Two great musical composers have birthdays today, so let me start with the one I don’t like: Andrew Lloyd Webber. Now notice: I do think he is a great composer. I just don’t especially like him. He’s not big of melody. I mean, he can do it. But he usually limits such exercises to two songs per show. Also, I don’t especially like him as a lyricist. For that, we have to wait for the second great musical composer today.

The very great Stephen Sondheim is 84 today. He writes a lot of catchy melodies. Call me old fashioned, but I like a tune I don’t have to hear a half dozen times to remember. But even more than that, Sondheim is one of the greatest lyricists ever. That was very clear in 1957 with West Side Story. I also happen to think that the music by Leonard Bernstein is perhaps the best of any musical I’ve ever heard. And then he followed that up with Gypsy, where the great Jule Styne wrote the music.

From then on, it was all “music and lyrics” by Stephen Sondheim. He did A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Sweeney Todd, and much more. This presents a problem in providing a song. I decided to go with “Everybody’s Got the Right” from Assassins. I just love how Sondheim manages to write upbeat songs about such dark subjects.

Happy birthday Stephen Sondheim!

Afterword

I do feel bad that I didn’t mention that William Shatner is 83 today. I think he is a totally awesome guy. Next year for sure!

Via the always and forever wonderful Digby, I found out that Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did parodies of those awful Republican “Millennials” commercials. All I’ve done is create a playlist so the original runs followed by the parody for the two. Enjoy:

Let me go through the history here, step by step, because it is a bit complex. First, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, The Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males. In it, he argued that liberals should not be so upset about Paul Ryan’s racist dog whistle, because it is essentially the same thing that President Obama says. My only problem with what he wrote was the application of the term “liberal” to Obama and his supporters. But otherwise: that’s absolutely true, as I discussed recently regarding Obama’s “Popeyes Chicken” speech in relation to Adolph Reed’s excellent article “Nothing Left.”

Next, Jonathan Chait wrote a kind of apologia for President Obama, Barack Obama, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Poverty, and Culture. He argued that there is a very important difference between Ryan and Obama. But he isn’t all that clear as to what that difference is. Supposedly, Obama only believes that culture is part of the problem whereas Ryan, like a good Republican, thinks it the entire problem because, you know, racism is a thing of the past. Ultimately, Chait sees the difference in the conclusions. Ryan wants to pretend that all we need to do is take away any help from the black community and all will be fine. Obama does not.

It isn’t surprising that Coates found this argument wanting. After I first read it, I thought it was something of a straw man. After all, Coates was not saying that Obama and Ryan were exactly the same—only that their perspective is the same, which is that there is some cultural problem with the black community. So Coates came back yesterday with an extremely powerful article, Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind. You should read the whole thing because it is finely argued. But it really comes down to this: there is no evidence that black oppression is due to cultural problems. There is an enormous amount of evidence that black oppression is due to, you know, oppression—for lack of a better term: white power.

What really stands out are the jailing statistics. Is it a black cultural problem that black men are arrested for cannabis possession far more than white men, even though they don’t use the drug any more? That sounds more like a white power problem than a black cultural problem. And something that Coates doesn’t talk about (although I’m sure he has elsewhere), the problem with incarceration is not the time spent in jail; it is the fact that you are labeled a felon for the rest of your life and your opportunities are greatly reduced. And this is on top of the fact that blacks already have many fewer opportunities. As Coates points out, black men without a criminal records are as likely to be hired as white men who were just released from prison.

What really is problematic here is that Obama shouldn’t place himself in the role of cheerleader for the black community. It is one thing for a black father to tell his son, “Regardless of the problems you face, you can succeed if you keep your nose clean and work hard!” When the President of the United States says that same thing, he is minimizing structural problems and maximizing individual problems. Rather than highlighting the social problem (white power is oppressing black individuals), he is highlighting the individual problems (blacks could succeed if they just tried hard enough). Everyone knows that a remarkable person with a fair amount of luck can overcome hardships. But that is not a social plan. And that is the basis of both Obama’s rhetoric and Paul Ryan’s.

H/T: Kathleen Geier

When I was a kid, H R Pufnstuf was a big show. It seemed to be on all the time. But I did a little research last night and found out that only one season of the show was ever produced—just 17 episodes. But my perception that it was on all the time was right. Although NBC did not make any more episodes, they repeated the show for a total of three years. Then they showed it on Sundays for a year and then over a decade in syndication. So the show was extremely successful.

