I have a few people who recommend books to me that invariably hit the spot. Those people are from different backgrounds and of different ages, and I agree with them 90 or so % of the time. I am grateful to them because they alert me to authors that I might otherwise never have encountered.
That does not hold for Naomie Klein – I have met her in several of the journalistic sources I read, among them the Guardian, the NYT and lately the Intercept. The book recommended by my handlers and still on my library reserve list is This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate (2014), but I am sharing here her acceptance speech at the Sydney Peace Prize.
I like Klein’s naming Trump “the grabber-in-chief,”but, more importantly, I am impressed with how she summarizes the looming climate disaster and its political antecedents.
Matching her theme of resistance to capitalistic ruthlessness that could, quite literally, kill us all, with operatic music was hard because of too many choices; Beethoven advanced revolutionary ideas in Fidelio. Kurt Weill wrote Die Bürgschaft — about a mythical land under a totalitarian, money-driven dictatorship. When it was criticized, he used words that could come from a contemporary composer. “I believe that the task of opera today is to move beyond the fate of private individuals toward universality,” he wrote. “Die Bürgschaft undertakes an attempt to adopt a position on matters that concern us all. Such an attempt must elicit discussions as a matter of course. That is part of its job.”
And then there is CO2, an opera by Giorgio Battista, commissioned by the Milan Scala and premiered there in 2015. Taking its focus from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, it is a small modern masterpiece implicating us all in the destruction of the earth and suggesting potential remedies we could adopt.
Klein herself cites Leonard Cohen, so I’ll add her chosen song as well – all this music should motivate us!
Czechoslovakia – Leos Janacek In the mists
Germany – Schubert Der Leiermann from Winterreise