RUTHFULLY YOURS

Out of the Proscenium, Into the Void “The Passenger” was powerful in Houston. It’s even stronger in New York

Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s haunting opera, “The Passenger,” a meditation on guilt and memory in the context of Auschwitz, was written in 1968 but was not staged until 2010. It is now making up for lost time. After touring Europe, David Pountney’s production was mounted by the Houston Grand Opera in January. Last weekend, the Lincoln Center Festival brought the staging, with the same HGO forces, to the Park Avenue Armory.

Zofia Posmysz, a Polish Catholic who spent three years in Auschwitz as a political prisoner, wrote the radio play and novel on which the opera is based. Traveling on an ocean liner 15 years after the end of the war, Liese, a former SS overseer in Auschwitz, thinks she sees Marta, a prisoner in whom she had taken a particular interest, and whom she thought dead. The encounter forces Liese to dredge up her repressed memories and to confront her own complicity in evil.

Powerful in Houston, the production was even stronger here. Removed from the enveloping, protective proscenium into the cavernous Armory space, it felt as though these heinous events were taking place in the void, where insignificant human beings must battle to preserve a semblance of humanity and a moral compass or, conversely, can wield power without fear of reprisal.

Thus, in Johan Engels’s set, the all-white ship floated serenely above the dark hell of Auschwitz, with its barracks and railroad tracks, and spotlights streaming straight down from the ceiling intensified the nightmarish qualities of the production and the opera itself. The orchestra, incisively led by Patrick Summers, was placed beside the set rather than in a pit. Removing that usual division between the audience and the singers gave their performances a stunning immediacy; the necessary amplification was barely noticeable. Among the excellent performers, the soprano Melody Moore came into her own as a passionate, full-voiced Marta, for whom memory becomes an ecstatic, affirming vehicle for survival.
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In the Lincoln Center Festival’s other opera offering this year, the Bolshoi brought no sets and costumes from Moscow, but its concert performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Tsar’s Bride” (1899) at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday afternoon was still a grand affair. Based on a play by Lev Mey, the opera, a Russian classic little heard in the U.S., imagines the scenario behind the premature death of Ivan the Terrible’s third wife. It is a colorful story in which Gryaznoy, one the Tsar’s marauding oprichniks, or secret police, falls in love with Marfa, a merchant’s daughter. No matter that she is engaged to her childhood sweetheart, Lykov, or that she is on the Tsar’s list of marital possibilities, or that Gryaznoy’s mistress, Lyubasha, will not tolerate being cast aside. Poison substituted for a love potion has a cascading effect, resulting in the deaths of all four principals.

At ABC News and CBS’s ’60 Minutes,’ producers would regularly kill stories critical of the powerful and connected.

With the founding of the Center for Public Integrity in the 1980s, Charles Lewis probably did more than anyone else to launch institutional nonprofit journalism in America. So it is worth paying attention to what he has to say, especially when his subject includes the fate of journalism itself. Mr. Lewis’s “935 Lies” repays such attention, though not right away.

The first half of the book is an unremarkable recounting of America’s supposed loss of innocence—its missteps and transgressions as well as its attempts to restore the nation’s ideals—from the Tonkin Gulf and Freedom Summer to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, from the Chilean coup to Iraq. An entire chapter, breaking no new ground, is devoted to the stubborn problem of race in America. The book’s historical narrative is meant to show, as the subtitle has it, “the decline of America’s moral integrity.” The title itself, which the author essentially disowns in a concluding note, refers to 935 statements by the George W. Bush administration about Iraq. Mr. Lewis asserts that the statements were all erroneous but concedes that they may not have been “lies” in the sense of knowing falsehood. In any case, the Iraq war plays only a limited role in Mr. Lewis’s tale of woe.

