Every Valley: Handel's Messiah

George Frideric Handel by Philip Mercier, c. 1730. Image credit: Händel-Haus, Halle. Image source: All About Handel

Today is the 283rd anniversary of the première of Handel's Messiah in Dublin on 13 April 1742. The story of Messiah's composition in just three weeks, the notorious adulteress who sang in its first performance, which took place during Holy Week, and the circumstances that brought her together with Handel in Dublin, are vividly retold in Charles King's Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel's Messiah (Doubleday, 2024).

In 1741 Handel was facing a crisis. In the winter season he had witnessed the failure of his Italian opera, Deidamia, which had received only three performances before being ignominiously pulled from the stage. Handel had composed opera seria in London for 30 years; indeed, it had been the reason he had relocated there. But Deidamia would be his final Italian opera.

At this low point, two serendipitous events provided Handel with an opportunity to change his fortunes. First, he received a new libretto from his cantankerous collaborator Charles Jennens, who had previously provided the word books for the English-language oratorios Saul (1739) and L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (The Active Man, the Pensive Man, and the Moderate Man, 1740). Jennens wrote to his friend Edward Holdsworth on 10 July 1741 about the new work, "I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition will excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah." [1]

Charles Jennens by Thomas Hudson, c. 1740s. Image credit: Handel Hendrix House. Image source: ArtFund.org

The second serendipitous event was an invitation to put on a season of music in Dublin, at a concert hall newly established in Fishamble Street by William Neale and the Charitable Musick Society. The invitation was probably extended and negotiated by William Cavendish, the 3rd Duke of Devonshire and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Handel began composing Messiah on 22 August, suggesting that he had received the Dublin invitation shortly before. He worked rapidly, drafting all the music by 12 September, just three weeks later, and then finishing the "filled-in" score by 14 September. Jennens later complained to Holdsworth that Handel had composed the music "in great hast[e], tho' he said he would be a year about it." [2]

The finished score of Messiah was clearly intended to suit whatever musical forces might be available in Dublin, a city only one-fifth the size of London. The score called only for strings, trumpets and tympani, a chorus, and for as few as four solo singers: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.

Handel's autograph score of the final measures of the Hallelujah Chorus, dated "September 6, 1741." Image credit: British Library R.M.20.f.2. Image source: The Handel Institute

After spending the late summer and early fall composing Messiah and, to a libretto by Newburgh Hamilton, the oratorio Samson, Handel left for Dublin, arriving on 18 November. Jennens wrote to Holdsworth, "I heard with great pleasure. . .that Handel had set the Oratorio of Messiah; but it was some mortification to me to hear that instead of performing it here he was gone into Ireland with it." [3]

On 29 December Handel wrote to Jennens from Dublin,

I am emboldened, Sir, by the generous Concern You please to take in relation to my affairs, to give You an Account of the Success I have met here. The Nobility did me the Honour to make amongst themselves a Subscription for 6 Nights, which did fill a Room of 600 Persons, so that I needed not sell one single Ticket at the Door, and without Vanity the Performance was received with a general Approbation. Sig[no]ra [Christina] Avo[g]lio, which I brought with me from London pleases extraordinary. . .as for the Instruments they are really excellent, Mr. [Matthew] Dubourgh [Master of the King's Musick in Ireland] being at the head of them, and the Musick sounds delightfully in this charming Room. . .They propose already to have some more Performances, when the 6 Nights of the Subscription are over. . .so that I shall be oblig'd to make my Stay longer than I thought. [4]

The first concert in the subscription series, a performance of L'Allegro, had taken place on 23 December. The series continued over the next month with a repeat performance of L'Allegro, followed by two performances of Acis and Galatea with Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, and it concluded with two performances of the oratorio Esther on 3 and 10 February. By then a second six-concert subscription series had been organized, with Alexander's Feast following on 17 February and repeated on 2 March, with weekly concerts continuing through the end of the month and an extra one added on 7 April. [5]

The second performance of Alexander's Feast had originally been scheduled for 24 February, but had to be postponed due to the illness of one of the singers, Susannah Cibber.

Susannah Cibber, by Thomas Hudson, c. 1740s. Image credit: National Portrait Gallery NPG 4526. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

In the winter of 1742 Mrs. Cibber had turned 28. For a decade she had been one of the leading actresses in London, and had come to Dublin in part to escape harassment by her husband, the actor Theophilus Cibber.

