Friday, July 10, 2020

Trump’s back-to-work diktat threatens teachers’ lives

WSWS.ORG 9 July 2020

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump demanded that US schools reopen in the fall amid a raging pandemic, threatening the lives of thousands of teachers.

The move to rapidly reopen schools, which is taking place globally, is a strategic imperative for the ruling class in its homicidal drive to force workers back on the job amid the deepening COVID-19 pandemic. If students are not back in school, their parents will not be able to go back to producing profits for the ruling class.

Trump’s campaign to reopen schools escalated Monday, when he tweeted, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” On the same day, the Florida Department of Education issued an emergency order requiring all schools to reopen in August, to facilitate “a return to Florida hitting its full economic stride.” The following day, the topic of reopening schools dominated multiple meetings at the White House, as well as an online call with governors from every state.

On Wednesday, hours before the White House Coronavirus Task Force held one of its rare press conferences, Trump tweeted, “In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS,” adding, “May cut off funding if not open!" He issued another tweet denouncing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for its supposedly “very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools.”

Under pressure from Trump, the CDC announced that its guidelines for reopening schools would be scrapped and replaced next week with less restrictive recommendations. CDC Director Robert Redfield provided the pseudoscientific justification for reopening schools, stating, “We really don’t have evidence that children are driving the transmission cycle of this.”

No credence can be given to this statement, made under open and public duress from the White House. In one recent study by researchers from Geneva University Hospitals and the University of Geneva, the vast majority of children who tested positive for COVID-19 carried the same amount of virus as adults, indicating that they serve as transmitters. The claims by Trump and Pence are only the latest in a string of lies aimed at justifying the end of all restrictions on the spread of the coronavirus.

In March, Trump asserted that “young people, people of good health, and groups of people, just are not strongly affected” by the virus. This was immediately contradicted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Multiple teenagers died as early as April, and cases of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) became more prevalent.

Available data from the New York City Health Department shows that in a city with widespread community transmission, the mortality rate for children ages 10-19 is 0.2 percent, meaning the potential death toll for school-age children could be in the tens of thousands.

The potential dangers facing millions of teachers and other educators—nearly 30 percent of whom are 50 and older and thus at a much higher risk of dying from COVID-19—were dismissed by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who on Tuesday accused teachers of “making excuses” in an interview on Fox News.

As with each section of the working class, there has been no official tracking of the number of deaths of educators, but a list compiled by Ed Week documents over 200 that have died from the virus.

The rush to reopen schools is bound up with the decades-long assault on public education. The ruling class sees the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to get rid of older, higher-paid teachers by placing them in a situation where they must choose to retire early or risk death. If educators die, this is seen by the ruling class as a positive good, as it means another pension will not have to be paid.

The drive to reopen schools is guided not by science, but by the profit interests of the financial elite. As with the broader population, there will be no universal testing of educators and students, or anywhere near the level of contact tracing required to contain the spread of the virus.

Despite the claims of Pence and other officials, there is broad hostility among educators to the reopening of schools, with a recent survey finding that 65 percent are opposed to the push to reopen. This opposition finds no expression in official politics, however, as Democrats at every level have collaborated with Trump in the back-to-work campaign.

Comparable to the role played by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in helping to restart auto production, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA), and their state and local affiliates, are now working closely with the political establishment to enforce the reopening of schools.

Before the pandemic, teachers and education workers spearheaded the resurgence of class struggle in the US, beginning with the 2018 wildcat strike by West Virginia teachers. Since then, over 700,000 educators in over a dozen states have gone on strike, while hundreds of thousands more around the world have also struck to oppose similar attacks on public education. The mass closure of schools in mid-March took place only due to the opposition of educators, who were increasingly organizing independently of the unions, which sought to enforce the continuation of in-person instruction.

The attacks on teachers being carried out by the Trump administration is an attack on the entire working class. To carry out a genuine struggle, educators, parents and students must take matters into their own hands by forming a network of independent, rank-and-file safety committees in every school and neighborhood.

These committees should link up with autoworkers who have formed safety committees in the plants and fight to unify the entire working class to halt nonessential production, prevent the unsafe reopening of schools, and implement policies to contain and defeat the pandemic.

