Opera in Black and White

Kind of a big Substack post—long, anyway.

For the Record: Space Opera

 

This is just to get Jordan to go nuts in the comments. A glorious time for once and all! My expressed opinions are not to be taken very seriously.

My "red flag" is "anybody who thinks a movie or television show form of society* is something we should be working towards."

* Except Star Trek fans because the Federation pretty much gets it right. :)

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) August 23, 2021

It's an updated western movie.

— TimeLovesAHero (@time_loves) August 23, 2021

Necrology

On the death of David Koch, I'm generally a nil nisi bonum kind of guy, but I think I might as well repost something from five years ago, which touches on some of the issues that have been coming up in the apologetics—that he wasn't really a moronic reactionary but a person compelled to his opinions by his special and enlightened philosophical bent, and that far from clinging selfishly and stingily to his fortune he spent it freely, but choosing his own causes rather than bowing to the will of the taxman—I was dubious then, and I haven't changed my mind:

Straw Dog photo from China News Service. Typical People's Republic, no credit to the photographer or even the author of the piece it illustrates, but there's an editor name, because hierarchy.

Via Steve M ("Libertarian Talk is Cheap"), I'm looking at a weird article by the editor in chief of Reason, one Nick Gillespie, who's been living by his own account off Koch brothers philanthropy for 21 years and wants us to know that old Charles and David are not hypocritical moralist Republican authoritarians but literally—wait for it—too liberal for the John Birch Society:

Trumpfendämmerung

We've often enjoyed seeing politicians' language as a performance of poetry, but today could be the first time I've seen it as opera. But it really is:

[This is the only really good performance I could find of the exact sequence I was looking for from Aida act 1, from the naming of young Radamès as general to go meet the invading Ethiopian army and the cries of "Ritorna vincitor!" (Come back victorious!) to the Ethiopian slave girl Aida gradually realizing that her secret lover Radamès will be working to kill her royal father and brothers and asking the gods to take pity on her in her ambivalence. Video and sound from 1966 not great, sorry, but the musicians including Leyla Gencer as the heroine are doing a fantastic job.]

The curtain rises, the emperor Don Donaldo (tenor) is holding his formal levée in the presence of the whole court including his most senior legislative advisers, La Pelosina (contralto) and Chuck (bass-baritone), and his lieutenant Michele di Pence, the Stone Guest (mime), and he sings, plangently, of the grandeur of his wall, which may or may not exist (that is, in fact it doesn't exist, but he's only sporadically aware of this, as of a pizza that still hasn't arrived a couple of hours after you ordered it), in his majestic aria, "Se vuoi provare del muro il valor":

If you really want to find out
how effective a wall is,
just ask Israel:
99.9 percent effective

our wall will be
every bit as good as that,
if not better.

So we’ve done a lot
of work on the wall,
a lot of wall is built.
A lot of people don’t know that.
A lot of wall is renovated.

We have walls that were
in very bad condition
and they are now
in A-1 tip-top shape.

And frankly, some wall
has been reinforced
by our military.
The military has done
a fantastic job.

Though something is darkening his pleasure, a sense that his legislative agenda may not be working so well: