Straight Up |: November 2005 Archives

In re: Yeah, the Holocaust really happened, a reader writes: "Americans might also remember this is a two-way street. With secret torture camps spread around Europe, we aren't cutting the best figure either." In fact, we had the same thought ourselves when posting the item.

We also had another thought: How come we keep harping on the Holocaust, which happened more than half a century ago, when we've said so little about recent genocides, like the genocide in Rwanda, or the current genocide in Darfur, or for that matter, the genocide of the Armenians -- the first Holocaust of the 20th century, if you will -- which we've never mentioned at all?

No answer, except our own inadequacy.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

The arrest in Vienna of discredited British historian David Irving for lying about the Holocaust got us to thinking: Is good news finally breaking out somewhere? Austrian authorities are holding him without bail, pending trial, for breaking a 1947 law that criminalizes Holocaust denial. His lawyer now says he's changed his views -- that gas chambers were, in fact, used in Auschwitz, contrary to a 1989 speech he gave in Austria 16 years ago, and that the Holocaust did indeed happen.

This also got us to thinking about our recent item on the hidebound circle jerks of the Vienna Philharmonic, whose long-buried historical relationship with the Holocaust still has contemporary echoes. For instance, at Anton Bruckner Private University (formerly the Bruckner-Konservatorium) in Linz (Hitler's hometown), not far from Vienna, the big concert hall is named for Wilhelm Jerger, who was director of the conservatory until 1973.

Jerger, right -- a contrabassist in the Vienna Philharmonic, and a Lieutenant in the Schutzstaffel (SS) -- became the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1938, when a program was set in motion to "Aryanize" Austrian culture after Austria was made part of Germany through the Anschluss. Musicologist William Osborne tells us:

During Jerger's leadership, six Jewish members of the Vienna Philharmonic died in the concentration camps. Eleven were able to save their lives by timely migration. Nine additional members were found to be of "mixed race" or "contaminated by kinship" ("Versippte") and reduced to secondary status within the orchestra. Twenty-six "non-Aryans" were thus either murdered, exiled or reduced in status while SS Lieutenant Jerger led the orchestra. [For documentation see: Dr. Clemens Hellsberg, Demokratie der Koenige: Die Geschichte der Wiener Philharmoniker (Zurich: Schweizer Verlagshaus: Wien: Kremayr & Scheriau; Mainz: Musikverlag Schott, 1992) p. 505. Hellsberg, who has a Ph.D. in musicology, is the current chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic. His book contains numerous discussions of Jerger's activities.]

In 1942, Wilhelm Jerger wrote a book celebrating the Vienna Philharmonic's centennial: Erbe und Sendung (Wien: Wiener Verlag Ernst Sopper & Karl Bauer, 1942.) Jerger's book illustrates his devotion to Nazi ideologies. He includes the genealogies of several prominent father-to-son generations that formed a historical continuum within the ranks of the Philharmonic. Jerger places an asterisk by the name of every "non-Aryan" listed in the tables. Jerger explains that the Aryan stock of these Philharmonic families was so "tough" that the purity of their "blood" was never notably damaged by what racists refer to as "dysgenic influences":

"And here it is demonstrated, that in spite of manifold influences of blood from elsewhere, this Mind [Geist] continues to implant itself with great toughness through the ancestral lineage, and that it is often very sharply imprinted. It is understandable, that such an inheritance must beget outstanding musicians, who in their stylistic education and in their experience of orchestral playing are already extraordinarily schooled. This is Mind from Old Mind, which helps tradition and inheritance, a dominant trait [überkommene Anlage] to a special development and fulfillment." (Page 87, translated from the German)

Schooling is acknowledged as important, but only in the context of a special "blood" inheritance that transmits "Mind". This follows National Socialism's ideology of Ahnenerbe, which asserts that cultural traits are genetically inherited. Jerger also presents a racist portrayal of Gustav Mahler, who became the General Music Director of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1898, replacing Hans Richter, who had led the orchestra for the previous 23 years. (The Vienna Philharmonic refers to the Richter years as its "golden age.") Mahler's tenure was troubled in part by a continual pattern of anti-Semitic harassment and he left the orchestra after three years. Using his own words and quoting those of Max Kalbeck (a famous critic at the time,) Jerger draws a comparison of Richter and Mahler that reveals the anti-Semitic attitudes Mahler confronted:

"A completely different type of personality entered with Mahler, 'as there' -- to speak with Max Kalbeck's vivid words -- 'instead of the tall blond bearded Hun, who placed himself wide and calm before the orchestra like an unshakable, solidly walled tower, there was a gifted shape [begabte Gestalt] balancing over the podium, thin, nervous, and with extraordinarily gangly limbs.' In fact, a greater contrast was really not possible. There the patriarchal Hans Richter in his stolidity and goodness, and his extremely hearty and collegial solidarity with the orchestra, and here Gustav Mahler, oriented to the new objectivity [neue Sachlichkeit] -- nervous, hasty, scatty, intellectualish [sic]-the music a pure matter of his overbred intellect." (Page 57, translated from the German)

Racist views are apparent in the language ("intellectualish," "overbred," "new objectivity" (a new aesthetic associated with Jews), "gangly limbs," "scatty" vs. "blond," "stolid," and so on). They reflect anti-Semitism and National Socialist aesthetics. The transparent sub-text is one of chauvinistic masculinity and genetic superiority.The book illustrates that Jerger was not an innocent bystander caught up in historical events. He was an active and avid cultural leader of the Nazi movement.

"Linz is by no means the only Musikhochschule with this problem," Osborne adds. "In Munich, Germany, the Musik Hochschule is housed in Hitler's personal office building. It was called the Fuehrerbau, and was designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, the same architect who designed Munich's Haus der Kunst." Osborne continues:

The Fuehrerbau is considered to be one of the most perfect stylizations of Nazi architecture still in existence. A lot of people get the creeps just walking into the place. There are stories still in circulation that people were tortured in the basement where the student cafeteria now is. Across the street is a sister building that looks identical and was a Nazi administration building. Much of Munich was destroyed by Allied bombing, but, ironically, these two buildings survived almost unscratched.

Yes, we know, much has changed in both Austria and Germany. But so much apparently has not.

Anyway, we think all of this is worth remembering when the Vienna Philharmonic's traditional New Year's concert is broadcast worldwide and when Carnegie Hall presents the orchestra this March for its annual concerts in New York.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

When 16,000 demonstrators marched in Columbus, Ga., earlier this month to protest U.S. military involvement in torture, they received less national attention than the Thanksgiving Day parade accident in which a giant helium balloon damaged a New York City lamppost and slightly injured two girls. How's that for media priorities?

Local press offered the best, most extensive, coverage of the protesters, who demanded that the Army shutter its Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly the School of the Americas), which trains Latin American military officers at Fort Benning. The (Columbus) Ledger-Enquirer not only ran three separate, well-written and -reported stories (on Nov. 20, "Record number of protesters"; on Nov. 21, "Orderly protest"; and on Nov. 22, "[Arrested] protesters get first day in court"), it put together a slide show series with audio on its Web site that easily matches the best media packages that major dailies and news sites on the Internet have to offer. Take a look at this.

The protest was not completely ignored by the national media. The Associated Press sent its own reporter, and the AP story was used by, among others, The Boston Globe.

The New York Times also covered the march, but chose to highlight the town's and the military's opposition to it with a Nov. 21 feature that ran under the headline "Annual Protest Draws Ire of Those Supporting Troops." While it's true the march has become an annual event, to call these demonstrations "as much a staple of fall as the Alabama-Auburn game," to quote The Times, is to trivialize what it's all about. Some critics might call the feature a whitewash.

The protest marches began 16 years ago, timed to coincide with the murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in November 1989 in El Salvador by a death squad that included, according to a congressional investigation, 19 soldiers who had graduated from the School of the Americas. (SOA once even published a torture handbook among its training manuals.)

The military insists that the successor to SOA, which was shut down in 2001, has changed its practices and policies. But as the Just the Facts Web site notes, "WHINSEC is located in the same building and offers many of the same courses," as the school it replaced. Doug Ireland, who calls himself "an old fan of SOA" wrote about it in the past and made the obvious connection to the torture at Abu Ghraib.

There's also a notable feature-length documentary out there, "Hidden in Plain Sight," released in 2003, about the school and U.S. policy in Latin America. Times reviewer Dave Kehr described it as "a sort of anthology of atrocity," but also called it "a sober, focused piece that asks Americans [unlike the Nov. 21 Times feature] to take another look at what is going on in their own backyard."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Just in time for Christmas, there's a new board game coming out, "Battle to Baghdad: The Fight For Freedom." It's the brainchild of a 33-year-old construction contractor from Oregon, The Telegraph reports. The game's creator "opposes the US presence in Iraq," according to the London daily, but he's been criticized "for capitalising on war." His response: "As an American, I was raised to believe that we should have ideas and try to make money out of them. That's the American way." Spoken like a true blue red-white-and-green patriot.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Courtesy of an Air Force colonel:

Battle Hymn of the Republicans

Feel free to sing along!

