The strange, short career of Judeo-Christianity

Gene Zubovich  AEON Magazine

University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the history of US liberalism and religion in the 20th century.

Pesident Barack Obama insists that the United States defines itself by civic principles rather than by religious affiliation. In an otherwise unremarkable press conference in Turkey in 2009, he said: ‘[A]lthough… we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.’ A torrent of conservative criticism followed, alleging that Obama had abandoned the country’s founding Judeo-Christian values. In recent months, most of the Republican candidates for their party’s nomination have called on the US to return to ‘the Judeo-Christian values that built this great nation’, as Senator Ted Cruz put it. Defenders of Judeo-Christianity believe that they are invoking timeless principles. In fact, Judeo-Christianity is a very recent invention.

The term ‘Judeo-Christian’ supposedly recognises the deep and ancient common heritage of Protestants, Catholics and Jews. The idea would have sent shivers down the spine of Puritans, who saw a diabolical Catholic ‘Papism’ lurking around every corner. Such a shared heritage would have been news to the authors of Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution, which required office-holders to ‘acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration’, and which effectively banned Jews from public office.

The phrase ‘Judeo-Christian’ first became popular in the late 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt began trying to mobilise Americans against Nazism. So Judeo-Christianity was actually popularised to oppose the anti-Semitism of another predominantly Christian nation. FDR’s repeated recourse to religion in public addresses set him apart from his predecessors, who preferred civic principles. So too did Roosevelt’s willingness to move beyond his own Protestantism and embrace Jews and Catholics. ‘We who have faith cannot afford to fall out among ourselves,’ he told radio listeners in 1936: ‘Religion in wide areas of the earth is being confronted with irreligion…. [Y]ou and I must reach across the lines between our creeds, clasp hands, and make common cause.’

In the 1930s, Roosevelt worked in concert with the National Council of Christians and Jews, for example, an organisation that fought popular anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. Roosevelt and other liberal Protestants took the lead in promoting Judeo-Christianity. In the works of liberal Protestant theologians, the term Judeo-Christianity began to appear here and there without a thorough defence or justification. During the Second World War, a spirit of national unity finally made the notion of Judeo-Christianity common, as Jews and Catholics were publically welcomed as junior partners in the country’s national life.

Only following the Second World War did someone stop to try to elaborate what ‘Judeo-Christian’ might actually mean. In his book Protestant – Catholic – Jew (1955), the sociologist Will Herberg extolled the virtues of Judeo-Christianity. He argued that Judeo-Christianity stemmed from ‘the collapse of all secular securities in the historical crisis of our time [and] the quest for a recovery of authenticity’. Judeo-Christianity ‘is a religiously oriented civic cooperation of Protestants, Catholics and Jews to bring about better mutual understanding and to promote enterprises and causes of common concern, despite all differences of “faith”. [Judeo-Christianity] is thus the highest expression of religious coexistence and cooperation within the American understanding of religion.’ As Herberg saw it, Judeo-Christianity arose because secularism had failed and three vibrant faiths stepped in to fill that vacuum.

Evangelicals, meanwhile, resisted the encroaching pluralism. In 1947, and again in 1954, working with political allies, the National Association of Evangelicals introduced the Christian amendment into Congress: ‘This nation devoutly recognises the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of all nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.’ Out of step with the burgeoning postwar pluralism, the Christian amendment was not passed.

By the 1960s, when the inclusion of Catholics and Jews seemed to be on safe footing, the liberal Protestant pioneers of the term moved on to consider how a broader range of religious groups could be included in the US nation. The Harvard scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith urged ‘all Christians to love and respect the faith of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and the others – if necessary without waiting for the theologians’. Some theologians in the 1960s began going beyond religious pluralism and encouraged Protestants to embrace secularism. In the process, they left Judeo-Christianity behind.

But others, who emphasised Judeo-Christianity’s anti-secularism, rededicated themselves to the term. Herberg’s insistence in Protestant – Catholic – Jew that secular thought was bankrupt led him to align himself with the burgeoning conservative movement. He joined the conservative journal National Review in 1961 as its religion editor.

At the moment when liberal Protestants and others left Judeo-Christianity behind, fearing the tri-faith model was too narrow to capture the world’s diversity, evangelical Protestants seized on the idea of Judeo-Christianity. As they came to slowly accept the legitimacy of Jewish and Catholic faith, Judeo-Christianity became a way to withhold legitimacy from others. Abandoning their earlier commitment to a ‘Christian Nation’, evangelicals now accepted Catholics and Jews as important allies in the fight against abortion, feminism and gay rights.

In its very brief history, the concept of Judeo-Christianity has taken on several meanings. Originally it denoted a cultural and theological pluralism, meant to unite Americans against Nazism. For this reason, it was widely celebrated by liberal advocates, many of whom ignored Judeo-Christianity’s anti-secular implications, and gave little thought to their relation with Islam and other world religions. Once the implications became clear, many liberals abandoned the term.

Today, the religiously unaffiliated make up about a quarter of the US population and Muslim Americans are becoming an increasingly visible and vocal community. The notion that the US is a nation bound together by civic principles enjoys a more distinguished history than the recently coined idea of the Judeo-Christian nation. It is also obvious that the US is more than a nation of many faiths. No wonder, then, that today Judeo-Christianity has few defenders apart from members of the Christian right, who use it to undermine the legitimacy of Muslims and the rapidly growing body of religiously unaffiliated Americans. The short career of Judeo-Christianity has already lasted too long.

Earl Hamner Jr., Who Created ‘The Waltons,’ Dies at 92

By WILLIAM GRIMES NY TIMES

Earl Hamner Jr., who drew on warm memories of his Depression childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to create the enormously popular 1970s television series “The Waltons,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 92.

The cause was bladder cancer, his daughter, Caroline Hamner, said.

Mr. Hamner was a novelist and television writer with eight episodes of “The Twilight Zone” to his credit when, in 1971, he took an incident from his novel of a decade earlier, “Spencer’s Mountain,” and rewrote it as a television special.

