"The Madam Butterfly Effect"
From Puccini on Lake Constance to amputations
in Ukraine, a look at the megapolitics beneath it all...
by Bill Bonner
“Un bel di, vedremo…” *
"One day it will be there, far out, where the sea meets the sky, a slender thread of smoke that rises above the water. A great white warship! Steaming into the harbor, she will fire her cannon. There it is! I can see it! I want to run to meet him. But, no, I will stand right at the edge of the hill, and wait as long as it takes for him to get here, and not grow weary.
Then down below, coming out of the city, a man, like a tiny ant, begins to climb up our hillside. Do you know who he is? When he has reached the top, do you know what he will do? He will call out, 'Butterfly, where are you?' I will not answer yet. I will keep myself hidden, partly to tease him, but mostly, so not to die from his first embrace! Then, anxiously, again he will call for me, crying, 'Oh, darling little wife! Oh, my cherry blossom!', sweet names he gave me on the day we were married. It will be just that way, I know it! Keep for yourself your fear. I have faith! He will come!"
~ "Madame Butterfly", Giacomo Puccini
Zurich, Switzerland - "On Wednesday night, we had the pleasure of some good old-fashioned racism, cultural appropriation, hetero-normalized genderism, toxic masculinity and religious intolerance…we went to see “Madame Butterfly” performed in Bregenz. Puccini’s famous opera, performed on the waterfront of Lake Constance, was such a magnificent production, we didn’t sleep a minute.
In 2017, the opera was performed in Seattle. The local newspaper reported that: "According to Gabrielle Kazuko Nomura Gainor, Seattle Opera’s media-relations manager… other members of the Asian-American community believe the problems with “Madame Butterfly” stem from far more than ignorance.
“It’s not just the fact that it’s white singers playing Japanese characters,” Gainor said. “It’s not just the fact that Cio-Cio San represents a very tired stereotype about Asian women, or that this work is constantly reinterpreted again and again, typically by a white or European director. It’s also a larger conversation about racial equity in opera. In reality, Cio-Cio San is a sex-trafficked 15-year-old Japanese teenager. Why are we so comfortable with that, to the point of romanticizing it and telling the story over and over?”
Racists, Colonialists and Simpleminded Superiority: ‘Butterfly’ is a 15-year-old Geisha. Pinkerton is a young US Navy officer. It takes place in Nagasaki, Japan around the turn of the last century. Even when the lyrics are sung in Italian…and translated for the audience on a screen in German (neither of which we speak), the story is easy to follow:
Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy goes back to the US where he gets another girl. First girl waits for him…with the son that he has sparked. Butterfly and her kin are unrepentant racists; for them, the American is a ‘barbarian.’ And they are religious bigots! When Butterfly marries him and converts to Christianity, her uncle rejects her…telling her, in effect, to ‘go to Hell.’ Pinkerton and his new wife are also racists; they regard the Japanese with the simpleminded superiority of colonialists. After all, they are bringing the future to Japan.
Yes, the megapolitics of the situation favored the US. By the late 19th century, Americans had the wind of the industrial revolution already at their backs; Japan was decades behind them. Early in the opera, Butterfly wraps herself in the US flag, convinced that she will have a better life in the USA. But in the story, as in real life, neither race…gender…white patriarchy…nor heteronormative intersectionality really matter. What matters is character, conduct….and firepower. Butterfly is pure, innocent, and honest. Pinkerton is a cad and a bounder.
An Army Without Arms: We’re not going to give away the ending (you probably know it already), but the story does not end well. Though the opera was written in 1898, Pinkerton prefigures a whole genre of foreign policy interventions…from the German occupation of France to America’s retreat from Saigon. Ignorant of local culture, the troops blow things up and then leave behind them dead bodies and live babies. Here’s the latest disaster, now unfolding in America’s proxy war in the Ukraine. Business Insider: "Amputations in Ukraine are as widespread as in the trenches of World War I. Before the war, Ukraine had several thousand amputations annually. That figure has risen to around 50,000 since the start of the war, 17 months ago, the outlet said."
Pinkerton leaves Butterfly…and things go from bad to worse. Still, looking on the bright side, at least Nagasaki is still intact when he goes."
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* "Un bel dì, vedremo" (Italian pronunciation: [um bɛl di veˈdreːmo]; "One fine day we'll see") is a soprano aria from the opera Madama Butterfly (1904) by Giacomo Puccini, set to a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It is sung by Cio-Cio San (Butterfly) on stage with Suzuki, as she imagines the return of her absent love, Pinkerton. It is the most famous aria in Madama Butterfly, and one of the most popular pieces in the entire soprano repertoire."
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