For quite some time, the Babylon Bee has been writing such sharp and relevant satire that it is almost painful to read. It skirts that thin line between humor and sad truth.
In the wake of ongoing anti-Israel protests that have engulfed the school’s campus, Columbia University announced it has switched to online classes so Jewish students can participate from the attics where they are hiding.
The school’s leadership met earlier in the week to discuss options that would ease tensions on campus and allow Jewish students to continue their education without leaving the safety of the attics where they have been forced to take refuge from rampant antisemitism among large pockets of the student body.
“I’m glad I can still do my coursework,” one Jewish student said after the announcement was made. “After being relegated to hiding here in this attic, I was afraid that I’d start missing too many classes and my grades would suffer. Thankfully, the administration has been kind enough to give me online access to my classes right here in this attic while they allow violent antisemitic protests to sweep across campus. Thanks!”
Academia, particularly at the level of Columbia and the Ivy League, is completely broken. I don’t think it can be repaired internally. They have created over 20 to 30 years a unified monoculture which is hostile to western values, which is hostile to capitalism, and which exploits and singles out Israel as the object of their ire as a mobilizing tactic…. People need to understand that there is no internal opposition left.
In other words, these universities are completely and utterly dominated by the left. Professor Jacobson knows whereof he speaks; he’s a law professor at Cornell, and the left tried to drive him out of his job recently but so far has failed.
And make no mistake about it, these anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and leftist developments in academia are led by faculty. Here’s Jacobson again:
I’d say you have to go back really 10, 20 years. There has been a gross dehumanization of Israeli Jews and of Israel on campuses led mostly by faculty.
There is no diversity of viewpoint among faculty on campuses, not just on domestic issues. We often talk about Republican versus Democrat and how there are no Republican professors left pretty much.The same is true for Israel.
There are almost no openly pro-Israel professors left because they don’t get hired.
I’ve written about some of the origins of the takeover by the left in many posts, most recently in this post from yesterday. But I’m planning another one, this time on one of the most influential figures within the campus movement that has borne such bitter fruit today: Edward Said, professor of literature at Columbia and influential political and philosophical activist for “Palestine” from the early 1960s till his death in 2003.
A book could be written about this, and several have; I won’t be writing a book. But it’s a huge topic, and I plan to at least touch on it in a post or posts.
“What is clear is in this case, Trump is right,” Turley told Fox News. “I mean, this is an embarrassment. I mean, the fact that we are actually talking about this case being presented in a New York courtroom leaves me in utter disbelief. I mean, the arguments today did in fact capture all the problems here. You know, you had this misdemeanor under state law that had run out. This is going back to the 2016 election. And they zapped it back into life by alleging that there was a campaign finance under federal laws that doesn’t exist.”
The word “embarrassment” is interesting, because it implies that the prosecutors are susceptible to shame about what they’re doing. They’re not. Nor are most Democrat spokespeople, as far as I can see. It’s a sobering fact and it bodes very very ill for the future of this country.
But we already knew that. And outrage is the proper emotion to feel about what is being done to Trump, to the country, and to the law.
[Trump] is charged with filing corporate records that included a false statement; namely, that payments to Michael Cohen that were described as being for legal services were, in fact, to reimburse Cohen for making one or more payments to Stormy Daniels in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement. But those payments to Daniels were perfectly legal, and filing a false corporate document is a misdemeanor on which the statute of limitation has passed.
So in order to charge Trump, District Attorney Alvin Bragg had to allege that the false documents were filed in order to cover up another crime. That would make it a felony. But what is that other crime? Bragg has been coy about it. In truth, there was no other crime, and Bragg’s prosecution is election interference on behalf of the Democratic Party, plain and simple.
In other words, doing what all candidates do all the time? That’s an “illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election”? Trying to keep skeletons – or even allegations of skeletons, whether true or not – in the closet? That crime? Like what the entire MSM, social media, the intelligence community, and the Democrats did regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020? Or changing the election rules so that fraud couldn’t be proven even if it occurred? Those sorts of crimes?
Or the crime of Bragg’s prosecution itself, which also is a conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a political election? As though the left cares about the integrity of elections.
