Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 511

How Much Class Resentment Is There in America?

Over at the Brookings Institution, Richard Reeves and Nathan Joo summarize some fascinating recent academic research on Americans’ preferences about the ideal level of social mobility—that is, the percentage of people born in the bottom quintile who should move upward, and the percentage of people born in the top quintile who should move downward. The takeaway: Americans want a lot of the former, but not so much of the latter:

Americans across the ideological spectrum want to see people born at the bottom to rise up the income ladder to a much greater extent than they do.

… But when asked about ideal rates of downward mobility from the top quintile, a very different answer emerges. Americans are against people being stuck in poverty, but are much less worried about the persistence of relative affluence. In fact, the ideal rate of stickiness at the top closely mirrors the real data.

These results, which held for liberals and conservatives alike, would be untenable if actually put into practice. As Reeves and Joo note, mobility across quintiles is a “zero-sum game”; it’s impossible for the poor to get rich and the rich to stay rich without blocking mobility for the middle. Still, the findings might not be surprising given America’s history. The authors of the original study note that “the idea of upward social mobility is part of the American ethos,” and any comparable emphasis on downward social mobility has been “notably absent.”

While perhaps consistent with the American ethos, the results of this study are at least somewhat in tension with the prevailing wisdom about the country’s current mood. Many pundits have interpreted the rise of Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders as evidence that Americans are deeply resentful of elites and elite institutions. This is probably mostly correct. But this study—if accurate—might suggest that Americans’ anti-elite sentiment isn’t quite as vindictive or all-encompassing as some analyses suggest. Americans want more upward mobility for the poor, but they don’t want it to come at the expense of the upper middle class. Americans want their elites to do a better job, but maybe they aren’t quite ready to throw them out just yet.

The President’s Foreign Policy Legacy

In advance of last night’s State of the Union, our own Walter Russell Mead wrote about President Obama’s foreign policy legacy for the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI). A taste:

President Obama’s final State of the Union address comes at a time when, for the first time in his administration, the public believes that the nation’s most serious problems involve foreign policy rather than domestic issues, the majority disapproves of the President’s handling of foreign affairs, and 73 percent say they want the next President to take a “different approach” to foreign policy. President Obama, for his part, remains deeply committed to his approach to foreign affairs, is determined to continue on his current course through the end of his mandate, and wants a new kind of foreign policy to be part of the political legacy of his administration. 

This will be an uphill battle. Even Hillary Clinton, the President’s former Secretary of State, has moved to distance herself from some of the President’s signature policies. (She would have been more interventionist in Syria, more patient with Israel, less forthcoming with Russia.) As for the Republicans, Senator Rand Paul was the candidate whose foreign policy views most resemble those of the President, and in large part because of the changes in public sentiment that the President is struggling with, Senator Paul has now been relegated to the second, insignificant tier of Republican hopefuls and dropped from the principal debates.

President Obama and Senator Paul both stand within the Jeffersonian tradition of American foreign policy. This school of thought believes that the principles of the American Revolution fare best when American foreign policy is least active. To actively seek America’s Manifest Destiny through the expansion of America’s global role, Jeffersonians believe, exposes the United States to foreign hostility, endangers civil liberties at home, and entangles the United States with untrustworthy powers who are fundamentally hostile to American ideals. America can best change the world, Jeffersonians believe, by cultivating its own garden and setting an example of democratic prosperity that others will emulate.

We recommend you read the whole thing.

Japan Tells China to Back Off

Tokyo says that it will send patrols to meet any Chinese ships that sail too close to the disputed Senkaku islands (called the Diaoyu islands in China). Reuters:

The SDF [Self-Defense Force] ships will be dispatched to urge Chinese naval vessels to leave if they come within about 22 kilometres (13.7 miles) of the Senkaku, the [Yomiuri] newspaper said. Japan informed China of its intentions after Chinese ships sailed around the islands last November, it added.

In response, Beijing warned Tokyo not to do something it might regret: “We advise Japan against taking provocative acts or doing anything to raise tensions, otherwise it will have to accept responsibility for everything that happens,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman menaced.

American policymakers will be watching how this plays out closely. The U.S. has been trying to calibrate its approach to China in the South China Sea—oscillating between various degrees of confrontation and appeasement. In the East China Sea, President Obama promised to defend Japan in the event of an altercation but has officially taken no side in the dispute over the islands themselves. Of course, the last thing this Administration wants is to be pulled into any sort of armed struggle with Beijing. Prime Minister Abe is betting that by standing tall and talking tough, he can keep China at bay. The U.S. and its regional partners very much hope he’s right.

