I’m with Iowahawk, who said on Twitter (April 30), referring to some of Obama’s foreign policy aides such as Ben Rhodes, “I have a hard time believing a foreign policy brain trust made up of America’s top failed novelists and campaign van drivers could get things wrong.”
Anyone who read Ben Rhodes’ resume (as I did, in 2013) would not be the least bit surprised at how events have panned out for him and the policies he pushed.
But Rhodes would have been nothing without Obama, who not only chose him but shared his worldview. And as far I can see, the worldview of Obama hasn’t changed much since he was in college, a phenomenon I wrote about here. In it, I discussed an article he wrote for a student newspaper at Columbia—one of the few pieces of early writing we have from Obama, who kept a light paper trail—and how it combined ignorance, idealism, leftism, and arrogance. I’d say the same for Rhodes; Obama chose advisors who agreed with him (which of course is his prerogative).
Of course, one could say that Trump has no foreign policy experience either, and one would be right. This was one of the things that worried me so powerfully during the 2016 campaign. I still wonder about it. But he’s certainly chosen people to advise him who have plenty of experience in the arena, and what I’ve seen so far I mostly like.
What’s more, one thing you can say about Trump is that, although some of his behavior (and many of his Tweets) may seem and sound sophomoric and/or crass, his world-view on foreign policy is not. It’s cynical, hard-nosed, and it’s based on a ton of practical real-world experience in negotiating in a somewhat different but perhaps-related area, that of international business.
During the campaign and since, I’ve also been worried that Trump’s experience in the latter world would not transfer to the former world. But so far it appears that some of the negotiating skills are similar. And they’re a great deal more similar than writing novels and/or student articles are to negotiating foreign policy in the real world. A lot more similar.
I have no idea how the current approach towards Iran will work out. But I am firmly convinced that no one does. And the objections of Obama et al do not move me one iota. They have absolutely no credibility with me.
Basically, it was part of the anti-vaccine hysteria.
Where I live, Lyme disease is a very real possibility if you go outside in the countryside or even suburbia. People have to dress with great care to avoid it, and I personally know several people who’ve had it and had to have rather elaborate treatment. I had no idea that an effective vaccine had been developed decades ago but became unavailable, based on reasoning that sounds deeply flawed.
I was listening to MSNBC for about 15 minutes last night, shortly after Trump announced that he was ending our participation in the Iran deal. The show featured a bunch of talking heads telling us in very dire tones that this was an awful thing that would lead to war, and that Israel wants war but wants the US to do its dirty work, and variations on such themes.
The message was similar to the idea suggested in this CNN headline: “Trump withdraws from Iran nuclear deal, isolating him further from world,” or worse:
Trump’s decision could have explosive consequences, straining longstanding US alliances, disrupting oil markets and boosting tensions in the Middle East, even if the US reversal doesn’t lead Iran to restart its atomic program…
While Trump supporters praised the move, analysts and critics said it undermines Washington’s credibility in future negotiations — particularly with North Korea — and potentially empowers the very hardliners in Iran that Trump vilified in his remarks.
It also further isolates Trump on the global stage, where he has angered even the staunchest US allies by reneging on US commitments to the Paris climate accord and pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
This is the way the left will go at it: the notion that we are now a pariah in the community of nations (as opposed to how beloved we were under Obama), that Obama’s successor is constrained from changing Obama’s foreign policy even if he/she strongly disagrees with it (because we must have continuity or other nations won’t trust us), and that any future development of a nuclear weapon on Iran’s part is Trump’s fault because of course the Iran deal would have prevented that from happening.
The Iranians knew that it was a deal rather than a treaty going in, and everyone else knew it as well. They knew that the continuation of the deal depended on Democrats retaining power and on the election of an Obama successor who thought the way he did.
I’ve read a number of sites on the right that emphasize that the Iran deal was not a treaty because it couldn’t get the 2/3 vote to pass as a treaty. But what was particularly remarkable about it was that Congress almost managed to find 60 votes to stop it; they came very close. The House rejected it with bipartisan support, meaning that all GOP members voted against it (except one who voted “present” because he thought it should have been voted down as a treaty instead of a deal) and were joined by 25 Democrats. And in the Senate, 42 Democrats in support of the deal managed to stop a vote by the majority against it. Not exactly resounding support; more like resounding (although in the end ineffective) opposition.
