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“Somehow they had pity on the farmers but they didn’t have pity on the Indians,” he said.

Bernstein, in his lecture, convincingly links that motif to a pleading phrase sung by Aida, beseeching the princess Amneris, her captor and rival in love, to have pity on her.

Achilles welcomed them courteously and set food and drink before them, but when they told him why they had come and all the rich gifts that would be his if he would yield, and begged him to have pity on his hard-pressed countrymen, they received an absolute refusal.

“It’s about time they have pity on us. But what do they care?” she said.

He’s spoken truth to power during national crises: His 1974 song “Mr. President, Have Pity on the Working Man” is a direct shot at then-President Nixon, but it could have been written about the pandemic: “Too late to run / Too late to cry now / The time has come for us to say goodbye now / Mr. President, have pity on the working man.”