The Mysterious Celtics Just Got a Lot More Obvious; And Bit Better

It's been an interesting few years as a Celtic fan -- five, specifically. The team's rise with Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen (for most of it) was intense. It was championship level basketball every night, with great personalities and memorable shots. And of course there was Rondo -- the good Rondo. The great Rondo. His dive-to-the-floor strip of Jason Williams during the 2010 playoffs, collection of the ball and drive to the hoop for the lay-up is one of the most satisfying basketball plays I've ever seen. After years in the wilderness when the Bird-McHale-Parish years ended, it was great to see the co-greatest of NBA franchises (props, Lakers) in fact be great again. That's even if taking the 2010 championship to make it a pair of Larry O'Briens would have truly sealed it as one of the great eras in the team's history.

All of that stopped, though, as it had to, when Garnett and Pierce were traded to New Jersey in 2013. The team won 25 games in 2013-4 and, while there were some enjoyable players -- Brandon Bass was always a worker and Jared Sullinger, for all the griping about his weight, was surprisingly good -- Jeff Green was the teams best player with an injured Rondo playing thirty games. The hope was the coach, and the massive array of draft picks they acquired from the Nets. Brad Stevens sure looked like he knew what he was doing, and the C's were on their way to potentially getting some intriguing talent -- though we all knew it would take a few, if not several, years for all of it to gel.

Then something unexpected happened. What was supposed to be a multi-year rebuild suddenly was not as Stevens turned out to really know what he was doing -- he beautifully manages rosters and his teams play with a gorgeous blend of both steadiness and pace -- and the C's struck gold in deciding to move on from Rondo, grabbing Brandon Bassx2 in Jae Crowder, hitting the sweet spot with their usage of Evan Turner and getting an even better deal with the mid-season acquisition of Isaiah Thomas. At the time, anyway (that changed last year), there was no superstar on the team. That was clear, and almost every commentator noted it. Something funny, however, began to lock into place. 1-12, almost every Celtic was about as good as everyone else -- and better yet, though no one was great, they were in fact all pretty good. Solid draft picks Kelly Olynyk and Marcus Smart were that -- solid players who contributed. Avery Bradley might have some deficiencies in his offensive game. You loved watching him play defense, though. Tyler Zeller was never going to be Shaq or Dwight in their primes. He played hard, though, and rolled to the hoop at the right moments. And Isaiah was small. But he had one heck of a knack of finding a way of putting the ball in the hoop.

And so it was again the year after. Everyone got just a little bit better, they threw in a couple of extra spare parts, grabbed another solid-if-not-spectacular draft pick in Terry Rozier, and what was roughly a .500 team became rather more than that via the simple fact that, in essence, Boston never went to their bench on a team filled with solid quality NBA players. I.e., there simply was no drop-off when Boston subbed-in, whereas even with the best teams, when the Stephs and LeBrons and Durants and Westbrooks tired out, one usually had to bring in someone along the way one would rather not. That's how the Celtics won games -- and became a kind of unique mystery in the process. It was the idea that you could get to a hundred with ten units of ten as well as adding up a unit of fifty, one of thirty, one of fifteen and then a bunch of threes, twos, fours and ones. And because there was no uber-player, the Celtics seemed to relish in the fact that they could surprise everyone, winning through process and the simple joy of being who they were.

The problem with that approach, though, was the playoffs. You could watch the Celtics compete and grind their way to somewhere between and .500 and .600 record by having more depth and continuity than opponents over 82 games. When your season's contingent upon you being able to blow by an opponent in a short series, though, you'd better have someone -- best yet, two or three someones -- whom you can't stop from putting the ball in the hoop. I.e., it's darn tough to get through a playoff series without a superstar of some kind, which as of 2015-6 -- though Isaiah was coming close -- the Celtics didn't have. And so you had a second straight year of losing in the first round of the playoffs.

The Celts had caproom, though, and so there was a chance -- a chance -- that in the 2016 offseason, they could add that superstar via free agency. They didn't quite. They added an All-Star in Al Horford, who turned out to be a slightly better version of the players they already had: good-if-not-spectacular at everything, workman-like, dedicated (I don't try to undo Horford here; an excellent player -- again, though, just not a superstar). Isaiah, though, went berserk. Making unbelievable drive after unbelievable drive to the hoop, the smallest of Celtics (and one of the smallest NBA players over the last few decades period) scored in a way Boston hadn't seen since Bird. And all of a sudden, though the depth of the team was still there, there were a couple of players with a bit more to offer -- wherein the Celtics weren't just a good, fun team that always competed, but a pretty darn good, fun team that always competed. They got through two playoff series. They enjoyed the ride. In the regular season, they won against Golden State in Golden State (the Warriors feature the most ferocious line-up since the 1990s Bulls). But they hit that wall. There's four teams in the NBA with players you can't stop: Golden State, Cleveland, Oklahoma City and Houston, and only two of those have star level supporting casts. Running into one of those teams in the Conference Finals -- the Cavaliers -- the Celtics got hammered. Yeah, Isaiah Thomas got hurt. However, it was simply clear that when you keyed in on him, you could slow him down (that's virtually impossible with LeBron James or Kevin Durant), and there was definitely no Steph Curry or Kyrie Irving -- nor a Draymond Green or Klay Thompson -- on the side. There was Horford -- good. Beyond that, though, the Celts were hoping that a chest full of solidly built AK 47s might take down a position manned by a couple of heavy-duty Gatling guns. Firepower wins every time.

The Celts thus had a choice. For sure -- there was no reason to make the team worse. The very solid talent that riddled the roster shouldn't be pawned off in a desperate hope that anyone would come their way. To make that leap, though -- to simply acquire more firepower -- the Celtics had to get some weapons with a high caliber, and that was going to cost. That meant a max contract for Brandon Hayward -- one of the couple of best free agents on the market. Paying for heavier weaponry meant getting rid of a couple of the AKs, however, which meant that stalwarts like Bradley and Olynyk had to go. But there was still that question -- really, had Boston gotten to where it might think, in a short battle, there was enough ammo to pick off one of the big dogs; to really ensure they had a legit chance to be there at the end? Again, the thinking was "likely not." In part that had not only to do with the roster, but with Thomas. It wasn't just the injury at the end of the playoffs. It was the improbability of what he seemed to do. He is so small. The margin of error for his shots and drives to the hoops is so thin. Was he really going to absolutely go bananas for a second straight season, or might the only player on the team who put up superstar numbers be really likely to see a 4-5% drop-off, which for the Celtics would definitely mean they'd be on the outside looking in? Moreover, there was certainly no way to expect more from a player who was already milking his physical potential for more than every ounce it was worth.