Mine Eyes have seen the bungling of that stumbling moron Bush;
he has blathered all the drivel that the neo-cons can push;
he has lost sight of all reason 'cause his head is up his tush;
The Doofus marches on.

I have heard him butcher syntax like a kindergarten fool;
There is warranted suspicion that he never went to school;
Should we fault him for the policies -- or is he just their tool?
The lies keep piling on.

Glory! Glory! How he'll Screw Ya!
Glory! Glory! What's It to Ya!
Glory! Glory! How he'll Screw Ya!
His wreckage will live on.

I have seen him cut the taxes of the billionaires' lone heir;
As he spends another zillion on an aircraft carrier;
Let the smokestacks keep polluting - do we really need clean air?
The surplus is now gone.

Glory! Glory! How he'll Screw Ya!
Glory! Glory! What's It to Ya!
Glory! Glory! How he'll Screw Ya!
Your safety net is gone!

Now he's got a mighty hankerin' to bomb a prostrate state;
Tho the whole world knows it's crazy, and the U.N. says to wait;
When he doesn't have the evidence, "We must prevaricate."
Or Diplomacy is gone!

Oh, a trumped-up war is excellent; we have no moral bounds;
Should the reasons be disputed, we'll just make up other grounds;
Enraging several billions -- to his brainlessness redounds;
The Doofus marches on!

Glory! Glory! How he'll Screw Ya!
Glory! Glory! What's It To Ya!
Glory! Glory! How he'll Screw Ya!
THIS .... DOOOO .... FUSS .... MAR...CHES....ON!

-- Brilliant Lyricist Unknown

Louis Menand writes that "Postwar," Tony Judt's new history of Europe since 1945, tells "a remarkable story, and, fortunately, 'Postwar' is a remarkable book." We thought Menand's New Yorker piece, "From the Ashes," was pretty remarkable, too -- that is, until our friend William Osborne -- an American expat composer, musicologist and cultural observer who has lived in Europe for more than a quarter century -- offered his take on it.

"Interesting review," Osborne writes, "but something bothers me about Menand -- the essentializing Manhattan worldview, a hidden agenda that everything revolves around American finance and globalization."

(We hadn't thought of that.)

Menand writes: "Western Europe rebuilt its economy because U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall proposed a plan of unprecedented financial assistance, and the plan was intelligently implemented."

(That's pretty much the standard view.)

Osborne responds: "What myopia! What were the Europeans going to do, sit in their rubble indefinitely and do nothing if the Americans didn't help them? In reality, the Europeans would have rebuilt anyway. The Marshall Plan was in large part a massive effort to quickly bring Western Europe under America's sphere of influence and to keep it from taking a third way between America and the Soviet Union. The communists and socialists were very powerful in Western Europe. The United States conducted a massive campaign against them. The Marshall Plan was part of that history. Parts of the work were indeed altruistic, but there was a big hidden agenda."

Menand writes: "Western Europe became a place of social planning, nationalized economies, and strong states not because democratic socialism was in the Continental genes but because there were no reserves of private capital and few viable non-governmental institutions around to put the world back together again."

(Again, pretty much the standard view.)

Osborne responds: "Uh yeah, political thought isn't genetic -- and let's not forget to put in a putdown of social democracy. In reality, socialist thought had deeply influenced Europe's intellectual life, and many of the programs instituted in Europe were also formulated by the leaders of Roosevelt's New Deal -- a history the American corporatocracy now wishes to erase. The state radio and television networks of Europe, for example, were established through the influence of America. They thrived in Europe, but the rightwingers in our own American society never let us have such benefits ourselves. The neoliberal agenda is now to destroy Europe's social democracies as well. This is what Mr. Menand and Mr. Judt know full well, and yet they remain carefully silent."

Menand, left, writes: "The European model, Judt says, was mostly an accident. There was no great political vision; necessity and pragmatism ruled the day. As [Foreign Affairs edtior Hamilton Fish] Armstrong wrote, you cannot eat ideology. A lot of what Americans take to be traditionally European is simply an artifact of the postwar scramble for survival, for example, national branding. The notion that cars made in Germany would ipso facto be better crafted than others, or that Italian-designed clothing, Belgian chocolates, French kitchenware, or Danish furniture were unquestionably the best to be had: this would have seemed curious indeed just a generation before, Judt writes. But it worked: Americans paid a premium for German engineering and Italian styling imagining that centuries of native craftsmanship lay behind them."

(We bought a Volkswagen once. It was cheap, and it worked great in the snow drifts of Northern Vermont.)

Osborne responds: "That is much overstated. Fine machine tooling does indeed have a long German tradition. And the Italians have been known for elegant design for 500 years. But of course, if you want to destroy cultural identity and create a massive neoliberal global economy, history and culture have to be erased. It's all just marketing, the sly neoliberal tells us."

Menand writes: "From the provincial American point of view, the most striking change in the status of Europe is that it is no longer the place where Americans with intellectual, artistic, or just life style aspirations wish or even pretend to wish to be."

(Scheisse! Call us provincials. We'll still take the French côte d'azure for our vacations anytime.)

Osborne responds: "OK, Mr. American White Guy, go live in Toledo or Omaha. Forget Paris, Utrecht, Heidelberg, Sienna, Florence, Dresden, Salzburg, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Prague, and Amsterdam. There's nothing quite like the wisdom of a closet neoliberal East Side Harvard professor writing for The New Yorker."

Menand writes: "Once, Europe was where all the new stuff seemed to be coming from. Then, some time in the nineteen-sixties, that stopped. Europe's great cities are still fascinating to Americans, but the fascination is fundamentally touristic. They're theme parks. Almost no one thinks that you can't be a real writer or painter or sophisticated bon vivant unless you spend some time living in one of them. This is not a judgment on the splendors of American civilization; it's just an observation about European civilization, and it bears on what sort of role in the world Europe will play during the rest of the century."

Osborne responds: "The Harvard professor apparently hasn't heard of Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Henze, Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez, Beckett, Pinter, Pirondello, Fellini, Jean Renoir, and on and on. America is not nearly capable of producing intellectuals like these, because it does not even have the cultural infrastructure to support them. In fact, the American system, with institutions such as Hollywood, has already done much to destroy parts of Europe's fine intellectual life, including its once-wonderful film industry. Someone please take Mr. Menand to a Fellini
film or a concert of Berio's 'Sinfonia' or a Beckett play before he turns into a complete Yankee imbecile."

(Now that we've been hipped, we're going to sit down to lunch and, like the rest of our compatriot imbeciles, devour yesterday's turkey leftovers.)

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

The best, least fawning part of George Will's grammatically challenged tribute to William F. Buckley, who turns 80 today, has this to say:

Married to a woman who matches his mettle, his proposal to her, made when he called her away from a card game, went like this:

He: "Patricia, would you consider marriage with me?"

She: "Bill, I've been asked this question many times. To others I've said no. To you I say yes. Now may I please get back and finish my hand?"

Presumably, Buckley will send Will a note of thanks with a slap on the wrist, expressing both his gratitude for the column's sentiments and his chagrin at its poor grammar.

The latest leak of a British memo -- stamped "Top Secret," it records a threat by the Bullshitter-in-Chief to bomb an Arab TV station in Qatar, a key Gulf ally -- is one more reason to ask (along with the protesters, below): "Would somebody please just give him a blowjob so we can get him impeached?! Somebody?!"

Yesterday's front page of the Daily Mirror, right, headlined a report that told how, last year, "Tony Blair talked [the Bullshitter] out of attacking satellite station al-Jazeera's HQ in friendly Qatar." Now the British government has warned the tab "not to publish further details" of the memo or face prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. "It is believed to be the first time the Blair government has threatened newspapers in this way," The Guardian reports today.

The British government claims the Bullshitter was only joking, and nobody took him seriously. So why not let us see the rest of the memo? We know he's a doofus. One more bad joke won't hurt us even if it's liable to give us indigestion. (We're going to enjoy Thanksgiving anyway.)

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Need we say more?

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Yeah, yeah, Indymedia UK had it first. And in case anyone forgot, here's why we call him the Bullshitter-in-Chief, not -- as we first intended -- the Liar-in-Chief.

In case you missed this tale over the weekend: There he was, Mr. America, the inimitable Bullshitter-in-Chief doing his embarrassing best in Beijing. After meeting with reporters, he tried to exit through a locked door, right. When it wouldn't open, he resorted to a bad imitation of MAD mag's Alfred E. Newman, the doofus he most resembles. Click the photo to see the entire sequence.

Then there was the serious stuff about Curveball:

BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq. -- From the Los Angeles Times

Or this about the guiding hand of torture:

WASHINGTON -- A former top State Department official said Sunday that Vice President Dick Cheney provided the "philosophical guidance" and "flexibility" that led to the torture of detainees in U.S. facilities. [What's more] retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told CNN that the practice of torture may be continuing in U.S.-run facilities.
-- From CNN.com

Or, for more fun and games, there was the tale recapping the corruption inquiry that threatens those sweaty Republican sweethearts in Congress.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

On the evidence of Ethan Bronner's condescending putdown of "The Great War for Civilisation," we couldn't help wondering: Is this what The New York Times really thinks, or is the paper's deputy foreign editor just being a jealous American flag-wagger?