As a result of this spurt of interest, I sat down and watched the first episode. It holds up rather well. But what’s most notable about it is how revolutionary it was. It premiered in 1969 and I don’t think there had ever been anything like it. But the success of Sid and Marty Krofft greatly affected children’s television with their many later shows like Sigmund and the Sea Monsters and most especially Land of the Lost. And then, of course, there scores of people copying them.

Based upon the shows, I always thought that the Kroffts were a couple of hippies. Certainly the Mr Show parody of their work—Sam and Criminy Kraffft—went right along with that thought. So I don’t think I was alone in assuming that. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend watching it. It is a loving and very funny tribute:

But it turns out that the Kroffts were not hippies but rather members of that small group that brings joy and light everywhere they go: puppeteers. In fact, Sid Krofft started working vaudeville, circuses, and burlesque shows, and eventually had his own one-man show, “The Unusual Artistry of Sid Krofft.” Marty is eight years younger and joined with Sid when the older brother got a gig opening for Judy Garland in Las Vegas.

I doubt that the impact of Sid and Marty Krofft can be overstated. It seems that every decent children’s show that comes out draws a direct line back to them. And that often involves explicit allusions to their work. For example, check out this opening to Pee-wee’s Playhouse:

We don’t tend to appreciate the artistry of stuff that we enjoy as kids. It’s always fun to go back and check them out. It’s also a good reminder of just how boring adult life tends to be. And sadly, adult entertainment. It’s why The Muppet Show still works. You can’t go wrong appealing to kids.

Afterword

Both the brothers are still alive and (I assume) well. Sid will turn 85 this July.

Sometimes a headline will tell you everything you need to know about a news story. That was certainly the case with the Metro headline, Husband Locked Wife in Shed for Singing “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead” When His Mother Died. There is slightly more to it, but it’s in the weeds. Like the husband’s comment, “She never really got on with my mum or any of my relatives and when my mum died she was horrible and offered me no support—she was extremely unsympathetic.” He also thinks she’s having an affair.

It’s funny, but it is also really, really sad. Many marriages go this way. Clearly the man behaved very badly but it was quite explicitly provoked. And I’m sure that this is not an isolated episode. These two should not be together. Now, I don’t know what the divorce laws are like in the United Kingdom. And it is certainly true that a lot of people stay in bad marriages out of inertia. But it does bring to mind the conservative push to make divorce harder. The assumption is that marriage is a public good. See, for example, ever other Ross Douthat column.

I’m highly skeptical about this. From my own experience, the single most important component of marital bliss is economic stability. Having problems paying your bills infects every part of the marriage and doubtless does all kinds of harm to the kids. Pushing marriage as the answer to our social ills is just avoiding the big issues and focusing on the small. The tragedy of this is that if we instituted policies to make people economically more secure like a living wage, it would strengthen marriage and families. So I really think that when conservatives push marriage as an answer to all our problems, they are doing it as a way to avoid doing anything productive that might, you know, take a little money away from the rich.

Dean Baker brought up this issue this morning regarding George Will’s most recent column, George Will: A Man Impervious to the Evidence In His Own Column. Will, like the good social conservative he is, argued that out of wedlock births are the real cause of poverty. Baker notes that this rate is higher among whites today where the poverty rate for them is 10% than it was for blacks 50 years ago when their poverty rate was 40%. So the numbers seem to indicate that if marriage is an issue, it is a small one.

Baker goes on to explain the primary problem:

The whole “social dysfunction” argument of conservatives strikes me very much like the guy searching for his keys under a street lamp. When a good Samaritan helps and finally asks where the man dropped his keys, the guy says, “Down the street, but the light is much better here.” Conservatives create a kind of ideological darkness over all the policies that they don’t like. So they look only in the bright spots, which turn out to be either minor help or actually harmful.

And this leads us back our poor English couple. There is no doubt that making divorce harder to get will keep some marriages together. But it will at least create some where people stay together and one ends up locking the other in the shed. It’s not at all clear to me that bad marriages prolonged will be offset by the happiness of marriages saved. Regardless, the issue from the government’s perspective should be its overall social value. And the conservative economic argument for it is very weak.