“The Homecoming: A Christmas Story,” about a close-knit mountain family waiting for the arrival of their father on Christmas Eve in 1933, drew strong ratings, and CBS picked it up as a series, “The Waltons,” with Mr. Hamner credited as creator and executive producer.

Because it was scheduled in the same time slot as “The Flip Wilson Show” on NBC, many CBS executives predicted a quick death, but viewers loved the clan — John-Boy, played by Richard Thomas, was based on Mr. Hamner — and its simple values of hard work and family unity. Mr. Hamner wrote only a few episodes of the series but was closely involved in creative decisions and provided the voice-over narration that began and ended each show.

“The Waltons,” first broadcast in September 1972, won six Emmy Awards for its first season. It ran for nine years and more than 200 episodes, carrying the family’s story forward from 1933 to 1946. It lived on for decades thereafter in several specials that reassembled most of the original cast, including “A Walton Wedding” (1995) and “A Walton Easter” (1997).

Earl Henry Hamner Jr. was born on July 10, 1923, in Schuyler, Va., the oldest of eight children. The family home had no telephone and only two books: a Bible and a beekeeping manual.

Earl Sr. worked for a company that mined and milled soapstone. When it failed during the Depression, he took a job at a DuPont factory 40 miles away. Every weekend, he walked six miles from the nearest bus station, in Hickory Creek, to see his family, a trek that inspired the Christmas Eve episode in “Spencer’s Mountain.”

Mr. Hamner’s mother, the former Doris Giannini, was descended from Italian immigrants who arrived in the area in the 19th century.

When Earl Jr. was 6, The Richmond Times-Dispatch published his poem “My Dog.” This, he later said, set him on the path to becoming a writer.

After the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the Army in his sophomore year at the University of Richmond, which he had been attending on a scholarship. Trained to defuse land mines, he was sent to France after the Normandy invasion. There, a superior officer found out that he could type and assigned him to the Quartermaster Corps.

While stationed in Paris, Mr. Hamner, inspired by his discovery of Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner and other American novelists, began writing fiction, including the first pages of what would become “Spencer’s Mountain,” about a man who dreams of building his wife a house on family land. The novel was published in 1961 with an admiring blurb from Harper Lee. A film version, with Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara, was later released.

Mr. Hamner earned a degree in broadcast communications from the University of Cincinnati in 1948 and began working at the Cincinnati radio station WLW, a job he soon quit to work on his first published novel, “Fifty Roads to Town,” about a revival preacher whose arrival in a small Appalachian town creates havoc. It was published in 1953, by which time Mr. Hamner had moved to New York and found work writing radio and television scripts for NBC.

In 1954, he married Jane Martin, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, who survives him. In addition to his daughter, he is also survived by a son, Scott; a brother, Paul; and two sisters, Audrey Hamner and Nancy Jameson.

Mr. Hamner moved to California in 1962 and got his first break when “The Twilight Zone” accepted two of his story ideas. His eight scripts for the series included “The Hunt,” about a man who is dead but does not realize it until his hunting dog prevents him from wandering into hell, and “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” in which the main characters turn out to be pets on an alien planet.

“My mother-in-law found them downright weird,” Mr. Hamner said of his “Twilight Zone” scripts in a 2008 commencement address at the University of Cincinnati. “After she had watched four or five of my stories, she wrote my wife a note saying, ‘I do hope that Earl is not smoking any of that awful green stuff.’”

Mr. Hamner turned his hand to a variety of projects. Before hitting it big with “The Waltons,” he wrote episodes for “Wagon Train,” “Gentle Ben” and “Nanny and the Professor” as well as the 1968 television version of “Heidi” and the 1963 movie “Palm Springs Weekend,” with Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens.

While working on “The Waltons,” he wrote scripts for the animated film “Charlotte’s Web” (1973), adapted from the children’s book by E. B. White, and for “Where the Lilies Bloom” (1974), a film based on Vera and Bill Cleaver’s young-adult novel about a family of orphans in Appalachia.

“I feel like, as a professional writer, I can write anything,” Mr. Hamner told the magazine Virginia Living in 2013. “I once said, ‘In my career, I have written everything but matchbook covers.’”

After “The Waltons” was canceled, he developed the series “Falcon Crest,” a soap opera set in California wine country that ran from 1981 to 1990. He left after the fifth season and formed a television production company with Don Sipes, a suspense writer with whom he wrote the novel “Murder in Tinseltown.”

“What has inspired my work has always been the family and neighbors I grew up with back in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia during the Great Depression of the 1930s,” Mr. Hamner said in his commencement address. “They were decent, God-fearing, patriotic people. Like most Appalachian folk, they were frugal, proud and self-reliant.

“To write about such people, it was inevitable that such stories deal with love and honor, pity and pride, compassion and sacrifice. And so much of my writing became a celebration of those traditional American values.”

Remarks by President Obama to the People of Cuba

Gran Teatro de la Habana

Havana, Cuba

10:10 A.M. CST

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Thank you.  Muchas gracias.  Thank you so much.  Thank you very much.

President Castro, the people of Cuba, thank you so much for the warm welcome that I have received, that my family have received, and that our delegation has received.  It is an extraordinary honor to be here today. 

Before I begin, please indulge me.  I want to comment on the terrorist attacks that have taken place in Brussels.  The thoughts and the prayers of the American people are with the people of Belgium.  We stand in solidarity with them in condemning these outrageous attacks against innocent people.  We will do whatever is necessary to support our friend and ally, Belgium, in bringing to justice those who are responsible.  And this is yet another reminder that the world must unite, we must be together, regardless of nationality, or race, or faith, in fighting against the scourge of terrorism.  We can -- and will -- defeat those who threaten the safety and security of people all around the world.

To the government and the people of Cuba, I want to thank you for the kindness that you’ve shown to me and Michelle, Malia, Sasha, my mother-in-law, Marian. 

