800 Words: Reuniting with West Side Story

I have just seen West Side Story twice this weekend at the Baltimore Symphony. As James Earl Jones would say, the memories were so thick I had to brush them away from my face. During 'America' I was five years old, watching Buddy Rich on PBS with John Williams and the Boston Pops, playing Buddy’s jazz version of the piece, the first I’d ever heard. During 'Maria' I was eight years old, watching the Three Tenors with my parents and Bubbie. During the 'Mambo' I was twelve at music camp, away from home for the first time and watching the New England Music Camp Symphonic Band play the Symphonic Dances of West Side Story. During the 'Dance at the Gym', I was fourteen years old, playing Doc and Glad Hand in a production of West Side Story in which the director instructed me to create a dance during it in a manner so uninhibited and crazy that it would cover up the fact that nobody on stage could dance any better than me. (It still makes me laugh to think about it. The experience of being in West Side Story is no doubt a post in itself... but that's a post to be written on another day/year/decade)

I'm sure I was far from the only person in the audience who feels that way. West Side Story is so much a part of the American DNA that it's impossible to go through life in America without encountering it at all sorts of felicitous moments. If you've never heard a song from it, you might as well have never heard Bob Dylan or James Brown. And yet, since my childhood, West Side Story had very little to do with my life, yet it was such a prominent part of my life's fabric until I was 14 that it never felt as though it left me. All through the time I familiarized myself with Company and Sunday in the Park with George, with Candide and the Jeremiah Symphony, playing in the pit for Wonderful Town and screwing up the violin solo in the Chichester Psalms, watching Bernstein's Mass in Baltimore with stinking revulsion and Sweeney Todd in London with unalloyed joy, the score of West Side Story which I could practically sing and orchestrate from memory was there. Yet this weekend was the first truly sustained acquaintance I've had with the show in nearly twenty years, and what a weekend it was...

Many people have gone to many more concerts than I, but I’ve been to so many memorable ones. I’ve wiped away tears as I watched Charles Mackerras lead the Philharmonia in Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass, and I’ve watched dozens of people wipe away tears as Leon Fleischer played Brahms’s arrangement of Bach’s Chaccone for left-hand piano, I watched Mavis Staples give a Golden Age Soul performance in 2011 and I’ve watched Bob Dylan fall to his knees, I’ve heard the Vienna Philharmonic play the Schubert and Dvorak of a lifetime and the Boston Symphony play Ives and Gershwin better than I’ll ever hear it again, I’ve watched Ozzy Osbourne sing a beat-and-a-half behind his band and I’ve watched Earl Scruggs play banjo at top speed when he was three limbs in the grave, I was there for the New York premiere of Le Grand Macabre and the Met premiere of Nixon in China, I’ve seen Aretha Franklin’s hat from across the National Mall and I’ve watched James Brown try to seem contemporary by leading a 2004 audience in a chant of ‘Whoop! Der’t Is!’. I’ve watched Daniel Barenboim conduct Beethoven in honor of the Olympics and James Levine conduct Verdi’s Requiem in honor of Pavarotti’s passing, I’ve been to Alfred Brendel’s last concert in America and Carlo Bergonzi’s last staged opera performance, I've watched Ravi Coltrane play jazz in Grant Park to an audience of 50,000 and Mark O'Connor play fiddle tunes in a black box theater to an audience of twenty, I’ve seen Don Giovanni and Peter Grimes in the theaters where they were premiered, I watched Yuri Temirkanov conduct Shostakovich’s Babi Yar Symphony in the presence of the poet whose music Shostakovich set and I watched Music for 18 Musicians two seats away from Steve Reich, I watched Gustavo Dudamel perform The Rite of Spring to an audience of students and I watched David Zinman lay the groundwork for what a modern American conductor was supposed to do in Baltimore when nearly every other orchestra in America was stuck in the 1800’s. But in all these years, I’ve never been so sure that I was watching something resembling a cosmic event, a performance so powerful, so revelatory, that in some miniscule way it altered the curve of history, and the world, in its small way, was a different place than it was before we heard this concert.

Now, to be sure, I've been to better performances than this (not much), and I've certainly been to better performances of better music than this. But for the first time, I felt like I was part of a unique experience of a that nobody ever experienced before those of us fortunate enough to be in the hall. The premise was simple - a live orchestra to accompany the movie version of West Side Story. The technology to create a concert like this was simply absent until the last few years, and the result was that we could experience West Side Story in real time with a full 110-piece orchestra playing every note of the score... and then some. Passages that sound tinny when played by a dozen musicians come through with an apocalyptic, Wagnerian, power and passion. I don't know if West Side Story will ever be understood, but we came a little closer to understanding it this weekend.

The problem is, Leonard Bernstein hated the movie music, and accused the orchestrator of destroying his score. It's not a completely unfair accusation. The movie 'overture' completely destroys the shock of a Broadway Musical beginning with a ballet of gang warfare. The 'Somewhere' ballet sequence is completely cut out, and songs as wonderful as 'One Hand, One Heart' and 'A Boy Like That' are hacked to pieces. Every potentially controversial line which Sondheim wrote is replaced by something thoroughly bland so that it doesn't offend the delicate sensibilities of Middle America. But it's also true that some scenes are better than in the original score - America is better when sung and danced by the entirety of the Sharks and not just their women, Officer Krupke and Cool switch places for the movie, and the switch makes far more sense than the original order. 

