War, what is is good for?

I played the organ for a military funeral last weekend.  A young man who attended my church was killed in action in Afghanistan.  He was 29, married, and a kind and generous person.  It gave me an opportunity to ponder a few things.  I'm a believer in the need to defend our borders from the barbarian hordes waiting to invade (the Visigoths come to mind) and I am extremely proud of my family and friends who have served their country in the military and grateful to all who serve.  But I wonder why,  after thousands of years of human existence on this planet, we haven't found a better way to solve our problems than killing each other.

My mother is the youngest of 13 children, 6 boys, 7 girls.  When her siblings would fight, her mother would set two hardback chairs facing each other a few feet apart and tie the miscreants to the seats.  Then she left the room, and the antagonists had no option but to sit and stare at each other until they worked out an amicable solution.  My mother claims this was hugely successful, often culminating with the siblings laughing together at how ridiculous they looked.  Perhaps they ought to try this at the UN.  Let's tie Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a couple of chairs and let them stare at each other until they laugh.  It may take awhile, but how long have we tried sanctions and peace talks?

Benjamin Britten may have agreed with me (I can't be certain as I am not skilled in communicating with the dead).  Britten was born in 1913 in England and saw firsthand the devastating effects of war.  In 1961 he was commissioned to compose a work for the dedication of the Coventry Cathedral, rebuilt after being destroyed in the bombings of World War II.  He composed the War Requiem, a massive piece for choir, boys choir, orchestra, chamber orchestra, and soloists.  For the text he used the traditional Latin text interspersed with poems by Wilfred Owen.  Owen was a soldier and poet in World War I.  He was killed by a sniper one week before the war's end.  With lines such as "Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to death, sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland" Owen paints a clear picture of the tragedy of war, the cost of so much life left on the battlefield.  Britten's musical and textual choices reveal his pacifist leanings and his moral objection to war.  Listen to the Dies Irae ("this day of wrath").  The insistent, aggressive brass motives, the percussive singing, all portray a bleak picture of war's devastation.

So the question remains;  War, what is it good for?  As Edwin Starr sings it, "Absolutely nothin'!"  I think that's a little extreme.  War appears to be necessary for stopping the occasional megalomaniac, like Hitler, perhaps. However, humankind can put man on the moon and robots on Mars.  We can genetically alter crops, treat diseases that were fatal 50 years ago, save infants born 10 weeks prematurely, build skyscrapers, electric cars, ever faster and smaller computers, create symphonies, poems, and paintings, and yet we cannot stop killing each other.  There has to be a better way.  It's time to follow my Grandmother's example.  Who's got a couple of chairs?

Benjamin Britten

News from the Beantrarian campaign trail

It has been a difficult few weeks for the Beantrarian Party.  Unforeseen complications have arisen.  Our ticket of Lully/Anonymous the Fourth has faced an onslaught from every side.  We have been unable to locate Jean-Baptiste Lully's birth certificate, which is apparently an affront to many voters.  They want proof that he is American and still alive.  We have explained through numerous media outlets that despite the lack of official documentation we know he was born in Italy in the 17th century, and is therefore European and very much dead.  However, there are those who refuse to believe the obvious without hard evidence.  These same voters have questioned Lully's views on guns, birth control, and apple pie.  It has been difficult for Lully to address these concerns as his tongue rotted away three hundred years ago.  But our campaign staff has worked tirelessly to translate his garbled communications, and we are happy to announce his response;

          Guns - "Every man should own a good flintlock to deter the husbands of their paramours."

          Birth Control - "Foregoing the pleasure is advisable when children are not wanted.  Shouldn't that be called Self Control?"

          Apple Pie - "I don't like pie.  It's those English, always putting perfectly good food in a crust."

We at campaign headquarters also feel a need to comment upon the critiques of Lully's debate performance.  Many voters complained that he was lackluster on the stage, seemingly distracted, lacking enthusiasm.  Others believe he appeared wooden and lifeless, to which we reply, he is.

Lully's running mate Anonymous the Fourth has been no less problematic.  He missed the vice-presidential debate completely because we still do not know who he is or where to find him so we were unable to extend the invitation.  The spinmeisters have promulgated the idea that he is from the highly educated upper class and therefore unsympathetic to the plight of the masses, favoring heavy taxes for the middle class and tax cuts for the rich.  Believing that this is an exaggerated, warped interpretation of what may be a privileged background, we asked Anonymous for his view on taxes.  He replied, "I like it.  Great Barbecue."  We replied, "Not Texas, taxes," but his 13th c. Middle English dialect was an impediment to clear understanding.