“Cultivo una rosa blanca.”  (Applause.)  In his most famous poem, Jose Marti made this offering of friendship and peace to both his friend and his enemy.  Today, as the President of the United States of America, I offer the Cuban people el saludo de paz.  (Applause.) 

Havana is only 90 miles from Florida, but to get here we had to travel a great distance -- over barriers of history and ideology; barriers of pain and separation.  The blue waters beneath Air Force One once carried American battleships to this island -- to liberate, but also to exert control over Cuba.  Those waters also carried generations of Cuban revolutionaries to the United States, where they built support for their cause.  And that short distance has been crossed by hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles -- on planes and makeshift rafts -- who came to America in pursuit of freedom and opportunity, sometimes leaving behind everything they owned and every person that they loved.

Like so many people in both of our countries, my lifetime has spanned a time of isolation between us.  The Cuban Revolution took place the same year that my father came to the United States from Kenya.  The Bay of Pigs took place the year that I was born. The next year, the entire world held its breath, watching our two countries, as humanity came as close as we ever have to the horror of nuclear war.  As the decades rolled by, our governments settled into a seemingly endless confrontation, fighting battles through proxies.  In a world that remade itself time and again, one constant was the conflict between the United States and Cuba.

I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.  (Applause.)  I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people.  (Applause.)  

I want to be clear:  The differences between our governments over these many years are real and they are important.  I’m sure President Castro would say the same thing -- I know, because I’ve heard him address those differences at length.  But before I discuss those issues, we also need to recognize how much we share.  Because in many ways, the United States and Cuba are like two brothers who’ve been estranged for many years, even as we share the same blood.

We both live in a new world, colonized by Europeans.  Cuba, like the United States, was built in part by slaves brought here from Africa.  Like the United States, the Cuban people can trace their heritage to both slaves and slave-owners.  We’ve welcomed both immigrants who came a great distance to start new lives in the Americas.

Over the years, our cultures have blended together.       Dr. Carlos Finlay’s work in Cuba paved the way for generations of doctors, including Walter Reed, who drew on Dr. Finlay’s work to help combat Yellow Fever.  Just as Marti wrote some of his most famous words in New York, Ernest Hemingway made a home in Cuba, and found inspiration in the waters of these shores.  We share a national past-time -- La Pelota -- and later today our players will compete on the same Havana field that Jackie Robinson played on before he made his Major League debut.  (Applause.)  And it's said that our greatest boxer, Muhammad Ali, once paid tribute to a Cuban that he could never fight -- saying that he would only be able to reach a draw with the great Cuban, Teofilo Stevenson.  (Applause.)  

So even as our governments became adversaries, our people continued to share these common passions, particularly as so many Cubans came to America.  In Miami or Havana, you can find places to dance the Cha-Cha-Cha or the Salsa, and eat ropa vieja.  People in both of our countries have sung along with Celia Cruz or Gloria Estefan, and now listen to reggaeton or Pitbull.  (Laughter.)  Millions of our people share a common religion -- a faith that I paid tribute to at the Shrine of our Lady of Charity in Miami, a peace that Cubans find in La Cachita.

For all of our differences, the Cuban and American people share common values in their own lives.  A sense of patriotism and a sense of pride -- a lot of pride.  A profound love of family.  A passion for our children, a commitment to their education.  And that's why I believe our grandchildren will look back on this period of isolation as an aberration, as just one chapter in a longer story of family and of friendship.

But we cannot, and should not, ignore the very real differences that we have -- about how we organize our governments, our economies, and our societies.  Cuba has a one-party system; the United States is a multi-party democracy.  Cuba has a socialist economic model; the United States is an open market.  Cuba has emphasized the role and rights of the state; the United States is founded upon the rights of the individual.

Despite these differences, on December 17th 2014, President Castro and I announced that the United States and Cuba would begin a process to normalize relations between our countries.  (Applause.)  Since then, we have established diplomatic relations and opened embassies.  We've begun initiatives to cooperate on health and agriculture, education and law enforcement.  We've reached agreements to restore direct flights and mail service.  We've expanded commercial ties, and increased the capacity of Americans to travel and do business in Cuba.

And these changes have been welcomed, even though there are still opponents to these policies.  But still, many people on both sides of this debate have asked:  Why now?  Why now?

There is one simple answer:  What the United States was doing was not working.  We have to have the courage to acknowledge that truth.  A policy of isolation designed for the Cold War made little sense in the 21st century.  The embargo was only hurting the Cuban people instead of helping them.  And I've always believed in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now” -- we should not fear change, we should embrace it.  (Applause.)  

That leads me to a bigger and more important reason for these changes:  Creo en el pueblo Cubano.  I believe in the Cuban people.  (Applause.)  This is not just a policy of normalizing relations with the Cuban government.  The United States of America is normalizing relations with the Cuban people.  (Applause.) 

And today, I want to share with you my vision of what our future can be.  I want the Cuban people -- especially the young people -- to understand why I believe that you should look to the future with hope; not the false promise which insists that things are better than they really are, or the blind optimism that says all your problems can go away tomorrow.  Hope that is rooted in the future that you can choose and that you can shape, and that you can build for your country.  

I'm hopeful because I believe that the Cuban people are as innovative as any people in the world.

In a global economy, powered by ideas and information, a country’s greatest asset is its people.  In the United States, we have a clear monument to what the Cuban people can build: it’s called Miami.  Here in Havana, we see that same talent in cuentapropistas, cooperatives and old cars that still run.  El Cubano inventa del aire.  (Applause.)  

Cuba has an extraordinary resource -- a system of education which values every boy and every girl.  (Applause.)  And in recent years, the Cuban government has begun to open up to the world, and to open up more space for that talent to thrive.  In just a few years, we've seen how cuentapropistas can succeed while sustaining a distinctly Cuban spirit.  Being self-employed is not about becoming more like America, it’s about being yourself.

Look at Sandra Lidice Aldama, who chose to start a small business.  Cubans, she said, can “innovate and adapt without losing our identity…our secret is in not copying or imitating but simply being ourselves.”

