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Music and the Wonders of Rossmoor

Friday, August 27th, 2010

By Eric Anschutz, August 25, 2010

Music. On Friday, August 13, we Rossmoorians were treated to an unforgettable concert performed by the Diablo Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with the Diablo Theatre Company. Their joint program offered the best of five Broadway Shows: West Side Story, Gypsy, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera, and Les Miserables.

The orchestra, conducted as always by Maestro Joyce Johnson Hamilton, was wonderful, filling the Fireside Room with sounds of memorable sometimes haunting beauty. But it was the four singers that elevated our evening from merely wonderful and delightful to truly heaven-sent. Soprano Rena Wilson, Alto Kerry Chapman, Tenor Nephi Speer, and Bass Derrick Silva gave performances singly and together that won enthusiastic applause, resounding shouts of bravo, and at the end a standing ovation lasting several minutes.

This superb concert filled our very large Fireside Room to overflowing. The next performance of the Diablo Symphony, again to be performed in the Fireside Room, is scheduled for Friday Evening, 8 PM, October 8. The same concert heard last week here in Rossmoor was performed again on the following day at the Lesher Center for the Arts. Rossmoor ticket prices were $5; Lesher Center tickets were $37. I note this to make the obvious point: we who live here are fortunate in so many ways. Some further thoughts on the wonders and unending perquisites of life in Rossmoor were expressed in Rossmoor: Eden in California, a book of photographs and essays co-authored by myself and photographer John McCurdy. The following paragraphs, taken from my writings in the Foreword of that book, are brought to mind by the concert.

The Wonders of Rossmoor. Almost ten thousand of us live here in some 6,500 “manors.” We are all of “a certain age,” a common ethos, a remarkable élan, at least a trace of the wisdom that comes with age, and an almost universal generosity of spirit. Each of us brings to the mix that is Rossmoor some six or seven or eight or nine decades of life experience. There are among us former university deans, physicians, CEO’s, diplomats, clergy, attorneys, nurses, truck drivers, schoolteachers, engineers, mechanics and shopkeepers. We are from every state in the union, and from all over the world. Most of us are parents, many of us are grandparents, and not a few are great-grandparents. Many of us have served in the wartime military. We are politically divided roughly 60-40 among Democrats and Republicans. But, each of us, whatever our professional background, our politics, our life experience, our religion – or dissent from religion – tries to avoid open dispute over conflicting views.

Many of us are actively linked to the internet, exchanging emails to keep one another abreast of the latest jokes and wisdom of the day. We Google daily to read blogs and newspapers and journals from around the world, and many of us find ourselves learning more online than we ever learned during our years in colleges!

Here is a sampler of life as it can be lived in this wonderful place. During recent weeks, Rossmoorians might have gone into town, to Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts, to see world-class Diablo Light Opera performances of musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof, and Center Rep productions of plays like The Mousetrap. Right here, in one of our own Rossmoor clubhouses, we might have heard the Diablo Symphony play Beethoven’s Eroica, and seen the California Opera Company perform La Traviata. Movies are shown several times weekly in Peacock Hall, our own 150-seat theatre. Available generally at no cost to Rossmoorians, Peacock offerings range from vintage films to recent ones, both domestic and international. There are frequent dinner-dances sponsored by various Rossmoor clubs. We have eight excellent tennis courts; we have two challenging park-like golf courses, one nine-hole and one 18 hole; we have several beautiful outdoor swimming pools, a glittering glass-covered indoor pool, with it’s adjacent top-notch fitness center, a world-class lawn-bowling green, and a first-rate bocce Court.

Rossmoor also offers a number of clubhouses that provide a variety of venues for the many activities here. The beautifully designed and well maintained plantings surrounding our “manors” and in our common areas make this a verdant Eden. Rossmoor features some 200 clubs, ranging from ceramics to woodworking to opera, computer learning, theater arts, Scrabble and bridge.

