RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yesterday I went to a performance of the world premiere of an opera with music composed by Ted Rosenthal, a respected jazz pianist, author and composer, with libretto and lyrics by Ted and Leslie Rosenthal and additional lyrics by Barry Singer, E.M. Lewis and Edward Einhorn. My friend Sheila W. concurred that the work, presented by the New York City Opera at the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage is a masterpiece based on a true story.

The libretto centers on a trove of letters from a mother left behind in Germany in 1938, by a young Jew who came to America- Erich Rosenthal – the composer’s father. Erich is a cold and distant father who does not reveal anything of his past to his children, as he copes with grief and loss and guilt at his failed efforts to rescue his abandoned family. The letters from his mother stopped abruptly in 1942 when she and her neighbors and family left for the death camp Sobibor.

The music, some jazz, some operatic was performed by a wonderful and brilliant cast, interspersed with haunting and devastating flashback scenes of the horrors of the impending genocide. The broken father, nearing death, ponders about his family :”Who will remember them when I am gone?”

Thanks to this magnificent opus, they will be remembered. I came home and looked at pictures of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins- all killed in Poland and recited their names to myself….rsk

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/13/the-game-

Americans always have been prone to reinventing themselves.

We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American notion of becoming anyone one pleases.

One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a careerist effort to separate oneself from the assumed dominate and victimizing majority of white heterosexual and often Christian males.

Ironically, the quest for a superficial separation from the majority comes at a time when the majority has never been so committed to the promise of the Declaration of Independence and when equal opportunity has become a reality rather than an abstract ideal.

Yet in our new binary society, we all have a choice to be seen either as victims or victimizers. And thus we make the necessary adjustments for the often more lucrative and careerist choice.

Victim Chic
At the most buffoonish, sometimes activists simply construct identities out of whole cloth. Ward Churchill did that pretty well, when he fabricated a Native American persona and parlayed it into a faculty billet at the University of Colorado that was otherwise unattainable for such a mediocrity with pseudo-credentials.

Rachel Dolezal, recently charged with welfare fraud, became Spokane chapter president of the NAACP by falsely claiming she was African-American.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years leveraged old family yarns about a high-cheekbone, Native American heritage into Harvard’s first authentically Native American law professor. Her self-invention was much more likely a route to advancement than more dreary publication, better teaching, or just being Elizabeth Warren, middle-aged white female scholar.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/george-soros-and-the-cult-of-death/

The Financial Times has selected George Soros as its Person of the Year. According to the paper, this choice was made both as a reflection of his achievements and for the values he represents:

He is the standard bearer of liberal democracy and open society… For more than three decades, Mr Soros has used philanthropy to battle against authoritarianism, racism and intolerance. Through his long commitment to openness, media freedom and human rights, he has attracted the wrath of authoritarian regimes and, increasingly, the national populists who continue to gain ground, particularly in Europe.

Reading this nonsense has prompted me to revisit Soros after almost a decade. In reality this “philanthropist” is a monster who has been promoting—relentlessly—the Western world’s political, moral and biological decay. Philanthropy used to be defined as “love to mankind; benevolence toward the whole human family; universal good will; desire and readiness to do good to all men.” Through his Open Society Institute and its vast network of affiliates, George Soros has provided extensive financial and lobbying support for groups that advocate lifestyles and causes that are invariably destructive, or outright repellant.

Soros promotes the legalization of hard drugs. He insists on the need to accept that “substance abuse is endemic in most societies.” It was tangibly thanks to his intervention that the terms “medicalization” and “non-violent drug offender” have entered public discourse.

In 1994 Soros—a self-professed atheist—launched his Project Death in America (PDIA) and provided $15 million in its initial funding. His mother, a member of the pro-suicide Hemlock Society, killed herself, and that Soros mentioned unsympathetically his dying father’s clinging on to life for too long. PDIA supports physician-assisted suicide and works “to begin forming a network of doctors that will eventually reach into one-fourth of America’s hospitals” and, in a chilling turn of phrase, lead to “the creation of innovative models of care and the development of new curricula on dying.”

Soros is an enthusiastic promoter of open immigration and a contributor to groups advocating amnesty and special rights for immigrants, including National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Law Center, National Immigration Forum, and dozens of others. He also promotes the preservation and expansion of public welfare, and in late 1996 he created the Emma Lazarus Fund that has given millions in grants to nonprofit legal services groups that undermine provisions of the welfare legislation ending immigrant entitlements.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272483/unprincipled-principles-never-trumpers-daniel-greenfield

The Weekly Standard was once dubbed, the “neo-conservative bible”. If it was ever the bible of neo-conservatives, it’s now the Koran of the anti-war radical left. Its new incarnation The Bulwark, is a project of Defending Democracy Together which is funded by Pierre Omidyar, the French-Iranian Silicon Valley billionaire behind The Intercept, and also providing funding to The Nation and Mother Jones.

It’s hard to imagine two sets of worldviews further apart than those which once separated the two movements. The ability of the godfather of the anti-war left to essentially take over a faction that stood for everything he opposed has much to say about the state of conservatism and the principles debate.

President Trump agilely co-opted the popular part of Republican national defense politics, defeating enemies and killing terrorists, supporting Israel and opposing Iran, while discarding the unpopular parts, nation-building and democracy promotion. Some Republican opponents of Trump made it very clear that they valued the unpopular parts more than the popular ones, and may have even viewed the popular parts as a way to sneak in the unpopular parts through the policy back door.

The Washington Post’s Never Trumper caucus, Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot, ceded the Iran Deal and Israel to Trump, reversing old positions and disposing of old allies, while hysterically attacking Trump as a man of bad character. “Trump’s character fall short,” Rubin recently wrote in another of her columns. Max Boot claims that conservatism means a “respect for character”. But the very people who can’t stop lecturing us about character and principles have proven that they have neither character nor principles.

What character do these characters have?

Never Trumpers invoked their principles to oppose Trump. But their principles have led to them taking cash from a serial funder of assaults on national security in the name of defending national security. The “bible of neo-conservatism” now shares a funding source with a platform for Edward Snowden, not to mention every possible defense of Islamic terrorism, the Iran Deal and assorted bursts of anti-Semitism.

Having realized that they have no principles, Never Trumpers spend less time speaking of principles and more about character. Having ceded their principles, they’ll be damned if they cede character.