RIP Charles Grodin

The New Neo Posted on by

Actor Charles Grodin died yesterday at the age of 86. He was fabulous in one of my favorite movies of all time, “Midnight Run.” In the movie, Grodin played an accountant who had embezzled money from a Chicago mobster, and De Niro was the bounty hunter attempting to bring Grodin in.

I could choose any number of clips from the film featuring Grodin, because the entire movie was wildly funny and entertaining from start to finish, but I’ll settle for these. Clips don’t do the movie – or Grodin – justice, but they’ll have to do:

Spoilers for this one, if you haven’t seen the movie and ever intend to see it:

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) A summary of the AP’s denial about its offices being housed in the same building as Hamas.

(2) So, has the teacher’s union been running the CDC? Apparently.

(3) Speaking of the CDC, Glenn Greenwald makes a good point here. He’s been making a lot of good points lately, hasn’t he?

(4) A person using a car as a weapon should not be considered “unarmed.”

(5) They used to call it “penis envy.” Now we’ve got this.

Leftist influence in the military

The New Neo Posted on by

We started hearing reports during the Obama years of a switchover in terms of ideology in the military. Here’s an article about it (written some years later, but I recall hearing about it at the time, too):

…[T]he Army that I joined during Obama’s first term was nothing like the Army that I left it towards the end of the second.

And I think the Army, the military in general, is such an opaque institution from the outside sometimes, that I think the American people are kind of in the dark a little bit, about what all of these policy changes and cultural changes implemented by progressive activists in the Obama administration are really doing…

Well, [the Obama adminstration was] focused more on accomplishing stated social goals versus simply focusing on the military’s sole job, which is to fight and win wars.

So, I interviewed scores of sources for the book, and a number of them were people like two- or three-star generals who were in the room when these decisions were being made.

And what they would tell me is that, we never got … coming from the White House, the administration, we were never getting guidance about, you know, hey, we want to have this many brigades ready, or like, tell us the status of the troops.

It was all simply focused on, basically, things like the transgender policy or integrating, creating gender-neutral infantry. And it’s over the objections of the commandant of the Marine Corps and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And so, basically, to pull one quote, someone said, “ … We got a lot of direction from the White House, but none of it had anything to do with war fighting.”

And I think that kind of sums it up…

…[T]he [military] academies now are increasingly run by civilian professors, rather than military instructors.

And that started during the Clinton administration, but it really expanded during the Obama administration. And I’ll get to why that’s problematic and how that plays out in a minute. But just as an example, West Point was 2% to 3% civilian professor in the early ’90s, and now it’s 25% . And now, one out of every three instructors at the Air Force Academy are civilian instructors…

You [shouldn’t] send people to West Point to become more “gender cosmopolitan,” you send them to West Point so they can prepare to lead soldiers.

It really became apparent when the story of Spenser Rapone broke in 2017. Remember him?:

Many people (me included) wondered how it was that the openly-Communist Spenser Rapone was allowed to graduate from West Point. It’s not as though Rapone was underground with his point of view as a proud Communist. And West Point isn’t Evergreen State College—is it? So how on earth did Rapone fall through the cracks?

Now the professor who had originally reported Rapone to West Point authorities (to no avail), retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Heffington, has issued an open letter to West Point graduates with a word—actually, many words—of explanation…

So now we have Matthew Lohmeier:

The Defense Department relieved Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier of his command of the 11th Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, CO, due to comments made on a podcast about Marxism spreading in the military.

Lohmeier told Sean Hannity the Marxism spread is not a recent development. It’s been happening for years.

Yes. If you’ve been paying attention, you know.

More:

I made that very clear to my own people that in light of a hyper politicized environment that I’ve seen since taking command and I’m no longer in command, I will not tolerate any discrimination of any kind based on politics, for example. So let me give you one example of what I saw in the past ten months when I was in command of the unit. There were videos sent out to every base and service member that we were asked to watch in preparation for our extremism down days and discussions on race in which we were taught that the country is evil and founded in 1619 and not 1776 and that whites are inherently evil. And so I speak up against those things in my book.

