On Failure—Or Not

Well, the work of this morning was supposed to be to tell you about failure, since Lady, Mr. Fernández and I had not so much been to the opera last night as we had been Igorred.

As in Prince Igor, the opera by Borodin that the Metropolitan Opera is putting on for the first time in nearly 100 years. So we went, all of us, to the broadcast at the Metro Theater. The broadcast (or rebroadcast, in this case) is absolutely better than actually going to the Met, since try eating popcorn at the Met! Oh, and another small advantage—you can see the singers, without having to shell out 300 bucks…..

“How long will this last,” asked Lady, who was attending for the first time. Four hours, I told her, wildly over-exaggerating, or so I thought—it actually clocked in at 4 and a half hours, and that was without the curtain calls (we scrambled out of the theater to grab the last bus home).

Well, it was a thing to have done to one—the first act alone came in at an hour and forty five minutes, and half of that was spent in a long hallucinatory scene set in a blaze of poppies (12,500 artificial, spring-loaded poppies—so loaded since the dancers were energetically crashing their way through the famous Polovtsian Dances {well, famous to all but the computer, my little red-squiggling friend….})

You see, Prince Igor, a twelfth-century figure, has made the fatal mistake of going off to fight the Cuman / Polovtsian tribes, despite having received a blazingly clear message from the heavens that it was a damn fool thing to do. OK—not so blazing, since the celestial tidings came in the form of a solar eclipse. But what sort of operatic moron goes off to war right after an eclipse? Hellooo!

Well, the predictable happens, but does Igor pick himself up, dust himself off, and get back to the world of the living—which in this case is to be a prisoner? Although not, since his captor seems to be a perfectly splendid man—and a khan, no less—who insists on treating him as a guest, even to the point of offering him one of the Polovtsian maidens. Oh, and he suggests that they go off and conquer all Russia together. Quite a reasonable offer, given that look—Igor isn’t bringing to the table much clout in the way of bargaining.

Right—so while Igor is moping around refusing to escape (since he’s a prince, get it?  And escaping, you see, is for the less exalted than he—therefore he’ll just sit around being operatically moody, which will draw out the opera…)

Now where was I?

Right—Igor is moping, but his wife’s brother? He’s having a great old time, stealing maidens from their havens by night and plotting to overthrow his brother-in-law by day. While all of this is going on, the khan attacks and—guess what!—the city falls. So now it’s one chicken salad wrap, two large coffees, one bag of popcorn with some illicit-but-oh-so-good Coca-Cola (suck it up, Bloomberg! Hah!) later, and now we’re in the fourth act / fourth hour—which is a scene of utter devastation!

Well, let’s go further—utter devastation, social ruin, economic collapse, and a profound, vast, bleak spiritual wasteland, from which no one will escape.

The Russians just love this stuff….

Igor, it seems, has now decided to escape, presumably so that he can come back when it’s entirely pointless (except, of course, to be in the final act). Obviously, being treated as the honored guest of the khan is insufficiently hair-shirted, especially when there is now the devastated city which he once ruled to mope about in. So there he is, Russianly catatonic, contemplating his and his city’s ruin, when two old souses come upon him, and decide to ring the bell, and get the citizenry (in this case the Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera—handy, hunh?)

Well, the wife is happy to see him, but Igor? Unlike all the operatic characters who are told not to speak to their loved ones but cannot, Igor ignores his beloved, so steeped in grief is he. So now it’s the crowd’s turn—very useful, since the chorus is now on overtime, and you might as well use ‘em—and soon they’re dancing about and tossing Igor in the air like a fraternity prank.

At last—and I do hope nobody in the audience last night was afflicted with hemorrhoids—Igor spins off, and lurches around for a minute or so in what appears to be a near-psychotic break. Then he takes hold of himself, goes to a crate and begins to lug it to the side. Gradually, the others join in—moving the rubble to the side, beginning the process of cleaning up.

“That was it?” asked Mr. Fernández, puzzled about how he had passed the last five hours of his life. The steppes of Russian, you see, are slightly chillier than Hollywood.