That leads us to the Kyrie Irving trade. For reasons of which many are unsure, Kyrie didn't want to play second fiddle to LeBron's first violin in Cleveland anymore. Rather than poison the atmosphere, the Cavs looked into trade partners. They found one -- the Celtics; one of the rare times direct conference rivals have swapped stars. Kyrie offered what the Celtics didn't have -- an absolute top echelon player who might get better, and really enter that pantheon of top tier stars. There's nothing Thomas did that Kyrie couldn't do -- and with Kyrie, there was the chance that he could do even more. At the very least, it seemed more likely that he could keep doing what he and Thomas both did in 2016-7 for a longer time: score prodigously and dish the ball. Kyrie is more solidly built, and not all of his drives to the hoop were accompanied by a kind of disbelief that he managed to get there at all.

That's the question around this trade -- the Kyrie for Isaiah deal: did the Celtics get better? Were it a one-to-one swap of Kyrie for Isaiah, the answer would almost certainly be yes. It just seems more reliable that you're going to get that top echelon output from Kyrie for years to come. What he does just looks less fragile. It wasn't just a Kyrie for Isaiah trade, however. The Celts had to give up Jae Crowder and a top draft pick (as well as some precious size in Ante Zizic, a European import). Crowder hurts. The absolute prototypical solid weapon in what up to now had been the Celtics' architecture, in giving him to Cleveland, the Celtics officially shifted from a team relying on consistency and depth -- the idea of simply being really good -- to a team adopting the "grab-as-many-stars-as-you-can" approach (and fill in as much of the roster as possible from there). This could pay off in a few years. If -- if -- they can grab one more star, or if one of two highly promising recent draft picks (either Jaylen Brown or Jayson Tatum) turns into a star in his own right, the Celts have the guns to shoot with anyone in the league. Yeah, sure -- Golden State is in insanity territory by carrying probably 4 of the top 20, if not 15 players, in the league on one roster, including two clearly in the top 5. It might not be that any roster could take them down in the next three or four years. With one more legit star, though, the Celtics would have as good a chance as any. It's an intriguing storyline.

Why then Kyrie now? Why this moment two break up the absolutely unique phenomenon that was the Celtics over the past two years with its essentially star-less "twelve guys who all play both well and hard" approach? It's a logical extension of the Horford and especially Hayward signings -- you don't get two stars without one, you don't get three without two, and you don't get four without three. Want to create a superteam that can wrestle Cleveland to the ground and really give Golden State a run for its money? Create a destination where that last star can say "all the pieces are in place but me; add me, though, and we're there." Then there's also the playoffs in any given year. In today's NBA, if you want to at all think you might be standing at the end of it all, you've at least got to have one guy with Kyrie's potential and talent -- the kind of guy who perhaps really couldn't be shut down, and for which there'd be no answer. We've seen not only that potential in Kyrie's game, but its actually emergence in last year's finals. It's that Kyrie the Celtics are banking on having bought.

The state of the Celtics is thus this. With the departures of Avery Bradley and Jae Crowder -- not to mention Olynyk -- they've given up a lot of defense. The recent C's could be an absolutely dastardly lock-down team when they wanted to, and they won't be that particularly often this year. The effort's likely to be there. On a team still featuring Horford and Marcus Smart, there'll be enough leadership to demand effort, and players like Brown have shown themselves to be willing on the defensive end. The absolute hounding the Celtics could give you, though, is over. Teams will score 100 on them with noticeably more regularity.

There's also a much bigger drop-off between the starters and the bench. That was the magic and mystery of the Celtics over the past three season. Lose a starter? Until Thomas this past year, it really didn't matter. The C's came at you in waves and were pretty sure that, even if your starting unit might outscore theirs by a few points, they'd have those points back once each team had run through ten men. Now you go from Horford, Hayward, Irving, Marcus Morris and Jaylen Brown to Marcus Smart, Jason Tatum, Terry Rozier, Aaron Baynes and -- well, from there, we're not sure precisely who. Shane Larkin? This year's second round draft pick? Guerschon "The Dancing Bear" Yabusele? There's some intriguing talent there. Tatum could be a real monster -- a real 12 point a game guy this year and 20 in the future. Smart is always a tough, tough defender and worth a good deal more than he looks. Rozier actually has a quite high ceiling, and has had moments in his pro career where he's been the most dynamic player on the floor. There's absolutely an A and B team on the Celtics now, though, whereas, in recent years, it was fascinating to watch a team full of B+ guys take down teams with A players.

That's what the Celtics have now, though, that they didn't before. They've got one guy clearly in the A category and a couple of A-'s. They might win the same 60% or so of their games over an 82-game season as they've won in recent years. Come the playoffs, though, they've more clearly got something to fire back with at the stiffest competition, and they're a very inviting destination for one more top-cut acquisition via either free agency or trade. The Celts have the obvious model now; they shed their recent mystery and charm. It's the way to collect playoff wins, though, which, as I see it, is what the calculation here is 100% about.

John Kerry's Dog, the Tale of 74 Million and Why It's Time for a New Formation on the Left -- Or, Put on a Pussyhat, Mr. Secretary

I've gotten to like John Kerry a bit more. I wasn't impressed in 2004 when, predictable though it may have been, he and his campaign descended into a lot of self-promotional, flag-waving stuff about his war record, he couldn't take down the stationary target that was George Bush, Jr., his campaign projected a vast air of privilege and the candidate himself exhibited a maddening propensity to gravitate centerwards on wide variety of issues. The last point may be a Democratic disease; contrary to what many on the right would tell you, the U.S.' version of a center-left party is hardly a raging bunch of socialists. Still, like many in the Obama Administration -- not the least of whom was Obama himself -- Kerry found his mettle in the face of Donald Trump. American's foreign minister spent not a small portion of his international political capital in the days since November 8 making it clear to the world that it was his opinion that rightward lurches were no good for anyone and that politics based on border closures and hyper-nationalism didn't improve chances for global peace -- wherein it became clear that, at the end of the day, international concord was in fact the goal of the American administration over the past eight years. Kerry's words were like a cool glass of water: they tasted awfully good after a damn long time in the sauna, especially a sauna smelling of old socks. Decoder ring: "damn long time in the sauna" means all the months we had to listen to Trump. "Old socks" concerns the quality of what he has had to say.

