On leaving the circle dance

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t underestimate how emotionally difficult it is. I know precisely what “Jan in MN” is talking about here:

Self-image shouldn’t be underestimated as a reason to close one’s mind to facts. I remember, in my change process, how frightening it was to begin acknowledging myself as conservative, one of those awful people. My initial step away from the liberal viewpoint was during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, but it wasn’t enough to make me depart the liberal camp entirely. The process was painful, as I saw friends drop away and as my concept of myself changed. Liberals, I had thought, were the caring folk, morally superior, and who wouldn’t want to be cozily wrapped up in that image?

Finally, facts mattered more, but it can be tough wrenching oneself away from the regard and cameraderie of friends and a philosophy that seemed so true and pure.

And I will now repeat a passage that I’ve quoted before in several previous posts. For me, it never gets old. It’s from the Czech author Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 1970s:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

Don’t underestimate how profoundly difficult it can be to step outside the circle.

A personal note—I never really had a desire to dance in a ring. In fact, I had a bit of a horror of it. But—and it’s a big “but”—I grew up in an atmosphere in which being a liberal Democrat (which was much less extreme a position than it is now) seemed to me to be reasonable and moral and kind. For much of my life I had paid only a sort of general attention to politics and world events. I wasn’t what you’d call a political junkie. I had some marked disagreements with the liberal line I heard around me, and I sometimes voiced them to other liberals, but my disagreements never seemed all that fundamental to anyone, including me, and they earned little or no enmity.

I was a part of a circle without even realizing it.

When I started the process of political change outlined on this blog in my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, I had absolutely no idea that I was taking a small step outside that circle in which I had danced, unawares, my entire life. And I had no idea that that first step would soon be followed by another, and another, until without even realizing that it had happened, I was standing far away looking in.

I’ve never fully joined another circle. As I said, circle dancing isn’t something for which I yearn. Now I seem to dance on the periphery of the circle formed by the right—weaving in and out, sometimes closer, sometimes further away. Some in that other far-off circle—the one with most of my friends and relatives—have shunned me, but at least the ones dancing there who still love me have decided that when we get together they will stop dancing for a while.

But the experience has been far more painful and far more wrenching than I ever would have imagined.

The human/monkey chimera

The New Neo Posted on by

I find this news very disturbing:

According to the newspaper [El País], the Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, who operates a lab at the Salk Institute in California, has been working working with monkey researchers in China to perform the disturbing research.

Their objective is to create “human-animal chimeras,” in this case monkey embryos to which human cells are added.

Why, why? The idea behind the research is to fashion animals that possess organs, like a kidney or liver, made up entirely of human cells. Such animals could be used as sources of organs for transplantation.

Making chimeras: The technique for making chimeras involves injecting human embryonic stem cells into a days-old embryo of another species. The hope is that the human cells will grow along with the embryo, adding to it.

Izpisúa Belmonte tried making human-animal chimeras previously by adding human cells to pig embryos, but the human cells didn’t take hold effectively.

Because monkeys are genetically closer to humans, it’s possible that such experiments could now succeed. To give the human cells a better chance of taking hold, scientists also use gene-editing technology to disable the formation of certain types of cells in the animal embryos…

So far, no part-human part-monkey has been born. Instead, the mixed embryos are only being allowed to develop for a week or two in the lab, at which time they can be studied.

It’s illegal in the US, but not in China.

We don’t know whether the report is true. But even if it isn’t, the idea that it could be done and probably will be done somewhere seems extremely plausible.

Why did Tulsi Gabbard attack Kamala Harris in the last debate?

The New Neo Posted on by

If you watched the Democratic debate—or if you merely read about it, as I did—you probably noticed that long-chancer Tulsi Gabbard went after Kamala Harris in a big way, and by all accounts scored a takedown. At Legal Insurrection, Professor Jacobson mentions that he predicted that Gabbard would be a “disrupter”:

What did I see that others didn’t? As the sub-headline to the post said: “Bring on the crowded debate stage, with a disrupter thrown like a hand grenade into the mix.”

While her politics are very different than ours, she has a spirit of disruption that also guides us.

