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 . . .