Bread (Kropotkin), The Serpent in Paradise (Sacher-Masoch), Les Paradis Artificiels (Baudelaire), Dead Souls (Gogol), The House of the Dead (Dostoievsky), The Inferno (Strindberg), A Rebours (Huysmans)…

As Miller remarks (about more books and authors than I have included), “What revolt, what disillusionment, what longing! Nothing but crises, breakdowns, hallucinations, and visions. The foundations of politics, morals, economics, and art tremble. The air is full of warnings and prophecies of the debacle to come–and in the 20th century it comes! …The moral crisis of the 19th century has merely given way to the spiritual bankruptcy of the 20th. It is the “time of the assassins” (a phrase of Rimbaud’s) and no mistaking it. Politics has become the business of gangsters….”

It’s a shame that there was so much promise in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the outcome was, all too often, horror. Remember that as science was discovering exciting new things about humanity’s past, about bacteria and how to defeat them, about thrilling new concepts about the world and universe, heroin and cocaine were first being formulated, ready to enslave thousands, if not millions, in the new century. And the new style of war first unveiled in 1914, led to the new movement of Communism taking over first one country, then more, which set off more wars. And the “civilized” countries got caught up in the blame game: Look what you made me do.

Is the 21st century going to be better? We can hope, and work to make it so, but it would be unwise to assume so.

Intense Music

The concerts I’ve enjoyed most have been those in which I’ve been unfamiliar with the form. The first popular music concert I attended was one by Phil Ochs, whom I think I’d heard of, but whose music I didn’t know. It wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t that impressed.

Less than a year later I went to a club near where I was working in Cleveland, Ohio, called La Cave. There I saw the Kweskin Jug Band. I didn’t know anything about jug band music, nor about the band, but I enjoyed it somewhat, especially being impressed by an electric violin (or viola) solo near the end.

But my next concert, in the same place, was by the Butterfield Blues Band. That was the first electric concert I’d been to, and that time I WAS impressed. Maybe blown away would be a better way to put it. I had heard some of Butterfield’s music before, but he wasn’t playing anything I was familiar with. The band had had two guitarists, now there was only one, and a trumpet and two saxophones had been added. I wasn’t crazy about the sound of horns in those days, but these weren’t bad. I was especially impressed by their last song, Tolling Bells, originally played and recorded by Lowell Fulson. I subsequently got the band’s third album on which that song was recorded, but it didn’t come across very well there. I went to a lot more concerts in the next couple of years, but there was only one other concert that impressed me very much.

That was by Canned Heat, a band I didn’t even like. They were opening for Blood, Sweat and Tears, a band led by Al Kooper, which added a number of horns to guitar, keyboards, bass, and drums. I was prepared to like the band because I’d fallen in love with the Blues Project, a band he’d been a member of. I liked them initially, but they didn’t wear well, and the horn players rebelled because they thought they were better musicians than Kooper. I saw them after they replaced him, and the band seemed to enjoy what they were doing much better, but I didn’t like it much. And Canned Heat, when they opened for them, practically blew them off the stage. I don’t know how they did it, but they did. They didn’t do it by introducing new material; I’d heard everything they played before, but that time they had more intensity somehow.

I saw some very good bands in the next couple of years, but nothing that really knocked me out, even though I got to see Muddy Waters at the college I was attending and Crazy Horse (minus Neil Young) in a venue in town. Crazy Horse was doing Young’s songs, as I recall, and they sounded very good, but I wasn’t amazed by them. I’d heard Muddy Waters’ name before, but didn’t understand his context at all. I enjoyed the concert well enough, but wasn’t thrown into the stratosphere by it.

I was, early in 1973, when I went to a concert to which I was invited by friends. I’m not sure I even knew who was playing.

The opening act was a black guitarist playing electric guitar solo for about 15 minutes or so. He played very well, but I’d never heard of him before, and don’t think I heard of him again. Too bad.

Next was the Mahavishnu Orchestra, whom I don’t think I’d heard of before, much less where the musicians had come from, and they were nothing short of amazing. John McLaughlin was the guitarist, and played a double-neck guitar, which I’d never heard of before, much less seen. I found out later he’d played with Miles Davis on Bitches Brew, perhaps Davis’ most famous album. The violin player, Steve Goodman (I think) had played with the Flock, whom I’d never heard. There was a very good bass player, Jan Hammer the keyboard player who subsequently performed the theme music for Miami Vice, and Billy Cobham, who was the fastest drummer I’d seen. I thought they played like they could play anything in the world.

