Across the Barricades 2: The Israel Lobby

Last year’s occupiers of Wall Street included protesters against not just the financial and banking lobby, but other powerful interest groups that dominate political life in America.   And the harshest criticism from across the barricades was directed not at people like me denouncing corporate greed, but against a lone fellow with a sign protesting U-S aid to Israel – billions of dollars in annual aid to a modern, prosperous country, far more than anything we give to any of the world’s poor nations.  He was subjected to long, heated lectures from passersby offended by the idea that the U.S should not provide such extraordinary support to its special friend in the Middle East.   I sympathized with him, and told him so, because I’ve been through it.

In fifty years as a journalist, I learned that criticizing Israel is a risky business in America – it can cost you friendships, reputation, career, or political office.  For example, in the current presidential campaign, no candidate including the President has questioned U.S. support for Israel, even as Israel has repeatedly threatened to ignite a disastrous war by attacking Iran’s nuclear program.  They haven’t because to do so would guarantee a storm of protest from one of the most powerful interest groups in America, known as the Israel lobby.

"A Separation:" Iran and Us

-- By Tom Phillips

Even if it’s just Ron Paul, I’m glad there’s one presidential candidate who’s willing to defy conventional wisdom and political orthodoxy, and talk sense about Iran's nuclear program.

Why shouldn’t Iran develop nuclear weapons?   

Paul, in his disarmingly candid way, points out that nuclear weapons earn nations respect.   They also provide protection from enemies, and Iran has two nuclear-armed enemies, Israel and the United States.  Iranians, like Americans and Israelis, understand that nuclear weapons are the best protection available for a state that’s on another state’s hit list.  Nonetheless, the U.S. is currently drawing red lines and threatening war with Iran over the nuclear issue, a war that would be disastrous to U.S. national interests.   Having invaded both of Iran’s Islamic neighbors, and considering the results and the costs, would anyone in his right mind order a third, potentially even bigger war in the region?   Following is a short list of reasons to let Iran be, concluding with a film review, so arts fans please stay with me.  

1.  Iranian nuclear weapons are no threat to the United States.  If Iran were to build a small arsenal of bombs, it would still lack the capacity to deliver them to targets in America, and absolutely no reason ever to do so.  That would be suicide for Iran.

2.   Rather than inflaming regional conflicts, nuclear weapons tend to stabilize them.    For example, Pakistan joined India in the nuclear club in 1998; and the two rivals, who went to war repeatedly in the 20^th century, have avoided major conflict in the 21^st, even though they have made little progress on the issues that divide them.  It’s as true in the nuclear age as ever – a balance of power promotes peace.   The only time nuclear weapons were used in war was when just one country had them -- which is exactly the situation today in the middle east.

3.   If Israel didn’t want its neighbors to build nuclear weapons, it shouldn’t have built them itself.  It is unreasonable in the extreme for any state to claim a right to a nuclear monopoly, in effect a one-way death threat against its neighbors.  Could the United States have argued that the Soviet Union had no right to build a bomb after World War Two?  Can Israel really argue that it is more peaceful and better-intentioned than its neighbors?   

4.   A nuclear-armed Iran could be contained, just like every other nuclear power.  If we can deal with Pakistan and North Korea, we can certainly deal with Iran.  The U.S. would have to change its tactics from bullying and threats to more conventional diplomacy, but the two nations have many interests in common, e.g. assuring a reliable flow of oil, and countering the strategic dominance of Russia and/or China in Asia.   

5.    U.S. policies of confrontation can only strengthen hard-liners and hotheads in Iran, a complex society with a complex government in which many points of view vie for influence. 

Like most Americans, I’ve never been to Iran and have met only a few Iranians over the years.  But recently, I peeked in a window on Iran today.   It’s the award-winning Iranian film“A Separation,” a realistic story without a happy ending.  This is the tangle of Iranian life at the domestic level, two families caught in a complex of deadly disputes, dragging issues of divorce, child care and eventually homicide into a disorderly but ultimately human system of justice.   One family – middle-class – is torn between a wife who wants to take the family abroad to educate their daughter, and a husband who feels bound to stay and take care of a senile, speechless father.   The other family – poor and desperate – is torn between a hot-headed, unemployed father looking for a payoff, and a devout Muslim mother who is afraid to lie for money because she’s afraid God will punish their daughter.  In this story, none of the characters is able to give in; every attempt at reconciliation is dashed.  I won’t give away the unhappy ending, but I will say it made me think of the current standoff between the U-S and Iran, and all the potential victims of mutual intransigence. 