The following demands should be discussed and popularized by teachers and parents:

No reopening of schools until conditions are safe, as determined by local rank-and-file committees in conjunction with scientists and public health workers. Where districts force the reopening of schools, universal testing and contact tracing, as well as personal protective equipment, must be provided to every educator and student. Any educator who chooses not to return for safety and health reasons must be provided with full pay and benefits, and allowed to teach remotely.
A vast expansion of funding for education. All cuts that have been implemented must be reversed, and hundreds of billions diverted from propping up Wall Street to fully fund public education. Every household must be provided with high quality computers and high-speed internet access to facilitate online learning. Academic, physical and emotional support for students must be provided through a dramatic increase in school counselors, nurses, arts programs, special education staff, vocational programs and English-language learning made available both online and in-person in a safe manner.
The modernization of all schools. Dilapidated school buildings must be rehabilitated or rebuilt for 21st-century learning, health and safety. A massive program of construction and infrastructure development is necessary, in line with the recommendations of health experts.

The struggles of educators must be connected to the fight of the entire working class against the homicidal back-to-work campaign, which is driven by the demand of the financial oligarchy that workers sacrifice their lives to pay for the trillions of dollars handed out to Wall Street.

As the Socialist Equality Party wrote in its May 21 statement, “Build rank-and-file factory and workplace committees to prevent transmission of the COVID-19 virus and save lives!”: “The SEP insists that the fight against the pandemic is inseparably linked to a struggle of workers against the ruling class—the corporate and financial oligarchy—and its dictatorship over economic and political life. It is, therefore, a fight against capitalism and for socialism, the restructuring of society on the basis of social need, not private profit.”

The SEP and the WSWS will provide all the assistance it can to teachers who want to establish rank-and-file safety committees. We urge all workers to study our program and make the decision to join the SEP and take up the fight for socialism.

Evan Blake

The collapse of the New York Times’ “Russian bounties” campaign

By Patrick Martin WSWS.ORG 10 July 2020

Less than two weeks after it kicked off a media frenzy with its front-page report claiming that the Russian military intelligence agency GRU had paid bounties to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan to kill American soldiers, the New York Times published an editorial effectively conceding that there was no factual basis for its reporting.

The editorial appeared on Wednesday, July 8, one day after General Frank McKenzie, the commander of Centcom, with overall responsibility for Afghanistan and the Middle East, told the press that there was no evidence that any US soldiers had been killed because of the alleged Russian bounties.

“I didn’t find that there was a causative link there,” McKenzie said, “the intel case wasn’t proved to me.” In any case, he continued, no additional precautions were required because the US military already takes “extreme force protection measures” in Afghanistan “whether the Russians are paying the Taliban or not.”

McKenzie was speaking Tuesday by telephone to a group of reporters including the Associated Press, which ran a report. The Times did not report his comments, which diametrically contradicted the newspaper’s own reporting of June 27.

But that night, the newspaper’s editorial page threw in the towel, publishing an editorial on the Times web site which appeared the next morning in the print edition, under the headline, “Don’t Let Russian Meddling Derail Afghanistan Withdrawal Plans.”

The editorial begins with the admission: “There’s a lot still missing from the reports that Russia paid for attacks on American and other coalition forces in Afghanistan. That’s why it’s critical that emotions and politics be kept at bay until the facts are in.”

This appeal for waiting “until the facts are in” is remarkable since the Times itself had claimed to be in possession of the facts about alleged Russian efforts to murder American soldiers, citing unnamed “intelligence officials,” and it gave the signal for a vast media campaign aimed at whipping up a very specific “emotion,” hatred of Russia.

Moreover, the Democratic Party—with which the Times is closely allied—immediately seized on this report to resurrect its long-discredited claims that Trump is a Russian stooge and does nothing without Vladimir Putin’s direction and approval.

This was the basis, first of the Mueller investigation and then of the impeachment inquiry, neither of which developed any credible evidence to back the McCarthyite howling about the White House doing the bidding of the Kremlin. Now the Times report has become the basis for demands by Democrats, and many Republicans, that Trump take immediate action that would, in the words of one senator, result in Russians going home “in body bags.”

The editorial further admits that there was no independent reporting to back the claims of Russian bounty payments. Instead, its articles “cite intelligence findings.” In other words, the Times served as a conduit for unnamed officials, apparently in the CIA, who leaked uncorroborated and disputed claims, allegedly based on the interrogation of prisoners captured in the war with the Taliban. The CIA did not divulge who these prisoners are, where they are being held, and what torture or other mistreatment they may have been subjected to.

The editorial goes on to say: “Then there’s the question of the motives behind the leaks and the solidity of the information.”

One might think that a first rule of journalism would be to question the motives of officials when they come forward with such inflammatory allegations, as well as to seek confirmation of claims made by an agency which specializes in lying and political provocations. However, that is not the relationship between the New York Times and the CIA.

On the contrary, the Times has been a willing stenographer and propagandist for the US intelligence services for many decades, going back to the “weapons of mass destruction” fraud that paved the way to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and well before.

The editorial continues: “Other questions abound: When did the reported payments begin? Were they payback for American support of Afghan militants against Soviet troops there in the 1980s, or something else? Were the payments a factor in the deaths of any American or other coalition troops? Was the intelligence tweaked by people seeking to hinder efforts to withdraw American troops?”

These are the questions that should, of course, have been addressed before the Times published its front-page “exposé.” The fact that they are only raised now, in an editorial 12 days later, is a declaration of journalistic bankruptcy.

As the last question in the list suggests, as well as the headline of the editorial, it now appears that CIA officials opposed to Trump’s decision to pull most US troops out of Afghanistan on a timetable geared to the November 3 election leaked the “bounties” claim to the Times to generate political pressure to overturn that decision. They were successful, as the White House has now delayed the final withdrawal, meaning that it can be more easily reversed by an incoming Democratic administration if Trump loses the election.

The Times is not the only “news” organization with egg on its face after the collapse of the “bounties” campaign. NBC News published a similar retraction on its web site, under the defensive headline, “US officials say intel on Russian bounties was less than conclusive. That misses the big picture.”

NBC admits that a “growing chorus of American officials” say that the evidence of Russian bounties is “less than conclusive.” But it argues that the “big picture” is the unsurprising news that Russian and American interests in Afghanistan do not coincide, and that Moscow has sought to cultivate relations with the Taliban in recent years, and even provide indirect support.

NBC casts some resentful blame on the Times for calling the report on the bounties a “finding” of the intelligence community, i.e., a consensus assessment, which turned out not to be true. The CIA drew its conclusion with only “moderate confidence”—a term of art that means, in effect, “we made it up”—while the National Security Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, said “it could not corroborate” the reports.

None of this alters the fact that the allegation of Russian bounties has entered the bloodstream of American capitalist politics like snake venom for which there is no antidote.

Hence the spectacle of Representative Jason Crow, a former Army special forces officer in Afghanistan, one of the CIA Democrats whose rise was analyzed and exposed by the WSWS in 2018, joining with Republican Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president and unindicted war criminal, to co-sponsor an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act barring the Trump administration from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan until it has taken action over the allegations of “Russian bounties.”

There is little doubt that Democratic candidates, from Joe Biden on down, will be making an issue of Trump’s failure to “punish” Russia for killing American soldiers right through November 3, regardless of the abject disavowal of these bogus charges by the Times.

Trump’s Postcard to America From the Shrine of Hypocrisy

by LYNNETTE GREY BULL

Mt. Rushmore Reimagined in Four Sacred Colors. Image: Alter-Native Media.

“This monument will never be desecrated,” Donald Trump bloviated at his second rally during the COVID-19 pandemic, a 4^th of July white supremacy-fest held in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. The mask-less crowd roared its approval. This is his response to a nation roiled by the dual crisis of an unprecedented pandemic and the racial reckoning rumbling through our nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In a time of unparalleled crisis, he chooses to make a promise to our nation. But not a promise to use his office to defend the country from a virus that has killed more than 130,000 of our fellow citizens, nor a promise to protect the livelihoods of millions who have lost their jobs during the pandemic. Not a promise to confront systemic and institutionalized racism. And certainly not a promise to defend our elections from foreign interference. No, Trump’s promise is to defend the Confederacy and the Lost Cause. Maybe Stephen Miller can find him a portrait of Jefferson Davis to replace the one of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office? But then again, Steve Bannon probably didn’t tell Trump who Jefferson Davis was.

At this moment, what does this promise really mean for the American people? What is protected by protecting Mount Rushmore? Who exactly is he protecting these MAGA masses from? He promised that Mount Rushmore would never be desecrated.

But Mount Rushmore is a desecration. It is important to understand that the Black Hills or Paha Sapa, where Rushmore is located, is the Holy Land of the Lakota and Cheyenne, and that our spiritual life-ways and Creation narratives revolve around this sacred sanctuary. In Lakota, it is He Sapa Wakan, or “The Heart of Everything That Is.” For the Cheyenne, Nóávóse, (Grizzly) Bear Butte, is the Center of the Universe. A day before he was arrested, Nick Tilsen, the president of NDN Collective and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, told CNN that the Black Hills “are a sacred place that I take my family and my children to, like the Vatican for Catholics or Mecca for Muslims. The Hills are where I feel most connected to Creator.”

Tilsen led roughly 150 protestors, 15 of whom were arrested for refusing to disperse, in an attempt to block the road to Trump’s rally in the memory of our ancestors who gave all for this land. Calling Trump’s rally a racist political stunt, these indigenous-led activists denounced the United States occupation of the Black Hills and demanded that the monstrosity be removed. Tilsen has been charged with two felonies. This is “law and order” beneath Trump’s proudly waving “stars and bars.”

Tilsen is right. Mount Rushmore is a constant reminder of colonialism and an affront to the deep spiritual importance of the region. This religious significance is as true now as it was in 1927 when Gutzon Borglum set his chisel to stone, and defaced the natural “monument” our elders revered as the Six Grandfathers, a mountain that was seen by the Lakota as the embodiment of our guides and guardians, who provided direction.

Whatever patriotic association Americans may have with Mount Rushmore, it was originally planned as little more than a tourist trap — a grotesque eye saw of cowboys and Western explorers — not an edifice purportedly dedicated to presidents, democracy and freedom. Its entire purpose was economic development. Doane Robinson, the historian who dreamt up the monument, simply wanted to attract more visitors to an area that was struggling to keep up a stream of tourism without something similar to Yellowstone to pull in coastal dollars. Fittingly, Mount “Rushmore” was named after a forgotten New York City investor, Charles Rushmore, who liked to vacation in the region to kill our four-legged relatives. Locals named it after him, pandering to his ego, presumably to convince him to return more frequently.

Mount Rushmore has no actual connection to any US history that is worth celebrating. Instead, it is connected to death, hate, violence, colonialism, and war. It embodies the United States merciless pursuit of the material riches of indigenous lands and the serial breaking of treaties, which began with the theft of the Black Hills in 1877 and culminated in the eventual dissolution of the Great Sioux Reservation for white settlers to colonize and mine. According to the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, what became the entire western half of South Dakota was meant to be Lakota land, in perpetuity.

When the activists blocking the road to Trump’s rally said he didn’t have permission to enter the Black Hills and that the land was stolen, they were not being metaphorical. The sacred Black Hills are enshrined in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, to have been set aside forever for the “undisturbed use and occupancy” of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and the allied Arapaho. But forever only lasted 6 years. After the Panic of 1873 and collapse of the Northern Pacific Railroad, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer furrowed the “Thieves Road,” the 1874 military expedition into the Black Hills which was mounted under the false pretense of seeking a site to build a fort to protect our people against colonists and prospectors. One of Custer’s “practical miners,” H.N. Ross, discovered gold, as was expected from the decades-old rumors, and within two months of Custer’s departure from the Hills, an estimated 15,000 illegal squatters mining for gold had invaded our Holy Land.

When the Lakota wouldn’t sell the Black Hills, the military was dispatched in 1876. It was Custer’s last foray into our territory, and it ended aside the Little Bighorn River. The Grant administration’s response was to literally starve our ancestors, who were placed in internment camps, and forced to enter into a bogus “agreement” to relinquish the Black Hills that is considered invalid by both by the tribal nations involved and the US Supreme Court. The land grab didn’t end with the Black Hills, as the Great Sioux Nation was continually broken up into smaller and smaller disconnected parcels of land that now compromise the current Lakota reservations.

“A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history,” stated the US Supreme Court on June 30^th, 1980, when it affirmed the decision of the US Court of Claims in favor of the Great Sioux Nation in US v. Sioux Nation of Indians. The US Court of Claims found that the Great Sioux Nation was never compensated for the broken treaty, and that the subsequent “sell or starve” duress invalidated the “agreement.” The Lakota rejected the monetary award from the Court of Claims, some $17.5 million, which with interest has grown to over $1 billion. Our people don’t want the money, we want the land returned. $1 billion is a fraction of the wealth amassed by the Homestake Mine which was illegally established in contravention of the 1868 treaty. If you consider $1 billion to be a lot of money, then ask how much does Mecca cost? How much for Jerusalem?