Netanyahu is standing trial for bribery and breach of trust. The “breach of trust” charge is a subjective catch-all concept that the prosecutors admit wouldn’t have sufficed on its own to bring Netanyahu to trial. The bribery charge was the key to Netanyahu’s political downfall. …
To achieve their political goal, the police descended on Netanyahu’s advisers one by one, and gave them the treatment generally reserved for terrorists and violent criminals. They were dragged from their beds at dawn, in front of their families, and carted off to investigation rooms and flea-ridden jail cells. They were denied food. They were subjected to public humiliation in the media. Their electronic communications were illegally tapped. Their families were threatened. Their livelihoods were destroyed.
And the police didn’t let them go until they gave them something—anything—to incriminate the prime minister of Israel.
Since Netanyahu had committed no crime, then-Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit and State Attorney Shai Nitzan reinvented the bribery statute to claim that lawful actions Netanyahu did undertake were criminal.
Like every politician on the face of the planet, Netanyahu sought positive coverage from news organizations. The prosecution decided that this effort amounted to a solicitation of a bribe. Netanyahu signed regulatory decisions that affected a telecommunications firm owned by his friend. The prosecution decided this was a favor—a payment for positive coverage from his friend’s news website. Unfortunately for the prosecution, Netanyahu received terrible coverage from the website. But no matter, the prosecutors simply updated the definition of bribery. They said Netanyahu received “undo responsiveness” from the website’s management to his requests for better coverage, and that was now the definition of a bribe.
Does that not sound familiar?
I’ve noticed over and over again that most people have little to no understanding of law, and that includes most intelligent people. That’s why prosecutors can get away with this horse manure in friendly (in this case, anti-Trump) venues – that, and the fact that emotion often overrides logic for the vast majority of people, who tend to see a prosecution as an excellent way to hurt a person they dislike, which makes any method okay. The ends justify the means, and all that.
Is it time for that Man For All Seasons clip again? I guess so:
And in addition, neither Trump nor Netanyahu is the devil; far from it.
ADDENDUM:
More here, including quotes from Andrew C. McCarthy’s article at NR (the article itself is behind a paywall).
Can’t have this sort of brazen “walking while Jewish.” Might upset the violent Islamicists and their leftist fellow travelers who seem to be proliferating in the West lately:
The Metropolitan Police in London face accusations that they capitulated to radical pro-Hamas activists last weekend by threatening to arrest a British Jew because his presence was deemed provocative to a mob of anti-Israel protesters.
A shocking video published by the British Campaign Against Antisemitism from the pro-Hamas and anti-Israel march shows a Metropolitan Police officer ordering Gideon Falter, the CEO of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, not to cross a street because of his “openly Jewish” appearance. Falter was returning from a Saturday synagogue service and was wearing a kippah, or skullcap.
This reminds me of accusing a woman wearing a short skirt of provoking a rapist into action – come to think of it, isn’t that what the burka is all about?
The officials in London are afraid of the protesters and would rather Jews not wave red flags in front of those particular bulls by walking around with Jewish garments on. But it’s not just London; this is what’s happening on so many campuses today.
If you want a roundup of the latest anti-Semitic campus happenings and various responses to it, please go here, here, here, here, here, and here. There’s plenty more out there, too.
Here’s a tweet from a Columbia assistant professor who is an Israeli:
Earlier today, @Columbia University refused to let me onto campus.
Why? Because they cannot protect my safety as a Jewish professor.
Note also the responses to what Davidai wrote. Many of them say the restriction is justified because he’s been videoing pro-Hamas student demonstrators and exposing who they are. Why is it not okay to identify them? Are they guaranteed anonymity? Aren’t they in a public place? Isn’t this what the left has been doing for ages?
The current turmoil on campus as well as the reaction of college administrators brings to mind the late 60s and what happened at Cornell. I’ve written about that many times before, mostly quoting the work of Thomas Sowell and Allan Bloom. Bloom included a long section about the subject in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Please note the book’s subtitle: “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” It’s only gotten worse since then, but the trends were already well established.