Of course, Trump has now been sworn in. As much as it might feel like it, that's neither rumor nor illusion. The man is president and, for better or worse, he's there legitimately. Now, 12 million more people did not vote for Trump than did -- something that's not easy to remember when he frequently crows about how "badly" he beat his opponents and, even when the news media raises the fact that Trump lost the popular vote, they only refer to the 2.8 million more votes received by Hillary Clinton as opposed to Trump. Obviously, 2.8 million is a lot of votes -- Bush, Jr., e.g., received about 500,000 fewer votes than Al Gore the last time we had a President who lost the popular vote. It is important to remember, though, that the Green Party came up a hair short of 1.5 million votes (1.5 million is about the size of the Austrian city Vienna), the Libertarian Party, with its free pot, ultra-liberal civil liberties agenda, came up a hair short of 4.5 million votes (roughly the size of greater Berlin), the Party for Socialism and Liberation with its ticket of Gloria La Riva and Eugene Puryear scored 75,000 votes (the size of a great number of American county seats), Bernie Sanders, who helped nominate Hillary Clinton, got 111,000 votes and anti-Trump Republican Evan McMullen got about the same number of votes as there are residents in the Swedish capital of Stockholm (about 750,000 [I'm not even counting the few million other write-ins]). I.e., a great many people didn't want Trump, and in both numerical reality and spirit, the man enters office as a minority President. That's the American system, though. Unless Trump is found guilty of some kind of maleficence or one does want to start an armed revolt, we'll have to live with his occupancy of the White House -- that until 2020, anyway.

Still, resistance -- perhaps the resistance -- emerged Saturday. Now, "emerged Saturday" might not be a fair characterization. I spent the bulk of Autumn 2016 on America's West Coast, and one can be dang sure that in cities from Portland to Seattle, people came heavily into the streets immediately after the November 8 results were announced to make it clear that they had no interest in the Trumpian worldview. Indeed, people in Portland and Seattle were but doing what no small number of people were doing all over the country, "from the Redwood Forests to the Gulfstream Waters," as the song goes. But my goodness; if the past few months has been a haze for the left and involved more than a few progressives staring into the bottom of empty liquor bottles, Saturday, they seem to have collectively drunk a glass of four raw eggs and started in on one of those Rocky-like training/workout scenes, replete with inspirational horn music and running up the stairs in front of some city hall in sweats to pump their fists in the air while looking triumphantly over the cityscape. Donning millions of "Pussyhats" and wielding signs saying things like "Fight Like a Girl" with the "A" in the anarchist circle, women and their allies from New York to Los Angeles to Anchorage to Lawrence, Kansas came out into the streets in what can only be described as droves, taking the fight right to Trump. It was cathartic. There were massive seas of pink as women and their allies took charge of the political day. Generations of women travelled together, with husband, boyfriends and partners often in support. I know, I know; the Women's Marches supposedly weren't anti-Trump. But, oh, they were. They went directly after the man and everything he stood for. Right on his front door.

The question that runs through a lot of the news cycle these days is "What Will the Democrats Do?" I.e., the Democratic Party is the main opposition party now, and there has been a lot of pseudo-tough talk about "fighting back" and "resisting" the Trump agenda coming from the party's leadership and central personalities. Some of the Party's important figures came out Saturday. Elizabeth Warren, senior Senator from Massachusetts, addressed the crowds at the Boston Women's March, declaring she was there to "fight back." Freshman Senator Kamala Harris of California spoke to the Washington march, asking protestors to "make today a beginning." New York Senator Kirstin Gillibrand did the same, saying that the point of hitting the streets, whether in Los Angeles or Los Alamos, was to stand up for "women's and civil rights." Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota met constituents and posed for pictures -- smiles all around. The Obamas, though, who are immensely popular, didn't take their Marine helicopter to a D.C. suburb, grab a breather and show up and the head of the march. They went off into quiet retreat in Palm Springs, California. Hillary Clinton, the supposed "change-maker" who sought to shatter that "highest of glass ceilings" but managed to Tweet; she was, as she herself noted, "scrolling" through images of the Women's March. John Kerry donned a furry bomber jacket and appeared with what seems to be a particularly well-trained Golden Retriever. Top congressional Democrat Chuck Schumer did show up at proceedings in New York. However, he's largely been reduced to offering platitudes like those he did on George Stephanopoulos' This Week in which he declared the intense protests that broke out not only in the U.S. but all over the world as part of a "Grand...Tradition" (thanks for the history lesson, Chuck). In the meantime, cabinet confirmation hearings proceed. There are overtures to working with Trump when possible (infrastructure and opposition to the TPP are popular items in this regard). Despite, yes, some cutting moments with Trump's nominees (Betsy DeVos got it pretty good for knowing little about laws and standards surrounding public schools), there's been a lot of "he-he and haw-haw" as well. Indeed, though the man gained office on a campaign of culturally if not legally disenfranchising ranges of minorities, there's a continuing engagement with parliamentary procedure and apparent collegiality in which it appears that, while Trump's views may be personally distasteful for many sitting in the United States' lawmaking bodies, there's a willingness to play along with the man's claim to legitimacy even though he seems to have a patently difficult time recognizing the legitimacy of anyone other than those from whom he simply hears a "yes." Free speech, one might remember, does extend to all citizens. Al Franken, funny though he may be, doesn't have to crack jokes with Rick Perry or meet him in his free time to gain further information about the man (hasn't Perry been around long enough such that we know that essence of his views?). Diane Feinstein could do more than just text that she appreciates her "sisters" when they march -- she could at least send someone from her office to grab a bull horn and walk at the front of their ranks. No one put the Democratic leadership at gun point and said "attend the inauguration" (though one worries it might come to that one day). One can sit stony faced and say "I refuse to countenance any statement, policy position or attempt to formulate a government based on views explicitly oriented towards undermining people's sense of security and denying recognitions of universal personhood." Being a member of the American government or the member of a major American political party doesn't obligate one to play nice. As more than a few hats, placards and tee-shirts said Saturday, one can be -- can be, anyway -- a "pussy" that "grabs back."

