Third Avenue

Anti-American theatre

It may surprise you to know that one of the sell-out shows here in Manhattan depicts the US military as providing a safe-haven with official sanction for men looking to procure sex with underage girls in developing countries.

The same show displays the US consular services in these developing countries providing explicit assistance in the said procurement, and also conniving in the forced international adoption of the children resulting from such unions.

Surely this is blatant anti-American propaganda.

Well, in fact no-one raises an eyebrow, because the show in question is Puccini's Madama Butterfly, currently on at the Met, from where I have just returned. It would be interesting to speculate what the reaction to Butterfly would be, however, were it to be composed today.

As it is, it is a veritable warhorse of the operatic repertoire, guaranteed to get a full house. The Met production is, as usual, extremely traditional, with pretty sets, lovely costumes, and zero social comment. What was disappointing tonight was the more lacklustre nature of the singing. While Vassily Grello's Sharpless was spot on, Roberto Aronica's Pinkerton was simply competent, and the American soprano Kallen Esperian in the title role seemed out of her depth. The high notes clearly put her under considerable strain, so much so that she failed even to attempt one of them. This is not what I have come to expect at the Met.

It takes a hard heart not to be moved by Butterfly, but tonight's performance was, I fear, if not unmoving, then at least swiftly forgotten.

A junkie gets his triumphant fix

Finally, finally. After weeks of mounting craving, relief was at hand.

Yes, the Metropolitan Opera's January break is at an end.

Having scraped together $15 dollars, mostly in quarters from the back of the sofa, I toddled along and picked up a standing only ticket for yesterday's opening night of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande.

The evening got off to a fairly amazing start. With my pauper's ticket in my hand, I was approaching the back of the auditorium when a man rushed towards me, making for the exit. He stopped momentarily, said 'here, take this' and handed me his own ticket before disappearing into the night. His ticket was worth $205. Well, gift horses, mouths, and all that.

So, safely ensconced in one of the prime seats in the house, I settled down to enjoy a fabulous operatic experience.

I have before praised the Met's musical quality, while berating the woeful lack of imagination of its productions. Last night, all was as it should be. Britain's Jonathan Miller was the director, and he shifted the action from the nebulous fantasy world of the libretto, to the fading late-Victorian drawing rooms of the time of the opera's composition. The frustratingly obtuse words of the protagonists now came across much more convincingly as the repressed code language of a family unable to verbalise its own decay and latent violence. Brilliant.

The singers were all of the highest quality - with perhaps highest praise going to Roberto Scandiuzzi in the role of Arkel.

But the real star of the evening was James Levine in the orchestra pit. He took Debussy's deliciously lugubrious score at a glacially slow pace, squeezing every last drop of nuance from his orchestra. This apparently anti-climactic opera was anything but in his hands.

Anything to criticise? Well, as usual, the Met audience seemed to be taking a collective audition for the role of the consumptive Violetta in La Traviata. Also, in another annoying Met habit, there was one interval too many, which broke the tension without any apparent need. The singers were clearly suffering some first-night nerves and seemed to be holding back at the beginning. But these are very minor caveats. The evening was a triumph.

Those of you in the UK can hear this production broadcast live on Radio 3 next Saturday, 5 February, at 6.30pm. Don't miss it.

Tips for New York living

When the air temperature is -14C, and the windchill is -25C, don't go out walking without your thermals. I've just tried it. Not nice.

Right-wing pundits can be right

I've been reading with some astonishment the leading article in this week's Spectator (registration required), and find that it makes for the most part just plain good sense (well, once you get past the tax stuff). Scary.

The article castigates the Tories' new immigration policy as both unworkable and bad for the country. The Spectator naturally puts in all in free-market terms, but it is still mostly good stuff, laying to rest several myths:

Like so many other social and economic phenomena, international migration tends to be cyclical, and is closely related to the labour market. Though many might find it hard to remember now, 25 years ago we were worrying about the ‘brain drain’. Between 1973 and 1982 Britain lost a net 430,000 residents, as high taxation and mass unemployment drove them abroad. As recently as 1993 there was a net outflow of residents from Britain. The reason immigration has increased since then is largely a response to the dramatic improvement in our economy. People are coming to Britain not, as the Daily Mail would have us believe, to live it up on job-seekers’ allowance: of the 91,000 Eastern Europeans who arrived in Britain to work during the first five months following EU enlargement last May, fewer than 15 have claimed benefits. They are coming to work: on our building sites, in our hospitals, in our restaurants. Without this external supply of labour, wage inflation would have soared and interest rates would be markedly higher than they are. Not only that; it would be all but impossible to find a cleaner or a tradesman in London.

