I will save democracy by wearing a suit

Over the last couple decades I’ve learned of the music of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a late 18th century French composer, yes about the time of Mozart. When my classical music radio stations began to play recordings of his music they would, of course, discuss that he was a black man and in addition to his abilities of composing and playing music, he was quite a good athlete, especially in fencing, and also a good soldier. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra has now played one of his symphonies. I didn’t go because the music of Mozart and his contemporaries is music I appreciate in small doses. When these stations began to talk about a movie of his life. I was, of course, interested. The movie is Chevalier, and was my Sunday movie. As with all of Hollywood movies one must not assume the whole thing is historically accurate, even though the frame probably is. A featured user review on IMDB says the movie is so historically inaccurate one would do better reading Saint-Georges’s Wikipedia page. Sticking to the what is historically accurate would have made a fine movie, so why muck it up with a fictional overlay? Alas, Wikipedia pages tend towards the dry side. Well, fine. Don’t watch this movie for the history. Instead, consider it as a fictional story. Does it do well at that? I think so and I enjoyed it. The acting is quite good, the movie is quite well made, and the story is a good one. The movie opens as Mozart and his orchestra finishes a concert and asks the audience what should be played as an encore. Joseph approaches the stage and proposes one of Mozart’s violin concertos – with Joseph playing along. Mozart agrees, no harm in humoring the guy. And Joseph begins to add another line to the solo part with the cadenza (usually improvised at the time) turning into a musical duel (though some of those riffs sound too bluesy for the 18th century). The audience is impressed. Then we see young Joseph being brought to a French music academy. His father is a white plantation owner on Guadeloupe, part of the French West Indies, his mother a slave. But Joseph already has good violin skills. This part is basically true. Once grown a fencing duel introduces him to Queen Marie Antoinette and she anoints him as Chevalier, the French equivalent of a knight. This gives him access to the high society circles and soon he is her guest in her box at the opera – and we pass from the historically dubious and on into the historically false. He hears that the job of director of the Paris Opera is open and he proposes to the queen that the one to get the job should be the one who writes the best opera. And he’s off and running. Then racism happens. And he has to figure out who he is. At the death of his father his mother arrives in France. She warns him about living in a white man’s world. As this is going on we get closer to the French Revolution, which Joseph begins to take interest in the people’s point of view – especially that égalité thing. It all comes to a satisfying (though not historically accurate) climax. At the end of the movie it says that when Napoleon came to power he banned Saint-Georges’s music because he was a person of color. It said that much of his music was destroyed, though consider this movie’s relationship with historical accuracy (I don’t know how much was lost). Napoleon’s ban is a big reason why this music was ignored for 200 years. We begin to wonder... Saint-Georges was called the “Black Mozart.” Perhaps Mozart should have been called the “White Saint-Georges?” I finished the book The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel. It’s a science fiction murder mystery. Kobo comes from a family so poor they lived in underground burrows. His burrow collapsed, killing his parents and mangling his right arm. The arm is replaced with a bionic version. And soon he is obsessed with getting the latest bionic body upgrade. Kobo is taken in by the family of JJ Zunz. Zunz is just a few days different in age from Kobo and they consider each other to be brothers. Kobo had a short stint in a baseball league that featured players with bionic body parts, but that league was banned. So he now works as a scout for the latest sort of baseball team, heavy with corporate ownership. His prospects include medical and genetic scientists as well as players. That’s because while bionic parts are banned chemical and biological enhancements are not. Then Zunz, now the star batter on another baseball team, is murdered by a biological agent during his last at-bat in the last game before the World Series, a very public death. Kobo is asked by Zunz’ team to investigate the murder in exchange for the hope of paying off his considerable medical debt. But only if he solves the crime before the end of the World Series. The plot has a great number of twists and turns and the ending is not anywhere near where one expects, which is good. Along the way are discussions of bionic enhancements and cloning. There are also discussions of inequality – if only the rich are able to afford bodily upgrades and perhaps long-term youthful vigor, where does that leave the poor? I enjoyed this one, though I tend to avoid murder mysteries because they start with a murder. Hunter of Daily Kos reported that the loudest noise coming from the Senate this week was about Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania routinely showing up at the chamber wearing a hoodie and gym shorts instead of a suit. To accommodate him Schumer told the Senate sergeant-at-arms to no longer enforce the dress code. Republicans promptly needed a fainting couch and pearls to clutch. They are mighty upset the Senate has lowered the bar on dress code. Hunter and many others noted Republicans are not at all upset about the lowered bar on behavior by members of Congress. That low standard includes things like Rep. Lauren Boebert and her date being booted from a theater because of vaping, groping, and being disturbing nuisances to those around them. Or the Pandemic Prince being awarded with $2 billion by the Saudis after departing the White House. Or it seems a frequent parade of Republicans caught in a sex scandal. Could you guess that Fetterman is a Democrat? Joan McCarter of Kos reported on Senate Republicans going “DressCon 1” over the relaxation of the Senate dress code. 46 of them signed a letter to Schumer discussing how casual clothing disrespects the Senate. Wrote McCarter:

They even pulled the war card. The Senate floor, they wrote, “is where we must make the gravest decision imaginable – whether to send our fellow Americans into battle to defend the freedoms we all hold dear.” Meanwhile, every one of the senators who signed that letter is standing by while Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville symbolically spits on our armed forces with his monthslong hold on military promotions and confirmations.

Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Fetterman, who had no tolerance for BS and is quick with humorous counterjab had a proposal to all those who don’t like his hoodies:

If those jagoffs in the House stop trying to shut our government down, and fully support Ukraine, then I will save democracy by wearing a suit on the Senate floor next week.

Fetterman’s campaign is now selling hoodies. Last June the Supreme Court handed down a decision that said colleges and universities could no long use race in the admissions process. That decision explicitly said it did not apply to the service academies – West Point and such. Nina Totenberg of NPR reported that the same organization that brought that suit against Harvard is now bringing a suit against West Point. Totenberg noted why the service academies are so invested in racial balance. During Vietnam black soldiers made up 25% of the enlisted men in the Army, but only 2% of officers of all branches. They determined lack of of minority officers “threatened the integrity and performance of the military.” So they consider race in admissions. The case will likely be before the Supreme Court some time next year. Sumner discussed the legacy of Rudy Giuliani. Once beloved for the way he seemed to handle the job of Mayor of New York after the 9/11 attacks (though Sumner reminds us that he was actually an awful mayor), Giuliani has fallen so far he was sued by his own attorney for about $1.3 million in unpaid legal fees. The more he associated with the nasty guy the worse things have gotten for him. And few people are shedding tears. McKay Coppins wrote a biography of Sen. Mitt Romney, to be published soon. Coinciding with Romney’s announcement that he will retire when his term is up next year Coppins published excerpts in The Atlantic. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed a few excerpts, mostly those that focused on Romney’s views of other Republicans. A big part of that was even though in public they toadied up to the nasty guy in private they ridiculed him, one declaring, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.” Yet, they voted to acquit at the impeachment trials. Coppins gets to why.

But after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged. One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him—why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Michael Tomasky of The New Republic discussing why Biden isn’t getting credit for his accomplishments.

There is no one reason. But there is one overwhelming factor in play: the media. Or rather, the two medias. It’s very important that people understand this: We reside in a media environment that promotes—whether it intends to or not—right-wing authoritarian spectacle. At the same time, as a culture, it’s consistently obsessed with who “won the day,” while placing far less value on the fact that the civic and democratic health of the country is nurtured through practices such as deliberation, compromise, and sober governance. The result is bad for Joe Biden. But it’s potentially tragic for democracy.

A few days ago – before I saw this quote – I got to thinking about the media obsession with the campaign as a horse race. I’ve talked many times about a social hierarchy and how many, perhaps most, people pay a great deal of attention to their position in the hierarchy, annoyed by those above them and pleased there is someone below them. I’ve seen the higher one is in the hierarchy the more one is obsessed with maintaining their position near the top. Most media companies are also obsessed with the hierarchy. That’s why they report on who “won the day” and who is ahead. That’s all about who is higher in the hierarchy, who is moving up, who is falling down. Policy issues, especially many of the ones pushed by Democrats, aren’t about the hierarchy, or rather about policies that help people to move up the hierarchy. In contrast, most – likely all – policies proposed by Republicans are about maintaining the hierarchy or pushing those low in the hierarchy to even lower positions, to make those at the top look better. Because of that to a media company obsessed with hierarchy policy is boring. In another roundup Dworkin had a few interesting quotes. One is a tweet by David Pepper:

More traditional/“moderate” Republicans: 1) engaged in egregious gerrymandering, and/or stopped efforts to reform it at the federal level 2) bemoan the state of their extremist party. Guys—1) led to 2)! You created the beast. A true self-own! Get on board & help fix it!

Dworkin quoted MatthewContinetti of Commentary

The first thing to say about the New Right is that it can get weird. Its ranks are composed almost entirely of men. They inhabit a social-media cocoon where they talk a lot about manhood, and strength, and manliness, and push-ups, and masculinity, and virility, and weight-lifting, and testosterone. “Wrestling should be mandated in middle schools,” write Arthur Milikh and Scott Yenor in the collection Up from Conservatism. “Students could learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals. Every male student could learn to skin an animal and every female to milk a cow.”

And the second thing is the “flirtation” (though I would use a much stronger word) with racism and anti-Semitiem. Yes, they’re obsessed with the hierarchy. Dworkin also included a tweet from Archaeo – Histories that has a couple photos of a 2200 year old mosaics recently uncovered in Turkey. Down in the comments Denise Oliver Velez included lots of cartoons. One is from Jesse Duquette of Harriet Tubman holding up the finger with the caption:

On this day in 1849: Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery. Florida schools: Ungrateful helper rudely abandons her generous landlords.

And a cartoon by Paul Noth in honor of Constitution Day (Sept. 17th). The document is now 236 years old. The cartoon shows several founding fathers seated around a table working on our founding document and one of them says:

But what if a tyrant comes to power and no one’s able to stop him because the whole thing’s kind of funny?

And in a third roundup is a cartoon from Pat Byrnes. Two elephants are walking in the Capitol and one says to the other, “But won’t charging Biden with something only help his electability?”