I’ll tell you a secret: it’s not Christmas. It’s Christmas Eve, and I am really pushing to get everything done for tomorrow (today) and maybe the day after (tomorrow). I love going out of town. But it is really hard to keep this blog going. At this point, it would probably help to have some alcohol. Instead, I’m ingesting caffeine. But there may be serious alcohol consumption in my future. Oh God, I don’t even want to writ these words…

On this day in 1728, the German classical composer Johann Adam Hiller was born. He was the inventor of the singspiel, which is basically an early form of the musical comedy. The following video is a very nice bit from his one act opera (or maybe singspiel) Die Muse. It was apparently written for soprano, oboe, and basso continuo (what we today would call a bass line and lead sheet). Here, the bass is played by a bassoon, and the harmony is played by a harpsichord. And that’s probably pretty much how it was originally performed. This version is done by what looks like three students and a teacher at the Calgary University Department of Music. It is lovely:

The great classical composer Joseph Boulogne was born on this day, most likely in 1745. He is known as the “black Mozart.” He was in the French army, where he was known for his fencing. But otherwise, he was more or less a court musician. The French Revolution, really screwed things up for him. First, it landed him in jail for a year and a half. And after that, he had a difficult time making ends meet. Regardless, he left us a huge amount of work and it is wonderful. Here is “Ballet No 1” from his opera, L’Amant Anonyme performed by the Tafelmusik Orchestra:

The actor Humphrey Bogart was born on this day in 1899. I hesitate to call him a “great actor” even though I know he is. He always reminds me of that line from the movie My Favorite Year, “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!” But there is no doubt that he’s one of the most authentic actors on screen ever. And he plays crazy great. I don’t think he’s ever been better than he is in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and (in a different kind of crazy) The Caine Mutiny. Of course, what I most love watching is Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. I never get tired of those films and a big part of it is him.

Here he is in a heartbreaking scene in The Caine Mutiny, where Captain Queeg is asking his men for help. But they refuse it. I don’t actually think you will see better acting anywhere on screen:

The great jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway was born in 1907. I don’t have a lot to say about him except that I always enjoy him. Here he is doing one of his many on screen versions of “Minnie the Moocher,” which shows off his acting:

Other birthdays: engineer Claude Chappe (1763); Irish novelist Sydney, Lady Morgan (1776); physicist Ernst Ruska (1906); sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911); Anwar Sadat (1918); the great Rod Serling (1924); film producer Ismail Merchant (1936); television producer Rick Berman (68); singer-songwriter Barbara Mandrell (65); actor Sissy Spacek (64); Antichrist Karl Rove (63); singer-songwriter Annie Lennox (59); and singer-songwriter Dido (42).

The day, however, belongs to Isaac Newton who was born on this day in 1642. I’ll assume that you don’t need to be told about him. He was one of the greatest scientists of all time. Of course, there is that thing about him inventing calculus at the same time as Leibniz. What I think is better to say is that, like Einstein and Maxwell, Newton was the right man for that time and place.

But let me say something about that apple. The story is surprisingly true. But the way people understand the story is all wrong. Newton’s insight was that the force that caused an apple to fall from a tree was the same as the force that caused the moon to orbit the earth. Even today, I find that a startling insight. If it were the same force, why doesn’t the moon careen into the earth? Well, it does. Kind of. The moon constantly has a motion that is parallel to the surface of the earth, and the gravitational force keeps pulling it into its elliptical orbit. Otherwise the moon would head in more or less a straight line away from the earth. Confused yet? Well, I’m doing my best! The truth is, it is more complicated than even that. But let’s leave it. If you really want to know, take a semester of calculus-based physics and then we’ll talk.

I really think the atheist community ought to start calling Christmas “Newton’s Day.” I don’t say this because Newton was that great, although he was. But the atheist community itself likes to drape itself in science. It’s actually one of the most annoying aspects of it. I mean, I love science. But I always get the feeling that atheists try to substitute science for religion. I think that’s a mistake. But then, I’m with Stephen Jay Gould: I believe in non-overlapping magisteria.

Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson on Newton, although his story is a bit fanciful:

Happy birthday Isaac Newton!

It’s Christmas Eve, my friends! And tomorrow would have been Rod Serling’s 89th birthday. And I think that everyone should spend a half-hour and watch the best Christmas television show of all time, the 11th episode of the second season of The Twilight Zone (47th overall), “The Night of the Meek.” It was unfortunately shot on video, so unlike most episode that were shot on film, the quality is bad. But it stars Art Carney and it presents the best idea of Christmas ever.

Forget about Linus’, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.” This is the real deal. Let us all get past the notion that this is a religious holiday, because that makes it exclusive, even if you are a believer. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not say anything about belief. He actually provides us with a kind of fairy tale, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” He says many other things about the justice that should exist in this unjust world. And that’s what ties us all together: that wish—that desire.

Tonight let us all be Henry Corwin, as seen in this full episode video:

Afterword

Yes, I have written about this before: Bitterness and Sentimentality.

Update (24 December 2013 9:53 pm)

After watching this episode again, I had a few thoughts. First is that the episode was not especially kind to a very typical kind of “Christian charity.” I don’t see any grace in Sister Florence. And the whole, “If you wanna get fed, you’re gonna listen to a sermon” is no kindness. What’s more, when an honest to God miracle happens, all she can think of is criminality. That, I suppose, is understandable. But wouldn’t any decent person—certainly any person with Christian grace—handle the matter in a way other than running to the police?

My second thought is that this episode does go along with what we hear from conservative Christians: that Christmas shouldn’t be about commercialism. “The reason for the season,” and all that. But it doesn’t substitute it with any kind of religious dogma. There is none of that, “We should care about Christmas because it is a celebration of the birth of our savior.” (I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow!) It is a simple message that comes to us from Jesus, but can be found many other places: the meek (“gentle” in my favored New American Standard Bible) matter and are even powerful. I hope we can all agree on that.

And my third thought is that the episode was very pro-booze! Note how in the end, Mr Dundee and Officer Flaherty make friends by getting drunk. And Dundee seems like a human being for the first time. Of course, Henry Corwin doesn’t need to drink anymore. Because he had the wisdom to wish well.

Here is a really funny sketch with Hugh Laurie and Rowan Aktinson, “A Small Rewrite.” Laurie plays “Bill” Shakespeare and Aktinson is his editor. I especially like the part about the length. “Act three may be a bit long? In fact, generally I think we got a bit of a length problem… It’s five hours, Bill!” As everyone who knows me well can tell you, I’m not keen on Hamlet. It is absolutely a mess of a play. It goes on way too long. And the best part of the play—Hamlet’s escape from certain death aboard a pirate ship—happens off stage, squeezed somewhere between Act IV, Scene 4 and Act V, Scene 1. Most of Act IV is spent with Ophelia running around crazy. Oh, I’ve got to stop. The play is a mess from beginning to end. The only thing worse is most of his comedies and histories.

But this really is very funny, even, I suspect, if you don’t know Shakespeare or Hamlet.

I’ve been reading Michael Lind’s excellent Up From Conservatism. It was published in 1996, so it is quite out of date. But, of course, it isn’t. He describes the far right of that time in a way that explains the fundamental mystery of the Tea Party: why all the libertarian rhetoric, but social conservative action? That is to say, why do Tea Party politicians talk about freedom but legislate about abortion? And why is the Tea Party movement completely okay with that? The reason is that the libertarian wing of the Republican Party has almost no overlap with the social conservative wing. The Tea Party movement is a social conservative movement that the economic conservatives use to gain power. The Tea Party movement today is what the Christian Coalition was in the 1990s.

Lind sees the same problem that I do in American politics, even though it is almost 20 years later: economic liberalism is barely found in either the Democratic or Republican parties. Yet, economic liberalism is hugely popular. He sees it as a transfer from the political world of “machines” and unions to one of “overlords” of left, center, and right varieties. But being rich, they all agree on one thing: “economic policies that benefit the affluent.” And, of course, it is helped enormously by “the gentleman’s agreement within the political-journalistic elite that the difference between ‘left,’ ‘liberal,’ and ‘conservative’ will chiefly turn on matters of social and cultural policy, like abortion and arts funding, rather than bread-and-butter issues.”

