Tom Glenn's Blog, page 53

Mozart’s Last Three Symphonies

Since childhood, when I first became enraptured with music, I have been in love with the last three symphonies that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote: number 39 in E♭ (KV 543), number 40 in G Minor (KV 550), and number 41 in C (KV 551, posthumously named Jupiter). I acquired 78 RPM recordings of each, later to be replaced with long-playing (LP) records, tape recordings, and, most recently, compact disks (CDs).

Each of the three is magical in its own way. Number 39, when it was written, was the apogee of symphonies, fulfilling the symphony form invented by Mozart’s contemporary Franz Joseph Haydn. The finale (last movement) is in the tempo of a rapid country dance and is the most “Haydn-like” movement.

The 40th is in a class by itself. Written in a minor key, it rebels against Haydn’s habit of sending the audience home happy by ending a minor symphony in the major. Mozart finishes the 40th firmly in the minor, mournful and severe.

The 41st is arguably the greatest symphony ever written. Its central key, C major, is the simplest with no sharps or flats in the key signature. The symphony’s themes are notable for their plainness. And yet, as writer Anna Bulycheva explains, “the finale [of the 41st] was to be the most important movement for the first time in the history of symphony music. Here Mozart demonstrates his skill of polyphony, endlessly blending the finale’s various themes in newer and newer combinations until, in the coda, all the individual elements eventually come together.”

Even though I have lived my entire life listening to these three symphonies, they continue to reveal new aspects of themselves with repeated hearings. Like Johann Sebastian Bach, who brought counterpoint (polyphony) to its acme, Mozart perfected the sonata form invented by Haydn. His use of that form in his last three symphonies remains unparalleled.

U.S. Gun Deaths

At the risk of repeating myself, I want to hammer home again the horror of gun deaths in the U.S. With 120.5 civilian-owned firearms per 100 people—we have more guns that people—the United States has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership and the highest number of gun deaths in the world. So far this year, we’ve witnessed 1,040 injuries and 1,433 deaths from gunfire. Last year saw over 40,000 injuries and 20,000 deaths from gunfire in the U.S. More numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

50 percent – That’s the percent of increase of gun deaths of children 14 and younger from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020.

15 percent – The amount of increase of gun deaths from 2019 to 2020.

#1 – And in the year 2020, gun violence was the number one leading cause of death for American children.

The argument that the U.S. is a gun culture is meaningless. To save over 20,000 lives annually, let’s change our culture. The way to do that is to reduce drastically the number of guns we have. The ratio between gun deaths and the number of guns in the hands of the citizenry is constant throughout the world. And yet it’s obvious to me that we as a nation are unwilling to change our culture to save lives.

What kind of people are we?

The Post Office

As a writer, I depend on the United States Postal Service (USPS) to deliver and carry my mail to and from publishers and others in the book business. I also use it to correspond with my friends and family, though far less these days than I did before email came along. Because of problems with the service caused by the Trump administration, I no longer take the USPS for granted. I did some research to learn more about it. Here’s what I found:

The USPS has an annual revenue of over $73 billion. It employs some 644,000 workers and operates 34,000 retail locations across the country. Most amazing, it delivers 48 percent of the world’s mail.

The current Postmaster General, that is, the head of the USPS, is Louis DeJoy, a multimillionaire named to job by the Board of Governors of the USPS in May 2020 at the behest of then-president Donald Trump. DeJoy was a generous contributor to Trump’s election campaign, and, as we learned, more than willing to sabotage the USPS operations in an effort to cripple vote-by-mail in the 2020 election in hopes that it would help Trump get reelected. That effort failed, but the damage to USPS operations was widespread and continues to this day.

President Biden can’t fire DeJoy. His removal from the job of Postmaster General can, by law, only be accomplished by the Board of Governors of the USPS. The majority of board members are still Trump supporters and refuse to fire DeJoy. Congress can appoint and dismiss USPS board members, but Republicans in Congress, who still support Trump, have so far blocked all efforts to change the composition of the board.

End result for me: mail to me is regularly delivered late; some days I get no mail. More than once, I have had to pay a late fee because a bill did not arrive on time or my payment delivery was delayed. Books sent to me for review are slow in transit. Copies of my books sent to others reach their destination late.

So we citizens of the U.S. are still paying the price for our election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Apparently, it will take a number of years to clean up the mess he created.

