German Romantic poets have been fortunate – putting aside that they are all dead – to have had their work immortalized in song.  German poetry flowered at a time when the powerhouses of Austro-German music took time out from the heavy work of composing symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and piano sonatas to focus immense talents on the creation of Lieder, miniature compositions in which a poem is set to music.

Mozart and Beethoven set songs, but it was Franz Schubert (1797-1828) who established the Lied as a distinctive product of Austro-German music.  He set over 600 poems for voice and (mostly) piano accompaniment.  You can get a sense of how Schubert worked his magic by listening to An die Musik, which runs about two and a half minutes, or if you prefer something a little less somber and philosophical, try Die Forelle[1], which runs less than two minutes.  As a newcomer to most of this music I have been particularly taken with Auf dem Wasser zu singen, which you can enjoy for an investment of less than four minutes of your time.

German has produced beautiful poetry, which is (to me at least) a surprise In light of the guttural sounds of which the language is capable, and considering the stiff and formal stereotypical image of the German character that many of us carry in our heads.  In an essay[2] in which he skewers the German tongue, Mark Twain puts satire aside for a moment to make the point:

There are some German words which are singularly and powerfully effective. For instance, those which describe lowly, peaceful, and affectionate home life; those which deal with love, in any and all forms, . . . ; those which deal with outdoor Nature, in its softest and loveliest aspects — with meadows and forests, and birds and flowers, the fragrance and sunshine of summer, and the moonlight of peaceful winter nights; in a word, those which deal with any and all forms of rest, repose, and peace; . . . and lastly and chiefly, in those words which express pathos, is the language surpassingly rich and affective. There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry. That shows that the sound of the words is correct — it interprets the meanings with truth and with exactness; and so the ear is informed, and through the ear, the heart. [Emphasis in original.]

He might have been describing the poem “Gestillte Sehnsucht” – “Stilled Longing” – by Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866), which Johannes Brahms set to music in the early 1880s.

In the first of four verses, the poet places us in a woodland scene at sunset.  After stopping to note the wind whispering through the trees and the soft song of the birds, the poet gets down to the real business at hand, an examination of his emotions.  In the second verse, he addresses them directly.  How long will you feelings of longing persist?  When will you rest?  When will you sleep?  The remaining two verses tell us that these feelings will go on his whole life through.  I feel, therefore I am.

Each verse has six lines; the last two lines of each verse are a refrain that explores the meaning of those whispering winds and birds.  Each appearance of the refrain provides a slightly different answer as the poem unfolds.  So powerful are the poet’s feelings that he never takes time to identify the object of his longing.  For all we know, it might be nothing more than a serving of schnitzel mit nudeln, and poems to food are not unheard of (e.g., Robert Burns’ “Ode to a Haggis”).  But from what we know of the Romantic poets, the longed-for subject is likely to be a fair member of the opposite sex.  Still, it would have been considerate to let the reader in on the secret.

Brahms wrote his song for contralto, viola, and piano, an unusual combination.  It is one of two for the same forces written for his friends Joseph Joachim, a famous violinist and violist, and his wife Amalie, born Schneeweiss[3], (“Snow White”), a noted contralto.  When the couple had a child, a boy whom they named Johannes, Brahms composed a lullaby for contralto, viola, and piano, intending to distribute the parts to the two Joachims with himself at the keyboard.  That song, Geistliches Wiegenlied (“Spiritual Lullaby”), was not published at the time of composition.  Later, the marriage went on the rocks when Herr Joachim accused Frau Joachim of infidelity, apparently without evidence or reason.  Brahms wrote a second song for the same voice and instruments, perhaps hoping to repair the marriage of his friends.  He published the two songs in 1883 as his Opus 91, designating the later song – Gestillte Sehnsucht – as Opus 91, Number 1 and the lullaby as Opus 91, Number 2.

Brahms conceived the song in A-B-A format, or more accurately A+ refrain – B + refrain – A + refrain, which meant that the poem had one verse too many.  He jettisoned the third verse and set verses 1, 2, and 4.

The song opens with an extended introduction by the viola accompanied by the piano, which hints at some of the melodic riches ahead.  After nearly a full minute, the contralto enters and sings the first four lines of the opening verse to a melody of round autumnal ripeness.  The two lines of the refrain are set to an ambling rhythm, lightly syncopated, that ends all three verses.

The mood changes with the second verse.  The emotions accompanying the poet’s address to his feelings generate shorter phrases and an unsettled melody until the refrain returns us to a place where we can breathe more freely.  Even so, echoes from the storm inside the poet’s breast turn the end of the refrain to a minor key.

The final verse returns us to the sunset-tinted melody of the first.  At the end of the refrain, the viola, which has conducted a dialogue with the contralto throughout, works with the piano to take us home.  Just before the final note, the viola and piano hit a dissonant chord, which is resolved as the piece fades to silence.  Perhaps this was Brahms expressing his hope that the discord in the Joachim marriage would be resolved equally harmoniously.  (It wasn’t.  They divorced.)

The song is so ravishing and there are so many lovely voices singing it on record that a listener would not go wrong by selecting the first version that YouTube throws out or the first download that Amazon suggests.  I have listened to every recording I could find.  Music lovers are truly fortunate to have so many beautiful voices available to sing such a moving song.  My clear favorite is a recording made in 1939 by Marian Anderson, accompanied by William Primrose, viola, and Franz Rupp, piano.

Most of the singers who present this piece have big operatic voices.  Their training and inclination is to project their voices to the back of a large hall.  The concert hall approach is out of place when the singer is asked to interpret a quiet moment, a poet alone with his thoughts as the setting sun bathes a forest in its glow.  Using high notes to shake the rafters seems to be second nature to many operatic singers, but to my ear the method doesn’t work when it comes to music as intimate as Gestillte Sehnsucht.  This criticism applies particularly to Marilyn Horne, Janet Evans, and Ann Murray.

The second line of the song is a key point for distinguishing the back-of-the-hall ladies from the others.  The line reads: “How solemnly the forest stands!”  The singer is asked to begin the line on a high note.  It seems that for many singers, a high note is a loud note.  But a quiet moment in which the poet is awed by the beauty around him should be presented to the listener at something less than full operatic volume.

Another tendency is to overwork the second verse, where the poet in his anguish addresses his feelings of longing.  In too many versions I hear instead Sieglinde running through the forest in Act Two of Die Walküre.  As the curtain comes down on Act One, Sieglinde is preparing to commit the dual sins of adultery and incest with the twin brother with whom she has just been reunited.  When I say “preparing to commit” I don’t mean that she is standing in front of a mirror a-wishin’ and a-hopin’.  If at the original performance the Act One curtain had come down a minute later than it does, the opera would have been banned by the censors and the world would have been denied the remaining twelve hours of the Ring cycle[4].

Once Act Two is underway, Sieglinde, whose longings were so recently un-stilled, is racing through the forest wracked with guilt.  As the old saying goes, commit incest in haste, repent at leisure.  That’s the emotional pitch of Sieglinde at that point in the drama.  That level of emotional turmoil is over the top in Brahms’s song.  Yet so many singers of Gestillte Sehnsucht overdo things that I have developed an informal “Sieglinde Index” to evaluate them.  I can’t listen to a recording when the Sieglinde Index starts to red-line into the “High” zone.  That leaves out Iris Vermillion (who I wanted to make my favorite for the sake of her name), Alice Coote, even Kirsten Flagstad (one of the greatest Wagnerian sopranos, superb in this song apart from the four lines in question).

I have come back repeatedly to Marian Anderson, Kathleen Ferrier, Jessye Norman, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Angelika Kirchshlager[5].  Ms. Norman offers her powerful voice – you sense that she could use it to engrave cold steel if she wanted to – in the service of an introspective performance.  Her Sieglinde Index is moderate.  She has so much power in reserve that she can hit her high notes without strain and without excessive volume.  As against that, she is a dramatic soprano, not a contralto.

Kirchshlager’s performance is outstanding, with a moderate-to-high but still acceptable Sieglinde Index.  Unfortunately, she takes the song at a speed I feel is too fast.  Von Otter’s performance likewise is beautiful.  She adopts a moderate tempo, about halfway between the fastest and slowest performances.  Her Sieglinde Index is acceptable.  And both of these superb singers are mezzos, not contraltos.

Anderson and Ferrier were both true contraltos.  My objection to Kathleen Ferrier’s performance is that, like Kirchshlager, she is too fast.  She moves through the song in some five minutes, where singers such as Anderson and Norman take more than seven.

Anderson’s reading of the song is superb.  Her musical bearing is restrained, patrician.  The emotional content of the music flows out of her without any need for embellishment.  What she provides is less an interpretation than a rendering.  Her accompanists are equally fine.  This most musically reserved performance is also for me the most moving.  She makes the song her own by simply presenting it, not selling it.  The 1939 sound is much better than I would have expected and does not get in the way at all.

It is impossible to listen to Marian Anderson without thinking of her compelling personal story.  We can take pride in the enormous racial progress our country has made since Ms. Anderson’s time, but the vicious stupidity that characterized so much of the treatment she experienced is shameful.  She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1897.  Her musical talents were first noticed through her church.  When she applied to the Philadelphia Academy of Music, the admissions clerk refused to accept her application, saying “We don’t take colored.”

Two incidents underscore the depth of her talent.  After the Academy turned her down, she sought a private teacher.  She auditioned for a voice coach named Giuseppe Boghetti[6].  This was a man who earned his living by evaluating voices in the cold-blooded way that a baseball scout might evaluate a curve ball.  As she began to sing for him, the beauty of her voice overwhelmed him.  He broke down in tears.  Some years later when she was touring Europe, Arturo Toscanini heard her sing and told her that a voice such as hers is heard once in a hundred years.