Yet in spite of the obvious signs of economic necessity, the term ‘economic migrant’ has come to be used as a form of abuse. It is taken to signify a lazy scumbag who can’t be bothered to find work back home, so chooses to sponge off us, bringing his wife and 18 children. In reality, economic migrants are the opposite: it requires a risk-taking mentality to seek work abroad; the lazy ones are those left behind in Poland. As for the claim that migrants are a burden on our health and education systems, most are young, healthy and single: a mere 5 per cent of migrants bring their families to Britain.

Equally good is Simon Jenkins in today's Times. Jenkins is a real Fleet Street veteran and knows how to put together a good article, but I (and I know many others) often find him exasperating. Today, however, he hits the nail on the head in his response to the Government's flabbergasting proposal to introduce indefinite house arrest without trial:

The Home Secretary said yesterday that he wants to get only those he “suspects of terrorism”. He will use his powers rarely and “only against individuals who wish to destroy everything we all stand for.” These are people, he claims, who want “to kill hundreds and thousands of people who are innocent of everything”. He says he knows who they are from “secret intelligence” which he cannot divulge to anyone. Mr Clarke is a true scion of King ’s College, Cambridge.

Those high on the narcotic of power lose their nose for right and wrong. Mr Clarke says he will use his powers “reasonably”. All authoritarians say that. He may not eat babies or beat Arabs in Belmarsh with rubber truncheons. But when four tortured British citizens were freed from Guantanamo Bay on Tuesday — imprisoned under the same rules as Mr Clarke espouses — he casually incarcerated them a further day, lest the dark ones think him soft on terror. It was a gesture of puerile cruelty.

Mr Clarke appeals to “the intelligence community” as his guide in assaulting British liberty. That community is on probation as the most tarnished in Whitehall. The dossiers used to create a climate of fear before the Iraq invasion were entirely false. Yet their authors are Mr Clarke’s best friends in deciding who is to be called a terrorist. For Mr Clarke to use them as a test of “reasonableness” is unbelievable.

For two years intelligence has been used by Downing Street as an agency of public fear. Britons have been threatened by “intelligence” with sarin, anthrax, smallpox and nuclear attack. Last month the authorities warned Londoners of a “significant threat” of a “Bali-style” bomb in a nightclub, cinema or theatre. This casual scaremongering may have hit West End profits for a while. Coming from the people who brought us the dodgy dossiers and the weekly “Tube menaces” they were crass. Yet Mr Clarke is suspending habeas corpus on their say-so.

American and British pro-war policies have yielded a massive bureaucratic and industrial security complex. They are a running pressure behind the fear agenda. Ministers may decline to list every attack which they claim the security services have prevented. But so discredited is this arm of government that it would be helpful if they could list one. They claim to have prevented Madrids and Istanbuls. But even Madrid and Istanbul did not, as Mr Clarke implies, “destroy everything for which we all stand”. People died, which was tragic. But neither atrocity was a threat to Western civilisation. Such talk is hyperbolic.

My Britain is more robust place than Mr Clarke’s cowering, bullying state. A nation that survived two world wars and many terrorist bombing campaigns has kept its freedoms intact without his special powers. For Mr Clarke to demand pre-emptive imprisonment on a par with what was used during the Second World War is an insult to history. Of course we need to be alert to the risk of terrorist attack. But his actions this week suggest a security establishment in blind panic over a threat it has not begun to justify.

Precisely. There may be justification for emergency arrest legislation in true times of national emergency (such as World War II). But the 'war on terror' is nothing like that. For one thing, it will end at a time of the Government's own choosing (tomorrow, never?). Britain and, indeed, the US are surely more robust countries than the panic measures introduced by the respective Governments imply.

Blog-link updates

I've decided to do some very minor housekeeping to my list of links. I've added Europhobia (thanks to Shuggy for this), which seems an excellent and entertaining take on all things European.

I've also decided to swap Oliver Kamm for Harry's Place. Oliver Kamm has become increasingly focused on long articles about the supposed historical mistakes made by Noam Chomsky. All very well, but not really what I read blogs for.

Harry's Place gets added because it seems to be one of the must-read leftish blogs.

The funny thing about Harry's Place is that it should really appeal to my woolly liberal nature much more than, say, Dead Men's Left or Lenin's Tomb. But give me DML or Lenin any day. I really enjoy their combination of earthy humour and forensic dissection, even when I don't necessarily agree with them.