But there are other problems - most importantly, the movie itself isn't that great. As the central pairing, Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood kind of stink. They suck out all the energy of their scenes together. Marlon Brando was eager to play Tony, and even if he was nearly 40, he'd have been a much better choice to play a street tough gone soft than this no-name would be matinee idol who resembles no one so much as Zeppo Marx. But at least Beymer had an adequate voice. Natalie Wood couldn't even sing her part and Marni Nixon had to be brought in every day to anonymously cover for her bad singing. As for her acting, she's at least better than Beymer. Though if she were acting next to Brando, god knows if she could have kept up. Perhaps the pair that was meant to be was Wood and James Dean reuniting for the first time since Rebel Without A Cause (a movie whose influence on the musical cannot be overestimated), but by the time this movie was made, Dean had been dead for almost six years. If the movie has a great performance, it's George Chakiris as Bernardo, and the movie never recovers after he dies. Rita Moreno is good as Anita, but not as great as people say - using her energetic body language to convey a "stock Latina" rather than a fully individual character.

But some of the problems can't even be blamed on the movie. The score is amazing, but it's schizophrenic - two musicals in one. Leonard Bernstein was fully able to create the jazzy Gershwin-like atmosphere of the streets, and when the play demanded Verdi-like operatic love, Bernstein provided the required over-the-top passion in spades. The problem is that this over-the-top passion has no place in a show like West Side Story. It is a pre-modern sentiment within an entirely modern story. In an era of arranged and shotgun marriages, when marriages of convenience were the norm, love as it’s experienced on the pre-20th century stage was the norm. Most people experienced (or expected to experience) a few days of true love in their lifetimes. So the immediate declarations and the extravagant sentiments of those scenes were probably much truer to their experience than it is to ours. But West Side Story demanded something much less mawkish than it was provided.

Much has been made of the fact that Arthur Laurents's book (script) is not up to the standard of the rest of the show. The truth is, Laurents's book is great - except when it isn't. He has the full measure of these violence-crazed, oversexed street thugs who secretly harbor true intelligence, but when fancies turn to thoughts of love, he has no idea what to do. Tony has got to be one of the stupidest characters ever written by a playwright, and the script gives no indication that he was ever anything but a love-crazed wimp who fell for Maria because of some kind of supernatural sign. Maria is a much, much more well-developed character - always the more pragmatic-minded of the lovebirds. Laurents was the only member of the creative team who wasn't a certifiable genius. But what American playwright of the era could possibly have equalled the other three. Arthur Miller? Tenessee Williams? Neither would have been right for it - Miller would never have understood how to write about love, Tenessee Williams would never have understood how to write about street smarts. Maybe some of the golden-age Hollywood screenwriters could have done it. What about the Epstein Brothers who wrote Casablanca? There's a team who understood both love and the streets!

The truth is that the great glory of West Side Story was always the dancing. The whole show was Jerome Robbins's idea, and there had never been a 'serious' musical in which dancing was so crucial to a show's success. Robbins's choreography was always like an encyclopedia of dance styles - the Dance at the Gym has the rival gangs trying to control the whole stage with the Sharks rhumba-ing while the Jets do the Chicken, or think of Fiddler on the Roof when the Russian peasants weave a Kazatzky through the raised arms of Hassidic Jews dancing the Hora..Jerome Robbins, like Leonard Bernstein, was a genius who killed his own talent. Both of them thought that Broadway was beneath them, and strove mightily to create masterpieces in their respective classical corpuses which eluded them for the entirety of their careers. They never understood that rhe classical worlds of music and ballet as they envisioned them never existed, nor would it ever. Broadway was, in fact, the American classical world. Because regardless of genre, greatest masterpieces are as populist in nature as they are elite, representing the perfect fusion of intellect and emotion. The 20th century classical world was simply to stuffy to accommodate anything which smacked of emotion, just as many more popular groups are too stupid to accommodate anything which smacks of intellect. It is generally agreed that Bernstein or Robbins never created anything so memorable for the concert hall and ballet stage as they did on Broadway, and when they left Broadway, Broadway never had a chance for a plethora of achievements to equal the best in film and popular music. But their absence did pave the way for one towering figure to accomplish alone what no creative team ever did.

Stephen Sondheim is the closest thing we've had in nearly half-a-millenium to a theatrical figure whose achievement equals Shakespeare - and the fact that he did it at a moment when the appeal of live theater seems on the wane makes his achievement that much more miraculous. Unlikely as it currently seems, it may transpire that live theater could soon be obliterated completely by movies, television, the internet, and virtual reality. And if that (admittedly) unlikely historical event happens, Sondheim will be remembered as the last true theatrical genius. But in West Side Story, we barely have any idea of what his talent has in store for us. His hands were completely tied in this work. There were so many 'wrong' moments in West Side Story that his genius could barely show through. How could he possibly turn songs like 'Maria' and 'I Feel Pretty' into something cosmic when the sentiment was completely wrong for the show's plot? When the show gets modern in moments like 'America' and 'Officer Krupke', we see him reaching out to his full powers, but when the show turns pre-modern, all he could do is write lyrics which sound as dumb as in any 19th century opera. For years, people wondered why Robbins, Sondheim, and Bernstein didn't team up again. When they began a failed attempt in the late 60's to adapt a Brecht play into a musical, Sondheim was immediately asked why they hadn't tried to collaborate since West Side Story. His answer was one word: "Wait..."