Yet when in 1939 her supporters tried to arrange a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., a private venue owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, the DAR refused to book the concert.  They could not abide an African American singer on their stage.  The DC city government had a hall available but refused to offer it because it did not have segregated bathrooms (which believe it or not was a code violation, like having bad wiring).  The Colonial Dames – P.G. Wodehouse’s name – did finally allow her to sing at Constitution Hall in 1943.  With bombs falling and the future of American civilization at risk, it was easier for them to look past the racial divide, apparently.  I was curious whether the DAR was still in existence.  I found an active website that announces that they welcome members – those who can trace their ancestry to a participant in the American Revolutionary War – of all races, creeds, and colors.  Mazel tov.

Her treatment and her response provide important examples for our time and place.  When she was denied admission to the Philadelphia Academy, denied the opportunity even to apply, she did not go off to her safe space.  She showed more tenacity in the face of genuine hostility than many of our contemporaries display in the presence of real or imagined micro-aggressions.  She squared her shoulders, developed her talent, and brought her gifts to appreciative audiences all over the world.

She was magnanimous.  When she finally performed at Constitution Hall in the middle of the Second World War, she took the stage and she sang.  If she felt a desire to lecture the audience in the manner of the script-readers of Hamilton fame, she overcame it.  Her nobility of character and talent contrasted with the base stupidity of those who had denied her a forum.  Her detractors live in footnotes in the story of her life.

She had a successful concert and recording career, first in Europe and eventually in her native country, but her operatic work was limited to the minor role of Ulrica in Verdi’s “Masked Ball”.  Perhaps the lack of an operatic resume is why she sings this song with such intimacy, without projecting drama to the imaginary back row of the theater.  That can’t be the entire explanation; any number of great operatic performers were also superb singers of Lieder.  In this instance, the singer and her accompanists made artistic decisions that fit perfectly with the mood and tone of the song.  It is a measure of the achievement of the composer and the musicians that the full beauty of the song is revealed by a performance that holds so much power in reserve.

[1] I was listening to different performances of this song on YouTube the other day.  I like to read the listener comments.  One person said that he would love to have a particular female singer standing on his washing machine.  I don’t expect to understand every nuance of listener comments, but this one went right by me.  The mystery deepened as other comments talked about washing machines and dryers.  The light dawned when one commenter said that she was “blown away” when she first heard the song.  It’s what her Samsung washer and dryer play at the end of a cycle!

[2] “The Awful German Language”.

[3] Joachim had converted from Judaism as an adult, but even so his family objected to the marriage because the bride wasn’t Jewish!

[4] “Wagner’s music is much better than it sounds.”  Mark Twain

[5] There are a number of unusual arrangements of the song on YouTube.  Some of these substitute a cello for the viola.  I don’t think the cello works here, but this hardly matters because the singers in these versions tend not be up to the song’s demands anyway.  An exception is the German mezzo Angelika Wied, who provides a near-perfect rendition of the song that in my opinion is ruined by the substitution of a cello for viola – it’s the instrument, not the performer.  Other novelties substitute the cello for the voice.  One YouTube commenter: I never liked the lyrics anyway.  Another try is to substitute a string chamber orchestra for the piano.  The most intriguing novelty approach I found was a rewrite that substituted a male baritone for the contralto and a clarinet for the viola.  That version almost worked.  The problem with all of these novelties is their presumption.  Brahms knew what he was doing.  He doesn’t need help.

[6] He was born Joseph Bogash to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents.  A trip to Italy convinced him that he could improve his prospects in the music business by italianizing his name.

We are all tempted to reason backwards.  If desired result R depends on the truth of proposition P, it is sometimes hard to resist arguing in favor of P without regard to its merits.  If your R is that you want Donald Trump’s electoral vote win to be illegitimate, then a handy P is that a candidate must win the nationwide popular vote to be considered the rightful winner of a presidential election.  Many times, the candidate with the most popular votes nationwide does not have a majority, just a plurality.  That was true in 1992, 1996, 2000, and now again in 2016.  Some countries that rely on a nationwide popular vote to select their head of state use a two-round system.  If no one wins a majority of the vote in the first round, the top two finishers compete in a second round.  One of the two will by necessity end up with a majority of the votes cast in the second round.  I know that France and Costa Rica both use this system, so the U.S. would not be breaking new ground.  However, the particular P before us is that a plurality is enough.  I don’t hear any calls for a run-off.

Applying this reasoning to other fields, Cleveland Indians fans can argue that the 2016 World Series has not been settled.  It ended in a tie.  Over the course of seven games, each team scored 27 runs in total.  We have ended up with an illegitimate World Series champion by using the arcane and biased method of counting the games won or lost rather than the number of runs scored over the entire series.  It’s obvious that we need a better method to settle a contest as important as the World Series.  Will Cleveland fans take to the streets until they get the result they desire?  If they are reading this, they just might.

The last works of both Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) were written in a final burst of creative energy called up after each of them had, he thought, retired.

At the time of his intended retirement in 1890, Brahms had published exactly 20 chamber works[1].  No fewer than nine of these – the three violins sonatas, the second cello sonata, the three piano trios[2] and the two string quintets — were written in the ten-years that ended in 1890, during the period of his full maturity as a composer.  With the publication of the second String Quintet, Op. 111, the great man said he was tired and had decided to leave composition to “the young folk”.

But in 1891, Brahms heard Richard Mühlfeld (1856 – 1907) play the clarinet and became enchanted with the beautiful sound that the younger man drew from the instrument.  The two became friends – some modern commentators suggest (or want to believe) that they were extremely close friends.  The result was that Brahms came out of retirement to write four final chamber works, all for the clarinet.  These are the Clarinet Trio (clarinet, cello, piano), Op. 114; the Clarinet Quintet (string quartet plus clarinet), Op. 115; and the two Clarinet Sonatas (clarinet and piano), Op. 120.

The trio is a wonderful work, but its dark tone has placed it in the shadow of the quintet.  I personally would rank the quintet among the very finest musical works we have.  Brahms uses the tonal resources of the clarinet to the highest advantage.  The woody, reedy lower register of the instrument, its liquid middle range, and its brilliant upper register are used sometimes as a counterweight to the strings or a commentary on their activity.  At other times, the clarinet combines with one or more of the string instruments while the others either rest or conduct their own conversation. The work has an air of mystery, of autumnal sadness and resignation, particularly in the two outer movements.  The second movement is among the most beautiful that Brahms ever wrote.  It demonstrates his ability to hold us in suspense while he draws out the musical line.  The third movement provides a moment of frolic in an otherwise solemn piece.  The fourth movement is a theme and variations, a favorite genre of Brahms and one that he used throughout his career.  The mysterious theme that opened the work reappears at the end to close it, although it has been just below the surface throughout.

You wouldn’t think that the combination of clarinet and piano would work.  Our intuition is that the piano would overwhelm its partner, particularly considering the typical density of Brahms’s writing for the piano.  But the two go together like ham and eggs.  After hearing the two sonatas, you would think that the clarinet and piano were the most natural pairing in the world.

The two sonatas provide a nice contrast to each other.  The first, in a minor key, is in four movements.  The second is in the gentle key of E-flat major in three movements.  The first is dramatic and declamatory, at least in its outer movements.  The second exudes charm, warmth, and geniality.  The second ends with a delightful theme and variations, a final nod by the composer to a format he loved so well.

All of Brahms’s late chamber works are a distillation of the style he developed over a lifetime of composition.  The final four works for clarinet represent the perfection of that style, the finial, the capstone of his career.  In contrast, Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff, is a departure from his previous style and practice in at least three ways.

First, right up through his intended retirement following the production of Aida Verdi wrote operas against a commission.  He saw himself as an artisan, a master, who worked his craft to meet the requirements of his client.  All the great Verdi operas up to the final two were created to meet contractual obligations.  Otello and Falstaff were written in response to the cajoling of both his librettist and publisher, not in response to a commission.

Second, Falstaff is a through-composed opera.  The classic Italian opera style was to string together set numbers (usually a recitative and an aria, sometimes a set piece for two, three, four or more), each one followed by wild audience applause and then by another number.  During Verdi’s time, Wagner had discarded this practice north of the Alps as did later Italian composers, but Verdi had retained it right through Aida (he is abandoning it already in Otello).  Consequently, the orchestra plays a role in Falstaff unlike that in earlier Verdi operas.  It does not just provide the overture and accompany the singers.  It becomes a comic chorus, underscoring the humor and absurdity parading on stage.

Third, Falstaff is a comedy.  Verdi wrote one comic opera in his youth that I confess I have never seen or heard.  There are comic moments in a couple of his dramatic operas, but in general Giuseppe Verdi was not a man to play a scene for laughs.  His operas are full to overflowing with curses, gruesome deaths, witches’ spells, revenge, and ardent love sundered by death.  Yet, this master of the grotesque chose to say farewell to the theater by bringing us the person of Sir John Falstaff.

But which Sir John to present?  The character who bestrides the first part of Henry IV is one of the great comic creations of all time.  In the second part, he is less endearing, but entertains us through his endless capacity for over-statement and his taste for complicated, earthy metaphors.  However, if you are looking for a comic story in which to place him, you need to look beyond the Henry plays.  The two parts of Henry IV cannot be played for any laughs other than the ones Falstaff provides.  Unfortunately, the comedy in which Falstaff appears, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is not reckoned among Shakespeare’s finest works and the Falstaff in the lighter play is more a lecher than the comic Roman candle of the Henry plays.[3]

The solution was to import the Falstaff of the Henry IV plays into the comedy.  The broad outline of the Merry Wives plot is retained, but the Falstaff is the more interesting fellow we got to know in Henry IV Parts One and Two, particularly Part One.  Any number of his speeches find their way into the opera, but in entirely new contexts.

