“The Most Happy Fella” is a musical by Frank Loesser (I wrote about Loesser and his oeuvre here) that opened on Broadway in 1956.
“Fella” is an odd bird in that it requires many operatic voices. Perhaps that’s why it’s so seldom performed. My parents, who often took me to Broadway musicals even at that tender age, omitted that one. My guess is that it was because it contained “adult” themes.
But we owned the record. It was one of the few musicals I learned through the recording only and didn’t see in person until I was well into middle age. It’s absolutely wonderful, one of the best ever, combining a touching story and an almost endless flow of beautiful music.
Was it an an opera? I would say not, since it contained huge reams of dialogue. I’d call it “operatic,” though. As a child, however, I didn’t care about such distinctions.
Robert Weede, who played Tony and is shown in this video, had previously been known as an opera singer. But he was a sensation in “The Most Happy Fella.” I’m sad that I didn’t get to see him, but I found a YouTube video of him performing one song from the show, live and in concert.
Do you think he’s hammy? Maybe, by today’s standards. I think he’s absolutely perfect. The character of Tony is supposed to be very emotional. Tony is an Italian-born (the stereotypical Italian accent is part of it) California vineyard owner, an older man who’s never been lucky in love but thinks he’s finally found a woman to love him. In addition, wonder of wonders, she’s young and beautiful. In this song he’s telling his long-dead mother (in heaven) the news.
Just watch Weede transition from explaining the character to being the character. That part begins at around 00:32, and the transformation becomes complete at around 00:42:
Giorgio Tozzi (1980) is very good singing the same song, but in my opinion not as good as Weede:
Michael Corvino, singing here more recently, has a very beautiful voice. But the acting, although fine, is more gentle and displays nothing like the astounding variety and power of the swiftly changing emotions Weede conveys with his face and gestures. Here’s Corvino:
While we’re at it, if you’re still with me, here’s a recording of another favorite song of mine from the original cast album. This one is among the songs from the show that are not the least bit operatic. Enjoy:
There’s this one, too. In the video (and on the record) there’s a short intro I’ve left in here, because it tells you a little bit about what’s happening. Tony is teaching some Italian to the younger woman with whom he’s in love and who is beginning to love him back. But it’s also a quartet that contrasts the happiness of the lovers—who rejoice in each passing day—with the depression of Tony’s older sister and the restlessness of the farm foreman Joey. There’s only one comment to the YouTube video at the moment, and even though I didn’t write it, it expresses my feelings about the song and the feeling I had about it even as a child (“This quartet is almost painfully beautiful.”):
There are few prominent political figures in America I have disliked as much or as long as John Kerry. Even back when I was a liberal Democrat, which is when he first became well-known, something about him (or maybe many things about him) rubbed me very much the wrong way.
Kerry was actually the subject of my very first post (2004) written expressly for this blog. And there’s also this post (“John Kerry: treason then and now”) which I wrote in 2014.
…[S]trangely enough, back when I was a liberal in the 60s and 70s, something about Kerry almost instantaneously raised my hackles. He seemed a phony, self-aggrandizing, pompous, opportunistic, narcissistic windbag even back then. Or maybe especially back then.
“Especially” not because he was actually worse then, but because his extreme arrogance and air of superiority seemed particularly misplaced in such a young person.
Kerry has always fancied himself an international negotiator, even as a young man:
”¦[H]e met on the trip with Nguyen Thi Binh, then foreign minister of the PRG and a top negotiator at the talks. Kerry acknowledged in that testimony that even going to the peace talks as a private citizen was at the “borderline” of what was permissible under U.S. law, which forbids citizens from negotiating treaties with foreign governments.
As one might expect, neither age nor his lengthy stint as senator nor his time as Secretary of State under Obama has dimmed his desire to negotiate, even now that he’s supposedly a private citizen. If this report is true, he’s still at it, this time to undermine Trump in the Middle East:
During the conversation, according to the report, Kerry asked Agha to convey a message to Abbas and ask him to “hold on and be strong.” Tell him, he told Agha, “that he should stay strong in his spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to President Trump’s demands.” According to Kerry, Trump will not remain in office for a long time. It was reported that within a year there was a good chance that Trump would not be in the White House.
