Playing Out of Tune

It’s the kind of random serendipity reminiscent of the great composers. Two stories currently announce themselves side by side on the website of the New Times. (It is not for nothing that www.nytimes.com is our homepage, our touchstone, therefore consulted more times a day that we would like to admit).

Obama Arrives in Moscow to Seek Arms Control Deal sits next to (this just in) a lengthy obit of Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary that (quote) “helped lead the US into the maelestrom of Vietnam and spent the rest of his life wrestling during the war’s moral consequences.”

McNamara was a brilliant technocrat recruited from the Ford Motor Company by JFK during the final tremulous shivers of the cold war. Nuclear power on their minds, and the idea of the USA losing a conflict unthinkable. He was in the room during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He served through the assassination to the Johnson administration, during which the war became his personal nightmare. Vietnam was called “McNamara’s War.” He did not object. “I am pleased to be identified with it,” he said, “and do whatever I can to win it.”

Later he confessed in a memoir that he had been “terribly, terribly wrong.” And in Errol Morris’s brilliant 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” the former secretary talked about his experience doing statistical analysis during WWII:

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals…What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

And finally, “Nuclear weapons serve no military purposes whatsoever,” he wrote. “They are totally useless — except only to deter one’s opponent from using them.”

But by the end of his life, McNamara’s lament was considered “too late”, his tears for the dead “stale,” his confessions hollow, out of key.

Today, over in column one, Obama wants to disarm the major powers, and took a plane to Moscow to get started. There are some who find him wrong, wrong. He’ll never do it. What a risk to take! It might right alone in the rooms of state, in the silence of a man’s conscious, but in practice! How?

How does one know when one is singing in the wrong key? Can one hear when the most dissonant tone is in fact deep perfection?

Now, about hte photo. We conclude with this item posted on Facebook for American Independence Day (July 4th) by Sue Schardt, Executive Director of the Association of Independents in Radio. (Thanks, Sue) The photo is the composer Igor Stravinky, the composer of The Rite of Spring that caused a stir at its premiere. Yes, it's a mugshot:

Igor Stravinsky was reportedly arrested in Boston in 1940 for including a major 7th chord his arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner. Massachusetts law prohibited "tampering with national property," which apparently included the national anthem.