The Arts in New York City

I have never posted on a blog before, but I hope to pick up on how the process works quickly enough. And the time on this page read 8:30 when it is in fact 9:30, so the electronic system does have flaws I am not responsible for.

Contemplating a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet today we wondered whether there are any intrinsic idenities that people ascribe to themselves and that people would be willing to fight, to die for. We mentioned political parties, but I sincerely doubt that they would risk their statures with murder. Any death that one could attribute to a politician would not be through a gun, but through a byzantine process of legislation and deceit and hidden deals in which the stronger side attempts to degrade the other. Especially now, in any case, politicians hold onto their ideologies primarily to appease the voters, aka the big lobbies that pay them not to think too much about the ideology. And any violence that might somehow arise among the policians would immediately be reported by the media.

The media in that case seems like an ammeliorater, but here is evidence that it isn’t. The Wall Street Journal today had a sidebar about newspapers warring in Italy. A Catholic paper of the Vatican accused Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister, of lewd behavior, so the nationally regulated newspaper responded with a piece alleging the Catholic newspaper’s editor’s homosexuality. The Catholic editor was forced to step down, and Vatican-Italian relations soured. Religion is irrelevant here, but the two governments, Vatican and Italian, use newspapers to escalate a conflict between them.

Newspapers evidently distort any conflict over identities. It will be interesting to see whether the newspaper industry can survive, though. I read the sidebars of newspapers in search for less subjective, front-page distortions. But if newspapers get more expensive and lose readership, and if the primary way of learning about worldly occurences becomes reading blogs, then “gang” warfare might change very dramatically. It might become difficult to distinguish clear factions with members of each faction posting their own opinions. I doubt it will come to that, though. Romeo and Juliet persists through the centuries because it contains an intricate discourse about raw human emotions. People will not just suddenly let go of those because they can opine about the world on blogs. Tensions about tradition and love will persist, and I do not want to prophesize about whether they will be forces powerful enough to motivate…all those foul things.