We Need Music and Love
A commentary on Trump, Shylock and D.E.I.
“If music be the food of love, play on.”
Those are famous words from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and most of us would agree with the sentiment.
Play on, indeed, for music is the art form to which all others aspire. And art at its most sublime level can transport us into the realm of the imagination, the realm of love.
But what if someone has neither music nor love in his or her soul?
What if someone’s body or spirit is clogged with noise and hatred?
What if someone drips with malice and poison almost every time he opens his mouth?
What if this someone, a killjoy, wants to “obliterate” the music and the love in the rest of us?
Our solipsist in chief is doing these very things.
He knows that he lies. That is second nature to him.
He knows that he steals and cheats.
These traits are second nature to him, too.
But does he understand that he has no poetry in him, as Harvey Keitel said of the man years ago, when Keitel was being interviewed by the Daily Beast, if memory serves?
I would add that that there is no music in the nation’s solipsist in chief.
Consider what William Shakespeare said of such a man in another play: “The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; the motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.”
Yes, by now, you might have guessed that those words come from The Merchant of Venice. This is the very play, whose villain, Shylock, remains unknown to Trump.
Shylock, we will recall, is the very word that Trump used to describe unethical money lenders last Thursday when he spoke in Iowa.
According to an L.A. Times’ story in the July 5 print edition of the paper, the nation’s chief executive said in Iowa after his small and hideous budget bill was passed, “No death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing some from, in some cases, a fine banker and in some cases shylocks and bad people.”
Trump claims that he is a friend of the Jews, but we will recall, as I have noted before, that he praised the “many fine people” on both sides at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., where anti-Semites carrying torches yelled, “Jews will not replace us.”
When questioned about his recent usage of the word, “shylocks,” Trump said that he had “never heard it that way. To me, a shylock is somebody that’s a moneylender at high rates. You view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.”
Most of us view it differently from Trump because Shylock, the character in The Merchant of Venice, is a villain, who also happens to be Jewish.
It is a horrible truth that Jews have been subjected to some of the most hideous lies over the centuries that we are unethical bankers who swindle others out of money.
This hideous lie does not derive from Shakespeare’s play or his depiction of Shylock.
By no means was Shakespeare anti-Semitic. He depicted other Jewish characters in his play as decent people.
But Shylock, who would extort a pound of flesh from a character to whom he has loaned money, is a greedy and evil man.
Not everyone, of course, realizes the origin of the word, Shylock.
Years ago, when then-vice president Joe Biden used the term in discussing unscrupulous moneylenders who were preying upon servicemen, I was critical of Biden.
In criticizing the then-vice president, I went too far.
I should have gone easier on Joe Biden, a very good man, who later apologized for his “poor choice” of words.
I too am sorry that I was harsh at the time in my critique of Biden, and I hope that he will accept my apology.
Unlike Trump, Joe Biden does indeed care for people, Jews and everyone else. A lover of Yeats, he overflows with love and music in his heart, in his soul.
The hateful and tone-deaf Trump, by contrast, would like us all to live in hell, where he resides, a dark pit, where there is no music, only noise.
It goes without saying that Trump views apologies as signs of weakness.
Not one of us is perfect.
And we all should apologize and ask for forgiveness.
For some reason, Trump must think that apologizing would detract from his masculinity.
Of course, he does not want to admit that he is an obscenely ignorant man.
And he wants the rest of us to be ignorant, too.
Donald Trump has been gutting the Department of Education. He has frozen research grants at Harvard, our country’s oldest and one of its most prestigious universities, as well as at other colleges and universities in this country. And because of Trump’s attacks on diversity initiatives, the president of the University of Virginia, one of the jewels of our public education system, felt pressured to resign.
Whether Trump is attacking public or private universities, he is trying to “obliterate” our educational institutions, as well as other institutions in this country.
Why?
Why would the man who proclaimed, without irony, that he has “the best words” try to damage the ability of people in this country to better themselves, to gain an education, to improve their minds?
Why?
Years ago, in late 1987, or early 1988, I recall standing in line at the United States Post Office on 23rd Street in Manhattan and talking to a gentleman, who was stylishly dressed in a fedora and suit and whom I could tell was a sage from sparks of illumination that emanated from him.
He had what Shakespeare would call a “mellifluous voice,” and he seemed like a magical character, a shaman, who appeared out of nowhere.
I had moved to the city a few months earlier, and I was taking a class at the New School for Social Research, a night class that was titled “Black Political Leadership in New York.”
It was taught by David Dinkins, then the Manhattan Borough President, who would later become the first African-American Mayor of New York.
Many years later, in 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd murder and protests, I would write about my years in the city in the late 1980s in a piece for Thrive Global, “Learning about Racial Injustice as a Young Man in the 1980s.”
In that piece, I talked about David Dinkins’ class and about my friendship with colleagues at the New York City Parks Department, a number of whom were African-American.
But in that 2020 piece, I did not write about this magical sage, whom I met at the U.S. Post Office in late 1987 or early 1988.
While I stood in line at the post office and spoke to the sage, he said to me, “Who do you think was the greatest African-American?”
I figured that it was Rev. Martin Luther King.
And that is what I guessed.
This sage, who was African-American, looked at me and said, “Frederick Douglass.”
I then realized that he was right.
“Yes, yes,” I said, as I smiled.
Frederick Douglass, the slave, who had been denied the right to an education, who had stolen books when he was a young man and taught himself how to read in the dark, on his own, who became one of the world’s greatest orators and most literate people, is not only the greatest African-American.
He might be the greatest American.
Yes, Frederick Douglass, who could command a stage and who inspired Abraham Lincoln, had more than a little music and love in his spirit, in his soul, not unlike the African-American man, with whom I spoke at the U.S. Post Office in late 1987 or early 1988.
This gentleman, with his jaunty fedora and mellifluous voice, seemed to tap-dance, as we left the post office that day.
Yes, he had more than a little poetry and love in him.
He was one of the people who inspired me when I was writing Strikeout at Hell Gate, a novel about baseball that is set in racially torn New York. I partly modeled one of the characters in the novel, an African-American shaman-like figure, after this man, whom I met at the post office.
This gentleman at the post office, like the character in my novel, was filled with wisdom and mysticism, neither of which can be accrued without integrity and without years, indeed decades, of devotion to learning.
Unlike Trump, who has tried to erase or “obliterate” the names of Jackie Robinson and other civil rights icons from Pentagon websites, the sage, whom I met, had a love for learning, for music, for truth and for justice.
I wish the same were true of others, some of whom hold positions of power in this country and who, in passing the small, hideous budget bill and supporting executive orders, are trying to wipe out the diversity initiatives that could otherwise enable future Frederick Douglasses to thrive and soar with their voices of eloquence.