Could it be that director Asghar Farhadi, working under the strict Iranian censorship that has cost other film-makers their careers, has smuggled out an allegory of the current struggles within Iran – hotheads and hard-liners, devout conservative loyalists, disaffected feminists, and a dying traditional society that no longer has a voice?  

Then there is the central character – the husband who refuses to emigrate, or divorce, or cop a plea.  He struck me as an emblem of the Iranian national character:  proud, principled, stubborn, willing to accept and inflict suffering rather than compromise when he feels he is in the right.   Might we have something in common with this fellow?  Gary Sick, an Iran scholar at Columbia University, suggests  we do.  He told The NewYork Times that the current campaign of sanctions, dirty tricks and assassinations is unlikely to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear program.  “It’s important to turn around and ask how the U.S. would feel if our revenue was being cut off, our scientists were being killed and we were under cyberattack,” Mr. Sick said. “Would we give in, or would we double down? I think we’d fight back, and Iran will, too.”

Unfortunately, while such points can be made freely among university scholars, state and defense department intellectuals, and foreign-policy think tanks, they have not become part of our public debate or the presidential campaign.  Ron Paul is roundly denounced by all rivals including President Obama, who ritually repeat the official line that Iranian nuclear weapons are “unacceptable” and subject to military response.

Why is it that oddball Ron Paul, who has no chance to be the next President, is the only one who dares question this dangerous policy?   The answer has to do with the distorting effect of lobbies on political discourse in the U.S.   There are certain issues which are off-limits in political campaigns, and a realistic discussion of the middle east is prime among them.  It’s also off-limits in much of mainstream journalism, where telling both sides of some stories can invite a storm of protest.    I learned about this in nearly fifty years as a journalist, and will write about it in an upcoming blogpost, hopefully before the next war breaks out.   

-- Copyright 2012 by Tom Phillips

“all legitimate art is a protest – a demand for a more human world.”  

Across the Barricades

By Tom Phillips

In several months of protesting with Occupy Wall Street, at Zuccotti Park, Times Square, Foley Square and Lincoln Center, I got into a number of conversations across the barricades.  As a more or less respectable 70-year-old, with signs in non-vulgar  language, I was an inviting target for curious cops, tourists, and passersby with one question on their minds:  What do you want?? 

“What would make you happy?  What would make you stop?” asked one exasperated cop at Lincoln Center, after complaining about 20-hour shifts on the barricades.

What I want is modest: a return to fairer competition and more equal sharing in the economic sphere, and a defensible set of values.  Protesters of my age have lived nearly 30 percent of this nation’s history, and we have seen sea-changes in the way America behaves, and the way we feel about ourselves as a nation.   Few would idealize the America of the 40s and 50s, with its stains of racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-communist witch hunts.  Still, the prevailing attitude then was one of common hope – that an expanding economy would benefit everyone, that success was to be shared.  Economic powers were roughly balanced – business was big but so was organized labor, strikes were feared and wages rose roughly in proportion to profits.  A progressive tax code with high marginal rates made the rich grumble, but for the most part they paid, out of respect for the “common man” who was seen as the hero of our economic as well as military dominance in the world.  It was a mentality of abundance. 

The U-S economy has continued to expand in the 50 years since my youth, but our mentality of abundance has disappeared.   I tried to tell the cop at the barricade that what I want would be good for him as well, as a member of the 99 percent.   I said we were basically in the same boat – like him, I had had a secure job with a strong union, good benefits, and a decent retirement.   But I didn’t want to live in a country that was denying those things to more and more of its people, including my own children and grandchildren.   The cop agreed that we were in the same boat, but his attitude was different:  “We can’t just give that to everybody, can we?  We can’t afford it.”   To him, his middle-class lifestyle was something to be defended against others’ claims.   We’re in the same boat, all right, but the only way we can stay in it is to keep others from climbing aboard.   Even as our national wealth has multiplied, America’s mentality of abundance has been replaced by one of scarcity and fear. 

What happened is NOT explained by a decline in the U-S economy; there has been no such thing.  Per capita GDP has more than doubled since 1960, but wages have risen less than half that (and hardly at all since the 1970s), while stock values have multiplied fourteenfold.  The bottom line is that the vast majority of increased wealth has gone to employers and investors.   That is due not to economics but politics:  a series of power grabs by the wealthiest Americans that deprived the rest of us of our share, and left us believing there’s not enough to go around.  