As for the question of whether Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Training (which is what Lohmeier is describing here) are actually Marxist, please see a discussion in yesterday’s comments that begins with this comment and link from “Art Deco.” My reply can be found here. Then that was followed by this and this.

A bit of computer trouble today

The New Neo Posted on by

My computer is old, and I should probably get a new one. But one thing I really hate is making technological transitions.

I bet some people love it. They love learning about all the bells and whistles on a new gadget. They love learning new ways to do the same old things.

Not me. I’m a creature of technological habit. My fingers do the walking and they like to walk on well-worn paths. People laugh at my computer with its keys where quite a few of the letters have been rubbed off and obliterated over time.

I don’t care. I touch-type, thanks to the NYC public junior high school system circa you-know-approximately-when. Typing was a mandatory class, and it was one of the hardest of all. The teacher was a tiny but incredibly strict woman. We had to learn on IBM machines with blank keys. No cheating for us; it wasn’t even possible.

But I digress. Today my computer decided to get slow and then slower and then freeze, so I just restarted it and it seems to have healed itself for now. I’m a firm believer in self-healing electronics, too.

So, back to blogging…

Using the word “kapo” as an insult

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I noticed this word appearing again lately, so I think it’s time to repost this. I originally wrote it in December of 2015.]

I’ve noticed the word “kapo” cropping up now and then in the comments section of this blog, to refer to someone Jewish who is seen as an underhanded betrayer of the Jewish people or Israel. Here’s a typical example, which was posted around the time of the Iran deal and referred to the vote for it:

Kapo:
Did Jerry Nadler Betray America, Israel and His Community?
Yes.

Kapos were an essential component in the running of the German National Socialist concentration camps.

But Jerry Nadler (and all the others I’ve ever seen described by the word, except of course for the actual, real-life historical kapos) had no gun pointed at his head when he decided about the Iran deal. Nor was he facing a death camp or concentration camp. And therein lies a tale—about the actual kapos, who they were and what they faced.

Let’s first establish that, although the word is often used to refer to Jews, and although some were certainly Jewish, most kapos were not [emphasis mine]:

A kapo or prisoner functionary was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks in the camp…The system was designed to turn victim against victim, as the prisoner functionaries were pitted against their fellow prisoners in order to maintain the favor of their SS guards. If they were derelict, they would be returned to the status of ordinary prisoners and be subject to other kapos. Many prisoner functionaries were recruited from the ranks of violent criminal gangs rather than from the more numerous political, religious and racial prisoners; those were known for their brutality toward other prisoners.

The kapos were involuntary prisoners in a system that was known for its overwhelming brutality. By becoming kapos, they qualified for some moderate privileges that meant they might actually be able to survive their horrific captivity. Some kapos actually were relatively decent (mostly in secrecy) to the fellow-prisoners under their supervision. The camp administrators preferred kapos from the criminal population, because they were less hampered by conventional morality:

At Buchenwald, these tasks were originally assigned to criminal prisoners, but after 1939, political prisoners began to displace the criminal prisoners, though criminals were preferred by the SS. At Mauthausen, on the other hand, functionary positions remained dominated by criminal prisoners until just before liberation…

Identified by green triangles, the befristeten Vorbeugungshé¤ftling or “BV” [criminal] kapos, were called “professional criminals” by other prisoners and were known for their brutality and lack of scruples. Indeed, they were selected by the SS because of those qualities. According to former prisoners, the criminal functionaries were more apt to be helpful to the SS than political functionaries, who were more apt to be helpful to other prisoners.

More evidence that Jews were not preferred by the SS to be chosen as kapos:

The SS sometimes had racial criteria for the prisoner functionaries, sometimes one had to be racially “superior” to be a functionary.

And once a person was fingered to be a kapo, there was no turning back. Here’s Himmler on the subject:

The moment we become dissatisfied with him, he is no longer Kapo, he’s back to sleeping with his men. And he knows that he will be beaten to death by them the first night.