Look at Papito Valladeres, a barber, whose success allowed him to improve conditions in his neighborhood.  “I realize I’m not going to solve all of the world’s problems,” he said.  “But if I can solve problems in the little piece of the world where I live, it can ripple across Havana.”

That’s where hope begins -- with the ability to earn your own living, and to build something you can be proud of.  That’s why our policies focus on supporting Cubans, instead of hurting them.  That’s why we got rid of limits on remittances -- so ordinary Cubans have more resources.  That’s why we’re encouraging travel -- which will build bridges between our people, and bring more revenue to those Cuban small businesses. That’s why we’ve opened up space for commerce and exchanges -- so that Americans and Cubans can work together to find cures for diseases, and create jobs, and open the door to more opportunity for the Cuban people. 

As President of the United States, I’ve called on our Congress to lift the embargo.  (Applause.)  It is an outdated burden on the Cuban people.  It's a burden on the Americans who want to work and do business or invest here in Cuba.  It's time to lift the embargo.  But even if we lifted the embargo tomorrow, Cubans would not realize their potential without continued change here in Cuba.  (Applause.)  It should be easier to open a business here in Cuba.  A worker should be able to get a job directly with companies who invest here in Cuba.  Two currencies shouldn’t separate the type of salaries that Cubans can earn.  The Internet should be available across the island, so that Cubans can connect to the wider world -- (applause) -- and to one of the greatest engines of growth in human history.

There’s no limitation from the United States on the ability of Cuba to take these steps.  It’s up to you.  And I can tell you as a friend that sustainable prosperity in the 21st century depends upon education, health care, and environmental protection.  But it also depends on the free and open exchange of ideas.  If you can’t access information online, if you cannot be exposed to different points of view, you will not reach your full potential.  And over time, the youth will lose hope.

I know these issues are sensitive, especially coming from an American President.  Before 1959, some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption.  And since 1959, we’ve been shadow-boxers in this battle of geopolitics and personalities.  I know the history, but I refuse to be trapped by it.  (Applause.)  

I’ve made it clear that the United States has neither the capacity, nor the intention to impose change on Cuba.  What changes come will depend upon the Cuban people.  We will not impose our political or economic system on you.  We recognize that every country, every people, must chart its own course and shape its own model.  But having removed the shadow of history from our relationship, I must speak honestly about the things that I believe -- the things that we, as Americans, believe.  As Marti said, “Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.”

So let me tell you what I believe.  I can't force you to agree, but you should know what I think.  I believe that every person should be equal under the law. (Applause.)  Every child deserves the dignity that comes with education, and health care and food on the table and a roof over their heads.  (Applause.)  I believe citizens should be free to speak their mind without fear -- (applause) -- to organize, and to criticize their government, and to protest peacefully, and that the rule of law should not include arbitrary detentions of people who exercise those rights.  (Applause.)  I believe that every person should have the freedom to practice their faith peacefully and publicly. (Applause.)  And, yes, I believe voters should be able to choose their governments in free and democratic elections.  (Applause.)  

Not everybody agrees with me on this.  Not everybody agrees with the American people on this.  But I believe those human rights are universal.  (Applause.)  I believe they are the rights of the American people, the Cuban people, and people around the world.

Now, there’s no secret that our governments disagree on many of these issues.  I’ve had frank conversations with President Castro.  For many years, he has pointed out the flaws in the American system -- economic inequality; the death penalty; racial discrimination; wars abroad.  That’s just a sample.  He has a much longer list.  (Laughter.)  But here’s what the Cuban people need to understand:  I welcome this open debate and dialogue. It’s good.  It’s healthy.  I’m not afraid of it.

We do have too much money in American politics.  But, in America, it's still possible for somebody like me -- a child who was raised by a single mom, a child of mixed race who did not have a lot of money -- to pursue and achieve the highest office in the land.  That's what’s possible in America.  (Applause.)  

We do have challenges with racial bias -- in our communities, in our criminal justice system, in our society -- the legacy of slavery and segregation.  But the fact that we have open debates within America’s own democracy is what allows us to get better.  In 1959, the year that my father moved to America, it was illegal for him to marry my mother, who was white, in many American states.  When I first started school, we were still struggling to desegregate schools across the American South.  But people organized; they protested; they debated these issues; they challenged government officials.  And because of those protests, and because of those debates, and because of popular mobilization, I’m able to stand here today as an African-American and as President of the United States.  That was because of the freedoms that were afforded in the United States that we were able to bring about change.  

I’m not saying this is easy.  There’s still enormous problems in our society.  But democracy is the way that we solve them.  That's how we got health care for more of our people.  That's how we made enormous gains in women’s rights and gay rights.  That's how we address the inequality that concentrates so much wealth at the top of our society.  Because workers can organize and ordinary people have a voice, American democracy has given our people the opportunity to pursue their dreams and enjoy a high standard of living.  (Applause.)  

Now, there are still some tough fights.  It isn’t always pretty, the process of democracy.   It's often frustrating.  You can see that in the election going on back home.  But just stop and consider this fact about the American campaign that's taking place right now.  You had two Cuban Americans in the Republican Party, running against the legacy of a black man who is President, while arguing that they’re the best person to beat the Democratic nominee who will either be a woman or a Democratic Socialist.  (Laughter and applause.)  Who would have believed that back in 1959?  That's a measure of our progress as a democracy.  (Applause.)  

So here’s my message to the Cuban government and the Cuban people:  The ideals that are the starting point for every revolution -- America’s revolution, Cuba’s revolution, the liberation movements around the world -- those ideals find their truest expression, I believe, in democracy.  Not because American democracy is perfect, but precisely because we’re not.  And we -- like every country -- need the space that democracy gives us to change.  It gives individuals the capacity to be catalysts to think in new ways, and to reimagine how our society should be, and to make them better. 

There’s already an evolution taking place inside of Cuba, a generational change.  Many suggested that I come here and ask the people of Cuba to tear something down -- but I’m appealing to the young people of Cuba who will lift something up, build something new.  (Applause.)  El futuro  de Cuba tiene que estar en las manos del pueblo Cubano.  (Applause.)  

