House of Turds

Well, the forts that guard the entrance to the harbor of the city of San Juan—those forts that have been open and operating for centuries—are now closed. Why? Because the national government is in a shutdown, and 800,000 people are stuck without a paycheck, all but essential services are cut, but guess what? Check out the cover of the Daily News:

Yes, the same congress that gave the middle finger to the 90% of the country who favor universal background checks for gun ownership has decided to hold the nation hostage. But let’s be real. What’s happening here?

Well, we can start with the fact that we’ve had gerrymandering of congressional districts. And what has that brought? The number of strongly Republican districts has increased, and the number of Democratic districts has decreased.

Then there are the various voting laws, the effect of which is to make it more difficult for young people, students, are minorities to vote.

But these are the symptoms—what really is going on?

“Is this about race?” asked Lady, the owner of the coffee shop I write in.

So I told her about José Serrano, who came out and said it frankly: there are people who have never accepted the fact that Obama is our president. And why is that? Pure racism. This is what Serrano told WKAQ 580, a radio station in Puerto Rico:

“‘Este grupo nunca ha aceptado que Barack Obama es un presidente legítimo, sí hay racismo, te lo dejo ahí. Hay un pequeño grupo que nunca pudo aceptar que él es un presidente legítimo y si les dolió que fuera elegido en el 2008, más les dolió la reelección’, subrayó el representante demócrata por Nueva York.”

“‘This group has never accepted Barack Obama as a legitimate president. There is racism involved there, I’ll tell you that. There’s a small group that has never accepted he’s a legitimate president, and, if they were upset by his election in 2008, his reelection upset them even more so,’ stated the Democrat for New York.”

There’s no ideology here. What is this? The terrified reaction of a bunch of rednecks who know that their world is vanishing and cannot cope with a world in which the straight white male is no longer supreme.

They know something else.

They know that they can get away with this. Why? Because the people back home will think them heroes, and the big money from special interest groups will keep flowing. In fact, they love the fact that they have shut down the government. Why? Because that’s exactly what they want—a minimal federal government that won’t interfere with them as they foul the environment, enrich the already too rich, and screw the poor.

The corporations and special interest groups have bought the statehouses.

And now they’ve shut down the federal government.

Requiem for the Judge's Wife

Well, the word is in. After an ordeal of three years, Aida de los Santos, the mucama or bedchamber maid, is free and innocent of all charges.

You may remember the case—Georgina Ortiz Ortiz, the wife of an ex-state supreme court judge, Carlos Irizarry Yunqué, was killed on 17 August 2010 in a fashionable area of San Juan.

And in what must have been the most cynical and depraved stunt of the year, the police decided to go after the maid, despite conflicting evidence of the husband, despite a witness who said that the photos of the scene didn’t match what he had seen, despite a bloodstained man’s shirt found in Irizarry’s hamper, despite the fact that the daughter of the victim had hired a private eye to follow her mother (so worried was she), despite the fact Irizarry had hired a detective as well to spy on his wife, despite the fact that DNA collected from under the nails of the victim was from more than one man….

Well, today’s banner headline in The New Day, our local paper, reads Sin justicia or No Justice, and there’s not much doubt—there was no justice done indeed. And the family of the victim came out and said it, yesterday—Irizarry was involved.

Well, if he was, wouldn’t you think there would be physical evidence? Oh, but there’s a problem—no one bothered to impound the judge’s car until two years after the murder of Ortiz.

Two factors—no, three—entered into this case.

Race—de los Santos is black;

Nationality—de los Santos is from the next island over, Dominican Republic. And yes, there’s a lot of prejudice against Dominicans here in Puerto Rico;

Do I need to tell you what the last factor is?

Minimally, it’s class; maximally, it’s the convergence of wealth, power, and politics. So for the last three years a woman had to take the rap for someone else—someone for whom she also had to clean his toilet. And for the last six weeks or so we’ve had to watch as a sham of a trial played out.

Justice has been served, said some—after all, de los Santos wasn’t convicted, right? In the end, it worked for her, didn’t it?

