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.

Developments in Russiagate

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t been covering this too closely since the Mueller testimony, but here’s a summary of what’s been going on.

My attitude at the moment is that I’m waiting for the IG report of Horowitz to be issued, as well as for more definitive developments in the investigations by U.S. attorneys Huber in Utah and Durham Connecticut, to see if any of the rumors pan out.

When truth must be denied because it’s unacceptable…

The New Neo Posted on by

…then you’re in a heap of trouble. How can a problem be solved if it can’t even be named, or described, or discussed?

This isn’t about Trump and Baltimore’s rats, although that’s one of many recent incidents that sparked the train of thought that led to this post. The furor that ensued after Trump’s rat tweet reminded me of a principle I first learned not long after 9/11, which is that PC thought leads away from the ability to deal with a problem.

Speech doesn’t solve things. But speech can make it more difficult to solve things, if a certain way of looking at something become verboten.

I’m not calling for a free-for-all of abusive speech or racist speech or hyperbole. But when (for example) the connection between extreme fundamentalist versions of Islam and terrorism could not be voiced without an answering scream of “Islamophobia,” when no black person can be criticized without the response of “Racist!” towards the one voicing the critique, when a rat-infested crime-ridden city such as Baltimore can’t be described that way because it happens to be run by Democrats and has a large black population—then we have a problem that leads us to be unable to ever go about trying to solve those problems.

But these days a truth—for example, “there are a lot of rats in Baltimore, and the city has failed to deal with the problem”—takes a back seat to the implications some people draw from that truth, although not necessarily one the speaker expresses or means to express. It is the listener who insists on hearing criticism of a black person as inevitably racist when nothing racial has been said. It is the listener who imagines that accurately describing the specific city of Baltimore and its rats negatively are speaking out against black communities in some general way.

I am reminded of a quote I’ve discussed before, written by Czech author Milan Kundera, in which he coins the phrase “imagology.” The quote is from the book Immortality, and it bears repeating:

…[C]ommunists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

That book was written in 1988.

Sharpton: Trump tweets, the Democrats defend the indefensible

The New Neo Posted on by

I see that Al Sharpton is in the news again. Sharpton responded to Trump’s remarks about rats in Baltimore by saying, “that he would travel to Baltimore to ‘address Trump’s remarks & bi-partisan outrage in the black community’ over them.”

And Trump tweeted this back:

Al Sharpton is a peripheral figure at best in this Baltimore controversy, “just doing his thing” which is trying to get publicity over some racial issue or other. I don’t think a lot of people were paying attention to him until Trump called him a con man. Sure enough, and predictably, you have a bunch of Democrats defending Sharpton, who is undoubtedly a con man and also a long-time racemonger par excellence.

A few quotes:

Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden called him a “champion in the fight for civil rights.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared he “has dedicated his life to the fight for justice for all.” Sen. Kamala Harris said Sharpton “has spent his life fighting for what’s right and working to improve our nation, even in the face of hate.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the abominable Sharpton’s history, please see this article I wrote for PJ Media in 2014 on Sharpton’s participation in the Tawana Brawley scam. This is not a man to be defended, and yet here the Democrats go again, doing just that. And then there’s this part of Sharpton’s résumé:

Since the 1980s, Sharpton has engineered protests, boycotts, and riots, often pitting African Americans against Jewish communities. Perhaps the most gruesome being a four-day race riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after a Hasidic driver killed the child of Guyanese immigrants in a tragic car accident. Sharpton stirred up anti-Semitic protesters, shouting, “No justice, no peace!” They targeted innocent Jewish homes, breaking windows and setting cars on fire, and an angry mob murdered Jewish bystander Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton lead the mobs who chanted about killing “bloodsucking Jews” and “Jew bastards.”

According to reporter Philip Gourevitch, Sharpton used his speech at the child’s funeral to stoke anger.

“Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. … All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no coffee klatsch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’,” Sharpton said.

