Some American Stories

I have a Netflix account. Which is maybe an odd thing to have since some time ago I unplugged my TV and all its accoutrements (DVD player and video player --I never got around to connecting up the digital adaptor I got for it). I thought I'd give it all away but it just sits here unused taking up space. I suppose it's handy to have a TV for DVDs, so I'm still somewhat undecided about giving it up completely, but as for movies I've found more than enough available through Netflix's "Instant Play" that can be watched on the computer monitor -- if your computer can handle it, and mine can. So now I just keep the DVD they send for a while and then send it back unwatched (it's too much for me to try to figure out how to set up the TV system again), but I watch many movies on Instant Play. The quality is great and you can watch a movie more than once at long intervals without having to re-order it through the mail. Of course the titles available this way are limited -- but not VERY limited. There's quite a good selection available.

Many good documentaries for instance. One of the very best is Ken Burns' documentary on the Lewis and Clark expedition, "Journey of the Corps of Discovery," about the adventures of the few dozen young men who were commissioned by then-President Thomas Jefferson to explore the unknown territory west of the Mississippi for the very first time (for the white man anyway), all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I've watched it twice now a few months apart. Great way to learn about American history. You feel as if you are on the journey with them.

I also watched Burns' biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and the one of Thomas Hart Benton, the painter, and recently finished the one of Mark Twain, all very well done and full of revelations about American history in the process of exploring the individual's life.

These three men were all American to the core, and all were strong-willed personalities with strong opinions about everything, especially their own importance. What as usual interests me most is their opinions about religion.


Wright was a Unitarian, an apostate by the standard of a Bible-believing Christian, a self-styled "free thinker" of a sort that abounded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, quite willing to pontificate for the benefit of all on whatever he happened to be thinking about (kind of like me in my blogs I suppose).










Benton doesn't seem to have had any strong religious opinions. He painted some scenes of American style revivalism but he was clearly not a believer.

Twain for most of his life had a vague idea that there was a God but he did nothing to get to know Him, and when tragedy struck he ended up denying that God exists because the God he'd so vaguely had in mind had turned out not to be much like the true God. One of the commentators said it was because he so much "wanted to believe" that he became so violent against "the Christian God" at the end. This happens to many and nobody bothers to explain that it makes no sense. They get an idea in their head that a "good" God wouldn't allow bad things to happen, having no idea what the Biblical explanation for evil is. Their own imagination becomes the standard for judging God and that's the end of that.

Norman Lebrecht on Herbert Von Karajan: Will the real Nazi please stand up?

Decided to make a separate post about Norman Lebrecht after posting his comments on Susan Boyle. Norman Lebrecht is someone I recently discovered as I developed an interest in the late classical music conductor Herbert Von Karajan, and found that Lebrecht is the leader of a pack of wolves who seem to have set themselves to destroy the man's reputation both in life and death.

Karajan was born in 1908 in Austria and lived through the Nazi era as conductor of orchestras in the German towns of Ulm and Aachen. In the fifties, well after the war, he became world-famous as the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. It was partly his charisma as a conductor, which can be seen in You Tube videos of various performances, and partly the fact that he had such enemies as Lebrecht, who rarely have a good word to say about him or his music, that made me want to know more about him. As I read about Karajan my admiration for him as a musician and as a personality only grew, and Lebrecht has become to me the embodiment of a virulent destructive form of Political Correctness as he multiplied nasty epithets against the man as a supposed "Nazi," which he wasn't.

I read enough to understand that Karajan joined the Nazi party in 1933, as a young man in his twenties just starting out as a conductor, because he was asked to, but although a membership number was issued the membership didn't go through for some reason, and he never pursued it or bothered to find out why. He was completely apolitical and completely involved in his career and the Nazis were just an obstacle to be gotten around. He also had no clout he could have used to confront them such as some older conductors and musicians had and used, although his not protesting is unfairly held against him by his merciless critics. He would simply have lost his job -- and his musical ambitions utterly dominated his life and eclipsed every other interest. Before he got the post in Aachen he even went through a period of near-starvation for lack of work.

