Month: March 2004

(political stuff here, move along if my leftist-mode offends)

Ever since 9-11-01, a common claim from more extreme sectors of the Right has been that if only Bill Clinton had ever done more than just lame missile strikes against Osama Bin Laden, how different things would have been. Ergo, how wonderful that we now have a President who realizes how important it is to take the fight to the terrorists, and to kill them whenever the opportunity arises, bringing whatever force necessary to bear.

Except, well, not quite.

“With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq. But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger….Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,’ said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution. Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe. The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.”

Imagine that. Faced with an opportunity to attack a known terrorist group, and quite possibly kill its leader, the plan to do so was shelved because going after the guy with no known terrorist connections and no weapons of mass destruction was deemed more important.

And the guy allowed to go away is still blowing up innocents in Iraq.

Yup, this President is just doing a great job in the War on Terror.

(Link via Morat)

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My own ignorance, that is.

Michelle headlines her most recent post with a directive to “Never forget” — and the event she is memorializing is one of which I’ve never heard, despite the fact that thousands died. It is a massacre that occurred on February 28, 1947, in Taiwan.

I believe I mentioned a while back that I need to read more about Asian history, and this reminds me of that.

Part of making sure that we “Never forget” something is to teach people about it in the first place. On that score, Michelle has reason to say, “Mission accomplished”.

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Words defy me.

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It’s always terribly hard to capture, in words, the essence of a musical work. To paraphrase Leonard Bernstein, “If the composer could say in words what he wanted to say, why would he use music at all?” Stirling Newberry, though, gives it a go with this essay about Beethoven’s Symphony #7.

The Seventh is often cited as Beethoven’s greatest work, and there’s a hell of a lot of reason why. For me, my tastes tend to embrace the Ninth more — not surprisingly, given my predilection for works of massive apocalyptic glory — but the Seventh is, and always will be, utterly amazing. What always strikes me about the Seventh is its inevitability, the way every single note seems to naturally spring from the one immediately before it.

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Matthew Yglesias points out an article suggesting that John Kerry make a Clinton his running mate — and not the junior Senator from New York, either, but that other famous Clinton. The one who’s been unemployed since noon on January 20, 2001.

Now, you’re thinking that the Constitution probably forbids such a thing, and you’re probably right, as Matthew describes; one Amendment says that “No person shall be elected President twice”, but then, another says that “No person ineligible to be President shall be Vice President”, although this might actually refer to the age and “natural born citizen” stuff, as opposed to the stuff about eligibility for mere election.

But really, the idea’s just dumb, anyway. If a Kerry/Clinton ticket were even legal (and Matthew is right that surely it wouldn’t be a good idea to have a ticket whose very legality would be a major issue), what of it? If Kerry/Clinton were elected, and Kerry died and thus re-elevated Bill Clinton to the Presidency, he’d be an instant lame duck. This would do the Democratic Party no good at all, since they’d have an incumbent ineligible to run again and thus would have to immediately start searching for yet another nominee; and it seems to me that the repercussions of such a transition from VP to President would be worse the closer one gets to the next election. If President Kerry were to die in, say, March of 2008, and VP Clinton ascended the Presidency but couldn’t run again, the country would be in the position of having no fewer than three different Presidents in a period of less than one year. (Kerry, then Clinton, then the 2008 winner upon the 2009 Inauguration.)

So, even if the Supreme Court were to decide that Clinton could be Vice President, I don’t think it would be a good idea. Now, I do think that a case can be made for allowing former Presidents who have had two terms to run again after a certain period of time — say, two or three full terms — given that lifespans are getting longer all the time. But even if such an Amendment to the Constitution ever comes to pass, I’m certain the language would “grandfather” Bill Clinton out of eligibility.

Bill Clinton, like him or hate him, is a compelling figure, and an important voice in America today. But he won’t be President again.

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This morning, I attended a performance of a stage version of Charlotte’s Web with the kid, as an outing organized by her preschool group. The performance was at Shea’s Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Buffalo, which is in turn the city’s main locale for big productions and such. Since there were a lot of different school groups attending this play, the theater seating was sectioned off by school group, so the ushers could — theoretically — direct incomers to their appropriate seating area. Fair enough.

Except, they also wanted to pack in as many seats as possible, so since we were actually the first people from the kid’s group to enter the theater, our usher — a cranky little old lady with a button the size of a dinner plate reading “I’M A VOLUNTEER!” — tried getting us to take a couple of empty seats in the middle of the school group in front of ours! This woman actually expected a four-year-old kid to understand her anal reasoning for not allowing her to sit with her friends, who started filing in moments later.

Luckily for her (the kid), I dug deep into my soul and found that part of me that refuses to respect authority. (Actually, it didn’t require digging all that deep.) As I directed the kid to the seat beside one of her best friends, I could hear THE VOLUNTEER! behind me, grousing something along the lines of, “Well, that’s not the way we do it.”

