Just a quick post so that my few readers will know I’m not dead.

I keep getting comments on this post. The Paul Robeson video has attracted four pages of fan comments at YouTube. You can read them here. And it’s even more surprising to me that I’ve attracted no anti-labor comments or rants from Robeson haters.

My post about Mack Harrell also continues to draw comments. In going back to it I discover that YouTube has removed the short Fauré Requiem excerpt. By way of turning the other cheek, here’s some more Mack Harrell, a recording I didn’t know about (and that I will be looking for) of “An die ferne Geliebte.” I’m especially glad to have discovered it because this song cycle was the first thing I studied with Mr. Harrell and the first piece I ever performed as his student.

I said maybe I would tell some stories. Here are a couple. As serious as he was about his vocation, Mr. Harrell was funny too—like the day we started working on the “Schöne Müllerin,” when he came in the studio in a straw hat with a stalk of grass in his teeth. I never called him Mack as some others of his students did; I noticed early on that they only did that behind his back. I also recall that he took a phone call from Rudolf Bing in the middle of one of my lessons once and told Bing that he wouldn’t return to the Metropolitan Opera for the next season, saying he had decided to “forgo opera.” I didn’t know that day that he already knew he was dying.

But the best memory I have is this one. I had failed to get an opera role for which I had auditioned, and I was depressed. When I arrived for my lesson the next day, Mr. Harrell played and sang for me a Schumann song, “Stirb Lieb’ und Freud’.” In it a young woman decides to take the veil, and her lover must reconcile himself to losing her forever. It’s a strophic song, beautifully simple and sublime, refining the emotions of which it treats and rendering them monumental. “We need to remember when we lose things,” Mr. Harrell said, “that there are still lots of good songs left in the world.” I remembered that in the summer of 1959 at Aspen, when he sang a group of Mendelssohn songs he had never sung before.

Here’s Alan Simpson objecting to what?

I’ve been under the weather for a bit and hadn’t seen this video until today. My guy appointed this man to the fiscal commission currently meeting periodically in our nation’s capital. Shame on them both.

To my mind, the reference to “lesser people” that comes near the beginning of the interview is hardly the worst of it. Check Paul Krugman’s view of Simpson’s contributions to the fiscal commission’s deliberations here. The video is fairly long. Watch all of it to get the full benefit of Simpson’s view of the world.

It’s a bird! it’s a plane! No, it’s the new Dodge Challenger, flags a-flying, mowing down a column of hapless redcoats as Americans in powdered wigs get cars and freedom right. You Betcha!

And to think it was only yesterday the American taxpayer, via the despised American government, bailed Chrysler out of the hole its enlightened free-enterpriser managers had dug for it. Chrysler ought to be a poster child for the economic failures of the past thirty years, sleaze upon sleaze. And now here’s more.

But it isn’t just Chrysler. There’s a trend, and where there’s a trend there’s an advertiser trying to take advantage of it. It’s the American way. According to a Washington Post story today,

Spokeswoman Dianna Gutierrez declined to say whether the Challenger commercial — which the company timed to appear during the World Cup soccer match between the United States and England — was aimed at buyers who are sore about the bailout.

But, sensitive to the fact that taxpayers helped pay for the slick new ad, she said Chrysler saved money by using costumes left over from an old Mel Gibson movie.

The same story puts the amount American taxpayers have paid Chrysler at “more than $7 billion.” A recent ABC News story under Diane Sawyer’s byline puts the figure at $22 billion. That’s a lot of “more than.” How interesting that management at Chrysler now seeks to exploit free-floating anger. Maybe the next thing will be pre-installed gun racks as standard equipment in Dodge pickups or other exploitation of more targeted forms of rage. There’s plenty of good stuff in Mel Gibson’s trash, after all, real tea party stuff.

