The Consequence of Matters

  Paul Camp t S r p r o n 1 5 s o S r h c e d    ·  One of the key questions raised by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory has been whether he represents a new turn in American politics or merely a blip who will be quickly forgotten if he loses in 2020. For a very long time Democrats have believed that demographics were on their side. Republicans are acutely dependent on white voters, and every election cycle the share of white voters declines by a percent or two. Since voters of color largely support Democrats, this would someday make it all but impossible for Republicans to win the presidency. But when would that day come? The Census Bureau projects that white voters won’t lose their absolute majority until 2044, but the Republican day of reckoning will come long before that, because not all white voters are conservative. In fact, I believe that it’s already happened. It came in 2008, and ever since then it’s been close to hopeless for a Republican to win the presidency. T...

  oday is the birthday of the extraordinary Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1893. Poet, satirist, reviewer, screenwriter, wit, and founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, she was ultimately placed on the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy era due to her left wing politics. She went to a Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street, though her father was Jewish and her stepmother was Protestant. But she was asked to leave after she referred to the Immaculate Conception as “spontaneous combustion.” Her formal education ended at age 14, and she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she wrote poetry. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914, and she got offered a job as an editorial assistant for Vogue, which was owned by the same company. Parker's career took off in 1918 while she was writing theater criticism for Vanity Fair, filling in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehous...

  Today is the birthday of Italian-born Viennese composer Antonio Salieri, born in Legnago, in the Republic of Venice 1750, and one of history's most slandered musicians. Although he was quite popular in the 18th century, he probably wouldn't be well known today were it not for the movie Amadeus (1984). The movie was based on Peter Shaffer's play by the same name (1979), which was in turn based on a short play by Aleksandr Pushkin, Mozart and Salieri (1830). These stories all present Salieri as a mediocre and uninspired composer who was jealous of Mozart's musical genius; Salieri tried to discredit Mozart at every turn, and some versions of the story even accuse him of poisoning his rival. But Salieri was a talented and successful composer, writing the scores for several popular operas. He was a pivotal figure in the development of late 18th-century opera. As a student of Florian Leopold Gassmann, and a protégé of Christoph Willibald Gluck, Salieri was a cosmopolitan co...

  Today is the birthday of Gene Roddenberry, born in El Paso, Texas in 1921. He was working as a TV writer and producer at NBC, writing scripts for Highway Patrol, Have Gun – Will Travel, and other series, before creating and producing his own television series, The Lieutenant. Then, in 1964, he got the idea for a new series about space exploration — "a Wagon Train to the stars," as he described it — and shopped it around to several studios, most of which were uninterested. Desilu Productions finally expressed an interest, and NBC agreed to air it. The pilot of his new show, Star Trek, about the voyages of the Starship Enterprise and its crew, aired on September 8, 1966. Roddenberry's wife, Majel Barrett, provided the voice for the Enterprise's computer. Ratings were never great, and it only aired for three seasons. It got a major push toward cancellation in season 3 when NBC tried to put it on Monday at 7:30 to build an audience, but an enraged George Schlatter insis...