A giant pillar is prepared for the set of Nixon In China, which will kick off the 2010 season of the Sydney Opera House.

John Adams’s opera will inaugurate in the backdrop of the 2010 Winter Olympics and the golden anniversary of the Vancouver Opera House, a perfect tribute to city at this time, opera house General Manager James Wright says, because of its themes of “internationalism” and “cultures moving closer together.”

Opera is known for being larger than life, but set designer Erhard Rom has never had to make a Boeing 707 land on-stage before.

In the opening scene of Nixon in China, he’ll do just that. A replica of the Spirit of ’76, the presidential jet that carried Richard Nixon on his 1972 diplomatic mission to Beijing, will touch down on a giant runway with its nose pointed toward the audience.

“I feel the landing of the 707 has to feel like an absolutely stunning moment,” says the artist, who’s helping design the new production for its Canadian premiere by the Vancouver Opera, which runs this Saturday (March 13) to March 20 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Speaking from his New Jersey home, Rom explains that he worked from actual plans of the airplane—and then enlarged it a bit “so it feels like the Titanic arriving”. “What struck me,” says Rom, “is that, in some ways, the piece is almost Wagnerian in scale—almost epic.”

The opera he’s speaking about, composed by John Adams to a libretto by poet Alice Goodman, is often described as a minimalist masterpiece. But there is nothing minimalist about Vancouver Opera’s mounting to mark both its golden anniversary season and the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad.

Vancouver Opera general manager James Wright admits it’s a big investment to commission a new production—not to mention one that has a chorus of 40. But Nixon in China, he says, seemed perfect for this city at this time, with the world gathered here.

“It’s about internationalism; it’s about cultures moving closer together,” says Wright, whose team is hosting an entire speaker series around the opera and Canada-China relations in the weeks before opening. “Then there is the fact that Beijing had hosted the 2008 Olympics, and the fact that Vancouver is seen as the North American centre for Asia.”

Michael Cavanagh, the acclaimed Toronto-based director Wright brought in to create the major new production, could not agree more. In fact, sitting in the rehearsal hall at the downtown Holy Rosary Cathedral, where right outside the doors people are decked out in flag gear and heading to a hockey game, he can’t help but make direct parallels with the Olympic Games.

“The show is a psychological examination of people involved in momentous events and how those can overwhelm and overtake them. And then how we need to wait and step back for history to tell us what it all meant,” Cavanagh says. “These couple of weeks in Vancouver are all about huge moments. This is one of the biggest events in this city’s history. But how is it going to be remembered?”

The show, he stresses, is much more than a dry chronicling of the historic visit between Nixon and Mao Zedong (sung by baritone Robert Orth and heldentenor Alan Woodrow, respectively) and the opening of the Far East. Yes, the opera depicts actual events: the arrival of Nixon and his cortege, the first uncomfortable meeting in Mao’s study and the huge banquet that followed it, as well as Pat Nixon’s tour of rural China. But it is just as much about the personalities and personal histories of the main players, not just Richard and Pat Nixon and Mao and his wife Chiang Ch’ing, but their advisers Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai.

The result defies the one-note image of Nixon as the Watergate crook, or even as the aloof apologist of the recent film Frost/Nixon. “This piece definitely does not treat him like a villain,” Cavanagh says. “This opera is a fantastic opportunity for us to get to know the giddy Nixon, the playful Nixon, the contemplative Nixon, the jokester, and the romantic. And it’s the same with Mao: at the time of the visit, Mao was kind of doddering.…But the opera gives us a chance to see Mao as a young man, doing a silly little jig at one point; he’s also romantically involved, even sexually involved—because he was a sensualist as well as a great thinker. They were complex—we’re all complex people.”

Just as the events go beyond the literal, delving into the psychologies of the characters, the design is stylized—beyond that initial jet landing, that is. The perspective and scale are exaggerated, with the characters lined up in front of huge triangular pillars painted with their portraits by the third act. The colour palette is a bold red, white, and blue. “We visit locations in a literal way, but the scope of the piece is so large, we wanted to go more abstract,” says Rom, who used architecture and news photos, among other things, in designing the production. “And then by the third act, you’re really into abstraction, because now we’re really all the way into the land of these people’s minds.”

Throughout the opera, a TV film crew captures the action on-stage, with the video replayed at key moments. “The great unblinking eye and the reductive power of television was something that Richard Nixon was all too aware of,” Cavanagh comments

Last year I wrote about an article which appeared in 1985 in the last print issue of Saturday Review, edited by TNN’s Frank Gannon, that discussed whether two very curious writings which appeared in the long-defunct little magazine The Phoenix in 1971 under the name “Giles Weaver” could have been Salinger’s work. The fact is (and this, for any Salinger fans out there, really is a little-known fact that isn’t in any of the many books about the writer) that the very last previously unpublished words that Salinger permitted in print under his own name appeared during the Nixon Administration. They are in the biography George M. Cohan: The Man Who Invented Broadway by the late John McCabe, which was published by Doubleday in 1973, and are two quotations from letters Salinger wrote to McCabe. In one, he reminisces about seeing Cohan in Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah Wilderness! in 1933. (Eight years later, Salinger would romance O’Neill’s daughter Oona for several months, until she went off to Hollywood and married Charlie Chaplin.) In the other, he compares Cohan’s acting style to that of Noel Coward.

One of the more perceptive articles about Salinger since his death is this one by F.X. Feeney of LA Weekly. It stresses something often forgotten about Salinger – that although his fiction almost never deals with World War II or the Holocaust (except for the famous story “For Esme – With Love And Squalor” and the less well-known “A Girl I Knew”) and even then rather indirectly, these events formed his life and writing profoundly. He was drafted into the Army soon after Pearl Harbor – as a 1-B, to his disgust, since he was a graduate of Valley Forge Military Academy – and, after serving in several units in several bases, ultimately was transferred to the Counter-Intelligence Corps, thanks to his knowledge of German. (He had worked in his father’s meat and cheese importing business in Vienna for several months just before the Anschluss, and then in Bydgoscz, Poland, not long before the Blitzkrieg.)

On June 6, 1944, his unit landed at Utah Beach. (In a sad indication of the current state of American journalism, the first version of his obituary put up on the New York Times’s site noted this fact but got the date wrong.) His unit fought its way across Normandy to Paris, where it paused just long enough for Salinger to enjoy what would be a huge thrill for any writer of his generation – an evening drinking with Ernest Hemingway, who had read and admired his stories in magazines.

Then Salinger’s unit fought on, through the Bulge, through Hurtgen Forest, and he did his duty, mainly interrogating captured German soldiers, trying to determine the next danger awaiting himself and his comrades. To borrow the title of the novel about this campaign by Richard Matheson, who fought in it, it was a group of “beardless warriors,” soldiers barely out of their teens or still in them, who were doing most of the fighting, since much of America’s older, better-trained servicemen were being kept in reserve for the much more daunting job of invading Japan. (At the time the atom bomb was top secret, and those who did know about it could not know if it could be finished before that invasion.) Salinger was one of the oldest soldiers in his unit and he saw most of the men in it killed or wounded by the time V-E Day came. His last days in combat were spent helping to liberate at least one death camp. Then he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for a time, which inspired “Esme,” maybe his single most powerful and moving work published to date.

And, as I mentioned above, even before that, in Vienna, he saw a whole vibrant Jewish community that, in a few years, would be almost completely wiped out. Indeed, the family with which he stayed in his months there was killed – this is what “A Girl I Knew” is about. And later, in Bydgoscz, he saw many, many Jews who, just over a year later, would be made the test subjects of one of the earliest Nazi experiments in mass deportation.

This sets Salinger apart in a substantial way from other Jewish American writers of his generation – forget, for the moment, that his mother was a gentile of Irish or Scottish descent (the accounts vary). Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller, and nearly all the others were products of the Depression, growing up too poor to visit Europe, and almost none of these writers had relatives rich enough to visit America before the war. It would have been a rare thing for them to have met anyone who later died in the camps.

But Salinger had been over there, had seen firsthand “the vanished world,” as Roman Vishniac called it in his books of photographs made in Poland before 1939. And later, he gave his utmost to stop those who made it vanish. Like nearly all who were in that Greatest Generation he was reluctant to talk about what had happened after the war – or to write about it, so far we know. In the coming months, or years, or decades, maybe we will find out whether he had anything to say beyond what has so far been published. But what matters now is that a hero, as well as a gifted and important writer, is gone.

There is restlessness across the land, the kind that fuels turbulence in the body politic. Presidential Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, used the term “anger” several times this past week in his remarks about the recent loss of the once-thought-mega-safe Senate seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy.

But is being angry enough to create constructive solutions to the problems that so easily beset the nation?

Taking a cue from something Winston Churchill once said in another context: Anger may be “a good starter, but it is a bad sticker.” In other words, there is a down side to un-tempered temper.

Now, before you dismiss this essay as short on conviction and insufficiently caustic for any authentic political conservative, hear me out. I share the current capacity and taste for outrage—politically and culturally. Beginning with the final years of the Bush administration, and accelerating at breakneck speed last year with the dawn of the age of Obama, we have borne witness to a steady erosion of conservative values, fiscal as well as social.

And I very much believe that recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and now Massachusetts, are a clear and notable reaction to the resurgence of big government-ism. The election of 2008, though a watershed moment in the sense of breaking an important barrier, is turning out not to be a mandate to govern from the far left, after all.

I mean, seriously—could there be any stronger hint that Americans don’t actually want the whole cap-and-trade, sweeping healthcare reform en route to socialized medicine, and a kinder-gentler you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent approach to those who are inclined to blow all of us up in the name of Islamism, than to have the forever-blue Ted Kennedy seat in the Senate turn several shades of Republican red?

Think of the imagery. It was, in a real sense, Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama just about two years ago that became the catalyst for the momentum leading to the Illinois Senator’s ultimately victory over front-runner Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. And Mr. Kennedy’s funeral last year became a obvious and awkwardly inappropriate rally for healthcare reform, turning the last lion into a Gipper of sorts.

So losing Teddy’s seat is a big deal on steroids.

This is where the Churchill-ism I referred to earlier—about anger being a good “starter” but not a good “sticker” comes in. The kind of anger we are hearing about and actually seeing has been sufficient to create electoral seismicity, but there is a case to be made that ire itself is not enough to effectuate lasting change.

In other words, anger may be a good place to start, but it is a horrible place to stay.

We should all should bear in mind that anger has throughout history been categorized as a serious, even deadly evil. Anger is impulsive and impatient. It can provide the spark to get a transformative engine started, but what it unleashes can sometimes turn ugly—especially if performance doesn’t match promise. Mr. Obama and his supporters are learning this lesson right now.

And if conservatives who have leveraged current political dissatisfaction into electoral triumph don’t deliver constructive and effective policies, they’ll feel the backlash sooner as opposed to later. There is no time for end-zone antics—the game is far from over.

While I find myself very glad that some who share my vision and values have recently been successful, I also am concerned that the angry mood in America—if not relieved somehow (ideally by reasonable policies involving a much more limited approach to government)—may lead to a period of political instability.

Anger can be a good thing—in small doses. Even the scripture says, “Be angry and sin not.” But we are also reminded not to let the sun go down on our wrath. Why? Because of all the great “sins,” anger is the easiest to rationalize. It is subtle and comforting. We feel right in being mad, or as we might prefer to call it, “righteously indignant.” But at some point anger must be put aside, jettisoned into the sea like an exhausted booster rocket, and wisdom and reasonableness must provide thrust thereafter. Prolonged and sustained anger is always toxic and destructive. Indignation, to be ultimately vindicated, can and must be transformed into positive and constructive action.

