Disturbing

Watching Madame Butterfly at the Santa Fe Opera I thought that the director had made a terrible mistake. The ending with the child holding a bloody sword and wrapped in the American flag seemed jarringly wrong.

Later, I wondered if this was not intended as a statement appropriate for the year in which the American opera Doctor Atomic is also featured (“Discussing ‘Doctor Atomic’ and the bomb’s legacy,” July 9). Both operas are about wrongs that America has committed toward the Japanese people. Madame Butterfly shows how American servicemen cynically used Japanese women, destroying their lives. Doctor Atomic is about the “gadget” which was and remains the ultimate destroyer of Japanese and potentially of all lives.

Both kinds of destruction occurred when America was “great.” Some wish to return to that period of conscience-less power, which was at least justified then because the enemy was so much worse. The flagwrapped child brandishing a sword is a powerful, disturbing image of our possible future. Barbara Olins Alpert

Santa Fe