Chris, I thank you for the opportunity to clear up the air on these important issues. These are my statements to you and I will be open to question about them but otherwise Im busy dealing with the problems of music and art and my cultures survival in this world. REH
1. You know American government and culture better than I do. You sound like an American Voice teacher claiming to teach bel canto better than anyone in Europe :>)). Frankly, it is not even possible that you might or could know American government and culture better than I do. I spent six years in Washington, have lived all over the country and am in the upper 2% of the nations Artists and Teachers. Should we compare curriculum vitae? Should I trot out a 70 page curriculum vitae and 68 years of living and working here, 40 of which in a city of such dazzling diversity as to be without equal, in world diversity. (Something that has been true in cultural products for at least 120 years.) Tell me another city that has the diversity of cultures and live art from all over the world than my home of the last forty years of my life? Even with that, I would never presume to be better at any of those cultures than my own, even though I teach them to work on their own art. Considering the response you get I would suggest to you that we dont know anything about the context from which your English flows. We certainly dont know more about where you grew up and live than you do. And if follows that you dont know more about American culture or government than I do. Culture has to be lived. Its a 24 hour seven day a week job. I watch the Canadian and the British parliament on television and the depths of what is going on is inscrutable. They may as well be Maori yelling at each other. In fact I have more of a gut connection to the Maori than to them. Hell, the cultures here are so strong and the systems so complete that they cant even do the New York State legislature. Theyve been hopelessly culturally locked for the entire forty years Ive been watching them. They all speak the same words with different meanings and layerings for them and are hopeless in their ability to communicate. Weve had a little European Union here in NYState for as long as Ive been here. The key here is humility and the giving of respect. Groups dont function together without that. Too often they confuse the role of the mirror with the person it is reflecting. A teacher is a mirror of sorts and can work in all kinds of contexts as such. But any teacher who believes that he knows more than his own culture is a fool. His reflections are tricky. The mirror is distorted by his personal history. That goes double for any other professions that doesnt have the communication rules of the teacher. But with all professions, if you are truly seeking the answer to a problem or problematic situation you have to seek truth and facts and you cannot be the sole possessor of such. We each possess our own system that examines that world. Putting those systems together make us all wiser and more accurate. Making it a litigious or competitive legalistic or capitalistic pursuit stirs psychology and makes all observations suspect. If you want to know, you have to ask. I can only tell you what Europeans have done to us. I can theorize as to why but truly, only they know the answer to that. I can also only tell you what I UNDERSTAND about the structure of European systematic thought. But understanding is not knowledge. Immigrants come here regularly trying to perform American Music. IF it involves words, like a Gilbert and Sullivan product of the 1800s or Stephen Sondheim today, the double entendres and layered meanings take life to be able to express. Americans never perform Gilbert and Sullivan with the kind of depth the ordinary Englishman has in his little finger much less the rest of his being. Hubris is the root of war. 2. The President is a Neo-con. You make a good point about his foundation. His foundation from his mother is pure English American. He is a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. I have those same genes in me as well from my mothers side. His mother was from Kansas, mine was from Oklahoma. You might call such conservatism Neo-con but I dont think so. There is a certain rigidity of thought in the Sons of the American Revolution just as there is in all founding groups. However: Harvard is a furnace. It tends to burn that stuff off and put people squarely in their heads. The Harvard Law Review like the medical school goes even further with that. Also his wife is a part of another Ivy League school, Princeton, where she had to fight the fact that it is the most prejudiced of all of the Ivy League schools against Blacks. I think you are mixing two things up here. 1. The fact of the toughness required of that family to survive in such a chaotic racial situation as America and 2. The fact that he taught at the University of Chicago which is the seat of neo-conservative thought in America. But the actual Neo-cons here do not claim him and project instead that he is a socialist. Although the underlying foundation to many of his actions could have the accent of neo-conservatism, I dont believe thats where his heart or intellect is. I think hes an old fashioned politician in the Robert Kerr, FDR, Carl Albert vein with a touch of Chicago thrown in. Thats what it feels like here in the actual country. 3. Health insurance proves that things can be done quickly. So America has a parliament. You make two grossly exaggerated judgments in this statement. 1. that Health Insurance happened quickly: Its been sixty years coming. and 2. that he sold out on it. Actually he made a foundation for it in the future by sticking his foot in the door and not being distracted by things that would get him re-elected. He has been much more accepting of the checks and balances and the typical liberal belief in compromise than any parliament in the world that Ive seen. He believes in the evolution of a product through compromise. That is not what happens, as I see from a distance (as you are seeing us), in parliaments. The Republicans want a parliamentary, litigious, antagonistic government. If they were native they would be Maori. So I think you got this wrong as well. 4. I speak badly of Jews even though I didnt mention Jews in what I said: Here we should make a distinction between systems and individuals. Traditional Indian people make some distinctions here that you are not. That is my culture and way of thinking. Basically we think in systems. Bear systems, Monkey Systems, Two legged Systems, Winged Systems, Standing people (trees) systems, Cree Systems, Cherokee Systems etc. Its because we are all related to each other in the family of life and as such we have to know how to treat each relatives family in the proper fashion. We even have a phrase for it. In English it sort of translates into the way