After the war, some particularly brutal kapos were tried and sentenced—German ones in Germany, Polish ones in Poland, and some Jewish ones in Israel. I have tried to get a good estimate of what percentage of kapos were Jews, since the word is usually used today in the context of accusing Jews of various offenses, and although I haven’t found an official estimate it’s clear that the Nazi preference was for them not to be Jews. This book of interviews with Jewish Sonderkommandos from Aushwitz contains one survivor’s estimate that 80% of the kapos were not Jewish, for example. Another memoir indicates that 10% of kapos were Jews. A historical novel QB VII by Leon Uris, presumably based on research, states that only a few out of every hundred were Jewish.

So it appears that the idea that kapos were predominantly Jewish is almost certainly false, and in fact Jews seem to have been significantly underrepresented among kapos in comparison to their numbers among regular camp prisoners. However, some kapos were indeed Jewish.

In addition, camp survivors usually say that the Jewish kapos tended to be better (see this) and German kapos were often (although not always) considered the worst (see this).

But the situation of the kapos in general, particularly those who had no previous criminal history, was so substantially different from that of virtually anyone in the US today, that I would say it is actually an abomination to compare the two, for the simple reason that kapos were concentration camp inmates under threat of torture and death. As kapos they received special privileges, and the most special one was life itself. In other words, their first motivation was to save their lives in a situation of evil so total and so horrific that in a very real way they were victims who were coerced into colluding with their oppressors.

Consider the case of Jacob Tannenbaum, a Jew and a former kapo who was alleged to have been violent and who was tried many years later in the US. This was his pre-kapo history:

…Tannenbaum [was] an observant Polish Jew who, before the war, had been active in Zionist activities. His wife, six-month-old daughter, parents and five siblings perished during the Holocaust.

Perhaps that would be enough to make a person go mad, even without more. But there was considerably more that Tannenbaum experienced before becoming a kapo:

After some time in a Polish camp in 1942, he was sent with other relatively healthy prisoners to the forced-labor camp in Galicia, where his Nazi captors blinded him in one eye and severely injured his back in a beating.

Finally, for eight months in 1944 and 1945, he served as a kapo in Gorlitz, supervising 1,000 prisoners who worked there in an armaments factory.

Tannenbaum was in camps for a total of three years. After the war he came to the US and became a citizen in 1955, a practicing Orthodox Jew who donated money to causes such as that of Weisenthal, the Nazi-tracker. Years later he was recognized and arrested, and the camp survivors testified that he had been especially brutal, beating them sometimes without even Germans being present, and in six cases causing the death of inmates (for example, by informing on them for infractions). But Tannenbaum said there had always been Germans present during the beatings and that he did what he did under threat of death. In the end there was a settlement, with Tannenbaum stripped of his citizenship but not deported for health reasons. He was 77 (or 79; I’ve read conflicting reports) at the time of the proceedings, suffered a stroke while testifying, and died a year later.

Some called Tannenbaum a tragic figure. In my opinion, he is surely that, but is he guilty? I would have to know more to make a decision, but I know that I have my doubts about his guilt in the moral sense. His case was exceptionally controversial, with many people thinking he should not have been charged, but I’m not bringing it up to decide his guilt or innocence. I’m bringing it up to point out the intensity of the pressures kapos were under, and the profundity of the moral decisions and dilemmas they faced.

I have already said that they did not volunteer for the camps, which is self-evident. What is less evident is that they did not volunteer for the job of kapo, either. They were selected [emphasis mine]:

…[T]he Tannenbaum case already has resurrected the history of the several hundred Jewish kapos, all selected by the Nazis to oversee and punish their own people, often with the hope of sparing themselves. Theirs was the conundrum within the catastrophe.

“I know that when the Tannenbaum case is heard, many of the allegations will be horrifying,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which studies the Holocaust and human rights issues. “What needs to be said generally is that one must make a distinction between those who volunteered for the SS or the Gestapo and those who thought they would save their lives by cooperating. You can’t say Patty Hearst played the same role as her kidnappers. The same is true of any kapo.”