Then came Frank Zappa and his band, which was large and VERY well rehearsed. I’d listened to his early Mothers of Invention albums, but hadn’t kept up with what he’d been doing since, and I was even MORE amazed. I didn’t expect to hear two bands playing on such a high level in the same concert, and I didn’t feel like I could comprehend it.

When I used to go to art museums I used to feel that I could absorb what I was seeing for maybe two hours, but after that it was no use trying. I felt the same about what Zappa’s band was doing, and my friends and I walked out of the concert early. I wish now I could have absorbed more, but I just didn’t feel able to. A real shame.

The next amazing concert I attended was by the Cleveland Orchestra in Akron, Ohio, where I was then living. I went to it because they were playing two of my favorite pieces: Ma Mere l’Oye by Ravel and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, by Rachmaninoff. I immediately noticed the keyboard player, an attractive woman who was playing an instrument I wasn’t familiar with in the piece by Ravel, then was the pianist in the Rhapsody. Rachmaninoff didn’t write easy piano parts, as he was himself a piano virtuoso with very big hands, but the pianist was up to it, and I was very happy with the performance.

But it was a weeknight, and I had to work the next morning, so I began walking out as the next piece began. That was Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, which comes with a story.

Shostakovich had written an opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, which got him into trouble with Josef Stalin. This was sometime in the 1930s when it was clear that trouble with Stalin could be fatal. But Shostakovitch knew what to do: he wrote a symphony and dedicated it to Stalin, which got him out of trouble. This was the first piece of Shostakovitch’s I’d heard, though I knew his name. And the early part of the first movement of the symphony sounded very strange in the concert hall, almost hallucinogenic, as if I was seeing distorted people, and I wish I had stayed for the rest of the symphony.

I’ve listened to recordings of the symphony since, but when listening recently realized I hadn’t ever gotten a real idea of its shape. I remembered it as having loud and raucous horns, which it does in some sections, but not a lot overall. There are as many strings as horns, and I remember the pianist playing in the first movement (unusual for a symphony) as the orchestra seemed to be trying to blow the hall apart. I didn’t have a similar experience again for some time, partly because I went to very few concerts.

I did go to a performance of Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto at Dartmouth College, in which the trumpet soloist was a student, and had very obviously not mastered his part. A more satisfying concert there was a performance of De Falla’s Nights in the Garden of Spain, another favorite of mine. But perhaps the dominant impression I got from that concert was the pomposity of the solo pianist, an older man whose name I don’t recall, if I ever knew it.

But the last amazing concert I attended was also at Dartmouth College, a performance by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. I worried at the beginning of it that I wouldn’t like the music; instead, I was again blown away, first by a saxophone solo early in the concert. I don’t recall the name of the soloist, but when I told a friend about it, I told him he seemed to be white, though he looked very weather-beaten. My friend corrected me, and said he was a red man (biracial). More than a decade later I was telling someone in a chatroom about it, and he said he’d fairly recently seen the band. I didn’t think that could be so, as Sun Ra had died six or seven years after I saw him, but apparently the band had stayed together after his death.

I’ve gone to occasional concerts since then which I’ve enjoyed, but have never experienced being thrown into another and more beautiful world again. I probably won’t experience that again in a concert context.

Beethoven

I was about ten years old when I began paying attention to classical music. My parents (especially my mother) played classical music on the record player quite often. One night I began actually listening to the record playing in another room. It was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, I fell in love with it, and began listening to all the records we had.

From Tchaikovsky to Beethoven, Bach and Mozart (I didn’t particularly like them), Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Smetana, Debussy. And eventually others.

But Beethoven was one of my favorites. I loved the 5th and 6th symphonies–we didn’t have any of the others at the time–and the piano sonatas we had: the Moonlight, the Pathetique, and number 24. That’s all the Beethoven we had them, but when I could I began buying books and music, and am still expanding my collection.

It must have been a year or two later, at the house of my aunt and uncle that I first encountered Beethoven’s Ninth symphony. I put it on, and almost immediately realized that this was something much different from what I’d heard before.

And two nights ago I came upon a documentary about the Ninth told from a variety of viewpoints.

From a Chinese composer working on a piece inspired by the Ninth, from Gregory Prokofiev (grandson of composer Sergei Prokofiev) also working on such a piece, from a musician born deaf (how one gets to be a musician when born deaf I have no idea), from two deaf people attending a performance in Barcelona, rehearsal of an orchestra at a music festival in Salzburg Austria, rehearsal of an orchestra in an obscure town in Japan which was where German POWs performed it and introduced it to the Japanese. Now it’s performed annually (maybe not this year) with a chorus of 10,000. Also an orchestra in Kinshasa, capital of the Republic of the Congo.