On this day in 1902, the great blues musician Son House was born. He’s one of the legends of Mississippi Delta blues, which more or less make him a blues legend across time and space. According to him, he met a young Robert Johnson who would have been 18 or 19. He said that the young Johnson was an acceptable harmonica player but a terrible guitar player. I find this hard to believe, because just six years later Johnson recorded some of the very best delta blues ever. There is no doubt, however, that Son House was a huge influence on Johnson.

Son House was more of less “discovered” by another of my favorite bluesmen, Charley Patton. The two of them began performing together. And House continued playing throughout the region long past Patton’s death in 1934. But ten years later, he gave up performing and moved to New York. Like other blues greats, he was rediscovered in the 1960s and became an even bigger star than he had been.

There is a surprising lack of live action video of Son House performing. So you are just going to have to settle with “Death Letter Blues,” which is the very best form of settling.

Happy birthday Son House!

The Monkey Cage is one of the best blogs going. Unfortunately, since it moved to the Washington Post, I don’t read it as much. There just isn’t enough coming from them to pay for a subscription, especially when the news and editorial page so often annoy me. However, I just noticed that they have lowered the price of subscriptions to $7.99 per month, which is slightly tempting. Regardless, earlier this week, Andrew Gelman published an interesting article, Why Do Asian Americans Mostly Vote for Democrats?

He talked about a recent article by political scientists Alexander Kuo, Neil Malhotra and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo published in Politico of all places, Why Are Asian Americans Democrats? The article is brutal to the Republicans. Basically, it finds that Asians identify with the Democratic Party because Asians see themselves as a minority group. And the Republicans can’t seem to utter more than a sentence without sending out the message, “White people are the only true Americans!”

But the authors do provide one potential way forward. In one experiment, they primed Asians by informing them of ways that Democratic policy helped Latinos at Asians’ expensive. This did indeed cause a fall in Asians’ self-identification as Democrat. But the effect was very small. When primed to see Latinos and Asians as a single group, 72% identified as Democrat. When primed to see Latinos as “the other” who take away from Asians, only 67% identified as Democrat. I don’t think this is surprising. The use of in-group/out-group politics is common. What’s more, I think that the Republicans already use this tactic, we just don’t see it much because the Asian community isn’t that large. Regardless, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for Republican growth in this study.

Gleman ads another potential cause of the heavy Democratic skew of Asians: urbanity. Asians tend to live in urban areas. But I’m not sure this isn’t just saying that Asians are more liberal. Whites in urban areas are more liberal than they are in rural areas. I know that part of this is that the hatred that is so critical to conservative thought is hard to maintain when you have to actually interact with different people. I remember a commentator (I think it was John Nichols) talking about how his experience of urban blacks was quite different from the stereotype: every day, he saw them lining up to take the bus to work at 6:00 in the morning. But the other side of why people are more liberal in cities is that more liberal people are going to choose to live in the cities.

Whatever the reason that Asians vote Democratic, it doesn’t seem like it is going to change any time soon. A more important question, for Democrats anyway, is why Asians vote at such low levels. According to census data, blacks have been been voting much more over the last 20 years and voted at higher rates than whites in 2012. Latinos have also improved their voting percentages but still have a long way to go. If you ignore the Obama elections, Asians have actually seen their voter participation decline. Even with Obama, they’ve only risen slightly. In the last election, Asians had the lowest turnout of any major ethnic group.

The way forward seems clear. Asians and Latinos seem like they are going to aligned with the Democratic Party for at least a generation. We need to encourage them to vote. The Republicans can work on why Asians don’t like them. I don’t think there is any secret as to why. But the Republicans work very hard at not seeming such obvious facts. If they didn’t, they would be forced to change. And change is not something the Republican Party wants to do. And until they do, that’s good for the Democrats.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of news the last few days, and that always has me roaming around FARK and blogs looking at what people are yammering about. Digby brought my attention to a very interesting article in Gothamist, NYC Gay Pride Parade Welcomes Catholic League & “Straight Is Great” Sign. It is delicious.

Just as many liberals have been upset that the New York City St Patrick’s Day Parade wouldn’t allow explicitly gay participants, many conservatives became upset when other people pulled out of the parade because of its intolerance. After Guinness pulled out, Catholic League president Bill Donohue was hopping mad. In an effort to show how everyone is intolerant in their own way (Sounds like a song!) “he said he wanted to march in the NYC Pride parade, with a banner that says, ‘Straight is Great.'” Unfortunately, everyone is not intolerant in their own way.

