The End Is Near

Like the rest of the world, I've been glued to the news feeds for the past few months, but unlike many, I have not been able to articulate what I feel about the current US state of affairs. The reactions from the US media and political leaders have been largely predictable, analyses largely superficial. So I am more interested in how the rest of the world is reacting, especially ordinary people - not pundits or philosophers. One comment from Croatia strikes me as typical. Many others are either too nasty or too gleeful, but this one, though not reflecting my opinion, reflects some of my confusion and, I am sure, the confusion of many other people around the world. Here is my approximate translation of the piece:

Boris Dežulovićfor N1 :  THE END IS NEAR

"There was a guy throwing money around, installing gold toilets, dying his hair with orange juice and grabbing women by the pussy, who also believed that the noise from wind turbines caused cancer and suggested that tornados and hurricanes could be stopped with nuclear bombs, and that Covid-19 could be cured with Clorox. And that guy was the U.S. president. 

On one occasion he gathered Baltic leaders and blamed them for the Balkan crisis. On another, his wife visited a camp for immigrant children, dressed in a jacket with a sign "I really don't care." And on yet another occasion his election-campaign chief organized a press conference in the luxury Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia but which took place outside a Four Seasons Total Landscaping center in a Philly suburb, in a parking lot between the local crematorium and a sex-toy shop.

So when he lost the election, the president urged his voters and followers to march on Washington and prevent the announcement of the voters' choice for the country's new leader.

There was another guy in the US state of Georgia who heeded the president's call to come to Washington, but he did not have a flag of his home state, so he ordered one from the Amazon. He logged into his account, typed in "Flag of Georgia" and placed an order. The next day he received an Amazon box containing a large, beautiful flag of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, which he hung on a pole, mounted on his car and drove nearly a thousand miles from his southern state through both Carolinas and entire Virginia to the nation's capital. He was cheered by truck drivers along the way while he turned up the volume on Willie Nelson's "Georgia On My Mind". Surreptitiously, he wiped away a tear or two of his patriotic pride, as he listened to "just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind."

"Which flag is it, my friend?" shouted the truck drivers through their open windows, and he lifted his chin importantly and said: "Georgia, my friend."  "Georgia?" they wondered, slightly ashamed of not recognizing the southern state's flag but he would just croon along with Willie Nelson, "I said Georgia, heh, maybe it’s because I’m from Augusta, Georgia.“ His compatriots responded with wows and thumbs up.

That guy was among the first to attack the US Capitol. His photos appeared in all the news and were scattered all over the internet. Reddit was on to him, the whole planet saw him charging the Congress with a flag offered by the Amazon when you search for "Flag of Georgia." Little did he know that the first Georgia on Amazon's mind was a Caucasian state, on the shores of the Black Sea. And so the man waved a white flag emblazoned with five red crosses as he climbed the Capitol steps. Tovarish Stalin, Soviet Georgia's greatest son, would have been thrilled to see it.

Then there was an average American housewife with average American intelligence, from an average U.S. city, who looked as if she had walked straight out of The Simpsons animated series.  She was determined to prevent satanist-pedophile-vaxxer-communist conspiracy against Donald Trump and America. She was in all the papers all over the internet, and Twitter filled its pages with her memes and gifs.  The entire globe saw her charging the Congress and, in her patriotic fervor, attack journalists of the mainstream media and foreign reporters. Noticing their Cyrillic and Arab letters - she accosted Russian and Al Jazeera reporters telling them to go back to the communist China where they came from.

There was also a guy from Arkansas who broke into the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He also was in all the news, the internet and social media and the whole world saw him break into madam speaker's office, sit in her armchair, lift his booted feet on her desk, take a hundred selfies and then - in case he had not yet been identified - pose for TV outlets in the street with items belonging to Ms. Pelosi in his hands. He bragged he did not steal anything because he had left 25 cents on her desk.

Then there was an expert fighter from Maryland, who watched in disbelief as the moron from Arkansas practically wrote his own arrest warrant. He left work at the local branch of Navistar Direct Marketing to join the siege of the US Congress and, having learned to be cautious from the experience of living under the dictatorship of the Deep State, he took steps to ensure he was not recognized.  He wrapped himself in the U.S. flag, pulled a hood over his head and a MAGA hat over it, and entered the Congress in the way General Lee entered Veracruz.  

