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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/hamilton-time-trump/"></div>On July third, as Donald Trump declared at Mount Rushmore that “a new far-left fascism” is waging a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” millions of those far-left fascists were watching the filmed version of Hamilton, a complex honoring of our founding that, whatever its flaws as history, opens the story up to include all the folks who are usually cut out. (For a full-throated examination of Alexander Hamilton’s actual relationship to slave holding, <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/21/hamilton-the-musical-black-actors-dress-up-like-slave-tradersand-its-not-halloween/">read Ishmael Reed</a> on the subject).
Hamilton is the ultimate Obama-era musical. In that faraway time, it was almost as if Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the show for and about the 44th president. And in a way he did. He began work on it in 2008, the year so many of us stood wherever we were and wept with pride when America elected its first Black president. The following year Miranda performed a number from what then was called the Hamilton Mixtape at one of the first cultural events hosted at the Obama White House.
When the show reached Broadway in 2015 it contained a song in which Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton both sing tenderly to their newborn infants:
<blockquote>[You] will come of age with our young nation.
We’ll bleed and fight for you,
We’ll make it right for you.
If we lay a strong enough foundation
We’ll pass it on to you,
We’ll give the world to you,
And you’ll blow us all away …
Someday, someday.</blockquote>
Five years ago, it seemed that someday had arrived. Watching the same scene in 2020 produces a much different effect. Did we in fact lay a strong enough foundation? At this moment we do not know, and we are certain to be flooded with a lot of new information on this point come November 3.
Other parts of the show adjusted themselves beautifully to the new American revolution taking place at this moment, with people dying in the streets just as they did then (and throughout our history). As a young Hamilton and his friends sing:
<blockquote>Rise up!
When you’re living on your knees
You rise up.
Tell your brother that he’s gotta rise up.
Tell your sister that she’s gotta rise up.
When are these colonies gonna
Rise up?</blockquote>
They could very well be the words of some of the leading speakers in the Black Lives Matter movement.
¤
Hamilton is packed with more substantive ideas and actual debate than any other musical I am aware of. Next to it, the other best known musical about our founding — 1776 by composer/lyricist Sherman Edwards and book writer Peter Stone, which premiered in another dramatic chapter of the civil-rights revolution, 1969 — is threadbare. 1776 is a show about feeling, while Hamilton is a show about thinking. Miranda achieves this in part by making reading and debate the subject of Hamilton, and both are referenced constantly in a show that itself is dense with references to Broadway musicals and hip hop culture. He turns arguments about the national debt and America’s place in the struggles of its allies into exciting rap battles between Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton is that rare contemporary musical whose score could only have been composed in the time in which it was written.
And, always, the musical picks up the thread between the people who fought for America’s creation and the people who fight now to keep its soul alive. There’s of course the famous line shared by Lafayette and Hamilton that always gets applause — “Immigrants. We get the job done.” But the one that reverberates even more today than when the musical was new is a toast Hamilton and his friends drink to themselves, turning to look at the audience on the second line: “Here’s to the four of us. Tomorrow they’ll be more of us.”
¤
I have many times discussed the theory that the arc of history bends toward justice with my son in law, who is of Mexican descent. When I say that things have gotten better in my lifetime, he argues that I am not in a position to actually know. And indeed I concede that, even if I can imagine his experiences with racism, I cannot  comprehend the full truth of what he has been through. The anti-Semitism I faced in my own career was for the most part minimal and usually so ridiculous that I could tell funny stories about it and laugh… although I do not remember laughing when I asked for a raise at my first full-time job and my boss said, “Why don’t you ask your rich Jew father in Pikesville for a raise?”
But I am in a position to know some things just because of the number of years I have lived. I was born in 1958 and I can remember what we called the riots in Baltimore in the spring of 1968 and the public dialogue at the time about racial issues. And in this we certainly have improved. Fox News notwithstanding, to turn on the TV or read the newspapers is to see a wide-ranging discussion with a new kind of depth and sophistication, one that was barely present in mass media in 1968. To put it in Hamilton terms: there are more of us.
When Obama addressed the graduates of 2020, he told them not to be afraid. He said something that might sound trite but is also true. He said, “America&#8217;s gone through tough times before — slavery and civil war, famine and disease, the Great Depression, and 9/11. And each time we came out stronger, usually because a new generation, young people like you, learned from past mistakes and figured out how to make things better.”
And so if we watch Hamilton in 2020 with renewed pleasure and hope, there is also a nagging fear as we wait for November.
Trying to get a screener so that I could write this piece a little earlier, I ran into a concrete example of something we are all seeing on every television commercial from every well- established company and corporation in the country, the financial giants who pay lip service to the changes at hand while at the same time they dig deeper trenches in the hope they will not have to change themselves.
Here’s a wee bit of background on Disney+, the only place right now through which to stream Hamilton. The service acquired the filmed musical in February for $75 million. The parent company, Disney, is of course among the most successful entertainment conglomerates in the world at present. But it is in financial trouble. According to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/04/disney-july4-future-hamilton/">a recent piece</a> in the Washington Post by Steven Zeitchik, “the results for Disney’s fiscal third quarter are expected to be dismal, with revenue massively down compared to 2019′s <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/06/disney-fiscal-q3-2019-earnings.html">$20.3 billion</a><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/06/disney-fiscal-q3-2019-earnings.html">.</a>” Its theme parks have been shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. And further, as Zeitchik writes, the “Black Lives Matter protests that sprang up in the wake of the killing of George Floyd … have infused many Americans with a sense of anger and social justice incompatible with Disney’s make-no-waves message of harmony.” Purchasing Hamilton was not only smart financially, it also sent a message that the mouse is more woke than people might think.
Wanting to write about the show, I went searching online for a Disney publicist; I planned to run this piece on July 3, the first day that Hamilton streamed, and so I wanted to view it a few days earlier, no big deal. I encountered a stumbling block unlike any I had met in my 40 years in journalism. Searching with all the tricks of my trade, I could find no sign of any publicist who worked at Disney Plus. It was as if no intermediary between the company and the press existed. So, instead I found the names of all the top executives at the company, figured out their emails, and sent a query about my problem to each one. A couple of days later I received an email from a publicist. I asked if there was a screener available and was told no, but to check back. I did and was told there was no screener available. So I waited and watched Hamilton when it streamed.
It’s a tiny thing, perhaps, but this corporate rejection of the norms of cultural debate — not allowing the press to review shows the way they have always been reviewed, through previews — is in its small way a mirror of Trump’s attacks on the press and his belief in the inherent rightness of the economically powerful. Ishmael Reed is right to castigate Miranda for not facing the totality of Hamilton’s relation to slavery, but one can’t help, in these dark days, cheer on Hamilton’s call to further revolution.
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Hamilton in the Time of Trump