Now, the funny thing is -- and I want to be careful about overusing the phrase, provocative though it is -- it appears that there's a heck of a large segment of the American polity, of all genders, races and creeds, wanting to be "pussies" that "grab back." There appears to be an extensive number of Americans who are darn willing to go right up to Trump and his coterie and tell them what they can do with their policies and so-called "movement." Those members of the American polity were there Saturday, in the streets. This was not "let's ask some perhaps-somewhat-provocative questions at a Senate hearing but then accept the results of the votes we know are coming." This was not saying "I'm ready for the fight" and then only "fighting" to a certain degree. This was saying "I reject, and I won't acquiesce." This was saying "I won't play along, and I'll take control of public space and discourse when I see fit or feel that I need." This was not just a mild reminder of equal rights and universal humanity. It was an insistence, near-existentially so, on the recognition of such things -- and a taking of some of them in the process. And, indeed, that radicalism -- that insistence on recognition -- was tied directly to a segment of the American polity that does not necessarily operate within the catechism of "well, if one party's not in power, than the other one is." The clarion call of the Women's March -- harkening to counter-cultural figures such as Angela Davis, who spoke, as well as the asymmetrical anti-authoritarianism of postmodern politics (represented in the mode of protest [Pussyhats? Yeah!]) -- was to a radical thinking exceeding any nation and its constitution; it was to modes of opposition and the asking for futures of care, practices denouncing hierarchy and the suggestion of social formations not always fitting nicely into boxes of middle-class liberalism or minimal realizations of rights. The concentration of voice felt like a call for something more maximal -- something more global in which traditional social formations that bring certain hierarchies are formally denounced and then laid on the table to be deconstructed in ways such that they can't come back. Put plainly, Saturday appeared a joining of forces: mainstream Democrats with the left-wing of that party together again with coalitions of activists playing well outside the boundaries of the party of the candidate who received 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump. I.e., the kind of resistance and activism that emerged over the weekend seemed to take us into decidedly different parts of the 74 million people who did not support the strutting, insulting braggadocio that, unfortunately, did collect 62 million-plus votes (Trump). The center of gravity Saturday wasn't the center of the Democratic Party or the politics of American consensus. Saturday's fulcrum was rather more to the left -- more towards something social- and radical-democratic; more towards the construction of a more thoroughly radical alternative than usual, two-party Amero-politics tends to present.

I grant: the reality of 2016 may be that Donald Trump hit a nerve. Trump activated enough energy from a patriarchal, nationalist right -- perhaps conjoined to certain legitimate economic concerns (or an imagination of potentially legitimate economic concerns) -- that a particular sector of the American populace spoke with a louder voice than one might expect. Trump may have not found a large enough "silent minority" such that one might call it a "silent majority."  Again, except in a universe where gravity is reversed, 62 million votes never outnumbers 74 million. Trump may have found a pissed-off-enough minority, however, that when they activated their vocal chords, the cacophony that ensued became loud enough to drown a lot else out. That's a motley chorus based in real anger -- an anger manifesting itself in a heck of a lot of places in the world. From France to Germany to America to Denmark, a lot of people want to shut borders and start declaring who belongs and who "doesn't." There's a lot of intense identity-staking and, because of the force of the articulations involved -- the often flat-out level of emotion to which they're bound -- resisting such ideas will take force itself. It will take something beyond vague assertions that one is "fighting" by asking what at the end of the day wind up being polite questions from one side or the other of senatorial daises according to the rules of hearings or legislative procedure. It means adopting stony-faced visages and not offering to play along. It means looking broadly and more radically for allies across the political spectrum and moving one's center of gravity to political locales where one's actions can't be interpreted in any other way other than that one is resisting. A thorough resistance means not insisting that one is somehow being "impractical" if one stands outside long-accepted structures -- that especially as the formations that are traditionally claimed as the "legitimate left" don't seem to be able to formulate a message that resonates forcefully enough to offer alternatives to what has become a highly activated alt-right. Both in America and in the world, the Democratic Party has had its place. From Roosevelt to Kennedy to Johnson to Carter and Clinton, the Party has made meaningful contributions to civil rights and international institutions. The Democratic Party's center right now, however, is neither the real center of gravity of social resistance nor, judging from this weekend's marches, the apparent center of real wins (which Saturday was). The construction of a real D/democratic resistance will come from either a radical reformulation of America's center-left part along social democratic lines, or the construction of an entirely new formation on the left  less interested in acquiescence to vested interests and things "as is": Big Bill Haywood meets Occupy, perhaps. The right end of the new left spectrum might begin with types like Elizabeth Warren. My guess, though, is that the center of the new American left begins somewhere rather more to the port side than that.

I appreciate John Kerry coming to the Washington Women's March with his dog. Kerry strolled through some of the crowds, shaking hands and engaging in some useful solidarity. It was in tack with a strong ending as Secretary of State. He was walking with a dog, though, and, man, fur-collared bomber jackets at a demo? Ditch the dog and put on a Pussyhat, Mr. Secretary. That'll put you and your party exactly where you need to be.

Orlando

(Note: this was composed before Trump and Clinton delivered their post-Orlando speeches)

One can raise the same question every time: how many people were killed in other places in the world yesterday, and not just in the what-happens-there-always-grabs attention United States? It's a good question. I'm not sure what to say about yesterday specifically -- though I can say that it was reported that the Syrian government began barrel-bombing the town of Daraya but hours after the Assad junta begrudgingly allowed food aid into the city for the first time in years. No one knows how many were killed. Twenty-eight barrel bombs were dropped, however, as people began to distribute the aid amongst themselves. I'm no military expert. However, it sounds like the kind of thing where some number of dozens could have easily been killed (see Al-Jazeera 2016). We'll wait for the numbers to come out.

Be that as it may, roughly fifty people (forty-nine plus the shooter) were killed in Orlando yesterday in what's the deadliest shooting attack in the U.S. since a twenty year-old took a semi-automatic assault rifle and killed twenty-plus mostly-children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012. Orlando was confusing. On one hand, it seemed to play directly into the global "war on terror" as the gunman, Omar Mateen (an American) apparently called 911 to pledge his loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the so-called Islamic State. It's something one can do: "lone wolf it" -- that as long as one finds a way to publicly give credit to the group (see Myre 2016). Still, if Orlando was an IS event, one has to say they choose a totally new target: LGBT American life. Of course, the massively conservative Islam to which IS adheres is no friend to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual world. Nonetheless, the Pulse nightclub is a very different target than the symbols of cosmpolitan thought and empire (e.g., Charlie Hebdo or the Twin Towers) traditionally topping the list of first al-Qaeda and now Islamic State terror targets. That's if Orlando was an "IS event."  Though professing support for al-Baghdadi, the group itself seemed largely unaware of what happened (no one asked Mateen to call), and there is a reasonable question to ask about what heavily armed Americans are doing roaming the ally ways and byways of their own city streets. Combined with Mateen's mental instability, the event mashed a heavy dose of international politics into with the American social cake. The result was a wafer whose different flavors are hard to taste. That's except for the fact that forty-nine innocent lives were lost: voices and presences whose individuality will never be replaced.