Of course, my views on this are rooted in scripture. But I learned long ago that unresolved and unrestrained anger becomes a breeding ground for bigger problems. Parents are admonished not to “provoke” children to wrath. Why? Because angry kids are more prone to get into other kinds of trouble. In fact, anger is a co-factor in most anti-social behavior.

And in a sense, it’s the same with politics. People voted out of anger in 2008. People voted out of anger in 2009. Now it has happened in 2010, and likely will again later this year. But it is not sufficient to be mad enough to throw the old people out. The new people must have a plan. Conservatives have an opportunity right now, a moment in time, not just to take seats and jobs away from those more liberal, but also to offer a compelling vision for the future.

Ronald Reagan was successful because he was a conservative who, while having the capacity for anger, knew that you caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. He wasn’t mean or ugly, brooding or negative—with him it was “morning in America,” not two minutes before midnight.

Richard Nixon’s highly effective campaign in 1966, during those off-year elections, is one that should be examined by Republican strategists and tacticians right now. He instinctively understood the anger in the nation at the time, but recognized that merely tapping into anger was not nearly enough to get anything worthwhile done. He emerged as someone seasoned and sage, a youngish elder statesman. And it paid off politically.

No one understood the practicalities of politics like Mr. Nixon.

I am not advocating a revival of phrases like “kinder-gentler” or even “compassionate conservatism,” but any resurgence of tough-minded authentic—even enlightened—conservatism in this country needs to have a congenial tone to match its populist bent.

Ever hear of Gershom Mendes Seixas? Well, he might just be the forgotten hero of Thanksgiving.

Our national Thanksgiving narrative is rich with stories about proclamations, gatherings, meals, traditions, football, and of course, the obligatory pardoning of a turkey by the president of these United States. School children rehearse that day long ago when the Plymouth pilgrims broke bread. We note things Lincoln said. And doubtless you have heard about what our first president, George Washington, declared while proclaiming the first “official” national day of Thanksgiving in 1789:

I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

We hear much these days about our “Judeo-Christian” heritage and its early and enduring influence on our culture. A look back at the founding era of our nation reminds us, however, that only about 2,500 Jews actually lived in the colonies in 1776. Usually those of us who speak of that early dual influence are referring to the Christian Bible with its Jewish roots.

But pointing this out is not to say that Jews were not active and represented during the colonial and founding periods, quite the contrary – there are some fascinating and often overlooked stories.

Gershom Mendes Seixas is a case in point. He was “American Judaism’s first public figure.” In 1768, he was appointed hazzan of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York – the only synagogue serving the city’s approximately 300 Jewish residents. He was only 23 years old at the time and largely self-taught in the Talmud with much help from his devout father, though never actually an “official” rabbi. In fact, it would be several decades before a rabbi was ordained in America.

Seixas was the first Jewish preacher to use the English language in his homilies. He was a gifted teacher and tireless worker. And when it came to the American Revolution, he was a patriot – as demonstrated by his actions while the colonies were struggling to actually realize the independence that had been recently proclaimed.

His synagogue, like the much of the greater public, was somewhat divided on the issue of independence. But Seixas used all of his persuasive skills to convince his congregation that they should cease operations in advance of the approaching British occupation of the city, during the early days of the conflict.

He fled to his wife’s family home in Connecticut, carrying various books and scrolls precious to the synagogue for safekeeping. In 1780, he accepted the leadership role at a synagogue in Philadelphia, where he became an outspoken cultural voice regularly calling on God to watch over General Washington and the great cause.

When the war ended, he was invited back to resume his work with Congregation Shearith Israel in New York. He returned with the books and scrolls to serve from 1784 until his death 32 years later.

When George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States on April 30, 1789, Seixas was asked to participate as one of the presiding clergyman. This was certainly an act of gratitude by Washington for the preacher’s stalwart support during the war. It was also, though, an expression of Washington’s thinking about the importance of religious freedom and diversity in the new nation.

Later that year, as the nation set aside Thursday, the 26th of November, the date so designated by the president for Thanksgiving, Seixas preached a sermon to his New York congregation.

His Thanksgiving Day message was based on a text from the Psalms where it talked about how King David had “made a joyful noise unto the Lord.” Seixas told his listeners that they had much to rejoice about – “the new nation, its president, and above all, the new constitution.”

Warming to his theme, he reminded them that they were “equal partakers of every benefit that results from this good government,” and therefore should be good citizens in full support of the government. Beyond that, they were encouraged to conduct themselves as “living evidences of his divine power and unity.” He further admonished them “to live as Jews ought to do in brotherhood and amity, to seek peace and pursue it.”

In my opinion, Gershom Mendes Seixas’ sermon is every bit as relevant to all of us 220 years later.

“A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.”

The philosophy of Chuckles  the Clown.

Comedy writer David Lloyd died last week at his home in Beverly Hills; he was 75.  A fitting epitaph was provided by Cheers co-creator Les Charles (for whom Lloyd wrote many episodes):  ”I do think he was the preeminent writer of television comedy.  If you consider how long his career was and how much he wrote for such really popular shows, he’s got to have been responsible for a record number of laughs in this world.”

Many of those laughs were concentrated in the seventh episode of the sixth season of the Mary Tyler Moore Show: “Chuckles Bites the Dust.”  In this script, the rarely seen Chuckles —host of a kid’s show at WJM, the Minneapolis TV station at which the series was set— meets a sudden and tragic end.

As Grand Marshal of the annual circus parade, he dresses as one of his many beloved characters Peter Peanut.  Station manager Lou Grant (Ed Asner) informs the shocked newsroom that, in this goober incarnation, Chuckles was shelled by a rogue elephant.

Here, from the show’s script, is that memorable moment:

               Lou enters, genuinely stricken.

                                     LOU
                              (Mutters)
                         Oh my! Oh, dear...!

                                     MARY
                         Mr. Grant...?

                                     LOU
                              (Really shaken)
                         Something terrible has happened.

                                     MURRAY
                              (Sober)
                         What is it, Lou?

                                     LOU
                         Someone we all know is dead.

                                     MARY
                         What! Mr. Grant--who?

                                     LOU
                              (Getting control)
                         No... I won't tell you about it now...
                         I don't want to upset you...

                                     MARY
                              (Frantic)
                         Mr. Grant!!...

                                     LOU
                         Where's Ted? I gotta tell Ted...

                                     MURRAY
                         He's on the air, Lou. What happened?
                         Who died? Tell us!

                                     LOU
                              (Still dazed)
                         Chuckles. Chuckles the Clown is dead.
                         It was a freak accident. He went to
                         the parade dressed as Peter Peanut...
                         and a rogue elephant tried to shell
                         him.

               They are both stunned.

For many years “Chuckles Bites the Dust” stood at the top of TV Guide’s list of the Top 100 Episodes of All Time.  (It has now been edged down to Number Three by Seinfeld’s 1992 “The Contest” and The Sopranos’ 1999 “College” episodes.)

Here’s TV Guide’s citation:

3. THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW
“Chuckles Bites the Dust” 10/25/1975
Take one unlucky peanut-clad clown, a rogue elephant, an irreverent newsroom, an Emmy-winning script and a virtuoso performance by one of TV’s greatest comedians, and you get one of the biggest laugh-out-loud sitcom episodes ever. When kiddie-show host Chuckles the Clown has his tragic culinary misadventure, it’s catnip to the WJM-TV crew—except for a disapproving Mary Richards. The comic payoff comes with Mary’s unsuccessful attempts to stifle her snickers during a eulogy celebrating Chuckles’ alter egos Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo and Auntie Yoo-Hoo. The pièce de genius: When the minister gives Mary permission to laugh, she begins to bawl. Amazingly, not everyone was on board, recalls star Mary Tyler Moore. The series’ usual director opted out of the episode “because he thought it was not in good taste,” says Moore. CBS also had misgivings about the show’s tone, she says, “but we knew it was something special. It’s not just about laughing at the funeral, but also the tensions and talking about it in the newsroom. It really is a uniquely funny episode.”

Here are links to the first, and second parts of “Chuckles Bites the Dust.”  And here is the final segment (which is even funnier if you watch the set up).   The audio is slightly out of sync but the laughs still arrive on time.

       Organ music stops and Reverend Burke steps to the lectern.

                                     BURKE
                         My friends... "Any man's death
                         diminishes me, because I am involved
                         in mankind. Therefore, ask not for
                         whom the bell tolls--it tolls for
                         thee."

                                     TED
                              (Sotto: scandalized)
                         Hey, Lou, he stole your poem!

                                     BURKE
                         Chuckles the Clown gave pleasure to
                         millions. The characters he created
                         will be remembered by children and
                         adults alike: Peter Peanut, Mr. Fee-
                         Fi-Fo, Billy Banana, and my particular
                         favorite, Aunt Yoo-Hoo.

               Mary stifles a laugh.

                                     BURKE
                         And not just for the laughter they
                         provided--there was always some deeper
                         meaning to whatever Chuckles did.
                         Remember Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo's little catch
                         phrase, remember how when his arch
                         rival Senor Caboom would hit him
                         with the giant cucumber and knock
                         him down? Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo would always
                         pick himself up, dust himself off
                         and say, "I hurt my foo-foo."

               Mary again stifles a laugh. The others in the row glare at
               her.

                                     BURKE
                         Life's a lot like that. From time to
                         time we all fall down and hurt our
                         foo-foo's.

               Mary again stifles a laugh. Other people turn to look at
               her.

                                     BURKE
                         If only we could all deal with it as
                         simple and bravely and honestly as
                         Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo. And what did Chuckles
                         ask in return? Not much--in his own
                         words--"A little song, a little dance,
                         a little seltzer down your pants."

               Mary has great difficulty in stifling herself here. Many
               people turn to look at her.

                                     BURKE
                              (Looking right at
                              Mary)
                         Excuse me, young lady... yes you...
                         would you stand up please?

               Mary, with no alternative, stands up.

                                     BURKE
                         You feel like laughing, don't you?
                         Don't try to stop yourself. Go ahead,
                         laugh out loud. Don't you see? Nothing
                         could have made Chuckles happier. He
                         lived to make people laugh. He found
                         tears offensive, deeply offensive.
                         He hated to see people cry. Go ahead,
                         my dear--laugh.

               As Mary bursts into tears, we:

                                                                   FADE OUT

                                      END OF ACT TWO

Bruce Weber in The New York Times and Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times offered excellent obituaries. One of David Lloyd’s sons, Christopher, is co-creator of Modern Family —- the superb sitcom which, along with FlashForward, will save the 2009 season from the trash heap of TV history.

And then there’s the granddaddy of all recent rhetorical absurdities when Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey uttered the incredibly clueless thought: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

Can someone explain to me how the death of 14 (one of the victims was pregnant) can be trumped by the importance of a particular political agenda? The General should include a very real apology in his resignation letter.

It would be funny if not for the fact that it is all so dangerously sad. As I take it all in, it’s like the ghost of Groucho Marx is sitting on one of my shoulders making me smile at the outrageousness of such comments with his famous, “Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your own eyes?” This is all balanced by the difficult to ignore presence of the ghost of Gen. George S. Patton, who sits on the other shoulder and regularly fills that ear (this would be the right ear, by the way – in every sense of that word) with words I am not completely able to translate in this column.