An awful lot of people are moved at least as deeply by it as I am.

Most probably know (but not necessarily) that Beethoven was stone deaf when he wrote the piece. He was nearing the end of his life and career, and many composers (and creative artists of all sorts) are no longer as good at the end of their careers as at the beginning. Beethoven went against that stereotype. He also wrote his Missa Solemnis and his late string quartets, which many believe to be among his greatest works.

The deaf pianist pointed out that at least Beethoven had had normal hearing at the beginning of his life, had become an extremely fine pianist, and had experience with composition. But he began to lose his hearing about age 28. It’s not hard to imagine the difficulty of deafness for a musician, and especially for a composer. But Beethoven didn’t begin writing his really great works until he was past thirty, having decided to continue composing despite his deafness.

Because of it he became increasingly isolated. He still had friends, but it was harder and harder for him to communicate with them. And he had very little money. About 1810 or 11 he had considered going to work for a nobleman (as Joseph Haydn had done), but was dissuaded by three noblemen who lived in Vienna and promised to subsidize him.

Alas, that never happened. One of the noblemen unexpectedly died, and Beethoven’s period was also that of Napoleon, –and the Napoleonic wars, an unstable time. He never got the subsidies he needed.

He also spent about six years writing almost nothing. During that time he became guardian of one of his nephews, which may have been a way of giving back for the gift of his tremendous talent. The period doesn’t seem to have otherwise have been very rewarding: he and his nephew didn’t get along well. Beethoven seems to have been a very difficult person.

He also yearned to be married, but probably could never have found a wife willing to live with him, even if he could have supported a wife. One biographer says he did find someone willing, but was too afraid to take the plunge and marry her. We know that his father abused him, trying to make him into another Mozart. Maybe this had something to do with his unwillingness to take that chance.

He began thinking about the symphony in 1818, but didn’t actually write it until 1823. It took time to arrange for a performance–it was canceled and rescheduled several times. But when performed, in 1824, Beethoven conducted, and it seems to have been an immediate hit. Beethoven’s friends had to turn him around, though, or he wouldn’t have known the whole audience was applauding.

This wasn’t his last work, though. He wrote his last five string quartets after that before becoming sick and dying in 1827. Many think these to have been some of his greatest works.

I listened to his Fifth Symphony recently, and found again that it doesn’t wear as well as some of his other works. It’s dramatic enough, but seems kind of disconnected to me. I don’t really care for his first four symphonies, either. I love the first movement of his Seventh, but the rest of it I’m less thrilled with. The Eighth is nice enough, but short. That leaves the Sixth, the Pastoral, which is my favorite, except for the Ninth. I like to listen to it every spring, but didn’t get around to it this year.

Beethoven is kind of an anomalous figure. Not as prolific as Haydn, Bach, or Mozart, but more emotionally accessible than they. He wasn’t a Romantic composer, though. He was still influenced by the Classical and Baroque periods, so he stands somewhere between. He tried almost every genre of classical music: a ballet, an opera, an oratorio. It wasn’t that he couldn’t write for voice, as witness the Ode to Joy that ends the Ninth symphony, as well as his opera and his Choral Fantasy. I think he also wrote songs, though one hardly hears about them.

But he was much more comfortable with piano, cello, and violin sonatas, as well as string quartets, though he never managed to write as many of them as either Mozart or Haydn, both prolific to a truly amazing level. Beethoven struggled with his compositions, and arguably wrote more profound music than the other two because of that.

His life was more dramatic because of that too. Few would have blamed him for not continuing composing because of deafness, but he did continue, and suffered from poverty and isolation because of that.

He might have been able to make more money if he’d been willing to write to order, but he never was. In his later career he was promised a large sum by a wealthy Englishman who wanted him to write a symphony in his earlier style. He denounced the man, and declared he would never write anything but what he was inspired to write.

Everyone was influenced by him, but also intimidated. Brahms took a long time, and made a couple of practice attempts with two Serenades before producing any symphonies. The practice seems to have been worth it, though, as most agree that his symphonies can stand comparison with Beethoven. Not that there were no symphonies worth hearing between Brahms and Beethoven, but there were very few. And few if any with the kind of immense talent that could produce such a symphony as the Ninth.

As it was, at least according to some, Beethoven spent his last years writing profound music almost without exception. Something few others could ever do. And he was able to write an ode to joy even though his life wasn’t (at least not obviously) very joyful. He wished for company in the high reaches of the spirit, and it seems unlikely he ever found it.