She also has very little to lose.

But why Harris? I’ve got a theory about that, and it goes as follows.

I believe that Gabbard knows she’s not going to be the Democratic nominee. She’s too young, too inexperienced, and what’s more, she has very low numbers. But I think she has strong aspirations to be the vice-presidential pick, and the person most likely to pick her would be Joe Biden.

Why Biden? They share a position in the present extremely-leftist Democratic Party as the moderates. Whether they really are moderate or not isn’t even the issue; they are perceived as moderate. Not only that, but Joe is old and Gabbard’s youth might be a benefit to balance the ticket. And of course, she’s photogenic as well as female. What’s more, she has a vague multi-ethnic air, being part Samoan and a Hindu, whereas Joe is that much-excoriated being, an old white male.

At any rate, Joe Biden is her best shot at moving up to that position. And who had attacked Joe Biden (somewhat successfully) during an earlier debate? Why, Kamala Harris, that’s who.

This time, Harris was probably expecting pushback from Biden. But not from Gabbard. And yet it was Gabbard who landed the blows.

Even before that, Gabbard already had zero chance of being the VP pick of someone like Harris or Warren, for two simple reasons, the latter of which is the most important: she isn’t leftist enough and she’s a young woman, much younger than either of them (although Harris is youngish compared to Warren, next to Gabbard she looks a bit long in the tooth).

Makes sense to me, anyway.

Glenn Loury and the comments in the NY Times: on Sharpton and the Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

Economics professor and pundit Glenn Loury, who is black, writes this opinion piece in the NY Times as a caution to his fellow Democrats:

When I first heard that President Trump had gone after the Rev. Al Sharpton — and that Mr. Sharpton had responded in kind — I must admit that I laughed. Are there two New York City hustlers who deserve one another more?

But 48 hours later, I feel differently. That’s thanks to the leading Democratic candidates for president, who have rushed to Mr. Sharpton’s defense, extolling his supposed virtues as a civil-rights paragon while denouncing Mr. Trump’s attack as racist. In doing so, they have, yet again, taken Mr. Trump’s bait, handing him another easy victory while yoking themselves to a genuine bigot.

Other than the usual Trump-bashing, it’s an excellent article, one the Democrats should well heed. But I doubt they will.

I found the comments to the article especially interesting and varied. There were a few of the usual conservatives and Republicans come in to berate the crowd, and I’ll skip over them. It was the Democrats and their reactions to the piece of sensible advice that I was curious about.

Here’s one that was typical of a sizeable faction:

I’d like to think there’s a way to point out the problematic aspects of Al Sharpton’s legacy without using tropes that have often served as racist dog whistles. Namely, laments about “Black-on-Black violence” and the decline of the Black family. Are there problems within the Black community? Sure, as there are in most communities, but racism from external sources is the main cause of our community’s ills, plain and simple. The correctness of some of the analysis of Al Sharpton isn’t sufficient to justify statements to the contrary.

Racism is the cause of it all, and “laments” about “Black-on Black violence” are a racist dog whistle. Party line stuff.

But there was also this sort of thing:

Thank you for writing this op-ed. I’m a self-described liberal Democrat and former New Yorker and I remember clearly the incidents you’ve recounted [regarding Sharpton]. He may say things that I agree with and support at the round tables on MSNBC but until I hear some full-throated admissions and apologies for past wrongs I will switch channels or mute the volume until he’s done.
If we want to castigate Trump for continuing to believe the Central Park 5 are guilty then let the same be done to Sharpton for refusing to publicly acknowledge that Tawana Brawley was lying.
That would be a good start.

But this is very typical as well:

I don’t care about Al Sharpton. I’ve known what he’s about for decades.

What I care about is an American president who is doing his best to sow racial discord for his own advantage.