Psychologists use the term “denial” to describe a way some people interpret reality. This manifests itself in denying something ever actually happened, or that it happened but it wasn’t to big of a deal (the “isolated event” approach), or even in something called “projection” which admits that something has indeed happened, but deflects blame and responsibility. We are a nation in official and pervasive denial.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis (c. 1962), if an American soldier would have opened fire on his comrades while wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt and yelling, “Long Live Lenin, Khruschev, and Castro,” it is doubtful that the guy’s communist sympathies would have been dismissed as irrelevant and peripheral. The commies were the enemy. And, if an investigation into his background would have yielded clues to his political feelings and fanaticism, there is no doubt that the case would have been a slam-dunk. And those who should have picked up on his radicalism before the awful fact would have been held accountable.

In fact, if some white-hooded fool were to open fire on a group today in the name of a fiery cross and a virulent racist perversion of certain passages in the Christian Bible, it is unlikely that such a terrorist would have any apologists reluctant to tie what he did to what he believed. Religious violence, be it of the cross or crescent, is always worthy of condemnation and contempt.

But when it comes to Islamism, the various contortions some use to distance what a Jihadist did from the ideology that so-obviously informed his actions are very difficult to watch.

Of course, I very much understand the complexities of this issue. We are a free society and among the most precious of those freedoms is that of religion. But as with another vital right – the freedom of speech – there are clear limits. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. And religious liberty notwithstanding, you cannot advocate the violent overturning of our constitutional way of life in this country in the name of any God.

Anyone, therefore, who embraces Sharia law and believes that it should become the code of a new America, should be disqualified from serving in the military. At any rate – how can they really take the required oath? Clearly one day long ago, the Fort Hood terrorist said:

I, Nidal Malik Hasan, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

We are told “officially” that there are 3,572 Muslims in our military ranks. Although it’s interesting to note that The American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council has that number much higher, in fact, four times higher – at more than 15,000. What do they know that those in the barracks don’t?

Some might want to counter that bad things have been done – violently so – in this country and the world throughout history, in the name of my religion – Christianity. And, sadly, I must confess that this has been the case, on occasion. But it has never been the norm. And those who do such stuff certainly don’t get their instructions from Christian doctrine.

To get from the teachings of Jesus to murderous evil requires a tortured, twisted, ignorant, and monumentally long journey. Yes, people have done bad things in Christ’s name – but in doing so they have, in effect, denied him.

Some ideologies, however, are much more friendly to the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. For example, when it comes to economic theory, you are hard pressed to find any possible pathway from Milton Friedman’s monetary ideas to killing a bunch of people. On the other hand, when you take a look at the writings of Karl Marx (no relation to Groucho), history has shown that the distance from theory to bloodshed is not all that far. In fact, Marxism and violence are close cousins because you really have to force people to turn from self-interest – all for their own good, of course.

The thing that too many in our nation are simply ignoring is that when it comes to Islam, as opposed to any other religious idea extant, the journey from ideology to what happened at Fort Hood is also not a very long one. For any Christian to become so radicalized as to open fire people in the name of his or her religion would require a virtual repudiation of the faith. Could it happen? Sure – anything can happen. And if it did, the mainstream media in this country would have no qualms about wrapping the deed around the doctrine.

But the quantifiable fact is that such things really don’t happen with Christians the way they do with Muslims. And even when certain violent acts by professed Christians, such as the killing of a doctor who has performed abortions, make the news, usually among the first and loudest expressions of condemnation and outrage are from Christians.

Does anyone hear all that many Muslim voices condemning Hasan?

Much has been made of the fact that the Fort Hood Jihadist/Terrorist was harassed for his beliefs. First, let me be clear – I think it is wrong, un-American, and certainly un-Christian to at all persecute someone for what is believed and practiced in the context of our Constitutional freedoms. And when it comes to Christians – who have known the pain of persecution throughout the centuries – there is no Biblical mandate for a follower of Jesus to ever persecute another human being. If fact, in our way of thinking, and from the wonderful Jewish scriptures that inform our faith, we are ever admonished to love neighbor as self.

The Christian response to persecution is never to be that of reactive violence. The Apostle Peter gave instruction near the end of his life on this matter:

Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. ‘Do not fear what they fear; do not be frightened.’ But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. – I Peter 3:13-16 (NIV)

Gentleness, respect, hope, and love – these are the watchwords of the follower of Jesus. But there is no “turn the other cheek” stuff in Islam. And at some point people in this country need to stop ignoring the obvious.

So I respect my Muslim neighbors and want them to be treated justly. This means, when there is peace, community, love of law, love of country, all will be well. And when these values are violently violated there must be justice of another kind – to punish evil, especially the egregious wickedness of terrorist murder.

But I also, taking another cue from Jesus, must be “wise as a serpent,” and this means I need to be aware that certain ideologies are more fertile when it comes to hate and violence. And, like it or not, they – and those who espouse such teachings – need to be watched very carefully.

Too many people have been looking the other way in America. It’s time to focus.

His uncle and aunt, Jay and Fran (Deitsch) Landesman, have for sixty years been familiar figures of, in turn, the New York, St. Louis, and London avant-garde scenes, crossing paths with everyone from Jack Kerouac to Barbra Streisand to the Beatles to the Sex Pistols; last year their son Cosmo told the story of their lives in his book Starstruck. (Here it’s worth mentioning that Fran Landesman co-wrote the jazz semi-standards “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” and “Ballad Of The Sad Young Men” with the late Tommy Wolf, later to be the musical director of Donny and Marie Osmond’s variety show.)

Rocco has had a somewhat more conventional career. After graduating from (and teaching at) the Yale School of Drama, he ran an investment fund for a decade until joining Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates a handful of the most prestigious showplaces on Broadway. In this capacity he produced some very considerable hits, including the late Roger Miller’s Big River; Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning Angels In America; and Mel Brooks’s blockbuster musical adaptation of his film The Producers. He’s also ventured, not quite as impressively, into horse racing and minor league baseball.

Last week, Landesman spoke before a group called Grantmakers In The Arts. He described what he sees as the vastly improved state of American culture since the inauguration of the forty-fourth President, in contrast to the cultural desert of much of the proceeding decade, then remarked:

“This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”

Since these words were first reported, many bloggers and columnists have remarked on them. What is thoroughly apparent from reading them is that the NEA chairman’s knowledge of the literary achievements of American presidents – and world leaders, for that matter – is a bit on the sparse side.

For one thing, it is a well-documented fact that Herbert Hoover, before, during, and after his Presidency, wrote every word of his many books and countless speeches, in a public career that stretched for a half-century from the 1910s. And there has never been much dispute that Jimmy Carter has written all or most of the contents of the two dozen books that have poured from his pen since leaving office in 1981, including his ventures into children’s fiction, the novel, and poetry.

While some Presidents, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote rather little on their own apart from letters, others have been more involved in the writing process. President Nixon made a point of crediting the editorial assistance of others with his books, but what he did not write unassisted as a first draft, he always revised and reshaped, and the really important parts of his books were, much more often than not, entirely his own work.

These include the lengthy opening section of Six Crises, describing the Alger Hiss case; at the time RN worked on it, in 1961, only seven or eight books had been published on the case (most being the work of Hiss apologists), and of these only Whittaker Chambers’s Witness was a truly first-hand account of the events. So it was up to RN to describe the incredible twists and turns of the story, as he had seen them unfold in 1948 and 1949.

Landesman’s notion that President Obama is the most powerful person to qualify as a writer since Julius Caesar is also mistaken – quite apart from the fact, pointed out by a number of writers already, that it’s curious for a member of the Obama administration to compare our Chief Executive to the man who destroyed the Roman Republic.

For example, in the second century AD Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, a man who ruled a territory far larger than Caesar ever controlled, wrote his immortal Meditations in the downtime (as we’d call it now) of his campaigns against barbarian tribes. It’s true that Meditations was more in the way of a notebook than a carefully thought-out manuscript. But subsequent rulers have written full-scale books.

Henry VIII of England wrote a defense of Catholicism against Martin Luther, long before he led his nation out of the Church; for this he was given the title “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope, which the present Queen still uses. James I of England, around the time his subjects established the first permanent colony in Virginia, wrote a book warning of the baleful influence of witchcraft. In more recent times, Vladimir Lenin wrote a number of full-scale books and dozens of pamphlets while bringing the USSR into existence. Joseph Stalin, who fancied himself a literary and cultural critic, seemed always to be plugging away at a book, in the few moments he could spare from terrorizing his countrymen. And there was nothing Mao Zedong liked better than to pen some lines of poetry, when the mood struck him.

To mention a man far less powerful, Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha wrote many volumes of garrulous memoirs toward the end of his life, and kept novelist Ismail Kadare out of jail and writing so that he could personally edit his work – much as Russia’s Nicholas I once said to Alexander Pushkin, “it is I that will be your censor.”

Yesterday, Rocco Landesman offered a clarification (of sorts) of his remarks. In correcting his mistakes, he manages to make a few more. He says that Obama “wrote, on his own, the manuscript for his first book and went looking for a publisher.” This was not the case. Obama, when a student at Harvard Law School, was approached by literary agent Jane Dystel after the New York Times wrote about him. He contracted with Poseidon, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, to write the book that became Dreams From My Father. Several years later, with Obama out of law school and back in Chicago, but with no book finished, S&S canceled the contract. Ms. Dystel then took the project to Random House’s Times Books imprint, which acquired it, and the future President then completed his MS and the book was published.

Landesman also acknowledges that while Abraham Lincoln “never wrote a whole book per se, his writings were collected in one.” Now, the most complete collections of Lincoln’s writings have been in a number of volumes; one book, even thin-paper and over a thousand pages, wouldn’t hold them all if the innumerable legal papers he drafted before 1861 are included.

Before drifting off into an account of his new friendship with National Council of the Arts member Lee Greenwood (of “God Bless The USA” fame), Landesman manages to make one misstep of sorts; when speaking of books with a presidential byline, he says that “one important one, it is generally accepted, was written by a ghostwriter without credit.”

Several bloggers have already wondered if this refers to John F. Kennedy’s Profiles In Courage and the reports that have circulated since shortly after the book won the Pulitzer Prize that Theodore Sorensen was responsible for at least most of the text. Though Sorensen acknowledged in his recent book Counselor that he did write the first draft of most of the chapters, which were then revised by the future President, the Kennedy family has always been very sensitive about any suggestion that Profiles was not, in the last analysis, JFK’s own work. But it may be that Landesman had another book in mind: Ronald Reagan’s post-presidential effort An American Life, which was widely reported at the time of its publication to be essentially the work of professional ghostwriter William Novak. In any event, Landesman’s sentence is a rather gauche one. And his performance as NEA Chairman, so far, makes one wish that the capable and eloquent Dana Gioia were still in that position.

White House renovator: First Lady Pat Nixon pictured with curator Clement Conger, daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower, designer David Richmond Byers III (left, from left to right), and architect Edward Vason Jones (right) in the Green Room in 1971.

Much has been written about First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s refurbishment and redecoration of the White House, home and principal workplace of the President of the United States. While Mrs. Kennedy’s efforts were successful in restoring many artifacts to the Executive Mansion, Mrs. Nixon’s efforts were enormously successful in furthering White House improvements. Mrs. Nixon incorporated other ideas into Mrs. Kennedy’s plans, producing marvelous and lasting results.

Mrs. Nixon did not receive immense press coverage for her work but she did not seek immediate publicity. Still, though, her story needs to be told and her efforts need to be highlighted.

French bergères: Pat Nixon returned President James Monroe’s special-order armchairs to the Blue Room.

