I am reading the news — essays about the transience of power, observing as the clegs orbit Ozymandias, and suddenly what is running through my mind’s ear is my old friend Robert Orth singing, “Has a, has a, has a sort of…” You know the rest: “mystery.”
Does the news have a sort of mystery? Is the news truly “beyond understanding?” The Bible tells us that mysteries can only be revealed through revelation. Stephen King says that “news is an emotional resonating device.” I adore a libretto penned by a priest — just my speed — Alice Goodman, for John Adams’ opera Nixon in China. Richard Nixon, a Quaker, careening into “yesterday night” aboard Airforce One, succumbing to the thrill of the unknown – and presumably unknowable – our Presidential Rumi-nator in Chief.
At least Tricky Dick was a tortured, alcoholic Machiavellian with a J.D. and not a wannabe jailhouse lawyer. Raw, undigested data (new information, or news) can “mean” whatever one wants it to. Librettist Goodman gave the lawyer from Yorba Linda a soul by placing the observation in his mouth; composer Adams provided the inexorable orchestral music that provided the sonic gesso over which one-note-Nixon ejaculated “News, News, News.”
Several bars from Nixon in China (Adams / Goodman)
There’s inarticulate reportage in the head of the snake; the body is a probing “has a, has a, has a,” and the tail, well the tale is in the tail, of course: the masterful, willful elongation of the last syllable in the word “mystery,” the sound of those Nixonian emotional and psychological gears grinding as he struggles impotently to land the melodic line. “Reeee-eeee-eee-eeee-eeee.” Nixon intuits the magisterial poetry of the moment, even that a revelation is being teed up, but, in this telling at least, he’s still the guy who has gotten the yips because Leonard Bernstein’s MASS is going up across town at the Kennedy Center and all those condescending liberals will be there making him feel inadequate and, and … well, 37 was man enough to leave well enough alone.
I’m naming the musical gesture the “Willful Elongation of Ry.” It feels like an apt metaphor. History itself, with the 1980 launch of CNN and the 24-hour-news-cycle, seemed to “speed up.” Now, the “flood-the-zone” news cycle makes everything a smear of information that makes as much sense as did the lurid images streaming past Hal and Dave at the end of 2001. Alvin Toffler’s “shattering stress and disorientation” has been institutionalized. “History is a mystery (to some),” quipped a valued mentor recently when I pointed out that a mutually beloved institution once proud of its institutional memory had … forgotten something. (I immediately thought of George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”) Well, I replied, “I’m done.” “Reeee-eeee-eee-eeee-eeee.” But am I? I’m not naive. I have lived long enough to experience the deaths of my mentors and the empowerment of my contemporaries. No wonder Nixon sang, “We live in an unsettled time,” in Goodman’s libretto.
In all its precious, quicksilver malleability, the truth inconveniently abides. Unlike Wenders’ angels Damiel and Cassiel, artists are not passive witnesses; we memorialize, we leaflet the heart. We don’t just work here. Honestly, “Reeee-eeee-eee-eeee-eeee” is beginning to sound more and more like the shriek of a siren to me.
Nixon was no Captain Vere, but he was a good writer, an avid reader, and an intelligent man; he assuredly knew his Transcendentalists and Goodman knows her Melville, so Nixon and Adams are led briefly toward the “infinite sea” before he settles into an acknowledgement that the “yesterday night” of the nation’s heartland will “skip a beat” and he closes, as do we all, on the verge of an insight. “Bruegel, Pat said.” Pat said. Pat.