There's much that can be said about this. However, I'd like to make two short points. Firstly, Orlando rammed directly into the American electoral cycle -- the guaranteed-to-be wild showdown just kicking off between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump -- and one of those figures (Trump) will ask us to make a human rights for security trade-off in the name of being "smart" (his vocabulary, not mine [see McCaskill and East 2016]). This isn't new. Trump's long been known for his proposed "Muslim ban" -- a concept contradicting the right to seek asylum discussed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948, article 14) -- and in the wake of the November attacks at the Bataclan and Stade de France, Trump proposed reinstating what in New York, anyway, had been a post-9/11 practice of placing extra surveillance on various locales grounding Muslim life (mosques, e.g.).* Now, that's racial profiling, and it contradicts the non-discriminatory nature of any human right (see Vandenhole 2005). I will admit, rights-for-security isn't an illegitimate idea. It's been well-noted that in times of emergency, states have the right to "derogate" otherwise essential human rights (Mégret 2014). Still, one has to be extremely careful with what one calls an "emergency" as if one isn't, one opens oneself to always living in a state of emergency and any conflict, heightened level of suspicion or degree of international strife becoming the grounds for eliminating due process as well as other potential basic freedoms and civil rights (the right to privacy, e.g.). Drumming up political popularity via curtailing civil liberties, or suggesting that one might, is an extremely dangerous idea. It cuts against any agreed-upon thinking about, and certainly the intended spirit, of universal justice. Of course, that might be the point. Trump's argument might be that rights don't belong to all; they exist in the context of specific states and, within those, rights really pertain to groups one thinks are "acceptable." Of course, that relies on a cultural imagination -- intuitive senses of who an entire people might be. That's whether or not those senses bear any relation to what anyone's particular sensibilities may be or not.**

Clinton, of course, will take a more measured approach. Thank god; if 2016 was just about one-upsmanship and competitions regarding who's genuinely "tough," the whole  electoral exercise would push the boundaries of mental pain. Still, the United States' second female Secretary of State has her exceptionalisms as well. In debating Bernie Sanders during the primary season, e.g., Clinton carefully noted that regarding policies foreign and domestic, one was dealing with "the United States of America" and not the practices of other states or political polities (CNN 2015).*** She's talked little about it in the 2016 campaign. Historically, however, while not explicitly opposing the International Criminal Court, she's also noted her reservations about the now fourteen year-old international justice organ (Vote Smart 2005).**** No doubt: Hillary Clinton's rhetoric will be radically less inflammatory and noticeably more inclusive than that of Trump. She seems to think that the American Dream involves some basic adherence to civil rights (see Pierce 2015). Still, we need to be careful that sympathetic reactions to an American event doesn't translate into a plague of drone strikes, shady "rendering" practices or surveillance practices violating various levels of privacy and security of person -- to say nothing of the right to life. Again, rights are complex. They are utopic. As legal scholar Learned Hand once said, however, "Thou shalt not ration justice" (in Minor and Rawson 2005, 352). Laws should principally come from our inherent worth. That's based on the notion that all are equal and that one's committing a crime if one leaves others without the full range of rights and freedoms.

That's point one. Point two, however, is that I'm astounded how far American, if not global, society has come in accepting LGBT subjectivity and life. Orlando was an attack on precisely those things and, regardless of what the shooter's most particular motives were -- whether he was an IS surrogate or not -- it's clear he acted on ideas that queer life is somehow a "sin." It's a medieval mindset who's traction may be loosing in the modern world. As far as yesterday goes, however, Mateen stood totally alone. No one but no one made common cause with the idea that gay life is "wrong," and no one heard any beyond unacceptable vocabulary that one might have heard at other ties suggesting that someone got what they "deserve."***** Of course, there were differences in tone. A pro-LGBT White House made solidarity with the gay community a point (The White House 2016); an attack on "sexual orientation," Barak Obama offered, was an attack on us all. However, even those parts of American society with intensely conservato-religious views held their tongue. The general tenor was that what happened really was an attack on some larger sense of American life. As opposed to the outcry when the Supreme Court supported gay marriage, or the attempt of some states to institute vaguely bizarre "bathroom laws," there seemed to be assent to the idea, at least momentarily, that lesbian, gay, transsexual and bisexual lives were as of much value as the lives of anyone else. It's hard to find solace in the murder of forty-nine people. If -- if -- any good is to come out of it, however, that might be it: the winding down of a debate as to whether there's a choice about non-discrimination on the basis of sexual preference or whether one might "choose" to accept the existence, reality and legitimacy of LGBT life. There isn't. The recognition of such equalities has arrived. If one isn't of such opinions oneself, suck it up and get used to it (on LGBT human rights, see Kollmana and Waitesa 2009).

Our are dangerous and troubling times. American is a political and cultural empire whose ups and downs may sometimes dominate headlines more than they should. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2016) notes, e.g., between 2003 and 2005, the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region cost upwards of 250,000 -- 250,000! -- lives; how much mainstream press coverage in Europe or the United States did that get? Still, what any humanitarian or supporter of basic rights knows is that it's a holocaust in singularity anytime bigotry and prejudice results in the end of a human life. When, in the name of "I know better than you," someone is denied the right to live, we enter a chasm of the dastardly from which we risk finding no way back. Orlando brought us forty-nine such moments; moments of the deepest despair. It brought us forty-nine miniatures of what Elie Wiesel (1982 [orig. 1956]) termed "night"  -- the journey into the darkest of part of the human soul. It's saddening; tragic. Maybe, though, what's emerges from such trials is the fecund soil of greater acceptance's grounds; that the good join hands and with a quiet stare indicating that those who don't value tolerance and inclusion might wait someplace else (or perhaps book some time on a therapist's couch). That's because for those of us who value rights' spirit, there's work to do. That's building peaceful social orders -- orders where weapons of death are hopefully in not in everyone's hands -- blame isn't assigned scattershot and we strive to protect everyone's rights. That's perhaps especially when, connected to a particular individual, some modicum of blame is to be found. Ours are dangerous and troubling times. They'll become more so, though, without the constant, vigilant and committed upholding of the broadest range of human rights. That's as it's in rights and their articulation in the social body that we find the expression of everyone's worth: that we maintain "reason and conscience" and that we gain the fullest articulation of all of us as "equal" and "free" (United Nations 1948, article 1).

