1225

Sunday, December 25, 2022

In bed  at 10, up at 6:50, one cognac.  Ran my iPhone out of juice with 'brown noise' on throughout the night.  Snowbirds on the ground feeding.  3 degrees outside, high of 11, wind out of the NW at 16 mph, wind chill 16 below zero.

Messiah   I watched and listened to Handel's Messiah while Geri was toiling away into the night making pies.  Watched both the Sydney Philharmonic Choirs at the Sydney Opera House and the  Royal Choral Society at Royal Albert Hall.  Both are wonderful performances but the Sydney Opera House was also visually stunning.  It looked like hundreds and hundreds of choristers as well as the large orchestra.  I would love to have experienced it as a member of the live audience.  Stunning.  I was stuck with each performance by what an enormity of human effort it represents.  How much individual contributions were necessary to make the performance possible, from each individual singer with years of learning behind her and hours of study and rehearsal, ditto each orchestra member and the conductor, ditto the each person who manufactured each instrument, each person who contributed effort to construct the performance hall, and each person who contributed effort to obtain or make the constituent materials necessary to construct the instruments and the performance space.  How many hundreds or thousands of hours of contributed effort were necessary to created this single particular live and, but for the cameras and sound equipment, ephemeral performance of Handel's great oratorio.  I have similar feelings when I watch the credits scroll across the screen at the end of a movie, noting how very, very many people contributed effort of one sort or another to the making of that film.  How much more work and coordinated effort is required to make one movie.  I have a similar feeling as I watch the reconstruction of Interstate 43 going on between Glendale and Grafton, what an immense project it is, how many hours were and are required to plan and carry out, to coordinate this immense work of necessary infrastructure improvement and how many people over how many years benefit from it.  The live Handel performance was ephemeral; the highway is semi-permanent yet both require an enormous probably incalculable amount of coordinated human effort to effect.  Makes the musical performance even more astounding, makes me wish we could find a similar kind of coordinated working together toward a single, worthwhile goal in other social endeavors like public health, forming a more perfect Union, establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common defence, promoting the general Welfare, and securing  the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.  Alas.

Was the Civil War Inevitable? NYT Magazine, 12.21.22  David W. Blight, Yale U. history professor

[O]ur country faces crises of institutional legitimacy, of utterly polarized media sources, of transparent voter suppression, of irreconcilable public-policy debates over guns, abortion, climate change, public schools and attempts to control the conduct of elections. We have reason to wonder if the persistence of racism is a transhistorical ingredient of American politics. Justifiably, we fear vigilante, militia violence against the institutions and political leaders we depend on. We rightly worry about whether American democracy can withstand the current pressures placed upon it by the authoritarian tendencies that Trumpism has unleashed. . . . Each decision says, in effect, that because certain freedoms were not enshrined in law historically, the evolution of society to embrace those freedoms is irrelevant. Would Justice Alito overturn Loving v. Virginia (1967) because marriage between two people of different races is nowhere in the Constitution, or because decades of state laws prohibited it? Should clean-air legislation be on the chopping block because it is nowhere in the 1787 or the 1868 Constitutions? What about Native American citizenship? Women’s suffrage? Federal regulation of the industrial economy? Disability rights? Same-sex marriage? And what of the precious right to vote, so long denied or suppressed by law or by violence in this country? Voting rights are not in the original Constitution, either. . .

In both cases (Dobbs & Dred Scott), the stakes are the nature and extent of freedom in this republic. What will the next year bring? Is a second Dobbs v. Jackson decision on the horizon, as Republicans in the late 1850s feared a second Dred Scott? There is good reason to fear the Moore v. Harper case from North Carolina, which will test the “independent state legislature” theory, which contends that only state legislatures — not the state courts — have authority over federal election procedures and voting rights. Progressives understandably fear that the states’ rights doctrine has become a Trojan horse of the right wing, returning power to the states so they remain safe from the post-Civil War and post-New Deal regulatory powers of the federal government. . .

Are today’s myriad crises somehow equivalent to the great question of slavery in late-antebellum America? Can our current rabble of loud difference still be governed?  . . . In other Western democracies, far-right extremists win seats in national assemblies, where coalitions can constrain their ideas. But in a two-party system, the capture of one party by extremists is enough to cause great political havoc and violence — a lesson we should have learned from the destruction of our Union in 1861.

Christian Celebration of Christmas. Texas governor Greg Abbott sent three busloads of migrants from Texas to the Naval Observatory, home of VP Kamala Harris, dropped off on Christmas Eve in sub-freezing temperatures. "Tonight, on Christmas Eve, Gov Abbott’s buses dropped off migrants at the VP’s house in the freezing cold,” the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network wrote on Twitter early Sunday. “This is not new, it has been happening for 8 months.”  "Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful, but since we've got no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow."  Peace on earth, good will to men.

Wonderful Christmas Day.  Spent a bit more than an hour with Andy, Anh, Peter, Lizzie, and Drew.  The present seemed to be hits.  Warm conversation. The afternoon was dinner with Steve and Nikki, up from Chicago, David, Sharon and Ellis, Maribeth Sazama and Lynn Celek, Sharon's mom and sister.  Geri roasted a leg of lamb accompanied by roasted potatoes, green beans, Brussels sprouts with pancetta, tossed salad, and hot dinner rolls plus the 2 cherry pies she made last night and the lemon mereign pie she made this morning.  Lots of animated good conversations, extended into the evening with Steve and Nikki after the other guests had left.  Lots of political talk with Steven and Nikki, each of us reinforcing our common beliefs and values. k Beaucoup de vin, some Benedictine after dinner, some cognac for me.  Lovely day all around, beginning to end.  A blessing.