She had married Theophilus, who was a decade older than she was, in 1734. It was not a love-match, but one arranged by her father for her professional advancement: Theophilus was the son of Colley Cibber, the actor, playwright, and poet laureate, and had taken over the management of his company. In 1737 the abusive and spendthrift Theophilus had borrowed money from a rich gentleman, William Sloper, and in lieu of paying him back had coerced Susannah into sleeping with him. The three were soon living in a ménage à trois in a series of houses rented by Sloper.

The arrangement backfired on Theophilus when Susannah fell in love with Sloper. Soon afterwards she became pregnant by him, and tried to leave Theophilus. He abducted her, but after her rescue by her brother Thomas Arne, Theophilus sued Sloper. He accused him of "Assaulting, Ravishing, and Carnally knowing" his wife and demanded £5000 in damages. A jury, hearing testimony about how Theophilus had connived in the situation for his own gain, awarded him a nominal £10. After Susannah gave birth to a daughter in 1739, Theophilus sued Sloper again, this time for £10,000; he was awarded £500. Still, Susannah was generally seen as her husband's victim; she and Sloper would remain together for the rest of her life.

Theophilus Cibber, Comedian, In the Character of a Fine Gentleman (date unknown). Image source: Folger Shakespeare Library ART File C567.7 no.1

In 1741 these events were still fresh in the public mind, and by travelling to Dublin Mrs. Cibber, like Handel, was looking for a break from the London scene. She was appearing in plays at the Aungier Street Theater when Handel asked her to join his group of singers for the second subscription series. Although she had performed before in Handel works, she could not read music and did not have a powerful voice. But as Charles Burney, who knew Mrs. Cibber personally, later wrote in his General History of Music, "by a natural pathos, and perfect conception of the words, she often penetrated the heart, when others, with infinitely greater voice and skill, could only reach the ear. . .[She] captivated every hearer of sensibility by her native sweetness of voice and powers of expression." [6]

Including the extra concert on 7 April, Handel's second subscription series ended just four days before Palm Sunday. He must have begun planning for the first public performance of Messiah shortly after Mrs. Cibber joined his company. Rehearsals would have had to begin well in advance, since she needed to learn her part by ear. 

Her presence among the performers also raised another issue. The dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin was Jonathan Swift. In January he had forbidden church singers and musicians "to assist at a Club of Fiddlers in Fishamble Street," and ordered the punishment of "such vicars as shall ever appear there, as Songsters, Fidlers, Pipers, Trumpeters, Drummers, Drummajors, or in any Sonal Quality, according to the Flagitious aggravations of their respective Disobedience, Rebellion, Perfidy & Ingratitude." [7]

Jonathan Swift by Francis Bindon, c. 1735. Image credit: National Portrait Gallery NPG 5319. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

If Swift was outraged by the church musicians performing in Handel's concert series, what would he think of Mrs. Cibber's participation, particularly in a performance of Messiah during Holy Week? The word book of the new oratorio was Jennens' compilation of excerpts from the King James Bible and Apocrypha about the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. It would be shocking enough to have an actress, even a married one, sing those words from the stage; Mrs. Cibber's eyebrow-raising sexual history would make it even more scandalous.

However, Handel was used to managing difficult personalities. He recruited allies, likely including Swift's Irish publisher George Faulkner, to plead with the dean. He also appealed to Swift's conscience by arranging that the performance of Messiah would benefit charitable causes. Dean Swift relented: on 27 March an announcement was printed in Faulkner's Dublin Journal that the performance would be held "for the relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the Support of Mercer's Hospital in Stephen's Green, and of the Charitable Infirmary on the Inns Quay," and that it would involve "the Gentlemen of the Choirs of both Cathedrals," St. Patrick's and Christ Church. [8]

A public rehearsal on the Friday before Palm Sunday stoked excitement for the première on Tuesday 13 April. So many tickets were sold, more than 700 for a room deigned to hold 600, that a notice was published in Faulkner's Dublin Journal: "The Stewards of the Charitable Musical Society request the Favour of the ladies not to come with Hoops this day to the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street. The Gentlemen are desired to come without their swords." [9] The performance started around noon.