Kerry offered his help to the Palestinians in an effort to advance the peace process and recommended that Abbas present his own peace plan. “Maybe it is time for the Palestinians to define their peace principles and present a positive plan,” Kerry suggested. He promised to use all his contacts and all his abilities to get support for such a plan. He asked Abbas, through Agha, not to attack the US or the Trump administration, but to concentrate on personal attacks on Trump himself, whom Kerry says is solely and directly responsible for the situation.
According to the report, referring to the president, Kerry used derogatory terms and even worse. Kerry offered to help create an alternative peace initiative and promised to help garner international support, among others, of Europeans, Arab states and the international community. Kerry hinted that many in the American establishment, as well as in American intelligence, are dissatisfied with Trump’s performance and the way he leads America. He surprised his interlocutor by saying he was seriously considering running for president in 2020. When asked about his advanced age, he said he was not much older than Trump and would not have an age problem.
Kerry may not think he has an age problem, but in that case he does have a math problem. If Kerry ran for president in 2020 and won, he would have just turned 77 years old before the inauguration. That’s quite a bit older than Trump was when he was first elected, and it’s still significantly older than Trump would be if Trump were re-elected. When you’re at that end of the age graph, every year counts more than it does at the beginning.
But age isn’t really Kerry’s problem if he wanted to run for national office. He lost in 2004 despite President Bush’s unpopularity because Kerry is widely despised, and there’s no big affection for him even among liberals.
But back to his alleged communication with Abbas through Agha. It seems to me that Kerry may be terrified at the possibility that Trump could actually broker a deal in the Middle East, something that eluded Kerry but that he had fervently hoped would be his ticket to diplomatic stardom. How dreadful, how positively unendurable, it would be if Trump—of all people—managed to do what Kerry could not do, and to get better terms for Israel into the bargain.
I have no problem believing that Kerry would do his best to prevent that from happening. It makes perfect sense: tell Abbas to hang tough and not be afraid of Trump, and then Kerry can swoop in later and use his contacts with Europe and the rest of the “international community” he knows so well to broker a much better deal for the Palestinians. As part of this proposal, he must convince Abbas that Trump is on the way out soon, so there’s no need to take his proposals seriously or to be afraid of him.
Andrew C. McCarthy is the most consistently readable, thorough, and clear writer on the topic of all the current government investigations going on, and recent ones in the past as well. I’ve cited him many times, and here I go again:
From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton”“emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call ”” not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.
If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton”“Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.
That is why such an indictment of Hillary Clinton was never going to happen.
McCarthy discusses the process by which, in several succeeding drafts of Comey’s statements exonerating Clinton from having committed any criminal act, all references to President Obama that had originally been included were expunged. An early draft had said this:
That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.
Later drafts changed the presidential reference so that it read “another senior government official.” By the time Comey delivered his remarks, that entire passage was gone, as well, and just Hillary was mentioned:
What most alarmed Obama and Clinton advisers (those groups overlap) was not only that there were several Clinton”“Obama email exchanges, but also that Obama dissembled about his knowledge of Clinton’s private email use in a nationally televised interview…
Perhaps [Obama] was confident that, because he had used an alias in communicating with Clinton, his emails to and from her ”” estimated to number around 20 ”” would remain undiscovered.
His and Clinton’s advisers were not so confident. Right after the interview aired, Clinton campaign secretary Josh Scherwin emailed Jennifer Palmieri and other senior campaign staffers, stating: “Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it on the news.”
Scherwin’s alert was forwarded to Mills. Shortly afterwards, an agitated Mills emailed Podesta: “We need to clean this up ”” he has emails from her ”” they do not say state.gov.”
A little while ago a commenter here wrote: “We and the Brits destabilized Iran in 1953 for the Shah, then the Shah’s reign led to this theocracy.”
The reference is to the coup engineered by the US and Britain against Iranian Prime Minister Mossaddegh [variously spelled]. Here’s what Wiki has to say about it. It’s the sort of thing you commonly will read if you do internet research on the subject:
He was the head of a democratically elected government, holding office as the Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 until 1953, when his government was overthrown in a coup d’état aided by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service.
An author, administrator, lawyer, and prominent parliamentarian, his administration introduced a range of progressive social and political reforms such as social security and land reforms, including taxation of the rent on land. His government’s most notable policy, however, was the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which had been under British control since 1913 through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC/AIOC) (later British Petroleum and BP).
Many Iranians regard Mosaddegh as the leading champion of secular democracy and resistance to foreign domination in Iran’s modern history. Mosaddegh was removed from power in a coup on 19 August 1953, organised and carried out by the CIA at the request of MI6, which chose Iranian General Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Mosaddegh.