And then there’s this, which was a discouraging reminder of the need to rationalize:

It’s certainly hard to forget or disavow Sharpton’s past, and, as a Jew, I’m certainly offended by many of his words and actions. And, of course, the Brawley affair was nothing short of despicable. And yet, on MSNBC, he comes across as thoughtful, measured, and reasonable. So, i guess he is a huckster, as is our President. But, for the moment, I’m willing to accept the image he’s choosing to project, and to reject the image Trump is choosing to project (BTW, it’s the same one DJT and his hateful father Fred always projected). Regarding the Rev, proceed with caution. Regarding his nemesis, proceed with fear and disdain.

A lot of liberals commenting on the Loury article hate Sharpton. They hate Trump, too, but they definitely hate Sharpton and are very disappointed that the candidates defended him.

But they’re not disappointed enough in the candidates to ever consider taking an objective look at Republicans and what they actually say and do rather than what the Times and the MSM in general say that they say and do. Although the Democrats’ stance re Sharpton puzzles them and many of them disapprove of it, it will probably remain just a tiny little blip on their radar screens.

This is a more extreme version of general disaffection:

Situations like this explain why I hate politics. I hate Trump and I hate Sharpton. Even the politicians I like personally do not hesitate to pay lip service to the people I loathe. I got nobody on my side.

If Donald Trump has done anything positive, it has been to prove that someone can throw caution to the wind, say “unsayable” things and win a national election. I’m just waiting for someone to take that path who isn’t a lying megalomaniac.

Sadly no one in the 2020 field fits that description.

And here’s someone who exemplifies what I mean when I say that a great many of them believe every word the MSM says about Trump, and don’t like Sharpton and are angry at his Democratic defenders, but would never, never ever, desert the Democrats no matter what they do:

Trump rarely speaks a true word but he is right about
Sharpton. Sharpton is a conman and a race-baiter and a cop-hater. I’m a 74-year-old Democrat who would rather be caged at the border than vote for a Republican, much less for Trump. But I hate being on the same team as
Sharpton — and Omar, too.

This next comment is just plain weird. Loury is black, as I said. And I am pretty sure this person is white but perhaps isn’t aware of Loury’s race:

The “collapse of the black family” is a coded message from the 1950s and 1960s segregationists. It’s really old news, and the fact that this economist brings it up just shows his own latent bias.

I wonder if the current generation of African-Americans would attest to a “collapse of the black family.” I suspect not. Only a white person would say that.

And an enormous number of commenters say that Sharpton and Trump are alike and that they “deserve each other,” something that Loury mentions in his first paragraph.

Here’s a different take; one of the few who has considered switching affiliations:

I have had the honor of having had several letters published on these pages; and while responding in different ways to different columnists, I have repeated consistently that I, a registered Democrat, was deeply influenced during Watergate by a Lutheran pro-Nixon colleague who argued that God supports imperfect leaders for good ends. The good ends now are the defense of Israel and the fight against antisemitism. To say the least, the Squad is not philosemitic, and President Trump is the best friend of Israel since President Truman. Like other American Jews, I pray for a just peace in the Middle East; and I believe that that can happen with a federated province of Palestine existing under the aegis of Israeli sovereignty, on the analogy of Quebec in Canada. Yes, President Trump plays the race card; but I believe the Squad, Al Sharpton, and many of the Democratic candidates play it as well in reverse. I consider the antisemitism of the Left to be a major problem which needs to be exposed and combatted forcefully. That that has not been done may well influence my turning Republican next year.

In the comments to the article, it’s taken as an absolute given that Trump is a racist, a conman, and a liar. No one gives an example, or thinks there’s a need to do so. They just say it, and no one refutes it because the group considers it a self-evident truth.

The Dems attacked Obama for not being far enough to the left

The New Neo Posted on by

Although I didn’t watch last night’s debate, I hear that the Democrats unloaded on Barack Obama, of all people, for not being leftist enough.

Makes sense, because frontrunner Biden is proud of his record as Obama’s Veep. It’s pretty much all he has—that, and the fact that he looks sane, competent, and moderate compared to most of the rest of the pack.

But I doubt Obama cares all that much about being trashed by this crop. He’s vastly more popular than they. He’s getting plenty of perks, post-presidency.

And back when he was president, he was being insufficiently leftist even for his own taste, but he calibrated his leftism to what he thought the public could bear at the time. I believe he fully approves of the far more leftist stances the candidates are taking in 2020, except for one thing: he’s politically smart enough to know they may be overplaying their leftist hand.

Careful, careful!, he might be thinking. Not about the policies themselves, but about voicing them too dramatically. Don’t alarm the voters!

Switzerland and the Netherlands suspend funds to UNRWA in wake of corruption allegations

The New Neo Posted on by

The UNRWA is the United Nations’ relief agency for Palestine, a huge agency since the 1948 war. Trump had cut off US funding for the UNRWA back in August of 2018 to the usual disapproval from the left:

“The United States will no longer commit further funding to this irredeemably flawed operation,” the US State Department said in a statement, adding it was not willing to “shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden” for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)…

Friday’s state department statement complained of UNRWA’s “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries”.

I believe that 2018 state department quote was a reference to the “entitled beneficiaries” on the Palestinian end; they are the only “refugees” whose children and children’s children earn that status from the UN. But it turns out that the US might just as well been referring to the UN bureaucrats who run the program when they said “entitled beneficiaries,” because both Switzerland and the Netherlands have now suspended funding awaiting an investigation in response to the revelation of what appears to be a major corruption scandal at UNRWA:

The 10-page confidential ethics report alleged that members of an “inner circle” at the top of the United Nations Relief Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East engaged in “abuse of authority for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives,” according to Al Jazeera, which was the first to report on the revelation Monday.

Seems like bizarro world, if Al Jazeera is the one that broke the story. But that appears to be the case.

More:

The United Nations said in a statement that the accusations in the report were being investigated by its New York oversight committee and that it would not comment on the ethics report until the probe is completed.

“Everything circulating now, including in the media, is ‘allegations’ and not findings,” the statement by the agency’s spokeswoman Tamara Alrifai said.

The article doesn’t mention what is actually alleged to have happened. But you can find some of it here:

Arranging a private fundraising campaign outside of U.N. purview, the UNRWA chief apparently went around crying poor and collecting money for business-class trips with his mistress, whom he fast-tracked into a role he invented for her in 2015—that of his “senior adviser”—so that she could accompany him around the world in style. And all behind his wife’s back.

More here:

Citing information from some 25 current and past UNRWA directors and staff, the report said an “inner circle” comprising Krahenbuhl, his deputy Sandra Mitchell, Chief of Staff Hakam Shahwan and senior adviser Maria Mohammedi have bypassed normal decision-making processes and sidelined field and program directors and other senior staff…

The report said some former executive office staff reported that Krahenbuhl was away from UNRWA headquarters in Jerusalem for 28-29 days per month, claiming a daily allowance. It said he told a senior staff member in mid-November that he had made 52 trips up until that time in 2018…

Al Jazeera said Mitchell rejected all allegations, including that she abused her power to secure an appointment for her spouse, and resigned in late July. It said Shahwan left in early July…

The report claims the funding crisis [exacerbated by the US fund cutoff] “has served as an excuse for an extreme concentration of decision-making power in members of the ‘clique.'”

The cumulative effects of these developments, it claimed, have been an exodus of staff and “an organizational culture characterized by low morale, fear of retaliation — including through non-renewal of contracts — distrust, bullying, intimidation, and marginalization.”

The report concluded that “there is overwhelming prima facie evidence” the interconnected behavior of the four inner circle members amounts to “abuse of authority.”

But it has long been known that the organization is corrupt. Here’s a report from January of 2018, before Trump cut off US funding. The recent scandal has some juicy new details, but the basic corruption has been part and parcel of the agency for close to its entire existence, and certainly in recent decades.

Note the way the Irish Times covers the story. The article is framed in terms of the threat to the refugees, who number many millions:

Unrwa’s very existence is challenged by scandal at the top as the agency scrambles for international funding to distribute emergency cash and food baskets and maintain health, educational, and welfare services for 5.4 million Palestinian refugees.

Unrwa was established by the UN to help Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

Without the agency, refugees in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza and host countries Lebanon, Syria and Jordan would be thrust into abject poverty and become intolerable burdens on countries where they dwell.