Pat Nixon added more than 600 paintings and furnishings to the White House, the single largest acquisition by any presidential administration. Among many notable improvements, she returned President James Monroe’s original special-order French bergères (or armchairs), to the Blue Room and replaced replicas of Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of John Quincy and Louisa Adams with the originals. With the help of a new White House Curator, Clement Conger, whom Mrs. Nixon hired, and Sarah Jackson Doyle, a design consultant who had worked with Mrs. Nixon since 1965, the First Lady redecorated both private family rooms in the upper quarters and public rooms on the State Floor. She refurbished nine rooms, and renovated the Map Room and the China Room, which displays samplings of all the White House china.

The White House China Room circa 1975: With the help of White House curator Clement Conger, Pat Nixon renovated the China Room.

But Mrs. Nixon’s efforts went beyond simply restoration. She made the White House accessible for the disabled by adding wheelchair ramps. For the convenience of foreign tourists, Mrs. Nixon had White House guide pamphlets translated into foreign languages. She opened the White House for tours in the evenings which were enjoyed by over half a million visitors; the tours at Christmas were lighted by candles.

The exterior of the mansion glows a soft-white every night due to the efforts of Pat Nixon. Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s reflection in Pat Nixon: The Untold Story is the best description of this:

The White House illuminated: The soft glow of the White House at nightfall is the work of Pat Nixon.

“[Mrs. Nixon] began work on the lighting of the White House… National Park Service engineers spent months studying diagrams of the house and grounds and submitted various plans for illumination which Mother studied. Great care was taken that the lighting be subtle but still reveal the architectural beauty of the President’s house.

“In August 1970, when my parents returned to Washington from a trip, as their helicopter neared the mansion, suddenly hundreds of carefully concealed lights on the White House grounds were switched on. The softly glowing mansion was a breathtaking sight from the air. Mother had not told my father that the project was completed, wanting him to be surprised. He was elated. Excited, he ordered the pilot to circle once, twice, a third time. Mother beamed with pleasure.

“On November 25, at a small ceremony, Patricia Nixon pressed a button to light the White House officially as the Marine Band played “America the Beautiful.” Ever since that evening, the White House has been illuminated after dusk and a lighted flag has flown by presidential proclamation, day and night. It was an exhilarating moment for my mother midpoint in the first Nixon Administration.”

As Mrs. Eisenhower alluded to, the American flag flies atop the White House twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, even when the president is not within the confines of the White House, as a result of the successful efforts of Pat Nixon.

Upon her death in 1993, the Washington Post wrote that Mrs. Nixon, with the help of Conger, “restore[d] the White House to its golden age” and left “as one of her legacies a more historically accurate, and perhaps a more American, White House.” Though she did not seek publicity in regards to any of these numerous accomplishments, the credit she deserves should be dutifully given to this determined, hardworking woman.

Stars and Stripes Forever: Because of Pat Nixon, the American Flag flies atop the White House twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week.

Soon, however, suspicion grew that something was awry. Crippen fled across the Atlantic with a paramour, while Scotland Yard investigators examined his home. They found partial remains of the body and began searching for the traveling couple. This was in 1910, just as wireless radio communication was being popularized. In fact, the capture of Crippen was largely due to the use of Mr. Marconi’s technology. Ship after ship passed word along across the Ocean, like runners passing a baton in a relay race, to be on the lookout for the doctor and his companion.

The captain of the SS Montrose had been keeping his eye on a suspicious looking couple on board his vessel, and finally sent the message: “”Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Mustache taken off – growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.”

Long story short, the law was waiting for Dr. Crippen and company when they arrived in Canada. This story is told famously in Erik Larson’s 2006 book, Thunderstruck. It was a world changing moment. A revolution in communications was underway.

Spark by spark, dot by dot, and dash by dash, the world was becoming smaller.

Recently, while in a hospital waiting room with family members of a wonderful lady who was about to undergo surgery for a serious health issue, I called the group together for prayer. A girl in her late 20s asked me to wait a moment as she fished through her purse.

I wondered why.

Then she held up her combination cell-phone, I-Pod, computer, and device of all trades – one of those hi-tech whachamacallits – and pushed a button. Then she said, “Alright, go ahead.” I prayed, but I was at least a little curious about that gadget. My first thought was that it was a camera. So I kept my eyes closed – you know, to look more spiritual in the picture. But I soon found out that the prayer had not been recorded as an image. Rather it was captured as an audio file via the device’s voice memo feature. Then this prayer was emailed to the patient awaiting surgery. It was my first experience with cyber-supplication. Hers too.

Just when many of us who have been around the proverbial block a few times have made our peace with so many changes in how we live our lives, now comes along a whole new genre of technology and practice to sweep the world and invade our homes, businesses, parishes and pews. And while some are still debating the merits of methods and technologies now already obsolete, we are faced with the challenges and opportunities presented by newer social media vehicles immensely popular right now – like Facebook and Twitter.

But can anything of real and lasting value come from technology that limits information to a mere 140 characters?

Certainly. We regularly see examples of how social media can play a constructive role in society. Last year when a hotel in Mumbai, India was attacked and held for a time by terrorists, the world first found out not via FOX NEWS, CNN, or any other mainstream media outlet. Instead, someone sent a Twitter message (called a “tweet”):

Mumbai is in chaos. 18 dead, 40 held hostage at Oberoi, a five star hotel, firing going on at a JW Marriott.

That message was 107 characters long, and it got the word out about the emerging and ongoing story several hours before any traditional news organization went on the air with it.

Earlier this year, as thousands of Iranians took to the streets in Tehran and elsewhere to protest a clearly corrupt election process, the preponderance of any news we were getting here in the west came via Twitter as courageous people sent messages all over the world.

I am a grandfather six times over. This, by definition means I am an old dog who has difficulty learning new tricks. It is a proven fact that the older we get the harder it is to acquire knowledge and skills on a conceptual level. If you doubt this, prepare to be humbled soon as some five year old gives you a tutorial on a video game.

How much of our resistance to any change is more about the fact that new things intimidate us instead of the well-articulated arguments we pontificate about? “Well, back in my day, we didn’t have sliced bread, or running water. We even had to grow our own oxygen.”

Scott Bettinger, is the President of Echo Media in the Detroit, Michigan area – his company specializes in helping organizations – even churches – tap into the power of technology. He suggests that, whether or not leaders use “social media, at the very least they need to understand it to better understand” their clients and customers.

The first thing we need to know about social media tools is that we must understand their limits – what they can and can’t do. They are designed for attention spans that are very short. And while the Biblical passage John 3:16 in the classic King James Version would fit in one “tweet” at 117 characters, fans of longer literary passages would find themselves increasingly frustrated. The Shakespearian concept that “brevity is the soul of wit” has a found a home in the 21st century.

My personal experience with social media tools started slowly; largely because of generational reluctance. But once I learned my way around, it opened many doors to help me get to know people in my congregation better – and for them to get to know me better. I find it especially rewarding to connect with young people this way. On a daily basis, I can keep up with them, a few sentences at a time. And it usually works out that I am able to have a real conversation the next time we meet in person. “Hey, how was the zoo?” or “Are you feeling better?” or “I read that article you linked to from your Facebook page, very interesting.”

Joe Sangl is a financial planner and author of the wonderful book, I Was Broke – Now I’m Not. He travels across the country conducting seminars. He is also a big fan of social media tools such as Twitter. In fact, he sent me a tweet directly on point as I was writing this article: “Social media amplified the individual voice and allowed us to follow our heroes and learn from them at a distance.”

Of course, as with anything, we must be careful about being preoccupied with anything. We should never worship at the altar of any tool or technology. Twitter, Facebook, computers, televisions, cars – all and any of it can become too important to us. But if we remember to keep such things as servants and not let them become masters our lives can be enriched.

A few months ago, our youngest daughter and her husband gave us our sixth grandchild, a beautiful boy named Tiernan. I was at the hospital, but keeping a wise distance from the festivities. When the baby arrived, I sent out a tweet: “eight pound boy – red hair.” Anyone up at 4:13 a.m. that Saturday got the word. Soon came a picture.

Congratulations poured in – via Twitter, of course.

Then at 7:26 a.m. the very next morning I sent a different kind of message: “Pray for Tiernan Michael Zizolfo, my grandson born yesterday, he has made his way to the NICU. Nothing alarming, but possibly an infection.” All turned out well, but it was comforting to be able to get word to people that quickly.

What Marconi unleashed on the world is still on the march. Sure the lingo can be confusing, I mean who would have guessed 10 years go that we’d have a word like “tweet” in our regular vocabulary? But then again, Mr. Morse’s code was, I’ll just bet, a little hard to figure out at first, too. And remember, when the first telegraph message was sent a little over 165 years ago, between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, the words were taken from the Bible as a reminder of the potential power of any tool and of the hand of God in and over all: “What God hath wrought.”

If you sent that today as a tweet, you’d have 117 to spare.

Unguided Missal? Mass composer Leonard Bernstein in 1971.

Last week on The New Yorker’s website, music critic Alex Ross wrote three articles based on newly released Freedom of Information Act-obtained government documents regarding inquiries into composer-conductor-polymath Leonard Bernstein’s politics. They include an 800-page FBI file, memos from the Nixon White House Special Investigation Unit (aka Plumbers), and several taped conversations between RN and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman regarding the impending premiere of Bernstein’s Mass at the opening of the Kennedy Center in September 1971.

Alex Ross is to music what Pauline Kael was to movies. Both New Yorker critics share a commuunicable enthusiasm for their subject, an unintimidating expertise, and a ravishing prose style. In his New Yorker columns, on his blog, and in The Rest Is Noise, his recent best selling history of modern music, Mr. Ross renders the uncompromisingly unlistenable relentlessly readable.

And the Bernstein material he has uncovered is fascinating enough in itself.

The inquiries into the young conductor’s politics began with the Truman White House’s request to the FBI for an ideological vetting:

Although Hoover’s operatives began tracking Bernstein’s left-wing activities as early as the mid-nineteen-forties, the first serious inquiry came in March, 1949, when David Niles, President Truman’s administrative assistant, asked the Bureau to look into the young musician’s background. Niles wanted the information because Truman and Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel, were scheduled to attend an event at which Bernstein was slated to perform. A memo from D. M. Ladd to Hoover states that Bernstein was “connected, affiliated, or in some manner associated” with various organizations described as Communist fronts…

Director Hoover found the file’s contents insufficient to merit his endorsement (“This phraseology means nothing + most certainly I can’t send to W. H. [the White House] such ambiguous + sweeping statements.”), so Mr. Niles was back at square one.  In the event, Bernstein conducted and Truman sent his regrets.

In 1951, Bernstein’s name turned up on the Prominent Individuals Section of the Security Index — apparently a list of people who would be rounded up in the event of war with the USSR. In 1953, in order for the State Department to renew his passport, Bernstein had to submit an 11-page affidavit swearing that he had never been a member of the Communist Party or knowingly engaged in any communist-friendly activities.

From the Ross Bernstein documents: Leonard Bernstein’s Truman era Security Index Card.

A thorough FBI investigation, in 1954-55, yielded no hard evidence to contradict Bernstein’s affidavit—only “hearsay,” according to a memo dated August, 1955. Yet the FBI continued to collect accusations and insinuations. In 1958, one informant stated: “I know that Bernstein is a card-carrying Communist but I have no proof of it but I can tell by the way he talks.”

The thin record —ranging from soulless bureaucratese to squirrely handwritten denunciations— was typical of the times; today it makes dispiriting, albeit fascinating, reading. Looking back at his long life, nineteen years after the Maestro’s death, it’s easy to see that the prodigiously talented Bernstein, when it came to politics, was an enthusiastic idealist; and, for all his great sophistication, an idealistic naïf.

