Was 'Everything Bad Under Hitler?'

Here's are some odd poll numbers from Austria (as reported in The Jerusalem Post)

'Forty two percent of Austrians think "not everything was bad under Hitler," while 57% think "there was nothing positive about the Hitler era," according to a poll conducted by newspaper 

Whatever this poll does or doesn't prove about Austrians' lingering affection for the Third Reich,  it certainly proves that they're hopeless at phrasing poll questions.  "Not everything was bad?", "there was nothing positive about it?" Those are the choices?  So, in theory if an answer like, "well, the Nazis ran the cruelest dictatorship in human history, violated every standard of civilized behavior, and built a pretty impressive highway system," would count as "Not everything was bad under Hitler," 

OK, that's a joke (I hope) but this sort of black-and-white thinking about the past has a lot of problems. It encourages us to think of people who lived in times and under governments that we consider bad as a different species from us, not affected by any of the same feelings, likes and dislikes. We flatter ourselves that we would have recognized Hitler and his regime as 100% bad from the git-go. That enables us to forget that oppressive regimes are often very, very comfortable for those they're not oppressing, which is how, then and now, they manage to find so many supporters.

Hell in the Jim Crow South

I'm reading Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns and can't contain my amazement. The best analogy I can think of is, suppose The Civil War happened and aside from a few obscure scholarly papers and memoirs, nobody wrote much about it? It's no exaggeration to claim that the lack of any comprehensive history of the half century-long migration of Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South and into northern and sometimes west coast cities is an oversight on that same scale. Fortunately, Isabel Wilkerson's wonderful 622 page books goes a long way in filling that history gap.

And what a story! The horrors of life in the segregated south show up in story after story: lynchings advertised in newspapers attracting crowds of thousands, the debt servitude of black sharecroppers who were powerless to protest when the 'boss man's' calculations after harvest time always seemed to leave them  deeper in the red than they were before planting, the highly educated African-Americans who couldn't get more than laborer jobs because of their color and on and on...It's a story that's not widely told because even in 2013 America, enough of the story's villains: southern white segregationists and their descendants are still with us, and still dedicated to promoting the fiction that "all that stuff happened a long time ago." This book tells a different and needed story.

Many, many people who are still alive and vital remember when southern black people's fortunes, careers and very existences depended on the whims of bigoted white people.  A not-very-old person like me can remember seeing a billboard on the road into  Fayetteville, North Carolina  in 1975 featuring a mounted klansman on a rearing stallion, welcoming (white) visitors with the admonition, "fight integration and communism."  My late mother could remember riding segregated buses in Louisiana during World War II. Jim Crow was brutal, shameful and very, very recent. Americans should never forget it, but first they must allow themselves to remember.

The Decline and Fall of the Heartthrob Tenor

A short while back I watched Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado and was surprised to find that NankiPoo, the male romantic lead, sings a song I'd always associated, and not in a flattering way, with the audition scene from Mel Brook's 1968 movie, The Producers. Practically all of that scene is a takedown of the cliches of the male operatic tenor, which by 1968 was definitely out of fashion.

You can't blame the hippies for this either. By 1968, the adults of the World War 2 generation had grown accustomed to earthier, streetwise singers like Frank Sinatra or Della Reese and considered the classic male tenor's deliver too pompous and overdone. And their children were listening to Mick Jagger who learned from Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters that women liked it better if you growled and slurred., and Bob Dylan, a nice boy from Minnesota who refined his vocal style until it sounded like the product of seven generations of Ozark holler inbreeding. 

Of course, it hadn't always been that way.  Less than 20 years before, in 1949, Mario Lanza had scored a number one hit with "Be My Love." Whatever other problem Mario Lanza might have had (alcoholism first on the list ), nobody ever said that his operatic tenor lacked sex appeal. Two odd New Zealand girls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, were smitten enough to add him to their personal roster of "saints," who for reasons still obscure, inspired them to murder Pauline's mother.

Despite the success of Placido Domingo and Pavorotti, the classical tenor vocals never went mainstream in the same way again.