Saturday, June 8, 20024
1937, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana premiered at the Frankfurt Opera.
1965, U.S. troops were ordered to fight offensively in Vietnam
1967, Israeli aircraft and PT boats attacked the U.S.S. Liberty in the Mediterranean
In bed at 11 after watching The Sense of an Ending, up at 5:40. The sun has cleared the treetops to the east and will reach an altitude of 70° at high noon (12:51 p.m.) I think back to those darker, shorter winter days when the sun's high altitude was in the mid-20°s. Around 6:30, a neighborhood Adonis ran past in house, wearing only shorts and his running shoes, and Ghassan Majdalani walked by with Athena. Later, a father on his big boy bike cruises past with his tyke on a tyke bike next to him. A heartwarming sight, and one that triggers my fears about what the future holds for them, with a right-wing takeover of government possible, maybe probable, come November. [See Carmina Burana and O, Fortuna below]
Prednisone, day 27, day 5 at 20 mg. My shoulders are still a bit gimpy, as they were yesterday. Cause??? Am I relapsing from the reduction from 30 mg. to 20 mg.?
Hostage rescue in Nuseurat: 4 rescued, hundreds of Palestinians dead or wounded. I wonder what is the grizzly ratio of acceptable civilian casualties per hostage to satisfy the "proportionality" requirement under the law of war. Is there any? What was it for us when we firebombed Tokyo and atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially Nagasaki? If Israel must kill 10 Palestinians to rescue one hostage, is that 'proportion' to the military objective? 100? 1,000? Does the number go up as the number of hostages to be rescued goes up? Four hostages permit 40 Palestinians? 400? 4,000? Can there really be any standard? Or, once Hamas did what it did on October 7, did all Palestinians in Gaza become "fair game"? Are they all fungible and expendable - children, women, elderly, sick, blind, halt, and lame - so long as there is some military mission to be accomplished? Was their right to life and bodily integrity forfeited conditionally on October 7, i.e., whenever some military benefit might accrue to the IDF or IDAF from their injury, death or dismemberment? I think back on Morley Safer's CBS report on the Marine with his Zippo lighter setting afire what we called a "hooch" but the owners called "home" back in 1965. I think of people in our designated "free fire zones." I think of entire villages displaced in our "strategic hamlet" program. I think of Donald Trump's response to Bill O'Reilly pointing out that Vladimir Putin "is a killer": "“There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?"
Anniversaries: First the attack on the USS Liberty. Israel claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, the Israelis believing the ship was Egyptian. Official investigations by both the U.S. and Israel concluded the same. There was evidence to the contrary and the official explanation for the attack was rejected by many senior U.S. officials including Dean Rusk and Adm. Thomas Moorer, member of the Joint Chiefs. Different motives have been tendered for the attack but all have been rejected by official Washington and Israel and controversy about it has lingered for more than half a century. What strikes me about the incident is the belief that Israel was willing to attack even the U. S., if its leaders believed it was in Israel's interests to do so. Of course, the same may be said of the U.S. and its willingness to attack any other country or non-state foe. The Liberty incident reminds us to question why, if at all, it is in the U.S. national interest to be so tightly tied to Israel and its government when there is much to suggest that it is not.
Carmina Burana, Carl Orff's cantata based on medieval manuscripts premiered in Frankfurt 4 years into the Third Reich, the audience undoubtedly filled with SS and SA uniforms and swastikas. Unlike many of his friends and musical colleagues, Orff never left Germany during the Nazi period; indeed, he prospered in it, especially after Carmina Burana. In the Allies' denazification investigations after the war, he was rated "Grey C, acceptable, or compromised by actions during the Nazi period but not a subscriber to Nazi doctrine, i.e., a passive anti-Nazi. I became familiar with Carmina when Anne sang it as a member of the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus under Margaret Hawkins. I watched and listened to the performance of the complete cantata by the Copenhagen Royal Orchestra this afternoon on YouTube. It is quite an impressive production, and I was struck, as I always am, by what an extraordinary amount of work, effort, preparation, and coordination performances like this represent. I was reminded again of how much I enjoy choral music, for which I am grateful to Anne (and Margaret Hawkins and Kenneth Schermerhorn) The cantata begins and ends with the Latin poem O Fortuna, which seemed timely for 1937 Germany, as it does now. On the other hand, the poem and song suggest that Fate or Fortune is fickle, unpredictable, 'ever waxing, ever waning.' I doubt that the Nazis in the Frankfurt audience felt that way about Germany's rising fortunes under Hitler who promised a Thousand Year Reich:
O Fortuna | O Fortune, . . . . . . . . . |
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