The problems with Mount Rushmore go beyond the land. The monument itself is riddled with white supremacist politics. When Gutzon Borglum was hired by Robinson to desecrate The Six Grandfathers, it was directly due to his association with the Ku Klux Klan. With the Klan behind him, Borglum created the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world at Stone Mountain, Georgia, where Trump heroes Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are heroically presented with CSA president, Jefferson Davis. Stone Mountain has been called “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world” by the NAACP. Borglum was a white-supremacist, openly anti-Semitic, and particularly hateful and prejudiced towards indigenous people. His views were warmly welcomed by the Klan, where he served on several committees and helped negotiate their resurgence.

When he insisted that Mount Rushmore be a celebration of US presidents instead of storied cowboys, Borglum knew what he was doing. He wanted to protect his legacy and knew the power that deifying “patriotic” historical figures could have after working with the KKK. But his destruction of the sacred was also motivated by political opportunism. If you ever thought it was strange that Teddy Roosevelt, a contemporary or the sculptor, was chosen, then you probably won’t be surprised that TR was a good friend and patron of Borglum’s, as well as an ardent eugenicist and Indian hater. It is doubtful that Trump and the “patriots” at his Mount Rushmore rally would be so protective or historically revisionist of a monument to Wild Bill, Wyatt Earp, or any number of other dime novel legends.

In this Trumpian dystopia, defacing Borglum’s monument would be to deface the United States itself; protecting it would be to protect the ahistorical and abstract ideals that each of those faces represents to the people attending Trump’s rally. Trump, too, is purposefully tapping into this blissfully ignorant patriotic haze of presidential deification to spread his campaign message of willful obliviousness and the demonization of the Democratic Party and the liberal left. For the Lakota, the desecration of the stolen Six Grandfathers is tangible historical trauma, but the subject matter itself adds insult to injury: American presidents, two slave owners, all four white supremacists, carved into a sacred mountain on stolen land, each face a reminder of genocidal Indian policies.

George Washington declared a total extermination of the Iroquois people in 1779. Thomas Jefferson supported the massacre of the Cherokee and the Muscogee, declaring that all Natives should be driven beyond the Mississippi. Lincoln was responsible for the public hanging of the Dakota 38 (+2), the largest mass execution in US history. Theodore Roosevelt is infamous for his racist musings: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” But it is often conveniently forgotten that Roosevelt used the military to ethnically cleanse the indigenous lands he declared as national parks and monuments.

As an ethnic minority facing centuries of poverty, health disparity, and systemic oppression, the continent’s first people – my people – are in the highest risk category for coronavirus vulnerability. Tribes endure levels of poverty that most Americans can scarcely imagine, and some reservations already have lower life expectancies than the poorest developing nations in the world. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, a Lakota reservation 90 minutes from Mount Rushmore, the life expectancy of 48 years-old for men and 52 for women is already lower than anywhere in the western hemisphere except Haiti. The unemployment rate hovers around 80 percent. Meanwhile, the Indian Health Service hospitals that serve Indian reservations have a total of 33 ICU beds nationwide, but Trump has responded with a total lack of concern, buoyed by the complicit silence of his regional enablers on Capitol Hill, Liz Cheney, John Barrasso, John Thune and Mike Rounds.

Like the Black communities we have seen disproportionately impacted during the pandemic, tribal members are ravaged by diabetes and other chronic health conditions caused by enduring environmental injustice and decades of American apartheid. From housing shortages and non-existent hospitals to reservation districts entirely without electricity, internet, or running water, Indian Country provides what Benjamin R. Brady and Howard M. Bahr described in 2014 as the “perfect storm” for a pandemic. Trump’s failure to act on Coronavirus has led to an immeasurable loss on the nation’s reservations, a disaster that only continues to worsen and claim indigenous lives as he swears to protect a monument which embodies this country’s broken promises to those same people.