Two years after the first attempt at membership, he was again asked to join the party -- obviously because he was not a member despite the earlier gesture in that direction -- and this time the membership went through. But some will say he's REALLY REALLY REALLY a Nazi because he "joined the party two times" which is ridiculous from any point of view and just shows how eager they are to make him into a villain for some reason. The fact that he never uttered a pro-Nazi word in his life or joined in any of their causes escapes these hateful fingerpointing slandermongers. He played for state events on occasion but never participated in anything but musical events. Hitler in fact, oddly perhaps, hated him from the time a singer missed his cue in an opera Karajan was conducting and the performance never recovered. Karajan's career subsequently suffered from Hitler's dislike of him, which increased when he married a woman with a Jewish grandparent. He was blocked from many career advancements he might have had otherwise. The idea that he was ever in any sense at all a Nazi is evil slander.

Norman Lebrecht is not one of my favorite people for this reason, so I was surprised to find myself appreciating his comments about Susan Boyle. But perhaps I'm fairer to him than he is to Von Karajan.

I don't know exactly what Lebrecht's role is in all this, though he seems to be the leader of the pack, but at least he is one of the more vocal denouncers of Karajan. He seems to hate everything about him and I've found the same attitude in others across the internet. There were pickets against Karajan's appearing in the US the few times he was here, with signs calling him a Nazi. Political Correctness run amok, out to destroy an individual who far from deserving the epithet suffered in his own way under the Nazis. Despicable. The same mentality is also directed against Karajan's young protege the violinist Ann-Sophie Mutter, apparently simply because she was his protege though the charge is that she asks too much money for her performances. The clue is that they call her names as they do Karajan ("The fiddler" is their put-down for her).

The singer Elizabeth Schwarzkopf is also spoken of the same way. Apparently she did join in some Nazi organizations when she was a young girl. The zeal with which people are persecuted for their attraction to something that seemed patriotic and wholesome at the time, as if they should have been able to recognize that the Nazis were murderers at that stage, as if they could see into the future, is to my mind as deplorable a human tendency as Nazism itself. Some did recognize the true nature of Nazism quite early; others were swept along with the emotionally charged atmosphere of patriotic fervor.

It happens. I think it's happening in America right now in different enough form to camouflage its basically fascistic character, with people swept up in an emotional embrace of a leader who is not what he seems to them, despite much evidence already that he got into power through deception, and will most probably be the destruction of this country as Hitler was of Germany. This time it's the people who are the most vociferously anti-fascistic fingerpointers who are supporting the real fascists.

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Here's a link to a column by Lebrecht about Karajan. His focus is his music but one has to suspect his judgment is clouded by his belief that he was a Nazi. Here he is passing on the false rumor about his role in Nazi Germany:

On Hitler's rise in 1933 he joined the Nazi party not once but twice and was rewarded with a post at Aachen, the youngest music director in the Reich. Before long he was hailed by the Goebbels-controlled press as "Das Wunder Karajan" – the Karajan Miracle – in contrast to the politically unreliable Wilhelm Furtwängler. Karajan learned from Goebbels how to play one man against another, among other black political arts. He strutted his stuff in occupied Paris and Amsterdam, to all effects the Nazi poster boy.

I read Richard Osborne's biography of Karajan that made it clear that not only is the idea he was a Nazi false -- far from bring a "Nazi poster boy" he was hated by Hitler because of a botched performance, and career advancements were blocked for that reason as well as his marriage to a one-quarter Jewish women -- but such judgments about his music are false as well. He already HAD the post at Aachen too, he wasn't "rewarded" with it, though it would have been threatened if he had not joined the party -- the second time in this case. And really, how ridiculous is it to think of someone joining the party twice as proof of great zeal for it? The only way that could possibly have happened is if the first membership hadn't gone through, and the only way THAT could possibly have happened is if Karajan had no interest in party membership, didn't participate in anything that would have required proof of it, and didn't bother to be sure it was legitimate. Also, although Hitler hated him, the music press thought he was great, and perhaps Goebbels did as well, but there is no evidence that the music critics were influenced by the political leaders.

The music critic, Lebrecht, however, is clearly influenced by his own political beliefs. That diatribe against Karajan has just about no correspondence to the reality of Karajan's life or musical achievements, but such a smear will of course stick unless it's countered by the truth. Lebrecht ought to read Osborne.

Susan Boyle

November 13 update. Well, the people promoting her have done a good job of supporting her through her bad patch, she's been eased into more public performances, recorded an album soon to be released, one song I've heard from it making it clear her beautiful voice is holding up just fine, got herself made over in some basic ways that improve her appearance tremendously, and seems to be well on her way to the career she's always wanted. I wish her success and happiness.