I watched it unfold and wrote about it as a journalist for nearly 50 years.   The 1960s opened with a surge of optimism.  When John F. Kennedy delivered his  inaugural speech -- “ask what you can do for your country” – America seemed to be on the verge of unparalleled greatness, and it was felt to be a communal effort, harking back to the general mobilization that won World War Two.   But as everyone knows, our age of unparalleled greatness crashed and burned in Vietnam, taking down with it Lyndon Johnson’s unpaid-for vision of a Great Society.  The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 began a conservative backlash that stumbled through the 1970s, but found its transformational leader in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. 

The Reagan revolution, for all its economic benefits, undermined our sense of common purpose.  Reaganomics – that heady combination of deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and a back of the hand for labor -  made it suddenly cool to take as much as you could for yourself, and never mind anyone else.  Corporations and individuals alike took the message to heart; the goal now was not just to make but to “maximize” profits, which meant that no amount of wealth was ever enough.  Our heroes were no longer common people but super-rich entrepreneurs and investors, as well as overpaid athletes and entertainers.  Rather than members of a winning team, these were seen as individuals who made their own rules, who left their peers and colleagues in the dust. 

Not everyone was comfortable with the new doctrine.  Accepting the Republican nomination in 1988, George H.W. Bush tried to moderate the free-market euphoria, calling timidly for a “kinder, gentler America.”  But that was drowned out in the celebration over the collapse of communism in 1989.  That seemed to seal the case for individual careerism, against any kind of collectivist thinking. 

The revolution stumbled again in the 1990s, as Ross Perot split the conservative majority and gave the White House to the Democrats.  But it didn’t stop, as the policies of the Clinton years made clear:  expanding global free trade, curtailing welfare at home, and deregulating banks with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.  The revolution reached its zenith in 2001 with the Bush tax cuts, which undermined the government’s ability to pay for itself, while accelerating the flow of wealth to the top one percent.   All this paved the way for the economic collapse of 2008 and the “great recession” that brought us to Zuccotti Park and this winter of discontent. 

So what is to be done?   Right now, it’s too cold for mass demonstrations, and camping out is only for the foolhardy.  Occupy Wall Street made its point and the real distinction between the one percent and the ninety-nine is widely accepted, as is the fact that growing inequality is bad for the economy as well as the social fabric.  

It was politics that got us into this mess, and politics will get us out.  But politics begins with the people.  Our President, the great compromiser for most of his first term, now seems to get the idea that there’s a bold movement out there that can re-elect him, if he’s squarely on the side of the public and not the oligarchies.  We need to hold him accountable if he wins.  And we need to do that at every level and branch of government.   We need to raise a new generation of political leaders who understand that we elect them to serve our interests, not sell us out. 

This is not going to be quick or easy.  It took thirty years for the right wing to establish its chokehold on American democracy, and it may take thirty years to pry every one of its fingers loose.  But the tide has turned. 

On New Year’s Eve, my wife and I went back to Zuccotti Park hoping to celebrate the New Year with our fellow protesters.  Unfortunately, most of the other celebrants were kids looking to pick a fight with the cops, who were glad to oblige.   Our conclusion:  there are more important things to do in 2012.   There’s no point in fighting with the cops; better to talk to them across the barricades, and convince them that what they too need is a government that looks out first for the interests of their families, not banks and corporations.  This kind of voter may indeed be the key to election 2012:  the middle and working-class whites who became Republicans in the Reagan years, and who have been ill-served by the GOP ever since. 

I don’t know how much progress I made with my blue-shirted friend at Lincoln Center.  He was suddenly called away to defend another part of the plaza against invading protesters.   His last words  were "I'll be back," but I never saw him again.  If you see him, whether across the barricades, in a donut shop, or watching the Super Bowl, talk to him.  

Copyright 2012 by Tom Phillips

On Strike Against New York City Ballet

By Tom Phillips

Full disclosure:  I did go to see Balanchine's Nutcracker at the David H. Koch Theater, paying $91 each for seats in the fourth ring, in order to bring a friend who'd never seen it.  It was a wonderful show as always.  But that's it, now I'm on strike against New York City Ballet.

I have seen hundreds of performances there since it opened as the New York State Theater in 1964, and written dozens of reviews over the last few years.  But I hereby vow to buy no more tickets, nor review any shows, nor accept any free press tickets, until the company reverses its ruinous new ticket price policies and invites the public back in. 

Is this fair?  I ask myself.  Dancers are fond of pointing out that the company does have bills to pay, and a multi-million dollar deficit.  How else can they survive?   I must answer that the company has brought its problems on itself, with decades of bad leadership, and the way back begins with changes at the top.

First to go should be Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief for nearly 30 years, who has proved unable to produce shows that the public will pay to see.  It’s not his fault that he is a poor choreographer.  But it is his fault that he has insisted on remaining the company’s chief choreographer through decades of badly-reviewed, badly-attended flops, culminating this year with the sinking of “Ocean’s Kingdom,” his collaboration with Paul and Stella McCartney.