After flying under the FBI’s radar for several years, Bernstein re-emerged in 1968 —with LBJ now in the White House— as a result of his ardent flirtation with the Black Panthers.

Although at first only those on the FBI’s need-to-know distribution list were kept abreast of the Bernsteins’ Panthermania, before long —on 8 June 1970 to be exact— the world would read about it in Tom Wolfe’s devastating New York Magazine piece “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”  Thanks to Wolfe’s kandy-kolored prose, the Bernsteins’ unironic earnestness was soon common knowledge and the subject of national mockery.

The Kennedy Center: The Wall Street Journal’s review of its 1971 opening said: “Unfortunately, a perfect opening may be one of the few things the Kennedy Center will have going for it.  Its monumental building which has been described by one well-known critic as “gemutlich Speer,” is, not to put too fine a point on it, awesome but cold.  It is in the style of the Soviet palaces of science and culture, and the dizzying halls of states and nations convey a distinct feeling of the Moscow underground.”

After the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy decided that the only monument in Washington to her late husband’s memory would be the cultural center —the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts— to be built on the banks of the Potomac.

She commissioned Bernstein —a longtime Kennedy friend and unquestionably the nation’s preeminent conductor and composer— to write a major original work, to be paid for by the late President’s family, for the opening of the Center.   His initial idea was to compose a traditional Requiem mass in the tradition of Mozart, Verdi, and Faure.

But, being Bernstein, he soon fastened on a less conventional approach. The result, very accurately titled Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers, was a hybrid of the concert hall and the Broadway stage, with a thick gloss of ‘60s Greening of America schmalz.

As the Alex Ross New Yorker articles show, there was some concern in the Nixon White House about the advisability of RN’s attending the Kennedy Center’s opening.

The press and TV, not surprisingly, were obsessed with the long-anticipated event.   Although Mrs. Kennedy had become Mrs. Onassis in the meantime, this would represent the refurling of Camelot’s flag in the heart of Nixonian Washington.  There was serious speculation devoted to whether Mrs. Onassis and/or President Nixon would attend; and, if they both did, about how that would be choreographed. There was also considerable grousing in the predictable circles that RN, by attending, would be intruding where he certainly wasn’t wanted and arguably didn’t belong.

Further, Bernstein and “sources close to Mass” had been hinting and leaking stories about the work in progress (which continued to be in progress right up to the premiere) that the event would be as much political as artistic.  There was speculation that the composer would use this Mass —with its likely captive audience of national leaders— as his means of speaking antiwar truth to power.

“Nixon + Jackie and Joe Blow”:  Bernstein made notes about Mass at the McDowell Colony in 1970.  Regarding The Communion (the Kiss of Peace) he wrote: “Something should happen that turns the militancy to love.  For me the Communion and the Kiss of Peace are not two things, but one: the kiss is the communion and should pass through the whole company in a ritual way, + be somehow transmitted on through the house, to Nixon + Jackie and Joe Blow — What music?  Quiet chorale, or big gay sound?”

The upshot was an FBI memo —dated 16 August 1971, roughly three weeks before opening night— on the subject: “PROPOSED PLANS OF ANTIWAR ELEMENTS TO EMBARRASS THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.”  The memo’s purpose was set out in the first paragraph:

To advise that information regarding a previously reported plot by Leonard Bernstein, conductor and composer, to embarrass the President and other Government official through an antiwar and anti-Government musical composition to be played at the dedication of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has been reported by the press.

The report in question was from Human Events that “rumors are sweeping Washington” that Bernstein would embarrass RN with an anti-administration bombshell.  It was noted that he had met in jail with the anti-war Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, who was serving a three year sentence for destroying draft files, and who was rumored to be a collaborator on the Mass’s Latin libretto.

As Bernstein’s working notes show, he had, indeed, received advice from Fr. Berrigan, and had originally considered writing “4 Lullabies for Martyrs” (JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X).  The “Epistle” —the produced Mass’s most explicitly political section— intersperses quotations from Second Timothy with letters from an imprisoned draft resister.

So the fact that this highly public and potentially politically sensitive event was the subject of discussion among RN and his staff isn’t surprising.

Robert Mardian, then head of the DOJ’s Internal Security Division, wrote a memo summarizing the situation as the premiere approached.  He paid particular attention to the Bernstein-Berrigan visit at the Danbury Correctional Institution on 25 May 1971.

One could surmise that this visit by Bernstein was in connection with his “Mass,” particularly when considered in the light of information circulation within the pro-Berrigan camp to the effect that Bernstein has requested Father Berrigan to compose words for the “Mass” in Latin and it would follow an antiwar theme.  If this is true, consider the implications and the publicity which would accrue to the antiwar movement if this “Mass” were to be politely applauded by high ranking Government officials who undoubtedly will attend the dedication ceremonies at the Kennedy Center and who probably are not conversant in Latin.

Mardian concluded:

The fact that two such controversial figures as Bernstein and Father Berrigan are collaborating on the dedication program should appear to offer sufficient reason for inquiries as to just what mischief they are up to.  It would also be interesting to know just how Father Berrigan’s contribution to this “Mass” is to be furnished to Bernstein — openly through regular channels, or clandestinely.

The Mardian memo reached Pat Buchanan, who sent it to the Domestic Council’s Bud Krogh.  Buchanan wrote: “My view is that we ought to find someone who can definitely translate that Latin Mass Bernstein is working on — to make sure this is accurate.”  And he had someone in mind: “”get us a good Jesuit to translate, maybe Father McLaughlin…”  This was John McLaughlin, a friend of Buchanan’s, who had recently joined the White House speechwriting staff.

Coincidentally, two weeks before, Krogh had been tasked with tracking down information regarding the leak of the Pentagon Papers (which had first appeared on the front page of The New York Times on 13 June).  Mr. Ross, understandably but incorrectly, assumes that this was common knowledge and explains why Krogh was given this assignment — an assumption supported by the fact that Krogh in turn tasked his new aide G. Gordon Liddy with obtaining a copy of the Mass’s libretto.  What Buchanan more likely had in mind when he wrote “we should be able to get a copy of what he is preparing — there will have to be rehearsals,” was Krogh’s Domestic Council responsibility for matters involving the District of Columbia.

Mr. Ross writes —correctly— that “Several personalities involved in this exchange of memos had ties to the White House’s Special Investigations Unit, better known as the Plumbers, and later to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP, which” —incorrectly— “organized the Watergate break-in of 1972.”  (The break-in emerged full-blown from the pervervid brain of G. Gordon Liddy, under the patronage of John Dean, and with the acquiescence of Jeb Magruder and, alas at least temporarily, John Mitchell; its only —tangential— CREEP connection was the presence of CRP employee James McCord among the burglars.)

Liddy, on 6 August, reported that he had met with White House Counsel John Dean —the spider at the center of so many webs—who “stated that his office had had the matter for more than a week and obtained a copy of the Mass.  Dean stated that it is definitely anti-war and anti-establishment, etc.”

On 9 August Haldeman told RN that Fr. McLaughlin’s opinion, rather than reflecting Dean’s dire judgment, was simply that Mass would be “very depressing.”   Reporting on a preview performance of Mass on 7 September, Haldeman answered RN’s question “Is it an opera?” by simply saying that it was “weird.”  The next day Haldeman reported that, while some passages were spectacular, others were “atonal-type music.”

As is clear from the several tapes Mr. Ross excerpts in his third post (“Bernstein in the Nixon Tapes“), RN’s conversations with Haldeman have mostly to do with the media minefields involved in attending —and thereby imposing Presidential protocol on— what would clearly otherwise be a Kennedy celebration.  (As it turned out to be.  Following the performance, Rose Kennedy presented Bernstein with a commemorative medal.)

The Solomonic solution they worked out was that RN would give the Presidential Box to Mrs. Onassis for Wednesday night’s opening of the Opera House with the Mass she had commissioned for the occasion.

And on the following, Thursday, night, RN would attend the National Symphony’s opening of the Center’s Concert Hall.

On 9 September, Haldeman informed RN that The New York Times’ review of Mass, by the paper’s chief music critic Harold Schonberg, would apparently “kick it around,” calling the work superficial and overplayed.  In fact, Schoenberg —who had been no friend of Bernstein’s for some time— pulled out all the stops when it came to Mass.  In the Sunday paper he called it “A combination of superficiality and pretentiousness, and the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce.”

Haldeman reported Len Garment’s opinion that it is “quite spectacular theater” but, as a combination of West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Hair, “it’s got a lot of lousy stuff in it.”

Most of Mass’s reviews ranged from lukewarm to underwhelmed; many were downright hostile.  Among the major national publications, the only glowing review appeared in The Wall Street Journal. And that review was written by, of all people, a new member of the Nixon White House staff —only on board since 2 August— who was working in the small room he shared with Dick Cheney in Don Rumsfeld’s second floor West Wing suite.

On the night of Wednesday, 8 September, this newly-minted aide was in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House for the premiere of Mass.  And on the 10th, his fulsome review appeared in the Journal.

And that fellow was…..me.

I had been reviewing books for the Journal for a couple of years, and had contributed a few theater reviews before moving to Washington to begin a White House Fellowship.  I had suggested the Mass reviewing gig, and the paper, which hadn’t planned to  note the occasion, had been able to make last minute arrangements for a single ticket.

I opened my review noting that Mrs. Onassis, by deciding not to turn up for the opening, had succeeded in making herself the center of attention.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts should have achieved its apotheosis at its opening on Wednesday night.

Everything was right for a unique and moving moment in American history.  The opening piece was Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” which was commissioned by Mrs. Kennedy soon after the President’s death.  It was the right choice of music from the right composer.

So for the opening of this center, the late President’s memorial in Washington, the sole, but crucial, missing element was Mrs. Onassis herself.  By suddenly deciding not to attend, she did exactly what she said she was trying to avoid, and for many people turned the opening night into yet another Jackie-watch.  Would she or wouldn’t she?  She didn’t, and “Mass” was thus robbed of the real presence it needed to consecrate the hall.

Because for all its musical interest and worth, “Mass” was of necessity a piece d’occasion.  This center is the memorial by which John F. Kennedy will be remembered.  Now, short years later, when historians are already placing him in a troubled and critical perspective is the time to recall and commemorate that vision and spirit which he represented and embodied.

Then I plunged right in praising Mass:

Mr. Bernstein’s work…is a complex, convoluted, striking, rollicking, stunning work of art.  It is also very beautiful, both to hear and to look at.  The concept itself is not perhaps as original as it must have been when he first began work on it.  Indeed, it is now almost a genre piece, and as such it will undoubtedly be weighed and found wanting by many.  Hard rockers will find it inferior to the Electric Prune’s “Mass in F Minor”; the general public will find it less appealing and catchy than “Jesus Christ Superstar”; and theater-goers will find it far less stimulating than “Hair.”

And yet it is the mixed-media masterpiece toward which Mr. Bernstein’s theatrical and musical careers have been pointing.  Echoes of all the best that have gone before are here fulfilled; his broad and deep theological vision, already indicated in his first (Jeremiah) and third (Kaddish) symphonies; his exquisite solo settings in the lamentation and kaddish of the symphonies and in the stunning “Chichester Psalms”; his popular melodic and rhythmic command in “West Side Story.”

Mass opens simply, with the Celebrant strumming a guitar and singing “A Simple Song.”  This clip is from a staged concert performance in August 2007 in Riga, Latvia.  The Celebrant is Douglas Webster; the conductor is Maris Sirmais.

