Madrid Spain. — I just saw the John Adams opera about Nixon in China. A work of this magnitude can only be seen in the Royal Theater of Madrid or at the Palau de la Música Catalana. Its grandiose staging, its choirs, its instrumentation, required a suitable building. It took her more than thirty years to see herself in Madrid. It premiered in 1987 about events that had occurred in 1972. It is seen, palpable, that the years have passed due to dark circles and bruises. Alice Goodman, an American Jew who chose to be an Anglican priestess, wrote the libretto for the opera. She is currently a Chaplain at Trinity College in Great Britain. She is married to Geoffrey Hill, an English poet (Benny Goodman, musician and leader of a big jazz band, was also Jewish, and his wife’s name was Alice, but I think it had nothing to do with this new Alice Goodman, poet born in 1958).
On February 22, 1972 Nixon is in Peking. He remembers that George Washington was born on that day and sees it as a good omen. But he hides what would be a leitmotiv of Henry Kissinger, his most important adviser: get the United States out of the European and Asian pits. Essentially, it is the lesson on international politics that George Washington offers in his “Farewell Address” (1796) on the newborn American republic. He had it published in the most important American newspaper of the time, naturally from Philadelphia. Separate yourself from the disputes in Europe,” says GW. The United States must not be mixed up with that kind of bloody incidents (That is what Henry Kissinger preaches, along with his assessment that there is nothing exceptional about the American future). Washington dies two and a half years after delivering his “Farewell Address.” He is dedicated, like Cincinnatus, to his private affairs after the feat of defeating the English.
Zhou Enlai is the Prime Minister as they prepare for Richard Nixon’s trip to meet Mao Zedong. Mao speaks like a prophet in apothegms. Zhou is in charge of foreign relations. He says intelligent and intelligible things. Pat Nixon, the wife of the US President, is full of empathy for Chinese women and communicates it excellently. Together they are preparing the betrayal of Taiwan.
In real life, not in the opera, Watergate (1972) occurs and after that scandal Nixon’s resignation (1974), preceded by the delivery of the vice presidency (1973). The country is governed and presided over by Gerald Ford, former spokesperson for the Republican Party in the House of Representatives (the only Republican who had ancestry among the Democratic caucus), constitutional successor to Vice President Spiro T. Agnew (1969-1973), who reached an agreement with his captors for a tax issue of just $29,000: he would not run for another electoral office while he could avail himself of not visiting jail. Agnew blamed Nixon for his sufferings and sorrows. According to him, Nixon handed over his head to no avail. Then they asked for theirs and those of other collaborators. Nearly 70 people were charged. 48 were sentenced to jail.
If the opera had been written in the year 2000, it would not bring Mao’s follies (“The Leap Forward” and, above all, “The Cultural Revolution”), but rather the achievements of Deng Xiaoping. All made under an aphorism that implied that the era of Mao’s voluntarism had ended: “what does it matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”. China had been until the fifteenth century the first nation on Earth. And he had occupied that enviable position, precisely for this reason: because he faced problems with a vision that was not ideological, but practical. Deng focused on philosophy the solution of problems. Hence, it is useless to try to find a “model” in the China that appears before history (in our day, of course). They were opening the market to the extent that the reform allowed.
Deng fired a poison dart at Marxism-Leninism when he said that “getting rich is beautiful.” There is no other way to get rich than with company captains devouring and reinvesting the difference between what things are worth at the bottom of the machine and the retail price, the famous surplus value that, according to Marx, should be assigned to Workers. Only there are subjective factors that do not enter into the equation, as the marginalists demonstrated in Marx’s own time, beginning with William S. Jevons, Carl Menger and Leon Walras, up to Eugen von Böhm-Barwek, who devoted an entire chapter of his book (Principal and Interest1884), which Marx could not read because it appeared a year after he died in 1883.
But we live in the era of Xi Jinping and not in the time of Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997), “the architect of modern China”, as the most reverent compatriots call him, who had a great press, despite the massacre of Tiananmen Square in 1989, where perhaps thousands of people died, though the government acknowledges fewer than 500. What do Deng and Xi agree on? For now, both are reformists and do not trust Marxism, although they use the Chinese Communist Party. In the meeting that Biden and his Chinese counterpart held in November 2022, it was reaffirmed that there would be no “Cold War” between the US and China. Xi went to tell Biden that Russia is throwing in the towel in Ukraine in exchange for internationalizing the sea around the Crimean peninsula. Would the team—John Adams and Alice Goodman—be encouraged to forge a new opera? What changes are the characters that move the threads of the story.