That was the politics of the deal, creating a foreign policy situation that as far as I know was unprecedented. To agree to an extremely important foreign policy with a country that is our sworn enemy, and have a strong majority of Congress—all of the opposing party and some from your own party—against it was an extraordinary move by Obama.
As far as the actual merits of the deal go, what you think of Trump’s withdrawal from it depends on whether you trust that the deal accomplished the aim of making it much harder for Iran to develop nuclear weapons or whether you think any such perception has been based on lies. In addition, it depends on what you think of other results of the deal—such, as, for example, as Andrew C. McCarthy writes:
In point of fact, war was not the alternative to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. War was the result of the JCPOA [the acronym for the official name of the Iran deal].
Obama said the mullahs would use the windfall to rebuild their country (while Kerry grudgingly confessed that a slice would still be diverted to the jihad). Instead, billions of dollars poured into Iran by Obama’s deal promptly poured out to Syria, where it funded both sides of the war. Cash flowed to the Taliban, where it funded the war on the American-backed government. It flowed to Hamas and Hezbollah for the war on Israel. It flowed to Yemen, funding a proxy war against Saudi Arabia.
The JCPOA made Iran better at war than it has ever been ”” and that’s saying something.
What does the future hold on Iran? I think I can safely say this: no one knows. But here are two competing articles to read, both from Vox. The first one gives us the negative point of view about Trump’s withdrawal, and the second one gives the positive. Please read.
[ADDENDUM: We know the deal was not a treaty. But was it even an “agreement”? See this:
Not only was [the deal] not a treaty, the State Department said that it was not an executive agreement, either. According to Obama’s State Department, this was a “political understanding” between Barack Obama and the other parties to the agreement and was not legally binding.
Another point constantly made by the left—as detailed in the piece by streiff I just linked—is the iea that Trump has no plan B. But as streiff writes, there is a Plan B, and it’s described here.]
Thank goodness the voters in the GOP primary in West Virginia saw fit to eliminate Blankenship from the running in the Senate race to challenge Joe Manchin. Blankenship was virtually certain to lose if by some chance he was nominated. His defeat—he came in third of three, with approximately 20% of the GOP vote—averts another one of those terrible situations in which a split contest winds up nominating a terrible, terrible candidate and forfeits an opportunity to hold onto (or in this case, gain) an important seat.
In fact, in all the primaries yesterday involving the US Senate, the results look pretty good for the GOP:
A night Republicans feared would end in disaster in at least one state instead produced Senate nominees that party leaders are pleased to run against three vulnerable Democratic senators in November’s midterm elections.
President Donald Trump welcomed the results in a Wednesday morning tweet, calling it a “great night” for the Republican Party.
But don’t discount the stupid party’s ability to be stupid yet. It’s a pretty long way to November.
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced an attempted redefinition of the word “planet” that excluded many objects, including Pluto. We think that decision was flawed, and that a logical and useful definition of planet will include many more worlds…
Most essentially, planetary worlds (including planetary moons) are those large enough to have pulled themselves into a ball by the strength of their own gravity. Below a certain size, the strength of ice and rock is enough to resist rounding by gravity, and so the smallest worlds are lumpy…
At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world’s astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world’s planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun ”” thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.
Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined “planet” in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has “cleared its zone,” or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what’s worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define “planet” in terms of the other objects that are ”” or are not ”” orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions.
So, they drummed Pluto out of the planet roll call by waiting till there weren’t many scientists left at the meeting before they took the vote? Sounds like politics to me. Give us back our Pluto, the ninth planet!
[Ned Lebow] says he was joking when he asked to be let off an elevator at the ladies’ lingerie department. A female scholar who was attending the same annual meeting of the International Studies Association was not amused, and neither was the association when she complained.
Now his refusal to formally apologize has touched off the latest skirmish in the #MeToo battles rocking academe. At issue is whether a comment made in jest rises to the level of a punishable offense, and what happens when a complaint some deem as trivial results in a vicious online backlash against the offended party.
Have all feminists turned into Nurse Ratched these days?
She said she offered to press the floor buttons for people in the elevator, whom she described as mostly conference attendees and all, except one other woman, white middle-aged men. Instead of saying a floor, Lebow smiled and asked for the women’s lingerie department “and all his buddies laughed,” Sharoni wrote in a complaint, the details of which he disputed, to the association later that day.
“After they walked out, the woman standing next to me turned to me and said, ”˜I wonder if we should have told them that it is no longer acceptable to make these jokes!” she said in her complaint.