After Election, Venezuela Paralyzed

Even as its economy implodes as oil prices tank, Venezuela’s government is paralyzed. The Wall Street Journal reports:

On Tuesday, the president of the assembly and an opposition leader, Henry Ramos, said the day’s session failed to reach a quorum, with neither side showing up, as a battle between the branches of the badly splintered government heats up.

A day earlier, the Supreme Court—packed with government allies—declared all acts by the assembly null and void because the opposition-dominated legislature had defied an order by the magistrates barring three opposition lawmakers from being sworn in. President Nicolás Maduro’s United Socialist Party had asked the court for a review of the results, asserting that there was vote-buying on the part of the opposition in the remote state of Amazonas, a claim the opposition denies.As the two sides maneuvered, it appeared that ruling party lawmakers would stay away from the assembly as Mr. Maduro tried to mute its role in governance. Indeed, the government is now trying to decide where the president would give his state-of-the-union address on Friday, a speech that until now has always been delivered in the assembly.“We’re not going to make the quorum for the opposition,” Diosdado Cabello, a ruling party lawmaker and the former president of the assembly, told reporters.

As to the court rulings against the opposition, the opposition itself rejects its legitimacy:

The government’s critics say the Supreme Court lacks legitimacy because the lame-duck parliament last month violated constitutional norms by packing it with 13 Socialist-allied judges. The governor of Amazonas, Liborio Guarulla, who is opposed to Mr. Maduro, said the evidence presented by the government of irregularities on election day was bogus.

“We’re going to show how this has all just been a setup, that they are illegal recordings, editing, fake names and all of that,” he told reporters. “The situation of repression and lies has continued.”

This paralysis may be designed to give the National Communal Parliament, an extra-legal body convened by Cabello after the election loss and housed in the same building as the normal Congress, some legitimacy—or at least to make it the only legislature in town that can actually meet under its own rules.

The reality is that Venezuela’s socialist government will not yield to anything but force. Even then the country is so divided that some people seem to be ready for civil war to defend the Chavez project. It is hard to see a peaceful and smooth way forward.The U.S. has long enjoyed the luxury of not having major crisis spots in its immediate neighborhood. That could be changing as Venezuela continues the slide toward catastrophe. Policymakers in Washington should probably start boning up on their Spanish.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, Reactionary?

Senator Bernie Sanders has broken with the progressive orthodoxy on campus sexual assault, which holds that such accusations should be handled internally by colleges, under a kind of parallel justice system with different rules from the criminal courts, instead of—or at least in addition to—courts of law. The Hill reports:

Decrying rape and sexual assault on campuses as an “epidemic,” [Sanders] said schools must not try to handle the issue internally.

“Rape and assault is rape or assault whether it takes place on a campus or a dark street,” he said Monday at the Black and Brown Presidential Forum in Iowa.
“If a student rapes another student it has got to be understood as a very serious crime, it has to get outside of the school and have a police investigation and that has to take place.”

These comments represent Sanders’ latest heresy on a hot-button cultural issue. He got burned by leftwing activists earlier in this campaign for declining to say “black lives matter,” and, after that, for suggesting that mass immigration could depress the wages of native workers. He is still taking heat from Clinton for his comparably more pro-gun record.

Taken together, these skirmishes highlight the fact that it’s too simple to describe the race between Clinton and Sanders as a fight between the “center-Left” and the “hard-Left.” In some ways, the race also represents the conflict between the “old Left” and the “new Left.” The old Left was organized around economic populism, believed strongly in civil liberties and due process of law, and cast a wider tent on social issues, like immigration and guns. The modern Democratic party, which is increasingly reliant for votes on minorities and single women, has instead organized its message around cultural issues and identity politics. That is Sanders’ weakness, as Clinton and her allies well know.The fight over sexual assault is one of the remaining areas of controversy between the old-time liberals and the new social progressives. While the old-time liberals were protective of rights of the accused, and comfortable with the traditional definition of sexual assault, the new progressives are pushing a cultural revolution in rape law—one that has as its aim the creation of a whole new paradigm for how our society treats such accusations. The new standard should be “yes means yes” rather than “no means no” and the new presumption should be “guilty until proven innocent” rather than “innocent until proven guilty.”Sanders’ view that campuses should be taken out of the business of adjudicating rape once again highlights the distance between his old-school economic populist liberalism and the new cultural left. To be sure, Sanders didn’t explicitly critique the campus tribunals on due process grounds—but by endorsing in these comments the criminal justice system as the proper place to handle campus assault, he implicitly repudiated the prevailing activist consensus that the courts provide too much due process for such crimes. This view is unlikely to win him too many supporters in the modern Democratic party. We wouldn’t be surprised if he starts backpedaling from it soon.