He discusses how working class people have been effectively left out of politics that actually affect their lives. On the right, left, and center, there is the old New Deal coalition. These are the people who are socially moderate, but economically liberal. In other words, these are the very people that I am most interested in talking to on this blog. I talk about this all the time. Now, personally, I’m socially liberal too. But I absolutely believe that if we solve our economic problems (primarily inequality), the social problems will take care of themselves. Similarly, no amount of liberalism on social issues will help a great deal as long as we have these enormous economic problems.

Lind calls this group of economic liberals and social moderates the “radical center.” Unfortunately, since that time (including in his later book with Ted Halstead, The Radical Center), the definition has changed. Now what passes for the “radical center” is one of the things that Lind is attacking: the New Democratic movement. That is: conservative Democrats. In fact, it would seem that Thomas Friedman thinks he is a proponent of the “radical center.”

Let’s face it: it’s a terrible term. Wikipedia defines it as, “The ‘radical’ in the term refers to a willingness on the part of most radical centrists to call for fundamental reform of institutions. The ‘centrism’ refers to a belief that genuine solutions require realism and pragmatism, not just idealism and emotion.” That’s the kind of definition that could literally fit anyone. I definitely see myself as promoting radical changes to the system that are entirely based upon policy solutions that are known to work. So okay, include me with everyone else.

But there is a problem here. In Up From Conservatism, Lind talks about the “radical center” as being FDR people: economically liberal, socially moderate. Where is that now? It seems the term now is mostly used by people who think that Clinton was the greatest president ever. And he wasn’t. Not even close. He was rather lucky with a big assist from Alan Greenspan’s iconoclastic monetary ideas. (In general, I don’t like him; but he was right that 5% unemployment is not “full employment”; he kept the party going and he was right.) As I’m arguing in my latest book project, the way to push back against the radical right is not with some mushy centrism that concedes the most important policy issues. There is no radical left to speak of. And we don’t really need one. But we do need a real economic left to push back against the conservative economic juggernaut that that is American politics.

I don’t know what you call that, but it isn’t the “radical center.”

On this day in 1761, the great astronomer Jean-Louis Pons was born. Born into a poor family, he became a caretaker at the Marseille observatory. But he gradually learned the field—mostly on his own—and began making observations himself. He seems to have had something of a photographic memory for star fields. As a result of this ability and much work, he discovered 37 comets—more than anyone else in history. Oh, how I long for late 18th century France when there was equality of opportunity!

Another great scientist, James Prescott Joule was born in 1818. He is known, of course, for the conservation of energy. Or more precisely: he showed that heat and mechanical work are equivalent forms of energy. What is most remarkable about him (to me) is that the reason he was able to do all of his very precise experimental work was that he was a master brewer, from a brewing family. And Joule’s Brewery is still in existence! Beer and Physics. You know, that sounds like a hell of an idea for a blog!

The great American writer and film director Nicholas Meyer is 68 today. He wrote the best-selling novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which I haven’t read nor have I seen the movie. But he is best known for directing the two best Star Trek films: The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country. Since then, he hasn’t done much directing. He thinks of himself primarily as a writer, I think. And rightly so.

Other birthdays: the Dutch Golden Age master Wilhelm Marstrand (1810); one of the greatest chess players of all time, Emanuel Lasker (1868); illustrator Johnny Gruelle (1880); American composer Charles Wakefield Cadman (1881); engineer and nutball, Howard Hughes (1905); journalist I F Stone (1907); Helvetica typeface creator, Max Miedinger (1910); actor Ava Gardner (1922); choreographer Robert Joffrey (1930); and singer-songwriter Ricky Martin (42).