Don’t see that—at one point in the ordeal, de los Santos may have attempted to take her life (her version is that she woke up in the Witness Protection Center when somebody was slipping ropes around her neck). No matter how innocent you knew you were, how—especially coming from the Dominican Republic—could you trust that you’d get a fair trial?

Mind you, I don’t think the judge did it—he would have been about 88 at the time. But for the same reason, it was never very credible that de los Santos did it, either.

Just to intrude this bloody fact into your day, it takes a lot of butchery and strength to slit the throat, as somebody did that bad day in June of 2010 to Ortiz. You need strength and surprise, as well as the trust of the victim. And so de los Santos would have needed to be exceptionally strong or exceptionally enraged to have killed her boss in that way.

Throughout the day, I’ve been listening to the most amazing music—music by a composer whom I can’t believe isn’t much more well-known, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, born in Germany forty years before Johann Sebastian Bach. Here’s his Requiem `a 15, a stunning work.

To the memory of Georgina Ortiz Ortiz. May she rest in peace.  

...Just so you know

She was impossible not to like, but I expected that. I know her sister, I’ve met her mother and her brother, and she’s lived for years in Canada. So it was clear—she’d be a nice, fun, intelligent woman. And she was.

She was also terrified of setting foot on American soil.

Which was literally about all she had to do—she was flying from Ottawa to Puerto Rico, and had a layover in JFK. But even that freaked her. Would she be safe? Would she be caught in crossfire? Who knew what could happen?

You guys up there? This is how the rest of the world is seeing us.

Consider the fact that the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, has just spoken to the NAACP, and revealed that he has had to sit down with his son—as his father sat down with him—and explain how to behave with the police. The message—yes, the police are racist; yes they will stop you unfairly; no, you can’t trust them.

This from the Attorney General?

Consider the fact that whites who kill blacks in “Stand-your-ground” states are 342% more likely to be exonerated that whites who kill other whites. Check out the chart below, based on 5,000 killings…..

Or what about the black woman who got 20 years for firing a warning shot at her ex-husband, against whom she had a restraining order?

It may be the horrific cold that has fallen upon me, or it may be true, but everything seemed seriously skewed. First of all, who dreamed up Stand-your-ground? OK—I’ve looked it up, and apparently it goes back to the very end of the 19^th century. Florida, however, only enacted the stand-your-ground law in 2005. And according to CBS Miami, deaths due to self-defense are up nearly triple since the law was enacted. 

OK—and this is how Wikipedia describes the moments before the shooting:

At approximately 7:09 PM,[Note 4] Zimmerman called the Sanford police non-emergency number to report what he considered a suspicious person in the Twin Lakes community.[69] Zimmerman stated, "We've had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there's a real suspicious guy."[32] He described an unknown male "just walking around looking about" in the rain and said, "This guy looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something."[70] Zimmerman reported that the person had his hand in his waistband and was walking around looking at homes.[71] On the recording, Zimmerman is heard saying, "these assholes, they always get away."[72][73]

About two minutes into the call, Zimmerman said, "he's running."[12] The dispatcher asked, "He's running? Which way is he running?"[74] The sound of a car door chime is heard, indicating Zimmerman opened his car door.[75] Zimmerman followed Martin, eventually losing sight of him.[12] The dispatcher asked Zimmerman if he was following him. When Zimmerman answered, "yeah," the dispatcher said, "We don't need you to do that." Zimmerman responded, "Okay."[76] Zimmerman asked that police call him upon their arrival so he could provide his location.[12] Zimmerman ended the call at 7:15 p.m.[12]

After Zimmerman ended his call with police, a violent encounter took place between Martin and Zimmerman, which ended when Zimmerman fatally shot Martin 70 yards (64 m) from the rear door of the townhouse where Martin was staying.

OK, so Martin was running away from Zimmerman. Zimmerman is chasing Martin—how in hell can this be self-defense? In Florida, can you really chase someone down, get into a fight, fear for your life, and kill? If so, nobody is safe.