LNG Exports Salvage Scuppered Tugboat Fleet

America’s very first cargo of LNG exports is being loaded onto a tanker at a Louisiana terminal today, and the tanker that will be transporting that superchilled hydrocarbon will itself be escorted by a fleet of custom tugboats that were initially commissioned to lead tankers bringing in shipments from abroad. Bloomberg reports:

Ready to steer the giant tanker [that will carry America’s first LNG export shipment] into Cheniere Energy Inc.’s $15 billion Sabine Pass terminal is a fleet of tugboats that’s spent the past seven years killing time — some days holding emergency exercises, some days racing each other. They were all set to escort shipments of natural-gas imports, but the ships never arrived: unexpectedly, the U.S. started producing enough gas of its own.

“The boats are beautiful — you could eat off the floor in the engine room,” said Richard Ennis, head of natural resources at ING Capital. With the switch to exports, the tugs will at last have a job to do — even if it’s not the one they expected. They “may actually get a scratch on them,” Ennis said.

The story of America’s about-face from seeking out LNG imports to now exporting that same commodity just a decade later is full of details like this. For example, back in 2003, a group of energy majors came together to fund a $2 billion LNG import terminal in Sabine Pass just a few miles from the Cheniere facility loading our first exports this week. These import terminals were, just like the port’s tugboat fleet, made idle by the shale boom, which slaked America’s thirst for natural gas.

But export terminal operators aren’t exactly in the clear now either, despite the fact that shipments are starting to roll out. The global LNG market has mirrored the oil market, as prices have cratered over the past year or so. At the beginning of 2015, Asian markets were paying as much as $15 per million British thermal units (mmBtu). Today, that price has dropped to under $7 per mmBtu. And when you do the math (domestic U.S. natural gas prices are trading around $2.40 per mmBtu, and it costs roughly $5 per mmBtu to liquify, transport, and then regassify natural gas), the price incentive for unloading American shale gas on the global LNG market is suddenly a lot more suspect. First, that is, we built the import terminals, and then decided we no longer needed to buy up LNG from abroad. Now we’ve constructed export terminals (which are roughly twice as expensive), and it seems that companies are going to have a hard time selling in today’s market.U.S. LNG, then, doesn’t look like it will be flooding the global market anytime soon—but at least the trickle that’s just now starting to flow will give those Sabine Pass tugboats something to do.

Africa’s Pivotal Year

This year is shaping up to be a pivotal one for democracy in Africa, potentially setting the course of the continent’s political and economic development for years to come, and at a historic moment when its long-awaited economic takeoff finally seems to be getting underway.

