Today's Stories

December 19 - 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground

December 18, 2008

Phillip Doe
The Man in the Hat: Salazar and the Status Quo

Ronnie Cummins
Vilsack: Another Shill for Monsanto

Jesse Sharkey
No School Left Unsold: Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda

Saul Landau
Postcard from Venezuela

Peter Morici
What's Next for the Fed?

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture

Panos Petrou
Days of Rage in Greece

Jeff Cohen /
Norman Solomon
The 2008 P.U.-litzer Prizes: the Stinkiest Media Performances of the Year

Worthy Group of the Day
Organic Consumer Alliance

December 17, 2008

Peter Lee
Pushing Pakistan Over the Edge

Conn Hallinan
Angels and Demons in Mumbai

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Fatal Flaw

Jeff Halper
Obama and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Alan Farago
The Audacity of Parkland

Peter Morici
The Big Hole

Norm Kent
Obama Lights Up

Col. Douglas MacGregor
The Price of Expediency

Margaret Kimberley
Blacks and Gay Rights

Ron Jacobs
The Myth of the Good Guy: Waiting on a President to Do the Right Thing

Worthy Group of the Day
Campaign to End the Death Penalty

December 16, 2008

Vicente Navarro
A Forgotten Genocide: the Case of Spain

Patrick Cockburn
Each Shoe was Worth a Thousand Words

Thomas Michael Power
Back to the Pump: an Economic and Environmental Dead End

Jason Hribal
Orangutans, Resistance and the Zoo: the Story of Ken Allen and Kumang

Farzana Versey
Straw Warriors and the Pantomime of Patriotism

Wajahat Ali /
Ahmed Rashid
Indian Muslims: Defining Their Loyalty

Mats Svensson
The Order to Destroy has been Given

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Mumbai Terror's Afghan Roots

David Macaray
Workplace Violence and Termination Etiquette

Howard Lisnoff
Left Control of Academia? The Case of William Felkner

Worthy Group of the Day
AWR: the Last, Best Hope for Saving the Big Wild

December 15, 2008

Andy Worthington
Hit Me Baby One More Time: a History of Music Torture in War on Terror

Franklin Lamb
Why Hezbollah Stiffed Carter

Karl Grossman
Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

Brian Cloughley
Land of the Free (To Torture and Imprison Without Trial)

Mary Lynn Cramer
Stiglitz's Foolishly Flawed Morality

Steve Early
From Nicky Pockets to Blago: Why Pay-to-Play is Bad for Labor

Thomas Christie
Pentagon Train Wreck Awaits Obama

Ken Paff
Remembering Ron Carey: a Great Labor Leader

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What is India to Do?

Dave Lindorff
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi

Alan Farago
The Artless Dodger

Worthy Group of the Day
Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

David Price
The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nukes Up the Hudson

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Sam Husseini
Putting the Pro in Protest

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

Paul Watson
Risky Business Down Under

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Kim Nicolini
Finally, a Vampire Movie You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Lerch and Crete

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

Weekend Edition
December 19 - 21, 2008

The Musical Patriot

Bach as Jihadi

By DAVID YEARSLEY

Bach helped future marketers of his music immeasurably by choosing an auspicious year to die in. Long before the mammoth commemorations of cultural figures became standard practice, Bach expired in the summer of 1750, concerned about his own salvation and oblivious to a distant future in which festival organizers and record producers would ride the waves of hype that roll in with this or that turn of the century or half century. On the crest of the mighty breaker that was the Year 2000, one could pick up a complete recording of Bach’s entire oeuvre on the Hänssler label for $999.99, a price point itself seemingly perched on the brink of new monetary Millennium. 

This thirst for completeness can never really be quenched, if only because new tidbits have the habit of continually turning up: a birthday cantata was discovered in the Amalien Library in Weimar, Germany in 2005, only a few weeks before that historic building was gutted by fire and its holdings destroyed. More recently a substantial organ piece has been rediscovered at an auction in Leipzig.

At the time of the millennium, four complete recording projects of Bach’s cantatas were then underway:  one on modern instruments using large choirs led by Helmut Rilling, an apostle of Bach’s music as a symbol of reconciliation; the other three used historic instruments with somewhat smaller choirs under the direction respectively of Ton Koopman, John Eliot Gardiner, and Masaaki Suzuki.  Koopman finished his series two years ago, while Suzuki labors doggedly on, having just issued volume 41. (http://www.bach.co.jp/english_page_top.htm)

Like weddings and funerals, composer commemorations can lead to bickering.  Over the course of their surveys of Bach’s vocal works, both Gardiner and Koopman parted company with their record companies, and began issuing their Bach CDs on their own labels.

Koopman founded the Antoine Marchand label (the French version of his name) after his contract was severed with Warner Classics.

The aristocratic and infamously temperamental Gardiner was in the midst of his pretentiously entitled Bach Pilgrimage 2000, in which he recorded all the cantatas live at churches in Europe and America in a single year, when he fell out with venerable Deutsche Gramophon. Undaunted, Gardiner continued his logistically impressive, not to say monomaniacal, tour, concluding it on New Year’s Eve in St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue in New York City. The notoriously imperious Gardiner can be seen on medici.tv until February conducting the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at this year’s Nobel Prize Concert, held at the beginning of the month. Probably most conductors of international renown, but none more so than Gardiner, believe that they should receive a special Nobel Prize.