Let’s now take a look at our also wonderful Walnut Creek, the town of some 60,000 people, of which Rossmoor is a part. All of us who live here are delighted with Broadway Plaza, Walnut Creek’s beautiful outdoor mall, with its many flowers and a central fountain plaza. Many times I have sat in the sun, often in the company of other old men, on the plaza’s circular surround, watching the kids (and their pretty young Moms!) toss pennies into the fountain-pond while waiting for my wife to complete her shopping at Nordstrom, Macy’s, Eileen Fisher or J. Jill.

At the hub of our city is the earlier-mentioned fabulous Lesher Center for the Arts, our own small-town (but richly endowed) Lincoln Center. Nearby is Walnut Creek’s multiple-screen movie-house. Our town offers dozens of fine restaurants, all just a stroll away from the Lesher Center and the shops at Broadway Plaza. To top it all off, we have Barnes and Noble – a great book store – featuring its own Starbucks café – where many of us often spend time over coffee and cheesecake, perusing several books while deciding which one or two to buy. Downtown Walnut Creek is a mere four miles outside the gates of Rossmoor; cost-free bus transportation is provided for those of us without cars.

We are some 30 miles from San Francisco, one of America’s most renowned cities. Our BART, the Bay Area Transit System, departs every 15 minutes or so from the Walnut Creek Station, and in less than 35 minutes we can be in the heart of San Francisco with its world-class entertainment and shopping, and renowned beauty. Beethoven could have written his Ninth Symphony, and its Chorale Fourth Movement, Ode to Joy, in honor of the place we call home.

Send your comments to ericsr@yahoo.com. This and earlier columns are posted on my blog: Rantle.com.

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Guns versus Butter

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

By Eric Anschutz, July 14, 2010

America needs to engage in a “Guns versus Butter” debate. We have never had a comprehensive national dialogue on the trade-offs between military spending and economic investment. Ever since the 1950’s, it has been simply assumed in our ongoing national discourse that national security requires our military to be more powerful than that of all other nations combined, and to be deployed worldwide.

But, since every dollar spent on military force is a dollar subtracted from cities and states and corporations and from the income of every citizen, it follows that excessive spending on our military can lead to economic weakness. Too much military spending is therefore as great a danger to national viability and global reach and influence as would be depletion of our military to the point of vulnerability to predators.

To that end, we need to ask ourselves whether it makes any sense for us to maintain large contingents of US military in places like Germany and South Korea and Japan, when each of these countries has a strong economy and is capable of defending itself? We need to question whether it makes sense to leave the projected large contingents of our military in Iraq and Afghanistan for the foreseeable future to assure “stability and security.” The dollar cost of these deployments is large, yet there is little if any debate among us as to whether these vast expenditures are the best way to allocate precious US resources.

US troops are everywhere, with bases in more than 100 countries (including such places as Ethiopia and Iceland), at least some of which would prefer for us to leave. Indeed, the Prime Minister of Japan was recently ousted from office because of his support, over the strong objections of all Okinawans and many on the Japanese mainland, of the very large US base in Okinawa.

US military spending is more than 4% of GNP (20% of our entire federal budget). Our military spending totals more than Social Security and the costs of Medicare and Medicaid combined. The Pentagon budget for 2010 is $693 billion, more than all other discretionary spending combined, and more than the combined military budgets of every other country in the world. And those vast sums do not include the CIA and VA or the very substantial defense-related costs of Homeland Security, NASA and DOE. We need to take special note of the fact that VA costs will be high for decades to come as the nation tends to the many profoundly wounded veterans of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A sure applause line for Red State politicians is to assert that the best way to preserve the peace is to possess unchallenged military superiority. Yet, much of this military spending goes to weapons we do not need. America has 11 aircraft carriers, twice as many as the rest of the world combined. No other nation has more than one, yet our Admirals petition for more and bigger carriers with a projected cost of $9 billion each. For what purpose?