But he left the evidence of his search to inspire others two hundred years later.

Who Gets Bailed Out?

Congress is trying to decide how to structure a new stimulus package. One of the issues dividing the two parties (and Senate and House) is about continuing the addition to unemployment benefits, as House Democrats want to do, or reducing it, as Senate Republicans prefer. The argument of the latter is that families are making more through unemployment than they would from their jobs. Republicans think that’s a disincentive to returning to work.

What they don’t mention is that there’s an even greater disincentive, at the moment. Ordinary American workers, the kind that can’t work from home, know that working in close contact with other employees or with the public puts them at risk of catching the virus and spreading it to spouses, children, and others. Surely business owners know this too, but seem to prefer coercing people into returning to work whether they feel safe or not.

It also doesn’t make sense, in that one of the conditions of unemployment insurance is that one must be actively seeking work, and must take a job if offered.

If individual workers aren’t given the money they need to survive (in the absence of their being able to return to work safely) and the protections against eviction aren’t renewed we’ll have a lot more homeless people before long. Who will benefit from that?

It seems pretty clear that employers want employees to work so the economy won’t fail. That’s a reasonable fear, but if they don’t want economic failure, giving money to the people most likely to spend it seems like a good strategy. Wealthy individuals and corporations have a choice about whether to spend money or not. People just barely getting by even when working full time don’t. They’ll spend money because they have to, and the economy will be stimulated.

But money is being given to large corporations in preference to individuals and small businesses, according to Time magazine.

I think the choice is stark: stimulate the economy or increase the number of homeless people.

I repeat: who benefits from people becoming homeless?

Crescendo

Crescendo is a movie about the organization of  a youth orchestra bringing together young Israeli and Palestinian musicians. I don’t know if it’s based on a true story, but I’m sure there have been a number of efforts to bring the two groups together, probably musically as well as other ways.

The conductor assigned to this task is an older man, and though he’s initially reluctant, he seems to be wise about how to get people to open up and cooperate.

After the musicians are chosen he tells them to yell all the bad feelings they have against each other. After all that is in the open they can get down to rehearsing.

Once the musicians have been selected they’re taken to the Austrian Tyrol to rehearse. They are to end with a concert, and it’s not clear what happens after that. The conductor talks to a young Palestinian man about studying music with him in Europe, but the young man is reluctant, feeling obligated to continue working with his father playing music at weddings and other community functions.

At least two scenes made me cry, at least partly because of the music. The first is when the orchestra plays a portion of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, music I dearly love. When the music ends the conductor tells them they’re no longer just Israelis and Palestinians, but musicians able to work cooperatively to produce beautiful music.

Sometime after this he tells the orchestra that he had grown up in the region of Austria where they’re rehearsing. His parents had been Nazis, and as World War II was ending had tried to escape, but had been killed near the border. He says he had been devastated and bitter for a long time, but now he had gone to Israel, and had had the privilege of working with young and talented musicians like them.

Only a little later, when they’ve gone on an outing a car drives by and throws what looks like a paint-filled balloon at the conductor. He isn’t injured, but we are left to infer that someone in the region doesn’t like what he’s doing. Very likely they don’t like Israelis; they may not like Palestinians either.

Meanwhile, a Jewish girl falls in love with the Palestinian young man spotlighted throughout the film. She seduces him, then foolishly sends a picture of them together to a friend. The friend sends the picture to her parents. They are not pleased.

They tell her she must come home, and send her uncle after her. She decides to run away instead, and persuades the Palestinian boy to go with her. They’re stopped along the road, and when they try to run away we hear what sounds like a vehicle running into what sounds like a body. We never learn the exact details, nor who did it, but learn that the boy is dead.

The girl is taken away by her uncle, the concert is canceled, and in the last scene we see the two groups in the orchestra in an airport waiting room, separated by a plastic or glass barrier. The intention of the orchestra seems to have been entirely frustrated.

But then the young Israeli man gets up, goes to the barrier, takes his bow and taps out the rhythm to Ravel’s Bolero and begins to play its theme (another piece of music I dearly love).

Slowly the other Israelis join in, followed by the Palestinians. That’s the second scene that moved me to tears. Nothing concrete has changed, and yet because of the collaboration and cooperation of the two groups there seems to be the possibility of reconciliation.

The bitterness between Palestinian and Israeli is written large what exists between many of us, in this country and throughout the world. Bitterness and fear usually prevent us from solving problems, and often plunge us into violence. This movie reminds us we have other potential choices.