Word book of Messiah, Dublin 1742. Image source: Foundling Museum

The first aria after the opening chorus in Part 2 had been given to Mrs. Cibber. The text of "He was despisèd" comes from the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, but it has been read in the Christian tradition as a prophecy of the experience of Jesus during his arrest, trials, condemnation, and the Stations of the Cross, events that would be commemorated in just a few days' time. Clearly Handel was relying on Mrs. Cibber's expressiveness and her ability to move her listeners through her "natural pathos." Here is my favorite version, performed by Anne Sofie von Otter accompanied by the English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock:

https://youtu.be/1iAb5pyEQi0

Dr. Patrick Delany, rector of St Werburgh’s Church and chancellor of both St. Patrick's and Christ Church, was so profoundly moved by Mrs. Cibber's performance of this aria that at its conclusion he called out to the stage, "Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven!" [10]

In Faulkner's Dublin Journal an anonymous reviewer wrote, "On Tuesday last Mr. Handel's Sacred Grand Oratorio, the MESSIAH, was performed in the New Musick-Hall in Fishamble-street; the best Judges allowed it to be the most finished piece of Musick. Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crouded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestick and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear." [11]

And Edward Synge, Bishop of Elphin, wrote, "As Mr. Handel in his oratorio's greatly excells all other Composers I am acquainted with, so in the famous one, called the Messiah, he seems to have excell'd himself. The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it. It seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other, and this is particularly remarkable of it, That tho' the Composition is very Masterly & artificial [in the sense of "displaying special art or skill"], yet the Harmony is so great and open, as to please all who have Ears & will hear, learned & unlearn'd." [12]

Handel went on to write a dozen more oratorios, and to cement his place as the most beloved English-language composer of all time. It was as an oratorio composer that he was remembered for another two and a half centuries, until his operas began to be revived and their musical riches rediscovered in the 20th century. But nearly three centuries after its première, Messiah remains Handel's most-performed composition.

King's Every Valley (small quibble: Handel set these words as "Ev'ry Valley," although I can see why that was not chosen as the title) covers the slow establishment of Messiah as an annual tradition, something that took another decade, and the fates of many of the participants in the première. It also connects the wealth of Handel's patrons and of Handel himself to the slave trade carried on by the South Sea Company. It's thoroughly researched and compellingly written, although readers unfamiliar with Handel and Messiah may not immediately understand each time King introduces and discusses at length persons whose connection to Messiah is only made fully apparent later on.

There are many books about Messiah; those by Donald Burrows (Cambridge, 1991) and Richard Luckett (Harcourt Brace, 1992) are especially recommendable, and Winton Dean's magisterial Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (Oxford, 1959) remains an essential source for researchers. But King's account, clearly originating in his deep affection for the work, is well-deserving of a place next to them on the shelf.

Image source: Bookshop.org

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1. Quoted in Donald Burrows, Handel, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The Master Musicians, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 259.
2. Quoted in David Vickers, Messiah (HWV 56) "A Sacred Oratorio." GFHandel.org
3. Quoted in Burrows, Handel, p. 260.
4. Quoted in Burrows, Handel, pp. 262–263.
5. Dates of the subscription series concerts taken from W. H. Grattan Flood, "Fishamble St. Music Hall, Dublin, from 1741 to 1777." Sammelbände Der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, vol. 14, no. 1, 1912, pp. 51–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/929446.
6. Charles Burney, A General History of Music, Volume the Second, Dover Publications, 1957, pp. 899, 1003. Reprint of 1935 edition edited by Frank Mercer and published by G.T. Foulis & Co., 1935, prepared from the second edition, 1789.
7. Quoted in Charles King, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel's Messiah, Doubleday, 2024, p. 199.
8. Quoted in King, Every Valley, pp. 201–202. The involvement of the church choirmen meant that the date of the première had to be shifted from 12 April, Holy Monday, to the next day.
9. Stanford University. Handel Reference Database: 1742.
10. Jonathan Bardon, "The Singer Saved by Handel's Messiah," Irish Daily Mail, 21 December 2015. https://www.pressreader.com/ireland/irish-daily-mail/20151221/281698318705097
11. Stanford University. Handel Reference Database: 1742.
12. Stanford University. Handel Reference Database: 1742.
    

Suggested reading: The first ten weeks edition

Protestors march in New York City on 5 April 2025. Image source: Associated Press

Yesterday hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered across the country to oppose the actions of the new administration. Its first ten weeks have been a spectacle of cruelty, crudity, corruption and mendacity that have exceeded, if that's the word, even my abysmal expectations. The attempted destruction of government services and vital data relating to health, education, social benefit programs, scientific research, environmental protection, worker and consumer safety, and financial fraud; the suppression of free speech, the arrest and deportation of legal immigrants for constitutionally-protected activities, and attacks on schools and academic freedom; the rampant self-dealing and conflicts of interest; the exposure of highly sensitive personal data; the defiance of court orders; the list could go on, and on.