According to the most recent edition of the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report, of the 13 countries with the highest projected compounded annual growth rate from 2014 through 2017, six are in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be the fastest-growing economic region in the world for 2015 (the figures are not yet in), with its GDP growing at 4.5 percent, slightly higher than China’s anticipated GDP increase of 4.3 percent. With prices for commodities remaining depressed globally—the price for oil plunged this week to new 12-year lows—and China’s demand for natural resources slumping as a result of its apparently sustained economic slowdown, African countries are clearly experiencing growth for reasons other than the demand for raw materials.Demographics are part of the explanation. By 2050, one in four workers in the world will be African. The continent also has the world’s fastest rate of urbanization, which will lower basic infrastructure costs and concentrate consumer markets. Africa’s communications infrastructure, for example, continues to grow at revolutionary rates: Cell phone and internet use have grown at five times global averages over the past decade.Improvements in governance are perhaps an even more critical component of the economic buoyancy. Countries once written off as “risky” bets are now increasingly attractive places to invest. Just a few years ago, amid violence that left 3,000 dead and displaced half a million, Côte d’Ivoire failed to make payments on its Eurobond. Now, under a new administration, it has posted annual growth in excess of 8 percent for several years in a row while benefiting from significant inflows of foreign investment. Not surprisingly, President Alassane Ouattara trounced the opposition this past October, winning a second term in office in the first round of the presidential election with more than 83 percent of the votes. Therein lies the importance of democracy: It ensures the accountability of those tasked with improving government performance and economic development.As former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell memorably put it with respect to a flawed poll in that country, most elections in Africa are more aptly termed “election-like events.” Incumbents dominate, mustering all the resources of their states to maintain their hold on power, but better informed and increasingly restive populations—many now connected by social media—have also been mobilizing and flexing their muscles. Last year saw the unprecedented defeat of incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and biggest economy, as well as remarkable gains by the opposition against Tanzania’s Party of the Revolution (CCM), the continent’s longest-ruling political organization. In other cases, such as Guinea, the incumbents clung on only by resorting to skulduggery: Amnesty International documented security forces killing people in election-related violence, while European Union monitors criticized the process as “inadequate” and “lacking transparency.”The 2015 contests, however, were but a prelude to this year, when national-level elections for the presidency and/or parliament will take place in about twenty African countries, including the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, Rwanda, Somalia, and Uganda. Moreover, provincial and local government elections are planned in a number of other countries, most notably South Africa, where polls are scheduled in all 52 of the country’s districts (the second tier of government below the nine provinces) and all of its 226 local municipalities. If the electorates continue their recent trend of rewarding performance while punishing incompetence and corruption, Africa may witness considerable upheaval in the months ahead.Nowhere is this likelier to occur—or with more significant consequences—than the ironically named Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The DRC has a population of more than 77 million people spread across the 11th-largest national territory in the world. Situated in the heart of Africa, the country is endowed with prodigious mineral reserves that even in today’s deflated commodities markets are still valued by some estimates at more than $20 trillion. And yet, for all that potential wealth, the DRC ranks a miserable 176th out of 188 countries and territories on the most recent edition of the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index, released last month. A shocking 95 percent of the country’s citizens live on less than $2 a day. Fair and free elections would not only honor the legitimate aspirations of its long-suffering people to control their own destiny, but also put considerable wind into the sails of African democracy.Alas, standing in the Congolese people’s way is their current ruler, Joseph Kabila, who inherited power from his father. Kabila père was an adventurer who seized power amid the collapse of longtime dictator Mobuto Sese Seko’s rule, only to be assassinated by his own bodyguard in 1999. His son was subsequently proclaimed the “winner” of elections in 2006 and 2011—the latter result denounced as “treachery, lies, and terror” by the DRC’s Roman Catholic bishops, who had deployed 40,000 trained poll watchers to report on the extent of the fraud. The constitution bars Kabila from seeking a third consecutive term this year (it explicitly states that the limit on presidential terms is not subject to “any constitutional revision”; in several other African countries without such provisions, leaders have recently amended the constitution for exactly this purpose). The Congolese ruler may not go quietly, however. If he respects the constitution and leaves office after elections due by November, Kabila faces a lifetime—he is only 44 years old, having come to power before he was even thirty—of looking over his shoulder for potential war crimes prosecutions, due to his role in the civil wars preceding his first “election” as well as the subsequent, poor human rights record of his regime.Consequently, it is no surprise that young Kabila and his entourage have been pulling out all the stops to avoid having to stand down at the end of this year. You name it, they’ve tried it: blocking legally-adopted children from joining their families (in order to gain leverage with governments abroad); trying to mandate a nationwide census before any vote (in a country the size of the DRC and as lacking in transport infrastructure, the census would take years to complete); splitting the Congo’s 11 provinces into 26 (thus gumming up the already delayed process of local and regional elections, and leaving regime appointees in control of the machinery of state). The most recent effort is a risible call for “national dialogue” to “discuss” a vote that is already enshrined in the constitution. Meanwhile, a report in December by the United Nations mission in the Congo documents the detention of at least 649 political opponents and civil society activists in the first nine months of 2015 alone. Rather diplomatically, it notes that “the shrinking of democratic space is likely to impact the electoral process.”Absent timely and free elections to enable the Congolese people to transition out of the Kabila era, it is hard to see how the country can avoid sliding back into conflict. The last time that happened nearly a dozen other countries were drawn in and upward of 5 million people lost their lives before the fighting was halted.The question is what to do now.While it is true, as Walter Russell Mead has noted, that the overall record of the democracy promotion efforts of the United States and its European partners is something of a mixed bag, U.S. administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have not fared badly in Africa. Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, for one, did not hesitate to credit Washington for helping to ensure not only that his country’s elections took place in a timely and credible fashion, but also that the historic results were respected and a peaceful, constitutional transition followed. With this success in mind, we have all the more reason to lament that, as the Carnegie Endowment’s Thomas Carothers has estimated, the Obama Administration has reduced U.S. assistance in fostering democracy, human rights, and accountability worldwide by nearly a third, while the U.S. Agency for International Development’s funding for Africa specifically has declined by 43 percent since 2009.As the U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa puts it, “as we look toward the future, it is clear that Africa is more important than ever to the security and prosperity of the international community, and to the United States in particular.” The United States ought to focus its diplomatic leverage and such material and human resources as are available on helping Africans progress toward transparent, effective governance as their continent’s economy continues to grow. If this can be accomplished, 2016 may be the year that the Congo and other African countries will finally pivot towards a more hopeful future.

Bizet’s Hidden Gem Restored

When Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers last premiered at the Metropolitan Opera on November 13, 1916, Enrico Caruso sang the lead role of Nadir, Woodrow Wilson had just been elected President, and the battles of the Somme and Verdun were still raging in Europe. After the Met opened the first new production of the opera in a century on New Years’ Eve, the big question is: why the heck did it take so long?

All but eclipsed by Bizet’s more famous Carmen, The Pearl Fishers tells the story of two Sri Lankan divers, Nadir and Zurga, who both fell in love with the same Hindu priestess, Leila. For the sake of their friendship, they vowed not to pursue her—but when Leila (soprano Diana Damrau) comes to their village, Nadir (tenor Matthew Polenzani) is unable to help himself. The villagers catch the couple in flagrante delicto in the midst of a tempest, blame the destructive storm on Leila’s failure to keep her vow of virginity, and demand the pair be put to death. Overwhelmed by jealousy, Zurga (baritone Mariusz Kwiecien), who has recently been appointed village chieftain, condemns the two. Just as Nadir and Leila are about to be burned alive, however, Zurga bursts back onstage with news that the village is aflame. While villagers rush to save their children, he cuts his old friend and his beloved free, confiding that it was he who set the fire. The couple flees to live in happiness, while Zurga remains to face his fate.The traditional rap on Pearl Fishers is that it has a weak libretto and brilliant but uneven music. But the Met’s new staging, directed by Penny Woolcock, reveals unexpected dramatic depth as well as moments of intense lyric beauty, all brought to life by a stunning set (by Dick Bird) and strong acting. At its New Years’ Eve gala opening, the new Pearl Fishers received ovation after ovation. All of which leads us back to the original question—why did this lie unperformed for 100 years? The question is not, as it turns out, rhetorical. Answering it will tell us a great deal about the state of modern opera.The Pearl Fishers’ long drought at the Met—15 years longer than the Boston Red Sox’s 1918–2004 World Series drought, seven years (and counting) shorter than the Cubs’—is representative both of its place in the tradition-bound opera world and of the changing fortunes of popular entertainment. Though it has not always been quite so thoroughly ignored by other American or European companies, Pearl Fishers is not generally considered among the 50 to 60-odd classics that make up the opera “repertory.” These are the big hits, such as Aida and Don Giovanni, that any singer or fan is expected to be familiar with and that make up the bulk of each season in every major opera house. When you consider that the Met puts on about 25 shows per season, and other big U.S. houses run 8–­12, this is not a very deep well to draw from. But until recently, economic conditions in the opera world, as well as broader cultural trends, virtually forced companies to operate this way, with little room for new works or those by old masters that were thought to be less than perfect. In other words, the Met—and other houses—could stage Pearl Fishers in 1916 and in 2016 for reasons that obtained on either of those dates, but perhaps not in between.