He appeared in all the newspapers and internet portals; Facebook and Twitter and the entire globe saw him marching through congressional halls.  Upon return home that evening, he found Deep State agents waiting for him as well as a notice of termination of employment form Navistar.  When he asked how they identified him so quickly, the agents showed him Facebook photos of him strutting through the Capitol with a Navistar Direct Marketing ID hanging around his neck. 

Finally, there was also a failed actor-singer from Arizona, who after mindless wondering through the wasteland of his life, re-invented himself as shaman and joined the people's liberation army of QAnon. He came to the Congress naked to the waist, with a fur hat and bison horns on his head. He urged people over a loudspeaker to topple the dictatorship of Masonic-Hollywood-satanistic-pedophile elites that kidnap little kids and take them to the infamous Washington pizzeria with a secret entrance into a large global network of underground tunnels, in which Soros, Gates and Rockefeller sexually abuse children and drink their blood to stay young.

The guy also appeared in all the newspapers, internet, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. The whole world could see and hear QAnon's shaman with bison horns as he explained to the international press corps that he can hear high-frequency sounds, not audible to the ear of a mere mortal, and that he had a passport for all the galaxies of the universe.

In short, those answering the call of the president who confuses the Balkans with the Baltics were people like the guy who does not know the flag of his native Georgia, a woman who does not distinguish Arabs from Asians, a thief who takes selfies while committing crime, and a guy who is hiding from Deep State by wearing a badge with his personal information on it. They were led by a shaman who can hear frequencies of a bat and is leading an international movement against a network of satanist pedophiles from the basement of a Washington pizzeria (which does not have a basement). The imbecilic group that could have come straight out of The Simpsons psychiatric clinic entered one of the most protected buildings in the world, in the most protected capital of the world and the most protected country in the world as if they were walking into a suburban Walmart.   

This is not the first time we have seen such scenes on TV. A few years ago, for example, there was a broadcast of Ronald Emmerich's movie White House Down in which terrorists attack the White House. James Vanderbilt's team had to re-write the scrip at least 20 times to make the story of invading the stronghold of the American democracy believable. But while the fictionalized attack was masterminded by sophisticated operatives and was carried out by elite special forces, in real life the Congress was demolished by a cast of characters from Dumb and Dumber. 

These characters announced their march on Washington at least a month before. US Capitol Police, Homeland Security, FBI and CIA, agents that stage coups in foreign countries - all were activated. Video footage was showing convoys of vehicles pouring toward the US capital, and Facebook published the exact route to the Congress and the time of the planned attack, January 6. And still the invasion of the Capitol shocked the security experts.  They watched in daze as the  man who took Nancy Pelosi's lectern to sell it on eBay cheerfully waved to them. 

Some of the best photographs from the riot were sold to Getty Images Inc. and published all over the internet with the logo "Via Getty." Afterwards, Google was literally flooded with questions "Who Is Via Getty?" and the police and secret service were promptly informed of Trump's new guerrilla operative named Via Getty, who is self-advertising on the social media.

What you have seen is jackass civilization in the era of imbeciles. The 20th century had its romantic revolutions, dark lieutenants, secret agents, spies, mercenaries, inglourious basterds and ailing poets - dreamers who believed in equality and a just new world. The revolutions of our time will be led by shamans with bison horns, who buy liberty flags on the Amazon; conspiracy theorists who believe that the recent earthquakes in Croatia were caused by satanist-pedophile elites mining their underground tunnels for ritual drinking of children's blood; and those who believe that pandemic was created on purpose so people can be vaccinated with microchips, and controlled by dark powers.  These revolutionaries will be confronted by conscientious citizens chasing over the Internet new Che Guevaras such as Via Getty.

The global revolution of our century is led by the prophets whom you may remember standing on banana crates with a sign: "The end is near - prepare!" 

Hasta la victoria siempre!

Siegfried - A Hero of Our Time

If Siegfried is your favorite Ring opera, as it is mine, getting to see a new production can be a mixed blessing.  Depending on the tenor portraying the title hero, the performance can offer four hours of pure bliss or just an average musical evening. WNO's rendition of the third part of Wagner's Nibelung Ring on Wednesday not only had charismatic Siegfried - it was outstanding in every way.

