This site is trying to pretend it’s for GWB. But it’s so obviously phony that only those who are truly stupid or psychotically anti-Bush could believe it’s a pro-Bush site. In his zeal to ban smear ads (or is he really just engaging in another clever campaign ploy?), Bush shouldn’t attack this site. He should spread the word about it. It will inflame his base to new heights of enthusiasm for his re-election.
Month: August 2004
Some Lessons from War
Peace Pledge Union Online has a slightly out-of-date (09/06/03) catalog of major wars and armed conflicts around the world. As of a year ago, the wars and armed conflicts listed below were in progress (country, year of onset, characterization of conflict). My interpretation follows the list.
Africa
Algeria 1992 civil war and civilian unrest
Burundi 1988 ethnic conflict continuing despite peace process
Congo-Brazzaville 1997 ethnic violence and aftermath
Congo-DR 1998 civil war, some moves towards peace
Kenya 1990 ethnic violence
Liberia 2000 rebel insurgency and cross-border conflicts
Nigeria 1997 recurrent ethnic, religious and political conflict
Somalia 1988 civil war and factional struggles
Sudan 1984 civil war
Uganda 1990 rebel/ethnic violenceAmerica (i.e., the American continents)
Colombia 1986 civil war
Peru 1983 civil war decliningAsia
South Asia
Afghanistan 1978 civil war; recurrent international involvement
India 1947 recurrent territorial dispute in Kashmir
Kashmir 1947 recurrent territorial dispute
Pakistan 1947 recurrent territorial dispute in Kashmir
Sri Lanka 1984 civil warSoutheast Asia
Burma 1948 political and ethnic struggle
Indonesia (West Papua) 1969 independence struggle
Philippines 1971 civil/sectarian warEurope
Russia 1999 renewed separatist war
Yugoslavia/Kosovo 1999 ethnic/separatist violence/NATO war aftermathMiddle East
Iraq 1990 interstate war; ethnic conflict
Israel 1982 interstate war; political/ethnic violence
A few of the conflicts may have abated in the last year, but several have intensified, and there are some new ones. But those changes don’t affect the moral I draw when I think about the list in the context of history:
1. Most wars and armed conflicts have nothing to do with the United States. The U.S. is not now — nor has it ever been — the leading cause of violence in the world. The U.S. didn’t start World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, or the Gulf War of 1990-91. Nor did the U.S. start the present war in Iraq — but that’s another discussion.
2. American might has, since 1945, sheltered the world from a massive war.
3. Armed conflict becomes less likely when representative government prevails, because it promotes the rule of law, which permits free markets to flourish (even allowing for the inevitable degree of regulation that attends representative government). The resulting prospect of stability and prosperity makes religious, tribal, and sectional rivalries less important in the scheme of life. Even the notable exception of Israel vs. Palestine proves the rule, for it is as much as anything else a war waged by a poor, despotic entity (Palestine) against a free and relatively prosperous one (Israel).
I do not mean to say that all conflict can be averted by the spread of representative government, the rule of law, and free markets. There are zealots in the world, and they will remain zealots regardless of democracy and prosperity — sometimes out of spite. The war on terror is a war against implacable zealots who care not for democracy, and we must fight those zealots by all means. But the spread of representative government, the rule of law, and prosperity eventually will diminish the zealots’ ability to elicit financial support and enlist suicide-fodder.
I am not calling for a “crusade” to bring representative government and free markets to all corners of the Earth. But — in addition to doing what we must do militarily to clean out the nest of vipers in the Middle East — we should use peaceful influence to promote the rule of law and the development of free markets whenever and wherever we can. To the extent that we can do those things, the world will be a more peaceful and prosperous place — for Americans as well as others.
Judicial Legislation — Example 9,999,999
Think what you will about the issue of abortion, but how can anyone say that this isn’t a judicial usurpation of legislative prerogative?
Judge Stops Partial-Birth Abortion Ban
By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK – In a highly anticipated ruling, a federal judge found the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional Thursday because it does not include a health exception.
U.S. District Judge Richard C. Casey in Manhattan said the Supreme Court has made it clear that a law that prohibits the performance of a particular abortion procedure must include an exception to preserve a woman’s life and health….
The law, signed in November, represented the first substantial federal legislation limiting a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Abortion rights activists said it conflicted with three decades of Supreme Court precedent.
It banned a procedure that is known to doctors as intact dilation and extraction, but is called “partial-birth abortion” by abortion foes. During the procedure, the fetus is partially removed from the womb, and its skull is punctured or crushed.
The judge challenged the conclusion by Congress that there is no significant body of medical opinion that the procedure has safety advantages for women…[emphasis added].
I would recant my position on judicial supremacy (here and here), if the alternative weren’t legal chaos. On the other hand, rulings like Judge Casey’s suggest that chaos is at hand.
This Is Getting out of Hand
I thought Bush’s condemnation of ads by 527 groups was a clever political ploy. After all, the SwiftVets shoe-string operation has hurt Kerry a lot more than Soros-Hollywood liberal backed outfits like MoveOn.org have hurt Bush. But now we read this:
Bush, McCain Discuss Ads by Outside Groups
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
LAS CRUCES, N.M. – President Bush wants to work with Republican Sen. John McCain to go to court against political ads by “shadowy” outside groups, the White House said Thursday amid growing pressure on the president to denounce attacks on John Kerry’s war record.
“We want to pursue court action,” Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to New Mexico. “The president said if the court action doesn’t work, that he would be willing to pursue legislative action with Sen. McCain on that.”