Columbia (2)

The Mall in Columbia, also known as the Columbia Mall, is the central shopping area for the city and the area around it. It has over two hundred specialty stores that include AMC Theatres, Main Event Entertainment, Barnes & Noble, JCPenney, Macy’s, and Nordstrom. Among the restaurants are PF Chang’s, Maggiano’s Little Italy, and The Cheesecake Factory.

Columbia, like its better-known sister-city, the District of Columbia (Washington), is named for Christopher Columbus, the Italian seaman who discovered the American continents. His Italian name was Cristoforo Colombo which he changed to Cristobal Colón when he decided to become a Spaniard. So here I am, a linguist comfortable in both Italian and Spanish, living in a city named after a man who claimed both nationalities.

The enduring attribute of the city of Columbia is its quiet beauty. Everywhere you look you see trees and bushes in their natural state. When it snows, as it has recently, the landscape becomes a welter of white twigs, limbs, and branches, a silvered web fading into a blank background. At the height of summer, it is a study in possible shades of green.

It is my inestimable good fortune to reside here. As long as I have a choice, I’ll stay.

Columbia

I have the good fortune to live in a city called Columbia, Maryland. It is a planned community, developed and built in the 1960s by self-made millionaire James W. Rouse (1914-1996). It has ten “villages,” districts built around “village centers” which usually consist of a small local government office and a modest shopping center. Sometimes within the villages, there are subsections with their own names.

What is remarkable about Columbia is its preserved and undeveloped parks that ramble throughout the entire city and are joined by macadam walkways. The city is dominated by Lake Kittamaqundi, a man-made 27-acre reservoir located adjacent to the Columbia Mall and Merriweather Post Pavilion. The Rouse Company created the lake in 1966 during the development of the city.

Behind my house is another small lake or pond, unnamed as far as I know. It is perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, half filled with water reeds and surrounded by matured trees, so that I feel like I’m living in the midst of a forest. My little pond is only one of many scattered throughout the city.

By design, Columbia is multiracial. Just over half the residents are White, slightly more than a quarter are Black, an eighth are Asian. Its total population in 2019 (the most recent date for which figures are available) was 103,991. Its area is 32.2 square miles. It is the most expensive place I have ever lived with a cost of living 46% higher than the national average.

More next time.

The Al Gray Photo

A friend pointed out to me that in my recent blog post on Al Gray, I failed to mention a photograph hanging on my office wall.

The walls in my office that are not covered by bookshelves are devoted to family pictures and writing awards. The awards wall sections display 21 writing prizes and one photo. That photo is of retired Marine colonel Ed Hall presenting a copy of my novel, Last of the Annamese, set during the fall of Saigon, to the retired Marine General Gray, who rescued me after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. I don’t remember when that happened, but it had to have been 2017 (the year Annamese was published) or later.

That picture brings back so many memories. During our Vietnam years, I once asked Al why he never married. He assured me that if the Marine Corps had wanted him to have a wife, they would have issued him one. When he was a major general in 1980 and having a wife to assist him in ceremonial duties became a necessity, he did indeed marry. His wife, Jan, died in 2020.

There is no question in my mind that Al Gray is a great man. He is the finest leader I have ever encountered. His success derived in large part from his humility. Unlike almost every other general I worked with during my years in government, Al lacked arrogance. He was focused his mission and the welfare of his troops. And his achievements, on and off the battlefield, bear testimony to his effectiveness.

So my acquaintance with Al Gray continues to be an honor. That he continues to correspond with me after all these years is evidence of his kindness. His greatness humbles me.

How Did the U.S. Change?

I ended my blog from yesterday expressing my mystification over how the U.S. has changed from the nation I risked my life to defend into a country where more than half of the members of one party (the Republicans) believe, despite overwhelming and proven evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Part of the answer to my question is that I misperceived the state of my homeland. Not obvious to me was that the well-to-do have always—quietly and without drawing attention to themselves—seen to it that the pesky minorities and lower classes lacked the power, political and financial, to create circumstances favorable to themselves. Billionaires in the U.S., for example, pay only 8.2 percent of their income in taxes, whereas the rest of us pay 25.4 percent. Racial prejudice is still a powerful force shaping laws and behavior throughout the U.S. And voter suppression, primarily against Latino and Black voters, is widespread. Following Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, by April 2021, 361 bills in 47 states had been proposed by GOP lawmakers designed to restrict voting access. Because Democrats outnumber Republicans, Republicans work hard to diminish voting access and win elections by decreasing opportunities for their opponents to vote.

