A new American aphorism

 I am officially claiming this aphorism as my own creation. Let it be noted.

"He so stupid, he couldn't put a two-piece puzzle together."

Jesse Welles plays Boston

Jesse Welles rocked Boston’s House of Blues on Friday night for a powerful two hour set of both solo acoustic and 5-piece electric. 

Called the musical inheritor of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, Welles has developed a massive following through his social media presence, where he posts work dealing with America, whether it’s ICE (“if you’re lacking control and authority, come with me and hunt down minorities, join ICE”) or Iran (“Sometimes you get out your B-2s and go bomb Iran") or a multitude of other issues of the day. Some say he has singlehandedly revived the protest song.

He’s a man of great energy. “You can’t really wait around for opportunities to show up to you,”  he said in a recent talk. His Under the Powerlines tour will bring him to 17 different cities in the month of March alone.

He also knows how to put on a show. The entire Boston evening was tightly paced and well thought out. Whether he’s  performing his hit “War Isn’t Murder” or he’s backed by his excellent band covering “Creep” by Radiohead, the audience of young and old is right there with him, even chiming in on a couple of tunes, including his closing rendition of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

Jesse Welles is so popular because he’s hit a nerve. He is in fact the modern day Dylan holding a mirror up to a nation that feels it can find neither its way nor its voice. Welles is trying to change that, one show at a time.

"I'm bored."

I heard my father say a word the other night that struck me. It was, “bored.” A waiter had said something in Spanish. My father said, “I know that word. That’s the limit of my Spanish, but it means something like ‘bored’.” 

Why did this strike me? Because it’s a word that my mother used to use to describe her life. That she was bored. And all of a sudden, I heard my parents, so many decades divorced and apart – my whole life in fact – reunited in a single word. It was the same word and perhaps even more importantly, the same intonation. “I’m bored.” I heard it to mean, I’m bored with life. 

I’m sure they learned that word together, as young people, 70 years ago. They learned to give it its meaning and its intonation. It was a shorthand for a whole world view, a telltale marker for “what I mean when I say …". It answered the question, “Who am I?” and it originated in their lives in 1959 but its origins must predate that. 

They were busy learning and adopting an existing tradition, a world view, a point of view. They were taking it and reinventing it – adding their own twist to it – to make it their own. It was a musical riff and they were refining it for their tastes and their time. And it served them well. Through the course of their lives they could refer to it, both out loud and in quiet. It helped them deal with the challenges that life throws at a person.  

When I heard my father say it the other night, I heard fatigue in his voice.

Gerson Rabinowitz

For some reason, the past is coming back. Not to haunt me so much as to nip at my heels.  I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's the weather. 

 I've been thinking about Aristotle recently, and as a result, I picked up the Nicomachean Ethics, a book I remember tackling briefly in Greek back in my undergraduate days on the Berkeley campus, under the tutelage of W.G. Rabinowitz, a wonderful crusty old chain smoking associate professor of Greek. He wasn’t the writing type, so he didn’t have much to his name that would have made him a full professor, but he loved Greek and teaching it and reading it. He taught a seminar on Aristotle. Translating the Greek was difficult but making sense of the philosophy even more so. A woman, she must have been a graduate student, leaned over during a class and offered this critique, “He (Rabinowitz) doesn’t say if you can have a thought without having words to express the thought?” It stuck in my head all these many years because I had never considered it before.

I also remember seeing Rabinowitz crossing the street in Berkeley – it must have been Bancroft Way, the street that bordered the south side of campus. At least that is where I believe it was, it’s the only place it makes any sense to have this memory. It was a striped crosswalk without any traffic lights, so the cars were expected to stop for pedestrians. These were uncommon in American cities in the 1980s. Without even a pause at curb’s edge, he just strode out confidently or recklessly into the flow of traffic without even a hitch in his step and sure enough, the cars did stop for him. 

And finally, he once told a story that brought him great amusement about a professor of his, Harold Cherniss. Cherniss said that at a graduation speech many years ago someone quoted a line from the Nicomachean Ethics. It was probably an effort to prove how smart they were, but they got it spectacularly wrong. You see, it all depends on understanding of the definite article in ancient Greek. Properly translated, the sentence reads, “Man is a political animal." But if you put the article “ho” in the wrong place, you get a very different translation, “Political man is an animal.” Both statements are true, but Aristotle can claim the first one only, not the second.

That was Gerson Rabinowitz, his old gray herringbone sports jacket just reeking of cigarette smoke and his weird Buddy Holly glasses. I suppose in that way he was straight out of the 1950s although it was the 1980s by the time I interacted with him. He didn’t care what you thought about him and he let you know it. Rabinowitz died in 1989.