To take one example, in Henry IV Part One, Falstaff and Prince Hal (the future Henry V) are about to go into battle.  Falstaff asks Hal if they can stay together during the battle.  Hal has his own work to do, reminds Falstaff that he owes God a death, and leaves the stage, where Falstaff proceeds to soliloquize.  Falstaff acknowledges that he owes God a death, but sees no reason to pay the debt ahead of the due date.  He decides to push ahead for the sake of honor, because honor “pricks him on”.  He continues:

Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I
come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or
an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is
honour? a word.

And on in that vein until he has persuaded himself that he needs to abandon honor or risk getting himself killed.

In the opera, Falstaff writes identical letters to the two Windsor wives that he plans to seduce, Meg and Alice (pronounced Ah-LEE-che in the opera). He hands a note to each of his drinking companions Bardolph and Pistol, directing them to the respective wives.  The two refuse.  They each consider the delivery of such a note to be beneath their honor.

At that point, Falstaff launches into a tirade against the two on the theme of honor, letting them know that thieves such as they can have no concept of it.  To make his point, he incorporates the very speech that Falstaff gave to convince himself that too close an adherence to honor would result in his early death.

It’s a remarkable coup, to use virtually the same words (in a different language, of course) in the mouth of the same character, in two wildly different contexts.  It works seamlessly, and Verdi pulls this off repeatedly throughout the three acts of the opera.

He pulls it off with a heavy assist from his librettist, Arrigo Boito (1842-1918)[4], who also wrote the libretto for Otello and persuaded Verdi to come out of retirement – twice, once for Otello and again for Falstaff –  to write operas that have been a joy to music lovers ever since.  Verdi resisted powerfully both times, pleading his great age (he was nearly 80 when he finished Falstaff), his fear of leaving the work unfinished, and the like.  Reading about the incident, I get the feeling that Verdi wanted to write these operas in the worst way, but wanted the assurance that came from the constant pleading of his librettist and his publisher that they truly wanted him to do it.

Another delightful feature of the opera is Verdi’s playful use of counterpoint, rhythm, and ensemble.  Again, to take only one example and not to belabor it too much, in Act I, Scene 2, there is a moment when the wives of Windsor realize what a cad Falstaff is (after they compare the identical notes he sent them) and start to plan their revenge. In a separate group, the men of Windsor learn about Falstaff’s plan to cuckold them and have their own conversation about what they plan to do to him.  Eventually, the two choruses sing about their plans at the same time, but the two choruses use different rhythms and are out of synch with each other.  The whole thing should sound chaotic but it’s held together by a tenor voice that rises above the fray and somehow brings order out of chaos.  The tenor is Fenton, the male half of a pair of young lovers.  His passionate but unconsummated affair with Nannetta provides an ongoing subplot throughout the work.  Verdi keeps pulling these rabbits out of his hat throughout the performance and caps the whole thing with a twelve-part fugue at the end.  The effect seems magical, but we know it is the result of the skill of a genius who interrupted his retirement for no purpose other than to entertain us.

If you don’t know these works and are interested in exploring, I’ll mention some favorite recordings.  I have never heard a bad recording of any of the Brahms pieces mentioned, but still there are some standouts.  Brahms Piano Trios:  Try the Stern-Rose-Istomin trio.  The recording is nearly 50 years old, still sounds great, and the performances are flawless.  Brahms Violin Sonatas: I like Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy.  Brahms Cello Sonatas: Leonard Rose and Jean-Bernard Pommier.  (I believe this was the last recording Rose made.)  Brahms String Quintets:  Look for a recording by the Boston Chamber Music Society.  Brahms Clarinet Trio and Quintet: Again, look for Boston Chamber Music Society (the two pieces are on one disc).  For the Clarinet Sonatas, I am drawn to Karl Leister and Gerhard Oppitz.

There are a lot of recordings of Falstaff.  The quality is a bit more uneven than with the Brahms pieces.  Two that I favor are each long in the tooth.  Herbert von Karajan recorded the opera twice.  I strongly prefer the earlier of the two with Tito Gobbi as Falstaff.  It was recorded in 1956, but don’t let that put you off.  Recording engineers knew what they were doing back then and the sound is absolutely fine.  Von Karajan can be eccentric in the Austro-German music that you would think would be in his wheelhouse, but set him down in an Italian opera and he shines like almost no one else.

I was listening to that recording a few days ago.  It stopped playing near the end of the first act.  The disc had gotten scratched.  I’m going to replace it but in the meantime, I took down from the shelf a 1950 mono recording by Toscanini.  There is applause after each act, so it’s a live performance but I think it must have been live in the studio, not on stage.  The remastered sound has a remarkable immediacy and you get to hear one of the greatest conductors of all time in one of his favorite operas.  One critic says that this is the finest opera recording ever made.

[1] He had written more than that.  He was highly self-critical and held his work to the sternest standards.  As a result, he burned numerous manuscripts of chamber music just before his death.  The loss is to be deeply regretted.  The works may not have met his standards, but they would have given great pleasure to countless listeners.  I have often wondered why, if he was so intent on destroying any chamber work that was less than perfect, he allowed the Piano Quartet No. 2, Op. 26 to survive the flames.

[2] We should put an asterisk next to one of the piano trios.  The first one was a work written in Brahms’s youth, Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 8.  He had never been happy with it and in his later years put the work through an extensive revision.  He thought about keeping both versions in the catalog, numbering the newer version as Op. 108.  He changed his mind and retained the original number for the revised work (and used Op. 108 for the third violin sonata).  Consequently, a work with the very early number Opus 8 is in fact the fruit of his ripest maturity.  It is one of the great treasures of the chamber music literature.

[3] The story, which might be true, is that Queen Elizabeth was so taken with the Falstaff of the Henry IV plays that she decided she wanted to see him in love.  She expressed this wish aloud and the word was passed to Shakespeare’s company.  When Queen Bess wanted a play, she got one, and the story goes that Shakespeare dashed the play off in a week to meet the demands of his sovereign.  Falstaff does not appear in any later play, but he is mentioned again in Henry V, where one of the characters recounts his death.  Apparently, Shakespeare wanted to get Falstaff out of the way so that he could work at his day job without fear that the Queen would find yet another situation for Sir John.

[4] Boito is the answer to a trivia question that underscores the complete dominance of Verdi in the Italian opera of his time.  Take the period from the end of the bel canto era – roughly the early 1840s – to the start of the verismo period – say 1890 – a period just shy of half a century.  Then look at the Italian operas in the standard repertoire composed during that nearly fifty-year period.  There are only a handful that were composed by anyone other than Verdi, and for those, Boito was either the librettist or the composer or both.  He wrote the book and music for Mefistofele (based on Faust) and for Nerone and even that one should be listed with an asterisk because it was left unfinished at Boito’s death.  It was not completed and performed until 1924.  Finally, he wrote the libretto for La Gioconda.  Anyone have an example of a non-Verdi opera of this period in which Boito did not have a hand?

Some twenty years ago America was asked whether the kind of foul language that Donald Trump has used and the revolting behavior that he is accused of are acceptable in a public official.  The answer was: Yes.  It’s OK.  Bill Clinton was forgiven for the same or worse.  Instead, the Congress that impeached him was punished.  A two-term president usually suffers serious losses in both houses of Congress in his second off-year election.  Reagan lost the Senate in 1986.  George W. Bush lost both houses in 2006.  In 2014, Barack Obama lost 13 seats in the House (already in Republican hands) and saw the Senate switch to Republican control.  Yet, in 1998, the Democrats gained four seats in the House and lost no net Senate seats in the wake of the impeachment of President (Bill) Clinton.

The nation was persuaded that the sexual misbehavior of which Bill Clinton was credibly accused was separate and distinct from his ability to perform the functions of his high office.  Even the charge of rape, sufficiently credible to persuade NBC to hold the story until after the impeachment trial had ended, has never produced more than a yawn from the public.  How is it that the people who gave Bill Clinton a pass reach for the smelling salts when the less appealing Mr. Trump turns up covered with the same pitch?

I don’t see the adolescent conversation as particularly disqualifying for Donald Trump.  I agree that the alleged sexual harrassment would be disqualifying if the accusations proved to be true.  For the same reason, I think Bill Clinton should have been removed from office for his goings on in the White House.  In the case of Mr. Trump, he was already unqualified to serve as president, so the alleged behavior would make him even more fully disqualified than many sensible people thought he was in the first place.  But let’s remember that there is a whole boat load of public officials with similar resumes, some of whom served without any complaints from their constituents.  Teddy Kennedy died in office.  Larry Craig chose not to run for re-election but served out his term.  The list of reprobates is much longer, needless to say.

In my humble opinion, someone who cannot govern himself or herself has no business governing others.  Why on earth would you for a moment allow policy on taxation, or trade, national defense, public health, or anything else of importance to be decided by someone who governs his conduct by soliciting sex in a public bathroom (to mention a Republican senator) or receiving oral sex in the work place (to mention a Democratic president)?

Rational people would not turn over political power to such individuals.  I would put each one of them out of office if I could.

But that’s just me.  The American public came to a different conclusion.  Bill Clinton left office with a very high approval rating.  He lost some ground when the public judged that he sold pardons at the end of his time in office.  He founded the various Clinton charities to rebuild his reputation and at this point his financial and sexual transgressions in office seem to have been forgotten even as later ones of both varieties have been overlooked.

And let’s remember that the inability to govern oneself can be displayed in ways other than sexual misconduct.  Financial corruption, lying, contempt for legal standards and requirements, these too are symptoms of an un-self-governed personality, one that is unfit to govern others.  Polling at time of writing suggests that a plurality at least of the American voting public is not moved by such considerations.

