Richard Rodgers (1902-1979)

We mark the death on December 30, 1979 – 40 years ago today – of the American composer Richard Rodgers at the age of 77. A life-long New Yorker, Rodgers was one of the most prolific American composers of all time, having written the music for – among other works – 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs. He is one of only two people to have scored an EGOT, meaning that he received an Emmy, a GRAMMY® (three of them, actually), an Oscar, a Tony (seven in all) along with a Pulitzer Prize (for the musical South Pacific, in 1950). (For our information, the only other person to have won all five awards was the phenomenal Marvin Hamlisch, 1944-2012.)

We will discuss Maestro Rodgers as an exemplar of the “American crucible” in a bit. But first, permit me some first-person information that, believe it or not, will eventually have a direct bearing on this post.

An observation: we all do things to our bodies when we are young (or relatively young) that, in retrospect, we should not have. For me it was fairly serious weightlifting, which I took up in my early 30’s and continued until I was 51.

Regarding weightlifting, the truism applies: our joints give out long before our muscles do. By the time I had to quit, I had wrecked both of my shoulders, though for years I did my level best to ignore the damage and the chronic pain that went with it. 3½ years ago I finally bit the bullet and had my right shoulder repaired: all four of the tendons that make up my rotator cuff were torn and had to be reconnected, as was my bicipital tendon; rather severe damage to my humerus bone (the large bone in my upper arm) necessitated a cadaver bone graft as well. On December 4 of this year – 26 days ago – I had my left shoulder repaired. Again, all four tendons of the rotator cuff had to be reattached and the bicipital tendon repaired, though thankfully there was no bone damage to deal with this time around.

A sling as accessory; very natty

Advice: if you can avoid such surgery, do so. It is painful and the recovery is slow. For the first two weeks after the surgery I could not drive, shower, or type (which means, for me, I could not work). Given my inability to do anything else, I did something I hadn’t done since my last shoulder surgery, and that was binge-watch Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu television shows.

Among the shows I consumed was Amazon’s/Ridley Scott’s The Man in the High Castle, a series loosely based on a book of the same title by Philip K. Dick. (Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the basis for Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner.) The Man in the High Castle takes place between 1962 and 1964. The basic premise is that in a parallel universe, the United States lost World War Two and as a result, the eastern and midwestern states are presently part of the “Greater Nazi Reich” and the western states constitute the “Japanese Pacific States”, with the Rocky Mountains acting as a Neutral Zone between them.

The opening credits are chilling. Black and white imagery depicts a destroyed United States Capitol Building (Washington, D.C. was nuked by the Germans in 1945), and various other American monuments – Mt. Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. – despoiled by the occupiers. The predominately Nazi imagery depicted during the credits is accompanied by a breathy rendition (think Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to J.F.K.) of the song Edelweiss, with its now sinister closing line, “bless my homeland forever.”

Opening credits for The Man in the High Castle

The choice of Edelweiss as the theme music for the credits was both a brilliant stroke and is, at the same time,