I’ve got plenty of posts on the subject of what happened at Cornell. But I think for now I’ll just link to and quote from this article written in 2009 by Tevi Troy. A few excerpts:
The student protests of four decades ago were not, of course, limited to Cornell. Outbreaks no less serious (and in several cases far more so) occurred at many other elite universities. A similar story line can be discerned in each case: student radicalism, often with racial overtones, spills into violence and tests the resolve of the university’s administrators, who quickly fail the test, cave to pressure to change the curriculum or other practices, and set a lasting precedent for the subordination of academic freedom to an extreme political agenda. In each case, too, the error was only exacerbated with time, with both the students’ violence and the administrations’ weakness now celebrated in ways that continue to harm the American academy.
The basic elements were there: threats and violence from a protected identity group, and the collusion and/or cowardice of faculty and administrators. It’s gotten worse, but it was bad enough then and it was over fifty years ago. The administrators and professors who were caving back then were not baby boomers or younger; they were of previous generations. For example, James A. Perkins, who was president of Cornell at the time, had been born in 1911. No boomer he.
The number of black students at Cornell had been steadily growing during the 1960s, thanks in particular to the efforts of the university’s administration. When James A. Perkins became Cornell’s president in 1963, only about 25 of the school’s 11,000 students were black. Perkins, a Quaker who had been chairman of the board of the United Negro College Fund, solicited a $250,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to help bring in promising black students. After the program proved successful, Perkins established the Committee on Special Education Projects to further intensify recruiting. By 1969, Cornell had 250 black students in a student body that, because of the baby boom, had reached 14,000.
But despite the efforts of the president and faculty to attract and integrate them, many black students at Cornell felt alienated from the student body and hostile to the administration. In 1966, a group of black students created the Afro-American Society. Strongly influenced by the national Black Power movement, the AAS sought to increase black students’ autonomy and change Cornell’s curriculum to suit its views, rather than pursue integration. …
In 1968, a group of AAS members disrupted the class of Father Michael McPhelin, a visiting economics professor from the Philippines who had criticized the economic-development policies of a number of African nations. Without addressing McPhelin’s criticism on the merits, the AAS tried to intimidate him into recanting. The students first tried to read a letter criticizing him in class—without showing it to him first—but he refused to allow it. Then they attempted to take over the class, and he resisted. McPhelin complained to the chairman of the economics department, who, instead of punishing the offending students, praised them for their activism. By the end of the year, McPhelin had left Cornell and, as Tarcov saw it, a pattern had been established: “The disruption of a class, seizure of a department office and chairman, and the threatened and actual use of force had gone unpunished and had even received the sympathy and admiration of liberals and administrators for the moral convictions manifested.”
Here’s what happened to Sowell:
Similarly, in the summer of 1968, Thomas Sowell, a black economics professor in his first academic position, tried to eject a disruptive black student from his course, only to find his decision overruled by the same chairman who had undercut McPhelin. In his memoir recounting his time at Cornell, Sowell reports that he was called a “man from Mars” for refusing to join any of the mass discussions or small-group intrigues that dominated the campus. Unhappy at Cornell, Sowell tendered his resignation.
And then:
In December 1968, black students demanding a separate curriculum turned over vending machines, brandished fake guns on campus, and marched on the tables of a student dining hall during a meal. The administration’s weak response to these disruptions invited greater ones.
Sure enough, these began in the winter of 1969. In February, a symposium about South Africa took place on campus. President Perkins agreed to appear and discuss the university’s investments in that country, of which many student activists disapproved. While Perkins was speaking, a black sophomore named Gary Patton climbed on stage and grabbed him by the collar. The crowd of 800 students let out a collective gasp as Perkins whispered ineffectually to Patton, “You better let go of me!” Ex-student Larry Dickson then pointed a large wooden plank at the head of Lowell George, Cornell’s supervisor of public safety, who had moved to defend Perkins. AAS members in the audience beat bongo drums as Patton continued to hold and threaten Perkins. After a few moments, Patton let go and Perkins rushed off the stage, but the New York Times ran a front-page story on the incident, and it was soon clear that Cornell was on the verge of an explosion.