Contrary to Bronner's review, we find Brit journalist Robert Fisk's massive book enlightening, beautifully written, filled with the skeptical wisdom of bitter experience. It's both an absorbing read and a thrilling ride. As mentioned before, Fisk's skill at connecting past and present is unbeatable.

Besides, we love his unimportant details. For instance, trying to fly to Jalalabad, where he was to be met and escorted to the mountains of Tora Bora for one of his secret interviews with Osama bin Laden back in the pre-history of 1980, Fisk describes the circuitous route that began in Beirut:

This time, the journey was a combination of farce and incredulity. There were no more flights from Dehli so I flew first to the emirate of Dubai. "Fly to Jalalabad?" my Indian travel agent there asked me."You have to contact 'Magic Carpet.' He was right. "Magic Carpet Travel" -- in a movie, the name would never have got past the screenplay writers* -- was run by a Lebanese who told me to turn up at 8:30 the next morning at the heat-bleached airport in the neighbouring and much poorer emirate of Sharjah, to which Ariana Afghan Airlines had now been sent in disgrace.

And the footnote's finishing touch:

*The more dangerous the destination, the more fictional the name of the airline that flies there. The only direct flight from Beirut to the cauldron of occupied Iraq was run by another company called -- yes, you guessed it -- "Flying Carpet Airlines."

Then there's the important stuff, which comes to more than a thousand pages of finishing touches.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Mein gott in la la land! Der Ahhhnold ist ein multi-talented mutter humper, ja? Just click. And now Der Bullshitter in la Beijing land! Wazzit gonna be? The Gangwashi Church theme park for the Forbidden City? With Pat and Mel doin' their shtick in the Holy Land? Ist wunderbar, ja?

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

In a word:

The filming [of "The Prince and the Showgirl," starring Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe] was a disaster almost from the beginning. Olivier should have expected trouble. He had asked William Wyler what she was like to work with, and he had replied, "Hitler."

-- From page 268 of Terry Coleman's "Olivier," a new biography based almost exclusively on primary sources. In fact, Wyler never worked with Monroe. Didn't matter. He knew.

Our favorite philosopher John Gray on René Descartes, by way of a book review, is a pleasure to read -- and a reminder that the great rationalists of Western thought owe a heavy, too heavy, debt to their religious origins and impulses.

It's not just that "Hegel's philosophy reproduced a Christian view of history"; or that "Locke's liberalism was rooted in his version of theism"; or that Descartes, an "avowed Catholic believer," had "an affinity with hermetic and occult thinkers" and may have been -- take your pick -- something of a Rosicrucian wacko or something of a Jesuit secret agent spying on Rosicrucian wackos.

Gray's point is that, by failing to take account of their religious origins and impulses, we acquire a deep misunderstanding of much Western philosophy, to say nothing of the pernicious roots that feed our murky 21st century. "For all his advocacy of methodical doubt," Gray writes of Descartes, "he adopted the moral prejudices of his time slavishly."

This is nowhere more clearly shown than in his view of animals as insensate automata -- a ridiculous view whose truth he attempted to demonstrate in some disgusting experiments. Modern philosophy might have developed very differently if its founder had followed the example of Montaigne in applying a degree of genuine scepticism to the anthropocentric prejudice that consciousness is a uniquely human phenomenon. We might have a more interesting body of ethical theory, and a wider philosophy of mind. ...

The notion that we alone are conscious is an error inherited from western religion, not a result of scientific inquiry. The fantastical theory of Cartesian dualism -- the idea that brain and mind are radically distinct but somehow interact -- could probably never have arisen except in a culture whose view of humanity was formed by Christianity.

But the influence of Christianity has no monopoly on vile human affairs. Far from it. We need only cite the front page of this morning's New York Times, which quotes the nauseating shouts of a radical Muslim, as he watches an old video showing the decapitation of Nicholas Berg by his Iraqi captors:

"Go to hell, enemy of God! Kill him! Kill him! Yes, like that! Cut his throat properly. Cut his head off! If I had been there, I would have burned him to make him already feel what hell was like. Cut off his head! God is great! God is great!"

Yeah, God's terrific. And so are all those Muslim true believers.

We asked the other day: "Isn't it time to drop religious faith from human belief?" The answer is self evident.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

He's never at a loss for rhymes. In re: the disclosure that caused a stir, our poet had this to say:

WOODWARD DOWNWARD

-- Leon Freilich

One story you won't find in William T. Vollmann's mammoth series of stories "Europe Central" -- the surprise winner of the National Book Award for fiction, which examines the moral decisions of real World War II Germans and others -- is the story of Johann Georg Elser.

So here's a WWII tale to remember. Most people have never heard of Elser, although he nearly changed the course of history 66 years ago this month -- on Nov. 8, 1939, to be precise -- when he tried to assassinate Hitler by planting a bomb in the Munich beer hall where the Führer showed up every year to celebrate his failed 1923 putsch.

Who was Elser? A carpenter from Swabia, born in 1903. According to Der Spiegel:

Elser was no thug and no hard-nosed ideologue. Rather, he was a highly talented musician and a ladies' man. He was also a man who preferred action to words -- he became a member of the Woodworkers' Union for the simple reason that, "one ought to be a member of this union." Whenever the Führer's speeches were broadcast on the radio, he would leave the building and he likewise refused to greet fellow Germans with the words "Heil Hitler!"

Because of unexpected weather -- a heavy fog settled on Munich that evening -- Hitler began his speech at the beer hall 30 minutes earlier than planned, so he could make the night train to Berlin. As Der Spiegel tells it, this saved his life. Elser's bomb, "hidden in a column directly behind where Hitler had been speaking," detonated 13 minutes after Hitler's departure. The explosion was so powerful it caused the roof to collapse, killing eight people and wounding 60 others. "When the bomb went off, Hitler was already sitting in a heated limousine, on his way to the train station."

Elser was captured the same night at the German-Swiss border. After confessing, he was brought to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin and tortured. He claimed to have acted alone. But Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo chief, refused to believe him. He wanted to tie the bombing to British intelligence agents who had been arrested, coincidentally. The Nazis intended to use Elser "as a witness against Churchill after their planned final victory over England," which Hitler was already eyeing for invasion, Claus Christian Malzahn writes -- so they kept him alive.

On April 9, 1945, Elser was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp.

A small memorial to Elser was erected in 1971-- "in the face of opposition from the local residents" -- in the town of Schnaitheim, not far from Heidenheim, where he had lived and worked for several years, according to an abstruse philosophical analysis of the assassination attempt for Konstanz and Tel-Aviv Universities. (The opposition apparently has had a long life. On Dec. 16, 2000, vandals poured red paint on the monument.)

But for nearly a half-century after the war nothing commemorated Elser at the site of the destroyed beer hall, where Munich's concert hall, the Gasteig Concert Center, now stands -- not even a small plaque to remind concertgoers of what happened there or of Elser's fraught moral decision to risk his own life and possibly save the world, not just Germany, from Hitler.

There is, according to the Bavarian Web site CollegeRadio, a memorial plaque now, above, embedded in a sidewalk near the concert hall in a location so obscure only the "initiated" will be able to find it. Ah well ... Munich has named a square for him, GeorgElser-Platz.

And let's not forget the Johann Georg Elser postage stamp, which Germany issued in 2003 in its long-established series of stamps commemorating German resistance to the Nazis. Let's also not forget: There's a monument to the resistance fighters in front of the State Capitol in Munich, left, but Elser's name is not included on it. In 1999, though, protesters decided to change that. They spray-painted his name so it couldn't be missed.

Isn't it time to drop religious faith from human belief? Edward O. Wilson thinks so, and to that, we say: "Amen, brother." Otherwise, at the very least, jokers like the Kansas Yahoos will be dogging us forever with their biblical delusions.

In an article in Harvard Magazine called "Intelligent Evolution," a more accurate title for which would have been "Darwin For Dummies," the naturalist-entomologist-evolutionary psychologist-sociobiologist writes:

There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. In the early part of this century, the toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view that humanism based on science is the effective antidote (and here Wilson gets a little purple for our literary taste, but never mind), the light and the way at last placed before us.

Trouble is, as explained by reporter Dennis Overbye in yesterday's New York Times, the Yahoos want to redefine the very meaning of science to include the supernatural. The crucial passage may be found on page 8 of a 78-page proposal by the Kansas State Board of Education:

Nature of Science

"Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation, that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building, to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena. Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us. Science does so through the use of observation, experimentation, and logical argument while maintaining strict empirical standards and healthy skepticism. Scientific explanations are built on observations, hypotheses, and theories. ..."

