What Do I Think About the Iraq War? Part I

First, allow me to say that Americans have a genius for learning the wrong lesson from their experiences. We see this, for example, in the progressive movement's scapegoating of Ralph Nader. (If Al Gore couldn't afford to lose even a few votes to Nader, surely the real problem wasn't Nader's presence on the ballot but Gore's own inadequacy. Bush Jr. might well have won the 2000 election even without the Nader campaign, and Gore might well have succeeded even with it.) Another example is the people who look at the present-day mess in Iraq and say that it proves Bush Sr. was right not to remove Saddam Hussein back in 1991.

Although I was far from enthusiastic about the 1991 war, I always thought it was wrong to stop short of removing Saddam from power. IMHO Saddam's removal at that time would have done little more harm but a lot more good. Of course, I can't say for sure that if an occupation back in 1991 had been carried out with the same incompetence as post-2003, the results wouldn't have been equally disastrous. But several factors would have improved the odds of success considerably: there would have been a far larger force to keep order, a genuinely international force with Arab nations well-represented. And there was no Al-Qaeda back then to exploit the disorder.

My first objection to the "containment" policy that Washington settled for is moral. Leaving Iraq in Saddam's hands meant condemning the Iraqi people to the worst of both worlds, caught between Saddam's dictatorship and the privations of a strict sanctions regime, with no means of escape. If Saddam was too dangerous to be left in power without these sanctions--and I'll take their word for it--then he was too dangerous to be left in power at all. As it worked out, about 500,000 innocent Iraqis seem to have died just from the effect of these sanctions, a number greater than the previous war and still comparable to the later one. (It's always seemed to me that Washington's Oil for Food program was a spin operation, to distract people from the fact that the Iraqis had been abandoned to their fate.) Bush Sr. may have said that America's fight was with Saddam and not with the Iraqi people, but look who paid the price in the end! I shuddered when I heard Bush Jr. say that his quarrel was with the Taliban and not the Afghan people.

Bush Sr.'s decision to bomb Iraq halfway to the Stone Age and then leave Saddam in power struck some people as "inconsistent." The way I see it, these two choices actually reflected a contemptible underlying consistency: the pursuit of power without responsibility. The best argument for the 2003 invasion was that it meant taking belated responsibility--at least in theory-- for a nation that had borne the brunt of American power without any accompanying benefits.

For those who dismiss me as a naively moral pwog incapable of realpolitik, my second objection is strategic: containment embodied short-sighted prudence. It wasn't that containment couldn't work on its own terms, though we can't be completely sure that Saddam could never have found some new way to become dangerous again. Rather, effecting containment meant stationing a large US force in Saudi Arabia to prevent Iraq from invading its neighbors again. And there were a lot of Saudis who didn't like the foreigners' presence in Islam's central "holy" land. One of them, Osama Bin-Laden, responded by forming Al-Qaeda and declaring the US an enemy of Islam. At the very least, the Americans had handed Osama a convenient pretext for turning other Arabs against them. The result was that several of Osama's rich friends gave generously and helped finance the building of a terrorist army from scratch. In 2001 the policy literally blew up in Uncle Sam's face. Containment itself was the true "root cause": the US presence in Saudi Arabia was only inevitable to the extent that leaving Saddam in power was inevitable--in other words, not at all.

Since I'd always considered containment despicable, I wasn't really in a position to oppose the 2003 invasion that ended the policy. (Consistency, of course, is "the hobgoblin of little minds.") But I did feel more than a bit skeptical about whether the Bush Jr. administration had the skills to pull it off successfully. More on Iraq in my next post.

"Plant a Tree, Laddie, It'll Grow While Ye're Sleeping!"

(old Scottish saying)

I often dream of my old home. For most of the time between 1963 and 1990 , I lived with my family in a ranch house near a quarry, at 8 West Avenue in the university town of Sackville New Brunswick. (My father was a physics professor at Mount Allison University.) The only exception was four years in which my father went away on sabbatical: 1965-66 we lived in Brighton, England, just when it was the big mod centre, something we were totally unaware of; 1974-75, when we lived in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga; 1981-82, when we spent the first half near Canterbury, England, and the second half in Toronto; 1988-89 when we were in Scotland. (I'm the youngest in the family, and by the time of his last sabbatical I was the only child still living at home.) That's a total of about 23 years.

At age 28 I finally moved to Toronto, visiting Sackville in May and August for the next few years. My parents eventually moved there too, and we finally sold the house in 1996, after renting it out for a couple of years. My parents and I came back to Sackville for a few days just before it was sold, and I'm glad I took that last trip.

My dreams about the old home feel funny because even as I dream, part of me remembers that it's now somebody else's house. I've sometimes dreamed that we're temporarily renting the house back from the owners! These dreams seem to take place in August, and sometimes I dream that it's time to return to Toronto and that we won't be coming there anymore. Other times I dream that I'm visiting the new owners. I feel like an intruder, even though I didn't ask to dream this way. We bought the house I now live in from a family that moved back to Portugal; I wonder if they dream about it too. (I also dream about a cottage we used to have near Northumberland Strait when I was a kid.)