Four years later, Sharpton was riling up protesters again, this time against Fred Harari, a Jewish subtenant who operated Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem, and evicted his own subtenant, a black-owned record store. “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business,” Sharpton told protesters.

Here’s more about Sharpton’s role in the Crown Heights riots.

If the Democrats want to defend Sharpton against Trump, they should know what they’re getting into.

Ah, but the following is their calculus, and maybe it will even work: they are banking on the idea that most voters haven’t a clue about Sharpton’s history and that the MSM will not expose it and make them look bad. They are betting that what people will see is “Trump attacks another black man, one who has dedicated his life to the rights of black people! Trump is a RACIST!!!”

The Brawley case is 30 years old. Crown Heights is close to 30 years old. What percentage of voters have a clue what happened during either of them?

The “most gullible man in Cambridge”?

The New Neo Posted on by

A number of people have asked my opinion of this article that appeared recently in New York Magazine, entitled “The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he?”

It’s about Bruce Hay, a Harvard Law professor who was scammed by two women in a way that’s a bit complex to describe, but it involves a paternity claim and ultimately the commandeering of his Cambridge home. It’s long, so you may not want to slog through it. Suffice to say that yes, Hay seems quite gullible, although I doubt he’s “the most gullible man in Cambridge.”

In online commentary at one site or other featuring the article, I’ve seen a lot of people mocking Hay. But I’m not joining in the mockery. One reason is that it’s easy, really really easy, to look at a con from the outside and feel superior to the mark (in this case, Hay). I would never be taken in by something so ridiculous and transparent, you say. And probably you wouldn’t. I don’t think I would.

But perhaps we both are wrong. Because con artists are clever, and they play on whatever is the weakness of the particular person with whom they are dealing at the moment. And we all have our weaknesses, although they’re not necessarily the same weaknesses as those of Bruce Hay.

What were the weaknesses that might have made him susceptible? Being middle-aged and divorced (although he lived with his ex-wife in what appears to have been an amicable arrangement for friendship and child-rearing.). Being susceptible to the come-on of an attractive young woman, and having sex with her. Being so liberal and PC that this woman and a transgender friend of hers could bully him into almost anything. Perhaps also being lonely in the emotional sense, and even (maybe) being somewhere on the spectrum and having some difficult in reading people.

And last but not least, consenting to have his private life aired in New York Magazine, with the effect of making him the object of ridicule.

Cry “racist”

The New Neo Posted on by

I agree with Roger Simon:

These days one might as well call the Democratic Party The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Racism…

The conclusion we are supposed to glean from this, the rule of rules that must be obeyed at all costs, is that whites are always wrong when criticizing blacks.

Not just wrong, but racist. Always. There is literally no negative word that might be said that is not racist, and that includes numbers like statistics.

And it is racist of me to point this out, no doubt.

As far as the specific words of Trump regarding Cummings’ section of Baltimore goes, Trump’s use of the word “infested” has been criticized as inherently racist. In fact, CNN host Victor Blackwell said, “when [Trump] tweets about infestation, it’s about black and brown people.” And this despite the fact that this is the sentence in which Trump used the word, “Cummings’ district is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

Is Blackwell implying that black and brown people are “rats and rodents?” Or alternatively, is he implying that only areas with black people can be “rat- and rodent-infested?” If that’s not a racist comment by Blackwell, I don’t know what is.

Rats and rodents are equal-opportunity pests. They thrive, for example, where there is garbage freely available. A more likely explanation of why there are rats in that part of Baltimore is that the city garbage collection and control is poor, and that Cummings (Trump’s target) isn’t raising a commotion with the city to get it taken care of. Trump’s point is that Cummings is neglecting his own district.

What is the goal here on the part of the Democrats? It is to broaden and broaden the definition of “racist” so that it can be tactically applied to nearly anything a Republican might say. And they keep attacking Trump in particular in this manner because he is especially blunt and non-PC in his words, and in addition he takes the fight to the Democrats, hitting them where it might hurt.

Make no mistake about it—Trump’s dig at Cummings was also aimed at cutting into the black vote for Democrats. And if that tactic by Trump were ever to be successful, the Democrats would be in big, big trouble. So their cries of “racist” are meant to rally the black vote as well as the leftist SJW vote.

Will it work? I don’t know. I do know that it’s getting old for a lot of people.

As recently as April, 2019, the Baltimore Sun published an editorial entitled, “Baltimore’s perpetual trash problem.” Here’s an excerpt:

Why can’t we have a clean city? It’s a problem that has perplexed generations of mayors in Baltimore. Call it the perpetual trash nemesis…

here we are again in a mess of a city. Food containers, balled up clothes, paper, banana peels, plastic bags and tons of other pieces of litter line the shoulders of roads, pile up in alleys and are strewn across fields and yards. Not only is it unsightly and contributes to a rodent problem, but it can create a glum and gloomy feel in a time when the city is already facing self-esteem issues because of high crime and the scandal surrounding the University Maryland Medical System and Mayor Catherine Pugh, who’s now on an indefinite leave, and her Healthy Holly books. If anything, the city needs a major scrubbing to help restore some of its faith and image.

Acting Mayor Jack Young, tired of seeing people casually toss litter out of car windows or on the ground as they walk down the street, has decided to take on the issue as one of his main platforms. “A clean city is an inviting city,” he said during a recent meeting with The Sun’s editorial board. The city’s crime problem makes it hard to keep some neighborhoods clean, he said, noting that criminals don’t like “clean spaces.” They need trash piles to hide drug stashes or debris-cluttered alleys to make it difficult for police to chase them. John F. Chalmers, head of the city’s Bureau of Solid Waste, said sanitation workers will clean up trash piles only to have dealers dirty them up again. Some will threaten city employees who try to tidy up. So whatever Mr. Young has in mind, it seems solutions for the trash and crime problems will go hand-in-hand.

Catherine Pugh is black. Acting mayor Jack Young is black. John F. Chalmers is black. Apparently they all can point out the garbage and rat problem without being accused of racism. The problem is a simple statement of fact which should be valid no matter who says it. But somehow, when the evil Trump says it, it’s suddenly a racist statement.

I have already said that one of the goals here is to redefine the word “racism” to mean something very broad when a Republican or a disfavored white person says it, so that the word becomes applicable to almost any utterance of that person and thus very useful to the left. But there’s a related goal, and that is to redefine the word “racism” to mean something very narrow and perhaps even non-existent when uttered by a black person who is not on the right, or even by a white person with the correct leftist political affiliation.

And it doesn’t matter if the words are almost identical.

[ADDENDUM: Maybe they really mean that Trump is “rattist.”]

Evaluating newborns

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting article about how Virginia Apgar came up with the Apgar scoring system for newborn babies, back in 1952. Till then:

There [had been] no routine examination of the newborns’ vital signs and, if there was, the methods varied from hospital to hospital and were often unscientific, and even unsafe. Doctors were missing signs that a baby was, for example, starved of oxygen, a factor in half of newborn deaths. Some doctors assumed that babies that were underweight or struggling to breathe should be left to die. “It was considered better not to be aggressive. You dried them, you shook them and some doctors patted them on the backside and that was it,” said Professor Alan Fleischman, professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

There was a dire need for a system that checked vital signs, such as heartbeat and breathing rate, from the minute a baby was born. That way, the appropriate special care could be put into place before it was too late.

So it’s come to this: skee-ball cheats

The New Neo Posted on by

I have a soft spot in my heart for skee-ball, a game I was able to play even as a tiny kid and still do well enough to not get teased too much.

As the years rolled on—and on (sort of like those skee-balls, coming out of the chute and rolling down the alley, over and over)—I’ve found myself now and then at the ocean or some other family resort area, and there’s one of those game centers, and I wander in and spy the skee-ball area.

I usually put a few quarters in and go for it. The balls are light and I can do it even with my arm injuries, and I still can sometimes score pretty well.

Yesterday I found myself at one of those arcades and took up a position, ready to start. But when I looked down I saw there were already quite a few balls in the “go” position, even though I hadn’t put in my quarter yet. I was curious what was going on, so I picked one up, rolled it towards its goal and scored, but nothing registered. Then I tried putting in a quarter. Still nothing.

I went over to the attendant’s booth (they still have actual people there to help) and explained that that particular lane was out of order. She called a young man over and gestured for him to help me, and they both explained that this happened all the time: people took the balls from other lanes, thinking they’d get extra chances and higher scores that way. It didn’t work, because the machines are programmed to stop toting up scores after nine balls. All it did was gum up the works.

I’ve been playing skee-ball for umpteen million years and I’ve never encountered this before.

What gives? Has the social contract broken down that much? People are now resorting to cheating at skee-ball? Isn’t skee-ball supposed be a game? Isn’t it supposed to be fun?

I had to assuage myself with some salt water taffy.

[NOTE: Maybe this has been going on for a long long time and I just failed to notice it before? Have you ever encountered it? The attendants said it happens to them constantly now.]

A few more thoughts on Robert Mueller and all the speculation about him

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m aware that there are people who say that Mueller’s befuddled performance on Wednesday was all an act. I maintain it was not. He would have to be a thespian of Academy Award-winning skills (and then some) to pull it off so convincingly, and nothing in Mueller’s resume suggests he has that ability.

Mueller would also have to have been willing to make himself look incompetent and feeble in the eyes of the world, and I doubt that his pride would allow that, unless he was the lifelong dedicated leftist that his resume also doesn’t seem to support.

So I think the simplest explanation is most likely, which is that his demeanor and answers reflected a mild but significant cognitive decline combined with the sort of lawyerly obfuscation demonstrated by his asking people to repeat questions that seemed challenging, as well as his repeated insistence that things that were clearly within his purview were not in his purview. His definition of “purview” was rather narrow, to say the least.

But I want to concentrate on something else, which is the oft-repeated (at least in the last few days) statement that Mueller is an old man.

Mueller is 74, about to turn 75 in a little over a week. Some of my best friends are—well, you know what I mean. In today’s world, and given good health, what 74 usually indicates in terms of cognitive decline is that you sometimes can’t remember the name of some minor celebrity, or an obscure word. You might walk into a room looking for something and forget exactly why you came. But 74 does not usually involve a decline of oft-learned skills that you’d expect from a lifelong lawyer at the highest level, such as answering questions about a report which that same lawyer has supposedly worked on for 2 years.

That doesn’t mean that significant cognitive decline can’t occur at that age or even prior to that age. It can, but it’s somewhat unusual and a diagnosis of some sort usually goes with it. There’s been no report of any such diagnosis with Mueller, which doesn’t mean he hasn’t received one.

We are left with the question of just how in charge Mueller was of the Mueller report. My guess here—and it’s just a guess—is “not very.” But in the usual course of things, the head of such an investigation would be delegating a great deal anyway. However, Mueller probably delegated even more than that. And by the time the task of writing the report rolled around, he may have delegated even more. But I doubt that, even with a fully functional director, a director would personally be writing the entirety of a 448-page legal document. So some delegation is quite normal.

I’m treading a sort of middle ground here. I don’t think that Mueller was initially perceived as all that far gone, but I do think that Mueller was appointed because he had a reputation for honesty and objectivity and yet was already shaky enough that he could be counted on to delegate a lot, and that his subordinates would be in a fair amount of control. And that’s exactly what happened.

In the ordinary course of things, this would not have become public knowledge. It was only Mueller’s public testimony that revealed the possible state of affairs.

Lastly, I’ll mention that Mueller looks much older than his 74 years. I’m not sure what that’s about—maybe he always did look old for his age—but it seems to me it may be a reflection of whatever else may have been going wrong with him in recent years. Trump is 73, and he looks a thousand years younger.