At least to my ears, the Latin text turned out to be mostly in Broadway ballad-friendly English.

The texts of the “Mass” are from the Roman liturgy with additions by the composer and the young author of “Godspell,” Stephen Schwartz.  But Mr. Bernstein’s hand is the most heavily present; the same kind of almost embarrassingly naïve and obvious lyrics which marked his opera “Trouble in Tahiti” are here, but here they are serving a vision so grand and towering that they seem to give it both an impetus of sincerity and a comforting human touch.

Gordon Davidson impressively and theatrically marshaled the cast of two hundred — including Alvin Ailey’s dancers, a brass band, and a massed choir — and kept the almost two hour intermissionless production from ever being “depressing.”  But there was no doubt that it was —as befits a requiem— serious bordering on sombre.

This “Mass” is in fact an anguished cry about our loss of faith.  The Gloria is a quiet little song regretting that the girl doesn’t ever seem to say Gloria any more; and the Credo is a driving lament that the man can no longer say “I believe.”  The Agnus Dei becomes a fierce, almost revolutionary red-lit surging, stopping demand for the peace promised: dona nobis pacem.  At the end a Mahleresque flute birdsong and the plainsung voice of a child restore the hope if not the faith for the final whispered Pax Tecum and the moving choral communion.  The text is full of word-plays in Latin, English, Greek and Hebrew.  “Accidents Do Happen,” sung during the consecration after the host and wine have been dropped, is perhaps the most obvious if not the best.

There are, to be sure, moments of excess and even a few of pure hoke, but in a work of this size and scale these are inevitable and piddling.  The insight Mr. Bernstein has shown into the mass and our times is uncanny and overwhelming; it is also very sophisticated and can hardly be justly judged on the basis of one viewing of this really razzmatazz theater show.

My review appeared on Friday, so I was able to include the Thursday night Concert Hall opening (which I hadn’t attended):

In the concert hall, which opened last night, President and Mrs. Nixon were treated to a program that would have been solid midweek subscription concert series fare for a good municipal orchestra.  Like “La Grande Scene,” the center’s expensive restaurant, whose menu is entirely in French, the National Symphony under Antal Dorati chose a wholly non-American program.  Is it parochial or foolish patriotic to have preferred hearing Leontyne Price singing Samuel Barber, Gershwin’s “Concerto in F”, and, say, and Ives symphony, to hearing “the Rite of Spring” for the Nth time, however well played?  Some of the center’s future fare is similarly prosaic or unaccountably exotic, and whether the center will be a viable economic proposition at the box-office will remain, anxiously, to be seen.  Be that as it may, it is now well and truly opened.

Before the kissing had to start: Leonard Bernstein, flanked (left) by director Gordon Davidson and co-lyricist Stephen Schwartz, takes a curtain call following the premiere of Mass at the Kennedy Center on 8 September 1971.

Bernstein’s notes for Mass reflect some of the advice given by Daniel Berrigan: “Father Dan said today: Leave them with the militant mood. You yell at them and turn off the lights.”  In fact, the ending Bernstein chose for Mass was exactly the opposite: a serenely moving, all but unaccompanied, choral hymn.

Almighty Father, incline thine ear.
Bless us and all those who have gathered here.
They angels send us,
Who shall defend us all:
And fill with grace
All who dwell in this place.
Amen.

A dozen years later —in 1984— the overture had already begun at a preview of a Broadway musical when three people arrived, late, to take the adjacent seats.  As I stood to let them pass I summoned up my best “if looks could kill” look — and found that I was bestowing it upon Adolph Comden, Betty Green, and Leonard Bernstein, who took the seat next to me.

At the intermission I introduced myself to him as a long-time admirer.  To set myself apart in that vast category, I said that, although I doubted he would remember it, I had written The Wall Street Journal’s review of Mass.  He smiled warmly, claimed to remember it, and said “Let me buy you a drink.”  (Reading my review last week, a friend said, “For that review he should have bought you a car.”)

Despite its critical drubbing —with the one noted notable exception— Mass found an immediate popular audience; in fact, it remains the best-selling multi-disc classical recording of all time.  Of the three currently available recordings, my favorite is the contemporaneous studio recording conducted by the composer and featuring the original cast. In 2004 Kent Nagano, and earlier this year Kristjan Jarvi released their versions.  On 25 August, Marin Alsop’s much-awaited Baltimore Symphony recording will be available; she prepared it as part of her 2008 Bernstein season celebrating what would have been her mentor’s 90th birthday.

There is also a DVD of a 1999 performance at Vatican City.

It seems that he was picking up a refill on some meds (my thought was that I hoped they were chill pills of some sort) and he was distressed that a previous prescription of 150 pills was refilled with only 75. Now, it wasn’t the capsule-count that bothered him – he just didn’t want to have to pay the same $10.00 co-pay for the 75 that he did for the 150. Never mind that the co-pay scale is pretty well set and that $10.00 is the bottom-line fee. Nope. He thought he should pay less. Or nothing.

The flustered, yet knowledgeable lady at the window then proceeded to show him how much the medicine would cost if he were to purchase it out of the system. Needless to say it wasn’t 10 bucks, but rather several multiples of it. Yet the guy who was buying medicine at a paid-down price still thought he was paying too much.

It’s a mindset – one that seems to be pervasive.

In fact, I suspect he may be one of millions of Americans who seem to think that medicine and medical care should not really cost them personally much of anything. Let the rich people pay for all of us – or the employer, or the government, it’s too expensive for me. Because it costs so much, goes the thinking, I really shouldn’t have to pay. God forbid that any American should have too many out of pocket health care expenses.

The logic is: nobody can afford it; somebody else should pay. Why does that remind me of something Yogi Berra might have once said?

Some time ago, I came to a parting of the ways with an employee. When our human resources person briefed him on COBRA to allow him to continue with health insurance coverage, he balked saying something to the effect: “I’m not paying for that.” Never mind that he had a wife and children and that being uninsured put them all at financial risk, he was unwilling to pay up out of pocket. To him, it was apparently just not something that was a financial priority. At any rate, he had told me and others that he was looking forward to the day when Barack Obama became president and everyone got coverage, whether they worked or not.

Of course, under the Obama plan this man would be fined for not having insurance when it was accessible to him.

I got the same kind of response when I put the health care reform issue out to a talk radio audience recently. I asked specifically for callers who had no coverage – wondering how they felt about the whole megilla. Frankly, I was surprised that so many who did not have health insurance actually had access to it, but really didn’t feel it was worth it to pay for it.

One caller told me that, at any rate, if he got sick he could just go to the emergency room, indicating that if the bill were too big and he couldn’t pay it would be the hospital’s problem. I suspect that more people think this way than we’d like to admit.

Actually, that kind of thing becomes everyone’s problem. And being lost in this national “teachable moment” are concepts like personal responsibility and living in such a way so as not to be a burden on others.

The reason something as integrity-rich as the idea of paying for what you receive is widely resisted when it comes to health care is because it is, in fact, so very expensive. But maybe if people accepted more personal responsibility and resisted the it-costs-so-much-I-can’t-afford-it-let-them-pay philosophy we might see some common sense enter the discussion.

Here’s an idea, why don’t we reform the system by turning it into one where individuals purchase their own insurance. What if every employer stopped providing health insurance as a benefit and instead translated the actual dollars spent on an employee’s plan into straight income – saying, in effect, “Here’s your health insurance money, you shop and buy your own plan.” This would need to be accompanied of course by market-based reform, eliminating the practice where states deny health plans from other states into their markets, and making such insurance completely portable, not tied to where you work.

The income used for health insurance could be tax exempt. If it wasn’t used to purchase insurance, it could be taxed – creating incentive. And if someone refused to spend the money they had on actually accessible insurance because, say, they wanted to buy a bigger house or car, well, then put a system in place where the government would help the hospital collect a bill over time, in the event of a costly illness. Pay me now or pay me later. Something like this has been described by John McClaughry president of the Ethan Allen Institute in a recent article entitled: What To Do With The Uninsured.

How many Americans would actually pay for health insurance under such circumstances? It’s hard to say. Possibly, we have been so conditioned to having another entity provide and pay for it that we truly see it as something that should be done for us?

It is axiomatic. Failure to act responsibly leads to the intervention of other parties, in the health care case – that would be the government. This intervention always means less autonomy and liberty.

Health insurance as we know it has only been around for about 80 years. With the rise of the New Deal and labor unions in the 1930s and then the economic realities during the crisis of World War II, Americans became increasingly accustomed to having the whole health care thing being part of an employee benefits package. In fact, during the war, when wages were somewhat regulated, the one way an employer could give someone a little more was through the benefits package.

Before long it became part of how things were done. You got a job and you got paid in money and stuff like health insurance. Cool.

The problem with it was that it began to put a degree of separation between the consumer and the health care service provider – we moved from a fee for service approach to something much more indirect and impersonal. Someone else was paying the bill. And when the apartment comes with utilities included you don’t look at the thermostat as much. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s no longer a market-driven enterprise.

When I was young boy, my dad had really good insurance because he was a Teamster. It wasn’t really called health insurance, though. It was hospitalization insurance. It was there for the tonsillectomy – not the runny nose. It was there for stitches in the emergency room, not for the yearly physical, or the chicken pox. In fact, when we went to the doctor, mom wrote a check. Doctor visits were not really health insurance issues. Even if people had good insurance, they usually still had to pay out of pocket to go to the family doctor, as with the dentist.

These days, though, with our whole health maintenance and managed care way of thinking, it’s all about minimizing out of pocket expenses. The problem is that this doesn’t eliminate the actual expense – it just takes it from view and increases the costs exponentially behind the scenes. We don’t see the transaction, so it isn’t really there.

Health insurance morphed into a right. Every one should have it and it should only cost those who can afford it. And few can really afford it, so the government should pay. We sure hope they have enough money – oh, what the heck, they’ll just print more. Or tax the rich more. So what if the top 1% of American households fork out more in taxes than the bottom 95% combined.

Our desire never to be out of pocket will one day soon lead to our country being out of pockets.

Putting a so-called public option into the mix is a poorly disguised foot in the door en route to the real goal of a single payer system. And once such a system is in place, it will never go away. Even conservatives in Britain don’t mess with their National Health Service (NHS). It’s part of the national fabric, like Social Security and Medicare are here already. Never mind that cancer patients over there have to wait on treatment so bureaucrats can meet “target” goals or that neurology delays put lives at risk or that some patients will now be paid to go “private” in certain cases.

After all, they have only had 61 years to work the kinks out of a program that is even now facing a funding crisis. Give them time. And surely we’d do better, right?

Just look at the Post Office. Or Amtrak.

At the time, the picture merited comment from less than a dozen bloggers, several dozen more comments at the magazine’s site, and that was it.  It was one of many visual lampoons of an unpopular President, and as such, was worth a chuckle or two from those who viewed it, and then forgotten.

But in recent weeks a similar image of another Chief Executive has provoked a different reaction.  As early as April, posters and stickers began showing up on the walls of buildings here and there in Los Angeles – and, more recently, in other American cities. The image portrayed on them is that of President Obama, his face made up in the especially ominous shade of clown white used by Ledger in The Dark Knight, with a ghoulish red smear around his mouth a la the Joker.  Beneath the picture, one word in lower-case letters: “socialism.”