Simply by removing the two words "natural explanations," Overbye writes, the Yahoos have signalled their intent to turn back the clock. "The changes in the official state definition," which are "fueled by the popular opposition to the Darwinian theory of evolution," are "a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science."

In his article, Wilson asks a key question: "Will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains?" And answers it in the negative:

A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the same position. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion. Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable.

In other words, if the Kansas Yahoos want to "Sing Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!" -- well -- that's their cross to bear. The idea is not to make it ours.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Invent your own. We think the guy on his knees is looking for the code to the Bullshitter's denials.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

She came. She led. She did not conquer. So sayeth the notices. "Indeed, Simone Young conducted a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic," the reviewer for the Wiener Zeitung remarked. "And what does that make her? Almost as important as the first woman in space."

Der Standard complained that her "creative method" was "often inflated" and that her "extreme agility and dynamics" made her seem, "in gesture," like a "hyperactive flight controller [who] rages, pushes, presses herself into the music, as if her art were a constant boxing match, a musical sports trainer." Die Presse was kinder: "[H]er usual carefulness guaranteed that the musicians would play unfamiliar music with the complicated meters of Bernstein (the Candide Overture) and Copland (the Clarinet Concerto) with sharpness and clarity."

Although the mixed-metaphor reviewers were underwhelmed, we don't want to leave the impression the notices were all that bad. Lukewarm is more like it. And we have it on good authority that they were generally courteous and even deferential -- a signal perhaps that while Vienna's musical life is stuck in the 19th century, it has some grace, intelligence and dignity. (Yes, we know, unlike us.)

In interviews before the concert, Young was quick to stress that the commentary surrounding her gender was merely a distraction from the music. She insisted she be judged as a musician and not as a woman. (Not that she has ignored the issue of sexism. In fact, she has worked to help young women musicians. Karen Kamensek's recent appointment as General Music Director of the State Opera House in Freiberg, Germany, was made possible partly through Young's advocacy.)

Meantime, Austrian musicologist Regina Himmelbauer offers us an important observation on the matter of Philharmonic tokenism toward women, when it's not outright exclusion: The concert Young conducted was not in the Goldener Saal of the Musikverein where the Philharmonic usually performs. It was in the much newer and less prestigious Konzerthaus, known for populist events that cater to the jeans and T-shirt crowd. Young was programmed on a new series called Proms, modeled on the BBC's Proms concerts in London.

Evenings at the Goldener Saal are far more prestigious and ceremonial. For instance, children wear formal dress when attending the Goldener Saal's children's concerts -- with the organizers in pink dresses carefully watching over them. Tickets for the Philharmonic's Goldener Saal concerts are sold by subscriptions passed down from generation to generation. It is nearly impossible to get a ticket otherwise. The audience is so steeped in the Viennese way of doing things that even when the Berlin-born (though Austrian-raised and educated) Nikolaus Harnoncourt led the Philharmonic, the audience was very apprehensive -- how could you dare play our well-known Mozart like this? So, to see a woman conducting on the stage of the Goldener Saal might cause an aneurism or two -- or at least a quick trip to a Viennese café after the concert to drown the horrors of the modern world in a bottle of bubbly.

And since we're on the subject, we'll have more later today on the Vienna Philharmonic -- this time about its racism.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: As promised, a li'l somethin' about the VPo's racist (unofficial, of course) hiring policy. Chief troublemaker William Osborne writes:

Until very recently, the Vienna Philharmonic maintained a long tradition of excluding people who are visibly members of racial minorities. The orchestra felt that such individuals would destroy the ensemble's image of Austrian authenticity.[1] These employment practices were directed most specifically toward Asians, since many have studied at the Wiener Musikhochschule (Vienna Academy of Music) and reached the highest professional standards.[2] Many of these musicians have also settled in Austria for marriage and other reasons, where they remain potential candidates for positions in the Philharmonic.

The memoirs published in 1970 by Otto Strasser, a former chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic, illustrate the attitudes Asian musicians have confronted:

"I hold it for incorrect that today the applicants play behind a screen; an arrangement that was brought in after the Second World War in order to assure objective judgments. I continuously fought against it, especially after I became Chairman of the Philharmonic, because I am convinced that to the artist also belongs the person, that one must not only hear, but also see, in order to judge him in his entire personality. [...] Even a grotesque situation that played itself out after my retirement was not able to change the situation. An applicant qualified himself as the best, and as the screen was raised, there stood a Japanese before the stunned jury. He was, however, not engaged, because his face did not fit with the 'Pizzicato-Polka' of the New Year’s Concert."

In the late 1990s, after I published several articles about the Philharmonic’s racial policies, they were put under pressure to change their employment practices.

In 2001, the orchestra hired Wilfried Hedenborg, an Austrian violinist whose racial background is half Asian. And in June 2003, Yasuto Sugiyama, a world-class tubist from the New Japan Philharmonic, was hired. From the outset, Sugiyama’s appointment was controversial, especially within the brass section. He did not pass his trial year at the Staatsoper and was fired. Soon afterwards, Mr. Sugiyama won the tuba audition for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Hedenborg's appointment received little notice in the press, but some of the comments were notable. The German news magazine Focus remarked, "Even a half-Japanese, son of a Philharmoniker, is now allowed to fiddle along. For a long time this was considered unthinkable, because the television pictures of the New Year's Concert, Mozart Masses, and Beethoven Symphonies were broadcast as nostalgic greeting cards of Middle European 'blessedness' to the whole world." [3]

This was one of the first times that the Vienna Philharmonic's discrimination against people who are visibly members of racial minorities had been acknowledged in the established media. After fulfilling the three-year tenure requirement, Mr. Hedenborg became a member of the Vienna Philharmonic. Mr. Sugiyama's dismissal, however, raised serious questions. If he were not qualified, how could he so quickly win a position with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra? The United States has only about one twenty-third the number of full-time, year-round orchestras per capita as Austria, so the competition for positions is much fiercer.

In response, the Vienna Philharmonic continues to rely on tokenism. They mention Mr. Hedenborg, as if having one member who is half Asian somehow represents integration. All other major orchestras in the world have a much higher representation of Asian members. The closely related Berlin Philharmonic even has a Japanese concertmaster, Toru Yasunaga.

In a 1998 interview in the Austrian magazine News, the Vienna Philharmonic’s chairman, Clemens Hellsberg, insisted that the orchestra has had difficulty finding qualified musicians of Asian heritage:

"It’s out of the question to say we do not accept Japanese. It is just that we have never found any who fit with our special style of playing. If they don’t have it, they won’t be accepted, and to have studied in Vienna is no guarantee. Our musicians come from 10 nations, many from the former Danube Monarchy, our new solo-cellist, for example, from the Budapest Opera. This is a matter of cultural tradition.[4]

Almost half of the musicians at the Vienna Academy of Music are foreigners, and most of those are Asians. It seems unlikely that no Asians in the 60 years since the Second World War were qualified to enter the orchestra. The Philharmonic notes that Seiji Ozawa has conducted them. Yet having an Asian guest conductor for one week does not equal having permanent Asian members in the rank-and-file of the ensemble.[5]

This season, violist Ursula Plaichinger was to have become the first non-harpist woman to gain entry to the Vienna Philharmonic as a full-fledged member, but she took a leave of absence under circumstances that have not been explained. With Ms. Plaichinger's departure, and Mr. Sugiyama's firing, an air of mistrust still surrounds the Vienna Philharmonic and its willingness to end its gender and racial employment practices.

Endnotes:
[1] For documentation of the Vienna Philharmonic's racial ideologies, see the following articles:
• Roland Girtler, "Mitgliedsaufnahme in den Noblen Bund der Wiener Philharmoniker Als Mannbarkeitsritual", Sociologia Internationalis, Beiheft 1 (1992);
• Elena Ostleitner, Liebe, Lust, Last und Leid (Wien, Bundesministerium fuer Unterricht und Kunst, 1995) p. 6;
• "Musikalische Misogynie," broadcast by the West German State Radio, Feb. 13, 1996, transcribed and translated into English;
• William Osborne, "Symphony Orchestras and Artist-Prophets: Cultural Isomorphism and the Allocation of Power in Music." Leonardo Music Journal 9 (1999): 69-76.
[2] For a specific discussion and further documentation of how these racial ideologies are specifically directed toward Asians, see: "The Special Characteristics of the Vienna Philharmonic's Racial Ideologies."
[3] Focus, "Ein Himmel Voller Geigen" (December 31, 2000.) ("Sogar ein Halbjapaner, Sohn eines Philharmonikers, darf jetzt mitgeigen. Das galt lange als undenkbar, weil die Fernsehbilder von Neujahrskonzert, Mozart-Messen und Beethoven-Symphonien als Grußkarten nostalgischer Mitteleuropa-Seligkeit in alle Welt gesendet wurden.") The sentence is difficult to translate in its subtleties. The term "Halbjapaner" can have an ugly tone approaching "half breed." An equivalent in English might be like saying "a half-negro." There is a quality of racial sarcasm to the statement that is disturbing because it is difficult to determine how ironically it was meant. The article says the musician in question is the son of a "Philharmoniker,“ but no one else with name Hedenborg is listed among the personnel. If the article is correct, it is possible that there is a second person in the orchestra who is half Asian.
[4] News (Issue 13, 1998) "Es ist keine Rede davon, daß wir keine Japaner nehmen. Es war nur bisher keiner dabei, der vom Spielstil zu uns gepaßt hätte. Wer den nicht hat, wird nicht genommen, und in Wien studiert zu haben, ist noch keine Garantie. Unsere Musiker kommen aus 10 Nationen, viele aus der früheren Donaumonarchie, unser neuer Solocellist, zum Beispiel von der Budapester Oper. Das ist auch eine Sache der kulturellen Tradition.“
[5] Mr. Ozawa is the General Music Director of the Vienna State Opera, but the conductors there are appointed by the house's administration, not the orchestra. The Vienna Philharmonic is a private enterprise the musicians run on the side. The Philharmonic chooses its own conductors, where Ozawa has only occasionally worked as an invited guest.

