2017
Kyrie
Performance of an earlier, prizewinning choral composition by my son, while at the San Francisco Conservatory. (The choir sheet music is here.)
Update: I've removed my YouTube embeds because I don't want to set up consent notices for their trackers. Clicking the above screenshot will take you to the video on their site. (June 2, 2024)
Bicycle Taxi Driver
The latest performed by my brother, Matthew, with Orquesta Aragón de Cuba, and posted by a fan on YouTube (sung in Spanish and with lyrics displayed in English):
Update: I've removed my YouTube embeds because I don't want to set up consent notices for their trackers
. Clicking the above screenshot will take you to the video on their site. (June 2, 2024)Teachers
With any luck at all, the best teachers . . . are the ones who aren’t done learning how to teach.
– Elizabeth Lehfeldt, “What’s in a Name?”, Tales Told out of School, February 13, 2017.
An Encounter between our Enslaved and our Immigrant Pasts
I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity.
– Frederick Douglas, quoted in Patrick Young, “When a Ban on the Chinese Was Proposed and Frederick Douglass Spoke Out,” Long Island Wins, February 8, 2017.
Intersections
After fleeing the Nazis, many Jewish refugee professors found homes at historically black colleges. And they were shocked by race relations in the South.
– Heather Gilligan on Timeline, February 10, 2017
Richard Evans on Trump
"How do the early days of the Trump administration look like the Third Reich? Historian Richard Evans [an important historian of Nazi Germany] weighs in." Interview by Isaac Chotiner, Slate, Feb. 10, 2017.
The question might still seem hyperbolic to many, but sober, historically informed analysis along such lines can be informative for understanding both present and past.
What's Going On?
No really, Laurel Leff wants to know. This isn’t a poltical-rhetorical question but something bigger. What are we to make of the president’s recent nod to Holocaust denial? We need to consider the matter in an open, fearless, and dispassionate way, but how?
For those of us who teach and research the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, the Trump administration’s refusal to mention Jews in a statement commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day has been both horrifying and confusing.
Read Leff’s whole piece, and if you haven’t read Deborah Lipstadt on why “Holocaust denial” is an appropriate term here, be sure to follow that link in Leff’s piece too.
Assault on Facts and Credibility
All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.
The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
– Charles J. Sykes, ”Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying,“ New York Times, February 4, 2017.
Justitia
After the latest Spiegel cover and all the news it embodies, this cartoon by Sam Machado feels really good, particularly with its use of gender against the U.S. chauvinist-in-chief.
Don’t be a Sucker (1947)
There is an infectious simplicity about this film, which rings true politically in these times, even if the history it tells was more complicated.
Source: U.S. War Department, Prelinger Archives, hosted by the Internet Archive.
German Magazine Cover
Feels more like a lobotomy to me, but this image by the leading German news weekly works too.
Totally Normal
Asked whether federal workers are dissenting in ways that go beyond previous party changes in the White House, Tom Malinow ski, who was President Barack Obama's assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, said, sarcastically: "Is it unusual? . . . There's nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about."
– Juliet Eilperin, Lisa Rein, and Marc Fisher, "Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump," The Washington Post, January 31, 2017.
History under Trump
Interesting comment today by Cameron Blevins: History and Its Limits under Trump.
Please Make It Stop
Being a historian right now feels like being kept awake through brain surgery.
– Elizabeth Catte on Twitter, January 28, 2017
The Past in the Present
Am still shaking my head over the new administration’s discriminatory ban on Muslims entering the United States. It was no surprise after the hateful rhetoric of the election season, but announcing it on Holocaust Remembrance Day? And not mentioning Jews in a statement about the Holocaust? I wish I could call these actions tone-deaf, but they feel more intentional and sinister than that, even if the more apt historical parallels are the U.S. rejection of Jews fleeing Nazism and the internment of Japanese-Americans as an entire class of people during the Second World War.
From the Historian who Brought us 'Ordinary Men'
"I would suggest that a major source of our unease — beyond Trump’s personal unfitness for the presidency — is not that Trump is going to attempt to construct some fascist-style dictatorship, but rather that the trends that are manifested in his triumph represent a threat to our democracy that has arrived from an unexpected direction. That is what has left me, in any case, bewildered and unprepared."
"But Hitler was a fixated ideologue with a strong party organization, while Trump is an opportunistic narcissist driven above all by the need for adulation. Hitler was the 'little corporal,' the man of the people, who feigned austerity, while Trump is a billionaire who flaunts his wealth and luxurious life-style. Ultimately, Trump seems far more a hybrid of Berlusconi and Putin, potentially merging kleptocracy and autocracy, than the reincarnation of an ideologically driven, war-mongering, and genocidal dictator."
Christopher R. Browning, “Dangers I didn't see coming: ‘tyranny of the minority’ and an irrelevant press,” Vox, January 18, 2017.I recommend reading Browning’s whole piece. See also the earlier comments by the sociologist and political scientist Theda Skopol, “A guide to rebuilding the Democratic Party, from the ground up,” Vox, January 5, 2017, which is about much more than the Democratic Party. She understands something that conservatives of various stripes have long acted on, but which Democrats have ignored to everyone’s detriment.
Gaslighting
I have been learning new terms these past months. Today it was “alternative facts,” which goes together with an older term, apparently repurposed for our current political and cultural moment—“gaslighting.” I saw the latter term on a protest sign at the Women’s March yesterday.
Ludwik Fleck on Cognition
Cognition is the most socially-conditioned activity of man, and knowledge is the paramount social creation [Gebilde].
– Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (The University of Chicago Press, 1979), Kindle ed., chap. 2, sec. 4.