March Director of NYC Pride, David Studinski, released a statement:

Other parade organizers have made similar statements including “pointing [out] that it’s ‘probably not the first time’ that a ‘Straight is Great’ sign has been shown in the parade.” But all this wonderful tolerance does not mean that the LGBT community is blind to what Donohue and his group are all about. In their statement, they included information about his beliefs and past statements:

Meanwhile, the Catholic League is busy working on a boycott of Guinness. Donohue said that the company has declared war on Catholics. He has a right to think what he wants, but that’s just silly. It is unfortunately, entirely typical of American conservatism with its constant feelings of persecution when people don’t provide them with special rights. It is the basis of the whole War on Christmas nonsense. But what is most clear in this whole incident is that the two sides are not equal. Everyone is not intolerant in their own way. And in the future, Bill Donohue will be remembered for his intolerance, not for any good works he may also do.

On this day in 1928, the very good neighbor Fred Rogers was born. But did you know that he got started in children’s television as a result of a child molestation conviction? You see, as part of his punishment, he was forced to do community service. This involved doing manual labor in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. But Rogers managed to organize the puppets and staged a coup d’etat. Most of this history is unknown because Rogers suppressed it. But if you check out the City Hall Records of Make-Believe, you will find that I’m right.

Not buying it? Would you believe…

The reason Mr Rogers always wore long-sleeved shirts was to hide his track marks. After taking over the show, the Heroin Dealer of Make-Believe got him hooked with free dope. From then on, the dealer was in control of the show. But this explains how Mr Rogers managed to stay so calm during the Genocide of Make-Believe and the later Race Riots of Make-Believe. It is widely reported that Fred Rogers died of stomach cancer, but it was really an overdose.

No? Would you believe…

Fred Rogers was a sniper in the Korean War with 18 confirmed kills. One time, he was attacked in his hideout and he ended up killing the attacker with his bare hands. After the war, he became radicalized, eventually going to the Soviet Union and finally killing John F Kennedy from his spot on the Grassy Knoll of Make-Believe. After Lee Harvey Oswald was nailed for the crime that he had committed, Rogers got therapy. His doctor recommend that he work with children and Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood was born.

No?

Well, all of these are common urban legends about the beloved children’s television star. I took a little poetic license. Normally people say that Rogers wore long-sleeved shirts to hide his military tattoos. And I generally “improved” the stories, which try to sound serious. The truth is that Rogers had planned to be a minister (he did eventually become ordained in the Presbyterian Church), but dropped out after first seeing television. He had a bachelor’s degree in music, so NBC hired him to work on some of its music shows. In 1954, he was hired by WQED in Pittsburgh to work as a puppeteer on the children’s show The Children’s Corner. And the rest is history. Or urban legend.

And here is a bit from his show that is the basis for another urban legend. Can you guess what it is?

Happy birthday Fred Rogers!

I was looking for something to watch on Netflix last night and after looking for a long time, I came upon Shakespeare Uncovered. It’s a six-part PBS series that dives into (more or less) one play per episode with a famous actor. The first was about Macbeth, which is probably my favorite Shakespearean play. It is certainly the play that works the best. But it was hosted by Ethan Hawke. I don’t know what it is about him, but he annoys me. And after five minutes, I was done with it.

So I switched to the third episode with Derek Jacobi doing Richard II. I figured that would be good. To begin with, the play is one of the better histories. What’s more, Jacobi is not only a great actor but quite a thoughtful analyzer and director of Shakespeare. Plus, I’ll admit, I just like him. And he did not disappoint. In addition to providing a good overview of the dynamics in the play, there was a lot of “inside the actor’s studio” stuff. Usually, I hate this kind of stuff, but it was great here. I don’t doubt this is largely due to the fact that the British take acting much more seriously as a craft than Americans.

There was one really strange part of the episode. Jacobi talks about how he doesn’t think that Shakespeare wrote Richard II or any of the other plays. He thinks that it was really Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who wrote the plays and Shakespeare was a director and “front” for de Vere. It just goes to show that you can be brilliant at some things and be totally clueless about others. Still, I find the belief rather charming. But what’s especially interesting is why Jacobi thinks this. He seems to have got it in his head that it couldn’t have been Shakespeare who wrote the plays. So he went shopping and the de Vere theory seemed the most reasonable.