The COVID-19 crisis has glaringly revealed what the indigenous people of this nation have known for generations: institutionalized racism infects every aspect of what is supposed to be the federal-Indian trust responsibility. The pandemic represents a stark example of the systemic failures of federal Indian policy and administration in Indian Country, and the immense costs these failures have for tribal members. The desperate need for broad and bold action has come and gone, and in its wake our officials have left us with inaction. The Global Indigenous Council (GIC) has advocated for a Marshall Plan for Indian Country, which was furnished to the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates and articulates the necessity of a sweeping approach to Indian Country.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the chaos it continues to wreak on tribal lands only emphasizes the urgency for this plan. A piecemeal approach to a systemic, century-plus crisis, will only perpetuate what has been a cycle of failure for generations of tribal citizens. We need bold initiatives that will begin to repair the utterly broken trust between tribal citizens and the federal government. The Marshall Plan for Indian Country is now an integral part of my policy platform as I challenge Liz Cheney for Wyoming’s US House seat.

By hosting his rally at the “Shrine of Hypocrisy,” Trump made a mockery of the pain and struggles of the indigenous people who consider the Black Hills sacred. When he tells his base that he will protect Mount Rushmore, he is telling them that he will protect them from the Americans who are tired of the mythology of American exceptionalism which allows the erasure and reinvention of history; the erasure of the inequality that diseases the heart of this nation and allows the continued oppression of Indigenous, Black and Brown people in this country. Yes, Trump will protect his faithful’s God-given-right to be racist. Farcically, Trump declared below Mount Rushmore that he “will never allow an angry mob to erase our history.” Whose history is really being erased, though? And who is the angry mob destroying our country?

Morricone: Maestro of Music and Image

by DAVID YEARSLEY COUNTERPUNCH JULY 10,2020

Morricone in the Festhalle Frankfurt in 2015. Photo: Sven-Sebastian Sajak, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born in 1929, the masterful composer Ennio Morricone, who died this week at the age of 91, made his entrance into the world just after the advent of synchronized cinematic sound. The Jazz Singer had come out just two years earlier. Over a life that spanned the history of the movie soundtrack, Morricone shaped the combined arts of music and image as few others have or will.

His melodies tended to the simple, even fragmentary: groups of three or four notes stolen from nature or the imagination (assuming there’s a difference) or even lifted from someone else; then a hesitation or pause before moving forward again. His harmonies were rarely adventurous, however rich and compelling. Yet Morricone was a revolutionary, transforming, even inventing ways of making music for moving pictures that exerted a huge influence on his contemporaries, his admirers, and, most enduringly, his audience. He was born and died in Rome, but his music for films stretched across the globe molding the way we see and understand landscapes, people, and history, from the South American rain forest to the grasslands and deserts of the North American West.

As a boy Morricone wanted to become a doctor: he admired his pediatrician, who also looked after Mussolini’s children. It was the age of movies and of fascism. Morricone’s father was a professional trumpet player, who gave a horn to his son and told him music not medicine would be his livelihood. The boy ~~obeyed, and also~~ studied composition from an early age, and his father’s contacts in the Roman music scene landed him arranging gigs in film and television.

Even in the midst of his toweringly prolific career as a composer of soundtracks and concert music, Morricone continued to play the trumpet as a member of the composers’ collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza from 1964 to 1980. The ensemble’s impressive and varied output reflected Morricone’s own more innovative impulses and his talent for drawing on disparate musical sources. Listen to his trumpet work on The Group’s 1970 LP the feed-back, a recording that brings together experimentalism with free jazz and funk, and hear how he strove to avoid producing conventional sounds from his instrument. Yet his timbre echoes Miles Davis, whom he admired, and in these spontaneous ideas meant to contribute to the whole rather than burnish individual glory, one can hear the thrilling High Plains pyrotechnics he ignited in the trumpet soloist for his Western scores, Michele Lacerenza.

The improvisation ensemble’s work grew indirectly out of the required pilgrimage Morricone and some of his colleagues made to the summer courses at Darmstadt, mecca of the European musical avant-garde, in 1958. But he turned away from modernism’s isolating, mathematical strictures in order to produce works that were, in his words, “to be listened to, rather … than remain an incommunicative theoretical system.”