The Trump incidents point out the staggering incompetence of his primary opponents.  The taped conversations that NBC released after a decade in the vault were between Trump and a fellow named Billy Bush.  We understand that he is a cousin of Jeb, or rather Jeb!  The two of them could have worked together to bring the tapes to our attention back when Jeb was still a candidate.  But perhaps Billy could see ahead to the trouble he would be in if the taped conversations were made public.  Also, Jeb! might have felt that gentlemen of his age, class, and station in life do not engage in gutter politics.

But such a constraint was not binding on Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Scott Walker, to name but three of the mighty 16 that Trump ultimately defeated.  I understand that Trump was a frequent guest on Howard Stern’s program in the 1990s and 2000s, where he engaged in the kind of adolescent summer camp monologues that we have become so familiar with in recent weeks.  The material to do him in was readily available.  You didn’t need a cousin at NBC to manage the job.

Was there no one among the 16 non-Trump Republican candidates prepared to do whatever it took to be rid of him?  We now know that it would have been easy to do, once this material was exposed.  When Henry II became exasperated at the insubordination of Thomas à Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, he said (or is supposed to have said) “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”  He said it in the presence of four of his loyal followers and days later Becket was dead, stabbed in his own cathedral, his blood flowing over the cold stone floor.

Could Christie, who some say can close great bridges through a wink to a subordinate, not find a way?  Marco Rubio’s forebears defied a Communist dictator and found a new home in a free country.  Surely the hot blood that fueled their determination is not completely diluted in his veins.  Scott Walker stood up to an organized takeover of his state capitol by angry demonstrators.  And yet not one of those three or any of the other competitors could turn to a trusted aide and say, “I want him out of the race.  Find a way.  Don’t tell me how you did it.”

Now, if one of them had taken Mr. Trump out of the race, it would not have been clear sailing for the eventual winner of the nomination.  Remember that Mitt Romney, who appears to have led a blameless life, was accused of having been part of a group in high school that might very well have forcibly cut the hair of a student who might possibly have been gay.  And of course, this kind of anti-gay bias is something that stays with a person forever.  Romney was also held responsible for the death of a former employee’s wife some years after the employee separated from service at a company that Romney’s firm acquired.  And Harry Reid charged Mitt with failure to pay federal taxes for a decade.  Reid made his accusation on the floor of the Senate, where he is immune from charges of libel and slander.

Bridgegate would have made Christie an easy target as the nominee.  Scott Walker could have been portrayed as a crazed anti-union fanatic, in the pocket of the Koch brothers.  In his autobiography, Marco Rubio fuddled the dates of his family’s move from Cuba, so that would have made him a target.  Incidentally, that kind of inaccuracy cannot be compared to Secretary Clinton’s reports of gunfire in Sarajevo or Senator Clinton’s eyewitness account of events on September 11, 2001 that didn’t actually take place – those are “brain freezes” and a cause for a warm chuckle among friends.  Who knows what corrupt deals Marco may have done as Speaker of the Florida state house of representatives?  And as a protégé of Jeb Bush, Rubio could have been charged with any number of Jeb’s missteps when he was Florida’s governor.

So, if someone had taken out Donald Trump in the primaries, the eventual Republican nominee would have run into some rough treatment.  It wouldn’t have been clear sailing.  But at least the Republican party would have avoided the embarrassment of losing to the Clintons over a sex scandal.

Edited 10/22/16 to correct a typo.

Some recent news stories got me musing about the following purely fictional series of events:

When he was at college, it was pleasant at first for Steve Carey to be thought a rich kid by his peers.  It was true that his family was better off than most.  He was labeled rich his second year because he had a car.  It wasn’t new and it wasn’t luxurious, but it marked him as someone who came from money.

As the source of his family’s wealth became more widely known, first among the students and later among the professors, he realized that there were different types of wealth, each with its own badge and rank.  His father owned a water bottling business, not the biggest in the country, not a household name outside of its home region, but big enough.  The problem wasn’t the size of the firm but the business it was in.  That his dad sold anything at retail put Steve toward the bottom of the wealth status rankings.  Add the fact that the firm sold a natural resource, essential to life itself, and Steve felt lucky not to be an outcast by the time he graduated.

After graduation, he worked for his dad at the Mineral Spring Vista Water Company for a few years while he decided what to do with his life.  Or, rather, he waited for a decision to come to him.  He had allowed five years for that sudden illumination to appear, but the decision was forced on him six months short of the scheduled date when one Friday afternoon his father keeled over from a massive heart attack.  They found him slumped over his desk with drafts of the recently ended quarter’s financial statements spread in front of him.  The numbers looked pretty good, so that wasn’t what killed him.

Steve had to make a decision and quickly.  Should he step into his father’s shoes, or sell the business?  His mother said she wanted him to do what he thought best, but hoped he would continue.  The minority shareholders, aging relatives and a few friends of his dad’s, did not favor a sale but were in no position to make a demand one way or the other.  His mom and dad, now his mom alone, had the controlling interest in the company.

He didn’t want to let her down and he did not like to disappoint his relatives and his dad’s friends.  He thought about the 700 or so employees of the firm.  What would happen to them if his mom sold out to one of the big national soft drink bottlers?  He decided to stay and run the business.

That had been three years ago and he realized that what he had inherited had been not a business but a never ending stream of problems.  There was not a moment in the day or a day of the week or a week in the year when there wasn’t a brace of crises that required solution.  Get too many wrong and you were out of business.  The tension and the pressure were unlike anything he had ever experienced.

There had been a strike at one of the bottling plants.  That went on for almost six months before the two sides settled, hurting sales every day it continued.  A few weeks later sales fell because of a Listeria scare.  A competitor’s product had gotten contaminated but bottled water sales from every company took a hit.  The national firms could absorb that kind of jolt better than the smaller guys like Mineral Spring Vista.  In fact, the national firms lobbied for an expensive new testing protocol to prevent future outbreaks.  You can’t argue against safety, but Steve did wonder at times if the bigger firms might favor costly testing as part of their competitive strategy.  Had someone in some nameless office at one of the big guys left a memo to that effect lying around?  He would have loved to get his hands on it.

Then there was that woman from India – he had forgotten her name and was not about to aggravate himself by looking it up and reminding himself – who had gone around the country lecturing about the evils of bottled water.  He had invested with a couple of other regional bottlers in a joint venture in India that had the goal of bringing fresh water to Indian villages.  The project actually penciled out financially and he was proud that he could help improve the lives of people who were desperately poor.  He had read that many Indian children, mostly girls, are kept out of school because their families need them to walk miles to the nearest source of fresh water.  They carry empty containers to the water source and then carry the filled containers home.  The kids, he read, had to do this several times a day to keep their families supplied.  Steve and his co-investors figured they could solve this problem and make a few bucks in the process.

The Indian woman – he could still see her, throwing the edge of her sari across her shoulder, a superior smirk on her face as she lectured – criticized the water business in general but his effort in particular because it undermined traditional Indian culture.  Folkways that had endured for centuries were being destroyed by an unscrupulous pursuit of profit!  And audiences across America had applauded her.  She had become quite a pet of certain segments of the academy.  The backlash from consumers was so strong, he and his partners ended up dropping the project.  He thought about those folkways – illiterate girls being kept out of school so they could spend their days hauling water in unsanitary containers – and it made him angry that such waste of human potential was being tolerated, even applauded, when an alternative was available.

The strength of his feeling led him to write his thoughts out in a semi-organized fashion.  It was the only time in his life he had written an Op-Ed piece, this one for the local paper.  It produced a few comments on the paper’s website and for a couple of days there was a small tempest as the locals used the comments feature to trade uninformed opinions on the benefits and the evils of the water business.  Then he forgot about it and went back to his daily battles, fighting for shelf space in supermarkets, arguing about broker’s commissions, negotiating with plastic bottle vendors, and generally working himself to exhaustion.

It was the Op-Ed that brought him to the notice of Global Impact, the charitable foundation with such remarkable international outreach.  One of their recruitment officers, a Valerie Sutcliffe, thought Mineral Spring Vista Water Company might want to make a contribution to Global Impact to re-establish the company’s record of good works.  She called, made an appointment through Michele Small, Steve’s secretary, and was sitting in his office at 2:00 on a Thursday afternoon two weeks later.

She brought a glossy, highly produced book with her that demonstrated the range of Global Impact’s activities.  “You probably know us best for disaster relief.  When a natural disaster hits, an earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, if it’s big enough to make the evening news, we’ll be there.  Our members help us provide temporary shelter, food, medical treatment and supplies, and – something you would be particularly interested in – water.”

Steve immediately saw the benefit of becoming a preferred provider for an outfit like that.  They probably need to have a few hundred thousand bottles of water handy so they can respond to emergencies.  It would be a nice business to be able to supply some part of that.  If a contribution of a couple of thousand dollars would put him on their list, it could be a win for everyone.

He realized later that it might have been smart at this stage to say that he had no interest.  Instead, he asked if Valerie was looking for a contribution.  “We can always use the money, Steve, so I appreciate you asking.”

When he suggested that he thought his company’s budget could stand a contribution of $1,000 or so, Valerie gently pulled her presentation book back toward her and closed it.  “Steve, we deal in numbers bigger than that.  Frankly, for us to accept a contribution less than a million is an accommodation.  The paperwork, the administration, filing with the IRS, it’s all a headache.  If we’re not both thinking along those lines, I may be wasting my time.  But, let me leave you something to read” – she put the presentation book back in her case and took out an eight-page brochure that she left on the table – “and perhaps I can check up with you in a few months.”

——————–

The next Monday, Harriet Hangman was about to begin her week, as she always did, by sipping her first cup of coffee as she reviewed the list of new matters requiring investigation that Sharon Wills, her long-time administrative assistant, had prepared for her.  Harriet thought that being a United States Attorney was the best job she had ever had.  She had her pick of the most interesting cases and was privileged to work with some of the sharpest legal minds in the business.  She got to lock horns with defense counsel every once in a while, and that could be fun, too.

Harriet’s path to this great job had been unconventional.  She began as a criminal defense lawyer and switched to the prosecution side after a fifteen-year career marked by a string of high profile and highly lucrative white collar defenses.  Most criminal lawyers who make a switch go the other way.  She remembered someone saying that defending the guilty was a challenge but the real test for a defense lawyer was how he or she defended the innocent.  Harriet had found that defending the guilty was challenging enough, although she had been open to representing an innocent person if one ever walked through her door.

She became a prosecutor after reading Harvey Silverglate’s “Three Felonies a Day”.  The thesis of the book is that the law in the modern American regulatory state has become so complex that any citizen can be found to have committed at least three felonies every day, just in going about his or her daily business.  A prosecutor who decides to target a seemingly innocent individual can easily find that the citizen, now a defendant, had violated three statutes or regulations without even knowing it.

Harriet chuckled when she read that.  She was sure the true number was closer to eight and proceeded to prove it.  She soon found that the power she enjoyed as a prosecutor was even sweeter than the significant fees she had been raking in as a defense lawyer.  On the whole, she decided, the acquisition of power was preferable to the accumulation of wealth, especially for someone who had already done plenty of accumulating.

The only better job she could think of was Attorney General of the United States and she had very good reason to believe that she would be on the short list for that job if her party won the next presidential election, less than a year away.  One of her goals was to make that list shorter than it already was.

She opened the folder to start evaluating the new matters that had come in at the end of the previous week.  Her practice was to assign the routine matters to her staff but to retain for herself those of particular interest.  Sometimes these were cases of intriguing intellectual complexity but usually they were matters that promised to generate publicity for a tough and incorruptible U.S. Attorney.

Harriet’s instruction to Sharon was that the Monday list was not to exceed five items except for extraordinary circumstances.  At the beginning of their long relationship, Harriet had explained to Sharon in a private meeting, doors closed, no notes or memos, that the “extraordinary circumstances” label was reserved for items that had important political implications, especially those where someone in a position to help or hurt Harriet’s career had expressed an interest.

Therefore, when Harriet noticed that today’s list contained an item numbered 6, her eye went there first: “6.  Possible collusion over pricing and territorial division in the water bottling industry.”

———–

Three weeks later, two FBI agents were standing in front of Michele Small’s desk asking to see Steve.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen.  Do you have an appointment?”  She knew they didn’t.

One of them said, “No, Miss, we don’t have an appointment.  We can certainly make one if Mr. Carey prefers, but the appointment would be at our headquarters in Washington, D.C.  Up to him.”

Two minutes later they were in Steve’s office.  They declined coffee and water (specialty of the house), assured their host that they were most comfortable, showed him their credentials and handed him their business cards.

He read them: Peter Weston, agent in charge; and Michael Schmidt, special agent.  Steve thought, “Schmidt and Weston.  Someone at the FBI has a sense of humor.”  He was wrong about that.  The joke had never occurred to anyone at the FBI.  No attempt to explain it would have produced a smile.

“How can I help you gentlemen?”

Schmidt began.  “Mr. Carey, did you attend a meeting of the American Water Bottlers Association recently?”

“Yes.  I’m a member, naturally.  That is, the company is a member and I attended the annual convention in San Diego from April 5 through 9.”

“And did you meet with a Mr. Thomas Siemens while at the convention, Mr. Carey?”

“Yes. Tom Siemens is an old friend of my father’s.  He owns Siemens bottling.  They’re in a similar line of business to ours, so we have a certain amount in common even though he’s about twice my age.”

“Did you discuss pricing with Mr. Siemens at any time, Mr. Carey?”

“Pricing?  We talked about how tough it is to make a buck in this business.”

“And did you and Mr. Siemens meet together with a Mr. James Robbins?”

“No, I didn’t meet with those two together.”

“What date did you arrive in San Diego, Mr. Carey?”

Then he remembered.  He had been having a drink with Tom Siemens and was about to leave the bar when Jim Robbins arrived.  They were together for a few minutes.

“Wait, I just remembered something.  Tom and Jim, that is Mr. Siemens and Mr. Robbins and I were in the bar of the hotel together for a few minutes.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Carey.  Are you changing your answer?”

“Well, you asked me if I met with the two of them.  I was having a drink with Tom and was about to leave when Jim, Mr. Robbins, arrived and the three of us chatted for a few minutes, maybe five minutes.  Then I left.”

“And did you talk about selling water, where they sell, where you sell?”

“Well, in a general sort of way.  We’re all three in the water business, after all.  Look, what’s this about?  Do I need a lawyer?”

Now Weston took over.  “Of course, Mr. Carey, you always have a right to a lawyer.  If you think you need one, just tell us and we’ll stop asking these questions.  It’s something to think about because, well, you know that you don’t have to talk to us and anything you say to the FBI could be used against you in a court of law if for some reason we ended up in a court of law.  From the look of this place, I would guess that you already have lawyers on retainer, maybe not criminal defense lawyers, but lawyers.  But I want to make it clear that if you decide you need a lawyer and you don’t think you can afford one, we would be sure to get one for you.  You understand all of that, I hope, Mr. Carey.”

Steve swallowed hard.  He had seen it done differently on TV, but he was pretty sure that Weston had just read him his rights.

Weston turned to Schmidt.  “I think we’re done for now.  Mr. Carey, thanks for your time.  We’ll be in touch.”

After they left, Steve looked at his hands.  They were shaking slightly and his palms were wet with sweat.  And, he thought, I haven’t done anything illegal!  Imagine how I’d be feeling if I had actually broken the law!

———–

Two months went by.  Steve heard nothing from Schmidt and Weston.  He thought about hiring a lawyer just in case but decided that there was no reason to spend money on a service he wasn’t going to need unless the two agents came back and pursued whatever line of inquiry had brought them to his door in the first place.  Still, he thought about them every day and his worry drained away some of the energy and focus he needed to stay on top of his business.

Then Valerie returned.  She didn’t make an appointment this time; she just showed up.  How she knew he would be available, he never asked, but he agreed to see her when Michele buzzed to say Ms. Sutcliffe was at the front desk.

After the mandatory exchange of pleasantries, Valerie got to the point.  “Steve, have you changed your mind about making a substantial contribution to Global Impact?  Hurricane season is just around the corner.  We could use your help.  And you know, I think you’ll find that making a contribution can help with other problems.”

Steve knew that he was unsophisticated in the ways of politics, but he thought he knew a shakedown when he saw one.

“Valerie, are you talking about the visit that the FBI made here a couple of months ago?”

“You know, Steve, it’s funny you should say that.  Kristal Mason, our director of South American Outreach, made the point to me just yesterday that people sometimes jump to the conclusion that Global Impact has some deep connection to U.S. government agencies.  The two are completely separate.  Sometimes, it may look like there’s a connection because so many people in high positions at Global Impact used to work for the government.  Like Kristal.  Her last job was Assistant Attorney General for Consumer Protection.  And it goes the other way, too.  A lot of people in Justice, Commerce, State, the FTC, the NLRB, you name it, have experience working for Global Impact.  But the two are separate.  Completely separate.  We’re very careful to keep it that way.

“No, Steve, what I meant was that many people tell us that the act of giving is itself beneficial.  It changes your heart, makes you a better person.  The other thing, that other business, not what I’m talking about.  As I said, we’re very careful to keep the two things separate.”

Steve got the point.  The two were connected.  “So, you were talking about a contribution of a million dollars.”

“Well, actually, Steve, I should have said something about that sooner.  We’ve had a change of policy.  I mentioned that there were a lot of complications with administration, record keeping, and so on.  We really can’t consider any contribution of less than two and a half million.”

Steve started to run numbers in his head.  The company made a small profit each year, enough to pay a two and a half percent dividend to the shareholders and a bonus to him as CEO.  Given the number of hours he put in, the bonus came to about forty dollars an hour for the year.  That’s good money per hour if you’re waiting tables, but he expected it was less per hour than Valerie was going to get for her efforts this year.  He could cut the dividend to one and half percent and reduce his bonus by fifty percent and find the rest of the money somewhere else.  Painful, but he did not want another visit from Schmidt and Weston.  It definitely would not make his day.

She saw him hesitate.  “You know, Steve, you could pass the cost on to your customers.”

It had always amazed him that people who knew nothing about business had that reason at the ready when they planned to impose a new cost on a business.  A higher tax, mandatory wage, required employee benefit, the cost of all of it could, in the minds of those imposing the cost, be “passed on”.  Nobody seemed to understand that people like him spent half their time busting a gut trying to sell as much of their product as they could for the best price they could get anyone to pay.  They spent the other half of their time cutting costs anywhere they could.  If you took in more than you paid out, you had “passed on” your costs and could stay in business to try again next year.  If you didn’t, you eventually went out of business.  Those costs didn’t get “passed on”.  If he could raise his price to cover costs, he would have raised them before the cost came along.  No one who bought his product cared what it cost him to make it.

The whole concept was based on a lack of understanding.  The only time a business could pass its costs on to a buyer was when it had a “cost plus” government contract.

At that moment, a bright light went off in his head.  He felt that he could see through the walls of his office, out to the horizon.  In that instant, he saw how Global Impact worked it.  It was brilliant in its simplicity.  He realized he should be flattered that they asked him to join the club, using the time-honored technique of making him an offer he couldn’t refuse.  He signed up right then.  As he was signing, he thought of those uneducated Indian girls and hoped that some of the money he was about to “contribute” would find its way to them.  Valerie agreed that he could make his contribution in monthly installments.  She told him that she expected to be back next year, assuming that things worked out this year to their mutual satisfaction.

—————–

Six weeks later, a Category 4 hurricane made a direct hit on one of those Caribbean islands that seem to generate a magnetic pull on tropical storms.  There was widespread devastation, thousands were homeless, and basic services were out of commission, possibly for months.

Mineral Spring Vista Water Company received a massive order for bottled water from a U.N. agency that Steve had never heard of.  The contract indicated that the agency was acting in coordination with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the disaster relief command of the United States Navy, although their names did not appear as parties to the contract.  The contract also stated that it was being administered by Global Impact, who would address all inquiries and communications and would handle all billing and payments.  A separate email contained the software needed to print the Global Impact label on all bottles and all containers supplied through the contract.  The supplier’s name was not to appear and the supplier was prohibited from making any public announcement about its involvement in disaster relief.

The contract was the most lucrative one that the company had that year.  The agency, whoever they were, paid more than double the going rate for bottled water and included a shipping allowance that was well in excess of actual cost.  The additional amount was labeled an “expediting fee”.

Steve wanted to celebrate, but didn’t want to start answering questions to friends and relations about how he had managed to land this remarkably profitable contract.  He went to a bar and sat alone, sipping an expensive single malt while he watched disaster relief being reported at the scene by one of the network news programs.  Steve wondered how the reporter, one of the finest looking females he had seen in weeks, found space in all that wreckage to have someone do such a spectacular job with her hair and makeup.

A few minutes later, a fellow solo customer took the stool next to him.  They watched as an aid worker emerged from a tent bearing the label “Global Impact” to speak to the reporter while an ambulance with the same logo on its sides and its back doors rumbled in the background, its roof tilting rhythmically from side to side as the driver negotiated the ruts in the mud-filled roadway.  Steve’s new companion tilted his glass toward the TV screen and said, “They do a lot of good, those people.”

 

I wondered whether Donald Trump, to show solidarity with Melania, might begin his acceptance speech with the words “Four score and seven years ago . . ..”  No such luck, but I was interested to learn not long ago that the final words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address were cribbed.  He ended the Address: “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in the late fourteenth century.  The preface to his Bible states: “This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people.”  The statement dates from 1384, twenty-three score and nineteen years before Lincoln spoke.  I don’t read the Bible very often, and I rarely venture into works written in Middle English, so it figured I was going to miss this connection.  Daniel Hannan pointed it out in his superb “Inventing Freedom”.

In his first address to Parliament after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill said “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”  Theodore Roosevelt had made a very similar statement in 1897.  Decades before Churchill, Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom Oscar Wilde had a love affair, said that poetry “is forged slowly and painfully, link by link, with blood and sweat and tears.”  Even earlier, the poets Donne and Byron each turned phrases incorporating tears, sweat, and blood, not necessarily in that order.

The moving final paragraphs of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, where he rings the changes on “Let Freedom Ring” are remarkably similar to an address to the Republican National Convention in 1952 by a gentleman named Archibald Carey, Sr.

Another class of borrowings arises when the original author is still living and has given permission for the use of his or her words, but which the current speaker or writer claims as his or her own.  In 2008, candidate Obama replied to candidate Clinton’s accusation that his ideas were “just words” by pointing out that the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and other famous statements were also “just words”.  Mr. Obama’s friend Deval Patrick had earlier made the same point in virtually the same words, but Senator Obama had not given Governor Patrick credit for them.  Governor Patrick confirmed that his friend had used the words with permission (although some critics thought the permission might have come after the fact) and then-Senator Obama agreed that he should have given Governor Patrick credit.

The relationship between President Kennedy and Ted Sorensen is more complicated.  Kennedy received the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Profiles in Courage,” which was published under his name.  There is good reason to think that most of the book was written by Sorensen.  Sorensen is said to have written Kennedy’s inaugural address, although Kennedy acted as if he were the author.  When a reporter, Hugh Sidey, visited Kennedy on January 17, 1961, Kennedy was writing on a legal pad and indicated that he was in the act of composing his inaugural address.  It later turned out that he was copying Sorensen’s text into his own hand.  After the President was murdered, the story goes that Mrs. Kennedy insisted that Sorensen destroy the draft of the speech he had prepared.

There is no shame in a president getting help on an inaugural address.  We know that Lincoln asked for William Seward’s editorial assistance on his First Inaugural.  Neither man made any attempt to hide the fact, and scholars have been able to review Seward’s edits to give us a good idea of what the speech owes to Lincoln and what to Seward.  The Kennedy case is different only because the parties insisted on keeping Sorensen’s role hidden.  Sorensen revealed his version of the story late in his life.

A more extreme example is also more speculative.  The writer Jack Cashill is convinced that Bill Ayers wrote “Dreams from My Father,” a book whose cover declares that its author is Barack Obama.  I haven’t read Cashill’s book (“Deconstructing Obama”) but I understand the author uses sophisticated methods of textual analysis to attribute the authorship of “Dreams” to Ayers.  Perhaps historians of a later generation will sort the story out, if indeed there is anything to be sorted.

And let’s not even examine the extensive plagiarism that Joe Biden committed in 1988, when he made a few superficial changes to a speech given by Neil Kinnock, the leader at the time of Britain’s Labor Party, and presented it as his own.

So, Melania Trump or her speech writer might have figured that cribbing a few phrases from Michelle Obama was no big deal, given the extensive history of heavy borrowing by all the worthies who went before her.  But context is everything and what may be forgiven in an Obama, overlooked in a Martin Luther King, or ignored in a Kennedy, is not going to go unnoticed when a Slovenian supermodel tries it.  A better way would have been: “As was said most recently by our First Lady, a woman whose house I hope to occupy with the same grace and dignity she demonstrates, and whose vegetable garden I hope to tend with my son Barron when the next growing season comes to Washington, Donald and I were ‘raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life . . . . .’”

July 17, 2016 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.  DiMaggio came to the plate four times in the 57^th game, played in Cleveland.  He sent two shots down the third base line that could easily have been hits.  Twice, the Cleveland third baseman made dramatic back-handed stabs at the ball, followed each time by a heroic throw to first to record two outs instead of two doubles.

The streak began on May 15, 1941.  During the course of the 56 games, DiMaggio hit .408, with 15 home runs and 55 runs batted in.

The record for consecutive games with a base hit that DiMaggio broke was set in 1897 by William Keeler, known to baseball history by the micro-aggressive nickname “Wee” – he stood five foot four.  Wee Willie Keeler hit safely in the first 44 games of the 1897 season.  He had hit safely in the last game of the 1896 season.  Because organized baseball allows consecutive game records to carry over from one season to the next, Keeler can be said to have held two records:  44 consecutive games with a hit in one season and 45 consecutive games over two.

Whichever record you care to assign to Wee Willie, it had stood for 44 years when the 1941 season started.  A measure of the magnitude of DiMaggio’s achievement is the fact that in the intervening three-quarters of a century, no one has come close to his 56 game mark.  Wee Willie broke a record that had been set in 1894.  Two players threatened his record in the early decades of the twentieth century.  Ty Cobb had a streak of 40 games in 1911.  George Sisler hit safely in 41 consecutive games in 1922.  When Wee Willie died in 1923, he may have felt that his record was going to be safe for a good long while.  And 44 years is an impressive lifespan for a baseball record.

Pete Rose is the only player to come within sight of the record.  He got to 44 in 1978.  Paul Molitor got to 39 in 1987.  Once a player gets into the 30s, every further game increases the notoriety and the pressure.  But Rose was two weeks away from reaching the record when even he, the all-time leader in career Major League hits (sorry, Ichiro), failed to get a hit in the 45^th game.

DiMaggio got a hit in what would have been the 58^th game had the streak continued.  That proved to be the first in a new 16 game streak.  So, the Yankee Clipper hit safely in 72 out of 73 games.

Baseball records and statistics are often front-loaded with qualifiers.  A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a few innings of Mariner baseball on the radio when Robinson Canó hit a home run.  The announcer told us that this was his 761^st career extra-base hit, which tied him for seventh place among Major League second basemen.  Prior to a World Series game a few years ago, I learned that one of the pitchers holds a record for World Series games in which a starting pitcher has gone at least eight innings and struck out ten or more batters without giving up a walk.  Sorry, I don’t remember who it was.

That’s part of the charm of DiMaggio’s record.  There are no qualifiers.  There is no wind-up.  He hit safely in 56 consecutive games, full stop.  No one else has come close.  It’s a record that will likely still be standing 75 years from today.

“We have two parties here, and only two. One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party. . .. Occasionally, the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.”  (attributed to M. Stanton Evans, Samuel T. Francis and others)

The year 2016 is one in which both parties have run their pennants, one marked with a big S and the other with a huge E, to the top of their respective flagpoles.  When the wind is strong enough, you can hear the two flags snapping in the breeze.

Let’s take the Stupid Party first.

When I was a lad growing up in northern New Jersey, I joined the Boy Scouts.  Our troop ran the way a lot of things did in New Jersey.  The kids whose fathers were in charge of the troop got their merit badges through “pull”.  Their dads would fill out the necessary paperwork and the badges were issued in due course.  The rest of us had to actually undertake the tasks required to get the badge.

One of the badges had to do with community service.  A local charity was looking to the Boy Scouts to help drum up publicity for a fundraiser.  Our job was to get local businesses to put signs in their store-front windows advertising the event.  We were divided into pairs and sent off to improve our community through our good works.

My partner and I walked into a small dry-cleaning shop and politely asked if we could put a sign in the front window.  We didn’t know that we were the tenth pair of Scouts to make the identical request that day.  The dry cleaning guy groaned.  What he might have said, had he been in a better mood, was something like “Boys, thanks so much for trying to help your community.  Unfortunately, you are the tenth pair of scouts to make the same request today.  I am already committed, but maybe you could try one of the many other stores on the street, see if they can help you.”

What he actually said was, “Whaddaya bothering me for?  There’s enough people for everybody!”