It seems pretty clear what is being said here, at least from the “progressive” (great word, isn’t it?] point of view. I’ll fill in the blanks for you: good guy Mossaddegh was doing wonderful things for a stable Iran until the greedy bad guys the Americans and Brits got mad at him for nationalizing the oil industry and claiming it for its rightful owners, the Iranians.
You can read that sort of thing all over. Is it true?
One can begin at any number of arbitrary points in Iranian (and Persian, before that) history or modern history. But this might be a good one. While you read it, mull over how very very stable Iran was (that’s sarcasm, by the way) before the coup.
The CIA’s immediate target was Mossadeq, whom the Shah had picked to run the government just before the parliament voted to nationalize the AIOC. A royal-blooded eccentric given to melodrama and hypochondria, Mossadeq often wept during speeches, had fits and swoons, and conducted affairs of state from bed wearing wool pajamas. During his visit to the United States in October 1951, Newsweek labeled him the “Fainting Fanatic” but also observed that, although most Westerners at first dismissed him as “feeble, senile, and probably a lunatic,” many came to regard him as “an immensely shrewd old man with an iron will and a flair for self-dramatization.” Time recognized his impact on world events by naming him its “Man of the Year” in 1951.
Mossadeq is Kinzer’s [author of a book about the coup being reviewed in the article] paladin””in contrast to the schemers he finds in the White House and Whitehall””but the author does subject him to sharp criticism. He points out, for example, that Mossadeq’s ideology blinded him to opportunities to benefit both himself and the Iranian people: “The single-mindedness with which he pursued his campaign against [the AIOC, otherwise known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company] made it impossible for him to compromise when he could and should have.” In addition, Mossadeq failed at a basic test of statecraft””trying to understand other leaders’ perspectives on the world. By ignoring the anticommunist basis of US policy, he wrenched the dispute with the AIOC out of its Cold War context and saw it only from his parochial nationalist viewpoint. Lastly, Mossadeq’s naé¯vete about communist tactics led him to ignore the Tudeh Party’s efforts to penetrate and control Iranian institutions. He seemed almost blithely unaware that pro-Soviet communists had taken advantage of democratic systems to seize power in parts of Eastern Europe. By not reining in Iran’s communists, he fell on Washington’s enemies list.
If you want to read a history of Mossadegh devoid of leftist memes, go here:
There are serious men who are under the impression that the CIA led a coup to replace an upstanding, democratic reformer named Mohammed Mossadegh with a fascist Shah named Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and that Pahlavi’s crimes were so atrocious that Iran was driven into the arms of the mullahs. None of that is true.
That’s near the beginning. The body of the article fleshes out that thesis with points such as this one:
Extremely valuable property [the AIOC, and the oil industry in Iran that had been developed by the British and not the Iranians], legally owned by the British government and British private citizens, had been confiscated by a foreign government. Before the war, Britain might have invaded. Instead, it retaliated against Mossadegh by leading an international embargo of Iran’s oil and by withdrawing its technicians from the nationalized holdings. Without British know-how, the company could barely function; after the withdrawal, Iranian oil production dropped 96 percent. And the oil that was produced couldn’t be sold.
Oil money funded the Iranian government; without it, Mossadegh’s reforms were worthless, and his popularity plunged. Mossadegh called a parliamentary election in late 1951. When he realized he was going to lose, he had the election suspended.
(That should put to bed the notion that he was an idealistic democrat.)
The entire article is well worth reading, if only to present a thought-provoking alternative to the usual simplistic “US bad, Mossaddegh good” story. Later on, there’s this [emphasis mine]:
The CIA was happy to take credit [for the coup], exaggerating its involvement in what was, at the time, considered a big success ”” but a private CIA cable credited Mossadegh’s collapse to the fact that “the flight of the Shah . . . galvanized the people into an irate pro-Shah force.” (A large portion of those galvanized people, it should be noted, were hard-core Islamists, who feared that Mossadegh’s slide to the left would include Communist atheism.)
So: Mossadegh was no democrat, and the CIA was not responsible for his ouster; the CIA did not install the Shah in his place, and it did not become involved because of oil. In fact, after Mossadegh was gone, Iran’s oil infrastructure remained nationalized, and eventually the British agreed to a 50-50 profit split.