If we look at the Met’s audience in 1916, we’d see the cheap seats populated by immigrants who spoke the traditional languages of opera—Italian, German, French. For them, this was popular entertainment. At the front of the house, American quasi-aristocrats of the Gilded Age were still doing their best to echo European tastes—hiring away European artists and conductors (such as Caruso or, a few years earlier, Gustav Mahler) just as they bought art and furniture from decaying European country houses. The Met put on new productions (it would stage the world premiere of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi two years after Pearl Fishers, in 1918), while racing to catch up with old ones. Since it had been founded several hundred years after the start of opera, there was a voluminous catalogue of works that had never been staged in the New World before. As a result, there was a rich and varied selection of works on at any time.But after the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act shut down U.S. immigration from Europe almost completely, the number of immigrants for whom opera was accessible, first-language entertainment began to dwindle. Meanwhile, the Depression significantly affected financial support. By the time that crisis was over, an increasingly self-confident, broader, and less aristocratic U.S. elite felt less obliged to follow European tastes. And as the radical composers of the Second Viennese School and their heirs divorced the intellectual appeal of classical music from the “gut” pull that many feel from the music of Mozart or Verdi, the children of the operagoers who had awaited every new Puccini opera turned to more accessible entertainments.Under these circumstances, opera houses survived by staging those works that had the broadest possible appeal to the middle and upper classes. (A sign of the audiences that were lost and gained: my immigrant, barely-educated, Italian-speaking great-grandmother frequented the 5-cent family circle seats at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music with her friends. I, on the other hand, became an opera fan only after playing the violin for a dozen years in private school.) Opera houses chose operas that the audience could appreciate without being able to understand the language, which meant works that were either really famous or really self-explanatory, with the lavish spectacle compensating for occasional befuddlement. But those trade-offs worked only if the music was consistently excellent throughout: not just good, but so superlative that you would happily listen for three straight hours to a language you didn’t understand, and to plots that often appeared (especially given the demand for spectacle) ridiculous. Bizet’s Carmen, written just before his untimely death at 36, is one such opera—but Pearl Fishers is not.This approach ensured opera’s survival in the United States, but it came with significant costs. If you believe that opera is dead and that opera houses are essentially museums of an art form whose best years are past, then this means we’ve taken an incredibly restrictive approach to preserving something of which we have a limited supply. No curator would pay to have Starry Night preserved and exhibited while leaving a lesser van Gogh, such as The Potato Eaters, to molder unseen in a damp basement; yet for three generations now, the opera community has taken exactly this approach to the lesser works of even the greatest of masters. Conversely, if you think opera is still kicking (or might wake back up), then we’ve created an impossibly high standard, one whereby new compositions need to meet or exceed not just Bizet’s works, but the best of Bizet’s works, to be good enough to keep around.But the rise of two technologies now seems to be helping the opera world break out of its programmatic rut. As Walter Russell Mead wrote in September:

The widespread adoption of supertitles (or, in the Met’s case, those wonderfully inconspicuous back-of-the-seat panels that discreetly flash the libretto in English translation), has changed the relationship of the audience to the drama. More than ever before in its history, opera today is a dramatic performance; audiences chortle, weep, and gasp in response to events on the stage, and singers are under more pressure than ever before to act convincingly. At the same time, the dramatic improvements in sound and video recording quality mean that high-definition broadcast and recorded versions of great opera performances can be enjoyed at a reasonable price by people all over the country.

The first supertitles were introduced in the early 1980s; the back-of-the-seat “Met Titles” came into use in 1995. That means we’re only one generation into a world in which American audience members can yet again understand the words they’re listening to. It took a while for the new possibilities to sink in for directors, for a new generation of singers trained to be as much actors as vocal stars to grow up, and for audiences to work through the old classics under new conditions. The first time they were intelligible to audiences in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the repertory standards must have seemed marvelously fresh. After a few reinterpretations of the same 40–60 works, though, it makes sense to start expanding our horizons.

