Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis Among the more shattering denouements du jour this week, the Pakistani tribal judges’ sentencing of the physician who helped us find Osama bin Laden really stood out. The dichotomy in Pakistan is costly: the traditionalist military who maintain power by nurturing the enmity with India (remember there are more Urdu speakers in Pakistan than in India), while holding down the more modern civilian rulers has persuaded us to pay them billions of dollars, meanwhile hiding al Qaida and Taliban terrorists, our enemies. Also, the vote in Egypt heavily favoring the Muslim Brotherhood was a defeat for the democratic people of the Mideast. It was paid for by bribe dollars supplied by Saudi aristocracy, according to news in the Coptic community here in NYC, a sad outcome after the US supported the popular Arab Spring. For escape, we went to Carnegie Hall to hear the Cleveland Orchestra concert performance of Salome, Richard Straus’s opera, which also brought up a topic of current political significance, severe punishment for homosexuality exacted a bit more than a century ago. Strauss used the text of Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play, originally written in French, as its libretto, as translated into German by Hedwig Lachman, because it Wilde’s words were more stark and impressive than a doctored opera-ready libretto. Oscar Wilde the brilliant Anglo-Irish playwright/novelist/poet lit up the scene in London’s art and literary world in the last decade of the 1800s, with four plays of caustic social criticism, particularly The Importance of Being Earnest, and a novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey. Salome, translated into English by his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, was banned from the British stage, and by the time of its eventual acceptance Wilde was in jail, sentenced to two years of hard labor, on the charge of immorality. When Richard Strauss started his composition, in 1903, Wilde had died, his health supposedly shattered by the imprisonment. The opera, directed by Franz Welser-Most, had four major singers. Slim Swedish soprano Nina Stemme, a Wagnerian singer of world-wide repute, was outstandingly strong-voiced Salome, while Austrian tenor Rudolf Schasching gave us a gentle Tetrarch Herod of Judea. As the modern world knows from the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, a beautiful young princesse’s dancing so charmed the Tetrarch that he offered her anything she wished, as a reward. Much to the rulers’ shock, the princess, identified as named Salome by the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, asked for the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter Despite much pleading on part of Herod, offering her gold, silver and beautiful pheasants, the 16-year old insisted on her bloody reward, pressing on Herod’s honor, until she succeeded, with her mother Herodias’s (American mezzo-soprano Jane Henschel) support. When the bloody gift was finally presented (figuratively, to the tense audience’s great relief), it became apparent, from a long solo wail, that the prophet (American bass-baritone Eric Owens) had gravely insulted the passionate girl by refusing to kiss her, and injured her mother, by accusing the latter with repeated adultery. When Salome won, she congratulated herself for being finally able to kiss the dead Prophet’s lips. A gruesome ending, but very effective drama. Wilde was an extraordinarily powerful poet and dramatist, who could drain the last drop of emotion from a scene, and Straus’s monotonous but tension–laden music provided a threat-filled crescendo base for the emotions. The climactic release at the end was received by the audience with thunderous applause. When we arrived home from Carnegie Hall, the first news on the radio was the slaughter of dozens of Syrian Sunni families by army soldiers and Alavite volunteers. The only sweetness of the evening came from the Ricola candies freely supplied by the Hall, to suppress coughs, and I give you an inside-NYC secret – the best Ricolas are the red ones.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis Saturday April 22, 2012m Earth Day, came to us with a warning of the greatest April storm and three-inch rainfall ever, to attack the Northeast within a day or two. It also came with another warning, from our upstate friends Kathy and Paul, who told us to worry about a possible decision of the NYS Dept of Environmental Conservation and its Advisory Council, approving hydro-fracking for natural gas in our southern area, on the edge of the gas-rich Marcellus Shale. You may remember that President Obama stated, in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, January 24, 2012 that his administration will take every possible action to safely expand shale gas drilling efforts. It was an endorsement of a practice that has divided statehouses, as lawmakers debate how to develop the industry while mitigating its environmental impacts. The development of natural gas will create 600,000 jobs and produce power for trucks and factories that is cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy, said the President, in what appeared to be a politics-over –conviction decision. His words could be a boon to lawmakers in shale-rich states hoping to stoke natural gas development by limiting restrictions on the practice of hydraulic fracturing, a method of improving the extraction of natural gas by drilling deep (200 to 2,000- plus ft) wells, and blasting deep into the openings millions of gallons of water laced with sand and toxic chemicals. Opponents of the technique — commonly known as fracking — say it taints local aquifers, putting drinking water supplies at risk. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has strongly indicated that he wants NYC water supply protected from contamination; he may able to protect the three NYC conduits, Croton (completed 1880), Catskills (1916) and Delaware aqueducts (1945, supplies ½ of city water) ,but there is the concern that the last mentioned uses some water from the Delaware River Basin (a source contractually shared by NYS-including NYC- NJ, DE and PA) that may cross hydro- fracking territory. Governor Andrew Cuomo has directed NYS Environmental Conservation Department to evaluate, with the aid of its legislative advisory committee, whether the state should engage in supporting hydro-fracking. Meanwhile, in a law suit between Anschutz Exploratory Company and the town of Dryden in Tompkins County, Judge Philip R. Ramsey of the NYS Supreme Court in Feb 2012 ruled that local governments can use their zoning laws to determine whether to permit oil and gas drilling.; and a farmer in Otsego County sued her local government, claiming encroachment on her rights regarding exploring on private property. And then there is a statement from the NYS Conservation Department that in matters of gas and oil state mining laws should prevail over local laws , except in jurisdiction over local roads. This seems to open new reviews, since roads are highly destructible. Further, some concerns about earthquakes have arisen. Checking the status of hydro-fracking further, in the NYSCD website, it appears that wells of 600 ft. plus depth need NYS review and approval. We should note that, since the late 1800s, NYS has drilled 75,000 oil, gas and salt wells, of which 14,000 are still active. To gain first-hand knowledge, our upstate friends have driven over to Williamsport in PA, a town of 120,000 inhabitants , west of Scranton, once the lumber capital of the world, with baronial mansions, currently the place of Little League world championships. Five years ago land agents invaded the territory and bought up gas drilling rights , and by 2009 Talisman Energy from Calgary had 53 wells, estimated to reach 150 plus during 2011. They produce 315 M cubic feet of gas a day. The roads are clogged by super-heavy Halliburton trucks, country lanes are in bad repair and getting destroyed . There is the thought that Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret meetings with gas and oil industry executives formed the basis of this activity, which is spreading towards the M arcellus Shale area edge in New York. Explorations in PA continue, with nearby Youngstown OH another active area. This activity, starting with drilling down as much as 2,000 feet, then sinking a pipe to contain the filling up of the hole, then sinking a liner cement pipe, and , if necessary, drilling up to another 2,000 feet and putting in a lower containment pipe, before pouring water, oil and chemicals under high pressure to fracture the rock, or shale, and pressing out the gas, has impact on the hard cover of the planet, the skin above the boiling magma. Most immediate is that of earthquakes. The chemicals constitute less than ½ of 1 percent of the fracturing mix, per industry sources, and have not yet heavily penetrated people’s water sources Governor John Kasich of Ohio, subsequent to the 4 Richter scale earthquakes in Youngstown, just over the PA borderline, had ordered a moratorium in a certain area of his pre-Cambrian layer of shale, which has since been removed, compensated by the addition of new government controls. Earthquakes were also reported in Arkansas. In NYS the resistance against hydro racking is limited, seemingly led by the Riverkeepers and land conservancy people. NY capital market money has gone into development, and the argument of “poisoning of water, our nonrenewable resource,” is being countered by proposals of how industry will stop the possible dangerous contamination of water. One might ask, how do you bring the water back back when it is dissipated and used to keep up the pressure on the gas; ? How do you purify all drinking water for mankind, at what cost? It may be that the markets are realizing this, since 1st Q 2012 economic growth is at 2.2 percent, and while manufacturing is up, the expected oil and gas industry investment spending is not there. President Obama may well be advised to review the controls needed to fulfill his 600,000 job proposal.