Osborne has since distributed this report by email to the International Alliance for Women in Music and has posted it on his Web site under the headline "Why Did the Vienna Philharmonic Fire Yasuto Sugiyama?"

More firebrand than elder statesman, Gore Vidal at 80 is proof that celebrity may not be such a bad thing. As "America’s most visible radical public intellectual," to quote Doug Ireland's description of him, Vidal has been exploiting his calculated celebrity "to explain to a large public the insidious effects of America’s domination by a ruling class of power elites bent on imperial expansion."

That's a mouthful, but only the half of it. The other half -- to quote Ireland's review of Dennis Altman’s new book, "Gore Vidal’s America" -- is that the quasi-sovereignty of the power elites has led to "the destruction of any meaningful choice or genuine information in an electoral process which is increasingly irrelevant to most Americans." (For an expanded version of the review, go here.)

Once upon a time -- it was Oct. 28, 2002, at 11:36 a.m. ET, on MSNBC.com -- we asked, "What kind of vitamins is Vidal taking?" He had just "leveled a 7,000-word attack against President Bush" (we weren't referring to him yet as the Bullshitter-in-Chief, nor would we have been allowed to). Vidal's attack was called, provocatively, "The Enemy Within" and "defied even his long track record as an armed and semi-dangerous gadfly," we noted. "He has always been a maverick, a patrician-born traitor to the ruling class. But now, in his old age, he has outdone himself."

Vidal was claiming that the failure to follow standard military procedures on the morning of 9/11 -- procedures that required fighter planes to be scrambled without a presidential order as soon as an airliner has deviated from its flight plan -- was deliberate and not a snafu. He was calling for "an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans." He was arguing that "a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home." (Due to rights problems, Vidal's piece was not online at the time. It is now.)

He maintained that 9/11 called into question not only "much of our fragile Bill of Rights" but also, as he put it, "our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta." The real motive for the Afghanistan war in Vidal's view, according to The (London) Guardian, "was to control the gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia's energy riches."

"Depending on your point of view," we wrote, "Vidal's attack is either bold or paranoid. But whichever it is, how come we have two of America's most prominent men of letters leading the attack on Bush? Last week we had Philip Roth calling Bush a ventriloquist's dummy. Now we have Vidal accusing him of worse. (Let's not even mention MIT's Noam Chomsky, a linguist but no belletrist.)"

The reaction of the debunkers was swift. Ron Rosenbaum, for instance, went after Vidal two weeks later (exactly three years ago Friday) in a column in the New York Observer headlined "Protocols of Elder Named Gore Vidal: Wacko 9/11 Piece," calling him, more than nuts, a deliberate fabricator. Not long after, however, Edward S. Morgan gave the lie to smears like Rosenbaum's, making the case both for Vidal's sanity and the vitality of his arguments, as noted in VIDAL UNGORED.

For a gorgeous sample of Vidal's sanity, have a listen to his take on the Bullshitter-in-Chief's second inaugural address. "It's a declaration of war against the entire globe," Vidal says. "There's not a word of truth in anything he said. ... It goes in one ear and out the other as lies often do, particularly rhetorical lies thought up by second-rate advertising men ..." What's more:

I think he thinks and many of the American people appear to think that we're in a movie, a lousy movie, but it's just a movie, and once the final credits run, all those dead people, who are just extras anyway, will stand up and come home.... It isn't a movie we're in. It's real life, and these are real dead people, and there are more and more of them, and the world won't tolerate it.

Now, 11 months later, even the American people are at last beginning not to tolerate it. So, Ron, where's your apology?

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

We hope you didn't miss this beautiful exposé of the "tackiness and gall" in David Brooks's know-nothing column about "French gangsta rap" and hip-hop culture in re: the suburban French riots. (The column, posted Thursday, is hidden behind the TimesSelect subscription wall, hélas, but you'll get his drift from the critique.)

Also, in re: the Evangelical theme park WHERE JESUS WALKED (posted Friday free of charge), Leon Freilich offers this verse commentary:

LOCAL TRADITION

Authenticity is assured;
Worshippers, though, must be inured:
Every Friday, a crucifixion
Re-enacting the affliction
With a volunteer who's flailed
Cruelly and finally nailed.
Who's to be the stricken Jesus?
Neither poor nor rich as Croesus;
Someone whole, not someone sliced,
Fully formed to be the Christ.
Muslim men are lining up,
Some as young as a high school pup,
Ready to go through the Passion,
But in their own special fashion:
Being modest, can't be nude,
Which is reckoned morally rude.
All're prepared to do their best--
Wearing an Intifada vest.

-- TSoT

We hesitate to use the infamous Goering remark about deceitful leaders and the ease with which they're able to mislead a nation into war while denouncing their critics as unpatriotic, not only because it's already been seen many times but because it draws a very nasty comparison between 21st-century America and the Nazi Germany of a former era.

But the Bullshitter-in-Chief has forced us to it with his duplicitous assault yesterday on the patriotism of those who rightly claim he led the United States to war in Iraq on a pack of lies and twisted facts. "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the Bullshitter said, exploiting Veterans Day, no less, to lash out at his critics. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."

So here it is again, from Hitler's onetime second in command, Hermann Goering, as quoted by Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking intelligence officer and psychologist who was granted access to the prisoners held in jail during the war crimes trials at Nuremberg:

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

Are Americans finally waking up to their Bullshitter's deceit? According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll:

64 percent of Americans disapprove of how Bush is handling the war and 60 percent believe it was not worth fighting -- in both cases, the worst numbers for the president since the invasion. The perjury indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who resigned as chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, has revived the issue of the administration's truthfulness in building the case for war, and nearly 3 in 5 voters in the Post-ABC poll do not consider Bush honest.

But there he was, as the Post reports,

[s]tanding before a warehouse full of current and former troops, [where] he spoke under a banner that read "Strategy for Victory" [while] the crowd cheered him exuberantly, especially when he embraced a constitutional amendment to ban the desecration of the American flag -- a proposal he has supported for years but almost never mentions in speeches.

We'll believe the notoriously fickle public has repudiated him once and for all -- something it should have done a year ago in the 2004 presidential election -- when he's either impeached for high crimes or when he voluntarily resigns because of political pressure, neither of which we expect to happen. Until then, comparative exaggeration notwithstanding, Goering's cynicism applies.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Will Mel Gibson cut the ribbon? American Evangelicals are to unveil plans for a $60-million theme park in the Holy Land. But proselytizing of local Jews will be against park rules. (Local Muslims are not mentioned, so they may be fair game.)

The developers say they plan to check kitsch and commercialism at the door. "No way will it be a Disneyland. We have to keep the spirit of the place. You can see the movie about Jesus' life, then see the mountain."

The reference is to the Mount of Beatitudes, where Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount. We point this out for the biblically challenged. They might want to book tickets in advance.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

A forerunner of performance art?

One of the most vivid pictures painted [by Richard Burnett in "Company of Pianos"] is that of the huge bonfire on the beach of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1904, when a thousand square pianos were burned to a crisp. The main manufacturers got together to put on this show in order to declare the "square" dead.

That quote, from a review of the book in The Times Literary Supplement, sent one of our tireless conscripts reeling: "Can't lay down a riff on da square, no way mama!"

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

"Zut alors!"

Say no more.

-- From our French correspondent embedded with Citroen

We see that Emma Rodgers, blogging at ABC News: Arts and Entertainment, has taken note of the fact that the Australian conductor Simone Young, below, has a gig to guest-conduct the 99.99999% all-male Vienna Philharmonic in a concert this coming weekend (which will make her the first woman ever to do so). (See the Postscript.)

Citing CIRCLE JERKS, our recent item about the orchestra's sexism, Rodgers wonders "whether [the orchestra's] long-standing critics (and there appear to be many of them) will hail Young's achievement as more than just a token gesture by the orchestra."

Well, Emma, let us help you out: No, we won't. That's the short answer.