Since 2005 Gardiner has steadily been issuing the recordings non-sequentially through subscription on his own label Soli Deo Gloria, as well as through the usual consumer venues like amazon.com. The twenty-seventh volume in the series came out in January of 2008. (All these covers can be viewed and the music sampled on iTunes)

All Gardiner’s double Bach CDs have covers with photographs taken by National Geographic correspondent Steve McCurry. These are images of people one what would earlier have called “tribal”: dark faces, some painted, pierced, or tattooed, topped with spectacular headgear, flanked by shawls, or offering glimpses at the shoulder of what must be glorious, spreading robes below and the still more enticing orbs such robes conceal, much to the disappointment of lecherous schoolboys weaned on National Geographic nudity. Whereas the 2000 Pilgrimage was confined to Europe and north America, the images which front the recorded results of that pilgrimage, are of Asians and Africans. The latest on volume 27 shows perhaps a “real” Caucasian, a young girl peering out from under her soiled head scarf. Gardiner’s Soli Deo Gloria websites asserts with an unattributed quotation that, “McCurry’s pictures are immensely striking: they seem to provide a potent imagery which perfectly complements that of the music.”

The cover of Volume 23 is a favorite of mine.  A brown-skinned man in a dirty white turban brushes his well-manicured beard with the back of his elegant, but hard-working hand. One could marvel for hours at the twisted strands of the magnificent turban and imagine the artifice it would take to tie it into the stable and well-proportioned orb it is. The textiles of the shirt and sweat-stained jacket are almost equally as fascinating in texture and hue as the face of the portrayed.

As on all the covers, from ornate old women, to fierce holy men, ornately costumed infants and children, the man’s dark bloodshot eyes stare directly out at the viewer. The portrait is as arresting an image, both in the richness of its fabric and the intensity of the subject’s gaze, as hard-edged as that of Jan van Eyck’s Man in a Red Turban, painted some 500 years ago.

None of the subjects smile. Few would seem to have much to smile about. It’s a hard life when you don’t have a surround-sound Bang & Olufsen stereo to enjoy Bach on.

The prospective buyer of Gardiner’s recordings, either on-line in the few CD shops that remain, regards someone who has likely never heard a note of Bach’s music, nor even the composer’s name. These provocative countenances—sometimes challenging, often defiant, and always proud—confront the listener from another world, indeed another millennium. Encompassing a great diversity of religion persuasions, these faces nonetheless belong to monotheists, or so I’m guessing, at least to the extant that one can count Hindus among the believers in one god, albeit of many forms.  Animists, even those with well-connected agents, are advised not to submit their headshots to the Soli Deo Gloria record label.

In the on-line forums where such things are discussed, the covers have elicited puzzlement, praise, and ridicule in equal measure.  On the one hand, a possible explanation for the choice of covers is that this multi-ethnic collection of impressive and beautifully photographed faces has something to do with Gardiner’s interest in other cultures.  While the conductor’s musical tastes are catholic, he studied Arabic at Cambridge, and at least a few of these photographic subjects must be Arabic speakers.  The imam whose eyes pierce the shadows of volume 1 is likely one of these. After the CD won an English Gramophone award in 2005, the cleric was made to look out over the top of a white banner advertising the prize. The image presents an unexpected contrast to conventional packaging of Bach CDs, never mind however ludicrous, even offensive, some Islamic clerics—perhaps even this one— might find the idea of his face being used for marketing purposes, especially when that face is pasted over a blatant plug for Western-style consumption and associated with music that was conceived by a narrowed-minded anti-Islamic Christian in the 18th-century.

Nine months after Gardiner completed his Bach Pilgrimage in Manhattan, September 11 would cast Islamic holy men in a rather different light. Aside from putting Gardiner on Homeland Securities’ radar screen, the cover of volume 1 and its successors also conveys the feel-good message that we are all part of one world.

It is a little surprising to me that Gardiner would adopt this ecumenical approach in his marketing, since over the course of his Pilgrimage he would have seen and heard just how fiercely evangelical and bloody Bach’s music can be.  Far from universal or transcendent, the music and texts are often narrow, bloodthirsty, violent, explicitly opposed to reason—that is, many of the values and attitudes that jihadists are often accused of.

Consider Bach’s music for Christmas, which one might expect to be full of images of universal good will and peaceful utopianism; in fact, this repertoire is filled with saber-rattling, severed heads, and pitched battles of immense violence. And while the enemy is named as the devil, the Turks were held to be a manifestation of these same forces of evil.

One could cite many unforgettable examples in the Bach cantatas of hand-to-hand combat, deeds of daring worthy of Gardiner’s Central Asian horsemen, but I’ll only mention quickly the final chorus of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. When I was a kid we would decorate the Christmas tree to the oratorio, large parts of which were originally written to glorify the war-loving Saxon royal house, and later re-fitted with their religious words. Yet the underlying ideology of violence bleeds through both the sacred and secular versions. The bombastic, galloping final chorus of the Christmas Oratorio proclaimed to the Christian faithful assembled in Leipzig St. Thomas’s Church that “Now you are thoroughly avenged, / for upon the host of your enemies, Christ has broken, that which was against you.”

It is this very fanaticism that inspired Bach’s genius and gives to his sacred music so much of its conviction and persuasiveness, however unsettling and “anti-modern” these may be. The unyielding qualities of this message might be those that Gardiner’s Man in the Turban would most appreciate. Two-and-a-half centuries since his death, Bach the warrior is the most modern Bach of all.

For more on Bach’s Christmas music, with audio links to saber-rattling cantata movements, see my just-posted essay “Princes of War and Peace and their Most Humble, Most Obedient Court Composer” at http://konturen.uoregon.edu/vol1_Yearsley.html

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu   

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