This poster, of course, brings to mind the celebrated “HOPE” images produced by artist Shepard Fairey (in turn, based on an Associated Press photo) which helped Obama reach the Oval Office last year.  And Fairey himself, fresh from an assignment producing another semi-iconic Obama portrait for Rolling Stone’s cover, was quick to inform the Los Angeles Times that although he didn’t think that the President was a Socialist, he personally thought the creater of the “socialism” poster (who remains unknown, as of this writing) had a right to his or her opinion. (As it happens, the earliest online image depicting Obama and captioned by “Socialist,” in the spring of 2008, was a direct steal of the Fairey/AP image.)

But others are not quite as sanguine.  Rich Lieberman of the San Francisco Chronicle contends that the “socialism” image is “creepy, unfunny, and sinister” and “a piece of garbage” to boot.  At the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott devoted an article to pondering what boundary of taste the image had crossed.  Both Lieberman and Kennicott have duly noted that Obama’s predecessor had been portrayed in the same fashion.  But they both argue that to give the current officeholder such treatment has something wrong about it – perhaps, if not quite racist (Lieberman remarks that the anonymous artist is “probably white,” but is clearly unwilling to affirm that he or she isn’t), then using “urban” imagery in a discriminatory fashion (as Kennicott maintains in a somewhat tortured argument, both in his article and in a lengthy online discussion at the Post’s site).

The latter discussion is rather interesting, not least because one of the commenters remarks that the poster, especially since it originates from LA, may well be meant as a  parody of anti-Obama sentiment instead of the real thing.  This spurs Kennicott to mention Andy Warhol.  But, surprisingly, neither he nor anyone else in the discussion notes that the poster (as opposed to the image it features, of which more in a moment) may well have been inspired by one that Warhol made.

That would be Vote McGovern, a silkscreen created by the famed Pop artist in 1972 as a limited-edition production, proceeds to be donated to Sen. George McGovern’s campaign for the White House.  In it, the face of President Nixon was recolored (in a ghoulish green) and retouched to make him look like Dracula.  McGovern supporters (and Warhol collectors) bought up the entire run of the series.  The next year, Warhol was audited by the Internal Revenue Service.  He always expressed uncertainty about whether this event was related to his silkscreen (though he often was audited during the next three presidencies, nonetheless) but the audit did have one fortunate consequence for students of twentieth-century American history: it made Warhol decide to make an hour-long tape every day, in which, as well as itemizing his personal and business expenses, he gossiped in uninhibited fashion about his wealthy, famous, and just plain bizarre friends and acquaintances. And thus, in 1989, two years after the artist’s death, the American reading public was treated to The Andy Warhol Diaries.

But the use of an altered photograph of a politician did not start with Warhol. Back in early 1963, Richard Hamilton, the British pioneer of Pop Art, was a ban-the-bomb activist, unhappy because Hugh Gaitskell, the head of the UK Labor Party, did not support unilateral nuclear disarmament.  So Hamilton put a Phantom-of-the-Opera mask on a photo on the MP and titled it Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland, though it’s not certain whether this was the inspiration for Warhol a decade later.  And, of course, caricaturists as far back as James Gillray in George III’s time have done brutal pictures of political leaders; this is the tradition to which Friedman’s Bush-as-Joker belongs.

But one thing that Lieberman and Kennicott evidently did not know when they wrote about the “socialism” poster was that its unidentified maker derived (or stole, if you want to put it that way) the Obama-as-Joker picture from a Flickr image posted last January, not by a tattooed neo-Nazi from the Rockies or some other likely candidate, but by Firas Khateeb, a twenty-year-old Palestinian-American engineering student (and Muslim) in Chicago who Photoshopped a 2008 Time cover of the then-candidate. 

Khateeb’s picture did not have the word “socialism” and, contrary to a couple of earlier blogposts which state that he created the image to express his disappointment that Obama was joking about pursuing a leftward agenda, he now states on Flickr that the altered Time cover (and presumably the “socialism” poster) does not express his political views in any way.  Apparently he just thought it would be a bit of a goof to make the President up to look like Heath Ledger.  But that jeux d’esprit has stirred up quite a fuss, not least because, in a rather direct way, it speaks for the disquiet so many Americans feel when their President announces schemes as vast, vague, and downright nebulous as rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by creating a gigantic “bad bank.”

Therefore, the chances seem good that we’ll be seeing more “viral” images like the Joker-in-Chief one emerging, no matter what the pundits think.

As a policeman held up traffic, photographer Iain Macmillan climbed a stepladder and shot several frames for each direction.  At one point, Paul, who had been wearing sandals, kicked them off and walked barefoot.  The shoot lasted about fifteen minutes.

Apple Corps’ creative director John Kosh insisted that the photograph would be sufficient and that the cover required no printed copy —the Beatles were, after all, probably the best known people in the world.  So Macmillan’s shot was printed unadorned in what quickly became an cover (and which, before very long, became the subject of extensive, and ultimately tedious, interpretation and speculation).  The album’s title (visible only on the spine and back cover) was Abbey Road.

Above: the iconic front cover of the Beatles’ 1969 (and last) album, Abbey Road.  Below: the less familiar back cover.

Here’s the first part of the medley of several songs —opening with  ”You Never Give Me Your Money”— that concluded Abbey Road.  The second part (opening with the gorgeous “Golden Slumbers”) is here.

From page 117 of Inherent Vice, with my notes in brackets:

Sauncho [Smilax, an associate of the book's detective protagonist "Doc" Sportello] had been out all day and night with a posse of federales aboard a garishly overequipped vessel belonging to the Justice Department, visiting a site previously identified as the spot where the Golden Fang [a mysterious ship that figures prominently in the book] was supposed to have left some kind of lagan [a nautical term referring to material deposited in the ocean]. Divers went down to have a look and, as the light shifted over the ocean, presently were bringing up one connex [sic: this seems to be a typo and Pynchon is probably referring to Conex portable containers] after another full of shrink-wrapped bundles of US currency [...] except that upon opening the containers, imagine how surprised everybody was to find that, instead of the usual dignitaries, Washington, Lincoln, Franklin or whoever, all these bills, no matter which denomination, seemed to have Nixon’s face on them. For an instant a federal joint task force paused to wonder if they might not after all, the whole boatload of them, be jointly hallucinating. Nixon was staring wildly at something just out of sight past the edge of the cartouche, almost cringing out of the way his eyes strangely unfocused, as if he had himself been abusing some novel Asian psychedelic.

According to intelligence contacts of Sancho’s, it had been common CIA practice for a while to put Nixon’s face on phony North Vietnamese bills, as part of a scheme to destabilize the enemy currency by airdropping millions of these fakes during routine bombing raids over the north. But Nixonizing US currency this was was not as easily explained, or sometimes even appreciated.

It may be that Pynchon is alluding to the recession (and the beginning of the raging inflation of the 1970s) that was underway at the time the events of his book take place. But it’s hard to tell; a page or so later the book’s characters are wondering why it is that, since there’s “Chicken of the Sea,” there is not also “Tuna of the Farm” – it’s that kind of a novel.

And a page or so after that, the President himself shows up to speak at the Century Plaza Hotel, to a group calling itself “Vigilant California.” (In real life RN did appear at the hotel in 1970, but at a press conference in June, a month or so after the time in which this passage takes place.) One of the book’s characters shows up to heckle him, and is dragged from the room by security as the President remarks a la Futurama, “Better get him to a hippie drug clinic.”

Incidentally, the mystery of the underwater currency never is cleared up – like much of what takes place in Inherent Vice.

Pynchon often writes in an historical setting. Much of V., his first book, takes place in pre-WWI Europe. Gravity’s Rainbow, his most acclaimed novel, sets its action in a hallucinatory Europe of WWII. Mason & Dixon features the adventures of the two famed Englishmen in the 1760s as they the line bearing their name, and Against The Day, his thousand-page 2006 opus, describes a plot occuring between the 1880s and 1919.  Inherent Vice is set in a past now much more distant than the Second World War was in 1973 when Gravity’s Rainbow appeared – the Los Angeles of 1970.  Yes, Pynchon, who reportedly lived in the LA suburb of Manhattan Beach in that time, is now giving his diverse readership a tale of the days of bell-bottoms and waterbeds. As Christopher Taylor reports in his review in tomorrow’s Guardian:

Although Doc [Sportello, the private-eye protagonist of Inherent Vice] himself is vague about what year it is, the novel is also located quite firmly during the run-up to Charles Manson’s trial, which started in June 1970. The murders committed by Manson’s followers are a well-worn symbol for the end of the 60s, and we’re encouraged to see Doc as a kind of anti-Manson, Manson’s non-evil double. Nixon and Reagan are much discussed too, making the book serve as a loose prequel to Vineland [Pynchon's 1990 novel set in Northern California] in which burned-out hippies and fascist cops get to grips with Reagan’s America. Yet the book’s most effective crushing-of-the-60s-dream scenes are more equivocal about who or what did the crushing than the plot’s top-down conspiracy suggests. Watching people in a record shop listening to rock’n'roll on headphones "in solitude, confinement and mutual silence", or passing through a town where old TV shows are endlessly reviewable, Doc gets glimpses of "how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all", with technology dispersing communality as much as aiding it.

This is not the first time the 37th President has shown up in Pynchon’s fiction. In 1972, the writer selected a quote from Joni Mitchell’s song "The Circle Game" to use as the epigraph to the final section of Gravity’s Rainbow (at that stage still titled Mindless Pleasures). Reportedly, his publisher could not secure permission to use the quote (which appeared in the advance galleys of the book), so at the last minute Pynchon inserted instead the single word "What?" and attributed it to RN (who also appears in the last pages of that book under the name Richard M. Zhlubb). 

No word yet on whether Spiro Agnew shows up in the new novel.

Correction: The Joni Mitchell song Pynchon quoted in the original text of Gravity’s Rainbow  was "Cactus Tree" from her first album rather than "The Circle Game," and the lines he used for an epigraph were:

She has brought them to her senses,
They have laughed inside her laughter;
Now, she rallies her defenses
For she fears that no one will ask her
For eternity
And she’s so busy being free

Washington National Symphony violinist Glenn Donnellan wanted to make the orchestra’s concerts for young people more engaging.  So, naturally, he decided to make a violin out of a Louisville Slugger.

As Anne Midgette reports in today’s WaPo:

Donnellan made his bat-violin when the orchestra was preparing to go to Arkansas this spring for the 19th of its annual American residencies, which offer concerts and outreach programs in areas of the country that may not be well served with classical music. He was looking for an instrument to use in a children’s concert; he had done the same program in D.C. with more standard electric fiddles, but he had only borrowed those instruments and couldn’t take them on tour.

Not everyone might have come up with his solution, which required hours backstage at the Kennedy Center, using the stagehands’ drill press to make holes in a baseball bat. “It’s tricky to drill a hole in the handle,” he observes. “If you use a small enough bit, it wants to drift.” He adds, “You’ll see how [the bat-violin] is kind of crude at the bottom.”

On the contrary, the video is downright elegant — both for the instrument, narrow and compact, and for the playing, executed with cool aplomb. It’s certainly not your typical classical-music approach to the national anthem. There are overtones of Jimi Hendrix in the reverberant electronic sound, though the arrangement is actually Donnellan’s own. (The video appears on YouTube as a “video response” to Hendrix, but Donnellan says that was an accident; new to the site, he randomly clicked a lot of different links when his post first went up.)

On the contrary, the video is downright elegant — both for the instrument, narrow and compact, and for the playing, executed with cool aplomb. It’s certainly not your typical classical-music approach to the national anthem. There are overtones of Jimi Hendrix in the reverberant electronic sound, though the arrangement is actually Donnellan’s own. (The video appears on YouTube as a “video response” to Hendrix, but Donnellan says that was an accident; new to the site, he randomly clicked a lot of different links when his post first went up.)