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June 10 I'm one of those who is fascinated with Susan Boyle. I can't really explain it. Everybody's been explaining it but none of it suffices it seems to me. There's an amazing amount of interest in her that just keeps going on and on. I also keep checking in to find out the latest news -- and I don't really know why I do. At the You Tube video that's racked up the biggest number of views of her first performance a little group of fans has collected and I go there to see what they're saying. In the last few days I seem to be losing interest though. Maybe some time I'll figure it all out and say more.

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It occurred to me briefly after watching Susan Boyle's final performance on BGT that she might be vulnerable to a nervous breakdown. I hoped not and let the thought pass. But today we're hearing that may very well have happened to her.

She's clearly a vulnerable personality, innocent of the world, and here the world has fallen on her almost literally, all six billion of us or whatever it is now. Her resolute dedication to keeping an upbeat attitude and a generous spirit toward others started to sound brittle and forced lately, after all the media attention of a sometimes very cruel kind. When I think about the unfamiliar and unwelcome thoughts that must have assaulted her over the last days and weeks I'm not surprised if her mind began to unravel. The only real protection against that sort of thing is faith in Jesus Christ but there is no sign that she believes the gospel. Many times in the last twenty years I could have unraveled out to jibbering sputtering incoherence under pressures in my own life if I hadn't had the Lord to cling to.

I didn't want to pray for her to win; it just doesn't seem right to pray that way, but I pray now for her recovery and for people to rally around her to shield and support her, and, yes, that the Lord would reveal Himself to her.

Norman Lebrecht on Susan Boyle

I've been following the Susan Boyle phenomenon all the way down to today, when she placed second in the final of the Britain's Got Talent competition. I was disappointed when her singing on both the semi-final and today's final didn't seem to me to be up to the standard of her first performance. That's easily explained on the basis of nerves, though, after what she's been through in the last few weeks with all the public attention and even harassment. I'm not sure how much it had to do with her losing in any case. This is a call-in public vote competition and it's hard to know what moves people to vote. The dance group Diversity, the winners, were in fact very good and very entertaining. But Boyle is still expected to go on and have the career she's always wanted. It's possible her loss was a blessing too, since it may take some of the glare of the public eye off her for a while.

I don't have the expertise to judge her voice but its richness when she really belts it is wonderful to my ear, and she also has that richness in quieter songs like "Cry Me a River" and "Killing Me Softly" -- old performances of hers that have been found and posted on the net. None of it is my kind of music but I really enjoy the sound of her voice in them.

People who say, rightly or wrongly, that there are other voices better than hers are missing the point. She's been a contestant on an amateur talent show, someone who always wanted a career and is good enough to have it. She doesn't have to be the best who ever lived to qualify for that.

I appreciate what Norman Lebrecht had to say about her voice recently, in his colorful prose:

...a voice as full as Loch Lomond in flood.

...a voice that seemed to come from nowhere, delivering show tunes like a pro.

...Boyle, with a voice that is reputedly untrained, works with comfort within a contralto range, taking the top in her stride and delivering arias with little dynamic variation. The vibrato is well controlled and the pitch is, unlike the still-touring [Paul]Potts, pin-point.

...She could pass any professional audition without difficulty, provided it was a blind audition and the judges weren’t influenced by her middle-aged, dull looks.

His assessment of her voice is to be trusted I think, because he's a music critic by profession.

But then he sums up her talent as "small" which leaves me wondering.

Millions from Kenya to Korea will be rooting for Boyle to win on Saturday night, not because they admire her small and very specific talent but because they live in hope that her dream could somehow be theirs. Boyle is the first heroine of the Yes We Can universe.

He goes on about the fantasy of success her story seems to have generated across the world and I suppose there's a lot to that, and he's not the first to say it. But it's still her voice itself that I enjoy the most, that to my mind not-so-small talent that is "as full as Loch Lomond in flood."

Miss California lost Miss USA because she opposes gay marriage

OOPS UPDATE, 11/05/09. Turns out Miss Prejean had made some sort of explicit sex tape that was produced during the legal battle in which she sought damages from the pageant administrators for her loss over an unfair political question. It WAS an unfair question, or at least an unfair judgment of her answer, but there are more important issues involved here. I said already (below) that a supposedly Christian girl shouldn't be exposing so much of herself in public anyway, but it turns out she'd already exposed even MORE of herself than the string bikini displayed. I really don't get this. How can so many people THINK they are Christian but act this way? It seems to be an epidemic of sorts these days. I'm assuming of course that she considered herself a Christian at the time of the taping too. Perhaps I'm wrong about that but I haven't heard otherwise yet.