The performance itself was pretty faithful, although I’m not entirely sure my daughter realized the sadness of Charlotte’s Web‘s ending. She seemed to have a good time, though.

(BTW, a note to theater groups: Please make sure your sound equipment is properly tested before you give your performance, OK? Especially if one of your speakers is prone to emitting sudden and deafening bursts of static with no warning. This is generally not welcomed by a theater full of kids ranging from preschool to second grade.)

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Steven Den Beste returned to blogging yesterday after taking a week off due to blogging fatigue, but in two of his first three posts since his return, he bitches about his readers.

Not that he needs my input, but this seems to me a sign that he came back too early.

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The other day, in speculating that the fair lass who married Aaron is, in fact, a vampire, I also reported that I absolutely loathe Maurice Ravel’s Bolero. In comments, Sean expressed surprise, so I should probably attempt to explain why I hate this piece.

Very simply, it boils down to a single reason: Bolero is nothing more than a single melody, repeated in its entirety something like twenty times, each time played by a different instrument or group of instruments and each time getting louder until, at the end, what started as a single pianissimo snare drum and a flute has become the entire orchestra blasting that melody until the paint peels from the concert hall’s walls. And admittedly, the orchestration is pretty damned amazing — Ravel gets some pretty startling sounds out of the standard orchestra, and you should probably hear the thing just once for that reason alone. I got to play it once, and I enjoyed the trumpet parts, when I got to play; but the rest of it was counting measures to the next entrance. And poor Aaron’s wife had to play the damned snare drum part, probably the most thankless task in all classical music after being the poor slob who has to play the bass line in Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

Cool orchestration, yeah. But it’s that damned melody, see — all Ravel does with it is repeat it. Literally, he does nothing but repeat it. It never develops, it never opens up into other melodic or rhythmic possibilities, it never goes anywhere except louder and somewhere else in the orchestra. And really, it’s not even that interesting of a melody in the first place, sounding to me like someone attempting to improvise a melody who isn’t confident enough to move beyond the confinesof the scale. (Hum it, if you don’t believe me — the entire melody is almost completely stepwise.)

True, Dimitri Shostakovich uses a very similar device in his Symphony No. 7 (the “Leningrad”), but I like Shosty’s melody more, he doesn’t call the crescendo-by-repetition device an entire piece, and it makes sense in that work’s programmatic context as representing the long, slow march toward Leningrad of the Nazi siege army.

I have the obligatory recording of Bolero on my shelf, since it was coupled with a recording of Ravel’s infinitely more-interesting Daphnis et Chloe Suite #2 and La Valse. Once every two years or so, I’ll put Bolero in the stereo, thinking that maybe I’ll have finally opened up to it, or, failing that, at least it’ll be over in fifteen minutes. And never once have I made it past the eight minute mark before hitting “Stop”. Lots of people, it seems, listen to Bolero and hear hypnotic sensualism; I listen to it and hear naught but boring repetition. Ears of the beholder, I guess.

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I may have been reading the wrong political blogs the last day or two, because I only learn today — via Kevin Drum, who is apparently behind the curve himself — that some journalist posed this question to John Kerry at the most recent Democratic debate: “Is God on America’s side?” James Lileks thinks this is just incredibly clever, although it doesn’t seem all that brilliant to me, since there are several obvious replies.

Kerry’s was “Most of the time”, to which Lileks thinks he gets the great trump card, “So, when wasn’t he?” Oh, I dunno — slavery? The resistance to the civil rights struggle? Vietnam? (No, James, to say that God would not have approved of Vietnam does not imply that God therefore supported Communism — but that’s the common rhetoric these days, when “Against this” must necessarily be equivalent to “For that”. But James Lileks, whenever I read him, seems utterly incapable of nuanced thinking whenever he goes into political mode. His every politics-centered Bleat is based on the idea that every issue admits only two possible positions, one right, and one Liberal or Democratic.) You just list a couple such instances, and then you say something like “But God is on our side when we learn from our mistakes, because that’s what he created us to do,” and there you go, question over. Lileks’s idea that this question pins Kerry into discomfort is ludicrous.

But an even better response would be something along the lines of, “I can’t presume to speak for God, but it seems to me we should wonder if America is on God’s side.” Short, direct, and it deflects the questioner’s attempt at moral superiority.

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Lynn Sislo points out (just before linking me; Thanks, Lynn!) a blog called Dispatches from the Culture Wars, which has all the earmarks of a pretty damned good blog. Good stuff on evolution taking place right now.

To return for just a moment to my off-hand comment about homeschooling that engendered a pretty extensive (for these parts) comment thread, I guess my real big problem with homeschooling, in principle, is that I think that we need to have a national debate one of these days on just what we think our kids should be learning. I don’t like the idea of children learning only those things that their parents wish them to learn, and I especially don’t like that idea in a time when science is generally held in very low esteem.

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