“It is important to retain a perspective,” said Henry Siegman, the executive director of the American Jewish Congress. “There is a critical difference between the Barbies of the world – the victimizers – and the Tannenbaums, as sad and tragic and despicable as they were. They were victims. They were people who succumbed to unbelievable stress.”

Tannenbaum alleged, among other things, that the beatings he administered were designed to save accused prisoners of worse at the hands of the Nazis themselves, who would just as soon have killed them instead. Who knows? Tannenbaum himself had been subject to psychological torment as well:

“He told us once that in one of the camps the Nazis played this ‘joke’ on him – a kind of psychological torture,” said Sonny Tannenbaum, a peace officer in the New York City court system. “They had him dig a grave and made him believe they were going to bury him alive in it. Then they all laughed and had him come out, and threw a dead German shepherd in the grave.”

Here’s the moral distinction the legal system was trying to make:

“Any inquiry like this, Jewish or German, comes down to whether someone took part in the persecution of innocent people willingly and voluntarily,” said Mr. Ryan, a former director of the Office of Special Investigations and now a lawyer for Harvard University. “It’s just that with the kapos you have to add the additional layer of what the SS was doing over their shoulders. Were the kapos beating the inmates only enough to keep the SS from beating them even more brutally? Or were they persecuting them as badly or even worse than the SS?”

How could one ever judge such a thing about a person who had been tortured as Tannenbaum had? There is little question in my mind that under anything remotely resembling ordinary circumstances he would not have done anything of the sort. Yes, he had choices, and he probably made some bad ones, but is he required to have been a hero and/or a saint, exhibiting a bravery and goodness that—to be honest—very few among us would be capable of under similar circumstances?

Someone using the word “kapo” to refer to anything less than that sort of pressure and that sort of horrific choice seems wrong to me, a trivialization of a profound human tragedy and a deep outrage.

What the January 6th surveillance tapes show

The New Neo Posted on by

I think we already knew some of this, but here’s further video confirmation [emphasis mine]:

…[N]ewly-obtained video shows United States Capitol Police officers speaking with several January 6 protestors—including Jacob Chansley, the so-called “Q shaman”—inside the Capitol that afternoon.

One officer, identified in the video and confirmed by charging documents as Officer Keith Robishaw, appears to tell Chansely’s group they won’t stop them from entering the building. “We’re not against . . . you need to show us . . . no attacking, no assault, remain calm,” Robishaw warns. Chansley and another protestor instruct the crowd to act peacefully. “This has to be peaceful,” Chansley yelled. “We have the right to peacefully assemble.”…

The video directly contradicts what government prosecutors allege in a complaint filed January 8 against Chansley: “Robishaw and other officers calmed the protestors somewhat and directed them to leave the area from the same way they had entered. Chansley approached Officer Robishaw and screamed, among other things, that this was their house, and that they were there to take the Capitol, and to get Congressional leaders.”

Chansley later is seen entering the Senate chambers with a police officer behind him; he led several protesters in prayer and sat in Vice President Mike Pence’s chair…

Chansley is not charged with assaulting an officer; he faces several counts for trespassing and disorderly conduct. He has been incarcerated since January, denied bail awaiting trial. He has no criminal record.

Ace writes:

This is why the DOJ absolutely refuses to release thousands of hours of surveillance video — they claim because it’s “too sensitive” and would compromise “national security.”

The actual truth is because the video shows Capitol Police allowing protesters to enter the Capitol, and you can’t make a trespassing charge stick when the agents of the state are giving permission to enter.

Now, that doesn’t excuse the relatively few — like 15-20 people — who were attacking cops. No cop gave permission to be attacked, and anyway, you can’t assent to assault.

But this does mean the 400 people being held without trial, in solitary confinement, for political “crimes,” including mere trespassing, cannot be convicted of that crime and should be released at once.

But they won’t be. The government has been taken over by Marxists at war with America and the American people.

But Chansley has served his purpose. Most people think he was some dangerous person trying to overthrow the government violently, along with many thousands of others that day, and that he stands in for the many millions of Trump supporters. Incarcerating a lot of them would be good for the nation, right? The narrative is set.