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(original post) Here's a link to the story at a well known liberal site, the Huffington Post, where they are calling Miss California "bigoted" and "intolerant" for saying she believes marriage is between a man and a woman. A more conservative sourceFox News has more showing how many are against this girl for having the guts to give her true opinion, including the co-directors of the California pageant. Here she says "God was testing my faith."

My feelings are mixed but not about the main topic. I really don't think Christians should be parading around in a tiny string bikini in front of the world in the first place, and Miss Prejean claims to be a Christian who is praying for the judge who asked her the question about gay marriage.

But accepting the terms of the beauty pageant, nobody should be judged on their political opinion. In ANY context really. Opinion should be a matter of personal right. So much for our Constitution. Well, it's been getting trashed for a long time and it's only going to get worse as self-appointed judges of what is the ONLY right opinion for anyone to have, the truly bigoted ones, are allowed to determine the fate of people who believe differently -- just as in any fascist state. In case you haven't noticed America is no longer free and it's getting worse all the time.

My opinion is that the judge should be disqualified and Miss California should be reinstated to share the win with Miss North Carolina.

Most likely it won't happen. Read the angry self-righteous opinions of those who are now vilifying Miss Prejean. They aren't going to give an inch.

But good for her. She says she's not sorry for what she said. It's what she believes and although it cost her the crown it was worth it.

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June 10
Now she's been fired from her position as Miss California, on the ground that she's failed to live up to her contract to make appearances for the organization. She claims she's made all the appearances she was asked to make.

What this is all about, it seems to me, is the sea change in the moral climate. It's about how the moral climate has now been reversed to the point that it's traditional morality that is denounced in tones of the same deep moral outrage that was once directed against violations of that traditional morality, by those who have the power to enforce their views. I think that only a few years ago they couldn't have done this to her. Of course this is the way things have been going more and more for years now, the calling of good evil and evil good as the Bible puts it. But when it has the power to triumph as far down as a beauty contest I think we've reached the watershed.

Susan Boyle gains the world

Susan Boyle always wanted to have a singing career and it never worked out. She sang in school and in the church choir, she sang karaoke at the local pub, she sang in local competitions, she won trophies, she even cut a couple of records, one at her own expense, but none of it brought her the career she wanted. Then two years after her mother's death and in honor of her mother's encouragement she applied for Britain's Got Talent and there is now no doubt she will have the career she's always wanted. She showed she has the voice for it, which she always knew.

She doesn't even claim that her voice is particularly outstanding, just that it's a good voice and should be her career. Most of the rest of us do think her voice is outstanding. When I went to other You Tube videos to compare her sound to various singers who were mentioned in comparison to her I didn't think any of them measured up, except Vera Lynn who was famous during World War II. On one of the many TV interviews about Susan Boyle, Amanda Holden, one of the judges at BGT, said what I thought too, that Susan's voice is actually better than Elaine Paige's, the singer Susan said has the success she'd aim for. Ms. Paige's voice is beautiful, but Susan's is extraordinary. Is it as good as Streisand's or Dion's? I can't really judge that because I don't really like their music overall, but I'd have to say it's in that general category of superstrong voices. In any case I'd enjoy hearing Susan sing more than either of them myself.

What about her being such a simple dowdy unattractive woman? That's what got her all the attention. If she'd had the spectacular voice but also the glamorous image of a singer she'd no doubt have received less attention.

But Susan is now famous for her personality as much as her voice. "Guileless" someone rightly described her. She seems to have no interest in living the life of a big star, in doing anything but singing for her living while living the life she's always lived. She's not much interested in having a makeover though she leaves open the possibility. "What's wrong with looking like Susan Boyle?" she asks. Her ambition goes as far as singing for the public, period.

Of course she's in for so many new experiences in the next months and years you have to expect her to rethink things as time goes on. We'll see if things look different to her down the road a ways.

She's thrilled and amazed at all the acclaim but all she really wanted to do was "show them" she could sing and that her appearance didn't matter. "It's not a beauty contest" she said. Well, she showed them. She showed the whole world.

I like a Cinderella story, we all do. I'll be watching for her next appearance on BGT, which I've heard is scheduled for May 23rd, which of course will be immediately all over YouTube and the news headlines.