Word: argument
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Robinson is quite arbitrary in picking six cherished operas as his text, and even more so in including Schubert's two greatest song cycles, on the theory that they are "distinctly operatic." His basic argument is that Mozart's Marriage of Figaro expresses the Enlightenment's belief in reason and reconciliation, that Rossini's Barber of Seville reflects the post-Napoleonic withdrawal from emotional involvement, and that Schubert's Winterreise and Schöne Müllerin represent the Romantics' concentration on the individual and his relationship to nature. Similarly, he asserts that Berlioz's Trojans dramatizes the 19th century's obsession...
...heavy argument indeed. But Robinson does not pursue it doggedly or even systematically (to have done so with such elusive material as music would have been painfully Procrustean). What he offers instead is an interesting potpourri of perceptions, suggestions and possibilities. He demonstrates, for example, the despair of the hero of Winterreise by noting that Schubert consistently describes reality in a minor key and changes into the major only when he is shifting into fantasy. This is a somewhat technical point, necessarily, for most writing about music is either technical or gush. In addition, Robinson has the wit to confess...
...death the city's mayor, George Moscone, and its first openly homosexual supervisor, Harvey Milk; by his own hand (carbon-monoxide poisoning); in San Francisco. At his 1979 trial, White pleaded "diminished capacity," contending that a diet of sugary junk food had aggravated his severe psychological problems, an argument that became known as the "Twinkie defense." When White was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, 5,000 rioters, most of them gays, stormed city hall. Following his release after five years in prison, White, unemployed and dogged by fears of retaliation, lived undercover, apart from his family...
...unlike Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News star, Coulter has never wobbled on Bush's signature deed, the war in Iraq. "The invasion of Iraq has gone fabulously well," she wrote last June, a few weeks after O'Reilly suggested the U.S. might need to pull out. Her only argument with Bush is that he isn't more like President Reagan. "'Compassionate conservative,'" she says, "carries the same negative implications as 'articulate black.'" Coulter believes not just in less government but in almost no government. She would eliminate the departments of Education, Commerce, Agriculture and several others. She opposes abortion...
...Statistics are like bikinis: what they show is important, but what they conceal is vital." "The message is clear," Coulter responded in her article. "The vital parts are the breasts and the vagina, so go get her." I was surprised to find that the piece made a standard feminist argument against pornography (an "atrocity" in which women are "exploited" and "dehumanized"). Its opening lines are: "Conservatives have a difficult time with women. For that matter...