The day, however, belongs to the great film director Michael Curtiz who was born in 1886. He is best known for directing Casablanca. To this day, I do not know why the film works so well. Yes, it’s very funny. Yes, it has some of our favorite actors. And yes, it’s great anti-Nazi propaganda from a time when most people didn’t know their full villainy. But there are all kinds of things in the film that normally I would hate. I think Ilsa behaves very poorly at the beginning, not giving Rick any space to be angry when he is clearly way over the legal limit. And then she acts like she’s a schoolgirl. Rich is too clean as the antihero and Laszlo is just too perfect generally. Yet somehow, it is still one of my favorite films.

But Curtiz didn’t just direct Casablanca. I won’t list all the great films he directed. But two that stand out to me are the Errol Flynn films Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood. He also did musicals like Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Jazz Singer. He could do anything and that is why, I think, he is not usually mentioned as one of the great directors. But I would argue that he understood the medium perfectly. He was the Martin Scorsese of his era. And I think eventually, film historians will come to see that.

Happy birthday Michael Curtiz!

A beefy looking, shirtless, tattooed guy named Anthony(; on twitter sent out the following image:

I mention that he looks a bit like a bruiser because most of the stuff he tweets out is really sweet. For example, he tweeted out this picture that actually made me cry. So I like to think of him as Rocky: tough looking but with a heart of gold. I hope he has found his Adrian.

So okay, sweet guy. But I really don’t like images like this one. For one thing, I’m not big on the whole idea of intelligence. But more important, the image is meant to make some people feel stupid and some people feel smart. What to do? Well, I don’t have a heart of gold. So I tweeted out:

Get it? If you were smart you would! No. Actually, I was just rubbing their noses in the fact that ostentatious self-importance is not appealing. I doubt that many of the almost 700 people who retweeted it even knows what an orthogonal transformation is. But that says absolutely nothing about their value or intelligence, whatever that may be.

Afterword

Those “puzzles” are not consistent. The 2s and the 3s are okay. But if you performed the same transformation on the 7s, you would not get a triangle. You would get a figure that included a triangle, but that’s the most you could say. The 7s would also require a horizontal transformation. I’m sure that Kurt Godel would not have known what to make of that stupid image!

Even before Washington conservatives like William Kristol repudiated the conservative populist strategy that the Republican right had pursued since the days of Nixon, conservative populism was revealed as a fraud by the deeds of Newt Gingrich and his allies in the Republican Congress elected in 1994. When they came to power, the Republican congressional leaders claimed they were leading a “revolution” against the rule of special interests on Capitol Hill. Within weeks, it was clear that nothing had changed apart from the substitution of Republican special interests for Democratic ones. Gingrich and other Republican leaders began a massive shakedown of Washington lobbyists, warning that if they did not fund the Republican Party they would lose access to Congress. When a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats tried to introduce campaign-finance-reform legislation, Gingrich sought to prevent the subject from coming quickly to a vote by turning the matter over to a commission.

The First Hundred Days of the Republican Congress turned into the greatest romp for business interests since the Gilded Age. A few conservative reformers, like House Budget Commission Chairman John Kasich, had promised to go after corporate welfare. Then corporate PAC money began pouring into Republican coffers, and the crusade against corporate welfare was put off indefinitely by the same method employed to thwart campaign-finance reform—a proposed independent commission. Instead of balancing the budget by getting rid of subsidies and tax breaks for corporations and the rich, the House Republicans concentrated on eliminating programs for the powerless poor. While leaving untouched $50 billion in tax breaks for big business, and subsidies like the $2.6 million the federal government pays to promote the products of the E & J Gallo Winery, the Republican “revolutionaries” saw to it that more than half of the $9.4 billion in cuts in the House budget proposal came from low-income housing programs. While proposing to increase the federal deficit by several hundred billion dollars through new tax cuts that would have chiefly benefited the rich, Gingrich’s Republicans posed as friends of wage-earning Americans by pointing to a “profamily tax cut” that would have given each American the handsome sum of an additional $9.60 a week. Even though full-time minimum-wage workers do not earn enough to reach the poverty line, Gingrich and Dole—each with an enormous salary compared with those of most Americans, and a generous government health care plan—argued that the economy could not afford an increase in wages for the poorest workers.

—Michael Lind
Up From Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America