But hang in—or skip to the second part, which is mostly a memoir and almost all about journalism. It includes one of the toughest critiques of television news ever written by an insider. From 1977 to 1989, Mr. Lewis worked for ABC News and then for CBS’s news program “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Lewis begins with an admiring portrait of Edward R. Murrow, whose wartime reporting and work at CBS in the early 1950s, he believes, embodied a time when the news business managed to avoid the plague of risk aversion that would later come from corporate masters seeking ever larger profits. Then he takes us into the halls of Don Hewitt’s “60 Minutes” and makes the most of his own disillusioning experience.

Nothing in the Supreme Court’s recent ruling denies women access to birth control.
In the days since the Supreme Court’s June 30 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision, we have been troubled by those who seem eager to misrepresent both the facts of the case and the impact of its ruling on women—all to divide Americans and score political points in a tough election year.

The biggest distortion: the #NotMyBossBusiness campaign on Twitter, which falsely suggests that under the ruling employers can deny their employees access to birth control.

That’s flat-out false. Nothing in the Hobby Lobby ruling stops a woman from getting or filling a prescription for any form of contraception. Those who distort the court’s decision insist that one cannot support religious liberty and also support access to safe, affordable birth control. But these are principles that we, and millions of others, support. Americans believe strongly that we should be able to practice our religion without undue interference from the government. It’s a fundamental conviction that goes to the very core of our character—and dates back to the founding of our nation. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case, which protects rights of conscience, reaffirmed our centuries-old tradition of religious liberty.

Contrary to the misleading rhetoric, the Hobby Lobby ruling does not take away women’s access to birth control. No employee is prohibited from purchasing any Food and Drug Administration approved drug or device, and contraception remains readily available and accessible for all women nationwide. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, prior to ObamaCare over 85% of large businesses already offered contraceptive coverage to their employees. And the ObamaCare mandate under review in the case doesn’t even apply to businesses with fewer than 50 employees. For lower-income women, there are five programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that help ensure access to contraception for women, including Medicaid.

The court’s decision applies to businesses whose owners have genuine religious convictions. In the Hobby Lobby case, the company’s owners—the Green family—offered health-care plans that provide coverage for 16 of the 20 FDA-approved contraceptive drugs and devices, including birth-control pills, required under the Affordable Care Act.

The greatest thing about movies is their ability to conflate reality with illusion, not just regarding special effects but in convincing us that actors are the characters they portray on screen. Movies made us believe that John Wayne was a war hero though he never served a minute in combat; we believed that Vivien Leigh, a neurasthenic, fragile British beauty was a southern belle with enough pluck to get her hands dirty in Tara’s soil; we believed that Rock Hudson was the ultimate lady’s man who enjoyed the many love scenes that he played with the screen’s sexiest women.

Through the combination of screenplay, cinematography, music and all the other elements that fascinate us despite the proliferation of oversized tv screens and ubiquitous personal gadgets, we remain enthralled by the great art form of the 20th century. So it is with enormous surprise that I note the unanimous rating of 100% critical approval on Rotten Tomatoes for a film that is the antithesis of this pretense, a return to the most literal of presentations instead of the most illusory. I’m speaking of “Boyhood,’ Richard Linklater’s lengthy, often plodding film about an American family seen through the life of a boy from the age of six until his freshman year at college. The gimmick that has tickled all the critics was the use of the actual actors as they aged over the course of twelve years. The director, refusing to avail himself of the usual tricks of the actor’s and cinematographer’s trades, simply waited until the characters really grew up and kept returning to shoot them in their real time. Since this isn’t a documentary, this versimilitude doesn’t amount to anything more than minor admiration for the director’s extreme patience in getting this project done. As I watched the movie, I thought that even if these children growing into adolescence had been in my own home movies, I would have been sufficiently bored by their banality to use an editor’s discretion to liven things up.