Note especially this: “So why do so many people believe the imperialist-calamity version of modern Persian history? Because the world is filled with freshmen and sophomoric adults.”
Guess so. My gut feeling is always that history tends to be far more complex than its presentation by either side. But generally I’ve found the right to be somewhat more reliable on that score than the left.
When the 1953 coup occurred, Iran wasn’t the least bit stable. It was already a battlefield among the groups fighting for power: the monarchists, the liberal democrats, the religious fundamentalists, and the /leftists/Communists. I’m pretty sure that the liberal democrats were the smallest group, even back then. In the end—that is, during the revolution of 1979—the latter two groups (religious fundamentalists and the left) united in unholy alliance in order to overthrow the first two groups. That temporary unity was one of the main reasons the revolution was successful.
Iran has suffered ever since. It turned out that it was the religious fundamentalists who were the last men standing, although the left had intended to take that position.
[NOTE: I’ve written quite a bit in the past about Iranian history and in particular the history of the years directly leading up to the revolution of 1979 (see thisthis, this, this, and this, which is just a sampler of the most important posts but is by no means an inclusive list).]
Gov. David Ige told reporters today that part of the delay in notifying the public that the Jan. 13 ballistic missile alert was a false alarm was that he did not know his Twitter account password.
The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency issued the false alarm at 8:07 a.m., and Ige was told the missile alert was a false alarm two minutes after the alert was sent to cell phones across the state. However, Ige’s office did not get out a cancellation message until 17 minutes after the alert.
It really gives a person a deep sense of faith in the efficiency and competence of government and government officials.
Ige is sixty-one years old, so he’s old enough to be of the generation that’s not exactly completely conversant with the internet. Then again, he needs to be. But don’t despair; it’s been fixed:
Ige added that “I have to confess that I don’t know my Twitter account log-ons and the passwords, so certainly that’s one of the changes that I’ve made. I’ve been putting that on my phone so that we can access the social media directly.”
One thing that even Trump’s enemies should be able to say about Trump is that he always seems (so far) to have been quite cognizant of his Twitter password—although they probably wish he weren’t.
A great deal of what goes on with a blog is unseen by the reader. For example, I’ve talked about the amount of spam comments I get, almost all of them blocked by my spam filter. A while back there was a period of a couple of years when spam came in at the rate of about 10,000 a day. Then for some unknown reason it suddenly went down to about 500 a day. That’s quite a jump.
Then it started creeping back up to about 1500 a day. Again, I have no idea why, although I believe there are several layers of filters that operate. Next, I installed a security system that was supposed to improve things, but the main thing it seemed to do was to inform me on a regular basis of the number of attacks the blog had sustained.
“Attacks” are not the same as spam. They’re not necessarily attempts to take over the entire blog by hacking into it, although I’m pretty sure those occur on a regular basis, too. The attacks I’m talking about are another type of behind-the-scenes war, the details of which I’ll skip except to say they’re an attempt by bots (or the people who design bots) to get into part of the blog’s information sources and use them.
Bots are indefatigable—as you might imagine, since they’re not alive. Every now and then I’ll block one through that same security system (I’m being purposely vague here) if I get a notice that it’s been attacking particularly relentlessly. Most of these bots are from places in China and Russia or Ukraine, although there are some from the US (not sure whether they’re really from the US or whether it’s a proxy IP number and location they’re using).
I blocked one a few days ago. Three days later the service reported that in those three days that bot had made approximately 6000 attempts to attack that were blocked. By my hasty calculations, that turns out to be one every one and a half minutes or so, round the clock.
Not all the attack bots are that busy. And I wonder if at a certain point, they are programmed to give up.
[NOTE: I’ll add that, simultaneously with my blocking some of these bots, my spam-comment-per-day rate has gone down to about 50, which is extraordinarily and unprecedentedly low. So, although my goal was not to block spam, it turns out that spam and the attack bots seem to be related.]
Ever since I first saw the play “Noises Off” on Broadway around 1984 I’ve been deeply impressed by Michael Frayn, its author.
I’d read about the play before I attended it. It was said to be very funny and very clever. But it was exponentially funnier and more clever than I’d imagined, probably the funniest and most clever play I’d ever seen, then or later. It was also crazily complex in terms of its “business” and its staging, requiring split-second perfection in its timing, as well as prodigious memories in its actors.