This edition of "Suggested reading" takes a look at the current administration, our historical amnesia, and the state of our politics:

1. "From comedy to brutality," Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, 13 March 2025.

   In the days surrounding his inauguration, He Who Shall Not Be Named offered to buy Greenland from Denmark (and told reporters that he would not rule out seizing it by military force), suggested that he would annex Canada as "the 51st state," threatened to invade Panama to reassert U.S. control of the Canal, and proclaimed that the U.S. would "own" Gaza and resettle its population.

   You might think that these ideas were unique to the considerable idiosyncrasies of the current occupier of the White House. However, as Fintan O'Toole reveals in the New York Review of Books, all of these schemes have long and often ignoble histories:

• Greenland: After the U.S. Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward requested "A Report on the Resources of Greenland and Iceland," which was issued in 1868. The U.S. had just purchased Alaska from Russia, and Seward was contemplating a similar deal with Denmark for Greenland and Iceland (but nothing came of it).

  

  Arctic Boundary as defined by the Arctic Research and Policy Act (modified by geographic labels). Map author: Allison Gaylord. Image source: US Arctic Research Commission

  And after World War II, during which the U.S. military occupied Greenland to deny its use to Germany, President Harry Truman approached Denmark with an offer to buy it (but nothing came of it). Eighty years later the U.S. still operates a major military base there, now called Pituffik Space Base.

  Greenland is actually closer to Moscow (2390 miles) than to Washington, DC (2620 miles), and closer to Copenhagen (1860 miles) than to the nearest location in the U.S.: Madawaska, a town at the northernmost tip of Maine just across the St. John River from Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada (1930 miles). [1]

  In short, whoever should have sovereignty over Greenland, geography would suggest that it isn't the U.S. A wild idea: perhaps the people who live there should govern themselves, and control Greenland's mineral and other resources? But as we know from many contexts, some discussed below, when you are occupying increasingly desirable real estate it is money, power, and violence that usually decide the outcome.

• Canada: From its very inception as a nation, the U.S. has had territorial designs on its northern neighbor. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the War of American Independence, the U.S. demanded and received all of the territory of the British Province of Quebec south of the Great Lakes; today, that territory comprises the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, as well as eastern Minnesota, western Pennsylvania, and about half of New York. In 1787, the Articles of Confederation contained a clause admitting the rest of British Canada as a state if it voted to join the former colonies (it didn't).

  

  The thirteen original colonies in 1774 (detail), McConnell Map Co., 1919. Image source: Library of Congress

  During the War of 1812 the U.S. invaded Canada in a campaign to capture Montreal, the key to the rest of Quebec; the invading forces were defeated almost as soon as they crossed the border. But the dream didn't die; in the late 19th century William Seward, Henry Adams, and the poet Walt Whitman, among many others, envisaged a United States that encompassed Canada. HWSNBN's annexation plan is just the latest irruption of this idea—probably one of the very few ideas he shares with Walt Whitman.

• Panama owes its existence to U.S. intervention. In 1903, the U.S. encouraged Panama, then a province of Colombia, to declare independence, and then immediately bought the rights to the land through which the Panama Canal would be carved. By happy coincidence, the Panamanian representative in the negotiations also worked for the French company that had been given a concession to build the canal across the isthmus. The deal included a $10 million payment to the Panamanian government plus annual rent of $250,000; $40 million went to the French company for the land rights.

  

  "The Coup d'Etat," by Charles G. Bush, New York World, 8 November 1903. Image source: The Age of Revolutions

  As historian Justin J. Masucci writes on the website The Age of Revolutions, "Panama granted the U.S. the right to build and operate an inter-ocean canal and also gave the U.S. de facto sovereignty over a ten mile-wide territory around the canal in perpetuity — in effect creating a U.S. colony in Panama." Panama remained a client state of the U.S. until the 1960s. It didn't gain jurisdiction over the Canal Zone until 1979, or control of the canal itself until 31 December 1999.

  

  Panama Canal and Canal Zone. Image source: Project Gutenberg

  Under the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaty that eventually turned control of the canal over to Panama, the U.S. retained the right to militarily defend the neutrality of the canal. However, it pledged to "abstain. . .from any intervention in the internal affairs of the Republic of Panama." [2] But just a dozen years after the signing of the treaty, U.S. armed forces invaded Panama to depose and take prisoner its leader Manuel Noriega and re-establish a U.S.-friendly government.
  