When we first meet Sigfried, he is a teenage orphan, adopted by Nibelung dwarf Mime who is grooming him for a fight with Fafner (giant-cum-dragon) over the Rhine treasure.  Like his brother Alberich and like ruling god Wotan, Mime covets the gold ring and headcover Tarnhelm, for their special powers. The evil dwarf hopes that Siegfried will get the gold for him just like Wotan hoped Siegfried's father would get it for him. Neither the dwarf nor the god can fight for the treasure themselves, one because he is too weak, the other because he is bound by a contract, which forbids him to fight the giant.

Mime trying to forge a sword, Act I, Siegfried

Wotan therefore needs a hero who would get the ring for him without implicating the gods. The hero must be a human and an enemy of gods. Siegmund may have been all of that, but Wotan's plan to use his estranged son, fell through when his wife Fricka convinced him (for her own reasons) that providing Siegmund with the god's invincible sword, no matter how indirectly, would still make him an accomplice.

There are countless interpretations of Wagner's story and intent, but this much is clear from the narrative. People who doze off during The Ring's lengthy recitatives may miss important details and subsequently watch the highlights without enough context. Among the multitude of questions that one hears these days is why is Wotan looking for a strong male hero when a female one ( his daughter Brünhilde) is standing right before him. Wotan explains it extensively in Act II, Scene 2 of Die Walküre and knowing the gist of that narrative helps understand the whole cycle. In Siegfried, I would suggest paying careful attention to Wotan's dialogue with Erda because it contains important clues to understanding The Ring's last opera, Götterdämmerung.

This is not to say that you can't simply sit back and enjoy the music. Daniel Brenna's Siegfried on Wednesday was captivating. He looked and sounded the age he is supposed to be - presumably late teens - so much so that I could almost hear him saying "whatever," or "you are hovering," and many other things my son used to say to me when he was a teenager.  He also made me think of many young U.S. servicemen shipped off to Iraq and Afghanistan, not quite knowing what awaits there. Brenna sang with a clear bell-like voice that sounded fresh till the very end, including the grueling Act III, after he had already been singing more than two hours and Brünhilde only began.

Daniel Brenna is a youthful and charismatic Siegfried

Catherine Foster's Brünhilde was a pleasure to hear and if you did not know she had hurt her ankle, you would not know it. She made it look like she was somewhat insecure on her legs because she was still waking up from her 18-year-long nap.

Alan Held showed us yet another side of Wotan - an aging god still holding on to power, but aware it won't be for long. Lindsay Ammann as Erda, was convincing as a wise Earth goddess who has gotten tired of the World and wants to retire for good. Her resignation is a last blow to Wotan, one that convinces him to accept the demise of the gods. Again, pay attention to what is said between them!

David Cangelosi as Mime provided the most entertainment for the evening, pausing with his shenanigans long enough and in right places to remind us of his evil intentions. Gordon Hawkins as his brother Alberich was straightforward in expressing anger and frustration at being duped. They made a good pair.

I was looking forward to Soloman Howard's Fafner and he was worth the wait. Howard has a deep, alluring bass and as a dying giant, he elicited compassion. Singing from inside a huge armored machine, which sensibly replaces the dragon in this production, gave his voice a sinister tint.

Jacqueline Echols was a chirpy Forest Bird, presented as a bookish young girl, intent on mentoring Siegfried, who is illiterate at least in some ways.  She connected well with Brenna.

The greatest hero of Wednesday night's performance was conductor Philippe Auguin. He spun some of the most beguiling sounds to be had from Wagner's score, and I'd never heard the WNO orchestra play so well.

WNO Opens 60th Season

Washington National Opera opened its 60th Season on Saturday and what an eventful season it promises to be! In addition to the complete Wagner Ring, it includes a Philip Glass opera, a Kurt Weill work, Hansel and Gretel and three brand new 20-minute operas based on contemporary American stories. With so many works rarely performed in Washington coming up, it is hardly surprising that the season started with a warhorse such as Carmen.

Kennedy Center, Saturday evening, WNO season about to begin

I am happy Francesca Zambello came to Washington and took over WNO in January 2013. She had previously impressed me with her creation of the so-called American Ring, her rendition of the Wagner's tetralogy performed here between 2006 and 2009.  She reconfirmed that impression with her staging of Berlioz's Les Troyens at the Metropolitan in 2012. As WNO's artistic director, she is turning an opera house of mediocre Traviatas and Trovatores into an art organization blowing fresh air into a staid cultural atmosphere of the nation's capital. Francesca (and I feel close enough to use her first name) is my only hope that we may see a Berlioz opera in Washington one day.