When we got out of the store, I started laughing and I didn’t stop until I got home.  When I quoted the guy to my parents, they started laughing.  For years, if I wanted to get a laugh in our house I could say “There’s enough people for everybody”.  It never failed (with an admittedly easy audience).

What’s even funnier, as I look back on it, is that I knew exactly what he meant.  If you have lived for any time in the New York metropolitan area, you’ll know the kind of person I’m talking about.  There is a certain communication style common in that area, where the speaker leaps from point to point, leaving it to others to figure out the logic, or lack of it, that underlies his or her (but usually his) commentary.  There is a certain skill required to decode the words used by these excitable people and their logic is often called into question by others with the same communication style.  The resulting dialogues make heavy use of sarcasm, generalization, and reductio ad absurdum.

I think Donald Trump is a person of this type.  He has something complicated he wants to say, he has a very short time to engage his audience, and the details might not hold their attention.  They certainly don’t hold his.  When complaining about the judge overseeing his Trump University case, he could have talked about the specifics of the rulings the judge has made and suggested that the judge is biased against him.  The judge has been a member of an organization that provides legal aid to illegal immigrants.  Trump has said he is in favor of more rigorous enforcement of the laws prohibiting illegal immigration.  He could have emphasized the disagreement and suggested that the judge is giving vent to an ingrained bias.

He might have been wrong about those accusations, but he would have been arguing from known and agreed facts.  Instead, he said the judge was “Mexican” and “hates Donald Trump.”  Had he spelled his points out and skipped the ethnic identification of the judge, he might have avoided some of the charges of racism that have been aimed at him.  Some, not all.  There is a segment of the commentariat that is going to accuse him of racism in any case.

Some, not all, of his other outlandish statements yield to this treatment.  Take his proposed ban on entry by Moslems into the U.S.  He might have made his point (if it in fact was his point) this way: “Sharia law is incompatible with republican self-government.  Our government is based on the principle stated in the Declaration that the people have the right to manage their own government ‘organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness’.  A system of law that looks to divine revelation, one that treats as apostasy all human efforts to adopt laws inconsistent with or beyond the scope of that revelation, is not appropriate to a free people.  We have no objection if other nations wish to organize their laws under the principles of Sharia.  Saudi Arabia offers a fine example of what such a system would look like and we recommend it to those who believe that Sharia offers the best path toward a stable, prosperous, and happy society.  Iran is another.  If you find those models appealing, please feel free to relocate to a country that provides you with the opportunity to live under a government and a system of law of which you approve.  However, we do not wish to inject into our political discourse an element that is aimed at replacing our system of republican self-government with rules that are derived from an authority that we do not recognize.

“We know that many Moslems do not believe in, or do not favor, the application of Sharia law.  With them, we have no argument and we are happy to see them practice their religion under the same system of ordered liberty under which we practice ours, or for that matter decline to practice any religion.  We need to find some way, consistent with our tradition of religious liberty, to deny entry to those whose political, not religious, convictions commit them to work toward the imposition of Sharia law.  We reject them whether they are jihadi terrorists who seek to achieve their goals through violence or Islamists who will try to achieve their objective through stealth or other non-violent methods.  We will not be unfair to anyone on the basis of religious belief but we reserve the sovereign right to exclude anyone whose political views are at odds with the fundamental principles of self-government on which our society is built.”

That takes too long to think, let alone say.  A lot of the audience is going to get lost or bored.  (Not anyone reading this, needless to say, but we all know people.)  It’s easier to just shout out that we need to ban all Moslems “until our government figures out what in the hell is going on.”  Could be a long wait.

Similarly, Mr. Trump’s attitude toward a physical barrier between the United States and Mexico is not wildly irrational.  There is reason to think that the population that enters the country illegally is somewhat more prone to commit crimes than the typical legal resident.[1]  The research is complicated and the conclusions are tentative.  It’s easier to say that “Mexico is sending their criminals across the border.”  Saying that also ignores the fact that about half of the individuals who are in the U.S. illegally entered the country on a visa.  Building a wall might solve the one-half of the problem that walks across the southern border, but it still leaves the country vulnerable.

Again, it takes too long to say that.  The speaker and the audience don’t have the time, the patience, or the interest.

And a number of Mr. Trump’s shenanigans do not yield to the generous treatment that I have suggested for some of his positions.  It is unforgivable to mock a disabled person.  Decent people do not attack others because of their appearance.  It is not acceptable to attribute an aggressive debate question to the moderator’s bodily functions.

Add to that the candidate’s brazen ignorance of the benefits of trade between nations, his stated preference for extending the reach of libel laws notwithstanding the First Amendment (on which question he may, if elected, be able to find common ground in the United States Senate, where every Democratic Senator has voted to limit the scope of the amendment), his limited understanding of the issues of life vs. choice, and you have someone who has demonstrated that he does not have sufficient intellectual depth or emotional stability to qualify him for the high and distinguished office he seeks.

And yet, we have to consider his likely opponent in November.  Let’s take a look at the standard bearer of the evil party.

Say this for Donald Trump.  Despite his public presentation as a crude, loutish, inarticulate, and superficial candidate, there is a small but growing brace of intelligent, articulate, public intellectuals who vouch for him[2].  The private Trump, they tell us, is far more impressive than the public one.

On the other hand, if you suggest that Hillary Clinton is a dishonest person, totally lacking in personal integrity, I don’t think you will hear a firm contradiction from her supporters.  It would be a bold commentator who would offer a direct defense of her honesty.   Instead, the response from her public defenders is of the “There’s no smoking gun” variety.  They’ll say this even when there is a smoking gun, like the private server in the bathroom closet in Colorado.  In fact, there is an arc to the various defensive postures that her supporters will take over the course of any given scandal.  We start with “Let’s let the investigation play out and see where it leads before we rush to judgment.”  We continue with “The investigation is nothing but a fishing expedition, a partisan attempt to smear a political opponent.”  We may make a quick stop at “This is straight out of the Republican play book, part of the vast right-wing conspiracy that has been out to get her for the last 25 years.”  We conclude with “This is old news.  There is no smoking gun.  It’s time to move on.”  Until the next one.

The point is, you will not hear her defenders say that this honest woman, a model of integrity, the very mold of honor, is being besmirched, the way you will occasionally hear Donald Trump’s supporters say that, in private, he is personable, intelligent, and articulate.

Perhaps the difference is that it is possible to be intelligent in private but a lout in public.  We can always hope that the private person will emerge to replace the public one.  If a person’s public conduct is lacking in integrity, his or her good behavior in private doesn’t carry much weight.  That is one of the connotations of “integrity”.

Rather than wander through her more than 40 years of public conduct, let’s focus on only one incident.  On the night of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, after the attack on the Benghazi consulate, Mrs. Clinton sent an email to her daughter describing the incident as an “Al Qaeda style attack”.  The next night, September 12, she sent an email to the Egyptian Prime Minister, telling him that the incident was a planned attack and not a reaction to a video.

At some point in the next few days, the Obama administration decided that the offensive video was the explanation for the Benghazi attack.  Susan Rice went on five Sunday news programs on September 16 to repeat the administration position about the video.

In between the attack on the 11^th and the Sunday shows on the 16^th, the nation held a solemn memorial service when the remains of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and the three individuals who died trying to protect him and the others in the compound were returned to Joint Base Andrews on September 14.  At the service, Hillary spoke to each of the four families.  Members of three families (excluding that of the ambassador) report that Hillary told them “We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”

She said this or something like it three times, once to each family.  Four different individuals have recalled these conversations.[3]  One of these individuals, a retired lawyer and administrative law judge, made a note of the Secretary’s comments in the memo book that (he tells us) he carries with him at all times.  The note is dated September 15.

She now denies making these comments.  The family members stand by their statements.

Dear reader and friend, could you do what Hillary is accused of doing?  Could you look a grieving family in the eye and lie to them about the cause of their loved one’s death?

You could not.  It would not occur to you to do it.

Would you join an organization whose leadership behaved that way?  Would you want a person who had done something like that – someone who has done things like this repeatedly over the course of her public life — running your neighborhood community club, your PTA, or your kids’ soccer league?

We are none of us saints.  Any leader of any organization will be imperfect and will have said things or done things that he or she would wish to unsay or undo.  But even after we acknowledge that none of us is fit to cast stones, is it unreasonable to expect a modicum of integrity or decency in a political leader?

The Stupid Party and the Evil Party have really outdone themselves this time.

It is barely conceivable that one or both of these specimens will fail to win their party’s nomination.  On the Republican side, several commentators from the #NeverTrump school have made the point that delegates are not legally bound to vote for a particular candidate.  More precisely, the position is that state laws purporting to bind delegates to a national convention are unconstitutional.  One hears reports that some delegates are persuaded and are actively attempting to derail the Trump nomination.  My record as a predictor of political events is spotty – worse than that if you have to know the truth – so I hesitate to offer a prediction.  I don’t expect the Stupid Party delegates to the Republican convention later this month to revolt in sufficient numbers to change the outcome.

On the Democratic side, the reaction to the meeting between former president Clinton and Attorney General Lynch may have decreased the attorney general’s room for maneuver should the FBI recommend criminal charges against the former Secretary of State.  Some reports state that she has agreed to “rubber stamp” the recommendation of the FBI and DOJ professional staff.  Others state that that she “fully expects” to accept the recommendation of the investigative team after it has been reviewed by senior staff.  The indications are that the recommendation, whatever it turns out to be, will not arrive prior to the Democratic convention.  So, the overwhelming likelihood is that Mrs. Clinton will be her party’s nominee at the convention, even if later events are in doubt.

I accept that there is a chance, perhaps 5%, that one of these two will not be the next president.  If that longshot does not come in, then on January 20, 2017, one of the finest exemplars that the Stupid Party or the Evil Party could conjure will take the oath of office.

