A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

The responses to my faux self-deprecatory celebration of my three millionth page view move me to make some comments about the movie Susie and I saw last Saturday in a free screening here at Carolina Meadows [complete with free popcorn], viz Amadeus.  I had seen the movie before, of course, and loved it, but this time around it had an unusually powerful effect on me.  Indeed, I choked up at several points.  In this comment, I am simply going to assume you have all seen it.  [Susie and I also saw Black Panther this past weekend, but that is another story entirely.]

It goes without saying that I identified with Salieri.  Mozart is presented in the movie as a sport of nature, a miracle, an alien creature.  It is impossible to identify with him.  But Salieri, especially as portrayed by F, Murray Abraham in a deservedly Oscar winning performance, is human, all too human.

The movie works precisely because Salieri is not really a mediocrity, the closing scene to the contrary notwithstanding.   He is a genuinely accomplished composer, cursed with the ability fully to recognize and appreciate Mozart’s incomprehensible genius.  He is, after all, quite capable of looking at a score and hearing the music in all its beauty.  And it is those moments in the film that made me weep.  The scene, for example, in which he looks at the original Mozart scores Constanza brings to him in an attempt to get him to lobby for a teaching gig that the profligate spendthrift Mozart needs.  Salieri genuinely loves music, and although his operas are merely competent workmanlike scores, he is ravished by the beauty he sees on Mozart’s pages and hears in his mind.  That is how I feel when I look beneath the surface of the Critique to the beautiful argument hidden within the text.  It is how I felt yesterday as I tried to show the people gathered in the room and those who will view the video the beauty of Marx’s insight into the mystifications of the capitalist marketplace.         

As I have frequently remarked, despite being a political thinker with beliefs to advance and criticisms to offer, my real pleasure comes from taking a difficult idea, making it clear to myself until it is transparent as Jack and the Beanstalk, and then showing it to a class or a reader so that others can see its beauty as I do.

Oh, the popcorn was good too.

IT'S HERE!

Okay, Alex Campbell has outdone himself, and the fourth lecture on Marx is here.  As promised, it begins with Jane Austen, the Cub Scouts, and a trip to the supermarket.

WORLD FAMOUS IN POLAND, TO QUOTE MEL BROOKS IN TO BE OR NOT TO BE.

If all goes well, tomorrow I should pass a significant milestone:  three million page views of this blog, only a million or so by me.  The Internet is a strange place indeed.

ON TO CAPITAL

In the fourth lecture, recorded today, I finally reach Capital itself and begin exploring the mystifications of capitalism.  It should be up on YouTube tomorrow.  Tell all your neighbors.  I realize that we do not live in a time ready to hear from Marx, but I have to do this.  It keeps me sane.

I RECOMMEND

that you read this column by the always worthwhile NY TIMES columnist Frank Bruni.  It has absolutely nothing to do with politics or philosophy or economics, and it is heartbreaking.  As I read it, I thought how fortunate I am to have reached the advanced age of eighty-four still alive and in good health.  And I reflected that sooner or later [Oh Lord, let it be later] something like this will happen to me, as it does, in some form or other, to us all.  Nobody gets out of life alive, as someone once observed.

Meanwhile, I take my daily baby aspirin, go for my not quite three mile walk, and deliver YouTube'd lectures on the thought of Karl Marx while having malicious and utterly unChristian thoughts about the temporary occupant of the Oval Office.

A RESPONSE TO SOME COMMENTS

I have, I confess, been somewhat puzzled by Lindsey’s reactions to my comments on the ongoing Mueller investigation, and, perhaps not surprisingly, I have found myself in agreement with Ed Barreras, LFC, and S . Wallerstein.  But all of this, as I said, amounts to no more than speculation on our part.  I really care about only one thing:  the danger that the expressions of skepticism by Lindsey and others of the same persuasion will weaken the commitment of anti-Trump folks to fight for the defeat of Republicans in the upcoming elections.  So long as Lindsey is prepared to join me with in that fight, I am content.

Did Russian interference have an effect on the outcome of the 2016 election?  Well, considering how close things were in a handful of key states, I would say the answer is almost certainly yes.  So did the weather, so perhaps did a competing football game, so also, as far as we know, did a vagrant strain of stomach flu.  I think we can be confident that voter suppression efforts by Republicans had an effect, perhaps so large as to swamp all these other possibles.  Will we ever know?  Of course not.

All of us who are not personally acquainted with Donald Trump and the members of his administration are compelled to rely on third person sources of information.  [Lindsey, are you quite sure that Trump is in fact President?  Could that not be a complex lie told by Clinton forces to conceal the fact that she was actually elected and inaugurated and is even now doing the bidding of her corporate masters?  Is that the real reason for the rapid rise in the stock market, assuming that really happened?  Absurd, you say.  But are you certain Obama was really born in Hawaii?]

Well, you see the problem.  I am quite certain that the sun rises in roughly the same place every morning because I see it, but I only have it on the testimony of others that that direction is the East.  I am under the impression that I live in North Carolina but could this actually be a little bit of Texas?  How do I really know?

TINKERING

My next lecture is prepared, but I continue to tinker with it, searching for ways to present a plausible literary analysis to folks many of whom have not read the text being analysed.  The temptation, to which I fear I have somewhat succumbed, is to read out passages.  I mean, who wants to hear Wolff when they can hear Marx?  Tomorrow evening the CCRC where I live is screening Amadeus [with free popcorn.]  At least Milos Forman could play Mozart's music in the background while the plot unfolds.