Here is a more poignant reflection on the man written by A.A. Long, a retired professor of ancient philosophy at Berkeley and a former colleague of Rabinowitz's. Long's themes aren't very different from mine, but they are more melodically put:

Gerson Rabinowitz was one of the Berkeley Classics Department’s most memorable characters and devoted teachers. Though he had retired at age 70 he continued to hold unofficial tutorials every week, reading Greek with a select number of students, especially Plato’s Republic, which he venerated as the source of timelessly valuable insight into the human condition. As a student at Johns Hopkins and Berkeley, he was inspired by Harold Cherniss, the country’s most eminent expert on ancient philosophy and a devoted Platonist, who instilled in Rabinowitz a passionate attachment to Plato. At the time of his appointment at Berkeley, Rabinowitz’s promise as a research scholar was widely acknowledged. His dissertation was published as a University of California monograph and he published a number of significant articles on Plato. He had plans of extending his work on Aristotle’s Protrepticus, and of embarking on a study of Galen’s Platonism. Yet, for reasons that remain imponderable, he suddenly abandoned all interest in these projects. After 1961 he refrained completely from publication, resisting all attempts by successive department chairs to get him to continue an orthodox research career. It is possible to speculate that he was disappointed by some of the reviews his monograph had received. It is also possible that he was mortified by harsh criticism that he heard from some Oxford scholars when he delivered a paper to the Oxford Philological Society. Whatever the cause may have been, Rabinowitz decided in the early 1960s to concentrate his professional work on undergraduate and graduate teaching at Berkeley, following Socrates’ observations in Plato’s Phaedrus that personal contact between teacher and student is greatly superior to the writing of books. He directed numerous dissertations of students who, in several cases, have made names for themselves in departments of classics or philosophy. He especially liked to teach beginning Greek and courses on Greek tragedy and philosophy. Some students found him too severe, but in many he inspired a reverence that was quite remarkable. What they valued in him was his tireless determination to help them understand all the nuances of Greek and, as one puts it, “to work through dialogue rather than simple assertion,” and to give “critiques that leave the student dissatisfied until he has given the best account of which he is capable.” Anyone familiar with Plato’s Socrates will recognize this allusion. He was in every sense of the word a personality, old-fashioned in his manners, abrasive in his conversation, but gifted with a fine sense of irony and self-deprecation. Opening the door of a colleague by mistake, he apologized with the words: “Trying to open the wrong door—that’s the story of my life.” As a young man he had been strikingly handsome and a fine tennis player. Even when elderly and frail, he was stylish in his dress and spritely in his demeanor. In his spare time he assiduously attended the Albany racetrack, and one would like to have known how his love of betting on horses meshed in with his Platonism. One may regret that a person so intelligent should have chosen to withdraw so resolutely from the scholarly community of his peers, but Rabinowitz had his own priorities and he remained true to them. Few university teachers leave as strong a mark on their students as he did. That is his main legacy.

Is Trump a Leninist?

 From a recent show on The Four Cast on Channel 4 News in the U.K., comes this fascinating conversation with author Robert Kaplan about, you guessed it, Donald Trump. In course of the discussion, the question arises, is Trump a Leninist? Read the answer below, or just click this link to watch the whole talk.

Krisnan Guru-Murthy: Is it too much of a stretch to say there’s a little bit of Leninism in Trump as well, in the sense of a man who believes in punishing the innocent to some degree?

Robert Kaplan: That’s the best way to describe Leninism. Don’t just punish the guilty because that gets you nothing. You have to strike fear into the hearts of the innocent and that way you get total control. That was the innovation of Leninism. And there’s a little bit of that in Trump but that’s not really where he is. He’s not serious enough to be a fascist or a Leninist ideologue. You know, to be a fascist or a Leninist ideologue, you have to read, you have to have a program.

Negative populism

 And one more quote, this time from Bill Clinton reflecting on the prevailing sentiment these days which he calls 'negative populism' and defines this way ... "You may not win in this new deal, but at least they'll lose."

Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances ...

 

“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

― George Bernard Shaw

That time of year, Messiah

The Handel + Haydn Society of Boston first performed Handel's Messiah (or at least portions of it) on Christmas night 1815, only 73 years after it was first performed in Dublin around Easter, 1742.

And starting in 1854, H + H has performed the entire Messiah every year at Christmas time. This year was no exception, with concerts in late November and early December in Boston's Symphony Hall.

Generations upon generations of Bostonians, both native born and transplants, have been able to hear this music every single year. 

As I sat in the concert hall -- itself a throwback unchanged in character since its very first opening night in 1900 (according to Wikipedia, "The hall's leather seats are the originals installed in 1900") -- I started to count back through the generations with this question in mind, "How far back do you have to go until you find an era of audience who are now all dead?"

Is anyone who attended the performance in Christmas 1963, one month after Kennedy's assassination, still alive? Probably yes. 

How about the audience of 1953? Or the audience of 1943? If children were in attendance, and they were probably in audience in 1943, then yes. 

But at some point, for some audience, there are no longer any living members of THAT performance, whichever performance it was. And all of the musicians who played the notes that were heard by that audience are also dead.

And I thought to myself: Different musicians. Different audience members. Old ones replaced by new ones. Yet, the music doesn't change. Always the same music. 

That must be a definition of culture.