Here's the long answer. It's an oldie but goodie: Musical Misogyny, a radio interview of the Vienna Philharmonic on WDR.

And here's the medium-length, most-up-to-date answer from the orchestra's chief troublemaker, William Osborne:

The Philharmonic's token gestures represent a small step forward. Even though the orchestra has long maintained gender and ethnic uniformity among its members, it has always allowed for outside influence through guest conductors and soloists. The orchestra has found it beneficial to consciously use these guests to rehabilitate its public image, while at the same time quietly denying rank and file membership to women and racial minorities.

This has been an effective public relations tool for resisting change. At times, the Philharmonic has even tried to capitalize on these gestures in financial terms. For instance, during the Waldheim affair in the late 1980's, the Austrian government made plans to send the Vienna Philharmonic to Israel with Leonard Bernstein. The orchestra, which is privately owned and operated by the players, who share the profits among themselves, used the occasion -- unsuccessfully -- to try to force the government to give it a permanent tax break.

We should also mention, in due fairness, that when Osborne first learned of Young's guest-conducting gig, he posted a widely distributed e-mail on Nov. 5 that began: "How about some good VPo news." A few days later the newspapers started writing about it, with some really nice hype, i.e.: "An Australian woman has broken one of the world's last bastions of male domination ..."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Today's New York Times notes that Young is the third woman to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic. "The orchestra was led by Carmen Studer Weingartner in Salzburg and Vienna in 1935 and by Anne Manson in Salzburg in 1994," it reports in Arts, Briefly. But Manson conducted the Salzberger Festspiel Orchestra, which technically is not the Vienna Philharmonic. The Phil does not choose the Festspiel conductors. Also, it denies that Manson ever conducted it. So, officially at least, Young is the first.

In re: "The Return of Ahmed Chalabi," may we remind you? Scroll to the postscript.

-- TSoT

We like the way the Los Angeles Times put it, with all eight "No"s, though you'd never know from the photo what happened:

No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No

Voters Reject All 8 Propositions
Schwarzenegger 'Sequel' Couldn't Captivate Voters

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Do you want to know what's happening, Mr. Jones? Do you really want to know? Then tune in to Robert Fisk this morning. "You know?" he quotes a CIA officer, "Torture works." In an interview on Democracy Now!, Fisk, who may be the most intrepid, most illuminating reporter working in Iraq and the Middle East, notes: "We are becoming the criminals. We are the criminals now. ... We have no further moral cause to fight for." He shouldn't be missed, nor his new book, "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East."

Fisk's skill at connecting past and present is unbeatable. Note his remarks about the French authorities who are dealing with the crisis of the French uprising. He reminds us of their old Vichy connection and the fact that many of them are the same ones who sent tens of thousands of Jews to their fate in the Nazi death camps. Note, too, Democracy Now!'s perfect pairing of a scene excerpted from "The Battle of Algiers" -- it's a news conference in which a military officer defends the use of torture -- with a scene from a White House press conference starring spokesman Scott McClellan on the same subject. As soon as DN! posts the interview, the first of a two-parter, we'll provide the link.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Well, it looks like Democracy Now! won't be posting a link to download a video of Fisk's interview, at least not at the moment. Here's what's posted. Maybe they're still working on it.

PPS: Ahh, here we go: the excerpt from "The Battle of Algiers" and the video of Fisk, beginning with the White House press conference.

Hmm ... To appreciate the full impact of Fisk's remarks -- about the uprising, the French leadership, the relevance of the Algerian war, excerpts from the film, what is now likely to happen in France, the routine use of torture by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the purpose of journalism -- it's best to have what he said in sequence. For that, watch this 33-minute segment, which has now been posted. It includes an interview with the Iranian-born author Behzad Yaghmaian.

If the British Parliament passes a new terrorism law that would criminalize "the dissemination of some chemistry textbooks" ('cuz they "contain basic explosive experiments"), what's next? Academic abstracts of provocative chemical coupling?

We're told this diagram, which illustrates "a reaction involving two inorganic molecules," is from "an entirely serious article" in the journal Inorganic Chemistry. It looks pretty unserious to us, though we have no idea what the actual formulation means. Could it possibly be erotic?

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Prompted, we believe, by the posting of CIRCLE JERKS, about the Vienna Philharmonic's sexist prancing, two messages showed up in our email bag. First this one, from Rex Bruce, the director of the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, about an exhibition with a title hinting of ... well, you figure it out ...

"UNBOUND"

Nov. 10-Dec. 3, 2005
Opening Reception: Thursday Nov. 10, 7-9 pm

"Unbound" features four women artists from Los Angeles working with video and digital imaging. These artists explore the shadowy side of the female psyche in relationship to woman's bodies and minds searching to transcend a largely male dominated culture and the limitations of traditional gender roles.

And then came this one, from the Webmaster of a site that shall remain nameless:

Hi!

Still thinking which women make better wives? Considering Latinos, Filipinos, Asians?

We don’t want to seem meddlesome but RUSSIAN women are the first ones to be considered! Why??? As some guys say, “Go with the Russians! They will cook, clean and do anything else you want…”

More than that -- it is absolutely impossible not to admit (we can’t help mentioning) the exceptional beauty of Russian girls! Look at those slim bodies, long tanned legs, wasp waists, tempting looks …

We are speechless.

We are also reminded of VPO Watch, an advocacy project of the International Alliance for Women in Music organized and posted by Monique Buzzarté. We should have noted it before. Anyone interested in the media coverage of the Vienna Philharmonic and the status of women will find it invaluable.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

"We do not torture," the Bullshitter-in-Chief declared. But ...

I pledge allegiance to the flog
Of the United States of Cheney
And to the tortures for which he stands,
One nation, with me as trainee.

-- Leon Freilich

How do you say "Burn, Baby, Burn" in French? And which would you believe, Doug Ireland's "Why is France Burning? The Rebellion of a Lost Generation," or Craig Smith's "France Has an Underclass, but Its Roots Are Still Shallow"? Did we really have to ask?

Ireland messages:

U.S. press coverage of the youth rebellion in France's ghettos hasn't done a very good job of portraying the reasons for those riots. As a journalist who worked in France for a decade and knows those ghettos, I've dissected the rebellion for you.

Compare. Here's Ireland writing on his Web site on Saturday about the "high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs," where the "tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion" began:

[They are ] run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities -- shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent. Both apartments and schools are over-crowded. Birth control is taboo in the Muslim culture the immigrants brought with them and transmitted to their children, and even for their male grandchildren of today, who've adopted hip-hop culture and created their own French-language rap music of extraordinary vitality (which often embodies stinging social and political content), condoms are a no-no because of Arab machismo, contributing to rising AIDS rates in the ghettos.

And here's Smith, reporting from Paris yesterday in The New York Times: "Even in the worst government housing developments, green lawns and neat flower beds break the monotony of the gray concrete." He also minimizes the crisis by quoting a French scholar's dismissive assessment: "It's a game of cowboys and Indians." The riots are pretty much "a local sport, a rite of passage," he tells Smith, who writes.

The despair in these housing projects (called cités here) has been mitigated by better schools than those that serve poor, minority districts in the United States (education is financed nationally in France, rather than through local tax rolls) and by extensive welfare programs. Even when employed, a family of four living in a government-subsidized apartment typically pays only a few hundred dollars a month in rent and can receive more than $1,200 a month in various subsidies. The unemployed receive more. For all, health care and education are free.

There is crime, but not nearly at the level of random violence feared in poor neighborhoods in American cities. Guns are tightly controlled and are still relatively rare. When a teenager was killed in a drive-by shooting in a Paris suburb this year, it made national headlines.

We don't doubt the facts Smith cites. We wonder why so many others are missing. The contrast between the stories is just another reason why we need an alternative press.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: A message just in from the establishment magazine Foreign Affairs, apropos the riots, reminding us of Robert S. Leiken's huge takeout, "Europe's Angry Muslims," which appeared in the July/August issue.

The short of it: "Radical Islam is spreading across Europe among descendants of Muslim immigrants. Disenfranchised and disillusioned by the failure of integration, some European Muslims have taken up jihad against the West. They are dangerous and committed -- and can enter the United States without a visa."

Leiken swings both ways within the establishment. He is Director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center and a nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Eight years ago, the all-male Vienna Philharmonic agreed to open its doors to women for the first time since it was founded, in 1842. Has it lived up to that agreement? In a word, no. These guys are still playing with themselves. Despite official promises and pronouncements, and the brief hiring of a female harpist who departed long ago, the orchestra remains as obdurate as ever.

William Osborne contended in "Art Is Just an Excuse," the first of his many scholarly Web-posted essays about gender bias, cultural isomorphism and other issues in classical music, that the Vienna Philharmonic’s exclusionary policy was part of an intolerable racist heritage. He argued that the orchestra’s stance, based on a belief in male supremacy and rooted in a historical rationale of national identity and cultural purity, cast such a pall over its considerable artistic achievement that the institution had turned out to be the shame, not the pride, of Western civilization.

