Let’s have a little music. For a review of Wagner’s
Walküre, at the Salzburg Easter Festival, go
here. For a review of the Berlin Philharmonic under Seiji Ozawa, with Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin soloist; and for a review of the Berliners under Sir Simon Rattle, with Heinrich Schiff, cello soloist — go
here. For a review of the New York Philharmonic, under Kurt Masur, go
here. (What the New Yorkers performed was the St. Matthew Passion.) All these reviews were published in the
New York Sun.
In response to my scribbles on Barack Obama and his grandmother —
here — many, many readers wrote in to say something like the following: Remember when Jesse Jackson admitted that, when he heard footsteps behind him at night, and turned around and saw that it was a white person, he was relieved?a
That was a very, very important statement: because it was heartbreaking — and heartbreakingly wrong — that it was true.
But remember how Jackson recovered from it, after a controversy ensued? He said
all he meant was that, if it were a white person behind him, they would probably be in a white neighborhood, meaning that cops would be on the beat — because police departments ignore black neighborhoods.
Sure: That’s what he meant.
Finally, I wanted to be sure you saw an obituary of Jacob DeShazer, a great man. These are excerpts from Richard Goldstein’s
obit in the New York Times:
Jacob DeShazer, a bombardier in the storied Doolittle raid over Japan in World War II who endured 40 months of brutality as a prisoner of the Japanese, then became a missionary in Japan spreading a message of Christian love and forgiveness, died on March 15 at his home in Salem, Ore. He was 95. . . .
Corporal DeShazer, a native of Oregon and the son of a Church of God minister, was among the five-member crew of Bat Out of Hell, the last bomber to depart the Hornet. . . .
The five crewmen bailed out over Japanese-occupied territory in China and all were quickly captured. In October 1942, a Japanese firing squad executed the pilot, Lt. William G. Farrow, and the engineer-gunner, Sgt. Harold A. Spatz, along with a captured crewman from another Doolittle raid plane. Corporal DeShazer and the other surviving crewmen from his plane, Lt. George Barr, the navigator, and Lt. Robert L. Hite, the co-pilot, were starved, beaten and tortured at prisons in Japan and China — spending most of their time in solitary confinement — until their liberation a few days after Japan’s surrender in August 1945.
Amid his misery, Corporal DeShazer had one source of solace.
“I begged my captors to get a Bible for me,” he recalled in “I Was a Prisoner of Japan,” a religious tract he wrote in 1950. “At last, in the month of May 1944, a guard brought me the book, but told me I could have it only for three weeks. I eagerly began to read its pages. I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes and that when I looked at the enemy officers and guards who had starved and beaten my companions and me so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity. I realized that these people did not know anything about my Savior and that if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel.”
Corporal DeShazer gained the strength to survive, and he became determined to spread Christian teachings to his enemy. . . .
In 1950, he gained a remarkable convert.
Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese naval flier who had led the Pearl Harbor attack and had become a rice farmer after the war, came upon the DeShazer tract.
“It was then that I met Jesus, and accepted him as my personal savior,” Mr. Fuchida recalled when he attended a memorial service in Hawaii in observance of the 25th anniversary of the attack. He had become an evangelist and had made several trips to the United States to meet with Japanese-speaking immigrants. . . .
Anyway, have a great weekend, y’all.
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