This is another “Let’s talk about snakes” post in honor of one of my graduate school professors who had a favorite schtick that began with that expression. I’ve written only fifteen of these in the three-year history of this blog, and it’s been a year since the last one. I should likely do better than that, especially since my habit of using the word, snakes, in a figure of speech that bears on some part of the post’s content is always a challenge to my ingenuity. So here goes:

Summer entertainments: We’ve been making the rounds of community arts events in the city this summer more than in some past years. A “Jungle Boogie” concert at the St. Louis Zoo was wonderful fun back at the end of May and introduced us to the Ralph Butler Band. At the Shakespeare Festival in Forest Park, we saw an excellent Hamlet, with no gimmicks other than Shakespeare’s own. We also took in two summer operas, The Marriage of Figaro and Eugene Onegin at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. In spite of a few sublime musical moments, Figaro is a silly opera. Some performances try to recapture some of the social satire lost in Da Ponte’s adaptation of Beaumarchais, but the Opera Theatre’s productiom leaned pretty heavily on soubrette and buffo clichés and stage business that did little to distract one’s attention from the silliness, and vocally the performance was pretty lackluster. The Onegin was better. The cast’s powerful voices and Tchaikovski’s music almost lent credence to Pushkin’s poetic melodrama. The performance of Russian-American soprano, Dina Kuznetsova as Tatiana, was exceptional among fine performances by all the lead singers.

The Biden Leaks: Ben Smith at Politico passes on information about how Vice Preaident Biden’s views on the Afghan war were leaked recently. So—if you’re an administration operative and you don’t like some policy your bosses are pursuing, all you have to do is leak information that among your bosses somebody is disagreeing. I’m not always in favor of punishing leakers, but this is a time when I think somebody (maybe more than one somebody) should be fired.

Old time religion: It’s fitting to remember as we celebrate Independence Day that Jefferson’s ringing claim of god-given rights didn’t extend even to all men, in his own time and afterwards for generations, even for generations after we fought a bloody civil war over slavery. And if we needed reminding, the posting of portions of Samuel Seabuty’s infamous defense of slavery over at Episcopal Café should do the trick. I think it is the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other theological conservatives that the gospel as understood by past ages is sufficient in the present. That view doesn’t survive much inspection of the past, when Christian churches and theologians justified slavery and the vilest anti-Semitism, and that’s only a part of the foreground. Friends have recently returned from President Obama’s home state of Hawaii, where they saw striking reminders of the inequality nourished and fostered there by an iniquitous cabal of missionaries and planters—not exactly the home of the brave, to quote Justice Scalia in another context.

A purloined letter: Over a year ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In light of recent events that I may write about one of these days, I took a look at an old blog post that linked to that letter the other day. Imagine my distress when I discovered that the link turned up this. Talk about dead letters! But today I’m happy to report that my letter is still accessible at the Post, though it is now in a different place. Indeed the listing of my letter amongst regular articles in the paper makes me feel less snake bit.

—though I didn’t exactly get a byline . . .

An email exchange has reminded me that much of today’s news seems to be saying something about the limits of power. Tim Burke has a good piece about this on his blog today, entitled “The Gods that Underachieved.”

The peculiarity of our time is that people all around the planet know that the high modernist state failed to live up to its promises of the perfected management of human societies through technocracy. Those who live in democratic societies know that their progress towards being fairer, more just or more open is at best stalled. Those who live in authoritarian societies must increasingly wonder at whether change can ever come, as the one area where the capacity of the contemporary nation-state continues to show improvement is its ability to mobilize violence against its own citizens and to manage their dissent.

Tim compares the modern technocratic state to a phantom limb. We know it’s gone, but we keep expecting it to be there and to serve our needs. Unscrupulous politicians manipulate our expectations by demanding results they know are impossible in a crisis and blaming the crisis on alleged inaction that would have produced those results, all the while claiming they themselves would have resolved the crisis had it been their job to do so and charging the state with government overreach however it acts. One can read the outlines of this analysis in the orchestrated Republican arguments about the Gulf Coast oil spill, the current and continuing financial crisis, and the Arizona immigration furor, to name a few sites of contention.

I’ve been thinking with respect to the oil spill and the financial crisis that we may be up against a twenty-first century phenomenon. If the technocratic state failed us in the last century, this century seems to be unfolding as a time when our knowledge will fail us. Of course, if knowledge is power, as the truism has held at least since Bacon, we may be in the second phase of the emptying out of our age’s popular faith in technology. But it’s frightening to think that we don’t know the extent of the Gulf Coast oil spill or whether we possess technology adequate to cope with it. And it’s even more frightening to think that we don’t know the extent of the present financial crisis worldwide, or whether we understand how to deal with it, let alone fix it.

Simon Sarmiento is reporting that the bishops of the CofE have not only commended the Anglican Covenant for adoption by the Church of England, but have also taken steps to ease its adoption. Still, passage is by no means certain, judging from the comments at Thinking Anglicans.

Katie Sherrod and Fr. Mark Harris have written useful commentary on the covenant’s reception by The (American) Episcopal Church, especially in relation to the recent visit of Canon Kenneth Kearon to the TEC Executive Council. You can read Katie’s thoughts and observations here and here. Canon Kearon is Secretary General of the Anglican Communion. Fr. Harris’s relevant posts are here, here, here, and here. The background of Fr. Harris’s reference to “mitregate” is a recent appearance of American Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as preacher and celebrant at Southwark Cathedral, London, where she was granted permission to preach and celebrate by The Archbishop of Canterbury but told she must not wear her mitre or carry her crozier.

Bishop Schori received a veiled apology from the Dean of Southwark Cathedral, though not from the ABC, and has reacted to this latest attempt to shame her with the aplomb of a canny American feminist who understands that there is no such thing as bad publicity. The more her enemies and the enemies of the ecclesial openness she represents attempt to denigrate her (and the attempts are serious, misogynistic, and hateful), the more sympathy she garners for her cause and the stronger she becomes.

I am opposed to the The Anglican Covenant, to the whole of it and not merely to section four which permits the church to discipline and punish. Were my church to constitute itself as the confessional body envisioned in the covenant, I would have to part company with my church. I have enough trouble with the Nicene Creed as it is, and believe that orthodoxies generally are pernicious things that require coercion for their establishment. But I also think the ABC’s refusal to allow Bishop Schori to preside at Southwark wearing the symbols of her office was not merely the coercive act of a petty authoritarian, not only a slight and an offense to Bishop Schori, to Americans and to the American church, but something more as well. Fr. Jake is featuring a challenging post the last few days entitled, “The Dark Side of Canterbury…Perhaps,” whose thesis is that the ABC is projecting power towards TEC because he has realized that we may need him more than he needs us since some of our present property disputes may hang on our membership in the Communion. I am thinking Fr. Jake is right and that there may be an even darker dimension to the ABC’s political maneuvering.

It seems clear that Dr. Williams not only wants to hold the Anglican Communion together, but that he also wants to preserve the primacy of the established English church. He is, after all, a peer of the realm by virtue of his office, and he has as recently as last February argued in the House of Lords in opposition to the prohibitions against discrimination contained in Britain’s new equality legislation. It seems unlikely that such a peer would wish to be reduced in stature or to be the cause of his national church’s diminution in stature in relation to the various colonial primates and churches who are presently subjecting him to great pressure. By promulgating the covenant, and now by getting out in front of it politically and fostering (by whatever means) its quick adoption by the general synod, perhaps Dr. Williams preserves advantage over the colonials as well as gaining leverage with TEC.

In light of these thoughts it’s interesting to note the recent appearance of three new Facebook pages, here, here, and here.

One more thing. The Episcopal Church’s prophetic positions with regard to gender roles and sexual orientration inevitably proclaim the bigotry of patriarchy and homophobia. The contentions generated by these proclamations cannot merely be held in tension. As Terry Eagleton has put it, “there are a good many important contentions which someone is going to have to win and someone else to lose.” Reactionary Anglicans (who may now count Dr. Williams as one of their number) understand that they cannot win social justice arguments about gender and sexual orientation and have chosen to cast these contentions rather as arguments over tradition and the authority of scripture. For a good many years now, Dr Williams has been developing and expanding a theological understanding of Christian identity that puts him on the side of traditionalists. I’m presently reading his recent book on Dostoyevsky, which seems to be a major statement of that theological understanding, and intend to post an essay about it in the fairly near future.