{"id":4103,"date":"2017-02-21T08:05:21","date_gmt":"2017-02-21T16:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=4103"},"modified":"2017-02-21T08:05:21","modified_gmt":"2017-02-21T16:05:21","slug":"first-class-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=4103","title":{"rendered":"First (Class) Act"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I have a few\u00a0people 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.<\/p>\n

That does not hold for Naomie Klein – I have met\u00a0her in several of the journalistic sources I read, among them the Guardian, the NYT <\/em>and lately the Intercept. <\/em>The book recommended by my handlers and still on my library reserve list is\u00a0This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate<\/em>\u00a0(2014), but I am sharing here her acceptance speech at the Sydney Peace Prize.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/intersectionality-is-the-only-path-forward-for-the-climate-movement\/<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I like Klein’s\u00a0naming Trump\u00a0“the grabber-in-chief,”but, more importantly, I am impressed with how she summarizes the looming climate disaster and its political antecedents.<\/p>\n

Matching her theme of resistance to capitalistic ruthlessness that could, quite literally, kill us all, with operatic music\u00a0was hard because of too many choices; Beethoven advanced revolutionary ideas in Fidelio.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0Kurt Weill wrote \u00a0Die B\u00fcrgschaft<\/em> \u2014 about a mythical land under a totalitarian, money-driven dictatorship. When it was criticized, he used words that could come from a contemporary composer. \u201cI believe that the task of opera today is to move beyond the fate of private individuals toward universality,\u201d he wrote. \u201cDie B\u00fcrgschaft 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u00a0An Inconvenient Truth,<\/em> it is a small modern masterpiece implicating us all in the destruction of the earth and suggesting potential remedies we could adopt.<\/p>\n