If that is to be the outcome, let us resign ourselves to it with as much grace as we can muster.  There will be another election in 2020.  Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, a socialist, conservative, or libertarian, pro-choice or pro-life, there is no reason to hand the Stupid Party to someone this stupid or the Evil Party to someone who presents this level of evil.  Let’s all resolve to provide a better person to bear our standard, whatever it may be, at our next opportunity.  The four years will go by before you know it.

[1] The question is not free from doubt.  See “Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue” at http://cis.org/ImmigrantCrime.  The authors are serious scholars and are not axe-grinders, which is not true of many researchers in this area.  Their tables 5, 6, and 7 provide a reasonable basis to believe that illegal immigrants are over-represented in prison populations and among those who have committed felonies.  It should also be emphasized that there is reason to believe that legal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the native population.

[2] I am thinking of Monica Crowley, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and Conrad Black.  Larry Kudlow joined this group late and Steven Moore appears to be signing up.

[3] Some family members report no recollection that she made such a statement.

Headline, seattletimes.com, 5/31/2016 http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-may-slap-new-rules-on-airbnb-to-ease-rental-crunch/

Consider this sequence of hypothetical events.

1. Jim Dancer is a terrific home cook. He is married to Jane Dancer, who has made a hobby of exploring wine and matching the perfect wine to Jim’s culinary creations.  Every two weeks or so, they invite their friends Bill and Joe Beamer to join them.  Bill and Joe start to feel a little guilty about enjoying such great food without contributing anything.  After a few meals with Jim and Jane, they offer to bring the wine.
2. They try this arrangement for a couple of weeks, but it soon becomes evident that Bill and Joe do not have quite the taste in wine that Jim’s cooking requires. After an awkward conversation, the couples decide that it would be better if Bill and Joe contributed some cash and let Jane buy the wine.
3. Several months later, another couple in the neighborhood, Peter and Moira, hears about Jim’s cooking and Jane’s wines and asks to be included. Jim, Jane, Bill, and Joe decide that Pete and Moira can join them for dinner by contributing something toward the food and wine.
4. A month after that, Pete and Moira have some friends visiting from out of town and ask to include them in an upcoming dinner gathering. They provide some cash and the group grows to eight.
5. When the friends go back home to Salt Lake City, they tell their friends about the fabulous food and wine they had at Jim and Jane’s house. Those friends start sending emails to Jim and Jane asking if they can reserve seats at Jim and Jane’s table for an upcoming meal.
6. Jim gets tired of answering emails when he could be preparing menus, sourcing his ingredients, and prepping his meals. He sets up a webpage where guests can sign up for upcoming meals.  Reservations are on a first-come, first-served basis.  Demand spreads beyond Salt Lake City, if you can imagine it.  In fact, after a while there are so many requests that Jim and Jane are welcoming paying guests four or five days a week.
7. This has been going on for six months when Jim and Jane realize that the monetary contributions they are receiving cover the cost of food and wine but don’t really compensate them for their time and effort. They decide to increase their prices and before long they are making a profit on their operation.  They even hire some local neighborhood teenagers to help them with service and cleanup.
8. Word has gotten out about Jim and Jane’s hospitality arrangement. Scores of talented home cooks and wine lovers across the city start inviting paying guests in for a meal.

I have some questions, purely speculative.  At which point in this sequence do the following things happen?

The Seattle Association of Restaurants (name invented) contacts a favorite City Council member to demand that “Jim and Jane” operations be regulated as a restaurant.  Note, they don’t demand that they be released from the burden of regulation, only that others be subjected to it.

Local 729 of the International Amalgamated Brotherhood of Restaurant Workers (name invented) contacts a favorite City Council member (with several to choose from) to demand that “Jim and Jane” operations are stealing jobs from union members and have to be shut down or required to replace their scab teenage workers with certified union workers and to hire certified cooks and wine stewards.

A Seattle City Council member proposes an ordinance to require sensible regulation of “Jim and Jane” style operations.  Requirements would include liability insurance, a liquor license, spot visits by Health Department inspectors, food safety training for all personnel who work in the business, a business license, a posting in a prominent place of the business license and a schedule of all applicable charges that diners will incur, along with the phone number and email address of the health department and the consumer affairs department to facilitate the lodging of complaints.

The mayor announces publicly that the time has come to end the practice of unlicensed and unsafe food service facilities that exploit out of town visitors and steal jobs from honest hardworking Seattle residents who play by the rules.

I became a grandfather for the first time in the early hours of May 20.  I have transitioned to grandparenthood.  The little girl is the first grandchild on both sides of her family.  I was in that position myself many moons ago.  I think it was easier for my grandparents.  They did not transition in any way that I ever noticed.  They were grandparents for as long as I knew them and they stayed that way.

The old people that I knew when I was young don’t seem so old anymore.  The oldest of my grandparents, my father’s father, was born in 1885.  With a little luck, my granddaughter will be complaining about her lumbago as her grandchildren ring in the start of the twenty-second century.

Seeing a new generation begin is a reminder that we are all bridges from the past to the future.  Most of the traffic that passes over those bridges carries selective nostalgia in the form of detailed accounts of walking to school through the snow and a general head-shaking attitude toward the deterioration of modern life.  It is too easy to remember a past that is better than today, better than the past as it was.

Like most of their generation, people like my grandparents devoted their energy to solving the problems they faced and had little time for introspection, or any interest in it.  They were intelligent and engaged but their focus was outward not directed at themselves.  We are more likely than they were to see racism, injustice, and prejudice, although they experienced it more directly and more frequently than we do.  We worry about micro-aggressions.  Hitler and Stalin dismembering Poland, that was aggression, nothing micro about it.  The threat we face from Islamic fundamentalism has ideological pretensions on a par with national socialism and its international cousin, but nothing like their firepower.  If they weren’t blowing something up every six months, we’d forget they were there.

I was born in the year that Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color barrier in major league baseball.  My granddaughter is born in the eighth year of the presidency of a man whose father was born and lived most of his life in Kenya.  I remember people speculating in the 1950s and 1960s about the possibility of an African American president sometime in the future.  The consensus was always somewhere between “never” and “not in my lifetime”.  But it happened.  A nation that had permitted racial segregation within living memory elected an African American as its political leader.  The argument over the merits of the individual who filled that role is beside the point.

The past is not all it’s cracked up to be.  The overwhelming likelihood is that little Quinn and her cohort will lead lives of even greater personal fulfillment, ease, and enjoyment than have their ancestors.  All of us have been lucky to live in a prosperous commercial republic founded – and at times conducted — on the principle that the prime purpose of government is to protect the rights of its citizens.  The “prosperous commercial” part will mean that the already impressive advances in medicine, genetics, materials, information technology, systems management, and other practical arts will increase both in rate and in quantity for the generation now being born and for their descendants.  They will enjoy a better material existence and will have the opportunity for a richer intellectual and emotional existence than their ancestors, although we have had it pretty good, compared to our own predecessors.  It would take active stupidity to get in the way of that process, although there is an abundant supply on offer, its owners lining up for the chance to make policy for the rest of us.

I worry about the “protect the rights of its citizens” part.  We have gotten a taste in recent years of what it’s like when the organs of state power are put to work to advance ideological interests.  The political power of courts, prosecutors, presidents, and administrative agencies is growing in tandem with the increased reluctance by legislators and news organizations to act as a brake on the unwarranted exercise of executive, administrative, and judicial power.

It is not foreordained that this process will continue.  It can be reversed.  But if it does continue, one generation is plenty of time to produce a nation populated by regimented minds living in a mental desert while surrounded by material prosperity.  To quote William S. Burroughs, “A functioning police state needs no police.”  The distance from Marilyn Mosby or Eric Schneiderman to Andrey Vyshinsky is not so great.  You start where we are today and push a little more every year.  There is no flashing red light to warn of danger ahead.  You arrive at your desert destination without noticing the subtle changes in the landscape along the way.

Advances in technology and progress in material well-being do not guarantee that the people enjoying their fruits will lead meaningful lives.  After all, the first satellite was put into orbit by the Soviets.  A slave society produced a major technological breakthrough (with a lot of help from captured German scientists).  Personal freedom is essential to our full development as humans, but it’s an impediment to the full development of governmental power.  Governments will try to increase their power the same way the Yankees will try to win another pennant.

It isn’t only governments that threaten liberty.  Real danger springs from the way so many minds are being closed, willingly, to challenging opinions and unwelcome information.  The modern trend to suppress dissenting opinions courts greater danger than would their unfettered expression.  If, for example, the “warmists” are correct, they can afford to allow the “deniers” the right to express dissent.  The correct view will be supported by sufficient evidence and logic to win the policy debate.  Of course, it may be that the reason to suppress dissent is to ensure victory in the policy debate, no matter how the evidence plays out.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Galileo ran into an opposition that was highly attuned to its own catalog of micro-agressions.

Little Quinn is born at a time of unlimited possibilities.  She and her cohort will have great scope to apply their talents and their gifts to the development of their potential and the improvement of the lives of others.  That’s a process that has been going on for a long time, but it increases with each generation as technological progress opens up vistas and uncovers niches that we could not see until they were presented to us.  Undoubtedly, earlier centuries produced their share of genius computer programmers and geneticists.  They arrived too early.  The fields in which they might have exercised those talents were invisible, enclosed behind a high wall.  The babies now being born will have fewer of those walls in their way than anyone in human history, other than the ones who come after them.  My hope is that Quinn and her cohort will achieve the great things ahead of them as free people.  That will be up to them, but it is also up to us who are preparing the way.

In the meantime, the important thing is to take the best possible care of this new child without overindulging her.  I can tell already that this will be a challenge for my wife, who has taken to being a grandmother with the energy and enthusiasm that she brings to everything she does.  I feel I should warn her to resist the urge to spoil the child.  The infant is so good-natured and so strikingly beautiful, I may find the urge hard to resist myself.