Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • July 23, 2014 Perspective is everything The time between July 4 and 14 was highlighted by an event that caused a certain amount of consternation in some quarters and jubilation in others. In World Cup action, the German soccer team reduced the hapless Bra- zilians to tears and defeated Argentina in the final game, provoking the Argentineans to injure 20 policemen. This was brought home to me while I was driving up the road and saw a black car coming the other way with a large German flag displayed on a side-post. The car was American-made, which is always great news. This flag is not one displayed very often in the United States, but the colors are unmistakable. In 1919, The Weimar Republic voted to haul down the Imperial German flag and replace it with the flag flown over the various German-speaking states in 1848-49 until the unification movement talked itself out of doing anything. The Imperial flag was based on the colors of the two North German states: black and white for Prussia, red and white for Hanover. These were the two large North German countries which had fought as allies of Britain against Napoleon. Prussia then gobbled up Hanover, which is probably why the red stripe got on the German national flag and definitely why the last king of Hanover, George V, lost his job. The south German states fought mostly for Napo- leon and when flag-making time rolled around, they got stiffed. When Weimar succeeded the Kaiser, the gold band succeeded the white band, which may have been an insult to both Prussia and Hanover. Prussians and Hanoverians noted that this was the perfect choice for liberal Germany’s new flag. The gold stood for the past. Goethe and Schiller were long dead and Wagner and Brahms were more recently dead. The red was for the present. Communists took over the North German seaports and Munich and had a try at Berlin. The black stood for the future. I was somewhat interested in the soccer showdown, but not enough to lose much sleep over the game. I learned that Germany had won in a 1-0 match against Argentina, which did not surprise me much, and that some Argen- tine fans had rioted, which did not surprise me at all. Two events had preoccupied me far more than the World Cup. The day before, I had seen a dead squirrel two blocks from my house, and I was concerned that it might have been the tenant of our garage. The garage squirrel is, I think, a third-generation hometown resident and he frequently shows up at breakfast time to see how things are going and amuses me, as did his grandfather before him. I was relieved, shortly afterward to find that the garage squirrel was still alive and the victim was, in a manner of speaking, somebody else’s squirrel. The death of any harmless wild creature is sad, and they contribute to a more symbiotic world by turning man-made and nat- ural scrap food into organic fertilizer. They also provide amusement in idle moments. I wish people would drive more carefully. The other major event of the weekend was the death of Lorin Maazel. PBS took some note of the soccer match: They played 20 minutes of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” in honor of Germany, and a two-minute tango in honor of Argentina. I found that slightly condescending. PBS certainly spent more time on Maazel than they did on the soccer match, and rightly so. Maazel was born in France while his American Jewish parents were studying music. His grandfather, Isaac Maazel, was a violinist with the Metropolitan Opera for several decades. Lorin -- “Little Lorin,” as they called him - - was a child prodigy on the violin and the piano, and later shifted to conducting. At the age of 30, in 1960, Maazel became the first American and the youngest conductor to conduct at Bayreuth, the Wagner Memo- rial in Bavaria. He also served as chief conductor of the Berlin Opera, the Vienna State Opera, and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, at the New York Phil- harmonic, and at the Munich Opera. He conducted the PBS New Year’s Concert from Vienna, a broadcast heard around the world eight times, most recently in 2005. Maazel and his wife, the German actress-musi- cian Dietlinde Turban, operated a foundation where they fostered young American artists and introduced Rappahannock County, Virginia, to German classi- cal music and some of the more progressive Broadway shows. People hope it continues. Maazel’s one opera, based on George Orwell’s “1984” was not a success, but he worked on one film opera that was unforgettable: the film version of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” that featured Maazel as the conductor, Julia Migenes as the fiery and dangerously fickle Carmen, and Placido Domingo as the hapless Don Jose. This is the perfect introductory film for ado- lescents who think opera is a snore where men wear silk stockings and powdered wigs and young women twitter and chirp instead of screaming. I remember a guy once twitted me about opera as not being a fit topic for he-man husbands and fathers like ourselves. Then he told me that I had to give a really strong pull on the door of his rusty old pickup truck. I ripped the door off the hinges and handed it to him. I wish I had a movie of that. Maazel also composed a 75-minute collation called “The Ring without Words” in which he condensed Wagner’s 18-hour cycle of four operas about lust, greed, and murder into an hour and a quarter. “The Ring of the Nibelung” captures the dramatic mood without ref- erence to the plot, yet it is in no way condescending. Maazel knew about Wagner’s shady character and about the very shady characters who co-opted his music. He also knew Wagner was the greatest musical genius of his era, though it was not politically correct to say so until the World Cup final. Maazel was an international cultural treasure, and his departure made a much greater impact on me than an international sports event. He was even bigger than the Olympics. His talent and his vision were both for real and not for sale. So it is all a matter of perspective. Rooting for national soccer teams is rather like worrying about your own garage squirrels. They mean a lot to you, but nobody else much cares. The collective concern of both Brazil and Argentina should perhaps be saving the rain forests, which are of concern to the whole world. Global warming is a much bigger deal than the World Cup. Brazil has a surprisingly good record on indigenous Indians. The Argentineans exterminated theirs, just as the Americans, Australians, and Chileans exterminated the harmless Indians of California, one of history’s least remembered genocides. The environment, the particu- lar concern about civil rights, not just for the Indians, and the need for civility at international events, should be more important to any lucid person than who won a sports event. So should the lives of people who foster apolitical respect and appreciation for great art and great music, which help to bring people together instead of prompting them to throw rocks at policemen. Letters to the Editor Finds extrapolation bogus Dear Editor: John Koster has written “Can history survive the flag wavers?” for his July 16 article. A better title would have been, “Can history survive John Koster, Wikipe- dia, and PBS?” Extrapolating from the Sultana to all of history and behavior and conflicts and humanity -- broad, but bogus. We surely owe every one of those soldiers in the U.S. armed forces a great debt. And yes, without our armed forces (members of the greatest generation), the survi- vors of World War II in the U.S. would be speaking Japa- nese or German. Stephen Struk Wyckoff Pezzuti appointed police chief (continued from page 5) administrative capacity as the department executive officer. The previous police chief, Irving Conklin, served in that position from 2000 until July 2010, when he retired. In a cost saving effort, the borough then agreed to rehire Conklin as a part-time public safety director six months after he retired, which would comply with the state’s pension requirements. Seltenrich served as acting police chief for six months after the previous chief retired in July 2010, and during those six months Conklin was the borough’s part-time public safety director, a position he held until he again retired in February 2012. Seltenrich was then named police chief. Seltenrich said he takes pride in seeing that his department has grown and improved over the past 38 years. He claims the department is now what he con- siders to be one of the best police departments in New Jersey.