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Categorie: Media (500)

Gepubliceerd: 15 januari 2016

Hardball

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

As the election season progresses and the Iowa caucus comes closer, the polls tighten and the campaigns get meaner.  On the Republican side it’s between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, at least for now.  After having acted as Best Friends Forever until recently Trump took the gloves off and brought up the issue of Cruz’s foreign birthplace, and the fact that the senator did not ditch his Canadian passport until he started running for US President. 
      Cruz tried to wave it off but soon landed in a legal quagmire.  A host of constitutional scholars has now argued that it has never been settled how ‘natural born citizen’ should be defined, but that the Framers clearly meant ‘born in the USA.’  Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, who taught constitutional law to Chief Justice Roberts as well as Barack Obama and Ted Cruz, pointedly argued that ‘redemptive constitutionalism,’ the liberal current in legal thought, would suggest that a broad, non-contemporary interpretation of the term is the proper one, which would make Cruz eligible to run for the White House, but he also made clear that Cruz’s own ‘originalism’ would prohibit that.
      Trump’s argument against Cruz’s eligibility to become president is a logical extension of the ‘birtherism’ campaign he launched against Obama.  The fact that Obama’s mother was a US citizen was never in doubt, and the issue at the time was whether Obama was born in Kenya or in Hawaii, with the assumption that the former scenario would have disqualified him.  Similarly, Cruz’s mother’s US citizenship is not in question, but from a legal perspective Canada is no different from Kenya.  Trump is hammering home his point in both a tenacious and an amusing way.  He correctly observes that if Cruz were to become the GOP nominee, Democrats would file a lawsuit against his candidacy, and therefore advises Cruz, ‘as a friend,’ to seek clarity about his status in the courts.  Cruz cannot expect any support from  his colleagues in the Senate, who in a  slightly similar situation in the past certified John McCain’s natural born citizenship, and Trump knows that any attempt at clarification will sow doubt in the minds of potential Cruz voters and tie the candidate up in a court battle for at least months, reducing his effectiveness on the trail.
      Although not surprising, it is still a sight to see how little support Cruz is getting in the political arena.  Mitch McConnell declared that the Senate should not involve itself with campaign issues, and John McCain called Trump’s questions ‘legitimate.’  Apart from Donald Trump, his wife and children, his parents, Steve King and Jeff Sessions nobody likes Ted Cruz, whom David Brooks in today’s New York Times calls a stranger to “humility, mercy, compassion and grace.”
      Meanwhile, on the Democratic side Hillary Clinton is now forcefully attacking Bernie Sanders for a House vote he took in 2005, shielding gun manufacturers from liability.  Sanders’s inability to call that vote a mistake will cost him votes in the long run, and Hillary is trying to get into Bernie’s socio-economic lane with a proposal for an added 4% tax on the super-rich.
      After having lost the nomination to a young black man in 2008 the possibility of losing to an old white man in 2016 must be a constant nightmare for Hillary, and as long as that possibility is real she’ll throw everything but the kitchen sink at Sanders, and if need be the sink too.

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Categorie: Media (500)

Gepubliceerd: 06 januari 2016

Luister bij het lezen naar My Country, Tis of Thee gezongen door Kelly Clarkson op Inauguration Day 2013

My Country, tis of Thee

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Lately I have frequently been watching, and listening to, the rendition of America’s first national anthem by Kelly Clarkson at Barack Obama’s second inauguration.  Somehow it gives me the certainty that in November 2016 the American people won’t hand the White House over to a real estate developer turned media clown, who at will can change into a xenophobe, a racist, a misogynist or a mini-Hitler, depending on the responses of his audiences, or to an acidic legal scholar operating on the far right side of the Constitution, whose only ambition is to starve the government, or to the son of Cuban immigrants, who betrayed his own kind in one of the most monumental flip-flops of all-time, or to a bully from New Jersey, who hasn’t seen his state in months but is probably already scouting the DC area for bridges he can close to retaliate against Democrats, or to the scion of a political dynasty, who has become so desperate that he now has his brother, the former president who was asleep when the 9/11 warnings came in, then sent US troops oversees for an insane adventure and had the economy collapse on his watch, campaigning for him.
      The lyrics of the song are not always encouraging.  ‘Sweet land of liberty’ is promising, but then comes the line ‘Land where my fathers died,’ suggesting that if your father didn’t die in the US you don’t belong here, which would make both Obama and me unwanted aliens.  The following line, ‘Land of the Pilgrim’s pride,’ is even more concerning.  Although the Pilgrims, as religious separatists, were not exactly like the Puritans, who still recognized the authority of the Church of England, they often had even more extreme views than the latter, who were infamous for their intolerance against other Christians, let alone Jews or Muslims.  If Donald Trump was not of German descent, and his family’s name had not originally been Drumpf, his anti-Muslim tirades would fit very well in this tradition.  It makes the line ‘Let freedom ring’ sound hollow, because the Pilgrims only wanted freedom for themselves but for nobody else.  But what makes the song so impressive is the way it is sung, the arrangement, the fantastic band and its director, and most of all Obama’s priceless, if hardly noticeable, facial expressions as Clarkson performs.
      The commentator announces Kelly Clarkson as ‘the winner of American Idol,’ and immediately after she’s finished all he can say is ‘Kelly Clarkson, a terrific voice.’  She goes from soft to all out in the three verses she sings, and every time her cue is the director who raises his head and opens his mouth wide when a verse starts.  During the first verse Obama looks pensive, during the second amazed, and during the third excited, as if he’s thinking:  “Shit, how fantastic is this?”
      At the time of his second inauguration Obama already had the major achievements of his presidency behind him.  He had pulled the economy out of the ravine where George W. Bush had left it and he had passed the Affordable Care Act, and his being fully accepted as the US President was perfectly mirrored by the shown acceptance of Clarkson by black women in the crowd.
      Call me a dreamer, but I cannot imagine that a country where such wonderful events have been possible so recently is about to regress into the grip of reactionary Republican rule that sends women back to the needle,  the uninsured needy to the ER, and the poor to charity.

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Categorie: Media (500)

Gepubliceerd: 30 december 2015

Anglo-Amerikaanse overheersing

Ik heb gisteren eens een tijd echt naar de Top 2000 geluisterd. Je weet natuurlijk dat die lijst gedomineerd wordt door Anglo-Amerikaanse bands en solisten. Maar het was erger dan ik dacht. ik hoorde alleen maar Engels tot Boudewijn de Groot na ruim een uur aan de beurt was.

Zou het echt zo monopolistisch zijn?
Zou onze keus uit pakweg 60 jaar populaire muziek in zekere zin vrijwel alleen maar bestaan uit meer van hetzelfde?
Zou er nog iets Frans, Duits of Spaans tussen zitten?
Zouden er nummers uit Afrika of Azië inzitten?
Uit Oost-Europa wellicht? Zuid-Amerika?

Nutteloze vragen. Je kent het antwoord.

Ik heb even de eerste 50 gerubriceerd.

24 keer Engeland
16 keer USA
1x Brits/Amerikaans
6 keer Nederland
1 keer Ierland
1 keer Schotland
1 keer Australië

Favorieten: Coldplay (4x); Adele (3x); Dire Straits (3x); Pink Floyd (3x); Metallica (2x); Rolling Stones (2x)

Voor Nederland: Claudia de Breij, Boudewijn de Groot, Racoon, Guus Meeuwis, Dotan en Wim Sonneveld.

De eerste ‘’buitenlanders’’ staan een eind verderop: Charles Aznavour (143). Abba (155); Jacques Brel (156)

Wat dit zegt over onze ontwikkeling, onze visie, onze moraal, onze afstemming, onze mores, onze diversiteit, onze eigenheid, onze opvoeding en onze kijk op de wereld moet uzelf maar uitmaken! Maar ik zou er niet gerust op zijn.

Goedemorgen!

Lees ook eens wat mijn oud VPRO-collega Wim Bloemendaal hier over schrijft

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Categorie: Media (500)

Gepubliceerd: 13 december 2015

Sinatra

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

When you drive into Hoboken (New Jersey), you see a sign ‘Birthplace of Baseball and Frank Sinatra.’  The first organized game of baseball, between two clubs from New York City, was played on the Elysian Fields, three blocks from my current apartment, and Sinatra was born on Monroe Street, one hundred years ago today.  I didn’t immediately see the sign, because I first arrived in Hoboken in the middle of the night, but the next day I walked into a bar called ‘The Chatterbox,’ and then I realized how important Sinatra still was to Hoboken.  Tending bar was Trudy, the niece of the owner, Thea, who spoke English with a beautiful Rotterdam accent.  At the bar were Hoboken old timers: George, Thea’s husband, Mario, Ray, Frankie, Willy, Izzie and Buddy, each with their own Sinatra memories.  In the jukebox were all the songs Sinatra had ever recorded.  I soon found my two absolute favorites, ‘I’ll be seeing you’ and ‘That’s what God looks like to me,’ which I liked even more after my son was born and played while I listened to their stories.  “Sinatra is the best,” they would say, an honor that was otherwise only reserved for DiMaggio.

Frank’s mother had been a midwife who also performed abortions, which was obviously illegal at the time.  She was sometimes referred to as ‘a little angel maker,’ but pretty much every old timer I knew claimed to have been delivered by her.  Frank’s father, a fireman, wanted him to attend Stevens Institute of Technology, where I’ve been teaching since 1987, but Frank wanted to be a singer, not an engineer, so he left Hoboken for New York City.  In 1985, over the protests of the students, Stevens honored Sinatra with a Doctorate in Engineering, for which President Reagan came over from DC in a helicopter.  I once joked that Frank basically had earned the honorary degree because he didn’t want to study at Stevens, but that didn’t go over well in the Faculty Club.  Sinatra anecdotes are famous, for instance the one about the time when he bought all the champagne glasses in a restaurant so that a waiter, who had been scolded by the manager, could break them, but my favorite is the one about the Stevens President who flew to LA to ask Sinatra for a donation, was briefly greeted on the first tee of a golf course, and never saw Sinatra again.

When you’re relatively young you don’t always see things in the right perspective, and therefore my generation, unlike the generation before us, largely missed the importance of Frank Sinatra.  We grew up with Elvis, Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones, and for us Sinatra was someone from the past, like Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole.  But Dylan, from that previous generation, knew better.  “Sinatra never went away,” he said in a recent, fascinating interview in the AARP magazine.

Still today, listening to Sinatra is a revelation.  As Bob Dylan says: “He had the ability to get inside of the song in sort of a conversational way.  Frank sang to you, not at you.”  The New York Times writes today that Sinatra brilliantly infused popular song with personal emotion, and to experience that again I’ll watch all four hours of ‘All or nothing at all’ on HBO tonight.

Before I moved to my current apartment I lived in a building on 406 Jefferson Street, one block from the lot at 415 Monroe Street where Sinatra’s birthplace had been.  So for a couple of years we were practically neighbors, and I still see him in Hoboken, a skinny Italian kid that wanted to be a singer.

(Op Sinatra-day geschreven; 12 december)

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