Which is what the black guy on the documentary said—is it now open season on young black men? What was Martin supposed to do? If he had stopped in his tracks and held his hands up, would that have prevented Zimmerman from attacking him? If he had walked toward Zimmerman, would that have been perceived as “threatening?” Having been branded as an “asshole who always gets away,” there was virtually nothing Martin could do.

Well, into this gloomy picture enters Georg Philipp Telemann, the baroque composer who, at the time, was much more respected than a guy called Johann Sebastian Bach. And who knew that there was such a thing as a chalumeau? Originally a folk instrument, it was popular during the baroque period, but then was replaced by the clarinet. And guess what? I like it much more.

Enjoy, guys. I’m putting this cold to bed.

Brahms Voiced

She wore the glorious crown of her voice with the grace of an empress and changed the lives of many through the subtle force of her spirit and demeanor. If the planet Earth could sing, I think it would sound something like Marian Anderson.

Right—you get that said about you, and you can go home and kick back with a beer. Add to the fact that the words are Jessye Norman’s—for decades the preeminent alto of her time—and there’s not much more to be said.

And will that stop me?

To say that she broke barriers is understatement. Anderson was born in Philadelphia; her mother was a teacher, her father sold ice and coal. Her grandfather had been a slave and seen emancipation in the 1860’s.

The family was religious; she sang in the church choir, and then sang solos in black churches around the city. There was no money for high school, at first, so she busied herself with her church, which eventually raised the funds for her to attend school; the principal of the school found a voice teacher. She was 24 when she finally finished high school.

And met with a slap—the director of admissions at the Philadelphia Music Academy didn’t mince words: “we don’t take colored.”

Bemused Reader, it was a different time. A time, for example, when no hotel would rent a room to a black person. So the black community, among others, opened their homes; when Anderson needed a place to stay in Princeton, Albert Einstein took her in, and they became close friends.

She studied in New York, won a competition with the New York Philharmonic in 1925, and then took off for Europe. There, she was enthusiastically received, especially in Scandinavia; for most of the 20’s and 30’s, she toured Europe.

It’s almost a shame that the incident with the DAR and the Constitution Hall occurred, since it’s the one story about Anderson that everybody knows. For those who don’t—here goes. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to rent their hall to Anderson, because she was black. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned, sent the organization a scorching letter, and arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial. 75,000 people came to the concert, millions listened on the radio. Seldom has a bird been flipped more graciously.

Which could be the word for Anderson—she put up with it all, and never bore a grudge. A few years later, she sang at Constitution Hall at the invitation of the DAR, and later recalled no feeling of revenge or victory. It was just another hall. Nor does she harbor any ill will at the Connecticut farmers that withdrew their property from sale when she went looking for a farm. She went right on, and then ingratiated herself with the community, singing Christmas carols at the lighting of the tree, never jumping in line in the stores even when offered to do so.

She was, in short, a thorough, complete lady. But most of all, she was an amazing singer with an impressive, rich voice. Distinctive as well—once you hear it a few times, you’ll never forget it.

And she brings a lovely, old school approach to these songs by Brahms, which are his only songs that have another instrument besides the piano. They’re special—Brahms composed the first for a dear friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim and his wife, an alto. The couple was expecting their first child. So Brahms wrote a lullaby, one of the tenderest pieces he would ever compose, and the three performed it in private: Brahms at the piano, Joachim on the viola, Amalie singing. The music meant so much to Brahms that he decided not publish it; it was private, and a gift.

Two decades later, Joachim’s marriage collapsed, he suspected Amalie of infidelity and filed for divorce. Brahms stupidly got in the middle, wrote a letter to Amalie expressing his belief in her innocence; Amalie introduces the letter in court. Anguished, Brahms wrote a companion song, in an attempt to breach the gap.

It took more than a song to heal the wounds; it took, in fact, the Double Concerto for violin and cello, and even then, the relationship never got completely back.

Anderson’s performance is just breath-taking, as is that of William Primrose, the violist. A perceptive viewer on YouTube made the comment—Primrose sounds like a contralto, Anderson sounds like a viola. It’s a completely satisfying performance….