I recently got a look at the script for “Noises Off,” something I’d always wondered about. How does a playwright even write the directions for that sort of thing? The script is just as complicated as I’d thought, a sort of fugue of action and words that’s hard to puzzle out when reading but works perfectly onstage, like a very intricate orchestral score.
And so I’ve long wondered about Frayn, who has also written other plays I’ve seen, of a very different type. What kind of a protean mind does he have?
MF: I never write with any audience in mind. I never think that anyone’s going to do the plays. People often ask if you think about an audience or if you think about which actors are going to perform them. Well, you can’t, or my brain is simply not big enough to do this. Every channel is, has to be dedicated to thinking about what you are writing. You really don’t have any, or I don’t have any spare space to spare to think about are people going to like this or whatever, or is this suitable for this kind of theatre or that kind of theatre. And certainly with Noises Off and with Copenhagen and with Democracy I didn’t think that anyone would perform them at all, I thought I was just writing them for my own amusement.
Astounding. He sounds sincere, too. Come to think of it, one of the joys of “Noises Off” may be just that: that it was a form of play in the nontheatrical meaning of the word, an activity “engaged in for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.”
“Noises Off” is not only the funniest play I’ve ever seen, bar none, but unlike many comedies its humor bears repeating. I believe I’ve seen it four or five times, the first three times within a couple of years of each other, and I continued to find it very funny each time. A lot of the humor is of the slapstick farcical variety, which is not ordinarily my cup of tea. But somehow it’s pulled off at such a brisk pace that it works phenomenally well.
I’ve seen Frayn’s play “Copenhagan” (also referenced in that quote of his) too, many years later. It’s thoughtful and intellectual and hardly a barrel of laughs. After I saw it, I had to go back and check to make sure the same person had written them both.
More from the interview:
UC: Could you give an example of one of your plays where you remember exactly how you got together the general idea and the specific topic?
MF: Well, I can remember with Noises Off, that – I told you that my first show was four short plays The Two of Us, and one of them was a farce and the point of the evening was, it was played by just two actors, one actor and an actress. And the farce had five characters in it, who were discovering each
other in embarrassing positions or whatever. So the two actors had to do a lot of fast, quick changing and running through one door and to another backstage putting on a different coat or so and one night I watched it from backstage and I thought this is funnier than what’s going on at the front and I must one day write a farce seen from behind.
It was a very easy thought to have and it took me a very, very long time to do.
I bet it did.
If you haven’t seen the play, I’ll mention that it has one of those play-within-a-play structures. But none of the action takes place outside the theater at all. The first act is a rehearsal of a supposed play that’s a second-rate farce. The second act is a performance of the same play as seen from backstage. The third act is a performance seen from the front but occurring much later in a grinding tour in which all the relationships between the actors (not so great to begin with) have disintegrated in various ways.
That explanation of “Noises Off” and its genesis is immediately followed by this one from Frayn, about his play “Copenhagen”:
Copenhagen is again, problems I’ve been thinking about for a long time, about quantum mechanics and indeterminacy. And then I happened to read a book by Thomas Powers called Heisenberg’s War which told the story of Heisenberg’s trip to Copenhagen in 1941, much written about then, but I had
never come across it, and since I’d read it, I thought: this suggests, this seems to encapsulate something about the difficulty of knowing why people do what they do and there is a parallel between that and the impossibility that Heisenberg established in physics, about ever knowing everything about
the behaviour of physical objects. So that idea sort of came quite quickly and it took a very, very long time then to work out how to do it. An appallingly long time.
That’s quite a wide-ranging mind Frayn has.
By the way, Frayn has also had a great deal of success as a translator of Russian:
He is now considered to be Britain’s finest translator of Anton Chekhov (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard) as well as an early untitled work, which he titled Wild Honey (other translations of the work have called it Platonov or Don Juan in the Russian Manner) and a number of Chekhov’s smaller plays for an evening called The Sneeze (originally performed on the West End by Rowan Atkinson).
He also translated Yuri Trifonov’s play Exchange, Leo Tolstoy’s The Fruits of Enlightenment, and Jean Anouilh’s Number One.
One more thing about “Noises Off.” Although it was made into a film, I advise you to stay far far away from that version. The play only works onstage. This is one of the few times I agree with Frank Rich, who “called “Noises Off” ‘the funniest play written in my lifetime’, [but] wrote that the film is ‘one of the worst ever made.'”
In a dramatic turnaround, Senate Democrats voted to reopen the government on Monday after receiving a commitment from Republicans to hold a vote on immigration legislation ”” paving the way to end the three-day shutdown.
