A convincing case has been made in a very nice 2019 write-up that the famous 1899 Enigma was supposed to make people think of Pergolesi.
…Edward Elgar composed what has become one of the most famous pieces of classical music in the world, the Enigma Variations. Its fame is due in large part to its beauty — its Nimrod theme must be one of the most moving passages of music ever written — but it has also captured people’s imagination for more than 100 years because, in its composition, Elgar set a puzzle that has never been solved.
Until now. Cue dramatic music.
…the Stabat mater being a more likely solution to Elgar’s enigma than the solutions previously suggested: when taken together, the evidence seems almost overwhelming. But stronger even than the appeal to logic is the appeal to the ears: when played alongside each other, the two themes fit astonishingly well. And that, taking Elgar at his word, should be the ultimate test.
Oh, and… spoiler alert!
Sorry, I’m obviously not very good at these riddle posts.
The murder rates in Trump-voting states from 2020 have exceeded those in Biden-voting states every year since 2000, according to a new analysis by ThirdWay, a center-left think tank. Republicans have built their party on being the crime-fighting candidates, even as murder rates in red states have outpaced blue states by an average of 23% over the past two decades.
That’s a huge difference.
Source: Axios
Every state has murders, every state has distribution of murders across population density (urban/rural), yet states running “Republican Red” seem to be the worst at providing safety to citizens.
Is it any wonder why?
Here’s a recent case example from San Francisco. A wealthy white man who allegedly was involved with his friend’s sister’s drugs… was murdered by his friend in a cold premeditated knife attack.
As soon as this story broke, many political commentators jumped onto a totally tired and false narrative that the “urban” areas are unsafe (implying SF is dangerous because of non-white people on the streets).
The fear of crime often gets presented as a response to numbers—murder rates, numbers of robberies, carjackings, and assaults—but it’s primarily an anecdotal phenomenon that very often runs counter to what all the metrics would suggest.
I say tired because “urban decay” is an old racist meme. It’s common for bored white American ladies in their later years to sit around and gossip about their “fear” of living in a city (e.g. around “poor people”, which they say to mean non-whites).
Source: The GRIOT, Volume 6, Issue 3, Summer 2003
These “poison squads” feign being “scared” all the way to today, like they haven’t stopped believing in a giant 1915 disinformation campaign of President Woodrow Wilson. He set “America First” as the platform to resurrect the KKK — fomenting a 1919 “Red Summer” pattern of white-on-black violence. If only more people recognized this old KKK violent racist pattern in the modern day Red state propaganda and policies on crime.
Red means dead (magazine loaded, round chambered, chamber locked) when America is a gun.
It’s no secret that science, as well as most forms of independent thought from actual learning, gets discouraged in these Republican-led states full of preventable deaths. The Reds want votes from scared believers, and they very likely don’t really plan to reduce crimes that generate the fears they prey upon.
Of course murder rates aren’t going to improve where the people charged with addressing such issues are too biased to even look and listen, let alone process real data and symptoms, while they go around banging their fear drum.
Back to San Francisco, reporters interestingly emphasize how homicide rates have dramatically lowered over time.
Source: Mission Local
And further to that point, as I’ve written before here in terms of qualitative investigation data, there’s an organized crime and police corruption element to San Francisco with very non-random targeting.
Anyone jumping to conclusions about “random” crimes in SF, probably isn’t digging into the data.
So I’ll say it again for the white men of Silicon Valley and their whispering wives who have been recklessly spreading old tired racist disinformation memes about “safety in cities”.
Perhaps their ignorance, and obvious inability to read any violent-crime report, is to be expected of these pickled olives hiding inside the comfort of their martini glasses. However, today they are doing it very disrespectfully — on the death bed of a white man who was killed in a clearly premeditated murder by an acquaintence in tech — and doing it in contradiction to well known quantitative and qualitative data on crime.
In 2021 a National Book Award went to a poet who described this Texas concept as…
…vigilantes hooded like blind angels, hunting with torches for men the color of night…
More to the point, this poet was reflecting how Texas implemented this under Woodrow Wilson’s nativist, xenophobic, genocidal platform called “America First“.
Dousing groups of Mexicans with kerosene and then burning them was also a topic of discussion for Americans on March 10, 1916 after the Battle of Columbus. Over 60 dead men were piled together, their bodies incinerated. Keep in mind this all was in the context of Americans a year earlier calling for the “extermination” of non-whites, which led to killing thousands of Americans who were of Mexican descent.
Let’s be honest.
Texas pioneered the kind of unaccountable racist vigilantism that Nazi Germany studied and applied in Europe.
Unlike Germany, however, America has never been held accountable and Texas is front and center in that issue. Hitler named his personal train “Amerika” (to honor genocide), and we can only wonder why he didn’t specify Texas.
Imagine someone in Germany proposing a bill to bring Nazi practices back. Impossible. In Texas, however, it’s hard to imagine someone NOT proposing a return to its worst chapters in history.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
At first glance this would seem to be a clever pun and eloquent distillation of W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1897 writing about two-ness in Black American identity.
…American world, — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes—foolishly, perhaps, but fervently—that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.
Yet Hughes also may be invoking a poem by a popular yet infamously racist poet.
Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) supposedly wrote about diversity in 1867, invoking visions of variation in individual agency, with “I hear America singing”.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
What’s missing from the list of voices in 1867?
That’s right after the Civil War.
This is what Whitman called the varied voices in America? And he says “belongs to him or her” as if there’s freedom through ownership, yet leaves out the burning issue of those denied freedom because they… are varied.
Whitman wasn’t just a white guy being like white guys at the time. No. Definitely not.
We have ample evidence of millions of white men fighting to end slavery, to end racism. When people say white men weren’t anti-racist in 1867 they’re displaying sad ignorance.
The attorney general with a newly created 1870 Department of Justice, Amos Akerman, was in fact accused of wanting too much equality. And he was a former Confederate colonel who redeemed himself immediately at the end of war.
Silas Soule?
And hello, John Brown?
Whitman doesn’t get any slack on this point. Stop normalizing his racism at a time when many, many prominent white men were virulently anti-racist and gave the ultimate sacrifice to equalize rights.
Whitman should have known and done better. Hughes doesn’t call this out directly, but you can hear that message in his singing.