I could keep quoting the article, but suffice to say the situation just got worse and worse. You also can read the relevant part of Allan Bloom’s book, or Sowell’s own account.
We can see how these events and attitudes have come to fruition now in the reaction of the universities to the Jew-haters on their campuses. They are protected groups, much like the violent black students of yesteryear, and the Jews are not. The current university presidents are selected for cowardice, compliance, wokeness, and the ability to spout lawyerly apparatchik lingo that carefully refuses to condemn even the worst excesses.
John Eastman – where do I begin? Here are his sterling credentials:
Eastman is the founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public-interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. He is a former professor and former dean at Chapman University School of Law. He ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for California’s 34th congressional district in 1990, and for California Attorney General in 2010. He is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
And yet Eastman has been recommended for disbarment in California, and is under indictment as a co-conspirator in the Jack Smith “2020 election subversion” case. In other words, he is under indictment for giving legal advice consistent with an arguable legal theory that the left doesn’t like – that is, they don’t like it when Republicans are espousing it for the benefit of a Republican; if it was a Democrat arguing for it and if it was to the benefit of Democrats, then it would be A-okay with them.
The indictment of Eastman is part of “Project 65,” a campaign by the left to go after lawyers who advise or help Trump. I’ve written about the project before, here as well as here.
Eastman has written what is perhaps the best summary of the election and voting irregularities and the evidence that fraud was certainly possible and even probable in that election, as well as of the unconstitutional ways in which the left engineered the voting regulation changes in many states by taking the teeth out of things such as signature verification. His article is also a summary of the legal challenges that failed, and why they failed.
You can find Eastman’s article here. Although it’s very long, it’s excellent and deserves to be read in its entirety. But even if you read just a portion of it, it’s worth it. You might also want to consider sending a link to anyone you know who thinks all of these claims of fraud and/or possible fraud have been “debunked” and yet who might retain at least a smidgen of an open mind on the subject.
I knew prior to the election that the most important thing the left was doing was to jettison the previous rules that protected voting integrity. They did this under cover of COVID fear as well as accusations that the prior rules were somehow racist. Once that happened and the rules were changed – by hook or by crook – it opened up both an opportunity to cheat and presented an impediment to proving (ex post facto) that cheating had occurred. So we could never know what happened, but we certainly could know that cheating was highly possible and perhaps probable. Once the voting public realized that, whatever trust had previously remained in the validity of elections disappeared, and much of the nation became far more cynical and angry – and rightly so.
The indictment of a man such as Eastman is the sequel, and it’s a terrible one. It increases the perception that we have crossed the line into banana republic status and/or Soviet-style show trials.
(1) Caroline Glick on Israel’s Iran strike, the Biden administration’s reported consideration of sanctioning an entire IDF unit composed of Orthodox Jews, and the meaning of Passover:
(2) If you want to know more about the Passover Seder, please read this.
(3) Anti-Semitic demonstrations at Yale: a Jewish student is stabbed in the eye by a Palestinian flag.
(4) And at Columbia it’s even worse. The Orthodox rabbi on campus wrote a letter to Jewish students advising them to go home because their safety is so compromised on the campus. You can find much more about the vile goings-on at Columbia in this post.
In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. And the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.
It takes on special significance this year.
(6) What follows is a repeat of a previous post of mine on Passover.
Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.
I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not solely religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.
A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:
“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”
Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”
Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent decades has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to foster it in places with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.
We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country – more potent in the last couple of years. This is happening despite our long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it.
Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists or their present-day Russian successors. Some of them are cynical and power-mad; some are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.
…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”
Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.
Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom (those of you who’ve been around this blog for a long time will recognize this passage I often quote):
Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?
Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee even of bread.
I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.
The House of Representatives on April 20 rejected another border security bill.
A person might be forgiven if, on reading that, he or she concludes that Republicans didn’t favor it. After all, the GOP controls the House (although barely), right? So shouldn’t it have passed, if the GOP members all voted “yes”?
But here’s why it didn’t pass:
In a vote under suspension of the rules, the House voted 215–199 to block the bill. Because it was not considered under normal rules, it required a two-thirds majority to pass.