The accessibility and vividness of his film scores often had a searing quality informed by his profound knowledge of music history and technique. Morricone was an erudite musician, basing his work on a foundation of study and hard-won technical skill, commitments he advised younger musicians to adopt. Among the many who heeded that advice was his admirer, Alessandro de Rosa, who collaborated with the composer in a wonderful book published in Italian in 2016 and translated in 2018 as Ennio Morricone: In his Own Words—an honest, thought-provoking, often unexpected, and ceaselessly informative book about the composer, his modes of creation, his aesthetic ideas, and the cast of fascinating and influential musicians and filmmakers he worked with over his six decades of dogged labor.

Rather than subject his musical material to abstruse procedures (though he was capable of these, too), Morricone often turned to the past, reanimating it through intuition and imagination. Daunting, disorienting chromaticism was a hallmark of his modernist contemporaries, but Morricone had a gift—and the attendant skill—for bringing it into the service of cinematic and political action. The credit sequence of his score for Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) in which the French forces raid the freedom fighters’ hide-out is driven by the gunfire tattoo of the snare drum. The heavier caliber of the piano adds to this barrage with a bass line that ascends through three half-steps then leaps down and presents the mirror image of that same figure.

Morricone took the motive from an antique Ricercar—a genre devised, as the word suggests, “to search” after new combinations of thematic material—by the seventeenth-century organist of St. Peter’s in Rome, Girolamo Frescobaldi.

Frescobaldi’s treatment of his theme was as recondite as anything the post-war intellectuals could devise. (Ten years before scoring The Battle of Algiers, Morricone had published a volume of piano pieces called Invenzione, Canone e Ricercari that paid homage to the ancient masters of polyphony.) But in his redeployment of Frescobaldi’s chromatic line, Morricone militarizes the researches of his Roman forebear from three centuries earlier like a commander barking orders at his musical troops. As the French counter-terrorist action unfolds on screen Morricone charges the brass to take over the same ascending chromatic figure but at a slower, warier pace, as if another unit were penetrating the Arab quarter. More winds then join the operation as it spreads through the Casbah. Through this ingenious contrapuntal collage the venerable motive is transformed into something unforgiving, remorseless, decisive. The music of attack becomes an attack on French colonial rule in North Africa, even an attack on oppression across the globe.

The theme for one of the leaders of the Resistance, Ali, is given to an African flute, straining at first against the shackles of European tonality.

The throaty notes rock incessantly between a pair of interlocking major and minor thirds heard above a tragically heroic orchestral accompaniment. The melody appears trapped in its own prison, but will not give up the fight. During preparations for the film, Morricone heard Pontecorvo, himself a musician, whistling the tune, but waited until the premiere of the film to disabuse the director of the notion that the theme had been transmitted to the composer clairvoyantly.

A distinctive melodist, Morricone proved himself equally adept at rhythm, whose possibilities imbued the images with energy and portent, as in the sequence from The Battle of Algiers where a group of Arab women, disguised as Europeans, place bombs in a café and club.

Morricone intensifies the urgency of this plot with North African percussion patterns that sound like motors: the machinery of history chugging towards tragedy, but continually slamming into the sounds of the city or, more terrifyingly, silence. These gaps in the soundtrack stretch the tension towards its terrible breaking point as the dancers and diners enjoy themselves in the final seconds before they are converted from occupiers to victims. A bass drone spurs a frenzy of wallops on the tenor drum that seems to detonate the bombs.

Kindred attempts—successful, if sometimes fraught—to clear sonic and ethical space for musical traditions that had resisted, or even been erased by European aggression moved Morricone to create one of his greatest, most opulent scores, that for Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1990). Set in eighteenth-century South America, the film elevates music to an affirmative force even in the clash between Old and New Worlds. The scene in which a Jesuit missionary (Jeremy Irons) captivates the Guarani warriors with his oboe (first alone, then with a studio symphony orchestra), can’t help but cast the European civilizer as Orpheus—and therefore the natives as wild beasts. With its tapestry of embellishments that Morricone gives to this Father Gabriel to play, his music evokes the baroque style of the film’s period.

Thanks to its rapturous melody and life-affirming orchestral backdrop, “Gabriel’s Oboe” became a huge hit, recorded by Yo Yo Ma and other international heavyweights.

Morricone was no ethnomusicologist, but he tried nonetheless to reclaim in The Mission something of what he imagined to be the lost music of the indigenous peoples by wedding simple choral acclamations with wistful Andean flute lines above yearning orchestral surges buffeted by the thump of jungle drums.