* The larger point here is that Trump appears interested to take national a particular set of practices used by the NYPD, but then phased out in recent years. See Haberman (2015).
** In large part, I'm pointing to stereotyping here: the blanket charge that particular groups might be "tainted" with particular behaviors. See Morey and Yaqin (2011).
*** This was largely in the context of economics (specifically issues surrounding the health system). Still, Clinton seemed clear to mark out that, though a supporter of international rights, there were clear instances when the "American" way of doing things absolutely came first.
**** One can see the logic in this argument: anti-rights states using rights-based justice systems to tie up great powers and coalitions insisting on international right. Still, the notion that the U.S. has a special role as a specific rights monitor, arbiter of international conflicts or that it has a special ability to step in and out of rights, even in their defense, is a tenuous idea. It sticks out like a sore thumb that along with Turkey, the U.S. is the only NATO ally that doesn't subject itself to the rules of the International Criminal Court. See Ignatieff (2005).
***** Bernadette Barton (2012), e.g., notes the idea held out some conservative Christian communities (sometimes quite violently expressed by extreme activists) that LGBT individuals haven't been "graced by God;" that they're an "abomination" somehow, leading to the legitimization of some quite violent attitude. It is a small victory to have had at least one day -- perhaps the first -- without that kind of public vitriol.

References
Al-Jazeera. 2016. "Syria's Daraya Bombing: France 'Outraged beyond Words'" (June 12). Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/syria-daraya-bombing-france-outraged-words-160611045150576.html.
Barton, Bernadette. 2012. Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays. New York: New York University Press.
CNN, 2015. “CNN Democratic Debate – Full Transcript” (October 13, 2015). Available at http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/10/13/cnn-democratic-debate-full-transcript/
Haberman, Maggie. 2015. "Donald Trump Calls for Surveillance of ‘Certain Mosques’ and a Syrian Refugee Database." The New York Times, November 21, 2015, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/us/politics/donald-trump-syrian-muslims-surveillance.html?_r=0.
Ignatieff, Michael, ed. 2005. American Exceptionalism and Human Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kollmana, Kelly and Matthew Waitesa, eds. 2009. "The Global Politics of LGBT Human Rights." Special issue, Contemporary Politics 15 (1).
McCaskill, Nolan and Kirsten East. 2016. "Trump Takes Credit for 'Being Right on Radical Islamic Terrorism'" (June 12). Politico. Available at http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/trump-terrorism-tweet-224237
Mégret, Frédéric. 2014. "Nature of Obligations." In International Human Rights Law. Ed. Daniel Moeckli, Sangeeta Shah and Sandesh Sivakumaran, 96-118. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Minor, Margaret and Hugh Rawson, eds.  2006. The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morey, Peter and Amina Yaqin. 2011. Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Myre, Greg. 2016. "A Mass Shooter 'Pledges Allegiance' To ISIS. What Does This Mean?" NPR (June 13). Available at http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/06/13/481284054/a-mass-shooter-pledges-allegiance-to-isis-what-does-this-mean.
Pierce, Charles P. 2015. “Why Hillary Clinton's Stint as a Civil-Rights Secret Agent Matters Today.” Esquire (December 28). Available at http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a40772/hillary-clinton-undercover-civil-rights/.
The White House. 2016. President Obama on the Tragic Shooting in Orlando. Available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/06/12/president-obama-tragic-shooting-orlando.
United Nations. 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available at http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2016. "Darfur." Available at https://www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/search-the-collections/bibliography/darfur.
Wiesel, Elie. 1982. Night. New York: Bantam.
Vandenhole, Wouter. 2005. Non-Discrimination and Equality in the View of the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies. Antwerpen: Intersentia.

Rewind Find, or Why You're Gonna Love Eileen

It probably was time for hair metal to die.  The movement ("movement?" really?) started earlier than most think -- Van Halen was its progenital band, perhaps its best, and their first album came out in '78.  '78 -- just nine years removed from Woodstock.  Just a year after the Sex Pistol's Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977).  It's said, sometimes, that punk killed metal.  Not at all.  Punk was in fact a little metal itself, and the hair metal movement was just an extension of some of the moves Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and the Guess Who had been up to since the late '60s and early '70s anyway.

That said, what hair.  What mascara. (Mascara? Yup, mascara.)  (Oh yeah; Nirvana did it -- killed hair metal.  Soundgarden's Louder than Love [a masterpiece album] was out by '89, but it was Nirvana that killed hair metal with the überpopularity of Nevermind. Right; back to the mascara.)  Rock and roll bad-assness had always had its badass quality because it made you pause for a moment and think.  Elvis was badass in the '50s because, well, was it true?  Was frowning and shaking our heads at shaking teenage hips really a reflection of our own repression?  (It was.)  The Doors were badass because maybe society was so screwed that a long acid trip was just as valid as anything one might do with a "normal" life (the Vietnam War was on, after all).  The Sex Pistols were badass because maybe counterculture had become too predicable.  Counter-counterculture may have veered off into randomness.  However, at least it made you think about what counterculture was.

Brett Michaels.  Nikki Sixx.  The guys from Cinderella (a better band than you'd think, by the way).  Great White.  White Lion.  Winger.  Whitesnake.  Warrant.  (What was with all the "Ws"?)  When those dudes came out looking like ladies, as Steven Tyler and Co. so epically put it, it was tough to tell what was going on.  It was the '80s.  There was something of a Western hangover after Vietnam and malaise from the intensity of the politicization of everything.  It was, apparently, ok to be wealthy again.  Things should sell, and parties should be had.  Just to party.  Not to make a "statement."

Partying in the '80s involved a lot of barfing in swimming pools and tons of coke.  That itself wasn't wildly different.  However, the fact that it was just about swimming pools and coke was.  It was vapid through and through.  When Fredric Jameson wrote his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991, it was  this culture he had in mind.  It wasn't the networked, Internet, immediate simulation of everything culture we have today; the book was too early for that.  It was a vapid 1980s culture referring to nothing.  No social meaning, no sense of change and no solidarity. The nadir was Britny Fox.  If you're not blinded by the glint of the stage light off the top of their mega-perms in "Girls' School," you've got stronger eyes than I.