And to President Castro -- who I appreciate being here today -- I want you to know, I believe my visit here demonstrates you do not need to fear a threat from the United States.  And given your commitment to Cuba’s sovereignty and self-determination, I am also confident that you need not fear the different voices of the Cuban people -- and their capacity to speak, and assemble, and vote for their leaders.  In fact, I’m hopeful for the future because I trust that the Cuban people will make the right decisions.

And as you do, I’m also confident that Cuba can continue to play an important role in the hemisphere and around the globe -- and my hope is, is that you can do so as a partner with the United States.

We’ve played very different roles in the world.  But no one should deny the service that thousands of Cuban doctors have delivered for the poor and suffering.  (Applause.)  Last year, American health care workers -- and the U.S. military -- worked side-by-side with Cubans to save lives and stamp out Ebola in West Africa.  I believe that we should continue that kind of cooperation in other countries.

We’ve been on the different side of so many conflicts in the Americas.  But today, Americans and Cubans are sitting together at the negotiating table, and we are helping the Colombian people resolve a civil war that’s dragged on for decades.  (Applause.)  That kind of cooperation is good for everybody.  It gives everyone in this hemisphere hope.

We took different journeys to our support for the people of South Africa in ending apartheid.  But President Castro and I could both be there in Johannesburg to pay tribute to the legacy of the great Nelson Mandela.  (Applause.)  And in examining his life and his words, I'm sure we both realize we have more work to do to promote equality in our own countries -- to reduce discrimination based on race in our own countries.  And in Cuba, we want our engagement to help lift up the Cubans who are of African descent -- (applause) -- who’ve proven that there’s nothing they cannot achieve when given the chance.

We’ve been a part of different blocs of nations in the hemisphere, and we will continue to have profound differences about how to promote peace, security, opportunity, and human rights.  But as we normalize our relations, I believe it can help foster a greater sense of unity in the Americas -- todos somos Americanos.  (Applause.)    

From the beginning of my time in office, I’ve urged the people of the Americas to leave behind the ideological battles of the past.  We are in a new era.  I know that many of the issues that I’ve talked about lack the drama of the past.  And I know that part of Cuba’s identity is its pride in being a small island nation that could stand up for its rights, and shake the world. But I also know that Cuba will always stand out because of the talent, hard work, and pride of the Cuban people.  That's your strength.  (Applause.)  Cuba doesn’t have to be defined by being against the United States, any more than the United States should be defined by being against Cuba.  I'm hopeful for the future because of the reconciliation that’s taking place among the Cuban people.

I know that for some Cubans on the island, there may be a sense that those who left somehow supported the old order in Cuba.  I'm sure there’s a narrative that lingers here which suggests that Cuban exiles ignored the problems of pre-Revolutionary Cuba, and rejected the struggle to build a new future.  But I can tell you today that so many Cuban exiles carry a memory of painful -- and sometimes violent -- separation.  They love Cuba.  A part of them still considers this their true home. That’s why their passion is so strong.  That's why their heartache is so great.  And for the Cuban American community that I’ve come to know and respect, this is not just about politics. This is about family -- the memory of a home that was lost; the desire to rebuild a broken bond; the hope for a better future the hope for return and reconciliation.

For all of the politics, people are people, and Cubans are Cubans.  And I’ve come here -- I’ve traveled this distance -- on a bridge that was built by Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits.  I first got to know the talent and passion of the Cuban people in America.  And I know how they have suffered more than the pain of exile -- they also know what it’s like to be an outsider, and to struggle, and to work harder to make sure their children can reach higher in America.

So the reconciliation of the Cuban people -- the children and grandchildren of revolution, and the children and grandchildren of exile -- that is fundamental to Cuba’s future.  (Applause.)  

You see it in Gloria Gonzalez, who traveled here in 2013 for the first time after 61 years of separation, and was met by her sister, Llorca.  “You recognized me, but I didn’t recognize you,” Gloria said after she embraced her sibling.  Imagine that, after 61 years.

You see it in Melinda Lopez, who came to her family’s old home.  And as she was walking the streets, an elderly woman recognized her as her mother’s daughter, and began to cry.  She took her into her home and showed her a pile of photos that included Melinda’s baby picture, which her mother had sent 50 years ago.  Melinda later said, “So many of us are now getting so much back.”

You see it in Cristian Miguel Soler, a young man who became the first of his family to travel here after 50 years.  And meeting relatives for the first time, he said, “I realized that family is family no matter the distance between us.”

Sometimes the most important changes start in small places. The tides of history can leave people in conflict and exile and poverty.  It takes time for those circumstances to change.  But the recognition of a common humanity, the reconciliation of people bound by blood and a belief in one another -- that’s where progress begins.  Understanding, and listening, and forgiveness. And if the Cuban people face the future together, it will be more likely that the young people of today will be able to live with dignity and achieve their dreams right here in Cuba.   

The history of the United States and Cuba encompass revolution and conflict; struggle and sacrifice; retribution and, now, reconciliation.  It is time, now, for us to leave the past behind.  It is time for us to look forward to the future together -- un future de esperanza.  And it won’t be easy, and there will be setbacks.  It will take time.  But my time here in Cuba renews my hope and my confidence in what the Cuban people will do.  We can make this journey as friends, and as neighbors, and as family -- together.  Si se puede.  Muchas gracias.  

Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Sensible Supreme Court Choice

BY LINCOLN CAPLAN The New Yorker

President Barack Obama has chosen to nominate Merrick B. Garland, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, to the Supreme Court. To understand why Garland is a wise choice for the nomination, read the judicial opinion he published last July upholding a federal ban on federal contractors making federal campaign contributions. It begins with this prologue:

Seventy-five years ago, Congress barred individuals and firms from making federal campaign contributions while they negotiate or perform federal contracts.