Sharoni, who wrote in her complaint that she has experienced sexual harassment in academe in the past and was shaken by the incident, said it took her a while to figure out that Lebow thought it was funny “to make a reference to men shopping for lingerie while attending an academic conference. I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that we froze and didn’t confront him,” she wrote.
Maybe if you’re so fragile, you shouldn’t be out in the world entering elevators where “white middle-aged men” make silly jokes and laugh at them. And maybe, just maybe, before you get on your high horse and complain to the International Studies Association, you should get a little perspective and sense of proportion, and maybe even the courage to say something to the person himself first:
After glancing at Lebow’s name tag, Sharoni says she went back to her hotel room to check out the association’s code of conduct. She then wrote to Mark A. Boyer, the association’s executive director. He forwarded the complaint to the group’s Committee on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, which determined that Lebow had violated the conduct code.
Lebow insists it never should have gotten to that point because he tried to resolve the problem informally, as the association’s conduct code recommends. After being informed that his conduct was under investigation, Lebow wrote Sharoni an email assuring her that “I certainly had no desire to insult women or to make you feel uncomfortable.”…
Boyer informed Lebow that his remarks had been deemed “offensive and inappropriate.” An even “more serious violation,” than the elevator remarks, Boyer wrote, was “that you chose to reach out to Prof. Sharoni, and termed her complaint ”˜frivolous.’”
Lebow was told to write an “unequivocal apology” to Sharoni and submit a written copy by May 15 to the association’s executive committee. The apology should focus on Lebow’s actions, rather than Sharoni’s perceptions of them, it said, adding that if he failed to comply, the executive committee would consider appropriate sanctions.
Lebow has refused.
He also sent an email to colleagues calling his treatment “a horrifying and chilling example of political correctness” that “encourages others to censor their remarks for fear of retribution.”…
He said it was a man, not a woman, who asked for the floors and that the other men in the elevator were not his “buddies” as she had described them. He wasn’t smiling, he said, and she wouldn’t have known if he was because he was standing in the back and she was in front of him.
Doesn’t matter, Ned. She sees you when you’re sleeping, she knows when you’re awake, she knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake.
So you better watch out. No public place is safe, especially if you’re wearing a name tag.
Oh, and “Lebow added that he felt he was the ‘aggrieved party,’ as someone who has supported, mentored, and coauthored with women in the profession for 53 years.” Doesn’t matter; won’t protect you.
I suggest that Lebow have a talk with Jordan Peterson on this. It might be helpful.
For Sharoni’s complaint to reach this level, the cooperation of an organization like the International Studies Association is required. It’s no accident this occurred in the context of academia, the epicenter of political correctness and the campaign against free speech.
[NOTE: I also want to call your attention to this news of the passage of a law attempting to protect free speech at Arizona universities (public state-supported ones, I’m assuming).]
Commenter and forecaster extraordinaire “Cornhead” (aka attorney David Begley) writes about a question-and-answer session with Warren Buffett that he attended:
In response to another question Buffett said that while he spent his own money backing Hillary Clinton, it would have been completely wrong (and illegal) to spend corporate money backing one political candidate. I can say with complete confidence that Warren Buffett is not part of the Resistance and he has moved on from Hillary’s defeat.
I found it very interesting that Buffett seemed to back President Trump on some of his trade policies and particularly on steel. Warren rattled off some numbers about how much of our economy is dependent upon foreign trade and how it is generally good for America…
Many times Warren and Charlie [Munger] spoke favorably of the Trump tax cuts. Their point is that the corporate tax cuts will be channeled into more investment in America and higher wages for workers as confidence in the American economy grows. Buffett thinks that the full effect of the tax cuts is still not fully priced into the market.
Buffett is a notable philanthropist, having pledged to give away 99 percent of his fortune to philanthropic causes, primarily via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He founded The Giving Pledge in 2009 with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, whereby billionaires pledge to give away at least half of their fortunes. He is also active contributing to political causes, having endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election; he has publicly opposed the policies, actions, and statements of the current U.S. president, Donald Trump
Here are more details of Buffett’s political point of view; he seems like a garden-variety liberal to me. I wonder whether his (perhaps grudging) support of the tax cuts, as reported by Cornhead, is representative of the reasons behind recent upticks for Trump in polls such as the one reported on here [emphasis mine]:
…But 52 percent of Americans approve of the president’s handling of the economy of the economy. And 57 percent say things are going well. That’s eight percentage points more than earlier this year, and it’s the highest mark since January 2007, before the last recession…
The improvement in the “how are things going” number is driven mostly by Democrats, though. 40 percent of the Dems in the survey say America is doing well. Only 25 percent said so in February. And 26 percent of Democrats approve of Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy, compared to 15 percent three months ago.
