The most uproarious artistic performance of the 20th century is often marked now as the screaming birth cry of modernism. It came in Paris, at the end of May, 1913.

The fabled Nijinsky choreographed the dance to Igor Stravinsky’s music, recounting in sounds of chaos a pagan “Rite of Spring,” the sacrifice of a young maiden to the sun god; conductor Pierre Monteux had orders to keep the orchestra playing, no matter the reaction-and the reaction was riotous. As was the music, in its own way: “spring seen from the inside,” one writer said, “with its violence, its spasms and its fissions.”

Almost a century later, Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” is a familiar old classic – though oddly enough there’s a lively argument yet about how fast it is supposed to be played. Maestro Ben Zander says Stravinsky himself recorded it too slow – because he didn’t think his players could keep up with the right mad tempo.

The Rite of Spring explained – in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ben Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.

The veteran Washington Post political journalist David Broder is here to tell you there’s something out there subverting American democracy – and it’s American democracy.

Americans disillusioned with DC insider politics are increasingly taking their proposals to the people in the form of ballot initiatives and referenda. It’s a romance that began with California’s Proposition 13 twenty-two years ago. Since then, Oregon alone has voted on 97 different initiatives.

Voters in Twenty-four states and hundreds of cities across the country have changed laws on things like abortion, casino gambling, campaign spending even bear baiting, nude dancing and thong bathing suits.

Direct democracy sounds like government by the people for the people, but Broder says the initiative process is even more dominated by cash and cronyism than the representative system we’ve come to distrust.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Broder of The Washington Post.

Alan Dershowitz’s boyish bargain with God was that he would be a faithful Jew if God would let the Brooklyn Dodgers win the World Series. And then in 1955, the Dodgers beat the Yankees for the ultimate title and promptly moved to Los Angeles. This is justice?

What young Dershowitz concluded was that God works in mysterious ways, none more mysterious, he observes now as a criminal defense lawyer and law professor, than in the justice meted out in the Bible’s book of Genesis.

Alan Dershowitz is currently the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School. He has taught courses in criminal law, psychiatry and the law, constititional litigaiton and the Bible and Justice. His clients have included O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Claus von Bulow, Michael Milken and Patricia Hearst.

Guests:

Alan Dershowitz

A decade after Operation Desert Storm, the US is still at war with Iraq. It’s the longest air war in American history. Nearly 12,000 missions last year alone were flown against 300 Iraqi targets. It’s the economic sanctions, though, that are causing the worst collateral damage in Iraq.

After eight years of embargo, Iraq’s currency has lost 98% of its value, and there’s a total break down in health care, education, and basic social services. Even food and water are hard to come by, and UNICEF reports that sanctions cost the lives of 200 children each day, and as many adults.

Two of the highest UN officials in charge of administering the sanctions have resigned in protest. Even Scott Ritter, the maverick arms inspector, calls US policy toward Iraq “morally bankrupt,” pointing out that it has only helped make Saddam Hussein stronger and Iraq’s civil society weaker.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Scott Ritter

Albie Sachs is one of the white heroes of the South African story. He was a member of the outlawed ANC and working as a civil rights lawyer in exile in Mozambique when he lost an arm and an eye in a car bomb attack in 1988.

In his life now as one of the judges on South Africa’s highest court and one of the main architects of its constitution, he practices what he calls soft vengeance. That’s when a lifelong struggle against apartheid gives you a front row seat as a founding father of a new democracy and a chief defender of its laws.

Soft vengeance is giving amnesty to your torturers, giving legal rights to the same people who denied you yours. Albie Sachs says if he could miraculously be given his arm back, he would refuse. His shape now, he says, has become irrecuperably embedded in the forward momentum of his country.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Albie Sachs

It’s time for a reality check on the new economy. Are we still making millions? Are we still having fun?

The age of the overnight, internet-industry sensation is over! A lot of dot-com employees from California’s Silicon Valley to New York’s Silicon Alley are mad as hell. They left their stable, old-economy jobs to seek their fortune, but many of them didn’t rake in the dough. They didn’t get their stock options, they didn’t get a company car, they worked 15 hour days, they slept under their desks, they lived on caffeine.

At the dawn of the information age, the former Boston Globe editor Tom Ashbrook got a whiff of new media. With three kids, a wife, two car payments, and a mortgage, he leapt into the internet goldrush. It was a manic, bumpy, breathless ride and he almost lost everything. And it was worth it, he says.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Tom Ashbrook, author of The Leap: A Memoir of Love and Madness in the Internet Gold Rush.

25 years after the US defeat in Vietnam, a fresh portrait of the architect of victory, Ho Chi Minh: ascetic and revolutionary, half-Lenin and half-Gandhi. Biographer William Duiker says Ho was a patriot with a monomania about national independence.

William Duiker is a Liberal Arts Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of the forthcoming book, “Ho Chi Minh.”

His earlier works include:
1) The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, Westview Press
2) Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam
3) US Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indo China

C. David Thomas, is a practising artist whose exhibition of Ho Chi Minh Portraits is being exhibited around the country. The exhibit will be at the Danforth Museum in September. Mr. Thomas is co-author of the diary novel “An Artist’s Portrait of Ho Chi Minh.” He is also Director of the Indo-China Arts Partnership and Professor of Studio Art at Emmanuel College in Massachusetts.

His artwork can be seen on Asianartnow.com.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Biographer William Duiker

Not since Monica has anyone or anything captured America’s attention and imagination like Elian. The six-year old Cuban who survived the storm and was fished from the sea has become an instant cultural metaphor – a symbol, depending on who you ask, of a government that would deny a boy freedom, or an interest group that would use a child for political ends.

Lots of people would say the Elian narrative isn’t about the US or the Gonzales family; it’s about the Cuban family, a family of islanders and exiles that’s been at war with itself for 41 years. Elian has become more than a six year old boy for some in the Cuban exile community – he’s become a living icon, the flesh and blood of the exile experience and a font of instant legend.

What does this story tell us about the Cold War, miracles at sea, the new Miami, and Janet Reno’s justice deparment?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Charlie Pierce’s father started putting on two pairs of pants at a time in the early 1980s, after he’d retired from school teaching. Then just before Memorial Day in 1984 he went out to buy flowers for the family graves in Worcester, Massachusetts, and disappeared.

Three days later he turned up incoherent in the rain in Montpelier, Vermont-unable to tell the police his name. It was the moment when the family disease, Alzheimer’s, became the family curse. All five siblings in Charlie Pierce’s father’s generation had Alzheimer’s.

So now at 44, the eldest in his own generation, Charlie Pierce looks in the mirror, and into the faces of his children, at the genetic resemblance to his Kerry County Irish forebears and takes daily stock of his memory. He knows all about Alzheimers genetic markers, and says, “no thank you,” to having his own genes tested.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Charlie Pierce

Pico Iyer got used to being called an “American writer living in Japan,” but also “an Indian writer living in America.”

He was born in England, actually, of Indian parents who took him to California as a boy; he took himself to Japan. He identifies himself now with the roughly one million people who cross international borders every day, the universal disapora, guest workers, boat people, marielitos, Rwandans in New Zealand, Moroccans in Iceland, permanent exiles, offshore no-wherians pining for home in the airports and malls of a Global City.

“One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston,” he writes, “is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafes; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the remotest point is just a click away.”

What if that fading sense of being rooted is an urgent need of the human soul? The troubled “Global Soul” of Pico Iyer – in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Travel writer Pico Iyer and his book, “The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home.”