So I thought about it all this morning, over coffee. And it’s a curious thing, the need of my country—despite having experienced it several times—never to have admitted defeat.

Let’s face it—we lost Vietnam. And Iraq? Afghanistan? Even our war on drugs? The American dream?

Yes—we’ve been attacked. But have we ever experienced the devastation of a ruined landscape / countryscape, coupled with the bitter taste of knowing that another nation has invaded and conquered? Have we gone through what so many nations around the world have endured?

‘I know about defeat,’ I thought, remembering four or five auditions that I completely choked. Each time it was the same—the disbelief of being gob sacked in the psychic solar plexus, the wailing of despair and frustration, the shame of calling friends and family and announcing that, yes, once again, I had failed. Reader—some things repetition does not make easier.

“We thoroughly enjoyed it,” said the tourist yesterday, handing me ten bucks for the organizations I support by playing Bach suites in the café. The story, you see, has a happy ending—I’m playing better than I ever have. More importantly, I’m playing in public, enjoying it, and tackling the solo suites without having the aid of another musician (often a pianist) to bolster me. It’s just the instrument and I.

People drift past, off to the bathroom. Often, I shift to another point in the bow, to allow them to pass. The parrot squawks. People take photos—shooting a red flash of light into the middle of a sarabande. Casals was right—a café is excellent practice for a developing musician, whatever his or her age….

Did it come easily? No. But if it came at all, it came from the devastated landscape of failure. And if I had denied that I had failed? If I had fallen for the rationale—perhaps real but not true—that no gringo could land a job with a Puerto Rican orchestra?

There are times, I decided, when you need devastation, failure, dirt in the mouth. That’s the only landscape from which to travel to other, better places.

Enter Susan, who wrote a comment on yesterday’s post, saying that she’d not heard of the French countertenor, Philippe Jaroussky. ‘Hmm,’ I thought, ‘how can that be?’ So I turned to YouTube, and came by chance on the clip below.

However many decades it took this bear of little brain to figure out his instrument, it took Jaroussky only a couple of years to go from starting to sing to conquering the world of song. And why shouldn’t he? He’s young, mouth-wateringly cute, and the voice?

But as you can see below, it’s the completely natural—and funny—way he approaches his music that carries the day. He has not, it looks, travelled the same paths that I have trod, at least not in music.

I rejoice for him, as I rejoice for the failures that—bitter as they were—led me onward to a world of such joy….

Et in terra pax redux

I might be for it if I thought we knew what we were doing.

The videos that came out of Syria following the chemical attack are horrifying, and yes—I think it’s more likely than not that it was the Syrian army, and not the rebels, who launched the attack. Why? Well, all three strikes were in rebel strongholds. As well, it’s apparently not so easy to carry out a chemical attack—either to make the agents or fire them.

And the Syrian government has, as Kerry pointed out, been reluctant to let the areas affected be inspected, which you would assume it would if they had nothing to hide.

So why am I not all for bombing the hell out Syria?

Well, apparently Syria has the third largest amount of chemical weapons in the world. And where is all that stuff? And even if we knew two weeks ago exactly where everything was, what happens if somebody moved it? And then we bombed it?

That said—what are we going to do? Fire a few missiles at army installations? Bomb the presidential palace? Take out infrastructure?

And when is enough enough? What’s our exit strategy—or are we going to improvise again, as we did / are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq?

And if we do a regime change—what will replace it? One commentator from an Al Jazeera program pointed out that none of the rebel groups are particularly friendly to the West—so is there any reason to get involved?

We may think that we can’t be more despised in the region than we already are, but guess what? We can, and will be. Go on YouTube and enter “Syria chemical attacks” and what you’ll see is chilling. About half are legitimate news clips—the other half (and by no means the least watched) are home-made affairs with titles like “Leaked Documents—U.S. Framed Syria in Chemical Weapons Attack.”

Then there’s the interesting question—over 100,000 people have been killed, and last week’s atrocity? The highest estimate I read was over 3,000. Yes, it is heinous for a government to gas its people. But the West has sat around and watched Syrians kill each other for two long years, now. If we had a moral obligation to act, shouldn’t we have done so a long time ago?