The reason that he doesn’t think that Shakespeare wrote the plays is because there is so little documentation of his life. There are many ways to counter this. To begin with, we know just as little about Christopher Marlowe, who was as popular in his life and Shakespeare was during his life. We know more about Ben Jonson, but that’s due to one big thing: Jonson wrote a lot about himself. I’m afraid that Jacobi is falling into the trap of thinking that because we highly value Shakespeare today they must have valued him a lot back them. But it’s very clear that for Shakespeare it was all just a way to get money and status. Once he attained that he retired. All he was by the end of his life was another member of the nouveau riche. That’s great, but hardly something that the world is going to worry about documenting.

Anyway, the whole thing got me to find the BBC production of Richard II starring Jacobi. I found it on YouTube and it is quite good. Much better than most of those BBC productions:

I also watched the episode on Hamlet with David Tennant. It was interesting because it focused on many of the glaring holes in the play. But as always, instead of admitting that it just isn’t a well written play, these problems are taken as an indication of Shakespeare’s brilliance. Still, it was nice to see the play treated seriously enough for these problems to even be acknowledged.

If there is one thing that most harms Shakespeare it is the tendency to approach it as fundamentalists do the Bible. If all of Shakespeare is wonderful, then none of it is. To me, the highs and lows of Shakespeare are often sitting one right next to the other. In Much Ado About Nothing, we get a wonderful scene with Benedick and Beatrice following by the most insipid drivel from Claudio and Hero. We also gets loads of sexism and racism and Shakespeare’s signature suck up to the aristocracy. And mostly we get incredibly two-dimensional characters, or in the case of Hamlet, zero-dimensional characters. But still, much of it is transcendent. And Shakespeare Uncovered provides an easy and enjoyable entry into Shakespeare at his best. Or the 17th Earl of Oxford. Take your pick.

Update (20 March 2014 8:48 pm)

I have a cold so I laid down and watched another episode. This one with Jeremy Irons on the Henry IV plays and Henry V. It was pretty annoying. At one point, he interviews a young film director who just made Henry V. She said (roughly), “When I told people I was making the film, they all ask, pro-war or anti-war? I don’t see it that way. People do go to war.” And I thought, “Oh! Pro-war!” Indeed, Henry V is quite pro-war regardless of the epilogue. Consider how the Battle of Agincourt is done. It goes from the St Crispin’s Day Speech right before the battle. And then the battle is over and the French messenger comes by and says, “You won!” Get that? Rousing patriotic speech followed by victory. No despot could ask for better propaganda.

It does bug me that Shakespeare is fairly straightforward, yet people want to imbue him with so much complexity. He was not a man who questioned authority. This is largely why he became such a big export of the British Empire. Any given production can change the plays to fit its wishes. One can indeed create a production that is anti-war or pro-war with the same play. But that play, on the page, is pro-British, pro-empire, and pro-war.

The following video is brilliant and important. And it has puppets! Sadly, it sums up the current “religious freedom” debate. It is also accurate that increasingly, religious zealots think that hormonal birth control is a form of abortion. You know, I’ve been saying this for at least a decade (I’m not alone). Once the anti-choice crowd made abortion illegal, they would switch to birth control. Of course, they didn’t even wait that long. But the reason I knew they would transition to birth control is that I knew the reason they were against abortion. It has nothing to do with the fetus. It is about controlling women. Hormonal birth control has done more to give women freedom than anything since the 19th Amendment.

I don’t want to get into the issues of employers controlling their workers. I’ve written before, Political Harassment in the Workplace. But mostly, it all comes down to the widely held believe that somehow employees have a choice to not work. While that may have been true back when the government was giving away farm land, it just isn’t true today. I discuss this in a little more detail here, Property Rights.

Before getting to the video, I just have to say something about the production. It is very funny and the puppets are cute as anything. But the puppeteers are terrible. When they talk, it looks like a bad dubbed movie. You could do as well with an on-off switch: turn it on when the puppet is talking, turn it off when not. Still, even it adds to the charm of the video about this most uncharming subject.

H/T: Digby