But my failed assessment only partly explained the status of rich-controlling-poor. It is now unquestionable that Trump and his Republican backers are trying to overturn the 2020 election by repeating the falsehood that Biden’s win was the result of fraud. All the evidence belies their claim. But truthfulness has never been a virtue Trump was known for. It is now irrevocably clear that during his presidency, Trump told lies at an unprecedented rate. According to the Washington Post, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency—averaging about 21 lies a day.

And his party, the Republicans, continue to support “the big lie” that Trump won the election.

So that’s where we stand today. How did it all happen? I still don’t know, but it’s clear that the situation has always been worse than I realized. Now it’s up to us Americans to use our political will and our votes to rectify it.

The Numbers

The statistics I’m reading in the press these days offer a shocking picture of today’s America. We have become a nation sharply divided between the Democrats, who favor elections and democratic choice, and Trump’s Republicans, who would prefer to ignore the vote and restore Trump to the presidency, choosing, in effect, fascism.

Here are some of the numbers I’ve stumbled across recently:

—More than a third of Americans, most of them Republicans, now believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified.

—121 House Republicans and 7 Republican Senators helped Trump try to overthrow our democracy by voting against certifying Joe Biden’s victory.

—43 Republicans voted to acquit Trump of all charges in the Senate Impeachment Trial.

—In the weeks between Joe Biden’s election victory and the January 6 assault on the Capitol, Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of the election, with many calling for executions or other political violence.

—As a result of the Trump-incited January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, some 150 officers from the Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Department, and local agencies were injured; as many as ten died.

— More than 725 people have been charged with crimes related to the insurrection.

— Over 70 percent of registered Republicans believe Trump won the 2020 election.

The image that emerges from these numbers is not the U.S. I was born into and risked my life to defend. Where has my country gone and who is guilty of defacing it?

Al Gray

I’m delighted to report that I sent a happy-new-year greeting to retired Marine General Al Gray, and he responded. He’ll turn 94 this year.

I first met Al Gray when he was a captain in the early 1960s in Vietnam. He was there in command of Marines on the battlefield. I was there as a civilian operating under cover as a soldier or Marine providing intelligence support to U.S. fighting forces. Our paths crossed innumerable times over the years until 1975 when he was a colonel and I was his civilian rank equivalent heading the clandestine NSA operation in South Vietnam. That’s when he saved my life by rescuing me and allowing me to escape under fire as the North Vietnamese seized Saigon.

Over the years following the loss of Vietnam, Al Gray and I stayed in touch and often appeared together as speakers discussing our defeat in Vietnam. And we rose in grade together. He moved up in the general ranks as I rose in the Senior Executive Service. Finally, he bested me. He became a four-star general while I topped out at the three-star equivalent rank. When he was named Commandant of the Marine Corps, I stopped calling him “Al” and addressed him as “sir.”

General Gray is the finest leader I have ever encountered. He invariably had two priorities: the accomplishment of his mission and the welfare of his troops. His men knew he would never ask them to do any job or face any danger he wouldn’t take on himself. His men responded with outstanding performance on and off the battlefield.

The only Marines I have ever met who don’t know who Al Gray is are the very young ones. And it is to esteem Al Gray and his men that I always capitalize “Marine.”

Honoring General Gray sums up my long and happy association with the Marine Corps. May he continue to prosper and may the Corps always be our nation’s most respected fighting force.

Shame

Today is the first anniversary of the Trump-incited attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump egged on his supporters to disrupt Congress’s affirmation that he lost the 2020 election. The number killed in the ensuing carnage is in dispute, but it could have been as many as ten. About 150 officers from the Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Department, and local agencies were injured. The cost to repair the damage done to the Capitol exceeds $30 million.

To their discredit, Trump’s Republicans now deny that the rampage ever took place. They falsely describe it as tourists visiting the Capitol or claim that the mob was not made up of Trump supporters but of anti-fascist progressives. According to press reports, despite overwhelming evidence of Biden’s comfortable victory, the majority of Republicans still don’t believe that Trump lost the 2020 election.

Trump not only incited the attack but then sat and watched it on television for several hours before he called off his supporters. As Kathleen Parker described it in yesterday’s Washington Post, “The president of the United States watched with delight what the rest of the nation watched with horror. And, still, they [the Republicans] want him back?”

Trump’s summons that day incited civil war. His Republican supporters in Congress still claim he won the election—147 of them voted to overturn the validated results.

January 6 is and will remain an ignominy, a day of historical disgrace, for our country. Yet one of our two political parties still espouse the perpetrator.

Shame is our name.