The Senate voted 81-18 to move forward on a bill to fund the government through Feb. 8 after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) agreed to end the shutdown and continue to negotiate on immigration and spending matters. If a broader deal is not reached by Feb. 8, the Senate would take up legislation to protect hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who are losing legal protections, as long as the government remains open…
Democrats had been deeply skeptical of McConnell’s commitment, but indicated after a party strategizing session that they’re willing to trust the majority leader.
I have a different—or perhaps I should say “additional—take on it. I think that the story, “The Republicans are to blame when Republicans shut down the government and the Republicans are to blame when Democrats shut down the government” didn’t play all that well in Peoria, and didn’t even play so very well in the Democratic equivalent of Peoria. The government shutdown was always theater anyway, and if the audience isn’t clapping it’s time to book another play in the same theater.
The Democrats are thinking that their next show will be more of a success:
In agreeing to break the impasse after a three-day shutdown, Democrats are banking that they have successfully pigeonholed Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell into opening an immigration debate in the coming weeks and that an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote for an immigration bill would put pressure on the House and White House. They are already warning that if their demands aren’t met, another government shutdown could happen on February 8, when the three-week short-term funding bill runs out. And next time they won’t have Republicans dangling a six-year funding extension for the Children’s Health Insurance Program over their heads.
The FBI is either abysmally incompetent (“fools”) or in full-fledged CYA mode in order to hide its own wrongdoing (“knaves”). I vote “aye” on the latter. But either way, we’re in trouble.
Investigators in both House and Senate were stunned late Friday when, receiving a batch of newly-released texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, they also received notice from the bureau that the FBI “failed to preserve” Strzok-Page messages from December 14, 2016 through May 17, 2017.
Given the amount of texting that went on between Strzok and Page, who were having an extramarital affair, that probably meant thousands of missing documents.
A number of critical events in the Trump-Russia affair occurred between December 2016 and May 2017, including:
Conversations between Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
The completion and publication of the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The briefing in which FBI director James Comey told President-elect Donald Trump about the Trump dossier.
The president’s inauguration.
The nomination and confirmation of new Justice Department leadership.
Flynn’s interview with the FBI (conducted by Strzok).
Comey’s assurances to Trump that he, Trump, was not under investigation.
A variety of revelations, mostly in the Washington Post and New York Times, about various Trump figures under investigation.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe.
The firing of top Obama Justice Department holdover Sally Yates.
Trump’s tweet alleging he was wiretapped.
Trump’s firing of Comey.
And, finally, on May 17, 2017 ”” the final day of the missing texts ”” the appointment of Trump-Russia special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Strzok and Page had a lot to talk about.
Please read the whole thing.
Even without the pages that have mysteriously gone missing, there’s plenty to mull over in the communications the FBI did supply:
In the newly-released texts, Strzok and Page discussed Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination, which they said would create “pressure” on the FBI to quickly finish up the Hillary Clinton email investigation, known inside the bureau as the “midyear exam,” or MYE…
…[There are] instances in the texts in which Strzok and Page told each other that they were switching to iMessage for further conversation, suggesting they might have moved their discussion of sensitive topics from their government-issued Samsung devices to private Apple devices.
One exchange between Strzok and Page, dated July 1, 2016, referenced then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s decision to accept the FBI’s conclusion in the Clinton investigation. Lynch’s announcement came days after it was revealed that the attorney general and former President Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting aboard her plane in Phoenix.
“Timing looks like hell,” Strzok texted Page.
“Yeah, that is awful timing,” Page agreed. In a later message, she added: “It’s a real profile in couragw [sic], since she knows no charges will be brought.”
It may be long past the time to ask what Loretta Lynch knew and when she knew it.
My post on Jordan Peterson’s interview with Cathy Newman was much longer—so much longer—that now that I’ve disgorged it I’m going out to enjoy what’s left of the daylight.
I might post a dance post tonight, because they’re fun.
Over and out, for now.
UPDATE 1/21 3:52 PM:
Well, I guess I never got that dance post up there, did I? Tomorrow is another day.
Isn’t there some sort of big football game today? Patriots? Tom Brady and his cut hand? I may watch a bit of it later, if it’s close. I can’t say I deeply care, though.
There’s been a lot of delighted buzz on the right about a new video of Jordan Peterson being interviewed by a British journalist named Cathy Newman. The gist of that buzz is that he demolished her in spectacular fashion—in the rhetorical and ideological sense, that is.
I’m a pretty good arguer myself. But I sure wouldn’t want to be on the other side of a Peterson debate (or maybe I would like it—just to get close, because I admit to a bit of a crush on the guy). But I think that most people are simplifying what happened in the Newman interview. I believe that what Peterson did vis a vis Newman was much more than just win the argument or make his points or embarrass or “crush” or demolish her, or whatever destructive verb you want to use to describe it.
If you’d like to watch the interview now, here it is. But you might want to read the rest of what I say about it first, and then watch it:
What Peterson does in that interview isn’t just on the order of what someone like Thomas Sowell (whom I also admire greatly) habitually does in argument, which is to counter the adversary on the cognitive and logical points, and to apply the results of research to the discussion. Peterson certainly does do that, and that’s what most people see when they watch that interview. But he adds certain techniques of the therapist and particularly of the family therapist (although I really don’t know if he’s done any family therapy; Peterson’s a psychologist and used to have a private practice as a therapist, however).
If you’re mostly familiar with the supportive touchy-feely type of therapy, that’s not what I’m talking about here. I can’t give you a crash course in therapeutic techniques or in particular in the way family therapists work, but I can tell you that it’s complicated, thoughtful, and strategic.
At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Whether most therapists live up to that description is a very different question, and I suspect the answer is “no.” But we’re talking about an ideal here.
Note that quite early on Peterson says to Newman, “I’m very very very careful with my words.” During training to be a family therapist (or an individual therapist, for that matter), students learn to be ultra-careful with words—so careful that it can lead to a headache every session, which is what I often experienced when I was in training and worked in a clinical program. Every word has meaning and every word can affect clients, because therapists often have a great deal of power over clients whether they (therapists or clients) want it or not.
In the Newman interview, Peterson is highly aware that each word shapes the argument and that a misstep on his part can and will give grist to the mill of his opponents. He’s also interested in communicating clearly so that his thoughts can be more easily understood. So you can feel the intensity of his effort to be 100% careful with his words, and I think he succeeds in that endeavor to an extraordinary extent.
He also listens hyper-intently, another hallmark of a good therapist. His interviewer Newman is not only inferior to him in that regard, she barely listens at all but just barrels ahead with questions that for the most part are hostile (and perhaps prepared in advance rather than made up on the spot). So this ability to listen gives him an enormous advantage—one that the best therapists generally have, as well.
Peterson is highly aware of the problem Newman has with listening. In fact, it would be hard for him not to be aware, because her failure to listen is so blatant. He must correct her again and again and again on her misinterpretation of what he’s said. But another thing he does in response to her is very therapist-like (although it may not sound that way to most people)—he calls her on it by saying at one point, “That’s because you’re actually not listening.” This is a case of going from content to process, another favorite technique of the therapist. And it’s done in an observational manner rather than a purely combative one.
The interview also reveals Peterson’s extreme patience. He must be annoyed with Newman—wouldn’t anyone in his position be? But he remains polite and explains himself to her time and again.
I’m not familiar with Newman’s previous work, but she’s a very experienced journalist, so we’re not talking about a tyro here. My guess is that, until now, Newman has displayed the trappings of being articulate and hard-hitting and relentless despite the fact that she’s approaching the topic (this one, anyway) with an appeal to emotion. That doesn’t mean she’s dumb (even if she may seem so here); it means that the appeal to emotion usually works. It’s probably usually rattled her subjects, if she’s trying to rattle them.
She’s certainly trying to rattle Peterson. But she’s chosen the wrong guy, because Peterson is not a person who gets rattled (in public, anyway, which is all we see of him). He can get firm, assertive, and/or almost angry, but only when he decides for strategic reasons to display those particular emotions. And yet he also seems—and I believe actually is—sincere even in anger. It’s an interesting and unusual juggling act. Like Peterson or hate him (and I like him very much), there’s no mistaking the fact that he comes across as speaking from the heart and the mind combined, and weighing his words about as carefully as words can be weighed.
Peterson has the ability to do two highly unusual things simultaneously: continue mostly unruffled in the face of a verbal onslaught, while intently tracking the conversation and hacking through the weeds of the back-and-forth exchange in order to remember and to clearly restate what he actually said (and what the other person said) rather than what the other person claims either of them said. These two things are exactly what therapists are trained to do, and something good therapists are able to do. Peterson is astoundingly good at both.