That was our summary of his argument almost six years ago in an article which traced how -- through his essays and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his emails -- Osborne had instigated protests against the orchestra, forced it to reverse its exclusionary policy, and showed the Internet to be "a potent tool for bringing change even to the most hidebound of cultural institutions."

Looking back now, we are forced to echo the Patrick Fitzgerald meme "a compelling story, if only it were true" -- because Osborne has just sent this message:

On February 13, 2001, violist Ursula Plaichinger became the first non-harpist woman to win an audition for the Vienna State Opera. After a three-year tenure, members of the State Opera Orchestra become members of the Vienna Philharmonic. Ms. Plaichinger should have entered the Vienna Philharmonic 14 months ago, but she has still not been made a member. She would have been the first non-harpist woman to join the Vienna Philharmonic in its 163-year history.

There is an application procedure and vote necessary for entering the Philharmonic, but it is merely a formality. There has never been a documented case of a member of the State Opera Orchestra being denied membership in the Philharmonic after the tenure requirement is completed. It is also noteworthy that all of the men who have completed the tenure requirement and who entered the orchestra after Ms. Plaichinger, have been made members. She alone has been left out.

Very little information is available that might explain why Ms. Plaichinger has not been made a member. The Vienna Philharmonic offers one of the most prestigious and high-paying orchestra jobs in the world. It seems unlikely that Ms. Plaichinger would not have applied for membership unless something put her under extreme duress.

Two months ago Ms. Plaichinger took a leave of absence from the orchestra and is now living in Amsterdam. She occasionally returns to Vienna to play in various ensembles.

Given that she would have been the first non-harpist woman to enter the orchestra, the Austrian media should have long since inquired about what is going on, but there have been no reports. It is also a difficult story to research, because the members of the Vienna Philharmonic have been strictly forbidden to speak with the press -- except by special permission and while they are monitored by the orchestra's officials.

Even if many expected that this sort of thing would probably happen, it is still very troubling and saddening news.

Osborne informs us that Plaichinger has not returned his phone calls. We should also mention that the orchestra currently lists one woman, Charlotte Balzereit, as a full-fledged member. It lists a total of 135 players in the ensemble, including 13 members of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra who have yet to receive Philharmonic membership, Plaichinger among them. Balzereit is one of two harpists. (The other is a man.) She replaced the first woman harpist who gained full membership and then retired. In any case, there aren't many male harpists for the orchestra to choose from and, besides, the harp is a peripheral instrument. It not only doesn't appear often, it is not regarded by the orchestra as central to its testosterone "soul."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Osborne reports further that Ursula Wex, a cellist, will be coming up for membership in a year or so. Also, the Staatsoper says it hired two women violinists last winter. They would be starting in the fall and become eligible in 2009 -- 12 years after the Philharmonic doors were opened. Ah, Vienna. So gemütlich.

PPS: See our follow-up item, IT TAKES A WOMAN, for more information.

A gag is making the email rounds:

1. Go to the Google home page. 2. Type in the word failure. 3. Don't click "Google Search," click "I'm Feeling Lucky." 4. Spread the word before the people at Google "fix" it.

This has been done before, but better. The type-in was weapons of mass destruction, which brought up a "cannot be displayed" page that was really funny because it looked so right and was such a dead-pan gag. The page lasted for a while as a Google re-direct and might still exist somewhere.

Aaaahhhh, here it is. We took note of it a couple of years ago -- on Aug. 11, 2003 in our first Straight Up post, to be precise -- and pointed out that the Web wit who thought up the gag and commandeered the Google site was a guy by the name of Anthony Cox. We didn't realize it at the time but he's a blogging pharmacist with a taste for Tom Lehrer and the Amateur Transplants. How 'bout that.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Have a listen to the Transplants' tune about a "brand new wonder drug": Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin. "It can cure the common cold / And being struck by lightning. ... It reverses impotence/And makes you good at fighting. ... It makes you smart as Einstein / And as muscular as Tysin." And, not to put too fine a point on it, "It's an antidote to Ricin." We want a prescription.

Prince Charles and his now-legal paramour, Camilla, are being trailed on their visit to the U.S. by a ragged army of U.K. reporters, each determined to come up with the royal goods, no matter how remote from reality. British news hounds were skewered 75 years ago by fellow Brit Humbert Wolfe in his famous ditty:

THE BRITISH JOURNALIST
[Actual title: "Over the Fire"]

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.

In the intervening decades, things have gotten no better. Leon Freilich, a Yank from Brooklyn with Brit connections, observes:

THE BRITISH JOURNALIST, STILL

You can expect
so very much
from someone with
the British touch!
The man's a master
of depiction
and uses all
the ways of fiction.

Most news stories live for a day and die the next. This one, by Sam Roberts, is different. It did not make the front page. No matter. The "news from Maidanek," as he reports it this morning more than a half-century later, will live for the ages. If he never writes another story, Roberts is assured a lasting place wherever journalists are entitled to be remembered.

Hooray! At long last a readable column from The New Yorker's television critic. A couple of her zingers in the current issue:

• CBS's "Two and a Half Men" [is] a show that seems more dependent than most on the cattle prod of its laugh track, and [it's] one that I have watched some two dozen times with a sporting interest: I want to be present when Charlie Sheen demonstrates that he has more than one facial expression.

• ["My Name Is] Earl" had me grinding my teeth from its first image -- a bobblehead dashboard figurine. I sensed that I was being handed a big can of whimsy and sent off against my will to camp camp.

She doesn't quite achieve the altitude of the zingers in Clive James's weekly columns in the Observer a quarter century ago, but then what other television critic has?

Here's a sampling of his stingers -- all but one of them ledes -- on subjects high and low from a collection of his columns, "Glued to the Box," dating from 1979 to 1982. They are a time capsule, of course. But they preserve a particular sensibility (one we don't always agree with, though never mind), as well as some of the period's social and political history:

• Antibes was the venue for this season's first international heat of Jeux sans frontières (BBC1), a television phenomenon which encapsulates the Europe of the present and presages the world of the future. It is omnilingual yet inarticulate, multicoloured yet homogeneous, frantic yet static, contrived yet banal. It is a girl from Urps-am-Gurgle dressed as a duck ...

• A repeat series of Shoestring (BBC1) and a brand new series of Minder (Thames) helped convince the viewer, by way of these two deservedly popular vigilantes, that good triumphs over evil in the end. Back in the real world, a rapist was let off with a £2000 fine because the girl brought it on herself by hitch-hiking after dark. The news that you can rape a hitch-hiker for only two grand will no doubt soon spread.

• As if to demonstrate that the tangles democracies get into count as nothing beside the horrors of tyranny, Idi Amin made an appearance on the Nine O'Clock News (BBC1). Exclusively interviewed by Brian Barron, Idi spoke from his mysterious hideout, which nobody except everybody knows to be the Sands Hotel Jeddah. That the BBC agreed with Idi to keep his whereabouts secret bespeaks a certain old-world charm, like the punctiliousness with which, during the Second World War, they are reputed to have paid Hitler's royalties into a Swiss bank account.

• Goodbye Gutenberg (BBC2) deserved its repeat. Here was a vision of the fully computerised future, when all the electronic machines in the world will be linked up and our bodies will consist entirely of transplants. There is nothing more thought-provokinng than the spectacle of a Japanese engineer and a Japanese computer having a long conversation in Japanese.

• Bad sight of the week was on TV Eye (Thames). Chinese whose fingers had been cut off in industrial accidents were to be seen having them sewn back on or replaced with toes. During the long operations, which involved micro-surgery of staggering intricacy, the patients stayed awake, presumably so that the visiting round-eyes from TV Eye could interview them. Some of the patients had had whole hands or even arms sliced off. These, too, were replaced. The cause of the accident was usually some such piece of machinery as a circular saw. Thousands of Chinese per year have digits or limbs removed in this way. Apparently it is deemed more interesting to explore surgical techniques for replacing the missing appendages than to devise safe machines.

• As was revealed on Newsnight (BBC2), Madame Toussaud's must have been all set for a Reagan victory. Within minutes of the announcement an effigy that looked nothing like him was being lifted into position, while the effigy that looked nothing like Carter was taken away to be given a new haircut and labelled as someone else -- Gary Cooper, perhaps.

• Fronting In Evidence --The Bomb (Yorkshire), Jonathan Dimbleby overwhelmingly proved that nuclear weapons were a bad thing. Anybody still harboring the belief that they were a species of Christmas decoration would have found the programme a rude shock.

• Rod Stewart and his wife, Alana, talked to Russell Hary (BBC1). Although obviously still employing a hair preparation based on epoxy resin, Rod evinced a new maturity.

• Mrs. Mao, up for trial in China, was looking well pleased with herself on all channels. She was back in show-business.

• The Making of Mankind (BBC2) is much more interesting now that it has reached a stage where Mankind started leaving consumer durables lying around. The hunter-gatherer phase reached its peak during the last Ice Age, during which the hunter gatherers, while waiting for the bison to show up, whiled away the time in deep caves by painting pictures of such astonishing accomplishment that you marvelled all over again at just how lousy our own artists were during the Middle Ages.