At the same time, the NYCB Board of Directors should take a look at itself.  In the absence of strong leadership from the artistic side, it is the board that must take responsibility for change.  Dominated by Wall Street investment bankers, CEOs and socialites, it seems to have no artistic ideas, other than repackaging ballet as a media art and selling it on TV.   But ballet is not a media art, it depends on a live audience.  And the NYCB board has approved a catastrophic new pricing policy designed to drive away its live audience.    

I don't personally know any of the current board members, but as a member of the press I have often found myself seated among them in the orchestra section.  During intermissions I have listened to them chat about board meetings, parties, weddings and galas.  I don’t believe I ever heard a serious discussion of the ballet.  I always felt uncomfortable in the orchestra, partly because I missed the company of real balletomanes, dancers and ballet students, who sat in the third and fourth rings, where the view of the choreography is better, and where the seats were cheap enough to allow a person of modest means to make ballet a passion.   Philip Johnson, the architect who designed the theater for Balanchine and Kirstein, made the fourth ring by far the largest.   It’s an architectural marvel – a deep horseshoe that feels like a theater in itself, with perfect sight-lines for dance.  Rows A and B, in front of the aisle and close to the stage, could be the best seats in the whole house.   I and many other balletomanes have learned most of what we know starting in the fourth ring.   

So now, New York City Ballet is closing it.   

After repeated seasons of half-empty houses, NYCB will shut down the top half of the theater for most performances this winter season.   Subscribers and habitués of the third and fourth rings will have no choice but to find seats in the lower rings, at steeply higher prices except for a limited number of $29 seats with bad sight lines.  According to a person with knowledge of the events, the board acted after commissioning a study and receiving recommendations from an outside consulting group.  

What were they thinking?  How can you develop an audience by squeezing your long-time friends, and pricing tickets beyond the range of younger patrons?   I don’t know, and my calls to the NYCB press office for comment were not returned.  But I’m not the first to go on strike.  The boycott began last summer, when subscribers received their renewal offers, with the attendant sticker shock.  You can read a long string of protests at the Ballet Alert! website, under the headline “NYC Ballet Prices: Audience member goes on strike.”

What’s wrong with this picture?  The board is running this company as if it were a doing a leveraged buyout – downsizing the customer base and trying to milk more revenue out of those who remain.  That’s a short-term strategy that might work for an airline or a mining monopoly.  But it’s a disaster for an arts organization, especially a national treasure like NYCB that lives not by the laws of supply and demand, but by making new friends and keeping the old.   

What’s the right answer?  The same as it has always been – to put on shows that will excite the audience and fill the house.   Then you can sell the expensive seats, and make money on the third and fourth rings as well.  And when people love you, fund-raising becomes a lot easier.   The answer is art – and it’s out there. 

  

The world’s top choreographic talent has been available to New York City ballet, but somehow the company could not sustain its relationships with Alexei Ratmansky or Christopher Wheeldon.   And it wasted a unique resource by driving away Suzanne Farrell, Balanchine’s ultimate muse.   She has had only spotty success trying to recreate the Balanchine canon with a small pickup company, when she could have been teaching and staging ballets in her artistic home.

  

It’s not too late.  Those talents could be lured back.  New York City Ballet still has the best home-grown company of dancers in America, the best repertory, the best school, a gorgeous theater (credit where credit is due to Koch’s $100 million renovation gift) a fine orchestra and music director, and a huge base of followers loyal to the Balanchine/Robbins tradition. 

But there’s no time to waste.  In case NYCB hasn’t noticed, American Ballet Theater has set out to claw them off their perch as American’s foremost dance troupe.   ABT now has Ratmansky as its resident choreographer, and his new Nutcracker at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with tickets at popular prices.  After years as an international pickup company, ABT now has its own school, and a Studio Company that serves as a training ground.  

ABT also has something else that NYCB crucially lacks – an artistic director.   This is a huge hole in NYCB’s management chart.   An organization of this size needs a strong figure to mediate between the financiers on the board, the choreographers and dancers in the studio, and the audience in the theater.   ABT has artistic director Kevin McKenzie to handle all that, and Ratmansky to make the ballets.  NYCB has nothing but Martins, plus an executive director (Katherine Brown) whose role is limited to promotion and fund-raising. 

It is past time for the NYCB board to begin the search for new leaders.   There are plenty of candidates, starting with the former NYCB dancers who now run arts organizations around the country, who know and love the company and who have a better sense of what the public will pay to see.  And who would do the job for less than the $600 thousand-plus salary the board has lavished on Martins.   