Years ago – many years ago – I would have thought that releasing information like this video would make a difference in that narrative. Years ago, that notion might even have been correct. Now I no longer think it will make any difference at all except to further anger those of us on the right who care.

I hope I’m wrong. I really really hope I’m wrong.

Condemned to repeat it?

The New Neo Posted on by

David Foster writes:

We have a century of evidence of what happens to a society when it falls into the traps of centralized economic planning, suppression of free speech, and the categorization of people–especially ethnic categorization. But an awful lot of people, including powerful and influential people, seem to want to go in these directions.

I can have some sympathy for people who became Communists and/or advocates of world government back in the 1920s. The theory of centralized economic planning is very seductive (see this, for the actual practice), and the slaughter of the First World War led people to grasp at any possible way of avoiding such horrors in the future…

And [today] we see the party, the political movement, and the individual politicians behind all of these directly totalitarian policies–many with clearly Fascist and/or Marxist lineage…being winked at or even embraced by many of those who were so quick to accuse Trump–and his supporters–of being ‘Fascists.’

My brothers and sisters, they cannot do it again. Only a race of madmen could do it again—

That last paragraph is a quote from A Canticle For Liebowitz, a futuristic novel about society rebuilding after a nuclear conflagration.

It is easy to understand why it seems “mad” – as in, “insane” – to go this way again. But it is also human nature, I submit, and it is not literally insane although it is tragic. After all, how often do we learn from experience, even in our private lives? Only sometimes, and only some people, and it usually takes an event that’s very personal and dramatic to cause the change. When I wrote “a mind is a difficult thing to change,” I wasn’t kidding and I wasn’t exaggerating.

Why is that the case? I don’t know, but here are certain things I believe may go towards explaining at least some of it:

(1) A person has to be paying attention and be able to connect the dots. There are often ways to rationalize away the conclusions one could and should draw.

(2) Emotions are huge drivers of behavior both personal and political. The leftist dream is enticing (I’ve written many posts about that, some of which you can find by doing a search for “socialism” on this blog), and it’s apparently easy to say “this time it will be different because we’re changing this detail or that one.” In this previous post I listed some of the emotions that drive the attraction to leftist thought: covetousness, anger, guilt, a desire to feel righteous, and the need for simple-sounding solutions.

(3) Leftists are dedicated True Believers, and whether their belief is sincere or just a way to get power, the result is that they are relentless in pursuing their goals. Taking over the educational establishment was the key to almost everything that has followed, and that includes legal education that forms the viewpoints of many judges and lawyers dedicated to The Cause.

(4) To even have a chance of learning from experience one must have more experiences and more knowledge than most young people have today. With a lowered voting age of eighteen, many people delaying adulthood in order to be students past that point, and the corruption of the teaching of history, most young people not only have the usual idealism and naivete of young people, but less experience in the real world and less knowledge of the past with which to compare the present. This is by design, and it is hurting us terribly.

As Santayana said in his famous quote:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

That’s true of the younger people, but it shouldn’t be true of the people in charge right now, who are older (and in some cases old). I submit that it’s not true of them, and that they remember the past but have a different interpretation of it and a different goal for the future. Their interpretation of the past is that all the bad things that happened were the result of the right or of bad luck, and their goal for the future is that the left will be in power forever.

The Biden administration is all too predictable, and the consequences are already awful

The New Neo Posted on by

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Yet between 2017 and 2021 there was relatively little violence in Israel and on the West Bank. Whatever our ideologies and politics, we all know the one reason why there is chaos now and not then.

The Trump Administration assumed that whenever there is perceived distance between the United States and democratic Israel, then unsavory players exploit the void and try things they otherwise would not…

For such a supposedly provocative Trump Administration, peace, not war, followed from its initiatives…

But if we were looking to achieve the exact opposite, then calm can become war in five easy steps:

1) Revive Iran…

2) Discourage Arab moderates…

3) Reboot corrupt Palestinian dictatorships…

4) Adopt globalist moral equivalence…

5) Do the exact opposite of the Trump Administration. In Pavlovian fashion, if Trump was evil and coarse, then erase all his evil and coarse policies without exception. Just as border walls, fracking, pipelines, low inflation, and low unemployment are now inherently bad, so too are all of Trump’s policies in the Middle East.