Harry's Place, on the other hand, has become more and more defensive and crotchety. Witness this posting from Thursday. They quote approvingly from an academic called Andrei Markovits. Markovits' thesis (rather simply put) is that the left has been taken over by those who hate the US and want to see the end of the state of Israel. The posting ends:

Finally, Markovits says, a new litmus test of progressive politics has emerged: anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. I think he exaggerates here, at least for the United States:

If one is not at least a serious doubter of the legitimacy of the state of Israel (never mind the policies of its government) and if one does not dismiss everything American as a priori vile and reactionary, one runs the risk of being excluded from the entity called "the left." There has not been a common issue since the Spanish Civil War that has united the left so clearly as has anti-Zionism and its twin, anti-Americanism. The left divided, and divides, over Serbia, over Chechnya, over Darfur, even over the war in Iraq. There are virtually no divisions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and over the essence of the United States. If one has anything positive-- or even non-derogatory-- to say about the United States or Israel, one always needs to qualify it with a resounding "but."

True enough for large segments of what passes for the Left these days. And true enough to drive some decent people out of the Left entirely. But as long as others of us refuse to be driven out-- refuse to accept the litmus test-- Markovits's gloomy assessment may be premature.

Even if you accept that Markovits is exaggerating (as Harry's Place admittedly does), 'at least for the United States', this is astonishing stuff. Markovits is saying that the left now requires its members to 'dismiss everything American as a priori vile and reactionary'. 'Everything American'? What, including Martin Luther King, Franklin Roosevelt, campaigners against slavery?

And, he says, the left is united in its 'anti-Zionism' which requires one to be 'at least a serious doubter of the legitimacy of the state of Israel'. Would this be the same left that is in power in No 10 Downing Street? The left of the Guardian, the Independent, the German SDP, the French Socialists?

Now I admit that Harry's Place does not give Markovits a 100% endorsement, but still it portrays that hardy band of 'decent people' that refuse to be 'driven out' of the left. The 'decent people' being them, I presume, and the drivers-out being some nebulous band of evil-doers, never actually defined.

The trouble with Harry's Place is that it has forgotten that its views are actually those of the powerful, but tries to pass itself off as somehow representative of a persecuted minority bravely standing its ground. In this way, at least, it shares the chip on the shoulder of the American right - in charge of everything, yet constantly moaning that it is the victim.

But I'm linking to it anyway (especially as I vented my spleen a little in the comments box)....

Reasons for European suspicion

Thomas Friedman has an interesting take today in the New York Times (registration required) on why Europeans are nervous about contemporary America. Here's his explanation:

It's this: Europeans love to make fun of naïve American optimism, but deep down, they envy it and they want America to be that open, foreigner-embracing, carefree, goofily enthusiastic place that cynical old Europe can never be. Many young Europeans blame Mr. Bush for making America, since 9/11, into a strange new land that exports fear more than hope, and has become dark and brooding - a place whose greeting to visitors has gone from "Give me your tired, your poor" to "Give me your fingerprints." They look at Mr. Bush as someone who stole something precious from them.

Tim Kreutzfeldt, [an East Berlin] bar owner, said to me: "Bush took away our America. I mean we love America. We are very sad about America. We believe in America and American values, but not in Bush. And it makes us angry that he distorted our image of the country which is so important to us. It is not what America stands for - and this makes us angry and it should make every American angry, because America lost so much in its reputation worldwide." The Bush team, he added, is giving everyone in the world the impression that "somebody is coming to kill you."

Stefan Elfenbein, a food critic nursing a beer at our table, added: "I know many people who don't want to travel to America anymore. ... People are afraid to be hassled at the border. ... We all discuss it, when somebody goes to America [we now ask:] 'Are you sure?' We had hope that Kerry would win and would make a statement, 'America is back to what it was four years ago.' We hoped that he would be the symbol, the figure who would say, '[America] is the country that welcomes everybody again.' [But] now we have to wait four more years, hopefully for somebody to give us back the country we knew and liked."

Yes, yes, there are legitimate counters to all these points. But before anyone here will listen to Mr. Bush make those counterpoints, he will have to really listen to them first.

Friedman's words say as much about the US's view of itself as they do about Europe. They certainly underline Bush's uncanny ability to speak directly and attractively to large sections of his own population, while leaving much of the rest of the world somewhere on the spectrum between bemused and nauseated.