About five years ago my parents and I were travelling in the Maritimes and we stopped in Sackville. We drove by the old house, and even parked at a discreet distance to look at it. (The new owners have laid a semicircular driveway on the front yard, like my aunt's house near Sydney, Nova Scotia.) What really impressed me were the trees. Over the years we've planted dozens of trees around the property, and some of them have grown really big. There's the weeping willow out back that's almost as old as me; the oak tree my brother transplanted from the other side of the quarry as a boy scout project (I think); the Scotch pine we planted in 1975; the fir trees we dug up out of town; the two maple trees we transplanted from the roof of the physics building auditorium in 1980 (they'd sprouted from leaves that fell off tall maples); the apple trees in the back yard; the poplar trees that emerged in 1985 as offshoots from our neighbor's poplars (they emerged because the early summer was really rainy, and my sister was getting married in Halifax so we didn't get around to mowing the lawn for quite a while).

Thinking about how the trees have continued to grow and grow after we left, I can't help thinking about how the trees you planted (literal and metaphoric) will continue to grow after you're dead, which gives me an odd feeling of comfort. I think I'd like to be cremated and have a tree planted over my ashes, as they often do in China. The Chinese have a proverb that goes, "Our ancestors planted trees; we sit in the shade." So let's all plant trees for our descendants.

My Current Reading Material

I'm now reading SUPERSTUD: OR HOW I BECAME A 24-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN. It's a memoir by Paul Feig (who created the classic TV series FREAKS AND GEEKS) about the time when he was a teenager in the late '70s, then a college boy in the early '80s, all the while trying to pick up girls. It's really funny!

"While I slowly and nervously maneuvered my grandmother's aircraft carrier of a car through the sea of souped-up Cameros, TransAms, El Caminos, and Dusters, I looked at the occupants of the other vehicles. It was at that moment I suddenly realized this was the first real rock concert I had ever attended. I'd managed to fool myself into thinking the Saturday-afternoon Beach Boys concert my friend Craig had taken me to the past summer at the pastoral Pine Knob outdoor concert theater had made me a veteran of live rock shows. But seeing the rough-looking mustached and bearded burnouts of all ages crammed into their muscle cars, swilling down cans of beer and bottles of Jack Daniel's, passing around joints and screaming "FUCKIN' A!" at the top of their lungs as their car stereos blurted out Ted Nugent and Led Zeppelin songs, I realized that I was completely out of my element. This crowd seemed like pure, mind-altered aggression. Chances were slim that if one of these guys decided he wanted to beat me up, I could win him over by doing my impression of Dan Ackroyd doing his impression of Jimmy Carter or by making a quarter disappear by doing the French Drop sleight-of-hand move I had leared in my Bill Tarr's NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T coin magic book. The most I could hope for was that the sight of Jill and her enormous bosoms walking next to me would get me the same respect that I seemed to be getting in the halls of my high school.

"Make sure Jill takes her coat off when we get inside, I mentally noted to myself."

I'll have to read Feig's other teenage memoir KICK ME.

Toronto Opera and Me

Last month I finished my third season as a baritone-bass in the chorus of the Toronto Opera Repertoire, a non-professional opera company (toronto-opera.com) that puts on shows every February at the Bickford Centre. We do it in the form of a night-school course, learning the music Tuesday nights in the fall term, and rehearsing on stage and performing in the winter term. (In the fall us men go downstairs to a separate room to learn our lines, and the women always seem to learn faster than we do!) Instead of an orchestra, we have piano accompaniment by the brilliant Adolfo diSantis. In recent seasons, we've had surtitles!

The company is headed by famous Toronto journalist Gerald Hannon, who also sings baritone solo roles, and his comic performances are really funny. We rely on regulars like George Seppenwolde (also a soloist), who does our makeup every year. (The first time I looked in a mirror and saw myself in stage makeup, I reminded myself of Laurence Olivier in THE ENTERTAINER.) In particular, Barbara Thompson is the Girl Friday who gets most of the work done, from making sure all the costumes have arrived to being a den mother keeping an eye on all the choristers for potential problems.

In 2003-4 we did Donizetti's LUCIA DI LAMERMOOR and Mozart's DON GIOVANNI; 2004-5 I skipped the opera and took drama courses instead, then went to see the others in Puccini's MADAMA BUTTERFLY and Rossini's THE BARBER OF SEVILLE; 2005-6 we did Donizetti's L'ELISIRE D'AMORE and a double bill of Puccini's SUOR ANGELICA and Pergolesi's LA SERVA PADRONA. But this past season the combined work was harder than usual. It was our 40th anniversary, so we did an ambitious program: Verdi's LA TRAVIATA and RIGOLETTO. The one constant each year is that we'll do one opera with quite a few choruses and a second with not so much. (Last year SUOR ANGELICA had largely female choruses, with us men only coming in at the end with the celestial voices; LA SERVA PADRONE was soloists only.) Rig is shorter on choruses, but even that has lots of difficult stuff where we come in at the end of the bar etc. and I found it the more challenging of the two. We had an unusually long time learning all our lines, and even I, who previously had my lines down cold by Christmas, took longer this year. But the gamble paid off, and we had a successful season.