To counter these discouraging setbacks we realized that we needed to implement two crucial strategic components that our campaign was hitherto missing.  The first is a party mascot.  The Democrats and the Republicans have their donkeys and elephants, what have the Beantrarians?  The choice is obvious.  We have selected the steer for our mascot, and have all ready ordered 1,342 T-shirts with the emblem.  Why the steer, you ask?  The steer is a castrated bull, and is therefore stupid, angry, and impotent, which perfectly describes many of our electorate.

We also created our campaign song.  It will be an important tool in promoting party enthusiasm and loyalty.  We have included it here so all may learn from this stirring rendition.

So let us continue to hold aloft the Beantrarian banner as we march toward our goals of obstinacy in the face of improvement, self-righteousness in the face of humility, and gluttony in the face of chocolate.

The Beantrarian mascot

American angst only, please

I recently learned a most interesting factoid.  It appears that during the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558-1602) there was great concern among the powers that be that England was too dependent upon foreign salt.  Salt was a much needed commodity.  It played a strategic role in England's global ambitions;  the soldiers in the army were given salt so they could kill and preserve any game they encountered in their campaigns, the Royal Navy was supplied with food preserved in salt for their lengthy sea travels, and salt was necessary for making gunpowder.  Much of this salt came from France, with whom England has never had a very cozy relationship (no doubt owing to the fact that for centuries England felt they owned a piece of it, and the French eat their fries with mayonnaise), so a great deal of effort was expended in an attempt to produce more English salt and rely less upon salt from the perceived enemy.  Forests were denuded and coal mines established to fuel the fires necessary to refine the salt extracted from underground brine pits.  Soon the countryside was polluted and ruined, with sinkholes developing near the salt works.

The salt conundrum is closely paralleled in the hue and cry I've heard all my adult life, "America relies too much upon foreign oil!"  This has resulted in similar concerns and attempts to create more domestic energy sources.  Fracking, drilling in Alaska's pristine wilderness, wind farms, and cars that need to be plugged in 24 hours to drive 40 mph and die 8 hours later are all examples of efforts to somehow fix our energy imbalance.  We only have 44 years worth of oil left, so the time to panic is now!  But what ever happened to England?  Four hundred years after their dire salt crises, they are still here, still kicking, and no longer concerned about salt.

We have become an alarmist nation, always looking for the next boogeyman around the corner.  As I am in a philanthropic mood, I have decided to be of service to our government leaders and point out a few crucial commodities that are in perilous danger of shortfall due to their nearly exclusive dependence upon the capricious whims of foreign countries.

1.  We rely too much upon the countries of the middle east, particularly Iran, to provide our national angst.  Without their constant turmoil and machinations, we would face a serious decline in anxiety, evangelical end-time scenarios, and amateur quality videos.  Perhaps our government could shift some of the onus to Liechtenstein, whom we could then invade and ransack looking for weapons of mass destruction.

2.  We are too dependent upon Austria, especially Vienna, for concert music by dead white guys.  Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Schubert, Johann Strauss I, II, and III, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Schönberg, Webern, and Berg, and of course, the perennial favorite, Franz Lehar, all called Vienna home at some time.  If Vienna were to become a rogue state symphony orchestras across the country would be forced to play more music by living Americans, a scandalous proposition.

3.  We are too heavily invested in Jewish comedians for our comic relief.  Now I realize these are American Jewish comedians, which don't constitute a foreign entity, but if they all decided to go Zionist and immigrate to Israel, where would we be?  The list is lengthy and includes such notables as Woody Allen, Billy Crystal, Jason Alexander, Jerry Seinfeld, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Bea Arthur, and Joan Rivers.  Clearly we need to diversify and encourage comics from other historically repressed societies with a pathological need to kvetch and unburden themselves for our entertainment.

There are many other possible scarcities on the horizon.  Let us each do our part to ensure that we will have the resources necessary for future generations of Americans to consume more than their share for a very long time.

Prince Liechtenstein
Our new angst

Franz Lehar,
Everyone's Favorite