Ms. Sotomayor and Mozart

I don’t know why I fell asleep in my chair just when Sen. Sessions was about to question Supreme Court nominee Ms. Sonia Sotomayor. I went into a cold, dead sleep, sleeping through the entire episode.

I thought it strange myself that just after the opening speech of chairman Patrick Leahy, I missed the entire questioning of Sen. Jeff Sessions who was the next person to question Ms. Sotomayor. This is very disturbing to me as to how and why that happened. However, why I turned off the television when Sen. Jon Kyle was questioning Ms. Sotomayor is clear to me and no mystery; his questioning of Ms. Sotomayor was, in my opinion, pure insanity.

In order to fully understand myself what happened today while watching the confirmations hearings, I have to put it in the perspectives of my world, the world of music and in particular in relationship to a scene in the movie “Amadeus,” the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The scene is in one of the grand ball rooms in the palace in Italy with Mozart‘s father, the King and members of his court in attendance. Salieri, a prominent musician of the time and much older than Mozart played one of his compositions for Mozart and Mozart responded by not only playing his composition back to him but with significant musical organizational insight and improvements. Salieri was pissed due in part to the fact he was the court musician and nothing like that had ever happened to him before; after all, he was the darling of the Italian court!

In my world, Ms. Sotomayor was Mozart and the questioning senators were Antonio Salieri. Some were gracious and in some cases feigned appreciation of Ms. Sotomayor’s brilliant legal mind. The senators played their song for Ms. Sotomayor and she used their melody playing her version dictated by her talents. I marveled! I yelled out into my empty living room “Brilliant!” followed by sustained hand claps of appreciation. I was beside myself with exhilaration and joy and I did not care. It felt good. I had not done that since Pres. Obama was in the primaries. Enter creepy Republican Sen. Jon Kyle.

This monster, this fiend, this horrible man played the single musical note of middle “C” on the harpsichord and asked Mozart, aka Ms. Sotomayor, to create a string quartet. To create a string quartet on the harpsichord and not in the key of “C” mind you but rather using the single musical note “C”. This is how my mind interpreted Sen. Kyl’s harsh insistence Ms. Sotomayor address his concerns about a statement she made regarding the wisdom of a Latina woman Vs. that of a white male. I watched the episode as long as I could but the logic used or not used by Sen. Kyle got the best of me. I simply could no longer process what he was talking about. My nerves had gotten twisted, I was in a panic mode and began to sweat. I had to turn the television off to re-process my sanity. It was a horrifying experience for me. I resumed my watching of the hearings to hear Sen. Schumer from New York save my day.
As always,
BB
P.S. I am hearing murmurs to once again ask the Justices of the Supreme Court to let cameras into their court.

Session’s hate speech
By Tom Gilroy
(Author: This brilliant post is a comfort. Kudos to Tom Gilroy)
So, if you're going to embrace affirmative action, feminism, equal rights, economic fairness, civil rights, -- Jesus, even empathy -- you stand warned you will be attacked. It has nothing to do with defeating Sotomayer and everything to do with discrediting what most Americans believe and intimidating us from expressing it. It's also a signal to their dwindling base -- disenfranchised, uneducated whites -- that the GOP is still the party of the cluelessly and inarticulately disgruntled.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-gilroy/sessionss-hate-speech_b_232246.html