What makes it all possible is the vision of conductor-director Giuseppe Macina, who's been with the company from the start. (His favorite expression is "JESUS MURPHY!") He used to sing opera at the pro levels, and he does everything down to set design. At the nonpro level, the key is to do more with less, and he has an eye for every detail, like that the Trav doctor should remove his glove before taking Violetta's pulse, or that the Rig women can wear rubies or emeralds, but they didn't wear diamonds back in the Renaissance. I used my regular shoes for Trav, but brought my slippers for Rig. What was especially fun was at the start of the third act of Rig, just after we've kidnapped Gilda, when he had us hustling her across the stage Snidely Whiplash-style. The piano accompaniment actually added to the silent-movie melodrama effect here.

Performing in an opera, even in the chorus, is a unique experience. Giuseppe has always seen the company as providing an opportunity for nonpro soloists to sing, but for us choristers it's also a rare chance. You get a fuller appreciation of even the most familiar operas by learning to sing them. (Even listening to the DON GIOVANNI music again and again backstage, I never got tired of it.) For me, the time when the lights go down before the performance starts is like the time at a birthday party when they lower the lights just before bringing in the cake with candles. We're supposed to keep quiet in the wings, but it's a rule honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Our ticket price is $22, less for students and old folk. We do very well to fill half the seats, though I'm told we'd sell out back in the '70s when there was less competition. We also have fundraisers, and last fall we had a big event in the mezzanine of the Canadian Opera Company's new building. (The COC's Richard Bradshaw is our honorary chair.) Our main expense is renting costumes from Malabar, and we're lucky they give us a generous discount.

Acting as well as singing is a challenge. When we put on LUCIA, Giuseppe wanted us to react more when Edgardo grabbed Lucia in the wedding scene, so I bit my thumb. (More Italian than Scottish, I'll admit.) For that production I even imagined myself as a clansman who really didn't want to fight Edgardo but didn't want to look weak in front of his kinfolk. Last fall we had an acting class, for which David Roche printed out a long list of possible motivations for being at Violetta's party, like "You come to steal her knick-knacks, either to sell them or out of spite," or "You're homosexual, and they understand these things here," or "You've lost your faith, so you may as well lose your virginity too." We did an exercise where we pretended to be freaks in a sideshow, and I became a Wild Man who went around scaring people. Great fun!

What will we do next year? It all depends on Giuseppe's evaluation of the solo talent.

UPDATE:

It turns out that we'll be doing two of the following three operas: Verdi's UN BALLO IN MASCHERA, Puccini's LA BOHEME, or Offenbach's TALES OF HOFFMAN.

The Amateur Editor

The opening paragraph of Lady Antonia Fraser’s MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS:

“The winter of 1542 was marked by tempestuous weather throughout the British Isles: in the north, on the borders of Scotland and England, there were heavy snow-falls in December and frost so savage that by January the ships were frozen into the harbour at Newcastle. These stark conditions found a bleak parallel in the political climate which then prevailed between the two countries. Scotland as a nation groaned under the humiliation of a recent defeat at English hands at the battle of Solway Moss. As a result of the battle, the Scottish nobility which had barely recovered from the defeat of Flodden before, were stricken yet again by the deaths of their leaders in their prime; of those who survived, many prominent members were prisoners in English hands, while the rest met the experience of defeat by quarrelling among themselves, showing their strongest loyalty to the principle of self-aggrandizement, rather than to the troubled monarchy. The Scottish national Church, although still officially Catholic for the next seventeen years, was already torn between those who wished to reform its manifold abuses from within, and those who wished to follow England’s example, by breaking away root and branch from the tree of Rome. The king of this divided country, James V, having led his people to defeat, lay dying with his face to the wall, the victim in this as much of his own passionate nature, as of the circumstances which had conspired against him. When James died on 14 December 1542, the most stalwart prince might have shrunk from the Herculean task of succeeding him. But his actual successor was a weakly female child born only six days before, his daughter Mary the new queen of Scotland.”

How I would have written it:

In December of 1542 the king of Scotland lay dying with his face to the wall. Snow fell heavily on the English border, with a savage frost that in a month would have Newcastle’s ships frozen into the harbour. James V had recently led the nation’s nobility, which had barely survived Flodden a generation before, to another English rout at Solway Moss. Many prominent lairds were dead or prisoners in England; the rest, putting their own interests before the troubled monarchy, turned to quarrelling among themselves. The national Church was also torn: some wanted to reform its manifold abuses from within, while others looked to England’s example and wished to break away root and branch from the tree of Rome, a move the Church would finally make seventeen years later. Circumstance had combined with the king’s passionate nature to produce crisis. James V passed away on the 14th, leaving a Herculean task for any successor. His weakly six-day-old daughter Mary became queen of Scotland.