The plaintiffs, who are individual government contractors, contend that this statute violates their First Amendment and equal protection rights. Because the concerns that spurred the original bar remain as important today as when the statute was enacted, and because the statute is closely drawn to avoid unnecessary abridgment of associational freedoms, we reject the plaintiffs’ challenge.

The case is about the most hotly contested constitutional issue in the era of the Roberts Court—the scope of First Amendment rights for people who want to contribute money to political campaigns—and the judges of the D.C. Circuit span a wide ideological range. Yet the opinion in the case, Wagner v. Federal Election Commission, is unanimous, representing the votes of all ten other active judges. (Garland and his colleagues heard the case under a federal law that assigns decisions on constitutional challenges to federal campaign-finance laws to the full court, rather than to the usual three-judge panel.)

They were likely unanimous because the decision is narrow. It pertains only to bans on “campaign contributions by individual contractors to candidates, parties, or traditional PACs that make contributions to candidates and parties.” It exemplifies the work of a judge who is moderate by conviction, while making clear that being moderate does not mean stinting on upholding essential democratic safeguards, like those against threats to good government. As an element of its narrowness, Garland’s opinion squarely applied the law laid down in the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Citizens United. Addressing only the problem of the literal kind of pay-for-play corruption, “a direct exchange of an official act for money,” which is obviously so wrong that you might think few would be foolish enough to try it, the opinion showed why the contribution ban is still amply justified.

In striking ways, Garland’s opinion resembles those that helped make Louis Brandeis an esteemed Justice a century ago. At unusual length, it presents the background of the law, from its “historical pedigree” in the eighteen-seventies through the continuous substantial basis for it: in 1939, for example, a congressman called the campaign contributions in question “political immorality and skullduggery that should not be tolerated.” In its deference to legislative history and to Congress, the opinion is also a model of judicial restraint. It shows that, as Obama wrote, on SCOTUSblog, in February, about his impending choice, Garland is “someone who recognizes the limits of the judiciary’s role; who understands that a judge’s job is to interpret the law, not make the law.”

If there is any substantive discussion of the nomination, it will be said, often, about Garland that, as a sitting federal appellate judge, he fits the limited career pattern of all but one current Justice (Elena Kagan was Solicitor General when she was nominated) and that, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, like four of the current Justices, he would compound the narrow élitism of the Supreme Court if confirmed.

To understand why Garland nonetheless has the most important criterion the President identified for his nominee—“experience that suggests he or she views the law not only as an intellectual exercise, but also grasps the way it affects the daily reality of people’s lives in a big, complicated democracy, and in rapidly changing times”—look only at the judge’s brief biography on the Web site of the D.C. Circuit. Here I reflect a bias, because I have known him for many years as a friend. I have followed every step of his career and believe I have an accurate sense of him and his accomplishments.

Next to his tenure as a judge, his longest professional experience was as a lawyer at the firm Arnold & Porter, one of the most respected in the country. He became a partner after only four years there—and then, after four more years, he left the firm to become a prosecutor. Kagan, when she was a professor* at Harvard Law School, said this about that shift, when introducing remarks he gave at the school in 2001: “Merrick made one of the coolest and gutsiest career moves I’ve ever heard of: giving up his highly lucrative and prestigious partnership in A&P to become an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the not-so-wealthy and, quite frankly, not-so-prestigious Washington, D.C., office.”

During his confirmation hearing for the D.C. Circuit, Garland said that, of all the positions he had held, his work as a prosecutor had best prepared him to be a judge. By then, he had been a law clerk to the great Judge Henry Friendly, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; a law clerk to the renowned Justice William Brennan, on the Supreme Court; and a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, in the Justice Department, during the Carter Administration, as well as a lawyer in private practice and a prosecutor. At forty, he had returned to the Justice Department as a top official in the Criminal Division in the Clinton Administration and then, as the official right below the Deputy Attorney General, became a key member of the team that ran the department under Attorney General Janet Reno.

He explained, though, that “the great joy of being a prosecutor is that you don’t take whatever case walks in the door. You evaluate the case. You make your best judgment. You only go forward if you believe that the defendant is guilty.” He continued, “It is the kind of evenhanded balancing that a judge should undertake, although, of course, the judge has the advantage of having somebody speak for the other side.”

Prosecutors today are almost omnipotent in the criminal-justice system, which is basically a plea-bargain system. They have such a wide array of laws with which to threaten to charge defendants that, in ninety-five per cent of criminal cases, they obtain plea bargains on lighter charges. Garland’s focus on guilt versus innocence makes him a throwback, the kind of self-effacing public servant who believes that “the United States wins its point whenever justice is done its citizens in the courts,” as an inscription outside the Justice Department office of the Attorney General says.

The day the President told Kagan that he planned to nominate her for the Supreme Court, in May of 2010, the Times ran a story saying that Garland “was widely seen as the most likely alternative to Ms. Kagan and the one most likely to win easy confirmation”; that Senator Orrin Hatch, the Republican from Utah, “privately made clear to the president that he considered Judge Garland a good choice”; and that “Mr. Obama ultimately opted to save Judge Garland for when he faces a more hostile Senate and needs a nominee with more Republican support.”

That moment has arrived. Garland has been a judge for almost nineteen years, and a chief judge for three. He has developed an indisputably illustrious record; he has proved himself to be the moderate, first-rate judge who, in the mid-nineties, Republicans as well as Democrats one-upped each other in predicting he would become. Garland is, to borrow the terms Obama used last week in describing his nominee, an “outstanding jurist” with “impeccable legal credentials, who, by historical standards, would not even be questioned as qualified for the Court.” By historical standards, he should be quickly and unanimously confirmed.

Would Donald Trump do this?

Mike Luckovich Atlanta Journal Constitution 3/16/16 

George Martin, Redefining Producer Who Guided the Beatles, Dies at 90

By ALLAN KOZINN NY TIMES

George Martin, the urbane English record producer who signed the Beatles to a recording contract on the small Parlophone label after every other British record company had turned them down, and who guided them in their transformation from a regional dance band into the most inventive, influential and studio-savvy rock group of the 1960s, died on Tuesday. He was 90.