It’s true that using chemical weapons is a particularly barbaric way of killing—it’s indiscriminate, for one thing, which is why so many women and children were victims. But the same might be true with bombs—and especially in civilian areas.

And it might be the case that the world needs to do something—just as we needed to do something in Kosovo. What saddens me is that a response may be justified, but the American people, to say nothing of the rest of the world, have seen enough posturing about chemical weapons—remember that vial of white powder (supposedly anthrax) in Colin Power’s hands? Now, when there really is a chemical attack, the world is too suspicious, and too weary, to respond.

“Why in the world would anybody bother to fight over that land,” my mother used to wonder, looking at some godforsaken desert on television and comparing it to her lush Wisconsin woods.

Why indeed?

Victims and Victor

Rachel Maddow surprisingly doesn’t make the obvious point in the clip below, when she talks about the Carnival Triumph debacle—the poop cruise, as she calls it—and the eight years that we suffered through George W. Bush. The Triumph passengers had a horrific week-long vacation. We spent 8 years while the ship drifted aimlessly, and then fell recklessly into maelstroms. Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Guantanamo, the War in Iraq, Katrina, the erosion of the worldwide goodwill after September 11^th, the list goes on and on.

Or rather, the poop kept rising while the ship kept sinking.

It was a disaster at every turn, and I was fortunate, I now realize, that I was so exhausted by Wal-Mart and Franny that very little of it got in. Yes, I read the headlines, skimmed the articles, and then went out to the back of the building to make my morning call to Franny. Then it was eight hours of teaching, an hour or two of emails / writing / class preparation / brownnosing the Human Resources ladies. (Yes, I caved to pressure, I’m sorry to say, and used to force myself to spend 20 minutes chatting with people in the department. I had been told, you see, that some people felt I was aloof, that I wasn’t fully a part of the department. So chatting I did….)

So all the five presidents and all the first ladies (minus Nancy) got together down in Texas to dedicate the new George W. Bush Library. And of course they would; it’s a club, after all, that handful of ex-presidents, and there must be a tacit disagreement. Once you’re out of office, your job is to shut up. Do good works: solve global warming or AIDS in Africa or build houses for the poor—but shut up.

And no one is gonna deny—the job’s not easy. My problem with W is that for him, it was. He was arrogant and entitled and too stupid to know how stupid he was on the first day of his presidency, when he inherited a country largely on its feet, and W was just as arrogant / entitled / etc. on the last day of his presidency. The difference?

The country was lurching on the edge of financial collapse, the rest of the world despised us, global warming was no longer a theory but a fact, and the United States Constitution had been overridden.

And the worst thing? Through a combination of arrogance and stupidity, Bush never realized the damage he had done. In fact, he said recently that he was “comfortable” with the decisions he had made.

Yeah?

We’ll never see him brought to justice, and I suppose he had to build his damn library, and he could hardly not do that and not dedicate it, and so he invited the boys down to Texas and they sighed and crossed a day out of their lives and whooped it up down in Texas with W and Laura.

And yes, by tomorrow we will have forgotten about it. And if Rachel Maddow is wondering, I can tell her that yes, last week there was a day when four cruise ships sailed into the old city, and walking Calle del Cristo felt more like Des Moines than San Juan. If the Carnival Triumph ever happened, you wouldn’t have known it as you found it impossible to move any faster than the gawking, open-mouthed couple ahead of you permitted.

We forget, the rest of the world does not. Often, of course, because so much happens over-there done by you-know-whom. Take a look at this:

 PAKISTAN

Name | Age | Gender

Noor Aziz | 8 | male


Abdul Wasit | 17 | male


Noor Syed | 8 | male


Wajid Noor | 9 | male


Syed Wali Shah | 7 | male


Ayeesha | 3 | female


Qari Alamzeb | 14| male


Shoaib | 8 | male


Hayatullah KhaMohammad | 16 | male


Tariq Aziz | 16 | male


Sanaullah Jan | 17 | male


Maezol Khan | 8 | female


Nasir Khan | male


Naeem Khan | male


Naeemullah | male


Mohammad Tahir | 16 | male


Azizul Wahab | 15 | male


Fazal Wahab | 16 | male


Ziauddin | 16 | male


Mohammad Yunus | 16 | male


Fazal Hakim | 19 | male


Ilyas | 13 | male


Sohail | 7 | male


Asadullah | 9 | male


Khalilullah | 9 | male


Noor Mohammad | 8 | male


Khalid | 12 | male


Saifullah | 9 | male


Mashooq Jan | 15 | male


Nawab | 17 | male


Sultanat Khan | 16 | male


Ziaur Rahman | 13 | male


Noor Mohammad | 15 | male


Mohammad Yaas Khan | 16 | male


Qari Alamzeb | 14 | male


Ziaur Rahman | 17 | male


Abdullah | 18 | male


Ikramullah Zada | 17 | male


Inayatur Rehman | 16 | male


Shahbuddin | 15 | male


Yahya Khan | 16 |male


Rahatullah |17 | male


Mohammad Salim | 11 | male


Shahjehan | 15 | male


Gul Sher Khan | 15 | male


Bakht Muneer | 14 | male


Numair | 14 | male


Mashooq Khan | 16 | male


Ihsanullah | 16 | male


Luqman | 12 | male


Jannatullah | 13 | male


Ismail | 12 | male


Taseel Khan | 18 | male


Zaheeruddin | 16 | male


Qari Ishaq | 19 | male


Jamshed Khan | 14 | male


Alam Nabi | 11 | male


Qari Abdul Karim | 19 | male


Rahmatullah | 14 | male


Abdus Samad | 17 | male


Siraj | 16 | male


Saeedullah | 17 | male


Abdul Waris | 16 | male


Darvesh | 13 | male


Ameer Said | 15 | male


Shaukat | 14 | male


Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male


Salman | 12 | male


Fazal Wahab | 18 | male


Baacha Rahman | 13 | male


Wali-ur-Rahman | 17 | male


Iftikhar | 17 | male


Inayatullah | 15 | male


Mashooq Khan | 16 | male


Ihsanullah | 16 | male


Luqman | 12 | male


Jannatullah | 13 | male


Ismail | 12 | male


Abdul Waris | 16 | male


Darvesh | 13 | male


Ameer Said | 15 | male


Shaukat | 14 | male


Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male


Adnan | 16 | male


Najibullah | 13 | male


Naeemullah | 17 | male


Hizbullah | 10 | male


Kitab Gul | 12 | male


Wilayat Khan | 11 | male


Zabihullah | 16 | male


Shehzad Gul | 11 | male


Shabir | 15 | male


Qari Sharifullah | 17 | male


Shafiullah | 16 | male


Nimatullah | 14 | male


Shakirullah | 16 | male


Talha | 8 | male

Right—so what is it? It’s the list of kids who have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan.

“No,” you say. “It can’t be. You trawled through the Internet and found a site to your liking, and now you’re ramming anti-America propaganda down our throats.”

http://www.policymic.com/articles/24164/a-list-of-children-killed-by-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-and-yemen

Well, it’s true—I haven’t checked out this site, which, by the way, adduces a Colombia Law School Human Rights Institute study that says that up to 98% of drone deaths are civilians.

But of course we do remember, on those rare occasions when the carnage takes place on our soil. We read the three thousand names every September 11^th.  Next April 15^th, there will be ceremonies, minutes of silence, bowed heads, tears and prayers.

I’m guilty of it myself. I had written about Tomas Young, the Iraq vet who wrote an angry last letter to George W. Bush, and then set himself the date of 20 April 2013 as the start date for his fast until his death.

20 April 2013—the day after two young men shut down an entire city plus several substantial suburbs / small towns. These “terrorists” killed five people and maimed over 150 victims.

Horrifying and completely indefensible.

But what would you say if you were the family of Luqman / 12 / male—to choose at random just one of the names on  the list above?

And sadly, there is a group of Americans who will remember—or rather, who are incapable of not remembering.