Wake up, Wall Street.   You can’t do this without the 99 percent. 

Copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips 

The David H. Koch Nutcracker

-- by Tom Phillips



Battle scene from Balanchine's Nutcracker

When New York City Ballet and New York City Opera announced in 2008 that David H. Koch would donate 100 million dollars to renovate the New York State Theater, the opera called it a “transformative gift.” The ballet said it would “ensure the integrity of George Balanchine’s vision for the theater ..for decades to come.”  Three years later the renovation is complete.  But the opera company has left the building, now called the David H. Koch Theater, and Balanchine’s vision is in the dumpster.  Lincoln Center, conceived as a place where high culture would be available to the masses, is becoming just another exclusive haunt for the One Percent.   

A Prisoner of Hope

On Thursday night, December 1, 2011, I joined several hundred people in occupying Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.  The Occupy Wall Street movement – evicted from Zuccotti Park and now wandering the streets looking for places to protest -- called a general assembly for 10:30 on the Lincoln Center Plaza, right after the performance of Philip Glass’s opera “Satyagraha” at the Met.  The composer had suggested the meeting and was to speak to the crowd.  

I showed up a little before ten, hoping to get the lay of the land before the action began.  When I arrived, police were setting up barricades at the foot of the stairs on the east side of the plaza, obviously planning to keep protesters away from the central area around the fountain.  I slipped in as they were setting up the last of the barricades, and eventually found a handful of other protesters conferring on the plaza near the Met.   One had a cart full of the latest Occupied Wall Street Journal.   Three of us wound up handing out the paper to opera-goers as they poured out of the Met, and directing them to the barricades where Glass was to speak.  It took me back to my days as a newsboy in the 1950s.   “Get your Occupied Wall Street Journal heah,” I bawled, “Latest Tissue!”   Within minutes, all my papers were gone.  (It was a friendly crowd, fans of Glass’s opera about Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and many of them were eager to go over and join the people at the barricade.)  

By the time I got there, Glass had already spoken and the General Assembly was underway.  Several hundred people were bunched now on both sides of the barricade, with a line of cops in between.   A couple of scuffles broke out, provoking angry shouts from the crowd, but the organizers succeeded in bringing the focus back to the speakers, broadcasting their messages over the famous human microphone.  To me, the most touching speeches were from young artists – a Juilliard student, an unemployed dancer, a chorus member from the New York City Opera who had just been fired.  They were close to tears at the sight of the barricades, set up to keep them out of the very place where they had studied and performed.    

Lincoln Center was conceived in the 1960s as a place where high culture would be available to the masses.   I have spent a large part of my life there, as a sometime dance critic, a music-lover, a father of two dancers, and a midtown worker who loved to take lunch next to the tranquil pool around Henry Moore’s sculptures.  But now I am a protester, against an arts center that has gone relentlessly upscale, and cares more about revenue than beauty.   The last straw fell the day before, when I went to buy tickets for a family excursion to New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker.  This has been a family tradition for decades, made possible by the popular prices that were part of the mission of the New York State Theater.   But the New York State Theater is now the David H. Koch Theater, renovated with a gift from the billionaire right-wing financier.  And a seat in the third ring now costs $112.

What is to be done?   I was happy to be a newsboy outside the Met, and a broadcaster for the human microphone.  But I have been a journalist and critic for all of my adult life, and I feel I must use whatever talent I have to fight a battle that will be long, and difficult, and unsure of success.  And so this blog.   

When I got home after midnight from Lincoln Center, I took a look at the Occupied Wall Street Journal.  The lead article is by Cornel West, headlined “A Love Supreme,” a title from John Coltrane.  It concludes with a call for a revolution, which I will take as my conclusion.  

West writes:  “Revolution may scare some people because of its connotation of violence…  but the revolution in our time – against oligarchy and plutocracy – need not be an ugly and violent one.  The rich legacies of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, and recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, have taught us that we can deal with our social catastrophes with compassion and that we can transform unjust societies with courageous visions and nonviolent strategies.  If we equip ourselves with truthful systemic analyses of power in our minds, moral commitments of steel in our backs and a genuine joy in serving others in our hearts, then our dream of justice spread across the globe may be no mere illusion.  

“We are prisoners of a blood-stained, tear-soaked hope.  This means we are free to imagine and create a more deeply democratic world than we have yet witnessed in history.” 

Amen!  

As for Philip Glass (and Lou Reed)  I did catch their comments later on Youtube.   Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p1HWwh-rM8&feature=share

-- Tom Phillips