Donnellan has been with the NSO since 1997; his violinist wife, Jan Chung, frequently plays with the orchestra, too. (They have two children: Adrian, 8, and Katherine, 6.) On his own time, Donnellan tries his hand at fiddling and experimenting with jazz. “Jamming with a guitarist on ‘Hotel California’ at the California Congressional offices on the Hill, and with kids playing the Blues in Mississippi were some of the most fun and memorable musical experiences I’ve had,” he writes in a follow-up e-mail. “In terms of playing outside the classical box, I think that if you can feel it, you can play it.”On the contrary, the video is downright elegant — both for the instrument, narrow and compact, and for the playing, executed with cool aplomb. It’s certainly not your typical classical-music approach to the national anthem. There are overtones of Jimi Hendrix in the reverberant electronic sound, though the arrangement is actually Donnellan’s own. (The video appears on YouTube as a “video response” to Hendrix, but Donnellan says that was an accident; new to the site, he randomly clicked a lot of different links when his post first went up.)

Donnellan has been with the NSO since 1997; his violinist wife, Jan Chung, frequently plays with the orchestra, too. (They have two children: Adrian, 8, and Katherine, 6.) On his own time, Donnellan tries his hand at fiddling and experimenting with jazz. “Jamming with a guitarist on ‘Hotel California’ at the California Congressional offices on the Hill, and with kids playing the Blues in Mississippi were some of the most fun and memorable musical experiences I’ve had,” he writes in a follow-up e-mail. “In terms of playing outside the classical box, I think that if you can feel it, you can play it.”

Christina Cristoforou’s interesting illustration on the op-ed page of today’s New York Times places our forty-four first ladies’ hair styles in historically cross-hatched perspective.  PN is in the middle of the second row from the bottom.  This reduction doesn’t do justice to the original which can be found here.

Columns such as mine talk a lot these days about taxes – maybe too much. But we certainly don’t talk enough about death, except when someone famous or beloved, sometimes both, passes on.

How many times have you heard the idea that bad things come in “threes?” Well, recently it seems we have transcended that. Ed McMahon passed the other day; so did Farrah Fawcett, now comes the death of pop icon Michael Jackson. The first two events seemed to be sadly imminent for sometime, one because of chronic health issues due to age, the other because of a battle – valiantly fought – with cancer. Mr. McMahon was 86, the former Charlie’s Angel was 62; Michael was 50.

There was Stephen Johns, the kind and generous security guard who opened a door at the Holocaust Museum recently, only to be gunned down by a hateful excuse of a man. And just the other day, a memorial service was held here in the Washington, D.C. area for Jeanice McMillan, the Metro train operator who perished after gallantly trying to stop her train from crashing into another. By all accounts, the lady was a hero. Then, of course, there are the eight others who died in that rail tragedy. Among them, Retired Major General, David Wherley, former commander of the D.C. Army and Air National Guard, and his wife, Ann, along with LaVonda King, a 23-year old mom on her way to pick up her two boys from daycare.

Of course, any morning newspaper is filled with death notices, names that mean something to relatively few as compared to what happens when someone famous dies. So, why is it that we find ourselves moved – even a little emotional – when we hear of the passing of someone we only knew from afar? Is it just because of the whole overdone 24/7 news coverage, looping stuff over and over and talking ad infinitum about a person?

I actually think something else is at play. Something deeper. Something instinctive. Something that is directly tied to how we are all wired.

Centuries ago, a king whose name is synonymous with wisdom, but who actually did a lot of dumb things – that being another story – reflected:

Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties. After all, everyone dies – so the living should take this to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for sadness has a refining influence on us. A wise person thinks a lot about death, while a fool thinks only about having a good time. – Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 (New Living Translation)

Solomon wasn’t talking here about some kind of morbid fascination with the details of death. He was referring to the quite healthy idea of stopping to think through the meaning of death. It is the ultimate area for personal reflection. We all identify with dying, death, and grief – whether we like, or want, to admit it.

So, as I watched the around the clock coverage of the passing of Michael Jackson, I found myself moved, not because I was a big fan – far from it. I liked the old Jackson Five stuff and when he sang to that rodent named Ben, but as he grew up and out there, I lost interest. This is not meant to demean or disparage the deceased, not at all. I feel for his family and his fans.

And I also hope that moments like this help all of us to think about what life means and what death is. We have birth certificates (those of us who can find them), but I have never seen one with an expiration date. Death comes in all shapes and sizes.

As a young minister starting out 31 years ago, the first funeral I conducted was for a stillborn baby, whose mother had gone into labor at the church baby shower. Three days later, I was called upon to officiate the service for a 93-year old man. Since then, my work has thrust me into moments somewhere between those age parameters.

I have given eulogies before thousands. And I have comforted an audience of one – a grieving mother – at a service for her son, a Vietnam vet who took his own life. I cried when she was given the flag.

Being a trumpet player, I have played taps in the distance. Being a preacher, I have shared words of comfort as best I could, always with the nagging sense that they fell short, because, well, they did. Being a human being, I have wept, even if my tears were tempered by my Christian faith and hope. Jesus himself wept, though knowing that his deceased friend, Lazarus, would momentarily rejoin the living.

Do I think celebrity-driven grief is overdone? Yeah probably, but I know it is easy for us to become myopic these days, obsessed with something out of proportion to how it actually impacts our individual lives. I also find myself somewhat put off when people can’t seem to find emotion in them when something sad – writ large – happens.

You see, when I think of Ed McMahon’s passing, I think of my elders, some who have long since left this earth, and others who are moving toward that inevitable moment. When I think of Farrah Fawcett, I can’t help but think of my mother, who passed several years ago in her 60s, after a lengthy and valiant battle with cancer and its complications.

Identification.

What do I think of when I focus on Michael Jackson’s passing? I think of a little boy with such talent, and then the man he grew into. He was obviously someone who struggled on several levels, and seemed to have so many unhappy moments, in spite of a global fan-base and the fleeting nature of material success.

As a student of history – and as an amateur historian, as well – I know that there is a time and place for the analysis of a life: the good, bad, and ugly. But it’s not during the wake. There should be a time and space to mourn, especially for those who really knew him. It is unseemly to sift cynically through a man’s life – and I imagine there is a lot there that would not match my values – in the immediate shadow of his passing. History can be written later, revealing things and teaching lessons.

Was Michael Jackson a bad or good person? I have my thoughts (rooted in scripture), others may think differently. But that he was a broken and hurting person, most would agree. When Jesus announced his ministry in Capernaum, quoting from Isaiah chapter 61, he did not indicate that he was on the scene to root out the bad people, but he did talk a lot about the broken and needy. And in the verse after the great John 3:16, Jesus talked about how he wasn’t sent to condemn the world, but to redeem it.

This is not an exercise in semantics, nor is it an attempt to water anything down. Jesus didn’t need to condemn, because the righteous law of God had been doing that all along. God is a judge and will judge according to righteousness. His righteousness. Defined by Him. It will be very real. In fact: “And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.” (Hebrews 9:27 New King James Version)

For now, the most compelling lesson for us as we note the passing of some famous people is to approach it all like Solomon: “A wise person thinks a lot about death, while a fool thinks only about having a good time.”

Hugo Chavez’s government bans Coke Zero:

The government’s concern over Coke Zero stems from one of the components in the no-calorie soft drink, Alvarez said. “We were notified on Wednesday of their concern and have started a process of demonstrating that there are no health risks,” she said.

The measure against Coca-Cola is only the latest episode in a long list of troubles assailing the company in Venezuela. A group of former workers, backed by legislators aligned with President Hugo Chavez, caused intermittent stoppages in bottling and distribution plants last year, hampering the company’s operations.

More recently, after being targeted by Chavez, the company agreed to hand over a parking lot that was used as a distribution center to the Venezuelan government in exchange for another location.

If readers can remember this type of low-intensity provocation isn’t foreign to the bombastic Chavez who last year declared war on the English lexicon.

Photo couresy of FP.

The Chief Executive’s appearance tomorrow is an opportunity for him to extend a conciliatory hand to the large number of Americans who, whether or not they voted for him in November, are not supporters of some of the radical programs being espoused by a considerable number of Democratic-affiliated groups, such as an expansion of legal abortion, decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs, and gay marriage.

It seems to become more evident by the month that when voters sought “change” in voting for Obama and Vice President Biden last month, a substantial percentage of them were mainly concerned with the economy, health care, and perhaps increased opportunity of education, and were not that keen on the other aspects of “change” as defined in the agendas of MoveOn.org or other groups. This would especially apply to voters in the states surrounding the Deep South, large portions of the Catholic electorate, and churchgoing African-American voters nationwide.

In California, the voters in the latter group helped Obama carry the state, but at the same time provided the margin that passed Proposition 8 which reversed the California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. And it turns out that on abortion, the percentage of voters supporting Roe vs. Wade and the pro-choice line, after peaking during the Clinton years, has steadily been declining, to the point that this week, a Gallup poll revealed that a bare majority of those whose opinion was sampled – 51% – described themselves as “pro-life.”

This strongly indicates that a considerable number of voters – perhaps poised on becoming the majority – would not be looking forward to Al Franken taking his seat in the Senate and locking in a (theoretically) filibuster-proof majority that would then fulfill all the left’s fondest dreams in the social arena.

The events of the last few weeks involving Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean, might prove a harbinger of things to come. A few weeks ago, during the Miss USA pageant, Ms. Prejean, educated at Christian schools, was asked by the online gossip columnist Perez Hilton, one of the pageant’s judges, what her opinion was of gay marriage. The contestant replied that her own view was that marriage could only exist between a man and woman – which is still officially the view of Congress, as expressed in the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by a majority of both parties and signed by President Clinton a decade ago.

Hilton (followed by an avalanche of bloggers and left-leaning pundits) subjected Ms. Prejean to ridicule. But instant polls soon made it clear that most Americans supported her right to express her opinion, and even Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who spearheaded the legalization of same-sex unions in his city, acknowledged her right to free speech.

Ms. Prejean was then ridiculed as a hypocrite, after some rather mild and fairly tasteful photos of her in an unclad state appeared online. But Donald Trump, owner of the Miss USA pageant, rejected pressure to strip her of her crown, and so in recent days the beauty queen has managed to largely prevail in the court of public opinion.

The way this particular controversy has played out has not been conveniently timed for the supporters of same-sex marriage. As I noted last week in my post “Gay Marriage At The Crossroads,”  the District of Columbia city council just voted to recognize such unions as performed in other states. Under the Home Rule Bill, Congress has a right to challenge this decision – and GOP lawmakers have made it clear that they will pursue this option, which means that in a matter of months each member of Congress will have to vote yes or no on this question.

The issues of abortion, gay marriage, and narcotics delegalization will also be prominent when the President selects a nominee to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. It seems less and less likely that any thoroughly liberal, MoveOn-approved choice would automatically sail through the Senate.

So I think that the best approach for the President tomorrow is not to mouth a series of platitudes predicated on the idea that his listeners (or the American public in general) will automatically accept all of his positions, but to acknowledge that there are differences of opinion and to express a willingness to work within the Constitution to achieve a consensus that will bridge these differences. If he does that, and follows through, he may considerably improve the chances of his party maintaining control of Congress in 2010. If he pursues a partisan path, however, the GOP – perhaps as early as the Virginia election this year – could be on the comeback trail.