Guys like Tomas Young, whose damage is physical, if they’re lucky. Or guys who have the worst fate thrust on them. Guys with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, guys who startle awake at 2AM when a car backfires, guys who take their wives “hostage” when their kid forgets not to slam the screen door.

Round Two

You know the story as well as I do: the two explosions; the 78 year-old runner blown to the street; the smoke lifting; the stunned man filming the event, who can only keep saying “Oh, my God.”

So it’s happened again, a dozen years after September 2001. We have spent billions of dollars on “security,” we’ve lost significant amounts of freedom, we have allowed the government to strip us of rights in order to “protect” us. In addition, we’ve lost the ability to think, and fallen victim to fear. Does anybody really think that having zillions of people scrutinize us as we empty our pockets and take off our shoes and belts and go through metal detectors at our airports is making us safer? Wouldn’t a simple lock on the cockpit door have done the trick? And why, since hijacking has been around since the 60’s, wasn’t it standard procedure to lock the cockpit?

So yes, I watched the videos compulsively yesterday, until it occurred to me—it wasn’t doing my stomach any good. Nor was it being particular useful to the people of Boston, so why was I doing it?

Later I wondered—under what circumstances would I ever put a bomb (or two or four, however many there were) in a crowd full of innocent people? Would I ever? Would I ever have so much hurt, so much pain, that it would give rise to that level of rage and bile?

I hope not.

OK—Adolf Hitler. When would I have the necessary knowledge to justify putting the bomb under his desk? Would I need to have seen the concentration camps? Would hearing accounts be enough? Would just seeing the Jews crammed in the cattle cars be sufficient?

So now the country is watching a city block of Boston, Massachusetts, and scratching their heads and saying, “why do they hate us?” The answer, most people think, is that there is such a thing as evil, and the people who perpetrated this deed were evil.

Well, I think there’s an alternative explanation, and the New York Times reported on it today. “US Practiced Torture After 9/11,” announced the headline, and my response was, predictably, “duh….”

Of course we were practicing torture—will anybody in the world forget that sadistic photograph of the female soldier, her cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, her foot resting on top of a heap of naked prisoners? We admitted that we water-boarded, it was reported that the justice department had written memos, and that we had signed off on these “interrogation” techniques, but that no—national security, we couldn’t read them.

So it was a true “dog bites man” moment for me, but not, apparently for a Republican guy named Asa Hutchinson, who served under Bush as head of the Drug Enforcement Agency and undersecretary of the Homeland Security. He was the Republican balance to a bipartisan report, and he initially started out believing that no, there was no torture committed. But here’s what the New York Times has him saying:

“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He said he thought everyone involved in decisions, from Mr. Bush down, had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to try to prevent more attacks.

“But I just think we learn from history,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “It’s incredibly important to have an accurate account not just of what happened but of how decisions were made.”

He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of that character is that we do not torture.”

Yeah? Wanna ask the rest of the world?

I read once that there was a British maxim—a man is judged by how he treats his enemy. And nations as well; that said, how well do we score?

Well, the Army Field Manual on Interrogation may reveal a hint or two; section M allows for interrogation sessions for up to 40 consecutive hours.

“Doesn’t sound like much,” you say. Right, but try staying awake from 8AM Monday morning to midnight the next day—that’s 40 hours.

And the very fact that it was officially permitted led to other things, not officially permitted. Here’s one chilling sentence from the Times story:

The C.I.A. not only water boarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.

Oh, and here’s another one:

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

Nor does the report spare the Obama administration:

While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.

Well, you know where I land on this issue. Obama didn’t want to focus on the past, he said, he wanted to focus on the future, going forward.

Lovely sentiment.

Bullshit.

No president is gonna go after a former president, for the simple fact that every president is going to BE at some point a former president.

So now we know. Oops, so sorry—looks like we went a little overboard.

Is that enough?

Let’s see—what time is it, over there in the Hague?

Et In Terra Pax

At first I dismissed it as typical hype, and worse, another example of a vexing condition from which we suffer. But first let me tell what prompted it all.

The New Day, or El Nuevo Día, as everybody else calls it, is the island’s largest newspaper. And today, it took the sensible step of telling us all how to cope in the event of nuclear fallout or rain.

Well, I remember the t-shirt from the sixties, which had more succinct and trenchant instructions. “Close all windows,” the t-shirt counseled, “sit in the middle of the room, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.”

Well, the New Day acted more professionally, today; they gave several intelligent pieces of advice. We should all have an emergency plan, including a meeting point in the event that a disaster happens when we are not at home. We’re supposed to have cash on hand, food for at least a week, water, extra medicines, insurance policies and identification documents. Then, we maintain ourselves informed—sorry, these Latin constructions are creeping in to my English—as well, of course, as tranquil (¿bíjte?).

Now then, in the event of an evacuation, we should have sleeping bags—time to run out to Wal-Mart—and also cages or carrying cases for all animals. Oh, and remember, you’ll need to check out whether the shelter will accept animals.

This is, you understand, just slightly surreal. We have four cats, one of whom is virtually impossible to put in a cage. And don’t even think about putting more than one cat per cage. So am I really supposed to go and buy two sleeping bags (in Puerto Rico? It’s early April and the temperature is already in the high 80’s) and three more cat carrying cases?

Somehow, it reminded me of Jack, my father, who got it into his head in the early ‘60’s that nuclear attack was imminent, and so he had to be prepared. Which meant that he got up one Saturday morning, headed down to the basement, and began beating the hell out of one of the walls with a pick ax. Then came the backhoe, and in a month’s time we had our bunker—a room about ten feet by twenty feet, with two single beds. Since there were five of us at the time, it wasn’t exactly certain how this arrangement would work—would we sleep in shifts?

Another problem, which Johnny—of course it would be he—pointed out, was that it wasn’t much of a secret around the neighborhood what we were up to; nobody could really believe that the backhoe was there for the garden, could they? So what to do about the neighbors, their children in their arms, who come running to our house when the A bomb hits? Would we let the Goodriches in, but not the Baumans?

And what was the point, asked Johnny, of the little stove pipe in the corner of the shelter that communicated with the outside? Was Jack really going to open that up, all the better to breathe in radiation-laden air?

Jack covered the pipe with a piece of plywood the next day.

So now the New Day has fulfilled its mission—in the event that a madman in North Korea decides to unload a missile on South Korea or Guam we readers are informed and ready to take necessary procedures to safeguard life and property. Oh, and fear not, because in the event of an disaster, the government—which barely works in normal times—will activate the emergency management team, and everything will be well under control. Wow!

The New Day did point out a few more things. Yes, it’s unlikely that North Korea will do a direct strike on the financial district of San Juan. But if it zaps South Korea, it may well contaminate the entire region, and guess what? We get a lot of our food from there.

Then there’s the little problem of radiation in seawater. In fact, a month ago fishermen off the coast of California pulled up a tuna contaminated with radiation. One wonders—how did they know? Are Geiger counters standard equipment on fishing boats nowadays? Or was the tuna merely glowing?

Oh, and the BBC reported that the Japanese nuclear reactor, Fukushima (always loved that name), had reported a leak yesterday. Well, that seemed sufficiently important to check out, and I’m happy to say it’s not true. In fact, Fukushima may have had THREE leaks since Saturday. And here’s what one writer for the BBC said, after touring the plant last March:

The scale of their task is daunting, and it will decades before anyone can truly say the Fukushima disaster is over, and the threat from the plant contained.

There is still a reactor—Number Three—that is so highly radioactive that no one can go into it. So how are they getting the rods out? By using remotely controlled cranes. Another reactor—Number Four—still has 1500 spent fuel rods, and the building may collapse if there’s another earthquake. And there are thousands of tons of highly contaminated water sitting in tanks that now, apparently, are leaking.

“Puerto Rico is an island surrounded by mirrors,” goes an old saying, “and when on occasion we look out to see the world, we can only see ourselves.” That’s what occurred to me this morning—a crisis is imminent a world away, and The New Day was worried about how it might affect us. In fact, it’s not improbable that the crisis happened two years ago in Japan, and anything North Korea does will only make it infinitely, infinitely worse.