In the article, Hanson fleshes out each of those five points in some detail. The strange thing is that, to any thinking person following current events, these observations should be obvious – but at least half the country disagrees with them, and/or some even think the current results are good. Hanson then adds [emphasis mine]:

Is such a scenario [Middle East war escalation] alarmist or fantastical?

No more than concluding that printing $5 trillion in new money, while discouraging employment and production, is inflationary.

No more than assuming that halting the southern border wall, rendering immigration law inert, and stopping border enforcement all encourage illegal immigration.

No more than believing that canceling pipelines, stopping new oil and gas leases on federal lands, promising to end fossil fuels in 20 years, and warning of new taxes and regulations, discourage oil producers from gearing up to meet demand, while encouraging foreign criminal hackers to take out our ability to deliver fossil fuels.

And no more than thinking that defunding the police and skipping arrests and indictments empower the lawbreakers and spike crime.

Historians will later calibrate whether in all these policies their authors were simply incompetent, misguided, and naïve, or else nihilists who equated ensuing chaos and pain as precursors to long-overdue equity and social justice.

The new American Middle East policy is an extension of the new American domestic policy. In both cases, malign naïveté leads to clueless hubris that ends in catastrophe.

Fools AND knaves.

The day Biden was elected – no, actually many many months before, when I perceived there was a good chance that Trump would lose and some leftist candidate would win – I saw the writing on the wall. As I’ve said many times, it didn’t take extreme brilliance to see it, either. It was obvious what any of the Democrats who had a chance of winning – Warren, Sanders, Biden, etc. – was going to do, and it was obvious what the results would be. We had a small preview during the Obama years, and this would be Obama redux times 10. Maybe times 100.

I don’t know whether a full-fledged Middle East war is in the cards. But I know that all of the already-terrible things that have occurred since Biden and company took office were utterly foreseeable, and yet were entered into anyway, and that most of the people I know either don’t pay attention, don’t see it, don’t care, or applaud what’s happened. I know that the effects of propaganda and groupthink are astoundingly large, and that the intelligent and well-meaning are not only not immune to them, but seem especially vulnerable.

“Elections have consequences” all right. But so do education, the MSM, entertainment, advertising, the legal system, and a host of other cultural and societal influences – and all of them affect elections and encourage certain results. And so here we are today.

This is the case whether you believe the 2020 election was fair or whether you believe it was not: here we are today. It is also true whether you believe that Joe Biden is in charge or not – or whether you believe, as I do, that he’s taking the advice of others but is still aware enough that he basically understands what he’s doing. Here we are today.

Why write about the Bee Gees?

The New Neo Posted on by

Why do I keep writing about the Bee Gees?

First, there’s the escape from difficult times that music affords. Long ago, dance class would take me away like that. It required my total concentration. And though music doesn’t require that, certain groups grab my concentration. With the Bee Gees, it’s the arrangements, the solo voices, the harmonies, the songs themselves, sometimes the words although that’s not primary, the emotions – and yes, I like looking at them.

But it’s also the fact that they are brothers, as well as their unusual and to me interesting history and the humor they display in so many interviews. I have a brother, my ex-husband has many brothers, and most of my boyfriends over the years were part of sibling groups heavy on brothers, too. Inter-brother humor is something with which I’m familiar, and I used to love to just sit and listen to my husband and brothers-in-law riff off each others’ humor. It sometimes had me literally falling on the floor laughing. They’re not all alive anymore, and that’s a tremendous grief in my life, and the Bee Gees make me think of that, too – loss, and in particular the loss of brothers.

Their story has it all. Rags to riches, literally. They made a decision as tiny children, so poor the three had to share a bed, that they were going to dedicate themselves to writing songs and singing harmony, and that they would become famous and rich (in that order) and someday live in America in houses next to each other. And it worked out just about like that, with more than a few speed bumps along the way. For many years they all had houses in Miami, two almost next door and the third just a few blocks away.

They fought, and they split early on for a while but realized two things. The first was that they missed each other as brothers. The second was that they missed each other musically. Alone they had great voices and could write beautiful songs, but together they were far more than the sum of those parts. In later years they periodically did projects alone, but always remained the Bee Gees and put out albums in five decades. Actually, they had performed in six decades, because as little children they already were the financial support of their parents and two other siblings, baby brother Andy and older sister Leslie.

Maurice Gibb’s death in 2003 is what ended the Bee Gees. Robin, Maurice’s fraternal twin, said he never recovered from it, and he died of cancer in 2012. Now Barry is alone. But there are a ton of videos online – concerts, single songs, interviews, documentaries – with many watchers. I’ve noticed that most of the comments at YouTube to Bee Gees videos take an almost proprietary and familial attitude towards the group: “our” Bee Gees are often mentioned, as though their admirers and they belong to one big family. Another way to refer to the three is “the boys” – there are people online from Australia who saw them as young children on TV and then followed them to the very end. There are many people who say they’ve listened to their music every day for fifty years, often before going to bed. They say it lightens their mood, calms and soothes them.

A lot of the comments are addressed to Barry as survivor, trying to comfort him after the losses of all three brothers (that includes twins Mo and Robin and their younger brother Andy), hoping he lives a long time, talking about their own losses, and saying how much the Bee Gees’ music has meant to them over the years. Here’s one that’s very typical – I chose it rather randomly:

You and your brothers taught me what music was about. As a child of the 80’s all I knew was metal head bangin till it bled, but one day I was introduced to the BEEGEES and my life was never the same. Ya’ll showed me that music was from the heart not the speakers. I mourn your loss. Forever will I be grateful for your music. God bless you and your family. The BEEGEES will forever be in my heart and soul. THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS YOU AND THE MEMORY OF YOUR BROTHERS

Music means different things to different people. For some – actually, for many – music has a direct line to the emotions. It’s often the case that a sorrow is released by music, and tears flow that have been held back for a long time.

I’ve found music to be a solace during the last year of stress. It can be enjoyed alone or in company. With the internet, we have access to so much music, and that includes the music of the past. You or I can watch a concert from decades ago, and then follow a group or a musician in time, up to the present. It’s an extraordinary thing, and I’ve done it for many many groups and individuals in just about every genre of music, because I have eclectic tastes. But the Bee Gees – long thought by me to be uninteresting specialists in one type of music, disco – turn out to be far more fascinating and enormously varied in their output.

So I’m not finished with them yet.

Here is their first TV performance. This is a clip from 1960 in Australia, when Barry was 13 and the twins ten years old. Barry wrote the song, and they had already been performing professionally for about four years. I think they are nervous here because it was their first break on television, but they were already seasoned performers.

And here are their parents Barbara and Hugh talking about discovering the boys could sing:

Every now and then the Bee Gees would reprise a portion of “Lollipop” for their fans. Here’s one example from 1975 in Chicago, with a little bit of their humor leading up to it:

I could choose almost any Bee Gees song to close this post, but here’s one that was written around that same time, 1975. It features the Bee Gees in a country mood, one of so many genres in which they wrote and performed. This was a pretty big hit for Olivia Newton-John, who covered it, but not for the Bee Gees. This is their own version, which demonstrates a favorite practice of theirs, which is to have Robin and Barry alternate solo voices in the same song. Robin is the higher voice and Barry the lower one:

[ADDENDUM: One more thing that occurs to me about my recent fascination with the Bee Gees is the element of surprise. For decades I thought I knew who they were and what their music was about; case closed. But it turns out that I knew nearly nothing about them. I didn’t know that some of my favorite songs from the 60s had been written by the Bee Gees. I didn’t know how varied their songbook was, or that they’d written and performed for close to fifty years. I didn’t know that they sang in anything other than falsetto. I didn’t know they’d written songs I liked for other artists. I didn’t know they were charming, funny, and smart, or that they’d been child performers supporting their family. It’s been a lesson – not the first, and probably not the last – in not assuming that I know more than I actually know about something.]