• With camera shutters crackling around her like an electrical storm, Lady Diana Spencer, as she then was, had a little crisis. Off she went in tears with all the world's media in pursuit. Perhaps the whole deal was off. Perhaps she would become a nun.

• Introducing The God That Fled (BBC2), narrator Christopher Hitchens announced that "the programme contains nudity and some scene of physical and psychological violence." No doubt the viewing figures were thereby enhanced. In the immortal words of Ronnie Scott, the bouncer was outside throwing them in.

• Albert Speer, the only top Nazi to make it all the way through into the television era, died of old age practically on camera. He was making a programme for the BBC when he finally gave up the Geist, leaving one with some curiostiy to see the as-yet unscreened tape, in order to ascertain how long his expression of innocent bewilderment stayed in place after his canny soul had departed.

• Chopin loved his country but resisted all appeals to go home, on the principle that whereas in Paris art was eternal, political turmoil in Poland was merely endless. Perhaps the only appropriate response to the week's events, for those of us who could do absolutely nothing about them, would have been to put on an old record of Rubinstein playing Chopin's second piano sonata and slowly consume a bottle of whatever they used to drink in Poland when they could still get it.

• Bad sight of the week was in an episode of Horizon (BBC2) dealing with high-speed and time-lapse photography. Sped up several hundred times, a gang of maggots devoured a dead mouse. Before time-lapse photography was invented it was always assumed that maggots, though they travelled in packs, did their actual eating on an individual basis. But time-lapse photography reveals that they dine as a group. "They are swimming in one another's juices," explained the voice-over. First they were all over the mouse's head like a cloche hat.Then they were around its neck like a feather boa fluttering in the wind. Then they were around its waist like a grass skirt worn by a particularly active hula dancer. Then they were sliding down past its hips like a dress being rapidly removed by an impatient lover. By this stage you had to remind yourself of the necessity to breathe.

• Always the best thing of its kind on the air, Minder (Thames) has been particularly nutritious lately, with George Cole's portrayal of Arthur Daly attaining such depths of seediness that a flock of starlings could feed off him.

• "I have a gift for disaster," said Richard Burton in The Medusa Touch (ITV). "I am the man with the power to cause catastrophe." He spent the whole movie taking the words out of your mouth.

The whole columns, too, hold up beautifully, which goes to show it's not just the wit of his ledes but the power of his reporting even on the most trivial subjects that make them readable so many years later. And powerful reporting, perhaps more than wit, is what's really lacking from The New Yorker's television criticism.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

We called him the Pick with an 'R'. Doug Ireland calls him Alito the Hun. "[I]t’s hard to imagine a more reactionary judge," Brother Doug writes. He begins his dissection with a couple of choice cuts:

Theocratic pit bull Gary Bauer, the dwarf former presidential candidate of the Christer hard right, crowed that the appointment of Alito was "a grand slam," and crackpot antediluvian Phyllis Schlafly -- who called Bush’s corporate flunky Harriet Miers a dangerous "feminist," of all things -- likewise gave her enthusiastic blessing ...

More from Brother Doug's terrible swift scalpel: The Hun "would gut Roe v. Wade," if given the chance, and he's homophobic -- see his decision "in a case involving a disabled kid who was repeatedly a target of nasty anti-gay epithets." He "doesn’t have much use for the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures," either. So "you can kiss a lot of your rights and liberties goodbye -- permanently" if "Holy Joe" Lieberman and other right-wing Senate Dems "vote to short-circuit any filibuster" of the nomination.

Trouble is, unless we miss our guess, the Pick with an 'R' is too damned mainstream to rate a filibuster. Forgive us, lawd, our jaundiced view.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: In re: Iraqi Official Aims to Refurbish Image:

TOP OF THE SAND HEAP

-- Leon Freilich

Dan Neil's column in this past Sunday's Los Angeles Times Magazine talks about the many "moments of ironic fallout" included on "Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security," which he describes as "a darkly amusing collection of songs, civil defense messages and short films [which] takes us to a zany yet oddly familiar land of galloping paranoia, where shadows are etched in concrete and happiness is a warm bomb shelter."

Neil writes that his favorite moment is this one:

A man returning from the ice cream parlor sees a blinding light, the mighty spark of an atom bomb. He comes to in a burning, irradiated ruin. Dazed and bleeding, he looks around desperately until, with a sigh of relief, he finds his smoldering fedora. It's the end of the world, but by all means, don't forget your hat.

That moment is a long, long way from the real thing, which is not for casual viewing. There was no irony when, on Aug. 6, 1945, "lessons [began] at the National Technical University on the outskirts of downtown Hiroshima, as always, at 8 a.m. ... and Keijiro Matsushima [was] gazing out the window, bored."

Suddenly, a gleaming light fills the classroom. A "reddish-orange flash" bright "as the sun" prompts him to dive beneath his desk. He places his hands over his eyes and his thumbs into his ears -- doing exactly what he has been told to do to protect himself in an air raid.

But nothing can protect him against what happens next.

Many artists have addressed what happened next. Most recently, the new John Adams-Peter Sellars opera "Doctor Atomic," which has been getting wide attention, treated it as the legend of a modern Faustus. But has any artist faced the subject more directly than Abbie Conant?

What happened next -- literally, not symbolically or mythologically -- is the subject of "Rachel's Lament," a music-video piece documenting Conant's response -- her "inner emotional experience," as she terms it -- to "the dropping of the first atomic bombs." (You'll need a broadband connection and RealPlayer to see and hear it.) Conant performed it this past summer in Santa Fe, N.M., "in the ancient spirit of the lament -- a woman weeping for the dead," on the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For more about what happened, have a look at this three-part "Remembering Hiroshima" series:

1) The Bomb That Was Meant for Hitler;
2) "My God, What Have We Done?"
3) The Cold War Heats Up.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

From a conscript in the Army of the Tireless:

There's a cropped picture of Egon Schiele's 1912 "Portrait of Wally" on the cover of the new cultural-property anthology "Who Owns the Past?" edited by Kate Fitz Gibbon in collaboration with former Metropolitan Museum counsel and power lawyer Ashton Hawkins. The book, subtitled "Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law," is to be launched tonight at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea and tomorrow at the Century Club.

Since 1997, when the painting was spotted at the Museum of Modern Art by heirs of Lea Bondi (the Jewish art dealer in Vienna from whom the Nazis seized it in 1939), MoMA has fought the Bondi family's efforts to get "Wally" back, arguing that the picture should be returned to its lender in Vienna, where claims by Jews for the return of Nazi-looted property are, to put it mildly, not welcomed. MoMA also commissioned a memorandum to discredit potential claims that the family might eventually make under Austrian law. The case is now in U.S. District Court.

The anthology (from Rutgers University Press) includes a MoMA-friendly article on the dispute, but insiders say the case is now spreading uneasy scrutiny to the Holocaust-era history of Schiele paintings in the collection of MoMA benefactor Ronald Lauder that are now on view at Lauder's Neue Galerie uptown. (Since MoMA first rebuffed the Bondi family in 1997, by the way, the value of "Wally" has risen from $1 million to about $10 million.)

You may recall that MoMA has beaten back reporters who've tried to cover the "Wally" story. If not, ask Morley Safer, whose crew was blocked from entering MoMA's 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective in retaliation for Safer's efforts to crack the Schiele scandal. Ask the New York Observer, whose reporter Andrew Goldman drew the ire of MoMA director Glenn Lowry for daring to note that Lowry had "reptilian eyes." (Ah, vanity.) Or ask David D'Arcy, the arts reporter ousted by NPR after MoMA attacked his coverage of the Schiele case on "All Things Considered" last Dec. 27.

Some background: D'Arcy was dumped for failing to do "fair and balanced reporting" when NPR management reversed its own editors, who had praised the story (listen to the broadcast), after a MoMA exec directly contacted NPR CEO Kevin Klose. NPR then issued a "correction" at MoMA's behest, stating that the museum, which had been in court over "Portrait of Wally" for more than seven years, never took "a position on the painting's ownership."

Amid claims that NPR had failed to stand up to MoMA, Holocaust specialists, lawyers and journalists condemned the "correction" as false and misleading, and -- what has not been reported -- NPR (through hardball lawyers at Williams & Connolly) subsequently offered to take D'Arcy back, but he refused to sign a letter that NPR's enforcers at the law firm demanded, stating that NPR "had not caved" to pressure from the museum.

We've already written a lot about the D'Arcy affair: See (in chronological order) DAVID D'ARCY, NPR, AND MoMA, RUNNING COVER FOR NPR IN D'ARCY CASE, DAVID D'ARCY REDUX, WHOSE KLOSE CALL GOT NPR REPORTER FIRED?, BATTLE OF THE NPR CORRECTIONS and 'I'M NOT EVEN ROAD KILL.' Maybe one day we'll get over it.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands