Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal. —Anatole France
Greetings from the far left coast, where your oft humbled scribe is deep in doldrums. Just weary of it all. But I caught a fine film.
Nina Hoss has been a favorite actor since I saw her in Barbara (2012), one of four films she has made with director Christian Petzold. I was less taken with Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008) than with Barbara and Phoenix (2014), but that has nothing to do with Hoss, and maybe more to do with my sensibility than anything negative about Petzold's efforts. Her 2020 film My Little Sister, directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, ranks with Barbara and Phoenix. Hoss is one of those actors who seem to work all the time. There is much I have missed, including American productions A Most Wanted Man (2014), with Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Homeland (Showtime 2014–2017).
Film journalist Lawrence Lerman compared Hoss to Isabelle Huppert before her (Huppert b. 1953, Hoss 1975) "in terms of emotional resonance, physical presence and a purity of technique" and like Huppert "her remarkable body of work finds its center in the quiet" (The Quiet Brilliance of Nina Hoss, The Insider, April 13, 2021). Huppert is another favorite.
In The Audition (2019, dir. Ina Weisse) Hoss is Anna, a music teacher who takes on a young violinist in whom she sees talent when other teachers at her school do not. Alexander is quiet, reserved, but eager to learn and improve. Teacher and pupil respond well to one another at the beginning, with Alexander soaking up everything Anna gives him.
As the date for an important audition approaches, Anna's determination to mold Alexander into the violinist she wants him to be turns into demand for perfection. She pushes ever harder, more demanding, less patient, when he does not measure up. Apart from mild protest when Anna instructs him to increase his practice time from two hours a day to four after having told him before that it is intensity that counts, not quantity, Alexander draws away, silent, anguish evident.
At home Anna's relationship with her husband, who makes musical instruments, is complicated. Displays of tenderness interplay with barely articulated longing and unfulfilled need. She pushes her son, several years younger than Alexander, to master the violin. Jonas goes in more for ice hockey. When he says he wants a dog, she tells him he has one, the violin. Her husband tells her she expects too much. Jonas can be good at other things. Anna replies that life is barely long enough to be good at one thing.
Anna is more sympathetic than the preceding remarks indicate. She loves her husband and Jonas, although both relationships are strained, and she cares about Alexander, yet she remains distant from them all, isolated, haunted and driven by insecurities and fears born of her own failures, talented, vulnerable, stubborn, unable to communicate her feelings to others.
We see some of what lies in the depths in an episode where a fellow teacher invites Anna to join his chamber ensemble. She is reluctant. He persists. She gives in. She is apprehensive while practicing with the group, then visibly distraught backstage before a concert. In the midst of the performance the bow escapes her grip and flies across the stage. She is mortified, shattered. Later she explains to her friend that this is why she left the orchestra. It started with a tremor in her right hand. In the end she could not even tune her violin. Whenever she plays, she is thinking of how she will fail, something to which I can relate.
Images that stick with me are of Anna walking in the rain to school or back home. Her stride and the way she holds herself convey the weight of solitude and the resolve that keeps her going as things fall apart. Near the end she blurts out to a colleague that her son hates her and her pupil does not come to class.
The concluding scenes are ambiguous. Brief triumph turns to tragedy. There may be hope for Anna and her relationship with her son, her marriage, and there may be hope for Alexander, but no assurance for any of it. Emotional, at times wrenching, moving and revelatory in the way that film is at its best. Yes. I liked it.
Back to weary of it all. I mean, at the outset, Democrats. And it is not Joe Manchin I have in mind. The abortion issue is gearing up to join Build Back Better in the fiasco parade. Can Chuck Schumer possibly be as incompetent as he appears? It is not all on Schumer, but he does have me shaking my head time and again. The temptation to call for an end to gerontocracy would be near irresistible if not for the general detachment from reality among the young firebreathers who head up the progressive ranks.
Even someone with my deep skepticism about polls can take seriously data backing up the intuitive conclusion that American attitudes about abortion are complicated. A majority support the right to abortion in some or all cases, but only a distinct minority, 19 percent, support it in all cases. This is consistent with polling since the Roe decision in 1973. (Kevin Robillard, Americans Favor Abortion Rights, But It’s Complicated, HuffPost, May 6, 2022, one of numerous reports of these findings).
PolitiFact puts up bluntly: "The reality is that the data is murkier and more contradictory than…supporters and opponents of abortion rights care to admit." The results can be affected by question wording, question order, and other variables (Louis Jacobson, Why polling about abortion hides the true complexity of what Americans think, May 5, 2022):
"There is ample evidence that many people are ambivalent about the issue or experience significant cross-pressures in formulating an opinion," said Scott Keeter, a senior survey advisor to the Pew Research Center. "These realities make it quite difficult to sum up abortion attitudes in one or two sentences or with one or two questions."
This seems to escape Schumer and the likes of the House Pro Choice Caucus. Schumer treated his faithful to a symbolic "show" vote on a bill passed by the House (H.R. 3755, "Women's Health Protection Act of 2021) that is cluttered with extraneous jeremiads about white supremacy, "anti-Black racism," historical injustices and present discrimination against "Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color," and misogyny, with de rigueur waves to LGBT concerns thrown in for good measure.
Maybe this stuff is included to justify the legislation in the fanciful event that it should pass, become law, and be subject to the inevitable litigation seeking to overturn it. If this is the case, one is left to wish the bill's sponsors had more capable wordsmiths at their disposal to cast a concise, coherent argument, something more than the laundry list of victims and grievances. Related issues such as inequities in access to health care are genuine and pressing. The bill's muzzy hodgepodge only murks up the waters.
Related reading:
White evangelicals in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade, which they considered a Catholic issue. They organized instead to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions, including Bob Jones University.
To suggest otherwise is to perpetrate…the fiction that the genesis of the Religious Right—the powerful evangelical political movement that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades—lay in opposition to abortion. (Randall Balmer, The Abortion History the Right Doesn’t Mention, Politico, May 10, 2022
For the record, numero uno: I believe abortion should be legal, appropriately regulated, and readily available. The second item leaves open room for considerable difference of opinion as to what constitutes appropriate regulation. I have yet to pin myself down on that. The principle seems sound, although it is a safe bet there is difference of opinion about this too.
Numero two-o, as Molly Ivins used to put it: I do not go in for demonstrations at homes of elected officials, judges, abortion providers, etc. This may be constitutionally protected on First Amendment grounds, with the arguable exception of judges, for which there is an applicable 1952 law. That does not make it right or advisable. The only thing I can see gained by protesting at private homes instead of public buildings such as the Capitol is the element of harassment and intimidation.
The Know-Nothing right is metastasizing. Fifty-seven House Republicans voted against aid to Ukraine. In the Senate the distinguished solon Rand Paul is holding up a vote.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher and former editor of The Nation, speaks for a faction on the left that finds common cause with the Know-Nothings when she characterizes the conflict as a proxy affair between the US and Russia and argues for accommodation with the aggressor to spare the Ukrainian people the consequences of a long, grinding war.
Anyone who is not a blockhead will share vanden Heuvel's concern about the horrendous loss of life and property in Ukraine and economic fallout across the globe where countries, many of them poor, depend on Russian energy exports and on Russian and Ukrainian grain and other foodstuffs. Warnings against war fever and the cost of the US commitment are well taken. Nowhere though can vanden Heuvel bring herself to acknowledge that all of this is happening because of unprovoked Russian aggression. To the contrary, the implication that the West shares responsibility runs throughout her argument.
How much aid can the US, and Europe for that matter, provide Ukraine? For how long? These questions are relevant. Limits and competing interests have to be taken into account along with the ethical and moral dimension. One hopes that behind closed doors Biden, his brain trust, a term I use advisedly, and the European allies are doing so. Telegraphing their answers to these questions is in the interest of no one outside the Kremlin.
Vanden Heuvel's position comes down to allowing Putin to keep whatever he can take and let bygones be bygones: She calls for a settlement that would provide cover for the claim that Ukraine's sovereignty has been preserved "but that also ends the war sooner rather than later." She envisions this coming after Russia conquers the whole of Donbas, "as now seems Vladimir Putin's intent."
Any settlement would no doubt demand withdrawal of Russian forces, probably in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality and territorial integrity, recognition of Russia’s control of Crimea, and some kind of federated status for the separatist provinces in Eastern Ukraine. And sanctions would no doubt need to be lifted. (Endless war in Ukraine hurts national and global security, The Washington Post, May 11, 2022)
There is no mention of Russian war crimes or responsibility to help rebuild Ukraine. At least vanden Heuvel does not propose that the West compensate Russia for damage to its economy caused by sanctions.
Tim Judah has been to Ukraine, seen the corpses of executed civilians, and spoken to survivors. His account in the current issue of The New York Review is riveting (The Russian Terror, May 26, 2022). Two passages particularly strike me:
It is not well understood abroad just how sophisticated and well organized Ukraine’s volunteer networks are. Many of them grew out of the Maidan Revolution of 2014, and even if many had been dormant since then, they have sprung back to life now via social media, giving people the opportunity to help. And that feeling of pulling together and wanting to be involved in however small a way is widespread. To get to Chernihiv I hitched a ride with some Ukrainian journalists. As we returned to Kyiv I took out some cash to pay for my share of the gas. Then, while we sat at a checkpoint waiting to enter the city, the colleague who was driving whipped out his phone and the money was promptly donated to the Ukrainian army.
Last July Putin wrote an essay, which was published on the Kremlin website, in which he discussed the idea of Russians and Ukrainians being one people, from which follows the idea that Ukraine has no right to exist as a state separate from Russia. The legacy of this war is that millions of Ukrainians now hate Russia and Russians with a passion that, for many, was not so strong even after the annexation of Crimea and the creation of the two pseudo-states in Luhansk and Donetsk by Russia in 2014. In the liberated towns and villages around Kyiv and Chernihiv and elsewhere, people are cleaning up now, if their homes have not been destroyed, but what is fanning the hatred even more than the experience of invasion and occupation are the murders, summary executions, and reports of rape.
Against this backdrop vanden Heuvel and the Know-Nothing brigade command the moral low ground.
Ah, I have rattled on enough, however much else in the swamp of current affairs warrants commentary, and quite a lot does. Maybe next time.
One new blog post: Preliminary Thoughts and My Own Slanted Perspective on the Leak and the Opinion. May 6, 2022. The wave of sturm und drang unleashed by the leak of Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade notwithstanding, the revelation tells us little we did not already know. It has for some time been a foregone conclusion…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: painting by Jim Darlington
