March 09, 2006, 8:24 a.m.
A perfect statement, &c.

I wonder if you noticed this statement, put around Iraq: "Extinguish the flames of the sectarian treachery. Every drop of blood shed is a waste."

Perfectly said, in my view. An amazing thing is that the Sadr people (radical Shiites) and the Sunni Endowment collaborated on that statement. Or so it was reported.

It bears repeating, don't you think? "Extinguish the flames of the sectarian treachery. Every drop of blood shed is a waste."

I'm looking at a cartoon drawn by Dan Wasserman of the Boston Globe. It shows Republican elephants and Democratic donkeys panicking over the Dubai ports deal. They're screaming "Arabs!" "Security Alert!" and the like. In the midst of them is President Bush, saying, "Hey! Wait! I do the fear-mongering around here!"

That was very, very sad to read. You may recall that, in my interview with Michael Chertoff, the homeland-security chief lamented that, whenever they give prudent warnings, or discuss the ongoing threat at all, they're accused of fear-mongering. They're accused of some kind of exaggerating, or pressing for political advantage.

And yet, if something went wrong, the Wassermans would jump up and down saying, "Asleep at the switch!" or what have you.

Very, very sad. Bush is no fear-monger. If anything, he errs on the side of cool, calm, and optimistic.

I don't know whether this is sad or silly, but . . . The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to impeach Bush. Or urge his impeachment. Or whatever.

Listen, whenever some right-wing nut acts up, the Left uses it to the hilt — tars all of conservativedom with it. How come the antics of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors — an official body — are never used against the Left, more broadly? (Remember that these San Franciscans also refused to harbor the USS Iowa.)

Many liberals like to say that the Republican party plays dirty, especially McCarthyistically. I always say: When?

I further say: As far as I can tell, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is the purest expression of the Democratic party going.

That high-schooler in Denver is catching a lot of flak, for taping his teacher, Jay Bennish. I've seen several news accounts that say Bennish was "criticizing" President Bush. Yeah, that's what he was doing: "criticizing," i.e., equating Bush to Hitler.

I'm delighted that the kid taped his teacher, exposing him to the public. Ideological teachers get away with murder in the classroom, never, ever called to account. They shut the door and become little dictators, or brainwashers.

Good for this kid. I wish he'd been around in some of my own classrooms.

Oh, and Mr. Bennish? I hope you saw that he teaches geography. That, of course, provides a perfect jumping-off point for likening George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler.

Reminds me of the kids who took the hard sciences at my college (not me, of course). They'd come back to the dorm and say the TA (teaching assistant) spent half the session talking up the FMLN in El Salvador. (Those were the Communist guerrillas, just in case you were wondering.)

This quote was highlighted in The Hotline the other day: "They're unlikely to reach out to the first chance that comes their way because that might look like a political payback." That was Pete Williams of NBC, talking about the new justices, Roberts and Alito, and why they won't press the Supreme Court to hear the South Dakota abortion case.

I bristled at the words "might look like." Isn't the point of the judicial branch that they're not a political branch? To heck with what something "might look like." What, do these guys face reelection? Are they not appointed for life? Are they not insulated from politics? What's Congress going to do, impeach them? If they wouldn't touch Warren . . .

Very annoying.

Speaking of annoying, I wonder if you saw a Richard Cohen column that began like this: "The charm of businessmen in general is not only that they lack irony but, because they took business courses in college, they lack basic knowledge."

I don't know about you, but I haven't found this true at all, in my experience. In fact, some of the most "basically knowledgeable" people I've known have been businessmen.

And yet, at one time — when I was politically stupid, and ill educated — I believed this, about businessmen. Of course, I was about 14. Richard Cohen is a powerful middle-aged pundit.

Very annoying.

Oh, and one more thing: Why shouldn't business fundamentals count as "basic knowledge"? I mean, I don't have them, and sometimes feel the lack of them.

When I was at Brown last week — marvelous time, by the way — I saw an ad, in the campus newspaper. It advertised a lecture (March 3) by Rhode Island's Democratic senator, Jack Reed. The ad gave the title of the lecture: "President Bush and the Long War: Are Slogans Enough?"

Now, what could the answer to that question be? I'm going to go out on a limb here: I'm guessing slogans aren't enough. But I don't want to be hasty. In the interests of fairness and balance, I should check with those — with the multitudes — who maintain that, in fact, slogans are enough.

A U.S. senator should be embarrassed to be associated with such tripe.

You know that I collect Bush speak, and Bush other things. The president said something utterly Bushian in India. There's no charm in it, on the page; you have to imagine it out of his mouth (which should be easy). Referring to freer trade between the two countries, Bush said, "The United States is looking forward to eating Indian mangos."

I don't know what you think. I just think that the sentence "The United States is looking forward to eating Indian mangos" is hilarious.