So, these three countries which themselves contribute a lot of refugees to the Western world, and with a combined total population of about 34 million people—all of the same religious and cultural (and even genetic, particularly in the case of Jordan) background as the Palestinians——can’t somehow absorb the 5 million?

Who are mostly the descendants of the original refugees, many of whom voluntarily fled the land that became Israel because they were promised by other Arab countries that they would launch a war to get the land back for them and drive the Israelis out? In fact (as the article in the Irish Times goes on to add), the original refugees numbered about 750,000, not millions, and I would imagine a great many of them are now dead. The entire idea of the refugee camps and their perpetual maintenance was to keep these people stateless and miserable, and to keep them from upsetting the Arab countries that might have absorbed them.

And that latter point was not an empty fear on the part of Lebanon and Jordan. See this for the history of the effort to destablize Jordan when they were taken in by that state, and the final civil war that drove them out in the early 1970s. And see this for the role the Palestinians played subsequently in the Lebanese Civil War that nearly wrecked the country.

Yes, a lot of people have excellent reasons for wanting to keep the Palestinians as refugees.

But back to the way the Irish Times describes the history [emphasis mine]:

For decades Israel has accused Unrwa of perpetuating the Palestinian- Israeli dispute by granting refugee status to descendants of the 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during Israel’s 1948 war of establishment.

The Trump administration in the US has bought into this claim…

And yet these are just simple statements of fact. Whether you think the five million are entitled to this expanded UN refugee status—unprecedented among other displaced groups—is a separate issue from whether it occurred. It did occur, and it did “perpetuate the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.” And note also how the Irish Times refers to the 1948 war as “Israel’s war of establishment.” They don’t even mention that it was a UN partition that established Israel in the first place, as well as a Palestinian state, both carved from a former British territory, and that it was the Palestinians who would not accept their own state, wanted the whole thing, and started that so-called “Israel’s war” of establishment.

[NOTE: After the Irish Times article, there’s a little blurb where the paper tries to get you to subscribe by writing, “Truth matters. For news you can trust. Subscribe.”

Pretty ironic, in light of what they leave out of the article.]

Tonight’s debate

The New Neo Posted on by

If anyone wants a new thread to comment on tonight’s debate, here it is.

ADDENDUM: Goodness gracious:

Former Vice President Joe Biden may have lost the second round of Democratic debates before the debate even began. When Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) came on stage, Biden said, “Go easy on me, kid.” Many liberals — including one other 2020 Democratic candidate — slammed Biden for calling the black former California attorney general a “kid.” While Biden seems to have been joking, there is a long ugly history of white Americans calling black Americans “boy.” Perhaps for that reason, liberals seem particularly outraged.

Or maybe it’s because they’re perpetually outraged and race-conscious, and Joe Biden’s not only a white guy but an old white guy, and because their reactivity lacks all sense of proportion.

The details of the immunity deals Loretta Lynch gave to Hillary Clinton’s people…

The New Neo Posted on by

…can be found here:

The ACLJ [American Center for Law and Justice] has just obtained previously unreleased documents related to the Clinton investigation and immunity agreements given to top Clinton aids. These agreements reveal that James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice (DOJ) granted immunity to Hillary Clinton’s aids and lawyers, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, from prosecution for anything found on their laptops violating multiple felony criminal statutes governing the mishandling of classified information and/or the removal or destruction of records, including Espionage Act provisions. Further, the DOJ and FBI also agreed to evade the statutory requirements of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by purporting to deem the contents of the laptops as not under DOJ or FBI “custody or control.”

These laptops were critical to any meaningful investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified emails and records. According to the DOJ Inspector General, who identified these as the “culling laptops,” “[a]ll 62,320 emails pulled from the Clinton servers were stored at one time on these laptops.” Having taken control of these laptops, agreeing to severely limit its searches, agreeing to unlawfully shield the laptops from FOIA, then agreeing to dispose of the laptops, it appears the Comey FBI and Lynch DOJ did everything in their power to protect Clinton’s senior aids and lawyers from both criminal liability and public scrutiny.

