The Post-Partisan Emporium

Did Bach Draw on Native American Musical Traditions? Here's a fascinating case study in how dirty dancing gets turned into the music of elites Ted Gioia In 1539, a poet in Panama named Fernando de Guzmán Mejía referred to a dance called the  zarabanda . His poem provides very few details, and later sources are equally vague. Some two decades later, a Mexican manuscript from Pedro de Trejo preserved the lyrics of a  çarauanda , which is likely the same dance. In 1579,  the Spanish missionary Diego Duran shared more information, describing the  zarabanda  as a “brisk and saucy” Aztec dance. Then the same dance showed up in Europe—or at least a dance with the same name. We don’t really know how it happened. Maybe some Aztec dancers actually crossed the ocean. That’s a mind-blowing notion. But we can’t even prove that the European sarabande is a direct descendant of its Native American predecessor. But whatever its origin, the  zarabanda  was well known in...

Ivermectin's Mechanism of Action Against SARS-CoV-2 Described SHAME on the hospital systems that systematically denied patients (and their begging families) this FDA-approved, Nobel prize winning, wonder drug. By  JOHN LEAKE Satoshi Ōmura, discoverer of  Streptomyces avermectinius, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2015. Researching our book— The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex —was often a distressing and maddening experience. The systematic lying about hydroxychloroquine to suppress its use in the outpatient setting was infuriating. However, for me, the most upsetting stories were about people who died in hospital after being systematically denied ivermectin. The sheer brutality of hospital chiefs and their attorneys, who fought tooth and nail against the administration of ivermectin to dying patients, must surely be the most morally repugnant story in modern medical history. As we document in o...

Infantilized R Us THOMAS HARRINGTON     I If you want to understand a culture, it is imperative that you listen carefully to the stories that it—or perhaps more accurately—its story-telling elites most assiduously disseminate among the general population.  To speak of “story-telling” in this context is to speak not only of well-worn verbal tropes such as “America as a city upon a hill” or “America as generous purveyor of democracy,” but also the broader set of repeated semiotic inputs that greet the citizen in the course of his daily adventures.  A short while back I wrote a piece on the  growing presence of speed bumps in our culture  and sought in this very vein of semiotic analysis to explain what message—beyond the obvious goal of slowing drivers down—the authorities installing them in increasing numbers in cities and towns might be sending about how they view their fellow citizens, and how, in turn, their seemingly condescending gaze might affect the w...