The bill was supported by all Republicans and was opposed by all but a handful of Democrats. Five Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the bill. But Republican support alone was not enough to push it over the finish line with the higher threshold.
Well now, that’s certainly interesting. So, why was the bill considered under rules that required two-thirds, rather than normal rules? Again, one would think it could be considered normally, since the GOP controls the House (although I repeat: only barely).
Here’s the rest of the story:
The legislation was considered under suspension of the rules because it had been blocked by conservatives on the House Rules Committee last week in protest to leadership’s decision to move forward on foreign aid legislation.
So it was blocked by the most conservative wing, who wanted to link it to foreign aid and use that as leverage to pass it. As Chip Roy said:
In a post to X, formerly known as Twitter, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas)—among those who blocked the bill in the Rules Committee—said, “Sorry, not sorry, for opposing a crappy rule that is a show vote/cover vote for funding Ukraine instead of border security.”
The move came after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) reneged on an earlier promise to not put Ukraine funding on the floor without border concessions from Democrats.
The reality is that Israeli aid has majority bipartisan support although quite a few Democrats oppose it. The reality is that Ukraine aid has majority bipartisan support although quite a few Republicans oppose it. And the reality is that border security has majority support although most Democrats oppose it. Therefore, all three bills would pass by themselves in the House if they came up for simple majority vote. But a border security bill would die in the Senate, although the foreign aid bills would pass.
And that’s why what I’ll call the Chip Roy wing wanted border security tied to foreign aid – the idea being that such an approach would be the only way to pressure Schumer to let it through. But he knows his own power, and I think it highly unlikely that he would have done so, and then the GOP would have been blamed not only for stiffing Ukraine in its hour of need – but for doing the same to Israel if border security were tied to Israeli aid as well.
Many on the Roy wing call what Johnson did “theater,” and want him gone:
The move received criticism from some of Mr. Johnson’s peers in the House, who have dismissed the tagalong border bill as “theatrics.”
“It’s a theatrics, shiny object; it’s the shiny object for Republicans that are saying, ‘We got to do something for the border,’” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said to the media following the bill’s unveiling.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chair of the House Freedom Caucus, called it “a joke,” “pretend,” and “theater.”
But I contend that what they have been doing on these issues is an even more “pretend” form of theater. They are pretending that somehow a combined bill would have passed the Senate and been signed by Biden, and that Johnson is just stubbornly thwarting them.
For example:
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) argued that Mr. Johnson should have put a clean Israel bill on the floor and attached a “Remain in Mexico” policy requirement to Ukraine legislation.
Does Ogles think that such a bill, if it passed the House (which it probably would have), would have passed the Senate or even been put to a Senate vote by Schumer? I don’t think so, and as I already said, the failure to support Ukraine in such a bill would have been blamed – successfully – on the GOP. That might have been popular with conservatives, but aid to Ukraine still has majority popular support.
And all three measures – Israeli aid, Ukraine aid, and border security – have majority support in Congress. Just not from the same people. And all three measures would have been passed as standalone bills if border security hadn’t been blocked by the conservatives in the House, forcing it to get a 2/3 vote in order to pass. But although Israel aid and Ukraine aid would also pass in the Senate and be signed by Biden, border security would not. And IMHO that is true whether border security was in a standalone ill or linked with the foreign aid, as the conservatives wished. And so the conservatives didn’t get what they wanted – border security. But they also would not have gotten what they wanted if all three had been linked, and they would have been blamed for abandoning Israel and/or Ukraine in the process.
They don’t see it that way. But I think they believe they have far more power to force the hand of the Democrats than they actually do.
The negotiations on these issues have been especially complicated and hard to follow. But I think it’s incorrect to believe there was a solution in which the conservatives could have gotten what they wanted. For example, this was the situation as it stood on April 14 (remarks in brackets are mine):
The House initially passed its GOP-led Israel support package days after Johnson was elected speaker in October. The package, which paired $14.3 billion in aid to Israel with cuts to IRS funding, was deemed dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate and President Joe Biden vowed to veto it.
Then, in February, the House failed to pass a stand-alone Israel aid bill without those IRS cuts, with many Republicans voting with Democrats to defeat the effort.