  Panama City is conveniently located next to the Pacific entrance of the canal. Any U.S. military invasion of the Canal Zone would inevitably involve its capture and the replacement of Panama's leaders, extending a long legacy of U.S. dominance of the country.

• Gaza: While rhetorically disapproving of Israeli settlement on Palestinian lands as an impediment to a two-state solution, the U.S. government has continued to provide an uninterrupted flow of weapons to Israeli governments. [3] According to the Council on Foreign Relations, since the end of World War II, Israel has been the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid by a factor of two. [4]
  
  Aid has continued to flow since the Oslo Accords in 1993 as the number of Israeli settlements and "outposts" has more than doubled, as the number of West Bank settlers has increased by more than four times to nearly half a million, and as the number of settlers in East Jerusalem has grown to nearly a quarter of a million. [5]

  

  Settler population growth in the West Bank, 1993–2023. Image source: Peace Now

  U.S. aid has provided direct and indirect support for this expansion.

  

  U.S. military and economic aid to Israel since 1970. Source: Council on Foreign Relations

  And during the Israeli government's assault on Gaza in 2024 U.S. military aid more than quadrupled from 2023 levels, to $12.5 billion. That assault has resulted in an estimated death toll to date of over 50,000 men, women and children. The weapons and munitions that resulted in this death and destruction are largely supplied by the U.S. [6] 

  And not only munitions: the Israeli military uses AI and cloud computing services supplied by Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon. According to an article by the Associated Press, "An Israeli intelligence officer told the AP that AI has been used to help pinpoint all targets in the past three years." These, then, must include the "pinpointing" of a car being driven by Hoda Hijazi. Her mother and her three daughters, Rimas, 14, Taline, 12, and Liane, 10, were killed, and later falsely claimed by the Israeli military to have been "Hamas targets." [7] Medical facilities and personnel and aid workers have also been targeted.

  

  Gaza in March 2024. Image source: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East

  So HWSNBN's open endorsement of the forcible relocation of the Palestinian population of Gaza does not seem to many Palestinians to be a radical departure from decades of implicit U.S. policy. The mildest term for such an action is "ethnic cleansing" (implying that the existing population is filth that needs to be swept away), which came into use during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The UN Commission of Experts stated that such actions "constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." [8]

  

  Palestinians walk amid the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings in Jabaliya, northern Gaza Strip, 14 March 2025. Image credit: Jehad Alshrafi/AP. Image source: NPR

  On 26 February, The Guardian reported that HWSNBN had posted a "bizarre AI-generated video" on his social media site depicting Gaza as a luxury seaside resort, or as he called it in a 4 February press conference, "the Riviera of the Middle East":

  Words fail.

2. "An Expanding Vision of America," Nicole Eustace, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   Of course, dispossession and genocide were foundational acts of the U.S. itself. As Nicole Eustace writes in her NYRB article,

   . . .at each point in the development of the political economy of the British colonies and the United States, exploitation of Native peoples, expropriation of Native land, and extraction of Native resources fueled Euro-American advancement.

   I have some disagreement with the way this statement is framed. First, it seems to anachronistically attribute to Native peoples a capitalistic ownership model of land and natural resources. Second, the phrase "exploitation of Native peoples" obfuscates how deadly the encounters between settlers and Native peoples were.

   

   California's indigenous history: Native people of this place. Image source: Digital Humanities at Santa Clara University

   Taking the state I live in as an example, in 1849 it's estimated that there were 150,000 Native people living in California. Drawing on Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Eustace points out that this population had already been decimated: these were "survivors of the first waves of colonialism in the area, tens of thousands of Native people having died in and around Spanish mission towns after their first establishment in 1769." By 1870, after two decades of murder, starvation, disease, and the seizure and privatization of the land, the estimated Native population was reduced by 80%, to 30,000. Over that same period the settler population grew from around 95,000 to over half a million. [9]
   
   Today, people who claim at least some continental American or Alaskan native ancestry make up 3.6% of the California population, a lower percentage than the estimated 5.4% of 1870. The three California counties with the lowest percentage of people with native ancestry are in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. [10] The Native peoples of California, as with others discussed in this post, had the misfortune to occupy land that other, more powerful people wanted.

3. "A Self Divided," Laura Marsh, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   The appalling spectacle of our current politics may be partially understood through reference to a study conducted at the University of Virginia in 2014. As Laura Marsh explains in the NYRB, the researchers

   asked participants to spend six to fifteen minutes alone in a room without cell phones, laptops, or books. All they had to do was think. Sixty percent reported difficulty, and nearly half found the experience unenjoyable.
   