The fact remains, West Side Story is the Great American Show. The Citizen Kane of American theater – the summit to which every piece of theater before was leading, and every piece since was a reaction. The one-off moment when America’s three greatest young theatrical talents put their titanic egos aside to make a musical together. The result was a sublime achievement on a level that in so many ways has never been equaled in the history of America – a seemless fusion of dance and song, a perfect melding of grand opera with popular idiom, and most importantly, a piece that speaks to the entirety of the American experience; both native and immigrant, on a level that no other piece of theater ever equaled, and perhaps never could. It gives the poorest and crassest of America’s residents a high dignity that humanizes them to people who’d cross the street to avoid these characters. And yet, it’s also totally ridiculous… with gang members speaking in a mixture of slang that probably dated already in 1957 and bad love poetry.


(Bernstein revisits West Side Story, an invaluable document of a recording disaster. Also worthwhile because you get to hear Lenny swear!!!)

If West Side Story has coherence, we haven't found it yet. And like most great works, every performance has been stunningly inadequate to the task of capturing its full power. The original cast album is still the best, but it feels like a rough draft. The performers are probably better than any since have been, but the details of Bernstein's writing are completely glossed over with bad cuts, shoddy playing from a too small orchestra, and tempos that are clearly faster than Bernstein and Sondheim intended. The movie version gets lots of things more right than the original, with dancing that's even more involved than the original choreography, and but where it goes wrong it's a travesty. Bernstein's own recording of the complete score is both a miracle and a grotesque disaster. The sheer detail of the orchestral parts come through as never before, and the love music is so utterly beautiful that it's difficult not to be moved to tears by it. But Bernstein made a fatal decision - it would be sung by opera singers. Tony was sung by Jose Carerras with a thick-as-oil Spanish accent (!), and Tatiana Troyanos sang Anita with all the sexiness of a troll. Bernstein made two recordings of the Symphonic Dances - a suite of orchestral music from the score - the first was incredibly sloppy, the second was drained of vitality. Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Symphonic Dances much better than Lenny ever did. The 2009 revival at least doesn't rush the tempos ahd contains great dancing, but the orchestra's smaller than ever, and the singing is as bad as on Bernstein's recording. Rather than too operatic, the revival version sounds as though sung by the cast of Glee or Rent - with vibrato-less belting and sliding into notes galore. I have yet to hear much of the 1980 revival, but what I've heard has some enormous strengths. Maybe it succeeded where the others failed, but I doubt it. 

Much, much more successful are the jazz takes on West Side Story. Bill Charlap, Dave Brubeck, Stan Kenton, Oscar Peterson, Shirley Bassey, Buddy Rich, Chick Corea. Save the original cast recording, every one of these covers is better than virtually any of the classical/Broadway versions we can hear (ok, not Chick Corea...). Jazz saw this score for what it was, a classical olive branch to jazz, and saw all the possibilities of building on Bernstein's achievement. 


(Finally, WSS from the point of view of the Sharks. Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Symphony of Venezuela.)

There is, unfortunately, something about West Side Story's importance which makes performers either too timid or too ego-driven to do justice to the piece. West Side Story was considered a classic from the moment that unfortunate movie was released. West Side Story has become the first and probably the most important of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of the American Lyric Theater along with Gypsy and A Funny Thing Happend on the Way to the Forum (no doubt a disputable claim) - as important to the American musical theater as The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte are to the European (but with Anyone Can Whistle and Candide being potential additions to the center if anybody can ever find convincing ways to stage them). What those three musicals achieved was something that was more than just the achievement of a great individual. It was a triumph, a short-lived triumph, of collaboration.

When talented people go into a room together, it's inevitable that they'll find something about which to disagree strongly. When a collaboration truly ignites, there is no way to keep it on the rails for long, eventually, the ignition explodes. But for those few years when collaborators of genius get together, the results are even better, but it is impossible for a tornado of resentment not to build, and the resentment usually kills the collaboration. Think of Lennon and McCartney, think of Monty Python, think of Gilbert and Sullivan.