That same month, the Senate passed a $95 billion national security package that included aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, but Johnson rejected the deal after killing a bipartisan effort in the Senate to address security at the U.S.-Mexico border [that was a terrible “effort” that would have done nothing to improve the border situation]. And, under pressure from GOP hard-liners who have warned him that tying Ukraine aid to the bill could prove detrimental to his speakership, Johnson has yet to address aid to the war-town country months later. …
“We cannot hope to deter conflict without demonstrating resolve and investing seriously in American strength. The Commander-in-Chief and the Congress must discharge our fundamental duties without delay,” he said of the package that ties aid to Ukraine and Israel. “The consequences of failure are clear, devastating, and avoidable.”
Most people probably are unaware that the aid to Ukraine in the bill that was actually passed was in the form of something Trump had proposed, a “forgivable loan”:
Last week, the factions in the U.S. Congress finally hit on a compromise: military and financial assistance to Ukraine is to be provided in the form of a “forgivable loan.” President Zelensky has agreed to such a compromise solution.
For the past few months not only has a lot of the news been extremely depressing, but it’s been appearing on so many fronts that I have at least thirty stories to choose from each day for my blog posts. I’m not superwoman and just can’t cover them all, so I pick the ones that either interest me the most or on which I think I have the most interesting things to say, and I leave it at that.
But the residue of all the bad news sticks to me, to a certain extent, even though I try to shed it. And then of course there are personal matters: trying to work on Gerard’s book launch (which seems to involve a thousand surprisingly time-consuming tasks), planning a summer trip out west that should end up being fun but requires juggling the schedules of many people (another surprisingly time-consuming – and frustrating – task), and of course the continual absence of Gerard now that over a year has passed.
If only the news of the world were better. For now we see through a glass, darkly, and so I try to be optimistic. I certainly realize I can’t see the future, and it might be better – even much better – than it looks now. However:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself; …
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
That last poem, by Robert Frost, is especially laconic and deceptively simple – almost like a child’s nursery rhyme. But it says a great deal.
All of the poems convey a sense of foreboding, and it’s hard not to feel that sort of dread today. I don’t think that emotion is the province of one side or another; from what I can see among the people I know, it’s shared by both, although exactly what they dread and their idea of the mechanism by which it could and perhaps will occur is quite different.
And yet, spring is here. I took this photo a few days ago near where I live. What’s unusual about it isn’t apparent in the photo, but it was a bunch of teeny miniature daffodils that had apparently seeded themselves in an area where nothing had been cultivated or purposely planted. They were just standing there alone, a real surprise:
If you’re not a ballet lover, you may never have heard of the ballet Raymonda. I’ve seen it quite a few times, and although it’s not my favorite it’s still enjoyable, and I very much like the Glazunov music.
I well remember two ballerinas from American Ballet Theater whose performances in the role were stellar. Luckily, I found videos of each of them doing one of the solos. But unfortunately, the quality of the videos isn’t good; they are blurry and sometimes the music is flat. And yet, unless one goes to the Lincoln Center library and watches videos there (they can’t be taken out), it’s all we have of these great artists.
The quality of these videos makes it seem as though these performances were from 100 years ago. But these are people I saw perform when I was already an adult. The videos appear to have been taken during live performances and have some annoying buzzing and clicking sounds.
But enough complaining.
First, we have Cynthia Gregory, who was tall and elegant, restrained but lovely. This is probably from some time in the early to mid 1970s:
And then we have Martine van Hamel, who was also elegant but had a more delicate and charming quality. She is from the same era. The music is flat, the picture is blurry, but I think she is amazing:
Here is a Russian dancer from the 1980s; actually, she’s Georgian. You can see that her movements are sharper and far more dramatic. She gives it that Russian/Georgian angst. Although her variation lacks the charm and centered stillness of the first two, I like it for its drama. The video quality is much better, of course, although the first few moments of the variation are missing:
And here is a very well-known French dancer who was a technical marvel, circa 1990 or so. Her version is too austere and severe for me, and I get that sense of posing rather than flow:
I had trouble finding more recent performances, but maybe it’s just as well. I assume they’re available, though.