“We can confirm that Sir George Martin passed away peacefully at home yesterday evening,” Adam Sharp, a founder of CA Management, a British company that represented Mr. Martin, said on Wednesday in an email. Mr. Sharp did not say how Mr. Martin had died.

“God bless George Martin,” Ringo Starr, the former Beatle, wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Martin helped redefine a record producer’s role in pop music. He was one of a handful of pop producers — Phil Spector and Quincy Jones among them — to become almost as famous as the musicians they recorded. And when he left Parlophone, a subsidiary of EMI Records, to start his own production company in 1965, his reputation as the producer of the Beatles helped raise the stature of record production as an independent career, rather than a record label function.

In the dozen years before he met the Beatles, Mr. Martin produced symphonic, chamber and choral recordings, jazz albums and a string of popular comedy records by Peter Ustinov, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. In the 1960s, as the recordings he made with the Beatles rode the top of the charts, he also produced hits by other British Invasion acts, among them Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cilla Black, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. He later worked with a diverse roster of pop and jazz performers, including Ella Fitzgerald, the Bee Gees, Jeff Beck, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Paul Winter, Cheap Trick, America and Ultravox.

His collaboration with the Beatles inevitably overshadowed his other accomplishments. Between 1962 and 1970, Mr. Martin produced 13 albums and 22 singles for the group, a compact body of work that adds up to less than 10 hours of music but that revolutionized the popular music world. After the Beatles broke up, he virtually doubled that output, overseeing archival releases drawn from the group’s concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, BBC radio performances and unreleased studio recordings that reveal a great deal about the Beatles’ working process.

Musicians, celebrities and political leaders paid tribute to Mr. Martin on social media on Wednesday, including the producers Mark Ronson and Quincy Jones, who described him on a Facebook post as “my musical brother” who “knew the secrets of our craft that so few know today.”

A modest man who had been trained as a classical pianist and oboist, Mr. Martin always deflected credit for the Beatles’ success, telling interviewers over the years that his own efforts were secondary to the songwriting genius of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and, to a lesser extent, George Harrison. The Beatles, for their part, recognized that Mr. Martin came to the job with a virtually infallible ear for arrangements. His advice and his behind-the-scenes scoring and editing gave some of the Beatles’ greatest recordings their characteristic sound.

When the Beatles played “Please Please Me” for him for the first time, for example, it was in a slow arrangement meant to evoke the style of Roy Orbison, one of their heroes. Mr. Martin told them the song sounded dreary, and insisted that they pick up the tempo and add a simple harmonica introduction. His suggestions transformed “Please Please Me,” which became their first big hit.

Always intent on expanding the Beatles’ horizons, Mr. Martin began chipping away at the group’s resistance to using orchestral musicians on its recordings in early 1965. While recording the “Help!” album that year, he brought in flutists for the simple adornment that enlivens Lennon’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and he convinced Mr. McCartney, against his initial resistance, that “Yesterday” should be accompanied by a string quartet.

A year later, during the recording of the album “Revolver,” Mr. Martin no longer had to cajole: The Beatles prevailed on him to augment their recordings with arrangements for strings (on “Eleanor Rigby”), brass (on “Got to Get You Into My Life”), marching band (on “Yellow Submarine”) and solo French horn (on “For No One”), as well as a tabla player for Harrison’s Indian-influenced song “Love You To.”

It was also at least partly through Mr. Martin’s encouragement that the Beatles became increasingly interested in electronic sound. Noting their inquisitiveness about both the technical and musical sides of recording, Mr. Martin ignored the traditional barrier between performers and technicians and invited the group into the control room, where he showed them how the recording equipment at EMI’s Abbey Road studios worked. He also introduced them to unorthodox recording techniques, including toying with tape speeds and playing tapes backward.

Mr. Martin had used some of these techniques in his comedy and novelty recordings, long before he began working with the Beatles.

“When I joined EMI,” he told The New York Times in 2003, “the criterion by which recordings were judged was their faithfulness to the original. If you made a recording that was so good that you couldn’t tell the difference between the recording and the actual performance, that was the acme. And I questioned that. I thought, O.K., we’re all taking photographs of an existing event. But we don’t have to make a photograph; we can paint. And that prompted me to experiment.”

Soon the Beatles themselves became intent on searching for new sounds, and Mr. Martin created another that the group adopted in 1966 (followed by many others). During the sessions for “Rain,” Mr. Martin took part of Lennon’s lead vocal and overlaid it, running backward, over the song’s coda.

“From that moment,” Mr. Martin said, “they wanted to do everything backwards. They wanted guitars backwards and drums backwards, and everything backwards, and it became a bore.” The technique did, however, benefit “I’m Only Sleeping” (with backward guitars) and “Strawberry Fields Forever” (with backward drums).

Mr. Martin was never particularly trendy, and when the Beatles adopted the flowery fashions of psychedelia in 1966 and 1967 he continued to attend sessions in a white shirt and tie, his hair combed back in a schoolmasterly pre-Beatles style. Musically, though, he was fully in step with them. When Lennon wanted a circus sound for his “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” Mr. Martin recorded a barrel organ and, following the example of John Cage, cut the tape into small pieces and reassembled them at random. His avant-garde orchestration and spacey production techniques made “A Day in the Life” into a monumental finale for the kaleidoscopic album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

George Henry Martin was born in London on Jan. 3, 1926, to Henry and Bertha Martin. As a child, he was a talented and largely self-taught pianist who had perfect pitch and was able to learn classical pieces and popular tunes by ear. While a student at Bromley Grammar School he formed a dance band, George Martin and the Four Tune Tellers. He continued a part-time career as a pianist during World War II, when he was a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm of the British Navy. When one of his performances attracted the attention of a BBC producer, he was invited to play one of his compositions, a piano prelude, on the “Navy Mixture” radio program.