Similarly, the Met in HD program, which at ten years old is even younger, also disrupted old expectations. For one thing, you can now see a dozen or more operas a year without living in Manhattan or going bankrupt (but I repeat myself). For another, the pressure on singers to act increases when they know their facial expressions will be seen up close and in HD. When Pearl Fishers gets its turn for the Hollywood treatment on January 16, it will be broadcast to 2,000 cinemas and 70 continents—that’s a lot of close-ups.Together, these technologies have been changing the rules of the game. By removing the language barrier, supertitles (or the subtitles, in the case of the Met in HD broadcasts) allow for the rediscovery of operas as dramas—which expands the repertory. Take, for instance, Donizetti’s Tudor Queens trilogy, which we will continue to cover as the Met produces it this year (for the review of Anna Bolena, go here). Even though all three of these operas were written in the 1830s, they all received their first-ever productions at the Met only during the past five years (and have enjoyed something of a global revival in the same period). Their appeal seems due at least as much to their dramatic content as to the music—which, while gorgeous, historically was not considered equal the heights of the composer’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which was part of the repertory.All this gives us a different lens through which to examine the new performance of Pearl Fishers—not “did it live up to Carmen?” (it didn’t—nothing does) but “did it work as a whole?” On New Year’s Eve, there were times during Pearl Fishers when the libretto (despite its reputation as comparatively weak) carried the music as much as vice versa. The third act, for instance, was largely sustained by the dramatic tension between Damrau and Kwiecien, as Leila pled with a conflicted Zurga to spare her lover’s life. Conversely, the first act dragged a bit in spots poetically, but was more than redeemed by the (justly) famous duet Au fond du temple saint and Polenzani’s achingly gorgeous rendition of Je crois entendre encore. Viewed based on the libretto or the music alone—i.e., as a stage drama or concert—the night might have been a failure; success came from the way both worked together—which is to say, as an opera.This newfound appeal of Pearl Fishers as an opera—as that fusion between drama, music, and the visual artwork that goes into stage productions and costumes—is at once enabled and enhanced by the technologies that now allow English-speaking audiences to follow more closely. Certain complexities of the staging, for instance, are possible only because the director knows the audience is reading the text and following even the minutiae. Likewise, productions can make more nuanced and varied political and social comment under these circumstances. Woolcock made much use of the theme, already present in Pearl Fishers’ libretto, of the constant presence and threat of the ocean. The opera opened with a stunning technical display: a mid-air ballet, staged during the overture, in which pearl divers suspended from wires “dove” from the top of the proscenium arch down to the space above the stage, which was overlaid with a silk screen onto which the ocean was projected, complete with very convincing bubbles rising from the divers’ mouths. (The screens were by 59 Productions, choreography by Andrew Dawson.) The first two acts and the second half of the third were set in huts perched on bamboo poles atop realistic “water,” while the screen that hid the stage between the second and third acts displayed huge and growing waves, evoking the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. As a note in the program confirms, the visuals were meant to underscore the libretto’s persistent warning about the danger of the rising sea, and thus resonate with a contemporary audience’s concerns about global warming.But this wasn’t a screed; the show’s messages were mostly muted and arose organically from the libretto. Woolcock and Dick set the production in an undefined but modern time in an unspecified South-Asian location. In this context, various topics familiar to readers of our own Via Meadia bubble briefly to the surface: Hindu nationalism, religious conservatism, the role (and abuse) of women, and the prominence of local strongmen within nominally democratic societies. When Zurga asks the crowd to choose a leader, they “spontaneously” name him and pull out pre-printed Zurga posters. Act III is set in the sort of local party boss’ office in a concrete tower one might expect to see in Pakistan. The village mixes traditional dress (particularly among the women), religion, and bamboo huts with modern costumes and buildings. Ultimately, though, Pearl Fishers is great art infused with a universalist spirit. Two boys fighting over an unattainable girl and worrying about friendship and promises: these are concerns that speak to almost anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time.Pearl Fishers is not Carmen; no one will ever mistake it for one of the top ten operas ever written. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a work I want in my “museum,” and one which will inspire new artists. Kudos to the Met for this outstanding production, and here’s hoping we’ll continue to see more unexpected, newly unearthed, old treasures like it.
Now through February 4. Tickets $25 and up, here. Met in HD: The January 16 matinee will be transmitted live to 2,000 movie theaters in 70 countries. For more information, click here.

Brace Yourself (Further): We Could See $20 Oil

Crude prices are creeping ever closer to $30, with Europe’s Brent benchmark currently trading at $30.67 per barrel and America’s West Texas Intermediate (WTI) now at $30.30. Over the past year and a half, non-OPEC producers (led by America’s upstart shale companies) have pushed supply well past demand, and rather than cutting production as it has in the past, the cartel’s members have boosted their own production to compete for market share. That’s the supply side, but it’s flagging demand that’s now driving prices to 12 year lows, as worries over China’s struggling economy have depressed prices by more than 15 percent in 2016 (the worst start to a year on record). And, as Bloomberg reports, analysts don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet:

A rapid appreciation of the U.S. dollar may send Brent oil to as low as $20 a barrel, according to Morgan Stanley […]

“Given the continued U.S. dollar appreciation, $20-$25 oil price scenarios are possible simply due to currency,” the analysts wrote in the report. “The U.S. dollar and non-fundamental factors continue to drive oil prices.” […]Oil tumbled last week on volatility in Chinese markets after the country sought to quell losses in equities and stabilize its currency. A 3.2 percent increase in the U.S. dollar — as implied by a possible 15 percent yuan devaluation — may drive crude in the high $20s, Morgan Stanley said. If other currencies move as well, the shift by both the dollar and oil could be even greater, according to the report.