While these immunity agreements and related news have been publicly discussed to some extent, the ACLJ has now obtained the actual documents so the public may see and judge them accordingly.

This isn’t exactly news, except for the fact that the documents themselves have now been released. But in the continuing and almost unremitting subsequent dislosures about Russiagate (or whatever name you want to give that lengthy brouhaha) in all its complexity, there has been so much to process in the two cases that I believe most people have lost the thread. But the double standard used in the investigation of Hillary Clinton and her aides versus that used in the investigation of Donald Trump and his aides has been extraordinary.

About the Democratic debate last night that I didn’t watch…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the one tonight that I won’t watch—

There are many reasons I don’t watch them.

The first you may already know if you’re a regular reader here: I hate political campaign debates. I hate them because I generally would prefer to read something rather than listen, if the “something” is serious-seeming talk that’s mostly empty blather. That’s what nearly all political debates between or among candidates seem like to me, and I’m including both parties.

Jargon and empty words at best, stupidity and lies at worst. That’s the usual, and the exceptions are somewhat rare.

Oh, and then there are the sound bites. I don’t make decisions based on sound bites, but I know other people do.

I know that debates reveal character, at least to a certain extent. Sometimes it’s a gesture—Bush senior looking at his watch, for example, widely interpreted as being uncaring and unconcerned as compared to Bill Clinton’s feeling your pain. But I don’t put so much into a single gesture, and I don’t assume I read minds.

That said, it’s impossible not to have a gut feeling about a candidate when I do watch a debate. Is he or she strong or weak? Logical or not? Up on the facts or ignorant? Calm or agitated? Combative or meek? And much more that probably occurs at a level below our conscious awareness. However, these impressions can be misleading because a candidates’ debate is an artificial format that does not resemble all that much in the real world.

I especially hate political debates featuring either party when there are a large number of contestants. That means that less and less of substance is said, and the format favors the sound bite more and more.

But I have special trouble with the Democratic debates this year. That’s because I almost literally cannot bear to listen to these particular candidates, as compared with the Democrats I remember from my youth and relative youth. This crew is so extreme they scare me—all of them except one who seems to have no chance at all (that means you, John Delaney). And even he scares me, because he’s part of the Party and the party’s agenda has become destructive.

As for Marianne Williamson, who seem people seem to find comic relief and/or inspirational—she just may scare me most of all. Her fuzzy New-Age-y approach connects with the rampant fuzzy New Age-y approach of no small number of voters, and she’s got a fair amount of charisma. Right now her stock is rising, but I don’t know if it’s just a temporary fun-and-games phenomenon. I think, though, it’s emblematic of how arid the field is, and how desperate Democrats are for someone they can feel good about.

Harold Prince, dead at 91

The New Neo Posted on by

Broadway giant Harold Prince has died:

It is impossible to speak of the American musical theater in the second half of the 20th century without invoking Prince’s name. He is associated in some crucial way with a majority of the great musicals of the period, and though he did not change the face of the musical theater alone, he collaborated with such giants as George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim in some of their most impressive undertakings.

Starting as a wunderkind producer with “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees” in the mid-’50s, Prince moved into directing as well, shaping intimate works like “Cabaret” and “Company” that deepened and transformed the scope of the musical. He was equally adept at spectacle, as he demonstrated with Andrew Lloyd Webber productions such as “Evita” and “Phantom of the Opera.”

I’m not keen on the later stuff, but I doubt that was Prince’s fault.

I’m actually surprised he was as young as 91, because he’d been around so very long. “Wunderkind” means “wonderchild”—that is, child prodigy—which indicates how young Prince was when he co-produced “The Pajama Game,” which became a big hit in 1954 when Prince was 26. His mentor was George Abbot, another huge Broadway force (and incidentally, even more long-lived; Abbot lived to be 107).

Found at Prince’s Wiki page, this fact increases my admiration for him: “He was offered the job of directing Cats by Lloyd Webber but turned it down.”

I would say “his death is the end of an era for the Broadway musical,” but his life spanned several eras. RIP.