As an admirer of Linklater’s previous movies with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight), I was struck by the missing quality that distinguished those movies from this one – charm. Delpy and Hawke played off against each other with conversation that had intelligence, wit and sparkle; even though the movies were scripted, they had the feel of spontaneous combustion between people whose twosome had emotional and physical chemistry. In “Boyhood,” there is the promise of some spark in the early footage of a sassy young Lorelei Linklater playing the petulant older sister to a six year old Mason – the title boy. By the time she ages into adolescence, her characterization is symbolized more by her hair morphing into shades of pink, red and henna than by her dialogue which becomes as spare and monotonous as the other teenagers in this film. The three other main children who comprise the blended family are taciturn and frankly, boring. We are looking at America’s mediocrity which may be a valid subject but not when it becomes celebrated and not when the movie ends with a song about diminished ambitions that takes on the aura of an anthem instead of a dirge.

Anti-Israel Protesters Attack Paris Synagogues Congregants trapped in building as Bastille Day demonstration turns violent

Traditionally French people dance in the streets and fire stations on the eve of the Quatorze Juillet, known in English as Bastille Day. This year, however, anti-Israel demonstrators took control of the monument in the center of the Bastille circle Sunday, brandishing Palestinian flags and cardboard replicas of scimitars [1] and Kassam rockets. Described in AFP releases as a well-mannered demonstration except for a few incidents, it was in fact a hate-fest against Israel and the Jews. “Death to the Jews,” “Murderous Israel,” “One Jew Some Jews All Jews are Terrorists” figured loudly among the slogans [2] hurled by kefiyyeh-clad marchers.

According to the police, the 7,000 demonstrators (organizers claimed 30,000) began in the northern quartier of Barbès, which has a large African and Maghrebi population, and marched to the Bastille, where they remained for several hours. A small contingent started to attack the police, and was quickly brought under control. At the same time, hundreds of protesters raced up rue de la Roquette—street of the rocket—and surrounded [3] the Don Isaac Abravanel [4] synagogue, which is protected by a tall metal gate. Security guards from the SPCJ (Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive), Beitar, and the Jewish Defense League faced assailants reportedly armed with knives, axes, and iron bars.

Five riot policemen stationed in front of the synagogue, where some 200 congregants happened to be attending a prayer service for Israel’s safety, were unable to handle the crowd. It took a half hour for reinforcements to arrive, and another two hours during which law enforcement combed the surrounding streets before members of the congregation were told it was safe to leave. The chief rabbi of Paris, Michel Guggenheim, was at the synagogue during the incident.

Another synagogue [5], on the rue des Tournelles near the Place des Vosges, was also targeted, though details of that incident have not yet emerged. Two weeks ago I attended a joyful ceremony there for the more than 1,500 French Jews making aliyah [6] this summer, in the presence of Natan and Avital Sharansky, as well as the Israeli ambassador to France and newly elected [7] chief rabbi of France Haim Korsia.

Jewish radio stations were abuzz Sunday evening and Monday with testimony from people who had been inside the synagogue and statements from Jewish community leaders. Mainstream media coverage, however, focused [8] largely on the 14 Juillet military parade, with the day’s “death to the Jews” chants neatly overlooked.

Roger Cukierman, the president of CRIF [9], the umbrella organization of French Jews, and Joël Mergui, president of the Consistoire [10], met with Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve yesterday, and asked for an outright ban on anti-Israel demonstrations due to their blatant disregard for law and order.

President Obama took it upon himself to dissolve the southern border of the United States (it’s a different matter on the 49th parallel, as Canadians or tourists bearing Kinder eggs well know). So, if there is no southern border de jure, where is it de facto? Try Massachusetts:

DARTMOUTH, Mass. – Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson said Monday that he’s dealing with a problem in Dartmouth that shouldn’t be his responsibility.

It’s not a new theme for him. He’s sounded the alarm about illegal immigrants before, but now he says it’s getting closer and closer to home.

Illegal immigrants come across the border in the American Southwest. When they are detained, the wave of humanity has overwhelmed local capacity. The illegal immigrants are being sent all over the country, including Massachusetts.

“We’re all becoming border states now… We know there are going to be more coming here from Texas. We’ve already got two groups coming off the planes here,” Hodgson said.

More from NECN:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has admitted that since April, four planes transported undocumented immigrants to detention centers in Massachusetts.