Our own Walter Russell Mead has an essay that’s well worth a read on the popping Chinese bubble. In it, he points out how “the producers of commodities and manufactured goods have bought into the idea that Chinese demand is a perpetual growth machine,” and how that misplaced trust has created a system that is currently reeling from the Chinese economy’s descent from those rarified airs of consistent double-digit annual growth. Oil isn’t the only commodity whose value is plummeting: zinc, copper, and nickel are in similar free fall. This is not an isolated problem, nor is it one that can be contained.

But these are especially trying times for oil producers, and OPEC’s petrostates are surely eying today’s market activities with what is becoming a practiced grimace. Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Nigeria’s oil minister is now floating the idea of an emergency meeting of the cartel, just two months after its scheduled biannual summit in Vienna that produced no agreement to curtail production:

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries “may hold an emergency meeting in the first quarter if prices remain at current levels,” Nigerian oil minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu said Tuesday at an Abu Dhabi energy conference, according to a recording of his comments.

Mr. Kachikwu said two countries—which he didn’t name—had made proposals for a gathering ahead of OPEC’s next scheduled meeting on June 2. The organization controls more than one-third of the world’s crude oil supply and has historically used such meetings to determine production levels as a way of regulating prices.

That idea is already receiving pushback, however, after the United Arab Emirates energy minister insisted the current course of action—pumping business as usual in the hopes of squeezing out competitors similarly beleaguered by low prices—was working. And, with relations between OPEC’s two most important members (Iran and Saudi Arabia) deteriorating, it’s hard to see any sort of production coordination anytime soon.

Citigroup’s oil guru Ed Morse has also noted that the world’s increasingly scarce storage capacity for all of this oil could push prices down even further, predicting prices “could fall as low as the $20 range.” Between that, the impending surge in Iranian supply pending the lifting of Western sanctions, and expectations for a torrid next few months for the Chinese economy, $20 oil doesn’t sound so far-fetched.

ISIS Suicide Bomber Strikes Heart of Istanbul

Explosions and fighting wracked Turkey on Monday in both the most cosmopolitan part of Istanbul and the country’s south-east. In Istanbul, a suicide bomber detonated a large bomb in the middle of the Sultanahmet district, killing at least 10 people. ISIS has already claimed responsibility. Sultanahmet is pretty much the center of the foreign tourist zone in Turkey: It’s where you’ll find the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi palace, and the Blue Mosque, and it’s packed with hotels and hostels. It’s home to some of the city’s most historic public spaces, stretching far back.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, street-to-street fighting continues to rage in important Kurdish areas. As the Financial Times reports:

In three weeks of intense fighting in Diyarbakir, the government has managed to clear militants from only about 60 per cent of the city centre, the province’s governor, Huseyin Aksoy, told the Financial Times. He blamed the slow progress on attempts to avoid civilian casualties, although 45 civilians have been killed, according to the ICG.

These two stories underline a core problem that seems to be plaguing today’s Turkey: The war in Syria and the rise of ethnic and sectarian hostilities in the region is increasingly playing on the deep, and historically often violent, divisions inside Turkey itself, divisions between modernizers and Islamists, Kurds and Turks, and Alevis and Sunnis.

The country’s economic prospects have already been hit hard in recent years by recent turbulence. Sanctions from Russia, the collapse of traditional export markets and trade routes in Syria and Iraq and across other troubled parts of the Arab world, stagnation in the southern Eurozone economy, and the ripple effects of China’s deceleration have all played a role in hurting Turkey. Now, the country, a NATO ally and a critical trading partner for Europe, faces a new level of internal risk. Americans should and must take notice. Unfortunately, Turkish President Erdogan’s political instincts— grandiose and autocratic—are likely to lead him to both overreach and underperform in the face of the challenge.