Saturday, December 8, 2018

Magnificat - Healey Willan


Musica Intima

I like this setting because the words are so clearly articulated in it as well as for its simplicity.  Healey Willan was a very good composer.

I can find this excellent group's website but I can't find a conductor listed for this recording.  Perhaps they sang it without a conductor.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Mick Jordan - My Brother Tim





No greater love hath any sister, so they say, than she who drags her slowcoach slob of a brother to a speed-date session, hoping to gift him a girlfriend or even the briefest of blind-dates. With Aonghus Óg MacAnally as a poorly socialised sibling, Kathy Rose O'Brien as his charitable sister, and Liz Fitzgibbon as their unaware objective, we bring you  by Mick Jordan, which was the recommended script in this year's P.J. O'Connor Awards.

Liz Fitzgibbon played Jenny,

Kathy Rose O'Brien ... Tiz

Aonghus Óg MacAnally .., Tim himself.

Jennifer O'Dea was both Sharon at the AA meeting and Nurse Bridie in the A+Ewhile 

Joe Taylor, who has been given the gift of tongues, appeared in multiple incarnations.

Sound supervision was by Richard McCullough Produced by  Aidan Mathews

Stupid Mail - A New Approach To Getting Guff About Gould From Gumbys

Every time some fan boy of the very dead, very late, very ex-pianist G.Gould brings him up to throw at me, I know they generally don't really care much about the music, they just know they love to mellow out to "Gould's Goldberg" or something.  Or they are showing their vintage in their conception of prestige and officially designated greatness.  That kind of kulcha does't interest me.

Instead of going over that most over-rated of 20th century pianists again, I'd rather post something played by his near-contemporary, the in just about every way superior musician, John Browning.  

I won't post his Bach playing because I'm not a huge fan of Bach played on piano and I disagree with some of his interpretation though I disagree with more in Gould's.  For the record, Browning played harpsichord but I don't believe he ever recorded on it or played it in recital.  I believe his approach to Bach changed over his playing career, too.  Gould's did as well, though I don't think the late recording of the Goldberg Variations is any improvement over the one that made him famous. 

Instead, here's John Browning playing Samuel Barber's Sonata op. 26.   Browning and Barber had a long association,  Barber composing some of his most significant music for Browning to play.  I would never call any such recording "definitive", only the composer could have possibly said that and I doubt Barber would have been stupid enough to say something like that.  I'm certain Browning would never have, he was one of the most thoughtful and subtle thinkers among the pianists of his generation. 


I have never heard a recording by the aforementioned most overly adulated pianist that approaches this level of playing.  

Browning had something in common with my dear, late piano teacher, both were students of the legendary piano teacher, the universally beloved Rosina Lhévinne.  Though I can't claim to have been taught the method he sets out in this fascinating movie,  I wish I'd seen this a long time ago.  If I were thirty or even twenty years younger some of it might have improved my playing.  

What he says about B Major being the key that falls most naturally under the hand is something I realized the first time I played in that key, I find it and its relative minor the most gratifying keys for my hands.  


I have seen the point made here also made elsewhere,  that of the foremost American pianists of his generation (Fleisher, Graffman, etc), Browning  was the only one whose career wasn't blighted by hand problems*.  That fact, alone, is enough to make this an important video to watch.  

What is said about knowing the piece as minutely as described beginning at 8:37 or so isn't possible except among those who have that particular skill, I'm not sure I think it's essential for us mere mortals.  It makes me think of the fact that the great, great, Jazz vibe player Gary Burton's sudden loss of his skill of perfect pitch disturbed him enough that he gave up playing.  No doubt his skill was a good part of why he was such a great improviser and endless source of musical newness, but there are people who never had that skill who, as well, were great.  Joseph Lhévinne's book, Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing, is in print in an inexpensive Dover edition and is extremely valuable.  You can download the Louis Plaidy exercises at IMSLP, I haven't used them but as soon as I can print them out I will try them.  You're never too old to try new things. 

* Rumor has it that it was his chain-smoking that did him in, in the end.  He died far too young.   

Messiaen: Vingt Regards - IV. Regard de la Vierge


Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

As RMJ pointed out the other day, the nativity story in Matthew with the star and the astrologers from the East and the evil King Herod and his plot which eventually included the murder of babies and Jesus and his parents becoming undocumented aliens in a foreign land, when looked at seriously is pretty chilling.

In writing a Christmas post about eleven years ago, I did a similar exercise of really thinking of what it said in the text to the people who those stories were originally told to would have made of the manger scene and the shepherds, having grown up on and lived on farms my entire life, my mind went to animal shit in a time and place when bedding for animals in a cave or hovel would have been minimal and labor to clean them out probably only slightly more plentiful.  To talk about the Son of God being born in a stable wouldn't have looked like the creches erected at almost any time since that custom started, it would have been filthy, smelly, fly ridden, noisy and probably a danger to the life of both mother and child.  And the people who first told that story and heard it would likely have known that.  "Silent Night" might have some truth in it but it isn't the truth.  No doubt mothers, especially young mothers who went through labor and gave birth in such circumstances might be touched with the feelings of that song but it wouldn't have been the only thing they thought and felt.  I can imagine it is something that lots of women who give birth to children under similar danger and hardship, today, might be those in the best position to tell us about what that must have been like. (Again, see RMJ who does the best Advent posts). 

I think this vision, this understanding of The Virgin carries some of that feeling of everything from maternal tenderness to the ominous danger all of them were in.  Not to mention the portents of the Angelic messenger that came before it in Luke.

Leaving out his technical description which you'd have to be a Messiaen scholar familiar with his harmonic theory to understand, here is what he said about this movement.

Toute simple et naïve . . . A la rentrée, un contrepoint mélodique nouveau exprime la tendresse du regard maternel. 

It's all simple and naive . . . At the return (of the opening theme)  a new melody in counterpoint expresses the tenderness of the mother's gaze. 

I should point out that Pierre-Laurent Aimard was a winner of the Olivier Messiaen prize, I believe during the lifetime of Yvonne Loriod and given by people who would have been very familiar with Messiaen's preferences in the performance of his music.  I think his playing of these is very good.

After 229 Years Of Deliberation The Verdict On The Actual Character Of American Democracy Is About To Come In

One of the things that I've done since I started making comments online is to continue something that I've been doing since the Reagan administration, arguing that the modern American conservative identity was in many if not all cases, actually a fascist movement.  The claims about  conservatives favoring limited government that my opponents in those early debates would throw out as a refutation against me is about to face the ultimate test and I have every expectation that the modern conservative movement will test out as fascists.

The filings by prosecutors in the case of Michael Cohen present evidence, strong evidence that Donald Trump is sitting as president while being guilty of serious crimes that, allowed to stand, will be the death of even the vestiges and pantomime show of American democracy.  Him remaining president, not removed by impeachment will confirm the actual nature of the American system as fascism under the control of a Republican Party which intends to wield fascistic power through elections corruption and fascistic propaganda in the mass media. 

I listened this morning to the video of Lawrence O'Donnell, correctly but perhaps a bit disingenuously,  pressuring Congressman Steve Cohen, a Democratic member of the House Judiciary  Committee to say that he will pursue impeachment hearings against Donald Trump, not making him the first American President credibly accused by federal prosecutors of committing serious crimes without impeachment hearings in the House being mounted. 

Cohen's answer that the Democrat's decision on impeachment would depend on Republicans agreeing to impeach a Republican president was the honest political answer to that question.  Congressman Cohen, like Nancy Pelosi, like congressman Nadler, are members of the House, they are politicians, that they see this in political terms is not wrong.  They have to be more realistic than a lawyerly, judicial view from the bargain-brand Mt. Olympus that the law takes.   It would be meaningless to mount an impeachment against Trump without the possibility of removing him.   The political reality of what that might cost Democrats in 2020 is a responsible consideration. 

O'Donnell's response that the Republicans are a party that won't shoulder responsibility was also honest.   His point that Democrats would leave that decision to Republicans if they failed to try to do the impossible is also true.  But it holds that Democrats in 2019 try to do what will be impossible without Republicans agreeing to do what they won't do.

I have held for decades that the idea of removing an American president by impeachment was a Constitutional fiction, a myth which has never been done despite presidents who have done everything up to and including causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people for their own political gain.  That atrocity started with Andrew Jackson who, surprisingly, was in violation of court rulings in his program of genocide and land theft in the removals of the Cherokees and others, it continues throughout our history, it has actually accelerated during my lifetime in a series of Republican Presidents, Nixon (the closest we have come to making the Constitution work) Reagan,  Bush I, Bush II and now Trump.  Of course, Bill Clinton was impeached for the most trivial and for the most partisan of real reasons that he was a Democrat who won over a Republican.  And he was impeached in the clearest of possible set-ups with paid liars and the most overtly partisan special prosecutor in the history of that office, Ken Starr appointed by corrupt judges, Sentelle working hand in glove with Senator Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth to engineer that. 

Now, in 2018, after two hundred, twenty-nine years of struggle to make a democracy out of the racist oligarchy the founders set up, we are at the clearest test of whether, ultimately, a "nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,"  is possible under the United States Constitution and it is those who claim to revere that Constitution the most who are proving that, left to them, "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall" perish from at least the United States. 

American conservatives have a matter of weeks to prove that they will insist that Republicans hold Donald Trump accountable for the highest of high crimes against American democracy or we should all admit that the United States Constitution is not what it was sold or is sold as being.  I would say if it hasn't happened by February first, we will have that answer.  That answer is likely to be that The Constitution isn't a vehicle for equality and democracy, it is as much a covenant with death as Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionists discovered, to their horror, it was as soon as the papers and other writings of the framers of the Constitution started to be written. 

One of the landmarks in my understanding of this didn't come from Republicans, it came from two of the great iconic figureheads of the Democratic Party,  Senator Edward Kennedy and his niece, Caroline Kennedy gave Gerald Ford the "Profiles in Courage" award specifically for his pardon of the criminal Richard Nixon in 1974, short circuiting the Constitutional remedy for presiential crime, impeachment.

That act, including both the pardon and the establishment reaction to it, as read in the media, in books and as lauded by the Kennedy family, was the beginning of my ever increasing skepticism of the Constitution.  Gerald Ford's pardon was one of the most damaging acts in the history of the United States it cemented the idea that even a proven criminal as president was, in fact, above the law.

It was an act of partisan character, the pardon was an act performed by a man who Nixon, himself, elevated to be in a position to assume the presidency from him, it stank of the very real possibility of the ultimate quid pro quo and it still does.  It stank of unequal justice, a pardon granted to a man who enthusiastically used racist paranoia and the popular prejudice against Black men as an inherently criminal class who was a proven criminal of the most serious kind.  And Edward and Caroline Kennedy rewarded the pardoner, calling what he did "courage". 

No, barring something verging on the miraculous - its uniqueness would justify that designation -  this Constitution is about to prove that it has always been as dodgy and fraudulent as its critics have always held it to be, as so many Black People, First Nations people and so many others have never had a reason to suspect other than that due to their treatment, under law, under the Constitutional system.  Donald Trump will get off because of Republican-fascism and Democrats will take the blame for that because they are left powerless under this system to hold Trump responsible for the crimes he is guilty of.  Not least because of the mass media which O'Donnell is one of the better people in it. 

The whole thing stinks, that smell is the smell of dead and decaying democracy. 

Note:  I've been studying the history of the Whig party and one thing that is becoming obvious to me, various stands and positions in politics, in relation to partisan labels, get jumbled and assigned with about the same predictability as drawing Scrabble tiles.   And that at any given point the diversity of members of a party will ensure that any holding of what that party stands for will be anything from generally and vaguely true to totally unjustified.  I do think that today's Republicans,entirely unlike those in the period up to the death of Lincoln, are a fascist party by their own actions and inactions.  "Fascism" as a reality isn't a peculiarly 20th century innovation anymore than Nazism can be separated from the currents that fed into it.  I think it's clear that the indigenous forms of that stuff present from the 19th century and earlier should be considered continuous with it.

If you want to get a real shock, look at what the Republican Party stood for at its founding in the 1850s and up till the death of Lincoln and how fast it turned into a cesspool of corruption starting in the Grant administration and, especially, as Hayes bought his way into the presidency through the corrupt deal made possible by the founders' Electoral College system.   Then consider how many elections during our lifetime were decided by the Electoral College and the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

"Profiles in Courage" is one of the most dishonest books of popular history I've ever read.  The chapter dealing with the non-impeachment of Andrew Johnson alone would ensure that.  The one about Robert Taft's opposition to the Nuremberg trials on the basis of legalistic fussiness was even worse.  That whole mindset needs to be seriously questioned, the Award should be scrapped until they justify its existence.


Friday, December 7, 2018

Magnificat - Leo Nestor



Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception Choir
Leo Nestor, conductor
Ars Nova Brass

Don't Drag Us into This: PETA Compares Anti-Animal Language to Racism and Homophobia


Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel are hilarious. 

Messiaen: Vingt Regards - III. L'échange


Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

In Cole Philip Burger's dissertation, Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus: Analytical, Religious, and Literary Considerations,  he says in regard to this movement, 

One theory defines Messiaen's structures along side his rhythmic innovations, similar to other composers before the Second World War.  Another hypothesis is to see the stasis of forms in conjunction with his aim to reflect the timelessness of a never-ending God.  This connection between form and religious considerations also relates to the notion of éblouissement also calls upon the transcendent and evokes the unimaginable.  The Vingt Regards includes contemplations of the immaterial, like the heights, time, and silence, as well as the ineffable, like the Exchange [this movement] and the Awesome Unction. 

Earlier in the dissertation he points to the definition that Messiaen gave to the term as:

. . . éblouissement (dazzlement), an inner blinding that embodies the synthesis of music and religion

If there's one thing the composer did, it was to try to explain in detail his mystical experience and its expression of his music while indicating that a lot of that can't be explained in words but is something that can only be experienced.  Though Messiaen, himself wrote notes on these pieces.  Of this one he said:

Toute la pièce est écrite en crescendo, selon le procédé de «l'agrandissement asymétrique»: les mêmes fragments, juxtaposés ou superposés, se répètent: à chaque terme, certains notes montent, d'autre descendent, d'autres restent immobiles.  C'est un commentaire de cette antienne du Missel: «Ô commerce admirable! Le Créateur du genre humain, prenant un corps en un âme, a daigné naître de la Vierge, pour nous faire part de sa divinité.»

The whole piece is written in crescendo, according to the principle of "asystemetric (?) enlargment":  The same fragments juxtaposed or superimposed, are repeated: at each term, some notes rise, others go down, others remain motionless.   It is a commentary on this antiphon from the Missal "O admirable commerce (exchange?) The Creator of human kind, taking a body in a soul, deigned to be born of  the Virgin, to make us a part of his divinity." 

The passage from the antiphon is probably more helpful than the musical analysis, Messiaen, in a line of French composers going back to at least Couperin (if not Machaut) weren't shy about giving instructions as to how their music was to be played but I don't think anyone did it in more detail or at times as opaquely as he did.  It's not something that can be put into words easily or fully. 

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Magnificat Secundi Toni - Manuel Cardoso


The Tallis Scholars,
Peter Phillips, director

I don't know anything about Manuel Cardoso except that he died in about 1650 and his style is quite conservative for that period.  And that he was, clearly, a very fine composer.  I'm posting mostly composers I'm unfamiliar with for now, the more well known will come later.

Quick Stupid Mail

I have had a very long two days so I'm really not interested in getting into a brawl on something I've said at least fifty times in response to the self-righteous, pseudo-morally indignant accusation that I fail to believe in "evolution" except in general.

A. You don't seem to know what the word "evolution" means or you'd know from reading the things you claim to have read BECAUSE IT'S CLEAR THROUGHOUT ALL OF THEM THAT I BELIEVE EVOLUTION IS ABOUT AS CLOSE TO A FACT AS YOU'RE GOING TO GET IN A RETROSPECTIVE SCIENCE OF THAT KIND. 

B.  What I'm not, anymore, only skeptical of but a complete apostate on is the collection of theories called "natural selection" all of which claim to be the true vessell of the pure thought of Charles Darwin.  Like that very early, perhaps the earliest apostate on the issue of natural selection,  St. George Mivart, the more I have learned about it the more skeptical I am of it. 

C.  I have come to believe that, generally and with a few exceptions, those sciences touching on evolution or hoping to ride on its coat tails are the most ideologically polluted, the most cliquish, the most clannish and some of the most dishonest of all the sciences, perhaps only rivaled by cosmology and science done for profit. I know that last one covers a lot of ground but they generally avoid ideology, there's no profit in it.

D.  Why don't you really say what's eatin' you Bunky, you see that as an attack on the atheism you really care about, in that you've got a lot of company in real science, lots of them are atheist-sci-ranger boys at heart too.

In Easily A Large Majority Of Cases The Highway To Hell Is Paved With "Enlightened" Self-Interest

Since it was thrown out here the other day that Samuel Johnson was alleged to have said,  "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," I looked it up to see what the context of it was, wondering if it was something more interesting than that.  In doing that I found out that formulation is spurious, though Boswell, in Life of Samuel Johnson quoted him as saying the equivalent, it's at the end of this passage.

I told him that our friend Goldsmith had said to me, that he had come too late into the world, for that Pope and other poets had taken up the places in the Temple of Fame; so that, as but a few at any period can possess poetical reputation, a man of genius can now hardly acquire it. JOHNSON. 'That is one of the most sensible things I have ever heard of Goldsmith. It is difficult to get literary fame, and it is every day growing more difficult. Ah, Sir, that should make a man think of securing happiness in another world, which all who try sincerely for it may attain. In comparison of that, how little are all other things! The belief of immortality is impressed upon all men, and all men act under an impression of it, however they may talk, and though, perhaps, they may be scarcely sensible of it.' I said, it appeared to me that some people had not the least notion of immortality; and I mentioned a distinguished gentleman of our acquaintance. JOHNSON. 'Sir, if it were not for the notion of immortality, he would cut a throat to fill his pockets.' When I quoted this to Beauclerk, who knew much more of the gentleman than we did, he said, in his acid manner, 'He would cut a throat to fill his pockets, if it were not for fear of being hanged.'

He was pleased to say, 'If you come to settle here, we will have one day in the week on which we will meet by ourselves. That is the happiest conversation where there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm quiet interchange of sentiments.' In his private register this evening is thus marked, 'Boswell sat with me till night; we had some serious talk.' It also appears from the same record, that after I left him he was occupied in religious duties, in 'giving Francis, his servant, some directions for preparation to communicate; in reviewing his life, and resolving on better conduct.' The humility and piety which he discovers on such occasions, is truely edifying. No saint, however, in the course of his religious warfare, was more sensible of the unhappy failure of pious resolves, than Johnson. He said one day, talking to an acquaintance on this subject, 'Sir Hell is paved with good intentions.'

So it's not especially useful, it's a rather banal point and not original.  One of the sources pointing out that the typical form of the statement might date back to Bernard of Clairveaux (1091-1153), as "Hell is full of good intentions or desires."

The way the phrase is typically used is by someone who doesn't like someone else bringing up a proposal to make the law and the government less amorally or immorally depraved or the media or society, etc.   Which is, surprisingly to me, far more cynical than the context the often cynical Johnson said it in.  I think it's way too seldom pointed out what a large percentage that cynicism made up of that period, especially in those who were held to comprise the "enlightenment".

What's even more obvious than that often used construction is that the road to hell is often facilitated by bad intentions.   Why that doesn't get said as a retort, I don't know.  Maybe it didn't occur to anyone to go against the great Johnson's authority.  Well, maybe that will change now.

Beware of someone piously invoking some famous literary cynic, in easily 9 times out of ten they're doing it for obviously hellish purposes.

Messiaen: Vingt Regards - II. Regard de L'Étoile


Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

Again, RMJ had interesting things to say about the star the other day and, especially the deeper meaning of the text in Matthew than the Sunday School pageant - listen to it once a year in church reading of it gives.  Messiaen's disruptive, even ominous second movement, Vision of the Star might twinkle but there's a lot more going on in it than that. 

I've wondered which of the translations of regards to use, I think "vision" is probably close without being accurate, as far as I can see, Messiaen wasn't exactly clear as to whether we should literally take these as being things seen.   Maybe something more like "understanding" is close, like Julian of Norwich's "shewings".   Seen with the mind with both insight and understanding and understanding both are limited, a job for music without words.

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Note:

My day turned a lot more complicated than I anticipated this morning so I've had no time to write.  Tomorrow might be as bad but I'm going to write something tonight.   I'm tempted to write about the adulation of George H. W. Bush and I will, but not tonight.

Until then,  RMJ is writing another great series of Advent posts, he has always done good Advent posts.  

On Ross Douthat's Wet Dream Of When WASPs Ruled

Related image

Magnificat - Diana Burrell



The Choir of New College, Oxford
Edward Higginbottom, director
Christopher Glynn, organ

In my Advent survey of dozens of settings of the Magnificat several years back, it early started to seem odd to me how many settings of this most female of songs, sung on the occasion of a probably 13 or 14 year old Mary finding out she was going to be a mother, calling herself the "handmaiden" of God was so often heard in men's voices, sometimes with boys singing the treble in settings written by men, especially in the context of ancient bans on Women being heard in church. 

If I won the lottery I think I'd commission settings by women to be sung by women and girls, we need to hear more of those.  I've got a feeling there are things they get about it that the guys need help to get.
Got a call to sit with a sick relative this morning, I'll probably post something around noontime.  

Olivier Messiaen - Vignt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jesus


Yvonne Loriod, piano

The American composer Elliot Carter criticized Messiaen's music as vulgar, I think it's because his conception of reality was not the same as Carter's, not due to any actual defect in the music, itself.  I think what Carter really didn't like was Messiaen's Christian, specifically Catholic mysticism, something which in one way or other motivated and informed his music.  Certainly if the likes of Eliot Carter found it vulgar, many other musicians didn't share his opinion.  You get to decide for yourself.

In the past decade or so, this has replaced American pop music Christmas for me, that has a lot to do with my giving up listening to the increasingly unlistenable American radio programming and totally avoiding going to the store during December.  I don't miss it.

Yvonne Loriod was married to Olivier Messiaen, I believe he wrote just about all of his piano music with her playing in mind.  I have, twice, posted the entire cycle one vision of the incarnation at a time.  I wanted Loriod's playing to start out with and found this posting of the entire piece with the score, it's more than two hours of music, just to let you know.  It's not music you can really listen to while doing housework.



Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Stupid Mail

What is the title going to be?   

"Dumber and Dumbest"? 

Magnificat in D - Leo Sowerby


The Choir of St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue
Director, Gerre Hancock,
Organist, Patrick Allen


Identity Politics Of The Privileged Necessitates The Existence Of The Identity Politics Of Those They Are Privileged Over

The great issue of how the social sciences have distorted our view of groups of people first occurred to me immediately after the 2016 election when people were grasping the surveys of outfits like Pew to try to figure out who they should assign blame (or, I'd imagine on the other side, "credit") for the catastrophe of the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.  That the real group that deserved the blame for putting yet another loser of a presidential election in the office, "The Founding Fathers" was pushed aside for blaming everything from "evangelicals" to "White Women" to whoever the person citing the statistics wanted to blame.  As if any of those categories as even reported by Pew et al were uniform in voting for Trump.  Even by Pew's own figures there were significant percentages, a fifth, a quarter, and even up to figures nearing 50% of the blamed groups, WHO VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON.  But the habits of sociological thinking which we were all educated into and taught to practice made those significant minorities of those identity groups disappear into insignificance.  That is something I've railed against since the first times I commented online.

I don't know if it was because my parents, especially my mother, had such an overriding sense of fairness and honesty so as to discourage us from thinking of individuals in a stereotypical manner or what but I never figured that that kind of thing was any different from saying "Women" or "Black People" or "whatever other you want to insert" as if that meant anything except that you were a bigot.

But not all groups are like that.   There are groups of very strong ideological identity that you might be able to make such conclusions about under drastic circumstances, the Republican Party as it became in the wake of Nixon and as that fascistic depravity accelerated to Trump means that anyone who chooses to join or remain as a Republican, today, is safely considered to share in that ever more overtly anti-democratic ideological program.  I'm struck at that distinction that Susanna Heschel made between someone who joined the Nazi Party in 1930, as the central leadership of that party were hiding their intentions and in 1937 when they were well into boldly asserting their intentions.  I don't think the basic intentions of the Republican Party, since the time of the strategy of attracting racists and "evangelicals" to win elections became obvious were as covert over a longer period.  People who, presented with the fact of a Trump, the predictable outcome of such a program, in short hand Nixon's "Southern strategy"* express their horror are disingenuous.  Every Republican President since Nixon and even going back to Barry Goldwater ran on the identity politics that no one calls "identity politics" White supremacy.   George H. W. Bush who is the object of artificial veneration this week, was one of the most vicious practitioners of such racist politics.  To some extent even the "nice" Republicans certainly intended to benefit from that strategy of racism.  When Barney Frank, during the myriad of Republican congressional hearings brought under Newt Gingrich's speakers-ship ask Jim Leach of Iowa "What's a nice guy like you doing in a party like this,"  the answer was obviously, he's being a Republican under the leadership of of Newt Gingrich.

The only good Republicans in the United States are so uninformed that they are deludedly living in a past that hasn't existed since Eisenhower's administration more than sixty years ago. 

--------------------------
Since I was accused, last night, of practicing "identity politics," I was reminded that I had meant to address this segment of the CBC Sunday Edition show, a short essay by Frances Lee a student about discovering the problems of and limits of such "identity politics".

One night, my partner and I were on the couch. We were looking at data about the overrepresentation of East Asian students at top universities. At my school earlier that day, I had been told that as a person of Chinese descent, I couldn't be part of my campus organization for underrepresented students of colour.

My partner, who is white, leaned over to me and joked: "I guess you're not oppressed anymore."

I panicked.

After years of being in social justice community, I had fully embraced my identity as a person of colour. I had grown attached to the special underdog comfort it provided me, especially when I found myself in a roomful of progressive white people.

And then it hit me — I don't know how to be anymore, without this identity.

As an activist, I've fought for justice and equality for myself and my communities.  And that has required me to constantly talk about being oppressed, even at times when I feel powerful.

Well, to some extent I think her problem is that she's young and young people tend to throw themselves into such identities, especially out of a felt need of belonging to something.  Also out of a clear desire to NOT be part of the oppressive machine, which is laudable, especially when consistent.   Though I think she's definitely on the cusp of pulling out of what can turn into a trap, though I hope she doesn't give up.  What this needs is more discernment, not abandonment.  Wisdom in such things might come with more experience of the world (or it might not come).  I think she is on the road to that because right after that passage, Lee cites this paper by Eve Tuck about the seductive dangers of giving yourself too much to that kind of thinking:

In this open letter, Eve Tuck calls on communities, researchers, and educators to reconsider the long-term impact of “damage-centered” research—research that intends to document peoples’ pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression. This kind of research operates with a flawed theory of change: it is often used to leverage reparations or resources for marginalized communities yet simultaneously reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless. Tuck urges communities to institute a moratorium on damagecentered research to reformulate the ways research is framed and conducted and to reimagine how findings might be used by, for, and with communities. 

I am certainly not going to miss the opportunity to point to this as a smoking gun in my indictment of the place that sociology and sociological methods ("research") have played in giving people who should know better the excuse to present stereotypes - as are constructed through sociological methods - as real things and an acceptable, even required way to talk about and think about diverse groups of people, classifying them as either sheep or goats (to use a Biblical metaphor).  You should be very careful because that thinking, even with the methods and imprimatur as being "science", because it's not that different from the very thing that is used to oppress us.  There is, in the end, even for members of "identity groups" the very real fact that the denial of individuality, of us NOT being like other members of that group is a form of oppression.   Especially when it's called "science" which we are all trained to consider as meaning it is of enhanced reliability, not merely a different form and framing of low-status, bigoted stereotyping as folklore.

The difficulty with "identity politics" is that the crux of the problem that necessitates such politics IS THAT WE ARE CONFRONTED BY THE IDENTITY POLITICS AS PRACTICED BY THOSE WHO ARE PRIVILEGED AND POWERFUL ENOUGH TO EFFECTIVELY OPPRESS US AND MISREPRESENT US IN MASS MEDIA.  Such "identity politics" as done by what was one universally taken as and considered as and became accustomed to considering themselves the default form of humanity, straight, white, males of whatever ethnic group(s) had the status as being the elite in their location, are never called "identity politics" in my experience, but that's what it is.   It was when people classified as in those groups for discrimination and oppression used that to point out the injustice done to them BY PEOPLE IN GROUPS ABOVE THEM in power and status and wealth, that people started whining about "identity politics".

Maybe the solution is to distinguish between them as  the identity politics of the privileged and the identity politics of those disadvantaged by that privilege.  You can do that because the first one is going to ensure the existence of the second kind which is a response to it. 

If you want a model, one of the clearest ones is the racist opposition to affirmative action in University admissions.  First, the clearest and longest standing form of what is, in fact, affirmative action, the legacy admission of the generally richer, generally white, often male offspring of earlier generations of graduates is generally considered unfair to mention in that argument.  Second, the largest and most benefited group to benefit from official affirmative action, White Women, is never talked of as actual beneficiaries of that law, even in those schools where they now predominate in admissions.  Third, it is only members of those groups who are not the beneficiaries of the privilege granted to those of white or light skin color who are beneficiaries of affirmative action that those already privileged by it or by previous forms of it (never called that) find a rich racist to fund a court challenge.

-------------------------

By chance, this morning I read in a news shorts column in the National Catholic Reporter, it said in regard to Pope Francis'* recent spot of hot water:

I am sure the extremists in the gay rights choir will be calling for Pope Francis' head after he told an interviewer that a gay priest who was not celibate should leave the priesthood rather than lead a double life. But does anyone think leading a double life is a thing to prefer? That said, if I could whisper something into the pope's ear, it would be this aphorism from Leon Wieseltier, from his magnificent essay "Against Identity": "I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?"

I am indebted to Michael Sean Winters for the link to Wieseltier's piece "Against Identity" from 1994, I have read it through, quickly once today - I think I may have read it around the time it was first published.  It is full of ideas that need to be addressed and I'm sure this is going to turn into a multi-part post,  I'm just not certain about how I'm going to handle it.  Wieseltier does confirm my recent suspicion that a lot of the bad habits surrounding this do come from sociological methods.

"I seize the word identity," wrote Robert Penn Warren in 1965, "It is a key word. You hear it over and over again." A few years earlier there appeared a book that portrayed the United States as The Identity Society. Identity, according to Erik Erikson, writing in the 1950s, is "vague," "ambiguous," "unfathomable," "colloquial," "naive," "all-pervasive." Identity was certainly one of the most repercussive contributions of the social sciences to American culture. But what was it? For many intellectuals in post-war America, identity was what alienation was not. For Erikson, it was a slogan for the end of childhood, for the crucible of adolescence, for the success of socialization. Identity smelled like teen spirit. (The crucible of adolescence: that is an example of Eriksonian sentimentality.) Finally Erikson's influence on the American obsession with identity was less a theory than a mood. He made identity into a romance.

I don't think, especially given the unreliability of the results and the inevitable misreporting of them even on those rare occasions that the researchers present their results in honestly modest terms that it's helpful.  I am less impressed with sociology than, perhaps, Robert Penn Warren was, though I think his identification of identity as a central issue in American life reaches the glaringly obvious.  It's embedded in the United States Constitution, against which so many "identity groups" have had to struggle.

I do have to wonder at Wieseltier, a straight white male of Jewish identity, a  product of elite private schools, at a time when there was a virtual 100% affirmative action program for white males in most if not all of those he attended was in effect, someone who would later be revealed to have a history of sexual harassment (which he admitted), working in a milieu in which his ethnicity would certainly not make him a target of oppression (The New Republic of the Marty Perez era), writing that article on that topic.   I certainly think the racism and other freely expressed bigotries freely expressed in that magazine he wrote it for is relevant to that consideration.

One thing is certain, from the fact that this article is twenty-four years old and that it cites much older authors talking about the issue that the current attempt to make "identity politics" a recent innovation of Women, Black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ, etc. people to whine about their victimization is a lie.  It's the whining, typically by the same people who mounted and benefited from the "Southern Strategy" to attack people struggling for their rights as members of minority groups and as individuals.

The issue for those of us in such "identity groups" is not to be so stupid as to reject allies among even straight-white-men and to not allow the stereotypical images of us deprive us of the ultimate goal, of being able to be ourselves in full equality.

*  I wish Pope Francis would stop giving interviews, it's about the only time he gets himself in trouble as journalists and those who read them can't deal with the level of nuance Pope Francis obviously thinks in.   They don't seem to understand that he still is the Pope of the Roman Catholic church and is not a politician.  I do wonder what his conception of "gay culture" is because there's lots that gets called that which I've got a problem with.

Note:  This is a preliminary article on this topic, it's kind of all over the place but I'm sure other posts will come dealing with it in smaller doses.

Monday, December 3, 2018

Reinier de Graaf -Magnificat


Vocal Enseble Leggiero

Other than that the composer is from the Netherlands, I can't find anything about him.  No conductor is listed.

" How Come You Answer Atheists Whose Comments You Don't Post?"

While I was writing for a blog belonging to someone else and often getting blog mobbed over what I said, I came to realize that there was organized trolling of comment threads by atheists and, especially in those years as the "new atheism" was still relatively new and ubiquitous that posting their comments was doing half of their work for them. 

I'd been trolled by and, on one hilariously wrong occasion, the target of an attempted doxing by some on the basis of some fairly mild criticism by 2006.  Personally,  twelve-years-ago, I was going from being a kind of wishy-washy believer, the kind which reading John Dominic Crossan's Historical Jesus could produce in the late 1990s to seeing that both the core of the Mosaic tradition and the Gospel were persuasively true.

That discovery of the truth, for me, is an ongoing effort.  Being a political blogger, I was already well on the way to realizing that the ubiquitous secular-anti-religious-atheist, libertarian-liberalism-leftism was wrong and was, in fact, demonstrated as a failure by its being pushed for more than a century.  The only success it had in real life was to make things steadily worse since the middle 1960s.

Confronting, over and over again, the same old lines and lies of atheism, like the same old, same old lines of Republican-fascism,  I decided that instead of posting them, yet again, that I would, generally, answer them without reinforcing the lie by repeating them in the form the atheists found most convenient to their ideological program.  Quite often it was possible to rephrase their claims so as to make them less dishonest before answering them.

Since the rise of Donald Trump I have come to see that decision as being validated by journalists such as Rachel Maddow who, correctly, refuse to post much in the way of Trump verbiage or the lies of Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Sean Spicer because it wasn't necessary and it only lent credibility to them that wasn't warranted.

I do frequently post comments from Simps and, on occasion, others because

a. they are typical in their wrongness,

b. they are generally direct and personal misrepresentations of what I've said posted at Duncan Black's blog or elsewhere and so require an answer,

c. they're useful to show how anti-intellectual and stupid the mix of lazily absorbed  modernistic-kewlitude obtained through commercial pop culture as opposed to the truth gained through study and thought is.

That mix of crap is, actually, what informs most of secular American culture, both left and right, the team colors and teams cheered for are the major difference, not the veridical character of what is held.  That was something I was horrified to learn from interactions with many thousands more self-declared lefties and liberals of that type online, in online discussions, in blog posts, etc. Even those who held PhDs and taught at prestigious schools and scribbled for influential journals were formed by and lived their lives of the mind within it.

The only other surprising thing about it is how stupid and stubbornly wrong it is no matter how many times it is confronted with fact. 

Defeating that form of secular- materialist-anti-religious-leftish-libertarian BALLOT BOX POISON is, in fact, essential for the success of the American tradition of liberalism, the heritage of the abolitionists, those who campaigned against wage-slavery, for Womens' suffrage, for equality and justice, including economic justice.   The history of anti-religious, secular "liberalism" proves it is the enemy of that traditional American liberalism, that traditional kind of liberalism being the only likely opposition to corporatist-oligarchic Mammonism which will succeed in the United States or, I hold, anywhere.

Getting Rid Of Crap While Sorting Crap To Get Rid Of?

While doing some very belated fall housekeeping just now, listening to the eminent philosopher, Daniel Came giving possible alternatives to The Big Bang in a "big bounce" speculation of an oscillating ensemble of universes (so as to avoid the type of absolute beginning of the universe such as the authors of Genesis intuited) and the refutation of arguments of design in this, our only known universe with multi-verse conjecture, something occurred to me that I've never heard anyone else bring up.

Multi-universe conjecture was invented on the premise that because our scheme of statistical probability - invented by us humans and obtaining whatever verification it has in this, our one, fine-tuned universe - means that any possible universe anyone comes up with and can make up equations for  have an equal chance of happening or existing.   But what if that basic premise of statistical probability is not, actually true when it comes to "other universes" which some of the most ardent proponents of posit are, in every way, different from our universe.  It strikes me as quite possible that in the case of "universes" they just don't sort out in a way that is vulnerable to statistical analysis.

Why should that be true for every "possible universe" which ideologically interested cosmologists and mathematicians can posit has an equal chance to exist?   Why couldn't it be as true that, in reality, in actual existence, ONLY the kind of universe which we are certain exits, is the only kind which can actually exist?

Our only possible frame of testing shows that the only kind of universe we can be certain exists is the one we inhabit, the one which seems very persuasively to be finely tuned and, therefore, indicative of the possibility of design.

We have no way of testing or frame of reference to say that any other kind of universe is possible, to claim that there is any reason to believe that any other kind of universe could exist or has any real probability of existing is unfounded.

We don't know that if there are 500,000,000,000,000,000 . . . other universes other than our own that there is any reason to expect anything except that every one of them will be "finely tuned" to make the possibility of intelligent life in them even an absolutely guaranteed aspect of the life of those universes..  If it's a certainty, as it seems to be in our universe, since we're here, is probability even relevant to it?  I can't help it but the whole idea of there being more than one UNIverse jars me as a linguistic contradiction. 

It could be that God abundantly creates such universes in order to create an infinite number of intelligent beings who are capable of doing as much and more than we can for reasons God chooses not to share with any of us.

Daniel Came and William Lane Craig, who Came was quite responsibly and quite politely refuting were engaged in an act of making logical arguments, not for the purpose of proof, I don't think anyone who has even a moderately sophisticated thought on the matter believes proof of any of this is possible, they are engaged in acts of PERSUASION.   I think the arguments that Craig came up with requires less speculation and less invention of untestable things up to and including the ultimate in universe creation out of nothing (except equations) by very finite and limited minds.  I have many disagreements with Craig on religion and politics, I do find his arguments were the more persuasive on the basis of intellectual plausibility.

Hate Mail - It's Funny When The Big Fat Iconoclastic Infidels Get Pissy Over Me Being Irreverent About The Unfunny George Carlin

I'll just post what Sam Seder, sometimes comic, sometimes pretty funny podcast host said about another unfunny guy late last week because it's pretty much the same thing Carlin did when his beatnik-hippy shtick didn't stand the test of time very long.

What's going to be interesting with Gavin [McInnes] is if anybody pays any attention to him.  He's obviously going to try to lay low now to hopefully get back some of his mojo in the hipster set.  I think it's unlikely that's going to happen.  But without him being an extremist he doesn't have much to offer because it's not like the guy is hugely funny.  Now look,  I happen to know some of Gavin's friends, and one of the things . . . former friends I should say . . . and one of the things they said, he desperately wants to be a comedian, he's always wanted to be a comedian, he hung out with a bunch of comedians, that's how I met him, in a group of comedians . . . 

but he's JUST . . . NOT . . . FUNNY.  

And, after a while, if it doesn't work, what do you do?  You develop a shtick that sells. 

Sam Seder on Gavin McInnes trying to leave the group of fascists he founded, Proud Boys, behind because he's afraid of paying a price for being such a racist, sexist, LGBT bashing jerk, a hero to a bunch of douche bags. 




Sunday, December 2, 2018

Why do you spend money for what is not bread, And your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And delight yourself in abundance. Isaiah 55:2 The Roches "Want Not Want Not"


I'm thinking of trying to get by for a whole year buying nothing but food to see what that's like.  I figure this is a good song to start the Christmas season with,  a non-having song.

Harold Darke - Magnificat in a minor


The Byron Consort of Harrow School March 14, 2015

I've decided to do another Advent series posting settings of the Magnificat.  I thought I'd start with this one by the relatively unknown British Anglican organist and compose a few of whose works I posted last month. 

Magnificat. St. Luke I. 46.

MY soul doth magnify the Lord, * and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
    For he hath regarded * the lowliness of his handmaiden.
    For behold, from henceforth * all generations shall call me blessed.
    For he that is mighty hath magnified me; * and holy is his Name.
    And his mercy is on them that fear him * throughout all generations.
    He hath showed strength with his arm; * he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
    He hath put down the mighty from their seat, * and hath exalted the humble and meek.
    He hath filled the hungry with good things; * and the rich he hath sent empty away.
    He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel; * as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed, for ever.

Book of Common Prayer 1928

Why Let The Facts or Logical Coherence Get In The Way Of A Satisfying Prejudice?

As I said in passing in a short, impromptu post a few days ago, I increasingly don't listen to the CBC's Sunday Edition because its longtime host Michael Enright can get on my nerves.  That was on my mind because last week was one I opted not to listen.

That's too bad because the piece I wrote about the scummy product of too many elite Catholic schools in the United States could have benefited from his piece about the scandal plagued St. Michael's School, which he went to, which had its own, Canadian problems with jock culture and machismo.  It's a good essay which I certainly would have referenced.  Hockey culture can be as anti-Christian as football, though most of that is not an intrinsic part of the game, as it is in American football.   You could, conceivably, play a game of hockey without any violation of anything in the Gospel or epistles.  Though you can certainly violate those as typically they are in all sports.  But you violate everything up to and including the Golden Rule as soon as you start playing football, violence is an intrinsic part of the game, it is more than slightly and more than intentionally like the Roman gladiatorial spectacles that were eventually banned by Christianity in Rome. The presence of American football at any Catholic or supposedly Christian school is a sign that the moral character of the place is a facade covering moral decay.

But my reason for writing this was in the letters Enright read today, a letter writer who talks about the priest-coach who ran a sadistic sports program, him witnessing the priest kicking a player of Italian heritage and calling him a "yellow wop".  The letter writer said that witnessing that put him off "organized religion".  My question is why didn't it put him off organized sports, especially organized sports in schools, such incidents abound in entirely secular contexts, schools, universities, amateur and professional sports, youth sports (wonder what the guy said about the various sex scandals involving prominent coaches in Canadian Youth Hockey a decade or more back).

It comes the day after I heard a podcast in which the host cites GORE VIDAL! as an expert on the history of the culpability of "single-god religions" in producing the long history of warfare and bloodshed.  That someone could believe Gore Vidal on anything much is a head shaker.  The guy was an admitted pederast whose frequent trips to Thailand, rightly infamous as a center of pedophile sex slavery as well as a long and documented life of cruising, sometimes in company with other celebrity writers and celebrities of not even that accomplishment are well known.  Not to mention that his veracity on matters historical is documented to be spotty and suspected of being ideological if not just a reflection of his prejudices and personal preferences.

This isn't what I was looking for by way of citations on this and I'm still worn out from being sick so I'll just post this:

In his hilarious [I'll break in here to stipulate that I've never found a single thing he did "hilarious"] analysis of The 10 Commandments, George Carlin said to loud applause, “More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason,” and many take this idea as an historical fact. When I hear someone state that religion has caused most wars, though, I will often and ask the person to name these wars. The response is typically, “Come on! The Crusades, The Inquisition, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, 9/11. Need I name more?”  

Well, yes, we do need to name more, because while clearly there were wars that had religion as the prime cause, an objective look at history reveals that those killed in the name of religion have, in fact, been a tiny fraction in the bloody history of human conflict. In their recently published book, “Encyclopedia of Wars,” authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of 1763 wars only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone.

History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict. The wars of the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. These wars were for territorial conquest, to control borders, secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority. In fact, the ancient conquerors, whether Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, or Roman, openly welcomed the religious beliefs of those they conquered, and often added the new gods to their own pantheon. 

Medieval and Renaissance wars were also typically about control and wealth as city-states vied for power, often with the support, but rarely instigation, of the Church. And the Mongol Asian rampage, which is thought to have killed nearly 30 million people, had no religious component whatsoever. 

Most modern wars, including the Napoleonic Campaign, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, the Russia Revolution, World War II, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, were not religious in nature or cause. While religious groups have been specifically targeted (most notably in World War II), to claim that religion was the cause is to blame the victim and to misunderstand the perpetrators’ motives, which were nationalistic and ethnic, not religious.

I think the reason that lazy-assed journalists, scribblers, babblers, go to that old saw about religion being to blame for everything is exactly that, they're lazy and they know that it's the easiest accusation in the world to make and, being easy, it will get the universal approval of the bigoted and superficial, risking little in the way of opposition.  And, as it notes in my immediate previous post, its total lack of veracity and documentation will not make the slightest bit of difference, even when the refutation of it is provided.

Stupid Mail - On The Insistence Of Being Ignorant

Like so many of the voluntarily mentally deficient, Simps thinks that his ignorance of something means the same thing as it being untrue. There's a lot of that at Duncan's.  It's a similar phenomenon that fuels climate change denial and far less importantly, the denial that evolution happened.   They're alike in practice, it's the details of what they deny that's different.

Like so many of our generation, Simps, trained on television and Hollywood movies, was brought up in ignorance of so many things.  Only one of those things is the fact that the Nazis explained their entire ideology in terms of the theory of natural selection, Darwinism was suppressed in the English language during the post-war period because it was desired to pretend that Nazism was a peculiarly German aberration when the connections with English language biology, especially eugenics were known in both Germany and in countries where English was spoken in the entire period of the existence of the Nazi party, from the 1920s and 30s, when English speaking biologists, quite mainstream biologists such as Charles Davenport, worked with Nazis to put their racist ideology into practice. 

That truth was known and admitted, even boasted of up to the start of the war.  I've given many, many citations of Darwinists as mainstream as Leonard Darwin, than whom there was no one with a stronger claim to the mantle of his father making that case by the start of the war.  If you're unfamiliar with my blog, look at the archive, I've given that documentation in, literally, scores of posts, with lengthy quotes, with citations and, where available, with links to primary documents in both English and German.

That the movie Schindler's List wouldn't discuss that fully documented connection is something I don't have any explanation of.  I saw it exactly once, not long after it came out and I have to admit I don't recall it very well.  It could be that,like Simps, Steven Zaillian, the writer and Steven Spielberg, the director of the movie and Thomas Keneally, the author of THE NOVEL ON WHICH THE MOVIE WAS BASED,  Schindler's Ark,  didn't know that glaring fact of history.  I will note that Zaillian has a degree in "Cinema" which strikes me as sort of like having a degree in "Madonnaology" or "Mixology".  I used to be that ignorant but, as I grew up,  I looked at the primary historical documentation instead of Hollywood movies or novels and found that the connection couldn't possibly be more certain or more abundantly documented. 

One thing I never was, in that ignorance, was stupid enough to think that Hollywood movies were a place to look for accurate historical information.  Maybe it was instinctual.   I recently reminisced with my brother about the first time my mother sent me into the variety store in town to pick up the Boston Globe and the Portland Press Herald, the first time I ever encountered a tabloid, the Record American aka, "the little picture paper."  I'd never seen or heard of a tabloid but I knew as soon as I saw the garish black and white photo on the cover and the screaming headlines that it wasn't something to be trusted. I would guess I was four or so.   I don't remember ever believing in what movies said.  Maybe my parents brought me up to be less credulous than Simp's raised him.   Or maybe they let him watch TV too much and it made him stupid.

I Come Not To Praise Bush I But To Tell The Unwelcomed Truth About Him

George H. W. Bush, "Bush I" was the head of a crime family which, being from the class of wealthy W.A.S.P.s who have had control of the United States government were able to prevent laws against their criminal behavior and, so, were not generally admitted to be little different from officially designated crime families while doing the same and worse than those who are members of such officially designated crime families. 

George H. W. Bush's greatest crimes were as part of the Nixon and Reagan administrations as well as his own, it involved the terror campaign on behalf of fascist dictators in Latin and Central America, in Southeast Asia in relation to the war in Vietnam and its expansion, in Africa and in the Middle-East.   One of the worst of those massive acts of criminality was the so-called "First Gulf-War" which was instigated by his ambassador giving Saddam Hussein tacit permission to invade Kuwait because Bush I wanted to be a "war president" to ensure his re-election.  He got his war, huge numbers of people died but his economic policies were damaging enough to the plebs in the United States that he didn't win reelection despite the great and endlessly self-congratulating "free press" going wildly enthusiastic for his war.  I'll never forget how CNN covered its start, one of the most Orwellian evenings of my life.

I could also point to his son's war, Bush II, installed by a putsch organized by a Bush crime family cousin on FOX and organized and staffed by other members of their criminal organization and made final by Republican-fascist Supreme Court action, we don't know everything about Daddy Bush's participation in that, no doubt as time goes on we will find out more about how that happened.  As with Bush I's war the great-self-congratulating United States free press, they backed the whole thing.  You know, the ones who are doing the ritual cover up for the dead G.H.W. Bush now that he's died at an age up to 94 times that of some of the many, many thousands who died as children and infants during his life of "public service".   I figured someone should say it.  The free-press won't.