Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock

I just saw Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock at the Tinker Street Cinema in Woodstock, NY. The concert, as the movie makes clear, was not in Woodstock but rather in White Lake, which is about 30 miles away. In real life Michael Lang, the then-young promoter of the Woodstock concert and often on horseback in the film, works out once in a while at the same gym I do, in the Emerson Inn and Spa. The film notes that its protagonist, Elliot Teichberg (aka Elliot Tiber), and Lang both grew up in Brooklyn not very far from my employer, Brooklyn College. I live about midway between Woodstock and where the concert actually was. During the summer of 1969 Jimi Hendrix lived about 4 miles away in Boiceville. He must have driven past my house, which was a small cabin then, when he drove to White Lake. I spent that summer as a janitor in a summer camp near Woodstock. I was only 15 years old and did not have the guts to ditch out and go to the concert. Even then I disliked crowds.

Taking Woodstock is a good movie. Ang Lee's direction, as usual, is crisp and sensitive. James Schamus's and Tiber's writing is excellent. All of the acting is very good. Demetri Martin as Elliot Teichberg is excellent as is Henry Goodman as Jake Teichberg. Imelda Staunton as Sonia Teichberg steals the show. She is great.

The film handles Teichberg's inner conflict about his homosexuality tastefully. But I thought that, like other recent movies about the Catskills such as Wendigo, it is unfair to the "locals". As the movie makes clear, there are at least two cultures in the Catskills. First, descendants of Dutch and Yankee settlers from the 18th and 19th centuries (for the most part the Catskills were settled almost as late as the American west because of a lengthy conflict and law suit about title to the Hardenburg patent, because the Livingstons' attempt to create a neo-feudal system by settling Scotch-Irish tenant farmers who were to sign three-generation leases failed, and because the Catskills are rocky, terrible farmland and have no natural resources except for their physical beauty, streams, wood and fish). Second, more recent immigrants from New York City and around the country.

An excellent book on Woodstock is the late Alf Evers' Woodstock: History of an American Town and his equally excellent Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock. The Catskills still has a remnant of true American individualism and there has always been an anti-establishment streak around here ever since the farmers used to dress as Indians and tar and feather the Livingstons' rent collectors. Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and Hervey White selected Woodstock for an artists' colony in 1902 because of the area's physical beauty. Within a few years there was a division between the musicians, who moved to Maverick Road and the artists who remained at the original artists' colony on Byrdcliffe that is still there, where some of the earliest artists' lofts still exist. Of course, Woodstock is not White Lake, and the various cultures in Woodstock, the old artist culture which is still around, the weekenders, and descendants of the original townspeople have gotten along reasonably well, despite occasional resentments, and on occasion have married. The film depicts the people of White Lake as quick to exhibit prejudice, and although bigotry exists everywhere, I do not think that is a fair depiction of the Catskills culture, which I have loved for most of my life.

Keep Big Brother Out of Our Schools

The Kingston Freeman editorialized in favor of President Obama's speech to school students. I wrote the following response:

Dear Editor:

Your editorial about Obama's speech is symptomatic of a division in American politics that is intensifying. Your Tuesday edition is riddled with it. The United States was built on the concept that private initiative and freedom maximize social welfare and that Americans ought to be free from government violence. Of course, the idea that government can be "violent" when it compels payment of taxes is alien to those on one side of the divide. But because of laissez-faire, the absence of government, the nation became the richest in the world, drawing huddled masses even as real wages grew two percent per year until the 1970s, when the effects of government expansion in the 1960s and expansion of Federal Reserve Bank power in 1971 began to take hold.

In the late 19th century, in part because Americans were awed by the German university and sent thousands of bright graduate students there, America's elite began to reject laissez-faire and began to advocate centralization and government violence, i.e., forcible extraction of taxes, redistribution of wealth (supposedly in the name of equality but inevitably toward the wealthy), and a wide range of failed government boondoggles that benefit the upper middle class at the expense of blue collar workers and small business. For the last century, newspapers and universities thus have advocated state expansion at the expense of freedom, individual initiative and entrepreneurship.

Thus, Pierre Angiel experiences bad advice from a government office about a badly designed government benefit plan, and, defying logic, his conclusion is to advocate total government control over all benefits. Patti Gibbons writes about corrupt and incompetent government in Kingston. And you editorialize that people who disagree with the President's statist ideology are wrong to shield their children from him.

President Obama was associated with hard leftists like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger prior to his election. Other than this and his confused health care proposal, his policies largely mirror those of George W. Bush. In fact, his promise of change with respect to the Iraqi War and economic policy are belied by his reappointment of President Bush's Secretary of Defense and Federal Reserve chairman. The assumptions that have driven both Bush's and Obama's presidencies are that subsidies to big business via monetary policy, corrupt bailouts. expansion of failed government programs at the expense of America's working population, and in general, big business socialism, are essential. Along with many Americans, I submit that the specter of big business socialism that Bush and Obama represent is a threat to this nation. President Eisenhower, who was not addressing school children, made a similar point about the military industrial complex.

Americans are right to shield their children from President Obama's version of Bush socialism. America is a nation based on freedom, not devotion to authority. We ought not permit Big Brother access to the classroom.

Sincerely,


Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.
Town of Olive, West Shokan
845-657-8460

Robert Lenzner and Judge Richard Posner Argue for International Socialism

I responded to a Forbes article by Robert Lenzner in which Lenzner quotes Judge Posner in arguing that subsidies to large, incompetently run Wall Street firms that produce no value are essential because otherwise benefits to Posner's employers, the University of Chicago and the federal court system, will slow to a trickle.

Posner has made a career arguing that the judicial system optimizes social welfare. In Posner's view, the United States is wealthy because of judges and academics, not because of the innovation of the free market. In his view, all that is needed to become wealthy is further government control and centralization.

The difference between Posner and Stalin is this: whereas Posner, like Trotsky, argues for international socialism, Stalin argued for socialism in one country.

My response to Lenser follows:

Judge Posner's theory that he is smarter than the dynamic of markets is in a long tradition of advocacy of centralized economic planning that goes back to the days of the Emperor Diocletian. Posner's ideas worked so well in the Soviet Union and Cuba that he aims to transplant them here. The difference is that in the Soviet Union the spoils of socialism went to armed thugs, whereas in the USA Posner aims to distribute them to donors to the University of Chicago and his clients in the federal court system.

Posner's ideas do not work. The court system has done nothing to make the economy more rational. Rather, it has redistributed wealth to the wealthy. Now, Posner aims to extend his failed utilitarian strategy by subsidizing incompetently run Wall Street firms which have been cancer in the lungs of the American economy for a century.

The idea that Bear Stearns needed help from me is like saying that my grandfather's pneumonia ought to have been encouraged by his physician.

If Wall Street created value it would not need subsidies. If it created value, we would not need to transfer massive amounts of wealth to it annually via the Federal Reserve Bank's monetary expansion. Wall Street steals from the productive sector of the economy and donates it to the unproductive, say universities and the court system.

In the 19th century the American economy was relatively decentralized, there was no Fed, the courts had less power, and the real hourly wage increased two percent per year. In the 20th century we have increasing power arrogated to a self-serving federal court system and Wall Street, and real wages are increasing 2% per 25 years.

Posner, Lensner and the rest of the "oh dear Wall Street needs a trillion dollars of your money or the sky will fall" corrupt nexus of mass media, courts and academia should move to Cuba, that benign island nation off the shore of Florida where Posner's ideas flourish.

Town of Olive Conservative Caucus Nominates Vince Barringer

I attended the Town of Olive Conservative Caucus last night in the Town of Olive Justice Court on Bostock Road. The most remarkable thing about that building is that the men's rooms have two wooden doors. You open the rickety wooden door to the men's room and there's a small ante-room and then you open a second rickety wooden door.

The Town of Olive has a split personality. The Conservative Party has about 85 members and gets about 10 percent of the popular vote in the town. But the town is no longer Republican as it once was. In the late 1980s, I am told, the Republican majority became Democratic as immigrants from New York City, owners of weekend houses, rock stars (no kidding) and other Democrats moved to Olive. Thus, there is a split personality, with a large chunk of the population descendants or long time residents and a large chunk consumers of granola and yogurt. As in New York City, many of the Republicans are left of the Democrats, but the Conservatives can play a decisive role. The candidates need to seem conservative on fiscal issues but liberal on environmental and lifestyle issues. There is a healthy competition for the Conservative Party nod because of the area's split personality.

All of the town's incumbents are Democrats. The Democrats enjoy roughly a ten percent lead in enrollment. The Democratic town supervisor, Berndt Leifeld, has been supervisor since 1988, according to the Olive Press. Timothy Cox, an attorney with the Catskill Watershed Commission and a former Republican, is running for town justice. Bruce Lamonda (who I know from the Emerson Inn and Spa's workout room) and Linda Burkhardt are running for town council and Jim Fugel, who turned down a cross-nomination from the Republicans, is running for highway supervisor. Running unopposed is Sylvia Rozzelle for town clerk. The Democratic candidates are all worthy. However, Republican challenger Vince Barringer makes an excellent point: Leifeld has been serving for over 20 years and is the highest paid town supervisor in Ulster County and among the highest paid in the State. This is excessive given that the Town of Olive is a small town, with less than 4,000 residents.

The Conservatives gave the nod to most of the Republicans, and this was a positive step as their support was not given. Barringer got the Conservative Party nod for town supervisor. Two charming and capable Republicans, both excellent candidates, Don van Buren and Craig Grazier, got the nod for town board. But the compassionate and insightful Earla van Kleeck was nudged out by Tim Cox. Van Kleeck is a good candidate and has an excellent shot at town justice. The Republican candidate for highway supervisor, Chet Scofield, was unable to attend the caucus and was nudged out by Democratic incumbent Fugel.

The candidates spoke to about 20 Conservatives and roughly an equal number of observers, of whom I was one. One of the interesting phenomena of a small town is that the politics are a little less subtle than in Albany or New York City. Two of the Democratic candidates' children are enrolled Conservatives and one of these began to aggressively disrupt and argue when the Republican candidate for town supervisor, Vince Barringer, was speaking. Nevertheless, I thought the Conservative caucus meeting was very well run and the outcome overall is positive for the Republican cause.