Another one bites the dust, amidst accusations by former lovers:
New York Attorney General Schneiderman follows the trail of infamy taken by once-esteemed New York politicians Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner when his resignation takes effect today amid accusations of sexual misconduct.
The claims against Schneiderman, a champion of the #MeToo movement and outspoken warrior against sexual harassment and abuse, include violent abuse…
Later Monday, Schneiderman said he would resign Tuesday after The New Yorker detailed allegations from four women who say he slapped, choked and degraded them. Schneiderman, 63, acknowledged engaging in role-playing “in the privacy of intimate relationships” but denied assaulting anyone or engaging in non-consensual sex.
So at the very least Schneiderman seems to have been into rough sex, which is not illegal if both parties are consenting adults. The women, however, say this was not the least bit consensual.
The article was by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow,the latter of course being the guy who revealed the Weinstein story. Once again, the New Yorker (a very liberal magazine) has decided that the exposure of the alleged abuse of women by a powerful man trumps (if you’ll pardon the expression) the protection of an influential liberal.
And oh, the irony and possible hypocrisy:
Schneiderman was outspoken in his criticism of Harvey Weinstein, the now-disgraced, one-time giant of filmmaking accused by numerous women of sexual harassment and assault. In February, Schneiderman’s office filed suit against Weinstein and The Weinstein Co. alleging sexual harassment and discrimination carried out by Harvey and his top lieutenants.
Is Schneiderman guilty? Those of you who are regular readers know that I don’t ascribe to “believe the women”—or “believe the men,” for that matter. I don’t believe or disbelieve people based on the sexual (or racial, or religious, or…) category to which they belong. I don’t know enough about this story to say I am absolutely certain one way or the other, although I did read the New Yorker article and I do lean towards the “most likely guilty” side.
More:
Selvaratnam [one of the named accusers] describes Schneiderman as “a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” figure, and says that seeing him lauded as a supporter of women has made her “feel sick,” adding, “This is a man who has staked his entire career, his personal narrative, on being a champion for women publicly. But he abuses them privately. He needs to be called out.”
I will say this: the stories told in the article are believable, and they allege a common pattern of behavior that involves very heavy drinking (“a bottle and a half of wine, or more” regularly) and some sedative abuse by Schneiderman. That’s a toxic combination that can not only markedly impact behavior, cloud judgement, and/or release inhibitions, but it can impair memory. It may be that Schneiderman doesn’t even remember any of it—a guess I do not offer as any sort of excuse whatsoever on his part.
The two named women (there are four in all, but only two have revealed their identities) seem to have no political ax to grind (they are “progressive feminist” Democrats). However, they are Scheniermann exes, so they may have personal reasons to want to get him into trouble, and also (although they are alleged to move in different social circles) they have friends in common and “have become aware of each other’s stories”—presumably before they read those stories in the New Yorker. None reported the abuse to police, but that’s not surprising, since they also allege that Schneiderman threatened them. After all, as one of them is quoted in the article as saying: “What do you do if your abuser is the top law-enforcement official in the state?”
In February, to huzzahs of delight from the media, the Democrats, and the NeverTrump people, Robert Mueller announced, via his errand boy Rod Rosenstein, the indictment of thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian entities for a variety of alleged computer crimes during the 2016 election.
There were some potential problems with that. For example:
Mueller just indicted a bunch of Russians for setting up fake social media accounts and buying Facebook ads to say nasty things about Hillary online
How anyone can miss the massive prosecutorial overreach and blatant First Amendment implications of this is beyond me
One of the many criticisms of Mueller’s move was that it was pure propaganda. He could charge these people all he wanted, but they were never going to be extradited and tried. That seemed obvious.
Well, guess what?
Then in April, the most amazing thing happened. One of the indicted companies informed Mueller that it had retained US counsel and would see him in court…
Because the Russian oligarch has enough money to hire real lawyers who fight for a living, Mueller faced real opposition rather than people with no resources to defend themselves. You can be excused for looking at the manhandling Mueller’s people took from Manafort’s legal team and concluding they aren’t used to doing much besides bullying indigent defendants into a plea bargain.