The result is romantic and utopian, exoticizing and intoxicating— a skeptic would rather say excessive, even schmaltzy. But this elixir can be so exhilarating because the ideal will be wrecked by the history the film portrays.

In counterpoint to the enchanting tones of the priest and the joyous music of the indigenous peoples, Morricone depicts the worldly imperatives of the Catholic church with quasi-renaissance vocal polyphony that could be (and probably by now, has been) heard in the Sistine Chapel. As the credits of The Mission roll Morricone brings all three elements together in a tour-de-force of polyphonic layering in a piece called “As Earth as it is in Heaven”—a final effusion of ambrosial, healing world music.

This reconciliation is celestial rather than terrestrial. The murdered will not be raised from the dead by the conquerors’ musket and sabre. Music, however radiantly ecumenical, cannot heal these wounds, forgive these crimes.

But this virtuosic, irresistible skill at contrapuntal combination in evoking places that Morricone had seen on film but never visited found its most famous expression in the films directed by his Roman schoolmate, Sergio Leone. In the first of the director’s Westerns, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Morricone repurposed an arrangement he had made of Woody Guthrie’s Pastures of Plenty for a recording of that song by Peter Tevis, a California singer then popular in Italy.

Morricone’s setting called on the whistle and whip to summon visions of the open range. The tolling of the bell and the chanting of the chorus (its English tinged by Italian accents) seems to suggest that a lone singer is riding with his own posse, or perhaps being urged on by the voices of destiny. This was hard-bitten, intrepid music, leagues distant from Guthrie’s plaint of struggling dirt farmers and herders.

Guthrie had based his song on the nineteenth-century ballad “Pretty Polly,” so Morricone was well within his rights to equip that same accompaniment with a new melody. He gave the newly-inserted invention to his celebrated whistler, Alessandro Alessandroni, the wind-riffled tune shot through with bolts from the electric guitar of Bruno Battisti D’Amario.

However popular and crucial to the composer’s subsequent success this music became, both Leone and Morricone thought A Fistful of Dollars their weakest, ugliest work.

The blatantly anachronistic electronics and studio effects could reach unprecedented levels of viciousness, as when D’Amario’s guitar slashes across a devastated homestead until the camera finds its way to the perpetrator—blue-eyed Henry Fonda, taking an unexpected turn as the black-hatted bad guy in the greatest of the Leone/Morricone Westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

A similar, if richer, texture to Morricone’s Pasture of Plenty /A Fistful of Dollars encompasses the three-way duel at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The rocking guitar figure is now taken by the piano; rather than a clear male voice, an English horn intones a solemn, sweeping melody. The chime tolls. The bass now moves with the force of fate. The musical tableau expands inexorably, magnificently towards the horizon. Lacerenza’s trumpet soars. The incomparable soprano Edda Dell’Orso—one of the singers in Alessandroni’s choir, Cantori Moderni., that is also heard in these Westerns offers up a benediction for the death soon to descend.

These pastures of plenty are full of the dead and the loot, the spoils of war and the winning of the west.

At the end, the coyote cry of the famed opening theme returns to lacerate the landscape. That musical utterance is so much more violent than the sounds of the animal itself. The soundtrack tells us that human deceit and revenge are unique in nature.

That Morricone’s score soared over the credits after the battle was done proved that, however closely tied to the images like the noose around “the ugly” Tuco’s head, music wins the final duel between sound and image.

Morricone received an honorary Oscar in 2007, handed to him by Clint Eastwood, whose first starring role had come in A Fistful of Dollars. In his speech, Morricone said that the prize represented not a point of arrival but of departure. He kept on riding. Nominated for a sixth time for his grand score (the penultimate soundtrack of the more than 500 he delivered) for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2016, Morricone become the oldest winner of a competitive Academy Award. He was as old as Oscar himself: Morricone and Academy Awards had both been born in the fateful year of 1929.

That evening in Los Angeles, Morricone spoke in Italian, with Eastwood translating. In Morricone: In His Own Words, the composer expressed regret that he never learned English or another foreign language. For all its ennobling mixture of diversity and specificity, technique and imagination, Morricone’s soundtracks speak a global language, immediately and powerfully understood and loved. Morricone shrugged off Tarantino’s fawning comparison of him to Mozart and Beethoven. The Maestro was modest about how history would judge his work, but his music doesn’t just survive him, it glorifies him and his visionary hearing of the world.

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