After the war Mr. Martin attended the Guildhall School of Music, where he took up the oboe in addition to studying composition, conducting and piano. He worked briefly as a freelance oboist and as a clerk in the BBC’s music library before he was invited to become an assistant to Oscar Preuss, the recording manager at Parlophone Records. When he succeeded Mr. Preuss in 1955, at 29, he was the youngest label manager at EMI.

Parlophone was a poor relation among EMI’s labels — HMV and Columbia were more prestigious — but it had a varied roster when Mr. Martin joined its staff in 1950. He was first assigned to the company’s classical projects, including recordings by the London Baroque Ensemble and the conductors Malcolm Sargent and Charles Mackerras. But he soon moved on to orchestral pops, with Sidney Torch and the Queen’s Hall Light Orchestra; jazz, with John Dankworth and Humphrey Lyttelton; popular vocal music, with Matt Monro; and comedy, with Mr. Ustinov, Mr. Sellers and the “Beyond the Fringe” troupe of Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett.

For all its diversity, though, Parlophone had little success with rock ’n’ roll until Mr. Martin began recording the Beatles. When Brian Epstein, the group’s manager, called on Mr. Martin in early 1962, the Beatles had already been rejected by virtually every British record label, including the other EMI subsidiaries. Mr. Martin turned them down, too.

But Sid Colman, the director of EMI’s publishing arm, Ardmore & Beechwood, had heard demonstration discs of some early Lennon-McCartney songs, and pushed EMI to sign the group so that he could publish their music. The company resisted at first, but finally agreed, and assigned the band to Mr. Martin’s Parlophone label.

Mr. Martin remained uninterested, assigning the group’s first session, on June 6, 1962, to Ron Richards, his assistant. But Mr. Richards found the Beatles interesting enough to send for Mr. Martin, who took over the session and was quickly won over by their charm and originality.

Still, he had doubts. He told the Beatles that their drummer at the time, Pete Best, was not good enough to record. They had their own doubts about Mr. Best, and quickly replaced him with Mr. Starr. Mr. Martin also had qualms about the first Lennon-McCartney songs he heard — “Love Me Do,” “P.S. I Love You” and “Hello Little Girl” — regarding them as derivative. He helped them find the spark that soon became their hallmark by insisting that they think carefully about their vocal harmonies and such niceties of the arranger’s art as introductions and endings. They quickly internalized his advice.

By the end of 1963 Mr. Martin was virtually coining money for EMI, not only with the Beatles’ recordings but also with the hits he was producing for Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cilla Black and others.

Mr. Martin did not at first share in the wealth these successes generated. When Mr. Epstein offered him a share of the Beatles’ publishing, he turned it down on the grounds that it would be a conflict of interest. He had, however, been arguing since early 1962 that EMI should pay him a royalty on his productions, instead of a salary. In August 1965, when EMI refused to offer Mr. Martin more than a token bonus, he left the company and formed his own production company, Associated Independent Recording (AIR), along with two other producers from EMI and the competing Decca label. The Beatles insisted that EMI continue to engage Mr. Martin as their producer after AIR was established, as did most of Mr. Martin’s other artists.

In 1966, not long after he established AIR, Mr. Martin married Judy Lockhart-Smith, who had been his secretary at Parlophone. An earlier marriage, to Sheena Chisolm, ended in divorce.

AIR opened its own studio in London in 1970, and a Caribbean branch, on the Caribbean island Montserrat, in 1979. When the Montserrat studio was destroyed in a hurricane in 1989, Mr. Martin decided not to rebuild. But he compiled an album of recordings made at the studio by Mr. McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, the Police, Elton John and others as a charity for the 12,000 people who lost their homes in the storm.

In 1993 Mr. Martin opened AIR Lyndhurst, a state-of-the-art studio in a converted Victorian church in London, which has become an important studio for orchestral film soundtrack recording. Mr. Martin remained involved in its operation long after he stopped producing recordings in the late 1990s.

“I’m there every week,” he said in 2003. “I listen to my friends who come and do film recording. I love sitting in a 100-piece orchestra and listening. And I still do a bit of writing, and I help a bit with studio work sometimes.”

As a composer, Mr. Martin supplied incidental music to the soundtracks of several films, including the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Yellow Submarine” as well as “Live and Let Die,” “Honky Tonk Freeway” and “Pulp.” He wrote the music for a recording of Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood” that he produced in 1989, using an entirely Welsh cast of actors and singers. Having made several recordings of his own arrangements of Beatles songs in the 1960s, he periodically conducted orchestras, mostly in Europe and Latin America, in concerts of Beatles music.

In the late 1990s, he toured as a lecturer, speaking about the making of “Sgt. Pepper” and tantalizing listeners with excerpts from the unreleased session tapes for that album. His last Beatles project was a collaboration with his son, Giles Martin, on the 2006 soundtrack for “Love,” the Cirque du Soleil show for which Beatles recordings were remixed and recombined.

Mr. Martin was also the host of several television programs, including “The Making of Sgt. Pepper” in 1992 and “The Glory of Gershwin” in 1993, and he wrote a handful of books, among them “All You Need Is Ears” (1979), “Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper” (1994) and a lavishly illustrated limited-edition autobiography, “Playback” (2003). He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1988 and was awarded a knighthood in 1996.

DONALD TRUMP ACTS LIKE A SERIOUS ADULT

Last night 3/1/2016 Donald Trump set aside the bombast the crazy talk and acted like a rational adult. He listened and he spoke quietly. He respected journalists and gave credible reposes. It was a remarkable revelation of the other side of his personality. No carnival barker, no bullshit. His discussion of trade and his grasp of detail was real and sustained. He wasn't just saying quotes, he had few notes. His ability to think on his feet and to stay focused was genuine.

Hillary Clinton must find a message that reaches millions of profoundly unhappy adults. The country is bitter and will not accept any more promises that sound like soundbites or cynical reads. 

Trump will probably lose because he has frightened the moderates. But then it might be that enough people will say it is time to rattle Washington get things stirred up. 

This man is not going away and if he can continue to talk and act responsibly he just might win the 2016 election.