of right relationship. That way of right relationship on a species level was set by the All Father the Lifegiver, the giver of breath to the animals. The one who is SO completely beyond all THAT He can only be expressed as Equa Usquanigodi or a Great Mystery. For any part of creation to cross that which cannot be described with being or non being (human language terms) is an act of such hubris that it constitutes the demonic. (So to extinguish a species is considered a curse against the Creator of All ontologies. Where is the wildlife in Europe? Where is the wildlife disappearing to here under capitalism or western philosophical socialism or in China?) There are Nations, like Iraq or Spain and then there are systems like the Basques, the Kurds or the Bahai, or the Cherokees, or the Swiss. ( Its my understanding that there are several different systems in the larger Swiss system. Is that true?) Its my belief that this is all about systems and not individuals. Just because all of the individuals I named were Jewish, unless I drew that systems parallel, there is no judgment of Judaism. As a matter of fact, von Hayek was Christian and the Jews in the Austrian economic circle were known for their prejudice against Jews until Hitler grouped them all together. Marx was a Jew and so are a huge number of communists and socialist economists in the world. To understand what I mean, let us consider the abstraction beneath the judgment on this so that you dont misstate who I am. To me both as a traditional Cherokee and as an Artist in the world, Stereotypes (or Convention)are the PR (publicity) that represents a culture or a system to the observer. Literally the Stereotype is the Header for a Newspaper. You could accurately call a Stereotype the Frame around the story. To stereotype an individual is to say that they are resonant with the convention or image of the culture. The system is not the Stereotype. The stereotype is the sign or symbol of the system and it may or may not be true. We have this in opera performance. It depends upon where you are from as to whether it is negative or positive. America loves stereotypical opera performances or conventional performances , Europe does not. European Opera Houses recreate IN THE PRESENT the old works outside of the stereotype. Stereotypical is a slur, along with conventional, derivative, clichéd etc. in the reviews by European critics of European Opera productions. America on the other hand is considered a museum (the words of Rudolf Bing the late Austrian General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera) of the conventional way of making an operatic production. When European directors come here they break the mold and Americans generally consider it superficial, ahistorical and hopelessly expensive. Europeans call the Metropolitan Opera a factory, (the latest was German Director Peter Stein who walked out of directing Boris Godunov in the recent Met production) . Americans call the Europeans addicted to temporary fashionable frills. Its all a clash of differing systemic needs. A clash of cultures. Art to the German is Heilige Kunst. To make it new is a sacred thing. To the American Art is at its best a dance with your ancestors and at its worst mere entertainment for the elite who want a sort of colonial Williamsburg approach to their artistic property. But as we leave the parallel pattern in the world of opera lets apply that to your statement about my attitude towards Jewish people and the system of Judaism. In my world, the small world minority known as Jewish, has much more diversity than the Neo-cons or any other group. The system of Judaism, as I know it from the outside, creates literacy as a necessity. They then spread out around the world in all kinds of things including leading sweat lodges at Sedona and chanting in Nepal. But so do the Germans. For me Judaism is the grandfather religion of both Christianity and Islam. In my understanding, It springs from the old Habiru desert religions around one Father and a split with other religions that has yet to heal. Some of the most angry atheists are Jewish. The father of world psychiatry was Jewish and the idea of separation and individuation is a part of the Jewish system. The father of world communism was Jewish and so was the founder of Neo-Classical American Economics, Leo Strauss and on and on. You wont find any parallels here other than their being leaders wherever they go. In my experience they are literally worshippers of literacy. At a time when the rest of us said the Natural World was the real bible, they said no. That has never changed or been dealt with. But it has little to do with the kind of stereotyping you are doing from Jewish individuals. Judaism is one of the worlds great systems of thought and your reverence for literacy springs from their story. In my system, all systems are equal. There is no hierarchy of systems in my understanding. Every system has been creating an expertise in one of the areas of reality since we became human. No system has THE story. Metaphorically all of the stories are shards to a great pot that once held a truth that took us back to the Creator of All. Taking one of our shards and trying to make it fit where we have eliminated someone elses piece is both impossible, destroys our uniqueness and is idolatrous. Why? Because we have substituted our Ego for the shard and its relationship to the whole we were all given in the beginning. Many of these economists happen to be Jewish but they also happen to be wrong. I wont blame that on their system but on their intelligence and their bad research. 5. Im starting a Holocaust Industry. No, I believe in justice. 6. The Tea Party is Zionist. Youre wrong but someone else can deal with this. 7. Im confusing literacy with Scriptures. The opposite parallel to this statement is: Literacy leads to Alzheimers. Once you learn to read you have begun to forget how to remember. I dont agree with either of the statements. But your worship of literacy makes no sense to me. Literacy is a tool and it creates a brain that is a problem for memory. There is a lot of research on literate and non-literate brains. I would suggest that if you dont want to seem hopelessly parochial that you look this up. It is of the variety of statement that I used to hear about Blacks from Southerners. Its not something that you want to get a reputation for. 8. Non-literate cultures equal ignorance. Already answered that. 9. Visit Europe so I know everyone is not the same. Are you offering to give me an all expenses paid vacation to Europe? Ill take it if my wife can come along. 10. I need to distinguish between the Europeans who stayed home and the ones who came here and destroyed. It is still an issue of justice and the systems that are destroying the life of the world must be deconstructed.
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