I also took note of what we learned from Kent Hance. Hance is the former Texas congressman (Democrat) who beat Bush in 1978. (The only race Bush has ever lost.) Hance is now a big supporter of the president's, and involved in the coming presidential library. Recently, Hance was talking about a conversation he had with Bush and Dick Cheney. Bush said to the vice president, "Cheney, if it weren't for Hance, I'd be chairman of the Ag Committee." Hance further reported, "They both laughed and laughed."

I'm laughing, too. (I wonder if the chairman of the Ag Committee is.)

P.S. You can bet Bush said "chairman," and not "chair."

Reading some clips from the Washington Post the other day, I came across the byline of Colum Lynch. Great name for a newspaper journalist: you know, column inch, Colum Lynch.

Poor guy's probably heard it a billion times. I hope he doesn't read this — and if he does, I apologize.

News from the music world — and the loony-Left world. A reader sent me the following, from the Berkshire Eagle, in western Massachusetts:

Bush partisans, beware. Tonight's Berkshire Symphony program comes with a political agenda.

Three works composed under Soviet regimes make up the program, which takes place at 8 in Chapin Hall. Each work is a response to war and injustice. Conductor Ronald Feldman chose the trilogy to suggest parallels between political repression under the Soviets and similar tendencies in the United States under the Bush administration.

The principal work is Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, the composer's response to criticism — and the threat of imprisonment or execution — by Stalin himself.

I remind you, dear hearts: Just because I make fun of these things, or sigh over them, doesn't mean I think they're anything but outrageous. Sometimes, all you can do is note, and move on . . .

. . . to this. I admire George Crumb, the composer, I really do. His Apparition is one of the best modern song cycles I know. I'm not so crazy about a piece for amplified flute and drums. This is An Idyll for the Misbegotten (1985), and it was performed recently in New York.

About this work, the composer has said, "I feel that 'misbegotten' well describes the fateful and melancholy predicament of the species homo sapiens at the present moment in time. Mankind has become ever more 'illegitimate' in the natural world of plants and animals."

That gives you something of the mindset of Mr. Crumb — and it has nothing to do, by the way, with my particular dislike (which in any case is not a strong dislike) of An Idyll for the Misbegotten. You know I make a strict separation, even if others — including composers — don't.

I took the Crumb statement on man and nature from the program notes of the concert I've mentioned. (The one at which the Idyll was performed.) I'd like to give you another slice of those program notes, discussing the same work:

Quotations are inherent to Crumb's method: both literary and musical quotations pop up very often in his work, expanding the historical suggestions inherent in his compositions. In this case, the Debussy quotation evokes a chaste nymph of mythology who flees Pan and hides in a river. Pan, not finding her where she is concealed, cuts down reeds growing there and forms them into pan-pipes. Possibly this may intensify the image of the rape of the natural world.

Faced with talk like this, I can only resort to Spanish: Ay, caramba!

As long as we're on music, try some criticism from the New York Sun: For a review of the flutist Dora Seres in recital, please go here. For a review of the pianist Yefim Bronfman, with the Russian National Orchestra, please go here. For a review of the Vienna Philharmonic, under Riccardo Muti, and a review of the New York Philharmonic, under Ludovic Morlot, please go here.

"Grandpa" Al Lewis died, last month. He was "Grandpa," of course, because he played that character on The Munsters. Later on, he liked to dabble in New York politics and appear on Howard Stern's radio show. I was interested to read that Lewis "was reported to be 95, but his son, Ted Lewis, claimed his father was 82." You don't often hear of fibbing up — upward in age — past the age of 20 or so. Do you?

Finally, you may recall the item I had on Helena Houdova and Cuba last week. (That column is here.) Houdova is the Czech supermodel who went to Cuba — for charitable reasons — and was arrested and detained when she took photos of slums.

That prompted a letter from Ron Radosh, the great analyst of Communism, and other matters. He writes,

Jay,

Your comment today brings to mind my own experience years ago. Glad to see things haven't changed much in Castro's fairyland.

When I was there on my 1970s trip — discussed in my memoir a few years ago — I too was arrested for taking photos of things they did not want anyone to see.

My crime was snapping a photo of a lengthy line of Cubans in front of the old nationalized Woolworth store in downtown Havana. The people had heard that a rare shipment of plastic shoes from the Eastern Bloc had just arrived. It was a ration line, and they had been there all night, waiting for the store to open. I snapped the picture, and within a second I felt a hand on my shoulder. I was taken away and put in a jail cell.

It was, however, only for about seven hours. I guess Miss Houdova's beauty accounted for her slightly longer stay. In my case, calls were put through to Cuban state security, who eventually showed up in an official car, saw that I was an official guest on a lefty trip, and admonished me to uphold my duty of revolutionary solidarity by not photographing anything that might harm the image of the great Revolution.

I replied that we had been instructed we could film anything except military installations — and this ration line on a normal street did not appear to be anything resembling such a location. They did not appreciate my reply.

Finally, after another half hour of lecturing, they let me go.

Your story leads me to suspect that the kind of freedom we take for granted won't exist in Cuba until Fidel and his comrades in power are long gone.

Thank you, Ron, and thank you all. See you.

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