Hamilton in the Time of Trump

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/three-questions-talking-jonathan-shapiro/"></div>Now playing at The Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills: Sisters in Law, a smart new play about the relationship of the Supreme Court’s first two female justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Tovah Feldshuh) and Sandra Day O’Connor (Stephanie Faracy). Playwright Jonathan Shapiro is a LARB contributor, but he doesn’t let that stop him from teaching at UCLA Law School, co-creating the Amazon Prime show Goliath with David E. Kelley, or writing for NBC’s The Blacklist and on the upcoming HBO series The Undoing. A former federal prosecutor, Shapiro kindly answered three questions about his play.
¤
LAURIE WINER: Your play pits two ways of addressing injustice — slow, steady and politely versus urgent and direct — as embodied by Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, respectively. I thought I detected your own preference, which I would say is the latter. Could you tell us something about where you stand and why?
JONATHAN SHAPIRO: I&#8217;m a big talker, but the truth is, I&#8217;m more of an incrementalist. From 2000 to 2006, I served as a State Senate appointee to the bipartisan Commission on California Government Organization and Economy (&#8220;The Little Hoover Commission&#8221;), including a year as its Chairman. It&#8217;s a good government state board created by Pat Brown to address intractable policy issues. With neither the responsibility nor the authority to actually change things, our entire influence depended on the quality and logic of our reports, and the power of people on both sides of the political aisle to come up with reasonable solutions — which meant compromise. None of our recommendations changed the world. But while I was there, our suggestions on how to address prison overcrowding, water shortages, infrastructure challenges relating to green energy, and the need for pension reform actually became statutes and policy. None of these were silver bullets, but they made the world better. Slowly. It isn&#8217;t as cathartic or dramatic as demanding direct change (which probably is my instinct). But it does move the ball down the field, which is something.
 Can you tell us what you made of the Brett Kavanaugh televised hearing? 
In terms of needlessly cruel and tawdry national spectacles, it ranks up there with the Army-McCarthy Senate Hearings and Thomas Confirmation. Having testified before the US Senate once myself in 2000 on an espionage case I prosecuted, and having worked as a special assistant for then Attorney General Janet Reno during the Waco Hearings, I&#8217;m never surprised by the ham-handed, bloviating absurdity of our legislative branch whenever it goes on TV pretending to be the judicial branch.
Audiences seem to noticeably enjoy the experience of hearing rational and responsible people debate the nature of justice in your play. Do you think Sisters in Law is addressing a specifically current need or hunger?
People really do seem to enjoy it! I hear it all the time. Which gives me hope. If you give people what they want but aren&#8217;t getting, you&#8217;ll be a hit. In a world of hysterical cablenistas and screaming meanies, a sincere disputation between smart people who actually listen to one another as they try to find the right answer feels radical, innovative, and exciting. The body politic is starving for more nutritious debate. Democracy dies without it. These two women were champions of it. We&#8217;re all sick of screaming, violent spewing. We want honest, hard-fought, fact-based, fair discussion. You can feel it.
&nbsp;
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills; September 18 through October 13, 8 p.m.; standby only, call for ticket prices. (310) 746-4000, <a href="http://thewallis.org/">thewallis.org</a>.
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Three Questions: Talking with Jonathan Shapiro about &#8220;Sisters in Law&#8221; (Sep. 18 – Oct. 13, Wallis Annenberg Center)

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/in-memoriam/pleasant-know-things-memory-jonathan-gold/"></div>During the two terms of President George W. Bush, I lunched every other week with food critic Jonathan Gold and novelist Michelle Huneven. These were long, agenda-less, winey meals in which conversation followed the contours of our current obsessions, meandering from books to politics to our projects, our families, adventures from our younger days, the stranger or more embarrassing the better. Sometimes you do not recognize a golden era when you are living it.
The three of us formed a comfortable and I would say sibling-like triangle. He was almost a foot taller than both of us, ground huggers at 5’2” and 3”. Wispy ginger hair surrounded his large head like a halo and just touched the suspenders on his shoulders. He carried his girth with dignity that some years later morphed into majesty. Sometimes we hugged or kissed when we met and said goodbye but usually we didn’t, because those types of formalities seemed formal.
Michelle and I both felt perpetually guilty about devoting a chunk of the work day to a meal, but we gave ourselves passes for mental health. For Jonathan of course it was his job, though you wouldn’t know by observation. We hardly discussed food. I never saw Jonathan take a note, and I never received a follow-up email asking me if I recalled some ingredient for his clarification. We ordered what we liked, though Michelle and I always asked if he had already had the Poc Chuk or Dan Dan Noodles, because we knew he needed to try as many menu items as possible. We ordered what we liked and then he added about 12 more dishes for the now note-taking server who usually betrayed no surprise but seemed to respect the scope of our commitment.
We rode the peaks and valleys of these bountiful meals, from the agitating interlude before the arrival of the first dishes, to the greedy plunder, which always gave way to the slow sipping of the last of the wine and then coffee or tea when conversation tailored off into a drowsy state of well being, the way you might spend an afternoon vacationing in a European food city. The listless sampling of desserts was often the setting for one of Jonathan’s surprising one-liners, delivered after the long pauses in which his genius brewed.
One discussion began with newly reported details of Prescott Bush&#8217;s protection of Nazi gold, sailed into the short stories of Anton Chekhov, and ended in a fascinating disquisition from Jonathan about the properties of the ink sac of the squid. There followed a wine-saturated silence.
Jonathan broke it. He said, offhandedly: &#8220;It is pleasant to know things.&#8221;
I frequently repeat that sentence in my mind and savor it.
One day I reported on my dinner at the home of a food editor of whom Jonathan was not overly fond. “What did she serve?” he and Michelle wanted to know. “We started with some grilled scallops and wilted spinach,” said I. Jonathan asked, “Beurre blanc?” “I think it was balsamic vinegar,” I said, remembering the condiment on the kitchen counter.
After yet another deep drink from his wine glass and a bit of silence, Jonathan softly declared, &#8220;Balsamic vinegar is the last refuge of a scoundrel.&#8221;
Difficult to describe why these lines gave us so much pleasure; at the time we simply nodded, satisfied that the day ended with a solid Jonathan-ism.
Afterwards we often accompanied him to some grocer or butcher that he had discovered; I remember several trips to Howie’s market in San Gabriel, to the butcher in the back, where I would buy whatever cut of meat Jonathan and Michelle ordered. I loved being a lazy acolyte. Though I was two years older than Jonathan, I slipped into my role as youngest sibling, content to follow along and trust I would learn invaluable lessons. Our lunches continued into Obama’s first term but petered off in the second. Michelle was teaching at UCLA and was always working on her next novel, I got involved in the founding of the Los Angeles Review of Books and a book of my own, Jonathan of course won the Pulitzer and went back to working at the Los Angeles Times, and his commitments grew and grew. Though my husband and I still dined with Jonathan and his wife Laurie Ochoa several times a year, the era of those sublime irregular days was over. I always thought we’d return to them when we got a bit older. Now I know that’s all I’ll get. It will be enough, though no amount of time would have been enough. Just one more thing I learned from Jonathan.
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It is Pleasant to Know Things: In Memory of Jonathan Gold

What Happened Here in Munich: An Interview with Mirjam Zadoff

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

20th-Century Classics for 21st-Century Audiences: An Interview with Bartlett Sher

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

The Michael Jackson Songbook

Letter from New York: The Dope on How We Cope, or, The Theater Cure

“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.” — Aristotle

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." — Patti Smith

Gender &amp; Sexuality

Radio Hour: Despina Stratigakos's "Hitler at Home" & Nicholson Baker on Nabokov's "Speak, Memory"

Radio Hour: Tracy Tynan's "Wear and Tear", plus D.W. Winnicott

Radio Hour: Ron Arias "The Wetback and Other Stories" plus Monica Coleman's "Bipolar Faith"

Radio Hour: Laura Albert on the Documentary "Author: The JT Leroy Story"

Radio Hour: Evan Kindley and Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

Radio Hour: Lauren Weedman's 'Miss Fortune' & David Ulin on Donald Trump

Two Very American Tragedies

Laurie Winer is a Los Angeles Review of Books founding editor.

Laurie Winer

Laurie Winer is a Los Angeles Review of Books founding editor.