Our Air Force Generals, supported by the military-industrial complex, whose influence President Eisenhower so wisely and presciently warned against, and despite strong opposition from the Secretary of Defense, seek to goad Congress into footing the bill for a next generation of fighter aircraft, despite the fact that our current planes are said to be far superior to and several generations more advanced than those of any other country. In debating the wisdom of these and other new weapons programs, Congress is concerned only with the effect on jobs in their districts, not at all on whether the programs make sense, and certainly not at all about whether the nation would be better served by spending these sums on such things as US infrastructure or education or alternative fuels.

Perhaps the greatest irrationality in the endless quest for new weaponry is the debate about a next generation of nuclear weapons, when our far-too-large and entirely useless nuclear arsenal sits in silos and submarines and bunkers as nothing more than a cold-war relic. Arguably, we need ten or so highly secure nuclear weapons for deterrence, anything more is waste. Not only is it a waste of money to increase or enhance our nuclear arsenal – doing so works directly against our efforts to stem nuclear proliferation.

Opposition to the war in Afghanistan is wide and increasingly deep. Though we are assured daily that progress is being made, evidence of progress is sparse to none. The same doubt applies to our stated purpose in that rock-strewn and mountainous place. Denial to al Qaeda of a staging area and sanctuary is said to be the reason for the war, yet they and other terrorist groups have morphed into Pakistan and Somalia and elsewhere. We seem to be continuing this fight not because it has a purpose, but rather because we are there and cannot devise an exit strategy that can be labeled as anything but a vast mistake.

But, to get back to the Guns versus Butter debate: our purpose in dealing with the rest of the world is to influence the outcome of global events in ways favorable to our interests. Having guns does help. But having a powerful economy, one that enables us to grant or withhold cooperation or largesse, also helps; in some cases economic power is more important than military power. Moral leadership, too, is important.

When we read news accounts of our construction of schools and roads and water supplies in Afghanistan, often destroyed by local insurgents as soon as work on them is completed, our thoughts turn to the need for schools and roads and water and electricity and so much else here in America. We waste there when we should be building here.

The Guns versus Butter debate needs to focus on bringing into better balance the various elements of national strength. An America seen globally as “the shining city on the hill” would be more likely to influence favorably the outcome of world events. An America endlessly and futilely involved in military conflict is less likely to command affection and emulation and support.

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Thoughts About Memorial Day

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

By Eric Anschutz, June 2, 2010

This column is an updated version of one that I wrote on Memorial Day, 2008. Sad to say, not much has changed since then. Our soldiers are still dying in counterproductive wars.

Sidsel and I watched the Memorial Day Concert. The concert, which comes to us every year from the Mall in Washington, DC, presented, as always, stirring renditions of the songs that stir our patriotic emotions. I view that kind of “celebration” of our fallen heroes with mixed emotions. Those young people whose lives are taken by war do of course merit every honor we can bestow upon their memory. Yet, as we pay tribute to those who have fallen in war, we know that more young kids are dying every day in wars that continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that more will die in yet more wars that are all but certain to be fought in coming years.

Seated in the front row of the Memorial Day Concert audience were a number of soldiers brought to the concert from nearby Walter Reed Army Hospital. They were beautiful young kids, most with missing limbs, some with terrible body and facial burns, all sitting stoically in wheelchairs. Seated alongside them were the parents, widows and small children of some who gave their lives in Iraq. While we recognize and honor the fallen, we need to be asking ourselves how might we bring this unending slaughter of our young to an end?

I read some time ago about a young soldier who in 2004 had suffered the concussive effects of one of the ubiquitous Improvised Explosive Devices that seem to line the roads in Iraq and Afghanistan. His brain injuries were such that he was left totally paralyzed, unable to speak or to move any part of his body. After four years of therapy this young man is now able to lift an eyebrow, but no one is certain that he understands anything. This now 24-year old young man is living at home with his mother (poor, black and altogether wonderful) who tends him with love and pride, as one would tend a baby, hopeful against all odds that one day he will return to some kind of life.