The federal government does not bother to inform the states on whom it’s dumping these “children”, many with diseases unseen in decades. The President has appointed himself Coyote-in-Chief, express-tracking illegal immigrants from the shores of the Rio Grande deep into the country – until, as Sheriff Hodgson says, we are all border states. My own informal impression – going by the Spanish you hear from conversing chambermaids in hotel corridors, the names in the local paper’s police blotter, the budget issues facing school boards from a sudden influx of “diversity” – is that the parallel Latino sub-culture is well-established in northern Massachusetts and quite a long way up I-87 to upstate New York. So the fast-shrinking gap between the northern border and the southern border is about two hours.

~There’s quite a lot about the armies of the Undocumented in After America, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore and go to support my pushback against the litigious climate mullah Michael E Mann, he pleads pitifully. Anyway, here’s a taste from page 244:

Banana Republic Update! Exactly a week ago in this space, I wrote:

Speaking of lèse-majesté, even when our sovereign liege lord is not present, it is improper to disrespect him. For example, Friday’s Fourth of July parade in Norfolk, Nebraska included a float with a wooden outhouse labeled “Obama Presidential Library”. According to the gentlemen of the press, the float has “drawn criticism”.

And we can’t have that, can we?

‘Norfolk City Councilman Dick Pfeil told the Omaha World-Herald that he was unhappy with the float, and he wanted to make clear the city had not approved it.’

Because nothing better exemplifies the spirit of Independence Day than having your float approved by the government.

Well, the good news is that Eric Holder’s Department of Justice – that would be the same Department of Justice that supplies guns to Mexican drug gangs, and monitors the phone calls and emails of US journalists, and declines to investigate the IRS’ obstruction of justice, and prosecutes states that seek to verify the immigration status of people within their borders, etc, etc – Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has dispatched a crack team of agents to Nebraska to investigate said act of lèse-majesté toward King Barack:

The department sent a member of its Community Relations Service team, which gets involved in discrimination disputes, to a Thursday meeting about the issue. Also at the meeting were the NAACP, the Norfolk mayor and The Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

So How Many Penguins Are There? The population of one breed of the flightless bird has soared.

Global-warming alarmists are denying scientific evidence indicating that penguin populations are healthy and growing.

Researchers recently attempted to count all of the Adélie penguins in Antarctica and found, to their own surprise, that the numbers of this white-eyed breed are exploding on the frigid continent, according to the Wall Street Journal. This contradicts claims by activists that the flightless bird is a victim of global warming whose dwindling numbers can be directly linked to dwindling ice caps. Wildlife biologists closely monitor Adélie penguins because their status correlates with annual sea-ice conditions and temperature trends.

But the Adélie population is actually 53 percent larger than previously estimated, having increased globally by 29 percent in two decades.

Heather Lynch of Stony Brook University, in New York, and imaging specialist Michelle LaRue of the University of Minnesota counted the birds by satellite and found that the Adélie penguin population is now 3.79 million breeding pairs, with 251 colonies.

The survey, published online this week by the American Ornithologists’ Union, coincides with another satellite census of Emperor penguins conducted in 2012 by geographers at the British Antarctic Survey that happened upon twice as many Emperor penguins as scientists had previously thought existed.

A recent article from Reuters.com reported findings from a study predicting that global warming would reduce Antarctica’s Emperor penguin population from 600,000 to around 480,000 by 2100. Governments have been reluctant to list the birds as endangered, however, because populations in 45 known colonies are supposed to rise until 2050 before declining. Emperors are one of three species considered stable, and of the 18 penguin species, only King, Adélie, and Chinstrap penguins are said to be increasing.

That is, unless the one talking is Ron Naveen, founder of the scientific research organization Oceanites, who told ABCnews.com, “We know two of the three penguin species in the peninsula, Chinstrap and Adélie, are declining significantly in a region where, in the last 60 years, it’s warmed by five degrees Fahrenheit annually and by nine degrees Fahrenheit in winter.” This organization found that it is actually the Gentoo species that is increasing.

See the movie “Gifted Hands” about Dr. Carson and his incredible achievements in medicine and surgery….rsk
A Curious Mind The acquisition of knowledge is the antidote to the herd mentality of the agenda-driven media.

I recently returned home after two weeks of engagements in New Zealand and Australia focusing on empowerment through reading. The Kiwis and Aussies are not very different from Americans, even though they inhabit the opposite side of the globe.

I was struck by the way many people perceived the political atmosphere in the United States. Although the well-educated individuals who have access to all of the American cable channels tend to be well informed on the issues, most people had only heard that America has finally repaired its broken medical system with the advent of Obamacare and now everyone, including the indigent, has excellent health care. They were under the impression that most Americans are very happy with Obamacare and with their wonderful president, who had ushered in a great new day in America with his brilliance in many areas.

Many people were shocked when I relayed the facts about the deleterious effects of Obamacare on employment, skyrocketing insurance premiums, and the displacement of health-care providers. Furthermore, they had little knowledge about Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service scandal, the Veterans Affairs debacle, or the depth of our financial woes. In other words, they were just like a multitude of Americans who pay little attention to their news sources and are not curious enough to seek multiple sources and arm themselves with enough historical knowledge to be able to decipher truth from fiction.

Fortunately, I found that most of the people Down Under are not nearly as dogmatic in their beliefs as Americans have become. Our people on either side of the political spectrum tend to be more close-minded, partaking only of news sources that align with their ideological beliefs and in many cases engaging in the demonization of other information sources. This, of course, leads to intolerance and ignorance, which are associated with a whole cadre of societal problems. Frequently, that narrow-mindedness is encouraged by hyper-partisan individuals who actually call out news outlets such as the Fox News Channel for ridicule.

Such people might do well to ask themselves what would become of our country if people heard only what the government wanted them to hear. If they could be honest with themselves, I think they would have to admit that they would be uncomfortable in that setting. The mainstream media could provide a great service to the American people, as well as people around the world, by embracing their duty to be objective investigators and reporters of the news. I realize the likelihood of that occurring is small, but hope springs eternal.

The Palestinian ‘Genocide’ Lie It’s a moral scandal that it’s even necessary to debunk equating Israel with the Nazis.

‘Here’s the difference between us,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained on Fox News Sunday. “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”

It’s a classic talking point. It’s also objectively true, and that truth is very frustrating for Israel’s critics.

All one needs to do is delve into the muck of Twitter and read the timelines for such hashtags as #GazaUnderAttack and #GenocideInGaza: “They’re killing the women and children to ensure there won’t be a new generation of Palestine.” “One Holocaust can NEVER justify another.”

And let’s not even talk about the globally trending hashtag #HitlerWasRight.

Of course, it’s not just on Twitter. Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the feckless Palestinian Authority, recently condemned Israel for committing “genocide” in Gaza. For decades, political cartoonists and cartoonish politicians have been jaw-jawing about how Israel now wears the SS uniform.

This too is basically a talking point — and a very old one. But this one is plainly a lie.

If the Israelis are, or have ever been, interested in genocide, they are utterly incompetent at it. As slanders go, it’s almost funny, like the old paranoid delusion that George W. Bush was simultaneously an idiot and a criminal mastermind.

On the one hand, the Israeli military is supposed to be ruthlessly competent and determined to wipe out the Palestinians. On the other, the Palestinian population has grown more than 100 percent since 1970. The population in the Gaza Strip has grown nearly threefold since 1990. The Palestinians themselves expect the population to double over the next two decades. “Genocide” is a loaded political term, but under any remotely reasonable definition, shouldn’t those numbers be going the other way?

It’s just a hunch, but if the Israelis wanted to wipe out as many Palestinians as possible, never mind commit genocide, they probably wouldn’t issue warnings to Gazans (by phone and leaflet) to get out of harm’s way. Nor would Israel continue to allow hundreds of trucks of food and medical aid to enter Gaza even as hundreds of rockets leave Gaza.