But something was in the air at this moment of New York. America was just beginning to stretch its legs to their full cultural reach. The 1950’s was (relatively speaking) the most economically successful, peaceful, hopeful time in America’s history. And this hopeful, peaceful kingdom of happiness required entertainment. But the entertainment got so good that it became art of its own - pushing every conceivable boundary in content and form to which mere entertainment is never supposed to push. The other arts were learning the lesson of movies, and brilliant individuals pooled their talents to make something still more brilliant than any of them could do alone. But these writer’s rooms were so boiling over with talent that all those brilliant individuals could not possibly work together for long. Right at the same time that Robbins, Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents, Jule Styne, and Larry Gelbart were collaborating on musicals; Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, Gil & Bill Evans were teaming up to make Kind of Blue; Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Woody Allen collaborated to make the original TV sketch comedy - Your Show of Shows; Rod Serling, John Frankenheimer, Franklin Schaffner, and Arthur Hiller joined forces to create Playhouse 90, a television show with the ambition of competing with the very best of Broadway Theater; Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller, and Phil Spector teamed up at Atlantic Records with a who’s who of Postwar musicians to literally create the music of the age; a group of famous actors and singers began hanging out at Humphrey Bogart’s New York house and would eventually become known as ‘The Rat Pack’; a group of gifted students who met at the City College of New York formed the basis of the ‘New York Intellectuals’ and shaped the intellectual discourse of the world by forming journals like The Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent; the Futurians, a group of science fiction afficianados who corresponded since their youths, practically took the science-fiction world by storm and included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Doc Lowndes, Frederik Pohl, and Donald Wollheim. All of these artists went on to brilliant achievements of their own, but it’s arguable that none of them ever achieved such universal appeal alone as they did together, and it’s arguable that never had cultural fare of such intelligence had such universal appeal. But right around the corner lay the 1960’s, John Kennedy, the Civil Rights Marches, the Great Society, the end of the Production Code, Bob Dylan, Lady Chatterly’s obscenity trial, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Beatlemania, and the triumph of individual expression. The classical age of American culture was drawing to a rather glorious end, and in its place would come the Romantic era with its individual expression and cultural scenes and niches. Emphasis in American life on importance of community was replaced with emphasis on the rights of the individual. What was once mass entertainment became Art with a Capital A. The energy which popular entertainment built up by the 1950’s was released in the 1960’s with an explosion of creativity and individuality - even the Movies became a cult of the director’s personality - but the energy released by that decade has subsided considerably. Eventually all that individuality got subsumed by mass entertainment’ more corporate, more generic, and dumber than ever before. It’s possible that more interesting art is being made than perhaps ever before in human history, but who can find the great stuff when there is so much shit around it? And even among the stuff that’s great, how much of it is truly cosmic? How much of it would court lastingness and universality of appeal if it were ever seen and publicized on a large scale? How much of it would still have meaning in 100 years? The difference in quality between West Side Story and even a show as good as The Book of Mormon is the difference between The Marriage of Figaro and Zampa. What... you’ve never heard of Zampa? There’s a reason for that... (nice overture though...)

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800 Words: The Cast of West Side Story - How They Died

Riff - Stabbed by Bernardo in the rumble underneath the highway.

Bernardo - Stabbed by Tony in the rumble underneath the highway.

Tony - Shot by Chino in the basketball court.

Chino - Beaten to death by prison guards twenty-eight years into his life without parole sentence at Sing-Sing.

Anita - Still alive, happily married to Pepe, having an affair with her grandson’s best friend.

Anybody’s - Impaled accidentally. Slipped on a Birkenstock she left in the middle of the living room and fell on a sports bra hanger.

Action - Still alive, became Bush White House aide.

Ice - Became a multi-millionaire by masterminding a 1980’s Wall Street Ponzi Scheme called 'Play It Cool Securities LLC.' Pushed out of his 50th floor office by his executive vice-president Bernie Madoff.

Baby John -  Married Maria. Eventually killed because of a hit put out by Chino from prison due to his divorcing Maria to marry Natalie Wood, whom he subsequently drowned on a boat.

Maria - Married Baby John to cover up that she was having Tony's baby, became a multi-millionaire by selling the rights to her life to United Artists - Baby John met Natalie Wood on the set and left her. She then used her money to fund the Cuban revolution and proceded to move to Bolivia to be near her one true love, Che Guevara. Whereabouts still unknown and #4 on the CIA most wanted list of freedom fighters in South America.

A-rab - Still alive. Stand-up comic trained for the borschtbelt but arrived just in time for the borschtbelt to disappear. Now makes his living playing to summer camps in Upstate New York and teaches a community college course called the 'Great Comedians and Gang Violence - from Shecky Green to Kanye West.'

Graziella - Broadway chorus girl who became a waitress. Shot at an audition by the director for singing a song from Rent.

Velma - Still alive. Marilyn Monroe impersonator who now moonlights by playing Joan from Mad Men.

Glad Hand - Shot in the late eighties at the inner city school after he quoted Perry Como lyrics to his students to give them inspiration. Student who was arrested called it a mercy killing.

Lieutenant Schrank - Demoted to traffic cop. Killed by Norman Bates after diagnosing him with Multiple Personality Disorder.

Doc - Died of a heart attack when he had a face to face with Dr. Zoidberg and realized they're the same person.

Officer Krupke - Choked on a donut during the 1968 riots.

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800 Words: If Only We'd Listened to President Wilson... Part 1

*Note - Much of this, over and above my usual dollop of plagiarism, is shamelessly pilfered from Richard Hofstadter’s indispensible book - The American Political Tradition. I would not feel comfortable posting this without acknowledging that debt of a completely unknown pygmy to a deservedly venerated master.

In these years of political gridlock and economic paralysis, it’s become all too common to look to old presidents who would have known better how to get us out of this mess. If only Lyndon Johnson were here to stare down Mitch McConnell, if only Teddy Roosevelt were around to hold Paul Ryan up to the oratorical shaming he deserves, if only Bill Clinton were still there to charm the pants off Lindsey Graham.

Johnson, TR, Clinton, virtuous presidents all of them, but none of them were great. Yeah, that’s right, none of them. I know it’s fashionable these days to hold up Theodore Rex as one of the true giants of the Presidency - Barack Obama himself does it from time to time, no doubt with a surfeit of cynicism. But Obama’s professed admiration for #26 is especially ironic considering that most liberal admirers of Teddy Rexpin use him as a Damoclean sword to drop into Barack Obama’s back. The fact remains that John McCain understands Teddy better than any liberal admirer ever did. At least relative to his reputation, Theodore Roosevelt was an oddly ineffectual president, nor was he a liberal after any manner of the word. His charisma and bluster belied the fact that he was inadequate when compared to the greatness a world on the brink of global warfare required of him, and moved in the direction of reform largely because he saw the prospect of organized labor as no different than a giant anarchist mob. His presidency contained major accomplishments, but its setbacks are rarely ever talked about.

Furthermore, it was only after his presidency was completed that Roosevelt ‘saw the light’ and switched his rhetoric to a truly radical mode in an effort to recapture the office he regretted relinquishing. Many of the forward-thinking positions Roosevelt was best known for - like his veneration of labor unions, direct primaries, workman’s compensation, inheritance tax, national limits on labor hours, government supervision of interstate commerce -  were positions he only took after he left office and saw a rising tide of progressivism he could navigate back to the center of the arena. And because he insisted on a platform to advocate for these very positions which he disavowed only four years earlier, he divided the Republican party, and delayed any chance of their passage by twenty years until his cousin Franklin had licence to enact more progressive legislation due to the Great Depression’s devastation - a devastation Teddy might have brought on the country much sooner due to his unbounded eagerness to join World War I against Germany by 1915, even though in 1914 he initially supported the German cause.

He was the sort of man who could not abide the thought that others would not constantly feel the weight of his imposition, and his daughter once commented that her father always felt the need to be ‘the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.’ And were another man like TR, with such a compulsive need for center stage, able to situate himself equally well in political life, he would never be able to restrain himself from political stances that would maximize the intensity of his limelight. He was, in every sense, a 19th century personality cultist and militarist who admired the heroism of soldiers and pioneers above all, and did what he could to move America to the course of a grand imperial project which rivaled the Great European Powers in scope. In some ways, the later president who most resembles his worldview and accomplishments is George W. Bush.

The previous war which The Iraq War most resembled, at least in inception, was the Spanish-American War. It was a war which took place for no better reason than America could make war and win its spoils, sold to the public as a humanitarian intervention. And like the Iraq War, the propaganda for it was managed by three distinct strands of the Republican party, some of whom believed very fervently in the war’s humanitarian side - one strand was the proto-Cheney businessmen like William Randolph Hearst who saw in Cuba the chance to sell newspapers and invest into major industrial development, another strand was proto-Wolfowitz conservatives obsessed with national greatness and virtue like Henry Cabot Lodge who saw a chance in this war to help Cuban Freedom Fighters and thereby rejuvenate America’s sense of moral purpose, the last by proto-Rumsfeld ‘visionaries’ like Teddy Roosevelt who carried within them massive dreams of proving America’s invincibility in the battlefield. Here’s a quote from Teddy at the Naval War College which he made as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897:

“No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war... We of the United States have passed most of our few years of national life in peace. We honor the architects of our wonderful material prosperity... But we feel, after all, that the men who have dared greatly in war, or the work which is akin to war, are those who deserve best of the country.”

(Charles Foster Kane - a Teddy Roosevelt Republican to the marrow)

As a New York assemblyman, Roosevelt was hardly a friend of the working man - opposing raises in the salaries of New York policemen and firemen, fighting against a bill to limit horse-car workers to twelve-hour work days, and denouncing a measure to require payment of two dollars a day to public employees as ‘demagogic.’ In 1895, his feelings against organized labor were so strenuous that he was quoted in the Evening Post:

“We shall guard as zealously the rights of the striker as those of the employer. But when riot is menaced it is different. The mob takes its own chance. Order will be kept at whatever cost. If it comes to shooting we shall shoot to hit. No blank cartridges or firing over the head of anybody.”

Even at this stage, Roosevelt was not completely indifferent to the working class’s plight. He toured the slums of New York City and managed to get a number of tenement buildings condemned. And when he became governor he managed to get on labor’s good side with a law against sweatshops and quickly switched sides on a number of issues he spent years inveighing against like the eight-hour-a-day limit for workers on government contracts. Nevertheless, Roosevelt was authoritarian to the bone. He believed in benevolent, enlightened autocracy in which the overclass bestows merciful governance upon the lower class as a reward earned by good behavior. To his mind, the working class was not deserving of rights so much as rewards. This is the aristocratic conservatism of duty and service - the conservatism of Hamilton, Disraeli, Churchill, and McCain. It’s preferable to many kinds of conservatism, but it’s still conservatism, and has a hugely destructive side for all its benefits. When general strikes hit an economically depressed New York in the middle of 1896, Roosevelt was quoted as saying:

“The sentiment now animating a large proportion of our people can only be suppressed as the Commune in Paris was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing... them against a wall, and shooting them dead. I believe it will come to that. These leaders are plotting a social revolution and the subversion of the American Republic.”

And like all great imperialists, Roosevelt had an undercurrent of racism going through his soul as long as the Northern Securities Railroads. In 1899 he made a speech in which he declared:

“In every instance the expansion has taken place because the race was a great race. It was a sign and proof of greatness in the expanding nation, and moreover bear in mind that in each instance it was of incalculable benefit to mankind . . . . When great nations fear to expand, shrink from expansion, it is because their greatness is coming to an end. Are we still in the prime of our lusty youth, still at the beginning of our glorious manhood, to sit down among the outworn people, to take our place with the weak and craven? A thousand times no!”

Woodrow Wilson wrote venerated the Ku Klux Klan in print, but he never said anything nearly so gargantuanly fascist as that. And lest you think this speech merely glorification of America and not necessarily indicative of racism directed at a particular ethnic group, let’s examine this whopper he wrote about Native Americans while tending to his Western ranch in 1886:

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”

These are just a few of many quotes Teddy Roosevelt made which would drop our jaws. To acknowledge his dark side is not to say that he was racist or imperialist or authoritarian over the average bigotry of his time, to acknowledge it is only to demand that he be treated with the same question marks as are bestowed to others among American History’s ‘greatest’ figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson.

In a sense, Roosevelt did form a vital center direction between unfettered capitalism and unorganized socialism, but it was a center that favored upper-class capitalism in every distinction. He held little belief in raising men up from the lower class, rather, he believed that the oligarchical Anglo-Saxon Protestant class from which he hailed had to be saved from itself if it was to remain prosperous - and therefore had to share as little of their spoils as possible so as to prevent an outright insurrection of the workers - a fact that was proven by the fact that his 1904 re-election campaign was virtually bankrolled by Morgan, Rockefeller, and their minority partners. In a passage that could have come straight from Clinton or Obama themselves, Roosevelt declared in a 1902 speech to congress:

“Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic... We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”

Roosevelt’s most celebrated lawsuit against a trust was against the Northern Securities Company in 1902 for their violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a suit which he won in the Supreme Court by a 5-4 majority. But The Northern Securities Company was a much-hated railroad monopoly that connected the Northern Midwest to the Northwest, within which the trustees feuded among each other in manners that constantly made headlines in the newspaper. J P Morgan was heavily involved in this trust, but it was hardly central to his banking interests. Meanwhile, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and J B Duke’s American Tobacco never had so much as a single case brought against them during Roosevelt’s time in office. During its seven-and-a-half years, the Roosevelt administration prosecuted 54 trust cases, during which time trusts grew more quickly than ever. Compare that to the four years of William Howard Taft, during which his administration prosecuted 90 cases.

For all his belligerence, the real President Roosevelt was a leader of relentless compromise. If there is a modern president to whom he can be safely compared, it is probably not George W. Bush but Bill Clinton - a similarly narcissistic egoist who painted himself as a friend to the average American with total mastery, but enacted gains for liberalism only incrementally, and found himself able to do so only by relentless concessions to big business interests. For all the political posturing of both figures, it mattered not a whit for their policies - which were enacted purely through the kind of incremental progress it takes to enact a successful policy over a period of many decades. They were both decent presidents, but the office deserves better, and, admittedly, usually gets worse.

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Early Louis Armstrong Playlist: Part 1

West End Blues

Hotter Than That

I'm Not Rough

I Ain't Gonna Play No Second Fiddle

Big Butter and Egg Man

Potato Head Blues

Muggles

The Last Time

Texas Moaner Blues

Mandy, Make Up Your Mind

Mabel's Dream

Go 'long Mule

How Come You Do Me Like You Do

Static Strut

Stomp Off

Sweet Little Papa

Struttin' with Some Barbecue

Melancholy

S.O.L. Blues

Wild Man Blues

Chicago Breakdown

Put'em Down Blues

Ory's Creole Trombone

Got No Blues

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800 Words: What is the Internet - Parts III - VI

III.

Within our lifetimes, it will never be possible to read and listen to the communications of hundreds of millions of people. We simply don't know how to do it, and there are some goals which not even the current speed of technological development will accommodate. It took nearly half-a-millenium to go from the chaos which the printing press unleashed to mastering its capabilities to the point that a totalitarian state could be created. We master new technology quicker than ever before, but we create new technology just as quickly, and those who would foil government control will remain steps ahead of those in government who control it for a long while yet.

A few days ago, we discovered precisely what we already knew. Verizon monitors who's calling us and whom we call, and is ordered to share that information with the government so that they can use it for anti-terrorism investigations. So, in all probability, is every major phone company in the world, and we also learned definitively that internet companies do something quite similar. It doesn't mean that they have the technology or the manpower to listen in on the things we say, we're probably hundreds of years away from anyone developing that level of technological competence. Everyone from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates to former NSA chief Michael Hayden has complained that there’s simply too much data to effectively use the information they have for investigations. But when you call on a cell phone, you're using government-developed technology with satellites which the government helped to install. When you’re on the internet, you’re using a technology which until twenty-five years ago was the nearly exclusive purview of the US Department of Defense. Did we really expect that the US government would rescind those privileges for nothing in return?

What we learned is neither a good nor bad development; it's simply inevitable. And in an era when online companies can aggregate your emails to create personalized advertisements, when satellites can watch the goings on of any street corner from any vantage point on earth, when airport security can look at x-rays of your person, when credit card companies can sell your personal information to the highest bidder, this is the least of our privacy violations.

The United States of America is coming out of a pointlessly war-torn era in which an incompetent president and his nefarious handlers exploited our post-9/11 fears to create a massive security apparatus which was utterly pointless to combat terrorism. It was a 20th century authoritarian reaction to a 21st century problem. To point that out is not the same as saying that there’s no existential threat from terror, because there certainly is, it is only to point out that we overreacted gigantically. We invaded two countries, one utterly without justification. Bombings we conducted in sovereign states like Pakistan and Yemen may have been justified, but they were carried out by remote and shrouded in secrecy. But most importantly, there are 850,000 (!) people working in the United States government with top secret security clearances. What is secret from us is not that secret. It will never be possible within our lifetimes to cull information from hundreds of millions of people, but that doesn’t mean that the government won’t do its damndest to try. But it will fail every time.

IV.

Twenty-six seconds of film - that is the surveillance tape which Abraham Zapruder took of the JFK assassination. Had Zapruder left his camera at home, there would be no Kennedy assassination footage, and every sane person would agree that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole killer of John F. Kennedy. Will computer surveillance increase certainty in people’s minds about what happens, or will it provoke more doubt? Will surveillance be more beneficial evidence to the prosecution, or to the defense?

V.

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.

- Aaron Swartz

Ironically, the reason that information will not be in the hands of an exclusive club is because of people like Aaron Swartz - deeply flawed, narcissistic idealists who do ballsy things which are not quite heroic, neither good nor evil, just fanatical. Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden; these men (and they’re all men so far) have changed the world we live in because of a dogmatic, intellectually limited insistence upon transparency in everything which governments and corporations do. They’ve democratized knowledge, but they haven't liberalized it. They've saved us from many kinds of corporate and government malfeasance, but they’ve opened up entirely new areas for powerful people to practice exactly that. When knowledge becomes opened up, there will be whole new opportunities for advertisement. If we’re being equally paranoid about transparency as Julian Assange is to secrecy, we might infer an extreme example of the dangers of openness. Corporations will be present regardless of whether they are open or secret, and as such we may have to go back to the patronage system, for which every academic paper or artistic project or schoolbook doubles as a press release for the corporation, the government, the university, or the private benefactor, who funds it; and must include adulatory comments about the benefactors who fund their donations and defend those benefactors' most controversial actions. This is precisely what happens on wikipedia, and unpaid editors cannot compete with the onslaught of paid press people who rewrite wikipedia entries to better fit the facts which moneyed people want the world to see. Like any marketplace, it is especially within the free exchange of ideas that those with money can control. Men like Edward Snowden act as though corrupt governments or corporations would think twice about committing acts of evil in broad daylight. If these evil people have enough money, they can simply brainwash the public into thinking their evil acts never happened.

VI.

The Patriot Act had many stupid items in it. But was it really bad to let the FBI wiretap terror suspects in a manner no different than they do the Mafia and drug traffic? Was it truly wrong to require banks and security brokers to file suspicious activity reports about money laundering (especially now that they’ll have to write about themselves?)? Was it wrong to remove the firewall between the FBI and the CIA so they can pool resources and information about terror suspects?

Let’s pause on that third question for a moment. The firewall between not only the FBI and the CIA, but also between law enforcement and intelligence gathering generally, existed because of the roughshod abuses of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unauthorized wiretappings, breaking and enterings into private residences, blackmail on a massive scale, and intimidation of all kinds to anyone who questioned his authority. It had the added benefit of limiting the CIA’s involvement in “black ops”, the third world operations by which the CIA replaced governments which they viewed as ‘Soviet-friendly’ with governments more susceptible to US interests.

The raising of such a firewall in 1978 was considered a major liberal victory at the time. And yet, a quarter-century later, liberals were the first to argue for such a firewall’s destruction - seeing the ending of such a firewall as far preferable to a massive Homeland Security bureaucracy.

It’s much too late to avoid the Homeland Security bureaucracy, but the elimination of the FBI/CIA firewall was probably the wise thing to do, because nobody can possibly cull that much information. But if there is any chance at all for a government to control us after the manner of the 20th century totalitarians, it will be because the intelligence of the world’s most powerful government is pooled together by a Hoover-like figure.

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800 Words: What is the Internet - Parts 1 and 2

I.

Between 1450 and 1455, a German tradesman named Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg invented the printing press, and the world was changed in the twinkling of an eye. Books were once produced by hand and calligraphy. They were fancy objects for fancy people created by people with fancy skills. But after Gutenberg, books were a mass produced object for the masses. Perhaps for the first time since the Roman republic, learning was not a pursuit confined to aristocrats. Even if the lower classes only read the Bible, they had more knowledge than ever before, and could go directly to the source of the material. It was only a matter of time before a religious ideology developed that was more in keeping with the spirit of that era. In 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Saxony. It railed, as all new movements do, against the corruption of the old order, and that the Catholic Church's teachings on morality were now inextricably linked to money, particularly in the matter of indulgences - a policy by which congregants could buy absolution, and allowed the Kingdom of Heaven to be better predisposed toward the rich than the poor. But most important among those ideas was Luther's idea that  God needs no intercessor into people's lives. With a Bible now present in every God-fearing home, families no longer needed to look to a clergyman to tell them how to worship. According to Luther, salvation could never be  purchased, it was bestowed by faith and by the personal relationship which each believer had with God due to their being able to interpret God's Word for themselves. The world was ready for a man like Luther, and his ideas spread like wildfire, inspiring everything from great community projects to Holy Wars between Protestants and Catholics all over Northern and Western Europe  - including The German Peasants War,The Battle of Kappel, The Schmalkadic War between The Holy Roman Emperor and the noble German followers of Luther, The Eighty Years War involving Spain and the Low Countries, The French Wars of Religion, The Wars of the Three Kingdoms on the British Isles, The Franco-Dutch War, and The Nine Years War which involved them all. Thus began the true decline of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, sustained  for nearly a millennium, and the peace which this empire keep reasonably well within the large chunk of Europe it inhabited and surrounded.

But in all these holy wars, one stands above the rest for its particular level of chaos. The Thirty Years War involved virtually all of Europe, may have killed 11.5 million people and perhaps as much as 40% of the world's German speaking peoples, with some German-speaking regions losing as much as two-thirds of their population. Germany thereafter remained a deeply divided non-kingdom with hundreds of principalities. The German/Frankish scions of the Holy Roman Empire retreated to Austria and founded a new empire there which was synonymous with decline from its very inception. Germany itself never recovered from the trauma of this long war fought almost exclusively upon German soil, and one could make a decent argument that the twentieth century's two world wars happened because of German traumas that were already three hundred years in the past.

There can be no doubt that the printing press fostered so much that is good in this world, but progress is value neutral. For all the progress which these more quickly made books disseminated, the printing press must be held to account for the massive amounts of death which it caused. Like all great strides in progress, it comes with a surfeit of truly lethal peril.

History is not over, and it is pure naive lunacy to pretend that we don't dance on the precipice of a similar era. The computer, and the internet it fostered, is, without a doubt, the most trans-formative invention in human history since the invention of the printing press itself. Knowledge used to be as far away as whatever book was written about the subject at hand, and would often require months to find the correct book, if it even existed. But knowledge is now available at the click of a button. In its original years, we have experienced the awesome life-giving power of the internet. In a matter of a few years, it has transformed everything we knew about commerce, about careers, about medicine, about navigation, about information storage, about journalism, about the arts, about memory, about space and time, and especially about communication, learning, and knowledge. The internet can create so much, but what can the internet destroy?

It hasn't happened yet, and it probably won't for a while longer. But what idea will the internet inspire that will make millions or billions of people to want to kill each other? What information will be spread that will make us kill each other more efficiently or agonizingly?

Something this powerful cannot simply give us unremitting light, and the utopia which the internet often seems like to many of us could not possibly last for centuries.

II.

What we most have to fear in our generation is not the totalitarian temptation. The world has grown too fast to have too much fear of big government anymore, because no government, however invasive, can possibly keep up with the world's developments. All a government can do, whether democratic like America's, or authoritarian like China's, is scramble to keep up with technologies which develop by the day. We live in an era of wikileaks and twitter revolutions. Gerontological dictators are overthrown at the drop of a hat, and excepting North Korea, no dictatorship, however powerful, can seem to stop the profusion of protests against it.

The Arab Spring was not an isolated movement in history - in its way, it was the same movement as Occupy Wall Street, the public employee protests all around America, the anti-Putin protests, the Greek riots, the Iranian election protests, the Burmese monk protests, the Pakistani judges protests, the French pension reform strikes, protests for greater political freedom all over the former Soviet satellites, protests against austerity all around Southern Europe, Ireland, and Iceland. These are all protests by people demanding greater dignity in their treatment from public officials, happening at the same moment, and coordinated by the internet. There is not a single one of these protests which does not have its own justifiable causes. And yet each of them seems so utterly far from accomplishing its goals that one has to pause, at least for a moment, to wonder whether every single one of them has been counterproductive.

With nearly 100,000 dead in The Syrian Civil War, it is definitively time to say that the Arab Spring was not the first step in a flowering for democracy. The Arab Spring's march toward freedom was tenuous at its best times, coordinated by a blindly idealistic educated class which believes that it can work with the  Islamic parties while controlling the Islamists' most hardline elements. But how long can this civil war in Syria go on without sucking in major involvement from neighboring countries? If that happens, as it is likely to , The Arab Spring may be remembered not as the 21st century's great democratic flowering, but as the first definitive step in the march from 20th century totalitarianism back to the chaos of previous eras.

What we have to fear is chaos. Today's political insanity is not an extremity of big government, but an extremity of small government. Of course, we have to fear libertarian conservatives and objectivists who want to reduce government regulation to null, provide no services to the public, and create an uneducated mass of wage slaves. But we also have to fear libertarian socialists and anarchists who want to do away with the entire idea of wage labor and replace states with autonomous collectives answerable to only themselves. If such a movement spread it would create economic chaos on a level comparable to the worst of the Great Depression, with consequences perhaps as far-reaching. For the moment, one movement clearly holds greater sway in public opinion than the other, but if the liberal American left and center become any less effective than they already are at opposing the American right, perhaps such an option will come to seem ever more attractive to many. Both are grounded in the same fevered utopian dreams which produced communism and fascism in the 20th century, and young people who subscribe to them now may find themselves horrified at what their beliefs have wrought by the time they reach their full maturity.

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