Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

It is the stuff of U2 legend. Anxious to reinvent themselves after the 1980s had seen them become the biggest band in the world - and the most po-faced - Bono and friends took one of the last ever flights into Berlin before it was officially reunified to try and hoover up some of the cultural gold dust that has long been associated with Germany's largest city - whether divided, or not.

Bono had quipped from that they would "go away to dream it all up again" from a Point, Dublin stage on the second last night of the 1980s. He was as good as his word. U2 returned with arguably their most critically acclaimed album, Achtung Baby, and the bitterly cold winter they spent in a studio near the collapsing Berlin Wall would play its part on songs that were dark, hopeful, playful and, well, sexy. As a career reinvention, it was pretty special - and it's hardly a surprise that U2 have subsequently regarded Berlin with great fondness.

They're not the only artists who have decamped to Berlin in search of inspiration. David Bowie made the same pilgrimage towards the end of the 1970s and emerged with Low and "Heroes" - fan-favourites that are far removed from his Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane personas of earlier that decade. The latter's distinctive cover image was inspired by an expressionist painting Bowie had seen in a left-field art gallery the city, but Berlin was all over the album sonically too - particularly in its experimental, largely instrumental second half

In an astonishingly fertile period of creativity, he also found time to produce two brilliant albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life, for his mate - and Berlin flatmate - Iggy Pop. Having been addled by the effects of cocaine in Los Angeles during the middle years of the 70s, Bowie went to one of the most decadent cities in Europe to get clean.

All those albums - and Achtung Baby too - were largely recorded in Hansa Studios, a fine old building in crumbling West Berlin that had been used as a Nazi ballroom during World War II. History reverberates in this great space as I discovered in 2015 when I went on a guided tour in advance of U2's four-night stand at the city's spanking new Mercedes-Benz Arena.

Thilo Schmied, the founder of Berlin Music Tours, had obsessive detail about the recording of all those storied albums and he spoke with real passion about the old ballroom where U2 had first given life to 'One' and the side room from which Bowie had spied "Heroes" co-producer Tony Visconti meeting a lover next to the Berlin Wall. Visconti was married at the time and the clandestine image burned itself into Bowie's imagination and the rousing title track of "Heroes" was born.

I remember Thilo - a child of the former East Berlin - pointing out this very window to where the Berlin Wall had stood, but it was impossible to imagine it such was the rate of change over the preceding quarter-century. The streets surrounding Hansa were like that of any modern capital, but it had all been so different when Bowie - and Depeche Mode in the 1980s - had first ventured here. Photos from the time show a building seemingly marooned in no-man's land.

Now, there are occasional street markings to denote where the wall had stood for 28 years, but often it's very difficult to tell whether you're in the old West or East.

For much of the 20th century, Berlin was synonymous with edgy art and culture. The artists of the Weimar Republic were a daring lot who took visual art into a bold new place. Germany led the world in architecture and its Bauhaus movement would leave a lasting impression on the built environment of the city - and much further afield.

It was also a capital famed for its cabaret clubs and the risqu, sexually open and gay-friendly culture here in the 1920s and 30s would mark the city out as Europe's most permissive.

The era is captured in vivid detail by the English author Christopher Isherwood, who lived in the city in the 1930s around the time the Nazis were coming to power. His classic book, Goodbye to Berlin, would spawn a hugely successful musical, Cabaret, and a film of the same name. For many, Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles embodied everything that was thrilling and erotic about pre-war Berlin.

The art-hating Nazis - ironic considering Adolf Hitler had been an art student - did all they could to suppress subversive painting, theatre and music. Their systemic vandalism would be felt for decades.

But Germany - and Berlin - began to reassert itself as a cultural force towards the end of the 1960s thanks to a golden wave of young directors. Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders helped change the course of art-house cinema thanks to films that captured life in West Germany and hinted at the complex relations with the Communist East.

One of Wenders' key films, the romantic fantasy, Wings of Desire, would prove to be influential to U2 when making Achtung Baby and they recruited the director to shoot the video for 'Stay (Faraway So Close)', the standout track on follow-up album Zooropa.

German music had its moment in the 1970s. Kraftwerk - from industrial Cologne - did more than anyone to invent electronic music and it can be argued that their influence on the charts today is every bit as significant as the Beatles.

And they weren't alone. Bands such as Can, Cluster, Neu! and Tangerine Dream were at the cerebral end of music in the 1970s and influenced a legion of contemporaries like David Bowie and Brian Eno. The London music press glibly dubbed the scene 'Krautrock', but this was music that broke down boundaries and expanded horizons.

It's difficult to argue that Germany and its capital have had quite as much of an influence on the cultural zeitgeist since the Berlin Wall tumbled as they had before, but there have been some wonderful exceptions. Goodbye Lenin from 2003 explored the curious phenomenon of Ostalgie - former East Germans being nostalgic for the foods, customs and way of life of the old Communist regime - while a much more sobering film, The Lives of Others, offered a chilling portrait of surveillance society in the Stasi-controlled East.

More recently, German TV drama has been in the ascendant. Deutschland 83 was a hit on Channel 4 last year and a new season will arrive by year end, and there's considerable excitement surrounding a new German-language series, Dark, which is soon to air on Netflix. And yet, serious aficionados of German drama will tell you that nothing will beat the scope or ambition of the 1980s and 1990s series, Heimat.

Today, the cost of living may not be quite as affordable as it was even a decade ago, but Berlin remains one of the least expensive capitals in Europe, especially when it comes to rent. It's still a magnet for Europe's bright young things and those hoping to make their mark on the arts.

A new generation of Irish artists and musicians have, at one stage or another, called Berlin home including Mick Flannery, Wallis Bird and Mano Le Tough.

The Irish population in Germany is up 50pc in a decade and Dublin entrepreneur and literature lover Orla Baumgarten is typical of the new breed making their mark in Berlin: she opened her bookshop, Curious Fox, in the once tough, now hip Neukln four years ago, and it's much admired.

Seasoned David Bowie admirers will be familiar with the district. It was the title of one of "Heroes" startling instrumentals. Like so many short-term immigrants - whose number includes U2 - Bowie took from the city, but he gave back too. Deutschland ber alles, indeed.

Indo Review

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Berlin: a soundtrack to history - Irish Independent

When WGN Americas drama Underground debuted last winter, it seemed like a cultural outlier. Stories from the Underground Railroad had long been relegated to nonfiction or the broad and simplistic brushstrokes of children's books. Even as stories about the horrors of oppression (12 Years a Slave) and the civil rights movement (42, Selma, All the Way) entered the mainstream, the Underground Railroad remained overlooked.

Lately, however, slaves flight to freedom has became a jumping off point for an array of creative endeavors. A few weeks after Underground, with its soundtrack curated by executive producer John Legend, came Barbara Hambly's mystery novel, Drinking Gourd, and Robert Morgan's escape saga, Chasing the North Star. Last summer Ben Winters counterfactual noir novel, Underground Airlines, hit bestseller lists; then came Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, the year's National Book Award winner for fiction.

In the fall, the surreal and subversive Underground Railroad Game opened to rapturous reviews off-Broadway. (The New York Times called it in-all-ways sensational.) Set in the present, the play depicts two teachers, one white and one black, stumbling along the treacherous path of educating children about slavery and racial oppression.

The topic hasn't been explored enough so I'm not surprised people are finding new and different angles, says Underground co-creator Joe Pokaski.

This month brings a new season of Underground, the opening of the National Park Services Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center in Cambridge, Md., and Through Darkness to Light, a photographic essay of the Underground Railroad by Jeanine Michna-Bales. The Underground River, a novel by Martha Conway, hits in June, and Viola Davis is developing a Tubman film for HBO.

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The Underground Railroad came at a time when our country was so polarized that there was no understanding on either side so the fascination with it now might be because we're back in that situation, says Michna-Bales, adding that the movement also blurred lines, bringing together white and black, and people from different religions and socioeconomic groups, while also giving women previously unheard of roles in public life. Her pictures aim to provide a first-person perspective on what a slave would have seen on the long and dangerous journey north.

Many more slaves actually attempted escape without the aid of the Underground Railroad, at least initially. The phrase Underground Railroad first appeared around 1839 but slaves had, naturally, been trying to escape since the implementation of this horrific institution. Many initially tried for Mexico or the Caribbean. Historians estimate that the railroad helped 30,000 to 100,000 (of the millions of enslaved blacks) to escape to Canada. But for the most part the railroad really ventured only about 100 miles into the South, so the first season of the TV series and Morgan's novel also explore the experience of slaves running without outside help.

Underground co-creator Misha Green puts all these new works in the larger context of publishers and producers recognizing the value artistically and commercially in stories about minorities, from the Roots remake to Oscar best-picture winner Moonlight. She points particularly to ones with characters seizing control of their own narrative, whether thats Straight Outta Compton or Hidden Figures. Indeed, last year also begat a movie (Birth of a Nation) and a play (Nathan Alan Davis Nat Turner in Jerusalem) about Turner's slave uprising.

Author Morgan, a professor at Cornell University, says the trend's roots stretch back decades.

Fiction is the way we learn about others, he says, pointing to waves of groups laying down their markers, from Southern writers in the 1930s to Jewish writers in the decades after World War II. The original 'Roots' was the building block and writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and August Wilson then paved the way, he says, so that these Underground Railroad stories are a natural evolution.

I think it's a good thing any time people are interested in history, says Eric Foner, a leading scholar of 19th century America, whose 2015 book, Gateway to Freedom, focused on the Underground Railroad. Foner understands artists taking liberties with the facts, and he admires Whitehead's fantastical creation of an actual railroad that runs underground. It's fantasy but Whitehead also gives a kaleidoscope of black history. It's very informed.

Most of the current projects began a few years ago, so Green says the zeitgeist partially reflects the rise of the tea party and birther movement followed by the spate of police shootings and the birth of Black Lives Matter.

These stories, like police brutality, have always existed but now the public might finally be primed and open to step outside its own orthodoxy and turn its gaze to them, adds Underground Railroad Game co-writer and costar Jennifer Kidwell.

Even as these stories make history more accessible to mainstream audiences, theyre refusing to whitewash the grim realities, striving instead to demolish the traditional narrative. This is not your grandfather's history that helps paint a rosier picture of historical atrocities, says Scott Sheppard, co-writer and costar of Underground Railroad Game, which will tour to as-yet-undetermined destinations in late 2017 and 2018.

We often use narratives as balms to sooth our concerns and fears about where we are now, Sheppard adds. The number of escaped slaves is minuscule compared to the systematic destruction of the millions of lives throughout slavery's history, so we want to remove that layer of romanticism and make everyone question their beliefs and values in as destabilizing a way as possible.

The effects of and resistance to that oppression and the lasting legacy are a foundation of who we are as a people.

Ben Winters, author of "Underground Airlines"

Underground may be slickly produced adventure TV yet one main character after another gets recaptured or killed. In Drinking Gourd, protagonist Benjamin January, a thoughtful and well-educated free black man, reflects on how he has come to hate virtually every white person, especially after learning the white abolitionist he encounters rapes the girls he helps to freedom. Whitehead's and Winters' novels are even darker.

Underground Airlines takes place in the present but imagines a world that had no Civil War, where slavery was only gradually abolished and where it still thrives in four Southern states. I'm hoping the book is a reminder of the presence of the past in our lives, says Winters, who connects a nation built on slavery to the institutionalized racism that persisted through Reconstruction and Jim Crow and that continues today. My alternative history isn't alternative enough.

Underground Railroad Game also ties the sins of America's past squarely to the present day.

Our play explores the myths of the white savior and of romanticized American history, Kidwell says. We just happened to set it against the Underground Railroad.

That is a recurring theme in interviews with the writers, especially those who are white.

It's important that these stories are not, 'Oh, these nice white people are helping these poor black slaves get away and are instead about free blacks and slaves taking agency, Hambly says.

In Winters novel, the idea of whites as nobles rescuing the helpless is derisively called the Mockingbird mentality, in reference to Harper Lee's Atticus Finch.

We are not just telling a black story, Winters says. Slavery is a story about white America; it's about the role that people who looked like me played and still play in oppressing people who look different. The effects of and resistance to that oppression and the lasting legacy are a foundation of who we are as a people.

Although these works were all conceived before Donald Trumps election, the current climate will influence the audiences perceptions. I reread my own book in November and it read differently, says Conway, whose book is about a Northern white woman dipping her toe in the water of activism. It's about how people change and how she went from being a bystander to a participant.

They will resonate differently, says musician Legend, who not only served as music curator and executive producer on Underground but also plays Frederick Douglass this season. We have a president who doesnt know anything about American history or black history, and people are starting to realize how important it is to understand our history so we can fight back.

Follow The Times arts team @culturemonster.

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A powerful symbol of resistance, the Underground Railroad inspires ... - Los Angeles Times

Something There...

You should see Beauty and the Beastthis weekend. Even if you're a homophobe.

The film, finally released Friday, is still the same tale as old as timerefreshingly so, if you're a purist of the animated feature; questionably so, if that makes you wonder why Disney bothered with a live adaptation at all.

But there is, as you no doubt have heard, something there that wasn't there before: HOMOSEXUALITY!

No doubt the biggest controversy in the film world these past few weeks has surrounded a so-called "exclusively gay moment" that director Bill Condon has included in this feature. It would mark the first time there was an obviously gay character in a family Disney film.

The sidekick character LeFou, played by Josh Gad, would be struggling with his feelings for his strapping Alpha hero, Luke Evans's Gaston.

LeFou is somebody who on one day wants to be Gaston and on another day wants to kiss Gaston," Condon said, in an interview with Attitude magazine.

He's confused about what he wants, he continued. It's somebody who's just realizing that he has these feelings. And Josh makes something really subtle and delicious out of it. And that's what has its payoff at the end, which I don't want to give away.

(We will give it away. SPOILERS below.)

The reveal made instant headlines.

Some cheered the progress toward inclusivity and representation. Some questioned the optics of making LeFou, a buffoonish, flamboyant, and nefarious joke character, the choice for the landmark moment. But the loudest, most ridiculous headlines detailed the backlash: boycotts, bans, and, most recently, Disney's refusal to edit out the moment in order to appease Malaysian censors.

Truth be told, the most exclusively gay moment in this new Beauty and the Beast is my dramatic eye roll after seeing the actual thing.

After all of the hullaballoo, you might expect LeFou to make his entrance in a codpiece while lip-synching to a Barbra Streisand show tune. Instead, you end up scrutinizing each scene like Tim Gunn inspecting a seam on Project Runway. And you breathe your Gunn-ian exasperated sigh after more and more time passes with nothing particularly gay happening.

Sure, LeFou offers a lingering gaze or two at Gaston, at one point even asking his strapping bud why he isn't happy with just the two of them palling around. At another point, he gets carried away in song and nuzzles himself into the crook of Gaston's neck, but the moment is too swept up in the musical comedy sequence to register as "gay."

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You begin to get annoyed, wondering if that's itif a slightly homophobic joke about Gaston being uncomfortable with LeFou hugging him is the moment. With so many red herrings by that point, you're not going to be satisfied until you see LeFou deep-throating a candlestick. Certainly you won't be satisfied with the actual moment when it arrives.

It comes during the grand finale, in the ballroom dance at the end of the film when everyone is human again.

It's one of those old-timey dances, where the men twirl the women and they change partners. In a roughly three-second cut, LeFou twirls his partner, but instead of another woman twirling into his personal space, it's a man. And they look at each other. And then the camera moves away.

If you had hopes and dreams about finally seeing gay inclusivity in a Disney film, you're furious.

If you had hopes and dreams of blaming Disney and its pro-gay agenda for the destruction of family and family entertainment, well, you're furious, too. Can you really hang a pitchfork campaign on a moment so slight that, were it not for weeks of press leading up to it, you probably wouldn't have even noticed?

Things like this are often called nontroversiesscandals that erupt over nothingbut this is more than that.

It exposes the giddy gusto with which the media will create a news vacuum, and suck us all into its void of hot takes and think pieces and talking-head arguments. Even after the film screened for critics and the gay emperor was exposed without his clothes, we still reported and debated that now-naked gay emperor.

Condon gave a statement regretting that so much ado had been made about the "exclusively gay moment." Actor Dan Stevens, who plays the Beast, decried to The Daily Beast that, I presume somebody somewhere thought it would drive a lot of traffic to their site, thats usually how these things start. For the love of god, even the voice actor who voiced LeFou in the animated film weighed in on the sexuality.

A second wave of press began mocking anyone who found the "gay moment" controversial. One comedy website's headline, in particularOutrage at Inclusion of Gay Character in Film About Woman-Buffalo Romancewent viral.

We became a goddamn singing candelabra, making a spectacle out of these non-news moments, parading them across the zeitgeist like dancing dishes and vaudeville teapots, inviting anti-gay and family-fretting critics to be our guest and feast on them.

And they are, happily. It's proof of a fallacy in terms of how much progress we think we've made in terms of LGBT acceptance and normalization and, more, an essential stop to making an effort like this again any time soon. (And, for the love of Lumiere, this was the smallest of small efforts.)

One character, who isnt a romantic lead in any way shape or form (and in fact might actually contribute to negative gay stereotypes), is given a hint of sexuality that reflects the real worldnot to mention, the real world of many Disney fansand it is treated with a hysteria akin to a terrorist bombing on the House of Mouse.

Were living in a time where the mere gesture of giving Cinderella or Belle a modicum of agency or feminist energy in these live-action updates is fretted over as if the decision may change the world as we know it. Given the backlash to LeFous groundbreaking three seconds of a man twirling into his general vicinity, its unlikely that any major studio will attempt something like this with a family film again.

Remember when there was a campaign to make Elsa a lesbian in the planned Frozen sequel? Well you canwait for itlet that one go. (Ba-da-ching.)

Its a shame, too, because Disney should by this point correct, or at least clarify, its alternately progressive and problematic history with gay themes.

For a LGBT, and especially questioning, community whose childhoods are so often defined by being a funny girldifferent from the rest of us and wondering when will my reflection show who I am inside, the messaging, the whimsical escape, and, for the love of Minnie, the camp of it all made the Disney vault a safe space.

For most of us, our first drag show was watching Ursula in The Little Mermaid. The Lion Kings Scar, Herculess Hades, Pocahontass Ratcliffe, Aladdins Jafar: these are all characters who are coded gay, meaning that they exhibit traits that are clues to their homosexuality, but not explicitly acknowledged. Elsas Let It Go in Frozen is considered a gay anthem.

But for all the erstwhile gayness of these animated musicals, theyre equally problematic. Gay panic, stereotypes, closeting, and equating homosexuality with perversion are as present in these films as any celebration of otherness or flamboyance.

For the oversell of the LeFou moment, maybe at least it was going to be a step forward for Disney.

LGBT rights groups like GLAAD have taken to speaking up against anti-Beauty and the Beast bans, saying, Film is one of Americas biggest exports, which is why LGBTQ representation in all-ages programming is incredibly important. These portrayals both help real LGBTQ youth to recognize they are not alone and know their identity is valid when they see someone they can recognize themselves in on-screen, especially in countries where being LGBTQ is criminalized.

Thats certainly true and valid, but mostly we still feel annoyed that this moment doesnt even seem worth the fuss of supporting. If Disney was going to take a step like this, make it one that deserves championing.

For all the strides we keep hearing are being made in terms of LGBTQ characters and portrayals in mainstream entertainment, this moment and the controversy surrounding it is a stark reminder of how dire the situation still is.

Even when ABC, for example, goes to the effort of airing the When We Rise miniseries about the gay civil rights movement in the U.S., its ratings are horrendous, hinting that an audience isnt willing to watch. Oh, and by the way, there still has not been an out gay actor whom Hollywood can unequivocally see as a leading man, in the classic sense.

For now, we can take comfort in knowing that this is hardly the gayest thing to happen to Beauty and the Beast. I present you to Disney Worlds dancing Gaston:

By the way, if homosexuality is all it takes to ruin your Disney entertainment experience, then I suggest you steer clear of Disney World in general, where Peter Pan is dating Prince Charming but cheating on him with Buzz Lightyear.

But dont worry. LeFou, apparently, is still single.

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Beauty and the Beast's Big Gay Nightmare: How One Dumb Scene Sparked Global Furor - Daily Beast

Rather than challenge racists, Mark Rutte has boosted their confidence. Geert Wilders and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

In the Netherlands, the defeat of Geert Wilders anti-EU, anti-immigration, anti-Islam Freedom party is a pyrrhic victory. The cost of this victory was that the countrys centre-right party appropriated the rhetoric of Wilders to beat him. Mark Rutte, who leads the VVD party, which won the largest number of seats in the election, talked of something wrong with our country and claimed the silent majority would no longer tolerate immigrants who come and abuse our freedom.

Rather than challenge racists, Rutte has boosted their confidence, pouring arsenic into the water supply of Dutch politics. Hes been happy to play the tough guy as prime minister in the last week of the election campaign Rutte burnished his populist credentials through a fractious dispute with Turkey. He calculated it was in the interests of the Dutch prime minister to be tough on Turkey, and in the interests of the Turkish president to be tough on the Netherlands. He happily sparked a mini-international crisis for the sake of votes. Rutte said stopping Wilders was about stopping the wrong sort of populism. The Dutch prime minister will learn that he cant run the rhetoric of reaction; it will end up running him.

Dealing with the populists who deal in fear offers three options: ignore, co-opt or confront. The surging force in rightwing politics is a form of ethno-populism, driven by heightened concerns over immigration and terrorism. When the right adopts the far-rights language and policies, the only victory is for the hardliners. Supping with the devil can mean you enter the room as a guest and end up as dessert. Look at France, where Marine Le Pen could end up in the second round of the presidential election leading a party with no significant presence in the National Assembly. She would then have a chance to peel off members of the centre-right Republican party by offering the premiership and other ministerial posts in her putative government.

Power is enormously seductive. Just ask Donald Trump. He first upended the US Republican establishment and now sits atop it. In the White House Trump models himself on Americas first populist president, Andrew Jackson. Jacksonian America is a paranoid place: under siege, with its values undermined either by an elite cabal or by immigrants and its future under threat by arms of government that oppress voters rather than protect them. Even US neoconservatives, who thought they were advancing a liberal agenda through war, recoil from the noxious racism.

If recent history is any guide, trying to ignore rightwing populists and the issues they raise does not work

Trump, Wilders and Le Pen are all part of a pitchfork rebellion on the right. It is a historically novel conservative movement. Margaret Thatcher would never have attacked the British intelligence services, nor would Ronald Reagan have traduced the family of a US soldier killed in action.

If recent history is any guide, trying to ignore rightwing populists and the issues they raise does not work. The policy flip-flops over immigration while Ed Miliband was leading Labour revealed to voters a vacillating streak over an issue that was rising to the top of their concerns; the party lost ground. The Dutch Labour party in this election framed their anti-migration arguments as protecting workers but the partys real problem was that it was in coalition with the centre-right government until 2014 and pushed through painful cuts to pensions and healthcare. Voters have not forgiven it.

What is lacking here is context. Technology has helped populists frame their messages to appear more in tune with the zeitgeist than established political parties, at a time when globalization has made many feel insecure about their position in society.

Political parties, and the system of representative government, grew out of a more restrained politics, where voters decided which package of policies they wanted. With the rise of social media and single-issue campaigning, parties lost their monopoly on information. This at a time when people are more and more interested in single issues, causes and individual campaigns. These lend themselves to rightwing demagoguery, which trades in unsubstantiated claims.

The change in politics is happening as poorer workers see their governments not bothering to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Ahead of them are white-collar workers, who are frightened of being downsized themselves and are wary of paying taxes to provide benefits for anyone else.

In the Netherlands, which appears a competitive and productive economy, real household consumption is still lower than a decade ago. Only last year, the head of the governments think-tank said prosperity was not being widely shared and a yawning gap was opening up between old and young, white and non-white as well as lowly-qualified and highly qualified people. Kim Putters of the Dutch Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP) warned people were being left powerless and sought control over their lives. Sound familiar?

This is the bumpy terrain over which the populist tweeters including Le Pen, Wilders and Trump ride. They play on the idea that the system has failed and once elected only they will deal with problems: the non-whites, non-Christians and other cultural deviants along with the smug bureaucrats, lawyers and professors. Populist movements want to overturn constitutional governments so that the groups they define as enemies of the people can be targeted. Thats why they need to be confronted. Thats why the progressive success story of the Dutch elections was the Green Left party, whose leader Jesse Klaver preached the virtues of an open, fair society: stand for your principles, he told voters. Be straight. Be pro-refugee. Be pro-European. With 14 seats, he can play kingmaker in coalition talks.

Klaver, the 30-year-old son of an absentee Moroccan father and part-Indonesian mother, was canny enough to use social media and rallies to build support, but his breakthrough was largely down to the fact he was the anti-Wilders candidate. Klaver, who looks like Canadas Justin Trudeau and sounds like Americas Bernie Sanders, sold an optimistic vision of tolerance, equality and environmentalism, through a slick, web-driven campaign strategy. His message to Wilders: I want my country back. He was given to slapping bigots down, saying he had had enough of hate. In TV debates he told Wilders that Islam wasnt the problem in Holland, Wilders was. Klavers right: the way to take on the far-right is not to imitate racists but to fight them.

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Geert Wilders was beaten, but at the cost of fuelling racism in the Netherlands - The Guardian

Most concerts by the new-music chamber choir the Crossing have a few listeners wondering out loud at the end where the group has been all these years.

Answer: Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, easily accessed by two SEPTA train lines, but still a psychological distance from Center City. And when not there, the Crossing might be in the wading pool outside Lincoln Center, singing through megaphones or inside Los Angeles' Disney Hall, navigating some of the most explosive and intricate music being written today. And, now, having just recorded music for an installation to open in May at the Wild Center in the Adirondack Mountains, the Crossing will be heard there for the next three years.

The more serious question at the 4 p.m. Sunday Chestnut Hill concert will be how could founder Donald Nally have foreseen the relevance of the new work he presents today -- Zealot Canticles by Lansing D. McLoskey -- based on the writings of Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka? The piece peers into the fanatical mind-set, not with well-honed poetry, but with blunt prose, like "I am right, you are wrong, I am right, you are dead."

Answer: Nally, 56, is so tapped into social issues that relevance of some sort is likely to surface at any time. Because choral works are created more quickly than symphonies and operas, composers can much more readily respond to the zeitgeist. So open-ended is the choral medium (literally, as the size of the Crossing ranges from eight to 32 voices) that it has acquired a Wild West quality -- relatively lawless and ready for anything.

So it is on the Crossing website (www.crossingchoir.com), with 40 or so SoundCloud and other digital links to its performances of composers from Philadelphia to Riga, and in three new commercially released CD sets.Seemingly out of nowhere, the group issued Clay Jug, a quite satisfying work by composer Edie Hill on the Navona label. Edie who? She's a Minneapolis composer of music that purposefully juxtaposes singing, humming, flute, marimba, and much else.

Many great, original compositional voices first came my way out of the group's 40-some world premieres and 30-some U.S. premieres, including Ted Hearne and Eriks Esenvalds. Crossing premieres have also revealed dramatic new sides of local composers Robert Maggio, Kile Smith, and James Primosch.

Few people at the turn of the current century could have seen this coming: New choral music was often written to accommodate amateurs and was heard mostly within the choral subculture, except for professional groups, such as the Philadelphia Singers Chorale, which kept busy with pieces such as the Mozart Requiem with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Now, this musical stepchild has evolved into a rock star, not just with the Crossing (founded in 2005 just as a collection of vocal professionals who wanted to sing together), but with superchoirs all over the world that have become focal points of important new music.

That and a few other key trends have come together here: Respect for the neo-tonality movement, among composers as well as listeners, meant voice-friendly music was taken more seriously. The Baltic republics, whosetradition of singing festivals was a key part of their liberation from Russia,have been producing mind-blowing sounds never previously imagined in choral music. Soyou understand Nally's nonchalance when the Rolling Stones tapped the Crossing for a 2013 local performance of "You Can't Always Get What You Want": It was the oldest and easiest music the group had ever sung.

Nally's own progression began with the mainstream Choral Arts Philadelphia, and, amid prestigious positions with the Welsh National Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago, he increasingly asked all who were within earshot about giving it all up and devoting more time to the Crossing. I told him no, he shouldn't. He heard "yes." I'm glad of that.

He subsequently landed a job at Northwestern University -- as director of choral ensembles -- that readily supports his new-music habit and allows him to train a "new music Jedi" generation of singers who can deal with anything.

To maintain artistic freedom, the Crossing went for years without much infrastructure, such as a board of directors. Rather than programming crowd pleasers by Eric Whitacre, Nally discovered Santa Ratniece, the 39-year-old Latvian whose "My Soul Will Sink Into You" was the highlight of last year's Seven Responses concerts with its clouds of near-hallucinatory, painfully ecstatic choral sound containing the words of a 13th-century saint. His relatively high success rate with new music isn't just luck. He persuades composers to drop or significantly revise large portions of movements that don't work.

The trio of new Crossing recordings, however, show how new recording techniques are badly needed for capturing unprecedented sounds. Hearne's Sound from the Bench, which comes out this week on the Cantaloupe label, represents a breakthrough, having been produced almost in the manner of a pop album, in a recording studio rather than in a church with microphones. The barely controlled chaos of Hearne's opening moments take on a more revealing sense of control than chaos in a piece that explores how the U.S. judicial system has increasingly granted corporations power over an unsuspecting human population.

The church acoustic in which the piece was first heard inevitably had a homogenizing effect on Hearne's poly-stylistic richness, whose words are set to harmonies that sound like an ironic version of the Beach Boys one minute and strident hellish voices in another. In Chestnut Hill, the electric guitar writing seemed a bit aimless. On the recording produced by Nick Tipp, guitars make perfect sense. I always respected Sound from the Bench; now I welcome it into my life.

The two-disc Seven Responses set on the Innova label documents the Crossing's biggest project to date -- seven composers examined the crucifixion of Christ -- but it was recorded in a single day at St. Peter's Church in Malvern. Ratniece's alternate harmonic planet truly needs surround sound to reveal all that's there. David T. Little's piece "dress in magic amulets" has percussion suggesting the nails used in the crucifixion, but faulty sound balance blunts the effect.

Caroline Shaw's meditation on compassion, "To the Hands," is yet another case of a piece growing into its own timeliness. Its fifth movement text consists mainly of statistics about displaced persons.

Some pieces haven't yet found their legs: Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's "Ad-cor" breaks into provocatively ironic speech -- "My body screams for sentimentality" -- though finding the right delivery for that remains elusive. But let's have some perspective here: These are significant works that are often heard only here (and, in the case of Seven Responses, New York's Mostly Mozart Festival). And there's maybe no wrong way to get the music beyond those city limits.

The Crossing premieres the "Zealot Canticles" at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 8855 Germantown Ave. Tickets: $20-$35. Information: http://www.crossingchoir.com.

Published: March 16, 2017 1:38 PM EDT

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The Crossing: Changing the world, one concert at a time - Philly.com

Everything that made Labour strong has been turned on its head. The party must embrace the future, or it will die.

Jesse Klaver, leader of the Dutch Green Left, which ate the Dutch Labour vote whole this week.

Yet another cold bucket of water has been tipped over the heads of Labour and social democrats everywhere. The PvdA, Labours Dutch sister party, has just suffered a catastrophic decline in support from 34 MPs to 9.It follows in the wake of PASOK in Greece, annihilation in Scotland, crisis in Italy and loss of power and influence for socialdemocratseverywhere. In France next month the Socialist candidate is likely to finish fourth. Yes, Martin Schulz, the SPD candidate for the premiership, is enjoying polling success in Germany but this could just be the fact that he is the new face in the race. Come September it could look very different, not least because its unclear if he has any real sense of political project.So even if his does win office he is unlikely to win or build the power to do much. Its more likely to be Hollandism than anything transformative.

So if you were harbouring any hope that there was some charismatic centre-left leader or technical fix to the existential crisis of social democracy the Dutch result forces us to think again. To bring the debate back to these shores, the crisis of Labour simply cements the notion of the floor disappearing beneath of the feet of social democrats.

As such, the crisis of Labour is not really about Jeremy Corbyn, though he is clearly not helping and may like Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair be hindering the real renewal of the party. Labour can change its leader, but its unlikely to make any real difference without a fundamental change of direction.Here is why.

Everything that once made Labour and social democrats strong from 1945 for roughly 30 years has gone and everything that makes Labour weak has replaced it. The working class as the engine of Labour is now very weak and the factories of solidarity that produced such classes have long gone. The hierarchical and bureaucratic system of government and control (Fordism) that helped win us win the second world war and acted as a model for Labour to govern have gone too. Indeed memories of that war and the depression that preceded it, which bound the nation together in hope, have long since faded from our memories. Finally, the threat of the Soviet Union, which brought the capitalists to the table in 1945 to concede the welfare state to buy off any revolution in the West, evaporated decades ago.

Since then globalization, financialisation, individualization and consumerisation have weakened Labour further to leave it in its current feeble state. The forward march of Labour has not just been halted but reversed.

New Labour was just a blip that temporarily addressed the electoral weaknesses of the party without ever addressing the cultural malaise. The end of something old, not the start of something new as Alan Finlayson has written. Post the 2008 crash, Corbynism looks like another blip in the long decline of a movement that belongs to the 20th century but not yet, and maybe never, the 21st. The idea that all Labour can do its swing between Bennism and Blairism leaves us without hope; a return to a 1975 siege economy and old style public ownership based on illusive ideas of full time employment or a return to the centrism of Blair, that got us into this mess, are neither feasible nor desirable. Its not just that Blairs electoral success can never be repeated, it helped poison the well of British politics. Lets be honest, almost any Labour Leader could have won in 1997. New Labour then enjoyed 60 consecutive quarters of growth in which they lowered taxes, set the City free, refused to build public houses and then agreed to extend Europe to the east and allow mass immigration with no transitional agreement. Yes it did many good things but it failed politically in terms of strengthen left politics rather it wakened left politics. The whole project was based on the belief that left voters had nowhere else to go. We now know different. In Scotland the brick moved and only the SNP where left. Across the North UKIP and the Tories can mop up working class votes and in the South the Liberal Democrats might be well placed to win the remain vote. Labour is stranded in no mans land. Electorally and culturally bereft. Can anything be done?

It will require far reaching change in terms of purpose, politics and policy. Labour must start with a fundamentally new vision of what it means to be human in the 21st century built on the recognition that we dont die wishing we owned more things but had more time with the people we love, doing and creating the things we love. So if its time and autonomy we aspire to, then how do we get them? The new approach Labour must adopt is called 45 Degree Politics. In the 21st century we are not going to be passive recipients of a politics done to us, we have too much influence through information and voice via new technology.But protests from the bottom up like pink hat march while welcome are simply fireworks that light up the terrain in a flash before darkness descends again. We need the resources and legitimacy of the state to sustain our action.45 Degree Politics is the meeting point of horizontal and vertical change, the fault line through which a new society can emerge. The zeitgeist of the 21st century is not the hierarchy but the network. The Corbyn wave is an outlier of this politics thats bubbling up across the civic society and the economy but to work parliament and the state must be taken seriously. In terms of policy basic income, taxing the machines and a shorter working week would liberate us all to do the jobs and work we want, but also to care and create.

For such a transformative programme, the idea that Labour and Labour alone will usher in this new era is farcical. Scotland has gone, maybe for good. The Greens and the Liberal Democrats are not going away. Note, it was the Green Left that were the bigger winners in the Dutch elections. The basis of this complex future will have to be negotiated not imposed through proportional voting a system that should deny the Tories are ever in power alone again.This in turn demands a progressive alliance to win power and change the system so we can change society. The disastrous Copeland by-election and the 19% deficit in the polls are just symptoms of the fundamental cultural disjuncture between Labours past, present and any future.

But there is more than enough hope and substance to unite a huge majority of the 52% who voted for Brexit and the 48% who didnt in a progressive campsite in which Labour is the biggest but not only tent. But can Labour get there? Can the likes of Clive Lewis and Lisa Nandy help the party transform itself?If they cant then the last Labour government, like the last Dutch Labour government, will be just that.

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Labour's problems are about far more than one leader - Open Democracy

The presidential election might not even be the most important election in France this year, argues Paul Smith a professor in Francophone studies, because what comes after could be far more crucial.

The 2017 presidential election wont be the first time the French have looked out across the political landscape and seen a fractured field.

In 2002, there were no fewer than 16 candidates standing in the first round of the presidential election. Back then, the field was so fractured that the Socialist prime ministerLionel Jospinwas eliminated from the contest. Voters were then left with a choice between the sitting, right-wing president, Jacques Chirac, and Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far right Front National (FN).

Of course, Chirac proceeded tocrush Le Pen, 82% to 18%, in the run-off. In the process, he forced the three competing parties of the right and centre right into an electoral alliance, then a single party, the UMP, which later became the Republicans.

The 2002 election is regarded as a turning point in the political history of theFifth Republic(the regime created by Charles de Gaulle in 1958). Not only was the outcome unexpected, but it was the first in which the president was elected for a new five-year term (reduced from seven) shortly before elections to the lower house, the National Assembly.

Initially, this was a simple coincidence of the electoral calendar but it now means the French are summoned, barely a month after electing a new president, to provide him or her with a majority in the National Assembly. One entirely predictable consequence of this has been the relegation of National Assembly elections to almost secondary status and high rates of abstention among those who didnt vote for the new head of state.

Its worth knowing this detail, because while the main focus currently is on the 2017 presidential candidates and their programmes, rallies and public utterances, and the who was paying whom and for what, behind the scenes there are also feverish negotiations going on over who will stand in the 577 constituencies in Junes assembly election.

In a system where political parties are weak and prone to fragmentation, the value of the support of a potentially victorious presidential candidate is a powerful lever.

(Emmanuel Macron. Photo: AFP)

By the same token, experience suggests that defeated presidential candidates do not make good rallying points for their parties when the parliamentary vote rolls around. EvenMarine Le Pencould only turn her 17% of the vote in the 2012 presidential election into two seats in the assembly neither of them for her.

Le Pens success between then and now has come through the intervening local and European elections and these have been as much about rejecting Hollandisme as they are an endorsement of her.

So far, there are five main presidential candidates in the 2017 race. They are, from left to right,Jean-Luc Mlenchon(heading a movement called La France insoumise), Benot Hamon (for the Socialists),Emmanuel Macron(who has established his own movement called En Marche!), Franois Fillon (for the Republicans), and Le Pen (for the Front National/Rassemblement Bleu Marine).

The ecologist Yannick Jadot may or may not run. Last week, his electors authorised him to negotiate a joint platform with Hamon and Mlenchon, which would, in due course, also cover the matter of an alliance for the general election. Hamon is receptive, but Mlenchon is not and, to be honest, never has been. Mlenchon left the Socialists in 2008, objecting to its drift towards social democracy. His singular goal, ever since, has been to destroy the party and recreate a new left under his leadership.

The Socialist party is straining to hold itself together. Party secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadlis has warned that anyone defecting to support Macron in the election will be expelled, and thus forfeit support if they plan to stand in the general election. Those with a strong local power base will see that as a risk they can take in the interests of backing a candidate more likely to win but not all will.

(Benoit Hamon. AFP)

The Socialist position might change, of course, if Macron is elected to the Elyse and Hamon does not get a creditable score (at least 16%) in the first round. Even though he is the party candidate, he is not its leader and if Macron made the right noises, a broad centre and left electoral alliance is not out of the question.

Another possibility would be a simple form of what is known as dsistement rpublicain, whereby the parties of the left (though not Mlenchon) and Macronistes agree to stand down for whichever of them is better placed in a particular constituency. The circle that Macron has to square is that while he might get elected by himself, he cannot govern alone and no-one can predict how his pop-up party will fare amid the rough and tumble of a general election campaign.

To Macrons right, the Republican party has flipped around completely. One of the explanations for Fillons unexpected victory in the primary was that he paid attention to the partys grassroots. While Nicolas Sarkozy controlled the hierarchy, his former PM focused on getting out into the provinces and holding small-scale meetings with the the rank and file. But it is precisely here that unease is strongest now.

(Franois Fillon. AFP)

While Fillon is determined to fight on, even as theformal investigation into his financial conductcontinues, and the partys heavyweights have voiced solidarity, there is real concern in the constituencies that Fillon will not deliver the alternance (a change of majority) they expect and demand. For the Gaullist core of a movement that sees itself as the natural party of government, the prospect of five more years out of power is almost unbearable. If Fillon is eliminated, who will pick up the pieces? The failure to answer that question adequately after Sarkozys defeat in 2012 is just one of the reasons for Le Pens rise and rise.

(Marine Le Pen. AFP)

And yet, while the Front National can make a pretty strong claim to be le premier parti de France, its position is not as strong as it might be. Despite winning 25% of the national vote in the European elections of 2014, the same in departmental elections, and 28% in the regionals in late 2015, the FN remains a leadership without much structure, few candidates and desperately short of funds. The party has more local councillors than ever before, but membership remains low. The FN is being very coy about just how many candidates it thinks it can field.

It is almost impossible to imagine a president elected without a majority in the assembly. Its just as hard to imagine any other party being willing to join the FN in a coalition.

While a Le Pen victory in May might fit the Brexit/Trump zeitgeist, Le Pen might actually be better off losing the 2017 election. She could spend five years building a parliamentary base, which also comes with state funding on a per seat basis, and mount a challenge in 2022. If she makes the run-off and then fails to take 40% of the votes, on the other hand, its perfectly possible that shell be booted out as leader of her party.

However it turns out, the election to the fourth five-year presidential term risks pushing France ever deeper into an institutional turmoil than its instigators could ever have imagined when they stood on the cusp of the Fifth-and-a-half Republic back in 2002. It was all supposed to be so simple.

Paul Smith is an Associate Professor in French and Francophone studies at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

This article originally appeared on the website The Conversation. You can view the original by clicking here.

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Why winning the French presidential election could be a poisoned chalice - The Local France

By Killenard based award winning Garden Designer Brian Burke.

So, what do you know about hyperlocalism? Not much, if anything. Well in that case you are in the same boat as I was in up until last Saturday.

Last Saturday night at about quarter past nine when most fully functioning adults are out in pursuit of some form of real world alcohol related cultural enrichment, I was at home opening a tweet from a Garden Design magazine which I imagined was just about to open the door for me to the realm of hyperlocalism.

Narnia, as I thought, for the adult organic enthusiast.

Right so what is it? Well, therein lies the source of much confusion and ensuing hilarity.

Because I assumed from the context, a tweet from a Garden Design magazine, and without reading the follow up link that what we were dealing with here was a recently concocted term to cover all those zeitgeisty organic matters such as local sourcing of materials, concern over the provenance of food items, avoidance of the carbon production associated with movement of goods a long way.

All those ultra-cool, eco things.

But never one to be accused of being negligent when it comes to fact checking I jumped over to dictionary.com to get the definitive low down.

Except you wont find any definition on dictionary.com thats even close to my interpretation.

Thats how new it is, says I to myself. The paint isnt even dry on the hoarding surrounding the kingdom of hyperlocalism, on the electric fence sectioning off the hyperlocalist from the remainder of humanity.

But no, its there all right. Hyperlocalism is covered as follows: Hyperlocal connotes information oriented around a well-defined community with its primary focus directed toward the concerns of the population in that community.

The term can be used as a noun in isolation or as a modifier of some other term (e.g. news).

But it could easily have been my definition.

It could easily have been something like: Early twenty first century movement concerned with countering globalisation and homogenisation. Its pure zeitgeist; it combines hype with local and coins a brand-new way of describing something which was already perfectly adequately described.

So, I was torn. There it was; an immovable definition for one thing which I knew in my heart should have been something completely different.

The thing was snowballing and it was starting to occupy this unique niche as being a very now sounding term that should exist for an entirely different purpose to that for which it does exist.

It was becoming very confusing. A misappropriated, misallocated, misdirected label.

So, what I am proposing is nothing less than a complete and utter redeployment of the term hyperlocalism. Because this news related definition is only nonsense.

Hyperlocalism beautifully describes where we are at. We need this phrase to do more for us, to work harder, to live up to its billing. We need to wrest control of this word back from where it has errantly been squandered all this time.

You know the way you buy your spuds from the local farmer and if someone forced you to describe such activity the best any of us would come up with would probably be a word such as loyalty. Well, under the new regime we are obliged to call that hyperlocalism.

Getting your limestone paving from Liscannor rather than Karachi; hyperlocalism. Buying larch from managed midlands forests rather than imported eastern European softwood; hyperlocalism. Keeping a few chickens; hyperlocalism.

Being lucky enough to be close enough to cycle to work or school; hyperlocalism. Not buying a house in Roscommon when you work in Bray; hyperlocalism. Saving in your credit union; hyperlocalism. Eschewing Amazon to order a book through your local bookstore; hyperlocalism. Or better still, hyperlocalism with an edge; using Amazon to do your research and then ordering it through your local bookstore.

Im hyper. Im local. Its not rocket science.

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Re-defining hyperlocalism - Leinster Express

This may be a first: The venerable Philadelphia Flower Show, which seeks to anticipate spring through floral sleight of hand, is this week coinciding with the real thing.

Americas largest and oldest flower show is a week or two later than normal this year while nature has declared the actual spring well underway, evidenced by the arrival of the Japanese cherry blossoms.

But this March hasnt been a gentle shift from winter into spring, more like a bloody tussle between the seasons, with high temperatures edging 80 degrees one day and plunging to the low 20s another. The prospect of a pesky snowstorm is the latest twist. The precocious blossoms are the collateral damage in this battle royal, along with our own notions of what constitutes spring, and when.

The flower show offers shelter from this psychological storm as the hundreds of thousands of flowers unfurl gently until Sunday in designed gardens and floral displays in the artificial environment of the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philly.

The calm spectacle is tempered even more by the 2017 shows homage to the Netherlands, whose phlegmatic citizens have a singular ability to feel passionately about plants without showing it. They are also particularly skilled at raising and selling them. Ton Akkerman, the agricultural attache in Washington, points out that 77percent of the global bulb trade comes from Holland. For cut flowers, its 44percent, he said. And we are 10times smaller than California.

And so the expected 250,000 visitors to the show will wander through gardens of tulips coaxed into bloom. Some 30,000 alone feature in a central display that replicates one of those high-arched brick bridges over Amsterdams canals. And at a preshow gala Friday, Akkermans ministry presented the city with its own tulip variety, an alluring blood red, fringed bloom unveiled as Philly Belle.

But since the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the shows organizers, last themed the show around Holland a generation ago, the plant world in the Netherlands has moved way beyond just the iconic tulip and the bulb trade.

The country is at the heart of a landscape design movement called the Dutch Wave, with landscapes of lots of grasses and perennials and, yes, bulbs, woven together in gardens of naturalism and sustainability.

Bart Hoes, one of the marquee landscape designers at the show, offered his take on a small urban garden, incorporating flowering perennials with vegetables, and a pergola designed to capture rainwater for garden irrigation. Next to a little greenhouse, he positioned a black bike. The greenhouse speaks to cold Hollands need for hothouse cultivation, the bicycle to its pedal-friendly flat terrain. We have to save the Earth somehow. It all helps, said Hoes, who is from a country with 17million people and 23million bicycles. (And almost 25,000 acres of commercial greenhouses.) The sustainability kick seems to extend to the Dutch themselves: Hoes is trim, rosy-cheeked and a youthful 59.

At another exhibit nearby, his compatriot Nico Wissing is supine in a cradle that forms part of a broad ribbon of woven willow branches that wanders and spirals over much of his exhibit, Reconnection. Two arms of this sculpture emerge from a basketweave bench. The other arm of wicker floats across the display to a woven birds nest about six feet across. Its cushions invite one to stay a while and perhaps lay an egg.

Give yourself somewhere to be in your garden, he said. Thats my take-home message, come and learn how to divide up space.

Wissing is another trim 50-something Dutchman immersed in the contemporary zeitgeist of ecological landscape architecture. He works on large-scale projects back home, including office parks and hospitals, but in his Philly show garden he has created a playful woodland of moss and snowdrops, and of yellow lupines blooming in the shadow of Japanese snowbell trees.

The wicker sculpture was made by a Dutch artisan named Piet-Hein Spieringhs and took almost two weeks to fabricate, Wissing said. It suggests a strand of DNA, he said, and then mentions that he started working in a nursery when he was 8 and that people who know me say I have green DNA.

He also designed a giant structure called the Ecodome, a 30-foot-high geodesic sphere made of metal arches and fabric and set up nearby to showcase Hollands green industry.

All the flowering plants for the show were forced into bloom in greenhouses in the greater Philadelphia area. Many had to be stored in coolers to arrest growth as February turned unseasonably warm.

The central exhibit incorporates traditional Dutch references Deflt tile under the bridge arch, an inverted field of abstract tulips mirroring the real fields of tulips, and windmill sails reconfigured as illuminated sets. The horticultural societys Sam Lemheney, who worked with Wissing for almost two years to create the display, said the Dutch have a long history of working with rather than against nature. This is the country, after all, where renewable wind power was used to drain and reclaim the land centuries ago. When you think of the windmill, it was very ahead of its time, he said.

No one at the show has a better perspective on the contemporary Dutch embrace of ecological horticulture than Carrie Preston, 40, who grew up in the New Jersey coastal town of Fair Haven but has spent the past 18 years in Holland as a plant-driven landscape designer. I went there because theyre renowned for horticulture. Holland, as far as the nursery industry is concerned, is second to none, she said.

Her exhibit, with 20,000 diminutive bulbs of anemones and species tulips, replicates the type of gardens around old brick manor houses in northern Holland, where bulbs have naturalized and spread through the years. The garden is framed on two sides by an arbor fashioned from chain-link fencing, as a synthesis of Dutch formality and American utility.

She said the Dutch have a different take on naturalism than other Western garden makers because so much of the landscape is more cultural than purely wild. In creating a naturalistic garden theyll add a modern element to it, theyre comfortable with that, she said.

But enough of this serious stuff, because back in the Ecodome a winsome fellow named Jens Baan from a nursery called Koppert Cress is offering samples of novel greens developed for adventurous chefs in trendy restaurants.

From an array of clamshell containers, he takes the leaf of one plant and folds it around the fleshy stalks of another, named Salty Fingers. This is what we call the vegetarian oyster, he said. The flavor is authentic.

Baan, who is 34 and from Haarlem, is wearing orange pants and a white blazer decorated with embroidered plants. We move on to a magenta orchid flower that tastes like a sweet endive. He takes long tweezers and presents part of a yellow flower that he calls Szechuan Button.

He waits until a visitor tries it before describing its effect: Its like putting a nine-volt battery next to your tongue, but it builds up so much saliva it cleanses your palate. The recipient, shocked and salivating, is left speechless.

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A flower show offers some calm amid the storm - Washington Post

Photo Credit: United Nations Photo / Flickr

We will serve the citizens of the United States of America, believe me, said President Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 24th. There is no such thing as a global anthem, a global currency, or a global flag. Four days later, in his first speech before a joint session of Congress, he continued, My job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America.

Donald Trump and his consigliere Steve Bannon (the likely author of those sentences) are hardly the first to nail so precisely this most basic feature of what political scientists call the world order of today. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, President George H.W. Bush was hounded and harassed by environmentalists at every turn. He wasnt doing enough, they said. He needed to protect the planet, they said. Finally he lost his cool, and in words remarkably similar to those uttered by President Trump at CPAC exclaimed, Im the President of the United States. Im not the President of the World. And while Im here Im going to do what best serves the interests of the American people.

The sovereign state system these two American leaders so accurately described, exactly a quarter century apart, is likely to persist far into the foreseeable future. But someday, is it possible that people around the world might actually sing a global anthem together? And hoist a global flag? And dwell together as citizens of a United Earth?

Why Not a Global Anthem?

If there is a global anthem floating around out there its not in any way official, hardly anyone knows it, and hardly anyone feels anything about it. The tone of Trumps assertion, however and of much his nascent presidency implies that its self-evident not just that there is no such thing, but that there shouldnt be, and never will be.

Most of us, however, maintain many different kinds of loyalties. Our affection for our schools and hometowns is a huge part of why sports are such a huge part of our culture. People feel fidelity to non-geographic communities as well ones bicycle club or the dog park gang or (for me) ones fellow geeks at the science fiction convention.

Yet the most primal devotion that most people feel today is arguably their allegiance to their nation. What American even those who agitate every day to make their country live up to its ideals has never gotten at least a little bit choked up at spectacular fireworks on July 4th, or singing The Star-Spangled Banner at a ballgame, or seeing a fluttering American flag leading a parade?

But our world grows smaller and more interconnected every day. No grand historical development is more defining of the modern age. Can we imagine the same feelings of camaraderie, kindred spiritedness, and tribal solidarity about our single human community? Can our loyalty to the world as a whole as it does for many for ones nation -- make our blood rush a little more quickly through our veins? Might our allegiance to our nations be accompanied by an allegiance to humanity?

Theres no reason why people cannot declare right now that they seem themselves as both citizens of their countries and citizens of the world. That their national patriotism is for them transcended by their planetary patriotism. And that all of us on this fragile planet must now consider ourselves, in the science fiction author Spider Robinsons memorable phrase, to be crewmates on Spaceship Earth.

One can imagine this becoming a hot button political issue quite suddenly. Imagine a dozen college students, perhaps half from countries outside the United States, enrolled at, oh, the University of California.

Perhaps they constitute the local student arm of Citizens for Global Solutions -- the 70-year-old NGO that openly advocates the establishment of a world republic. These students band together because they embrace th e principl e that above and beyond their devotion to the country where they happen to have been born is their loyalty to the human race.

So they arrange a meeting with the chancellor. They introduce themselves, and then announce that they do not consider themselves to be primarily American or Nigerian or Iranian or Mexican or Chinese. They are Earthlings. So they request that above the flag of the United States on the official university flagpole, the university will now fly a flag depicting our beautiful blue Earth from space.

The chancellor hesitates. She isnt quite sure how this will go over with that $1M donor whose name just went up on the dormitory right across from that flagpole. The Daily Californian school paper does a front page article about the hesitation. Students begin to march and demonstrate. Other students -- declaring that their only patriotism is their American patriotism -- confront the Earthlings. Commotion ensues. Now the San Francisco Chronicle does a front page article about it. That gets picked up by Asahi Shimbun andDeutsche Welle. And a transnational conversation begins to unfold.

These ideals of larger loyalty have been promulgated by some of the greatest figures in the human heritage. Its what Voltaire called "the party of humanity." Its what Victor Hugo meant when he said, I belong to a party which does not yet exist the party of revolution and civilization. Its what the signatories of the 1955 "Einstein-Russell Manifesto" were describing when they claimed to speak "not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt."

And in July 1979, Neil Armstrong was asked what had been going through his mind ten years earlier when he stood on the surface of the moon, and saluted the American flag. His reply? I suppose youre thinking about pride and patriotism. But we didnt have a strong nationalistic feeling at that time. We felt more that it was a venture of all mankind.

Who Does Represent the World?

President Trump and the first President Bush were also not wrong about who they represent. Its that way for every president. Theres nothing unusual or unprecedented or groundbreaking about it. The oath an American president swears is about protecting the United States of America and its constitution nothing else!

This is why President Bill Clinton, agonizingly, did not dispatch American military power to rescue perhaps of a million people being hacked into pieces with machetes in Rwanda in the spring of 1994 because the genocide, as horrifying as just about anything could possibly be, did not directly threaten American interests. Its why President George W. Bush DID dispatch attack helicopters from the U.S.S. Kearsarge into Liberia during an eruption of civil war and atrocity there in 2003 to evacuate the American citizens on the scene. (Back home at the same time, the U.S. Navy was running recruiting commercials on ESPN, describing itself as a global force for good.)

But this leads to a rather severe problem in our ever shrinking world. Some 200 separate sovereign units, each pursuing their own individual national interests, can hardly guarantee optimal outcomes for the common human interest. And we see this in cold, hard realities, from the massive displacement and refugee flows generated by economic hopelessness, to transborder cyberattacks and runaway climate change. Stronger multilateralism, robust support for international institutions and enhanced mechanisms of global governance are the optimal policy tools not Donald Trumps cultivation of xenophobia and far-right nativism (which is what these straw men truly represent).

So who, today, which individuals in which elected offices, can we identify whose raison detre is to serve the larger collectivity, the whole of the human community, the global public good?

The answer is no one. Its not Donald Trumps job but its no one elses either. There is no supranational authority that stands above the nation state. There is no institution, no elected official anywhere, whose job it is to represent the human race.

How About a Global Flag?

Although our students at the University of California would undoubtedly design something visually wonderful, President Trump is also right to say theres no such thing as a global flag that officially represents anything. But its hardly self-evident that what those political scientists call the Westphalian state system (originating in the peace treaty of 1648 that ended Europes calamitous wars of religion) will endure as a permanent feature of human history.

We can imagine a redesigned and democratized and empowered United Nations. (Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and her Commission on Global Security Justice and Governance, have proposed a World Summit on Global Governance during the UNs 75th anniversary year in 2020.) Further down the road its not impossible to envision that the same basic structures of governance long established almost universally at city, state, and national levels worldwide a legislature and an executive and a judiciary might someday be fashioned and founded at the global level as well.

This vision too not just the intangible ideal of global citizenship but the tangible idea of a world state has been put forth by some of the greatest figures in the human heritage. I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furld, In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World." Thats Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, in his 1842 masterpiece Locksley Hall.The Earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens. Thats Bahaullah, the founder of the Bahai Faith, in 1857. (By most accounts its the first or second fastest growing religion in the world today.) "Without some effective world supergovernment the prospects of peace and human progress are dark ... (But) if it is found possible to build a world organization of irresistible force and inviolable authority there are no limits to the blessings which all men may enjoy and share. Thats conservative hero Winston Churchill in 1949. (Take that Alt-Right!)

These kinds of possible future developments might someday give tangible content and historical meaning to the planetary patriotism that, perhaps, more and more Earthlings might over time declare. Perhaps this hypothetical future entity might be established, some distant day, by a duly negotiated and legally enacted world constitution. They might call it an Earth Union, or the Federal Republic of the World, or a United Earth. In the fictional future history of STAR TREK, after all, the United Federation of Planets in the galaxy was preceded by a United Federation of Nations on Earth. Hundreds of science fiction novels contain similar depictions of a politically unified human race. If writers can make such a future seem so plausible and believable, is it really so ridiculous simply to ask whether we can aspire to it as an actual historical goal?

We are one people with one destiny, said President Trump toward the end of his speech to Congress addressing himself, of course, exclusively to Americans. But perhaps it is not too much to suppose that someday, some political leader will sit in a position, and maintain the responsibility, and show a sufficient elevation of the human spirit, to say not just to the citizens of one particular country but to all the people of Planet Earth, We are one people with one destiny.

The Road to One World

So which comes first? A sentiment of planetary patriotism or an actually politically unified planet? It's sort of like the proverbial question about the chicken and the egg -- only prospective instead of retrospective. It may be that we'll never see any kind of tangible progress toward world political unity until a substantial number of people feel, deep in their bones, something like an ethic of human unity. Or it may be instead that we'll never have a great many people who see themselves primarily as citizens of the world until every living human being has in fact become a citizen with both rights and responsibilities of a United Earth.

In 1946, the writer Phillip Marshall Brown wrote a cover story on world government agitation for Newsweek magazine. (Yes, for a brief but incandescent few years immediately following the Second World War, the movement to actually create something like a world republic was enough a part of the zeitgeist especially among high school and college students that it generated that kind of attention. My own occasional co-author, former U.S. Senator and JFK White House aide Harris Wofford, served as the founder then of the Student Federalists which established fervent chapters on 367 high school and college campuses around the U.S. , and which still exists today as that student arm of Citizens for Global Solutions.) At the end of the piece Mr. Brown took a stand on the chicken/egg question, and asserted that "all attempts, no matter how idealistic, to establish a world government will inevitably fail unless the people of the world can be united into one brotherhood." That forecast may well eventually prove to be right. Or it may turn out to be entirely the other way around.

In Steve Bannons own CPAC speech, he said that national security and sovereignty were one of the Trump administrations three central purposes. And both he and President Trump have repeatedly used the phrase America First. So the two of them are unlikely to embrace the suggestion that perhaps there ought to be a global anthem and global flag, or any contention that individual national interests might sometimes be trumped by common human interests.

One thing that might mean for those of us open to such expansive future possibilities? It just might make for yet another point on which to resist the Trump agenda. It just might provide yet another vehicle for getting under his skin.

Because maybe, someday though likely long after Trump and Bannon have been consigned to the dustbin of history there will be a global anthem. Maybe, someday, there will be a global flag. Maybe, someday, well all live together in One World.

Tad Daley, author ofAPOCALYPSE NEVER: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free Worldfrom Rutgers University Press, is a fellow with theCenter for War/Peace Studies. Hes currently writing his second book, on the extraordinary history and possible future of the idea of a world republic. Follow him on Twitter @TheTadDaley.

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Why Not 'A Global Anthem,' Donald Trump? Who Does 'Represent the World,' Steve Bannon? - AlterNet