Still, what did come next?  Depression?  More drug habits -- just without the fun?  Power ballads where one just took the shine off the production values and asked for scratchy vocals instead of the operatics of the post-Plant generation? (Sorry; that's what Pearl Jam's "Daughter" is -- a power ballad.)  I'm not convinced.  If you're going to have a coke habit, have a COKE habit.  With some ladies (or dudes if you are a lady, or just swing that way if you're a dude).  Rockers have been depressed since John Lennon.  It's not new.

That leaves the music.  From the perspective of critics and musicians who wanted poetry with their music, hair metal stunk.  Endless weedling on guitars (though most songs clocked in around four minutes; hardly Yes-like marathons).  The words did stink ("A school bell rings off the day, brings in a stray, a few girls at play" [our friends from Britny Fox]).  At its best -- and the best all-around artifact from the era is Van Halen's 1984 -- hair metal could give a slightly dark insight into the culture of nothing; of hedonism and so-called virtuosity.  That was awfully rare, though.  Most of the time we were stuck with Warrant's "Cherry Pie" and Kip Winger's odes to "sparks" coming from the "corner of his eye" at a girl it turns out (surprise, surprise) who was "only seventeen."

Still, some of those dudes could play.  And not just the guys from VH.  When they balanced the production the right way -- and sometimes they did -- there could come some awfully crunchy hard-rockin' stuff that saved you from the darkness of thrash and death metal (indeed, hair metal was always extremely melodic) yet blew the doors off with an awfully rich tonal sound.  It was also ok to know how to play the guitar.  There wasn't much material for the bass players and drummers; it was mostly straight up rock beats with the occasional shuffle (and everything -- absolutely everything -- was in four).  Some of the guitar pyrotechnics were pretty pyroctechnical, though.  Guys from Ratt to Whitesnake to Tesla to even our brothers from Winger came up with some pretty inventive riffs.  It was a bit like getting in a Corvette.  Overdone?  Yes.  Potentially inelegant?  Yeah.  When done right, though, it was like jamming your foot to the bottom on one of those things and just feeling it explode under you.  Anybody had to smile.

That brings us to Steelheart.  It seems that Steelheart had a hit towards the end of all this:  1989's "Never Let You Go" from their eponymously titled debut album.  I don't remember it.  Apparently it climbed to #16 on the U.S. charts.  They released one more album, 1992's Tangled in Reins, before their lead singer got clocked in the head with a boom opening for Slaughter.  There's a very, very fine line before hair metal turns into a massive parody of itself (a very fine line).  That's a line not captured by the 1984 "rockumentary" This is Spinal Tap (with an umlaut placed over the "n") -- that parody was bit more on the '70s -- but this later Tap video, "The Majesty of Rock."   As a singer, Van Halen's David Lee Roth lived on that boundary line; he was almost a running joke about the genre.  However, Roth was backed by a pretty serious band that balanced out the whole affair.  As an entire group, though, Steelheart, totally unwittingly, ran the entire operation as absolutely right up to the border between parody and real music as possible.  Put the needle down on "Like Never Before" from Steelheart, and you'll begin by hearing the absolute prototype -- almost like it would be taught in hair metal school -- of the high tenor hard rock howl that was a prerequisite for every singer of that generation.  But it is prototypical; indeed, archetypical.  To a tee.  Like you have a hard rock coach in your living room teaching you how to go "Ooooooh" after being kicked in the nuts but still have it be singing.  That's before the band kicks in with absolutely textbook, perfectly distorted hard rock riffs with a ridiculously miked drum kit (there's no better example than "Everybody Loves Eileen," also from Steelheart).  It's a joke.  A total joke.  That is, if they didn't do it so well.

From a player's and riff perspective, there's some surprisingly good music to come from a handful of the bands from that era -- including bands not named Van Halen.  Ratt had a couple of rockin' tunes.  Tesla's "Edison's Medicine" has some pretty inventive stuff.  Lynch Mob has a forgotten couple of albums very much worth a listen from if you like electric guitar.  Even Winger's "Seventeen" starts with some absolutely killer chord changes.  Steelheart -- essentially forgotten (and in many ways justifiably so) -- comes with the whole package.  For every kid who ever sat in his bedroom in 1988 and thought "man, I'd love to have a ROCKIN' band and just, you know, totally ROCK," Steelheart actually made those albums.  Two of them.  Just as you'd imagine them.  They did it picture perfectly, and then the music died.

Steelheart's Steelheart and Tangled in Reins (7/10)

Vox Populi

Two exhibitions might have helped define the world of modern art:  the 1913 Armory Show, organized by the Association of American Painters at the Lexington Street National Guard Armory in New York -- introducing Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism to broad public audiences (it was advertised as the "new spirit" in art [figures like Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse and Picasso gained their first exposure to major North American publics]) -- and Hitler's 1937 exhibition of "degenerate art" in Munich, exhibiting the work of some of the exact same artists, or their inheritors, as examples of "dilettantism" and that ever-dangerous Jewish imagination.  You know -- the Jewish imagination that apparently ran the worldwide banking conspiracy and the Bolshevik revolution at the same time.  The American exhibition was relatively well-received.  Publics were shocked but interested; after New York, the show made its way to Chicago and Boston.  The Munich show was really well-received.  More than two million people went through its doors on its four  month run.  Down the street, Hitler put on another shindig with his favorite Nazi artists; happy farmers and Teutons with bulging muscles.  About a tenth as many people went to that.

The Neue Galerie, on New York's Upper East Side, has recently replicated Hitler's show based on what few pieces it was able to get its hands on -- some Klees, some Kirchners, some Kokoschkas (trouble makers, all of them).  The New Yorker reports in its March 24 issue that the exhibition also features a room with large empty frames formerly housing works by many of the same artists, probably destroyed during the War -- vanished into illicit black markets, or burned in that great symbolic gesture often used from inquisitions to anti-Semitic purges: tossing intellectually important artifacts onto a fire.  The "degenerate" show is a heck of a thing to try to reproduce.  Art in the first decades of the twentieth century was surrounded by torsion; how do you represent the human being on occasions when the West and the world were about to make themselves into a "slaughter bench," as philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once termed it -- and technology and politics were moving to extremes of space, time and logic which human minds were not used to comprehending?

Of course, looking back now, we can see the significance of daring strikes to remake representation; to tear the human being down to his or her psychological soul, as so many at the start of the twentieth century were prone to do, or simply contemplate the very nature (and possibility) of a straight line or whether the color blue (or any other color) made sense anymore (as more than a few were also prone to do in those years).  "Artists before their times," we might say; free spirits in search of publics, or because of their daring and "larger" society's lack of comprehension, figures doomed to be misunderstood and experience the pain of persecution before acceptance.  It's a funny thing with the popular mind or voice, though; that which can vote (sometimes hyper) nationalist parties into power, descend into the illogic of pogroms or bandy about anti-intellectualism over dinner tables.  It's the same people, at least in some cases, who can detect free expression when they see it and whose curiosity can be the beginning of acceptance even when acceptance is more curiosity than acceptance to begin with.  The art, and memorialization, at the Neue Galerie, is undoubtedly important and a historical monument worth noting.  The most significant monument, however, might be the faint echoes of the footsteps of the more than two million people who saw the show that one can still hear if one puts one's ear up to history.  Indeed, their footsteps echo especially loudly when compared with the very few footsteps echoing through the halls of the show Hitler and his cronies wanted us to see -- silence around art no one really wanted.  Seventy-seven years later, footsteps in an art gallery, of all places, ring like the sound of distant yet constant truth; the possibility of human insight subverting the worst attempts to deliver truths that, in the end, aren't really that.

Heimat

In an article from the 1990s, the sociologist Roland Robertson coined the term "glocalization."  There are massive forces in the world making us the same, he argued -- consumerism is high on the chart -- and the worlds of international organizations, "third way" politics and intense levels of electrified, postmodern communications brings us together.  However, they (at least can) help us lose senses of who we are; "alienation," as so many German philosophers described it, is a common modern experience.  Sometimes we react.  Sometimes, in reaction to globalization, we create nationalisms.  We refer to ancient customs; we seek to make ourselves different from others.  We react to globalization by invoking our small scale provincial mentalities and primitive subconsciences.  Sometimes we bring those mentalities into national and international politics; those can be scary moments -- moments when societies rip themselves into two along lines of left and right.  In any case, the local makes the global more complex.  Bringing the local into the picture means globalizaton concerns heterogenization as much as homogenization.  We pull away from each other as much as we pull together.  That's because globalization's "together" sometimes doesn't feel like our together -- one we own.

Underneath the local and provincial, Robertson argues, is nonetheless an impulse not just representing backwater reactionary mentalities.  The local concerns, he argues, a sense of home -- the attempt to find a place where you belong.  Feelings about that are tough to account for as they are intuitive and learned.  They are real, though, and help give us that last 5% of who we are.  That's as we fight against the anomie, washes of anonymity and senses of disorientation modern life can often provide.  An interesting thought is how to join home and  cosmos; the global metropole and the tribe from which one comes -- to find a love that can flow through both, drawing from the countryside's quiet while using the vibrancy of the global city to spread love's essence and break down the boundary lines between its locales.  As The Circumstance; goes home today, those thoughts are very much in the air.

Ban-zai?

A former kamikaze pilot -- yeah, there are a few left (some guys missed) -- turns out to be in possession of quite a  number of letters written by fellow World War II suicide pilots just before they got in their planes and did their thing.  Their "thing," of course, was a one way trip to oblivion.  Funny; hidden behind the grainy textures of black and white, given enough distance between now and then (seventy years or so) and made part of the mystical experience of a "great generation" (Second World War twenty-somethings), kamikazes don't seem so dangerous.  What's funny about it is that we get the pants scared off of us today when a generation of young men wraps headbands around their foreheads and dictates their last testaments.  Jihad; glory to the Emperor -- where does the difference lie?

Tadamasa Itatsu is in possession of some extremely unique documents:  the writings of young men who knew they were about to die in a fruitless, last ditch attempt to defend Japan from a country (the U.S) to whom it knew it was going to lose (kamikaze flights started in 1944 -- the last year or so of the War).  The letters are remarkable; they are to families, friends and loved ones, expressing last thoughts.  They tell why one chose to do what one was going to do.  They made manifestations of personal philosophy.  Some letters jar -- strident defenses of empire and glory.  Other letters are remarkable in their acknowledgement of the Japanese system as corrupt and outdated.  Some ask for more universal, democratic principles.  The power of the state and culture, though, was such that the few guys taking the last positions got into planes and flew themselves into the sides of boats anyway (well, decks, mostly).

The Japanese city of Minami Kyushu is asking UNESCO -- the UN's educational and cultural organization -- to grant the letters world heritage status.  World heritage status grants a kind of canonized status to cultural, and sometimes natural, artifacts.  World heritage sites and artifacts are protected by the Geneva convention.  No bombing that stuff.  The Chinese don't like the smell of it.  As with almost anything concerning Japan in the Second World War, China feels Japan should keep away from self-celebratory gestures, if not adopt positions of virtually eternal apology.  Westerners can do well to remember that from Chinese perspectives, the Second World War started in 1937 -- not 1939.  What would eventually happen in Poland had been well underway in China for a couple of years before Hitler swung into action, if not before.

Questions of historical memory are sticky.  The Chinese regularly get annoyed with the Japanese in that department -- over school textbooks, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visiting the Yasukuni Shrine; the one that memorializes Japan's war dead, including some ugly characters from the 1930s and '40s.  In relation to the Crimea situation, the Russians are throwing around the word "fascist" like it's summer 1941.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center is still hunting Nazis.  Morally valid actions?  No doubt.  I don't know if there should be a statute of limitations on human rights violations.  Occasionally, however, it can be worth remembering the power of being the ones who won -- you won.  No quarter should be given to the Slobodan Milosevices or Ratko Mladices of the world; they should be tried and jailed (though not put to death; that violates the same principles for which they should be brought to trial -- questions of the right to life).  There is, though, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years later an invisible line one crosses where the cause of world peace and the best possible conditions for human rights are served by forgetting.  Forgetting not what happened, but the anger that causes one to condemn.  Condemning happens in the present.  As time goes by, historical pictures gets blurred; things become more complicated than they appear.  The letters Mr. Itatsu wants to bring to the world's attention are like that -- the stories of men, some brainwashed by an over-zealous empire, some trembling in fear at what they were about to do, some knowing it was wrong.  I don't know about world heritage artifact.  It seems, though, there is undoubtedly an artifact there to be preserved, and one that could perhaps even be utilized as a site of forgiveness.  Sometimes you have to say "Banzai!" and jump into the letting go.