Having seen several excellent performances of Carmen in the past few years, most recently a live broadcast from Orange, France, with Jonas Kaufmann and Kate Aldrich, I was prepared for a less than exciting evening. But once the lights went down and the curtain up (in this case a set splitting along a jagged line in the middle) magic happened. The more-or-less standard production directed by Loren Meeker had a few novelties to offer, such as a couple of enter-acte flamenco dancers. Since Clémentine Margaine's Carmen was not an especially skilled dancer, it would have been good to see a little more of Fanny Ara doing it for her.

Flamenco dancers Fanny Ara and Timo Nuñez 

Margaine has a beautiful voice, but her entrance was not impressive and it took a while for her to assert her presence. In the first act one could hardly distinguish her from other factory girls and her rendition of Habanera did nothing to make her stand out. Maybe a more strategic wardrobe and makeup would help. Her singing improved in the subsequent acts, but the wardrobe did not.

One problem most Carmens have is how to be seductive without being ridiculous. This one did nothing different than most others before her (Baltimore Opera's Milena Kitić from a decade ago comes to mind) and her trump card was spreading her legs around a guy. Directors should make a little more effort than have the "Gypsy" girl strut back and forth on the stage, wiggling her hips and hawking her wares like a vulgar street girl. That's not sexy. Furthermore, coming from the Balkans, I have seen more Gypsies than an average American opera patron, and none of their women walk like the operatic Carmen. Kate Aldrich changed the routine somewhat in the contemporary Orange production, but in my view, nobody has done a better job of seduction than Elina Garanča for the Met's Carmen a few years ago. She seemed to have a lot of fun with it and everything she did looked natural. A singer who is not good with gestures can be made more seductive with the right clothes and a suitable wig.

Bryan Hymel was an impressive Énée in Les Troyens recently and thus an artist to look forward to in WNO's Carmen. He was a sensitive and convincing Don José, though sharing more chemistry with Janai Brugger's excellent Micaëla than with Margaine's Carmen.

Bryan Hymel and Janai Brugger as Don José and Micaëla in WNO' Carmen

Michael Todd Simpson was a lackluster Escamillo. His entrance failed to electrify the stage as a celebrity toreador's is expected to do, although there was some improvement in the last act. Kenneth Kellog was well suited for the role of Lieutenant Zuniga and Nicholas Houhoulis did well as tavern owner Lillas Pastia. The sets were a slightly stylized take on the standard for the opera, with the faded image of la Nuestra Señora de Guadelupe hinting that the smuggling might be taking place on the U.S. border with Mexico rather than anywhere near Seville.

Overall, it was a solid performance that should please anyone who has not seen Bizet's masterpiece in a while. It was also an appropriate prelude to the new and rarely seen works such as Appomatox and others that will follow. The 2007 opera by Philip Glass will be WNO's first ever performance of a work by arguably the most celebrated contemporary American composer. The reworked version includes a completely new second act, featuring Washington native Soloman Howard as Martin Luther King Jr.

An important company premiere will be a South African production of Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars based on Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Bass-baritone Eric Owens interprets Stephen Kumalo, a minister in apartheid-era South Africa who travels from his small village to Johannesburg to find his errant son.

The highlight of the WNO's 60th anniversary without doubt is Wagner's Ring. The cycle of the four operas attracts the world's attention whenever it is staged and people will travel distances to see the Met Ring, the Seattle Ring, the Melbourne Ring, and others, with the Bayreuth Ring remaining a lifelong dream for many an opera lover. WNO performed the four operas separately over four seasons about a decade ago, with the last one, Götterdämmerung given in concert form as the production money ran out. Oh, but what a glorious concert it was - with South African Gidon Kramer brooding his way into the role of Hagen to create the sexiest version of the evil dwarf's offspring ever seen on the stage. The then-WNO director Placido Domingo did a commendable job as Siegmund in the 2007 Walküre. All in all, it was a memorable Ring, the staggered performances whetting the appetite for every subsequent installment - and now making one eager to see how the next year's complete cycle will compare to the first run.