Attitudes to violence

Consider these statistics:

• New York murder rate is 6.9 per 100,000
• London murder rate is 2.4 per 100,000

So, why is it that the British press sees the former as a beacon of safety and good policing, and the latter as a dangerous hellhole?

EU alert - don't let it ruin your retirement

Had any thoughts on how to spend your declining years yet? Dreaming of that farmhouse in the Dordogne, or maybe a poolside apartment on one of the Costas? Perhaps you are already fantasising about abandoning middle-management and setting up with your own olive grove in the Tuscan hills.

Well, beware, for a growing section of the British political classes want to deprive you of the ability to take this decision yourself, and rather hand it to the vagaries of foreign bureaucrats.

Of course, this has long been the stated policy of the UK Independence Party, but now that not-uninfluential columnist, Melanie Phillips, has nailed her colours to the mast. As she says in her latest posting:

Michael Howard should now go for broke and announce that the Tories will take Britain out of the EU.

Withdrawal would mean the loss of our current right to live, work and travel freely in Europe. The decision of where we could go, how long we could stay, and what we could do there would henceforth be entirely in the hands of an overworked consular official. Those of you reading this in your foreign villas had better get ready for those immigration officials to come knocking on your door and putting you on a plane bound for Luton before you can say easyjet.com. Want to take your belongings with you? Sorry, my friends, customs officials want them for their own weekend cottages. And there won't be a single thing you or your government will be able do about it.

The timidity of the pro-European lobby never ceases to amaze me. Given that the most immediate impact of withdrawal on people's everyday lives, hopes and aspirations, surely the real stuff of politics, will be entirely negative (I can't think of a single immediate positive impact - and longer-term ones are pretty elusive too), it beggars belief that the pro-Europeans aren't shouting about them from the rooftops.

In seeking to preserve the abstract notion of sovereignty, the Eurosceptics are in fact seeking to deprive us of the concrete lifestyle which we now so cherish.

Jazz in Greenwich village

I haven't mentioned a trip to the opera for some time. It's not that I was too harrowed by Turandot, rather the Met is having a winter break.

But to keep my ear in tune, I went last night (first time ever) to a jazz club, the Fat Cat in Greenwich village, where I was to be found still happily snoozing into the small hours.

Star of the show was Ari Hoening, joined by Jean-Michel Pilc, Matt Penman and Jacques Schwarz-Bart.

I doubt it will ever replace a good wallop of Wagner in my affections, but still it was $10 well spent.

Best of all, though, was the complete absence of cigarette smoke. This is a shock at first to us nicotine-hardened Europeans, but I'm happy to throw any libertarian credentials out of the window on this one, and press Uncle Sam's ever-waking nanny state firmly to my bosom.

What divides us

It strikes me that I've yet to post anything of any substance on US politics. Partly, this is because I retain a rather nerd-ish interest in UK issues and partly because I am still feeling my way into the initially bemusing and confusing reality of the goings-on in Washington, Albany (the state capital) and here in NYC.

Still, there are a few issues that I shall try to grapple with over the coming months - including this year's mayoral elections in New York (how can such a Democratic city have a Republican mayor?).

For the time being, I am more fascinated at how the same issues play quite differently on both sides of the Atlantic. I hope to write quite soon on EU stuff - a theme naturally completely absent here.

But I see that back in the motherland the political classes are having one of their periodic clashes over immigration (see also here and here). The contrast with the US is striking. Illegal immigration here is rampant (countless millions), and yet politicians are much more wary of playing the immigration card. Recently, even ultra-conservative Senators were unwilling to allow a law to pass that would ban States from issuing drivers' licences to illegal aliens.

Of course, the word 'immigration' here has quite different connotations - nearly every one is either an immigrant or descended from one. So any critique of immigration carries a personal baggage that is rather different from that of Europe.

The Tories' solution to the 'flood' of immigration is to abandon the UK's commitments under the Geneva Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights.

I'm always struck at how no-one on the right (or for that matter the left) ever wants to play the positive patriotic card on this issue, by saying 'I feel proud that so many immigrants want to come to Britain. It shows what a great country this is'. Rather, the Tories seem to want to say that the fact that so many migrants come is somehow a symbol of how crap the country is.

But I've got a simpler solution to cutting the flow. Change the official language to, say, Lithuanian. It is English that is one of the key reasons why the UK remains such an attractive goal to many migrants. Take this away, and I'm quite convinced we'd see those numbers falling. Any takers?