For me these tributes to “our boys” ring hollow when they are delivered by politicians who are only too ready to keep sending still more young men and women into wars that are not only wrong and unnecessary – but are by every metric actually counterproductive to our national interests. Yet, we have raised the ante in both Afghanistan and Iran by committing more troops to the former and threatening ever-tighter sanctions and implied military action against the latter. General Petraeus has ordered the sending of Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and perform reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate. And in response to the heightened tensions between North and South Korea we are now conducting joint naval operations there and have placed on alert the 35,000 US troops in South Korea – thereby injecting ourselves ever more deeply into that unendingly dangerous and peril-filled arena.

President Obama did, in his recent speech to the West Point graduating class, set forth what has been termed a “new national security strategy” rooted in diplomatic engagement and international alliances, repudiating his predecessor’s emphasis on unilateral American power and the right to wage preemptive war. “…America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation. We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice – so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities, and they face consequences when they don’t.”

There is in fact nothing “new” in Obama’s words. From the man who promised change, we get the continuing rhetoric of a self-appointed world policeman. When we proclaim that “nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities,” we set our nation up as the judge of whether other nations are meeting their responsibilities. When we proclaim that “they face consequences when they don’t,” we commit ourselves to the imposition of those consequences. While this kind of bombast stops well short of unilateralism and threats of preemptive war, it is also well short of the kind of “change” that Obama promised in his campaign renunciation of “dumb wars.”

I know that Obama agonizes over the killing and maiming that are the inevitable result of war. But so did Bush. There is in fact only one way to avoid the tragedy of maimed bodies and empty lives we see every Memorial Day, and that is to implicitly (if not explicitly) renounce war as an instrument of national policy. European nations have essentially done that, with the possible exception of England where the government staunchly supports us in every conflict we choose to undertake – over the objections of its people. Though Russia has had regional conflicts (Chechnya, Georgia, Afghanistan), no Russian troops are based outside its borders. Nor does China have troops based outside its borders; indeed, China proclaims and vigorously enforces a policy of non-interference in the affairs of other states. (That is why China is so reluctant to join us in sanctions against North Korea and Iran.) The rest of the world is tired of confrontation and war. It is only our country that has the misguided notion that we need to station more than 400,000 of our troops across the world to “maintain order and stability,” and to fight the in Afghanistan against an elusive enemy whose weaponry is chiefly roadside bombs and suicide bombers.

When will we learn? When will we honor our fallen and profoundly wounded soldiers in the only way that matters: stop going to war. Stop spending our national treasure on such weaponry as aircraft carriers; they cost in the neighborhood of $10 billion each, not counting the planes (we have 11 carriers and are building another , no other nation has more than one, most have none). Stop bluster and embrace diplomacy; focus on building our national infrastructure, educate our young, and become the world’s leader in green technologies. Only then will Obama have delivered on his promise of change. As I said in my column of two years ago: How about another national holiday, perhaps as an extension of Memorial Day? We could call it “World Peace Day,” and dedicate that day to a nationwide pondering of ways to avoid future wars.

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Back to The Two Guys in the Rowboat

Monday, May 17th, 2010

By Eric Anschutz, April 28, 2010

Today we revisit our metaphorical rowboat. Manned by a liberal on the left oar and a conservative on the right oar, our last column left the rowboat floundering among towering waves and threatening winds because the two oarsmen could neither synchronize their rowing nor agree on a direction in which to row. Let’s listen in on their conversation as they wallow in the ocean of America’s growing discontent.

The Conservative says to the liberal: Tax and spend is all that you lefties know about governing. You ignore the constitution, you are creating a mountain of debt that will be left for our children and grandchildren to pay off, and our country is drifting headlong into European-Style Socialism.

The Liberal responds: You right-wingers have only one simplistic set of policies: reduce taxes and fight wars. When Bush took office, he inherited from Clinton a budget in surplus – and squandered it with his tax cuts for the rich and the costs of the tragically counterproductive war in Iraq. Bush, on leaving office, handed to Obama a country mired in two ongoing wars, a national debt of over $1.5 trillion, and an economy in collapse. Speaking of massive deficits, I must say that the expanded and increasingly costly war in Afghanistan is one Obama policy with which we liberals strongly disagree.