Eric Dubelier of Reed Smith, who represents Concord Management and Consulting LLC, has posed dozens of questions to Mueller’s prosecutors, demanding detailed information about how prosecutors built their case and the identity of all witnesses and cooperators.
According to a filing Friday in federal court in Washington, Dubelier even wants prosecutors to catalog U.S. efforts to influence foreign elections around the world since 1945.
Mueller asked for more time, but the court has denied the request, and the arraignment is supposed to occur on Wednesday.
Let’s start with how much Canadians actually pay. The OECD arrives at its figures by the hopelessly simplistic method of dividing a nation’s total health care expenditure by its population. Thus, Canadians pay about $5,500 a head while we pay a little over $10,000 apiece for our system. But these figures are meaningless to actual Canadian families. What matters to them is how much they pay for coverage, via taxation. The Fraser Institute, a non-partisan think tank based in British Columbia, reports that the average two-adult family pays more than $12K annually. And it gets worse:
Between 1997 and 2017, the average Canadian family’s cash income increased by 96.6%.”¦ Over that two decades, the cost of health care insurance for the average Canadian family (all family types) increased by 173.6%.
Canada really knows how to do health care inflation:
For the average Canadian family, between 1997 and 2017, the cost of public health care insurance increased 3.2 times as fast as the cost of food, 2.7 times as fast as the cost of clothing, 1.9 times as fast as the cost of shelter, and 1.8 times faster than average income.
In addition, there’s the issue of choice:
As Sally Pipes, CEO and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute, writes:
I came to the United States in 1991, in part, to escape the single-payer system called Medicare, in my native Canada. A recent OECD study of nine developed nations showed that Canada was the only country that outright banned any private coverage for procedures deemed medically necessary.
And then there’s the issue of the waits. Back in the 1990s, I personally observed the terrible situation that chronic pain patients in Canada and Great Britain faced, when in connection with my arm and back injuries I was on a discussion board for chronic pain (the following quote’s from a post I wrote in 2009):
It was actually my injuries that first propelled me online over ten years ago, looking for information to help me with my decisions, and to read about the experiences of other people who suffered from similar problems. One of the things I found at that time that made a deep impression on me were the stories told by patients in Canada and Britain. Although they didn’t have to worry about insurance coverage, they were uniformly the most miserable of all the chronic pain patients on several message boards I frequented. They had to wait forever for tests. There were far fewer specialists in Canada and Britain who knew anything about their injuries or how to treat them either surgically or medically. The problems of these patients were generally considered unimportant and they were given low priority.
Until that time, if I’d thought about the health care system in those countries at all, I had assumed it was a great thing that there was universal coverage. But during this experience I learned that, at least for nerve injuries and chronic pain of the sort I had, the care here was far better. In fact, many of these people dreamed of saving up enough money to come to the US to some of the surgeons I’d been able to see. But they could not afford it, and they continued to suffer.
I’m not a rich person. But ever since then I’ve continued to pay extra for the medical insurance most likely to preserve my freedom to choose. If I hadn’t been able to have surgery on the west coast, I believe that even now, ten years later, I would probably be suffering from pain at or above the level of those early years. The prospect is so dreadful that I shudder to even think about it. I’m just grateful that wasn’t the case.
I wasn’t political in the 90s, back when this was happening. I had no ax to grind against single-payer—in fact, prior to that experience I probably would have said it was a good thing. But I couldn’t help but notice the desperation and increased suffering of the people on those boards from Canada and Great Britain.
There is no free lunch. There is no free health care. And anyone comparing outcomes in different countries by comparing statistics on infant mortality and life expectancy is comparing apples and oranges. These matters are influenced by much more than a healthcare insurance system.
There are more than ten Democrats for every one Republican among elite professors at America’s top liberal arts colleges, a new study found. Worse, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 70 to 1 in religion departments, and that wasn’t the worst disparity.
Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business management at Brooklyn College, examined the party affiliations of 8,688 tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors at 51 of the top 60 liberal arts colleges in U.S. News and World Report’s 2017 rankings, and found that there were 10.4 times as many Democrats as Republicans. This sample proved far from complete, since 37.8 percent of professors are either not registered to vote or not registered with a specific party, but the study did show a rough litmus test of political opinion at top colleges…
Worse, 39 percent of the colleges he surveyed had not one Republican on the faculty. The political registration in the remaining 61 percent proved slightly more than zero but nevertheless “absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation.” At Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. ”” ranked number 1 by U.S. News and World Report ”” Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 132 to one.
“Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference,” Langbert reported.
It didn’t used to be that way. But that’s the way it is now, and the trend really got going in the 1990s. A little while ago I saw a video in which Jonathan Haidt described the reasons:
Here’s another excellent Haidt video on the subject of universities’ lack of diversity of political thought:
“Re-imagining” works of art that have withstood the test of time is a trend, one I encountered last night when I attended this performance of the full opera “Hansel and Gretel” at the Yale School of Music.
I’ve written about this opera and my love of it before (see also this), and I’m well aware that sometimes directors are inspired to “re-imagine” it—always in ways that undermine the classic’s beauty, charm, and even the gravitas of parts of it (yes, gravitas).
So I’m usually aware of the warning signs that I might have that kind of experience if I attend a certain production. While I’m tolerant of some changes—in costuming, in translation, in orchestration (often missing and replaced by a forlorn and single piano), there are certain changes I really have trouble stomaching, such as the ones in the current Met production (see this).
I didn’t see any hints of special problems in the description of the evening’s offering: “Yale Opera: A fully-staged production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel in the intimate Morse Recital Hall.” The accompanying photo at that website looked like a standard but minimalist production. But it turns out it’s not a photo of the current production, which is costumed something like a more schlumpy version of this:
And the college setting didn’t clue me in, either, because I’d seen beautiful versions at CUNY-Purchase in New York, with a full orchestra and traditional staging and scenery. Here’s an example of a Purchase production, if you’re an H&G aficionado:
Too bad I didn’t look at this article about the Yale production (published after I’d done my research and purchased my tickets) before I hied myself to Yale and sat in the audience for what turned out to be one of the most dreadful experiences I’ve ever had in the theater.
And that’s saying something.
At least the Yale campus was in full spring flower. I got there early and walked around and saw trees and bulbs in bloom on a gorgeous day. So there’s that.
In reimagining [there’s the dread word; beware, beware!] Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel for Yale Opera’s spring production, director John Giampietro found inspiration in the technology that consumes us even as we recognize the benefits of being so thoroughly connected.
…Giampietro wanted to ask, by way of the production, “How is this immediate to our world and our experience?” The Brooklyn, New York-based director pointed out that “in our modern-day world, we’re sort of lost as a civilization,” we’re having “our lost-in-the woods moment,” consumed by technology and asking ourselves, “What is real?”
In the Yale Opera production, the mother hooks the children up to a virtual realty game in which they enter a forest depicted by projected designs. To find and rescue their children from danger, the parents, too, have to enter a virtual reality and play the game…
That doesn’t even begin to describe how awful a “re-imagining” this actually was.
Here’s what I have to say to wannabee geniuses like Giampietro: If you must make a commentary on the alienation of modern life and the internet, start your own blog. And if you want to stage an opera on that subject, write your own friggin masterpiece. Don’t ruin someone else’s.
Perhaps if Giampietro wrote his own opera on that theme, few people would come to it. Or perhaps he’s popular enough that it could get the crowds, and I encourage him to go for it. But by putting on “Hansel and Gretel,” he gets a ready-made audience for what amounts to a bait-and-switch. At least make sure you put “re-imagined” on the website, so people are forewarned.
What Giampietro did to this opera was an abomination—hard to follow (even though I know it by heart), devoid of meaningful context (the plot was actually nonsensical in various ways), with the delicate, humorous, and touching interplay between and among the characters virtually (to coin a phrase) gone.
And whoever “designed” the set (white couches and a light show projected on the back wall) and the “costumes” (mostly black and white clothes that might be suitable for waitresses in a hamburger place or maybe working out) should get out of the theater, pronto. I’ve never seen a more visually boring piece of “entertainment.”
The sad thing—or perhaps it’s the happy thing—is that the performers’ voices were wonderful. If you closed your eyes you could even imagine you were listening to a good recording of the opera—albeit miked, as far as my ears could tell; and if these are opera students, why the miking, particularly when they were only competing for attention with a single piano? (See this for a discussion of the amplification of opera sound).
I wish these young and talented opera singers good luck with the current trends in the operatic (and theatrical, for that matter) world. They should be better served by their directors, but somehow I doubt that they will be.