   In a follow-up study, the researchers added a twist: participants were given the chance to experience a negative sensation—a mild electric shock—during the quiet time. Sixty-seven percent of the men and 25 percent of the women in the study decided to take it. "Simply being alone with their own thoughts" was a deeply unappealing prospect for many people, the researchers found; they would "rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all."

   Two-thirds of the college-age American men in this study would rather give themselves an electric shock than be "alone with their own thoughts" for as little as six minutes.

   In The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press, 2025), journalist Chris Hayes points to this study as a way to explain why many people spend a majority of their free time scrolling on their phones. As Marsh writes,

   The smartphone offers distraction so readily and abundantly that it's possible to spend hours every day skipping from tab to tab [app to app?], or from video to video, without enjoying a moment of it—often, in fact, feeling somewhat drained and diminished.

   For social media addicts, "the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing," the journalist Richard Seymour wrote in The Twittering Machine (2019). Or as the tech critic Max Read has put it, "The actual point of 'screen time' is the time part—the hours it allows you to numbly burn up."

   

   Image source: OpenAccessGovernment.org

   Hayes contrasts the social media model with the old television model. Decades ago TV producers needed to create programming that would hold your attention for 30 to 60 minutes at a time, or longer: I remember in the early 1970s regularly watching, along with my whole family, the entire three-hour Saturday night CBS lineup of All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. A little later on I would follow this with the local 11 o'clock news and then switch to NBC for two new shows, Saturday Night Live (three Saturdays a month) or Weekend (one Saturday a month). The idea was to root you to the spot to provide a reliable audience for advertisers.

   The social media model is compared to playing a slot machine, "where the experience of a new stimulus every few seconds feels more important than the outcome of the bet." Hayes writes,

   What will hold people's attention? [Social media companies] don't have to have an answer. They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention, and then repeat those.

   HWSNBN is a master of using repeated distraction to grab attention. As Marsh notes,

   He has often drawn attention in ways that make him look reckless or cruel or untrustworthy. . .[but] the next day (or the next hour) brings a new story, another wave of attention, and another, and another. The news cycle becomes a blur in which individual incidents are hazy and only the unifying theme—wall-to-wall coverage of [HWSNBN]—sticks out.

   As Antonia Hitchens writes in the London Review of Books ("At CPAC," 20 March), in 2018 former HWSNBN strategist Steve Bannon called this technique "flooding the zone." As he put it, "If you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one."
   
   Of course, HWSNBN also has the advantage of almost universal name recognition from his "decades as a fixture of the tabloid press and a television personality"—combining the advantages of old and new media. HWSNBN is the first social media president; others must inexorably follow.
   
   Our 21st-century technological innovations are ironically returning us to the late 19th century, when the main features of our politics were cynical and corrupt party loyalty and grotesque smear campaigns, and when our economy was dominated by exploitative robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and Leland Stanford. It was a time of extreme anti-labor violence, inequality, anti-immigrant actions, and ideological conformity. Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Only this time around no one other than the crew of billionaires, ideologues, enablers and toadies surrounding HWSNBN is laughing.

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1. Air distances calculated from Greenland's geographical center on the Distance.to website.
2. "Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal," U.S. Department of State Archive.
3. The only exceptions I've found: in 1982 the Reagan Administration refused to provide cluster bombs to Israel after they were used against civilians; in 1991 the Bush Administration delayed a $10 billion loan package for four months when Israel's government would not pledge not to use the aid to build more settlements; and in 2024 the Biden Administration paused a shipment of 2,000-lb bombs because similar munitions had been dropped on Gaza, causing many civilian deaths.
4. Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts. Council on Foreign Relations, 13 November 2024.
5. Peace Now Settlement Watch, 30 Years After Oslo – The data that shows how the settlements proliferated following the Oslo Accords, September 2023.
6. Hadeel Al-Shalchi, Anas Baba, and Daniel Estrin, Palestinian deaths in Gaza rise above 50,000 as Israel expands its military campaign, NPR, 25 March 2025.
7. Michael Biesecker, Sam Mednick and Garance Burke, "As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies," Associated Press, 18 February 2025.
   
8. Ethnic Cleansing, Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes, United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Note to idiots and trolls: my reportage of these facts does not imply support of Hamas.
9. Oakland Museum of California. Resource 6-1a: California Population by Ethnic Groups, 1790-1880.
10. U.S. Census Bureau. California 2020 census.