Conservative: Obama’s socialist bailout of the banks and the car companies, and his wasteful and needless economic stimulus has doubled the debt, failed to stop the rise in unemployment and done nothing to stem the tide of foreclosures across the country. And when it comes to supporting our brave military, we knew all along that you liberal wimps would press Obama to walk away from our commitment to Afghanistan – which is the one good thing his administration is doing.

Liberal: Warren Buffet, whose income is mostly from capital gains, has correctly pointed out that he pays a far lower tax rate than his secretary whose income is solely from her wages. To close the growing income gap between rich and poor, we need to change tax policies that continue to favor capital gains over income, and revert to a more progressive income tax to shelter incomes of the poor and sharply raise taxes on the wealthy. When the post-tax income gap narrows, the poor benefit for obvious reasons, but the wealthy benefit too. Here’s why: when the poor can afford better housing and health care and nutrition, productivity rises and crime decreases and the tax base grows. We are all left better off.

Conservative: As Ronald Reagan would say: there you go again. You liberals want to take money from the people that work hard for a living, and give it to the undeserving slothful people who don’t pay taxes at all. You people don’t seem to understand that by raising taxes on capital gains and on those with high incomes, you take away the incentive to invest and to work hard. Low tax rates on capital gains stimulate investment in business – which in turn creates jobs and thereby enriches us all. That is what we call “trickle down” economics.

Liberal: What you conservatives don’t seem to realize is that Reagan and Bush 41 (though the elder Bush rightly called it Voo-Doo economics) and Bush 43 each embraced various versions of trickle down economics. That 20-year experiment failed in every case – especially so with Bush 43. It was Bill Clinton who showed us the way. When Clinton raised taxes in 1993, not a single Republican voted with him; indeed they all made long speeches predicting the downfall of the economy. Instead, his policies produced surplus budgets and aggressive growth across the entire spectrum of our economy. Given the current continuing economic distress, President Obama must continue to invest federal funds to rebuild the economy. Lowering taxes today would be a patently absurd way to reduce the fiscal deficit: why would Obama want to rely on trickle down policies when they have so abjectly failed during each of the Republican administrations since Reagan?

Conservative: We conservatives are united in wanting to stop the creeping socialism happening under Obama. As Sarah Palin put it recently in her address to the Boston Tea Party: “We’ll keep clinging to our Constitution, our guns and our religion – and you can keep the change.” The Tea Party enthusiasts reflect the mood across America when they tell us that they “Want to take our country back.” They are right too in asserting that Obama is a traitor who by his policies weakens our National Security. Glen Beck tells us that low-income citizens who pay no taxes and who therefore do not monetarily support our military should be made to go into military service. Michelle Bachman refers to the Obama administration as “this gangster government.”

Liberal: There is a rising tide in America of anger at government. The hatred and vitriol we see when conservatives and Tea Partiers assemble is scary. We hear of death threats to the lives of congressmen. Gun enthusiasts brazenly display their weapons at open assemblies; we see signs that say: “When votes fail, guns will succeed.” Oklahomans claim the need to create a militia whose purpose would be to defend against encroachment of the federal government. None of this has a place in America.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Eisenhower, and Reagan, speaking in unison from heaven: Fellow Americans, dissent in a vigorous democracy is nothing new. Just as it is today, there was also strong dissent during our time in office. Abe even had to prosecute a Civil War. So, we know first-hand about the passions that can be aroused in democratic debate about the best direction for the nation. But, as we see the particularly vitriolic dissent in today’s America, we have a message for both sides: in a democracy, elections matter. To Democrats: the electorate gave you massive majorities in both houses of Congress and has a right to expect you to deliver the promised progressive agenda (ala healthcare!) with or without support from conservatives. To Republicans: remember that finding the best way forward is done through sustained and intelligent discussion – not through unthinking negativism and unremitting hostility.