But that’s not all. Yes, Peterson is trying to state the factual and cognitive case in a clear manner. Yes, he’s also trying to remain calm and yet show appropriate assertiveness. Yes, he’s trying to track the conversation and not get caught in the interviewer’s misstatements about his statements. But he’s also trying (I believe) to encourage a transformation within his interviewer, and not just a cognitive transformation, either.
Again, that’s what good therapists do. And I believe a lot of people missed that part of it when watching this interview.
Peterson does this in a number of ways, but one of them is by surprising Newman and behaving in a way that runs counter to her expectations, not just about what he’s saying and what he stands for (basically, liberty and responsible adulthood are what he stands for), but about who he is as a human being. Peterson’s sincerity and brilliance are part of this—no ideology-spouting boilerplate demagogue is he—and so is his calmness. But he just might be at his most effective when he disarms Newman with statements such as, “I suspect you’re not very agreeable”—which on paper might look like an angry insult, but in person is said not in hostile criticism but as amiable praise for her assertiveness in her climb to the top and for her tenaciousness in the interview.
These are traits about which Peterson is pretty sure Newman takes pride: her assertiveness and tenaciousness as a reporter and interviewer. These are also traits some of her interviewees (and other people) might have found off-putting, or even unfeminine. So Peterson has accomplished a kind of verbal jujutsu. He has turned what starts out sounding like criticism into praise for qualities in herself that Newman values. And it’s a type of criticism she is likely to have heard before and thinks is a sexist sort of criticism. But here, Peterson (someone she’s thought might be an anti-woman troglodyte) is saying she’s to be praised for it!
That accomplishes two things. The first is that it probably creates a bit of doubt in her mind about the idea that Peterson has a disempowering attitude towards women. The second is that praising her for something she values is an example of something that has a name in the therapy business: it’s called joining. Joining helps to get a previously hostile person on your side, if only for a moment and hopefully even longer.
But the more striking turning point is Peterson’s response when Newman asks him what gives him the right to be offensive to a transgender person (I’m doing this from memory and my original notes on first listening, because the video is so long I haven’t taken the time to listen to it again). He turns the tables on her and observes that she has been offending him during the interview—but with the goal of getting at the truth. Again we have the same method of saying something that initially sounds like it will be an insult, but then praising and joining her for it. Both exchanges are also examples of something known in therapy as a reframe, in this case reframing “offensive speech” as “truth-seeking speech.”
It’s another powerful moment. Peterson’s observation is completely unexpected and takes Newman by surprise. Newman is so taken aback that she becomes virtually speechless for a while. She now knows (on both the cognitive and the emotional level) several things she didn’t know before—about herself and about liberty and about Peterson. It’s a lot for her to take in. In response, at one point I thought I could see a fleeting little smile of respect and enjoyment on her face.
And then to top it all off, Paterson says “Ha! Gotcha!” in the most playful way. It’s another table-turning moment, because it’s done with good humor and charm rather than nastiness. “Gotcha” can be said in a hostile and nasty tone, but here Peterson’s tone is anything but. This in effect becomes another process observation on Peterson’s part, drawing attention to the game-playing aspect of the entire interview. It’s an element of interviews that’s usually ignored and not talked about during the interview itself, in which both people usually stick to content rather than process.
Peterson’s also correct with that playful “Gotcha!”—he has stumped her, and she knows it. And although she must feel somewhat humiliated, I think Newman also perceives the spirit in which Peterson said it. We’re in this game together, he seems to be saying. We’re sometimes willing to offend and not always be greeable, but we’re truth-seekers, playing for high stakes in the world of ideas but bobbing and weaving in a gamelike fashion as we spar about them.
I don’t know for sure whether that’s what she sees, but that’s what I see happening there.
It’s a tour de force on Peterson’s part. I don’t know whether I’m interpreting Newman’s reaction correctly, and I’m certainly not saying that even if she had that reaction that it would last very long. But man, he’s impressive—as thinker, debater, therapist, and human being. Newman got to experience all four of those things during that interview.
I have no desire to write about it in any detail. If it turns into Something, I’ll write about it. We’ve seen too many similar versions of this play already, although the cast of characters keeps changing.
Some of the characters remain the same, though. It’s their lines that keep changing:
I’d prefer to see him do this portion of a famous soliloquy:
…It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