Croatia: Refugees Ante Portas

A Croatian friend from Las Vegas sends me an e-mail from our native Zagreb which she is visiting after several years of absence. She says she has shelved any plans for a possible retirement in the old country, and that even future visits are in question. Why? She finds the conversations too shallow, or "pouring from the hollow into the empty" as they say there, and people too grim-faced, xenophobic and generally mean-spirited, living beyond their means, pretending to be what they are not, and thinking they know everything - even if they have not stepped out of their backyard for the past quarter-century.

Of course she is exaggerating, but I know what she means. Over several past decades, I have made at least five or six - probably more - trips to Croatia. The conversations invariably revolved around local issues: prices and availability of goods and services, alleged incompetence of political leaders and local who-are-whos. Despite the popularity of American movies and TV shows, the distaste for the United States is widespread (it's the country that wants total control of the world, where danger lurks around every corner; goods are cheap and poor quality; high culture is non-existent, and the food is good enough only for the boat people). Washington is not worth a visit for these "intellectuals" in the country of "cultural traditions" dating back to King Tomislav. Only "refined" cities such as Paris, Rome, London or Vienna will do. As my Las Vegas friend notes, without ever visiting the United States, many of these people believe they know all they need to know about it, so the opportunity to learn first-hand from someone who actually lives there is passed up. During these many visits, I don't recall anyone asking me about my lifestyle, my career or my experience living in the United States. If I volunteer, the eyes glaze over and the subject is quickly changed.

Cafè in central Zagreb:  World News Not Discussed Here

Just recently, I attempted an e-mail discussion with an acquaintance in Zagreb about the averted train attack in Europe and the bravery of the Americans who subdued the heavily armed gunman. I thought surely that would be of interest to someone who lives on the continent and might travel on just such a train. The response was a total blank - the acquaintance had not heard about the incident. Neither had she heard of the Croatian worker who was kidnapped and beheaded by ISIS in Egypt. She does not read newspapers or watch TV news said this "educated" person with a published book or two behind her belt. Such news are of no use to her. She feels sorry for the poor Croatian guy, she said, but the information I gave her only upsets her and has no other purpose. I was speechless. Of course she has the right to block out the unwanted information and, yes, the news overall are mostly depressing. But can an intellectual, even a fiction writer as opposed to a journalist, live in a vacuum - in a personal bubble protected from the infections from the outside world? I guess so.

Today's news (September 17) is "dismal" for Croatia. Thousands of migrants poured in through the border with Serbia as they head for Western Europe. Unprepared for the crowds the size of a small Croatian town, the border authorities were overwhelmed and what they hoped would be an orderly passage turned into chaos. Even those willing to help the exhausted, desperate and angry people were taken aback. An estimated 14,000 migrants entered the country in just two days after being diverted from the Serbian border with Hungary, which is now sealed.

Refugees are not new to Croatia. The country hosted tens of thousands of people displaced by the 1990's ethnic conflict in the Balkans. But those refugees trickled in gradually, they were neighbors, some of them had relatives in Croatia and they spoke a language that can be understood. After the war, many returned to their homes and those who stayed were easily integrated.

Chaos on the Croatian Border with Serbia

The current waves comprise people from the Middle East and other remote foreign regions.  They don't plan to stay, but as a European Union member, Croatia will have to settle a certain number of the refugees that have reached Europe in the past few years. Many locals cringe at the idea of integrating people of such different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. 

During my school years in Zagreb, the handful of Middle-easterners and Africans in the town were young people from the so-called non-aligned countries, befriended by longtime Yugoslav leader Tito, and they came temporarily to study at the Zagreb University.  Only one of those students, a Kenyan,  became a permanent resident at the time.  But EU executives earlier this month said each member nation should accept 160,000 migrants. Even one third of that figure would create a huge impact on the Slavic country with few and not so diverse minorities.  Maybe that's a jolt that Croatia, Hungary and some other eastern European countries need to realize that they are part of an increasingly global world, despite barbed-wire fences they may put up.

The barbarity of the Balkan conflict stunned the world in the early 1990's. By the time observers recovered from their stupor, tens of thousands of people were massacred, tortured and displaced. The world is now equally stunned by (and therefore unprepared to accommodate or process) the number of people risking life and limb to escape the new places of conflict, popping up in the developing world. Why the surprise? Could it be because too many "intellectuals" block out distressing news and choose to live protected in their comfortable bubbles?