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That’s Amore

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

By Eric Anschutz, February 24, 2010

The Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle, always one of the highlights of my week, coincided recently with Valentine’s Day. To complete the Valentine’s Day puzzle, entitled “That’s Amore,” it was necessary to find a number of possible answers to ”what is love?” Joseph Campbell, we learned, said that love is “Friendship set to music.” St. Augustine defined it as “The beauty of the soul.” Charles Schultz: “Sharing your popcorn.” Frank Sinatra: “A many-splendored thing.” The Beatles: “All you need.” And, finally, Shakespeare put it most simply: Love, he wrote, is “Blind.”

All of this is to set the stage for telling you about the Contra Cost Wind Symphony, which on February 10 came to our Del Valle Clubhouse to present a Valentine concert entitled “To Rossmoor With Love.” The Wind Symphony comes to Rossmoor several times a year, and for me there is nothing more thrilling than hearing some 50 wind instruments (flutes, oboes, bassoons, clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, French horns, trombones, tubas, and even a flugelhorn and a euphonium).

I do like violins, and am especially enthralled by cellos, but there is nothing like the blare of saxophones and trumpets to excite my aging ears. To put my love of horns in perspective, I might tell you that my favorite musical passage comes in the late-middle of the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony when trumpets, French horns and bassoons combine to rouse the listener to an awe-inspiring, breathtaking and altogether exhilarating high. To experience this thrilling passage, go to Google, type in “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Third Movement,” and soar for a few moments of glory with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.

The Contra Costa Wind Symphony is made up of dedicated artists with a common love of performing high quality symphonic band music. While the group is based in Walnut Creek, its talented musicians come from all over the Bay Area. They play for pleasure – none of them is paid for performing with the Wind Symphony – they all have “day jobs.” The ensemble was formed in 1980.

The Wind Symphony group has been conducted since 1981 by Duane Carroll, holder of a doctorate in Musical Arts from the University of Michigan. Maestro Carroll played clarinet, saxophone and oboe with the Third US Army Band in Georgia and in Germany. He has taught music at all levels from elementary through university, has received numerous honors, and has guest-conducted wind-instrument concerts in Germany and Hungary. The Wind Symphony will perform next at the Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church, on April 17 at 8PM, and that concert will include piano, violin and cello soloists. Further information is available at CCWindSymphony.org. The group will next appear in Rossmoor on Wednesday, June 9, 7:30 PM in celebration of Flag Day.

I write this not only to extol the virtues of the Contra Cost Wind Symphony. I want also to commend the Rossmoor Recreation Department for bringing this kind of glorious entertainment to us on a continuing basis. The Rossmoor News tells us in its weekly Public Events listing and in its Arts and Leisure section of all that is available to Rossmoorians, most at no cost. Movies of all genres, string quartets, pianists, singers, jazz one day and opera the next. The listing varies, of course, from one week to the next, but there is always something to attract every interest and every taste.

Together with photographer John McCurdy, I recently authored a book titled Rossmoor: Eden in California, in which I wrote “We (Rossmoorians) are all of a ‘certain age,’ a common ethos, a remarkable élan, at least a trace of the wisdom that comes with age, and an almost universal generosity of spirit.” I wrote in the book’s many essays of the richness of all that is offered to those of us fortunate enough to live here. Entertainment, yes, but more than that we are surrounded by the endless possibilities of tennis, golf, lawn bowling, swimming pools, fitness center, and more than 200 clubs for everything from bridge to ceramics, theatre arts, computers, Scrabble and woodworking. The book portrays much of that and more in John’s numerous and always stunning photographs.

Rossmoor is a place for senior citizens. Sure. But, more than that, it provides all the facilities of a country club, a level and quality of entertainment and educational opportunities comparable to that found in a college town, and social opportunities that create a remarkable sense of togetherness and cultural cohesion. Beyond all that, Rossmoor is located in the best small city in America, Walnut Creek. The Syringa Tree, now on stage at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center, is quite possibly the finest and most demanding one-woman performance ever staged. And for world-class shopping, we have Walnut Creek’s Broadway Plaza and its beautiful flower-filled outdoor mall, with stores ranging from Nordstrom to Pottery Barn to Restoration Hardware to Tiffany’s and the amazing Apple Store.
That’s Amore!

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