Say it ain’t so, George.
Patriotism in Song
As I posted a few days ago, patriotism is defined as “love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it,” according to TheFreeDictionary.com. I accept that definition as a starting point, but I want to take a harder look at patriotism. Why should an American, to be precise, love his or her country? And why and how might an American sacrifice for the sake of America?
The most familiar verses of America’s popular anthems express love of country in a variety of ways. There’s the hippy-dippy sentiment of “This Land Is Your Land”:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
Nothing there, unless you’re a welfare-state liberal who likes scenery.
Let’s try the first verse of “America the Beautiful”:
O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties above thy fruited plain!
America, America, god shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea
It’s “This Land Is Your Land” without the socialism.
“God Bless America” — composed in the years before World War II — begins to get it right:
While the storm clouds gather far across the
Sea, let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair, as we
Raise our voices in a solemn prayer.God bless America, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Thru the night with a light from above.
From the mountains to the prairies,
To the oceans white with foam.
God bless America, my home sweet home.
God bless America, my home sweet home.
Now we have “the land that’s free” as well as beautiful.
The first verse of “America” gets to the heart of the matter by focusing on liberty and its deep roots in America:
My country ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrims’ pride,
From ev’ry mountain side,
Let freedom ring.
And the “Star Spangled Banner” reminds us that war is sometimes the price of liberty:
Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
It’s hard to sing, and it lacks the lyrical beauty of its competitors, but the “Star Spangled Banner” still says it best: America is the beacon of liberty, and Americans so cherish liberty that millions of them have been willing to go to war for its sake.
In my next post on this subject I’ll look at sacrifice for liberty’s sake. It won’t be all about going to war.
The Face of America
I’m reminded of something unpleasant in my past by this post at The American Thinker:
PC discrimination in the U.K.
Like the United States, Great Britain is in the throes of multiculturalism and political correctness. The latest evidence comes from racial discrimination complaints filed by London police. Half of them have been filed by Caucasian officers, alleging they are being unfairly passed over, as the police rushes to make itself “look like” the population it serves.
In order to achieve the desired racialist outcome, it is contended that 80% of the new hires will have to be non-white. That sort of nonsense is what happens when population demographics change rapidly, and it is assumed that all institutions should automatically reflect the new racial profile.
I once worked for a CEO who was a blatant Democrat; he carried his political prejudices in his briefcase. He insisted that the workforce at our tax-funded think-tank should reflect “the face of America.” No amount of logic could persuade him that we owed it to taxpayers to fill jobs with the best available candidates rather than satisfy his pseudo-egalitarian urges. (I say pseudo-egalitarian because upon becoming CEO one of his first acts was to double the already ample size of the CEO’s office.) In particular, no amount of logic could persuade him that unless we drastically reduced the quality of our professional staff (traditionally freighted with Ph.D.s), we would never achieve anything resembling “the face of America” among the professionals upon whom our reputation depended. We had these conversations with predictable regularity, and they always ended in a stalemate.
Luckily, our think-tank was merely in the business of producing analysis of doubtful usefulness and influence. Police forces and armies, on the other hand, have real work to do. It’s scary when that work is undermined by political correctness.
Favorite Posts: Affirmative Action and Race
Blindsided by the Truth
In the preceding post I got carried away with my critique of Jeff Jarvis’s post about presidential character. Actually, there’s a classic book on the subject, Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, by James David Barber. I haven’t read it in years, but I recall finding it quite insightful — well, as insightful as hindsight can be. Barber makes a good case for the influence of a president’s character on his execution of the office.
Anyway, I think Jarvis may have had another point, to which I do subscribe. That is, most of the yelling and screaming that’s associated with political campaigns these days simply does no good. The yellers and screamers are simply convincing themselves, and those who already agree with them, that they’re right. Their main accomplishment is to provide blog-fodder for their political allies and opponents.
Yelling and screaming doesn’t change anyone’s mind. Being yelled and screamed at only makes you hate your political opponents and their politics all the more. Yet, some people do change their minds, in time. Why is that?
It’s said that people tend to become more politically conservative (or libertarian) with age. If that is so, it’s because age is a proxy for experience. Many people learn, from experience, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, that the law of unintended consequences often prevails, that there is no such thing as a free lunch (unless you happen to belong to the right interest group), and that negotiating for peace is a fool’s undertaking.
Experience blindsides people with the truth. Of course, not everyone is susceptible to the truth. Those who have taken a firm, “principled” stand in favor of government intervention in our lives and economic institutions are unlikely to back down from that stand. They have too much ego at stake.
But “average” people — John and Jane Public — can and do learn from experience. That is why I have hope for the future of freedom in the U.S. and for our ultimate victory over Islamism.
Is Character Really an Issue?
That’s the question asked and answered by Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. Here’s much of what he has to say (my comments are bracketed and bolded):
It’s accepted wisdom that character is an issue in elections, especially Presidential elections. Let’s examine that assumption.
Sure, if you know with good evidence that a candidate is a lying, thieving, stealing, sliming, philadering, cheating, insane idiot and louse — well, then, yes, character is an issue. [In other words, character can never be an issue with Jarvis. Why did he bother to write the rest of this post?]
But when is any human being really so one-dimensionally flawed (and when — since 1933 — are every one of his backers so hypnotized or stupid or corrupt to allow him to get this far in life)? [Hey, Jeff, people like to be on the winning side. A lot of them don’t care what it takes to win. Take Hillary Clinton, for instance. She put up with a guy who hit eight out of nine on your list, above. I don’t think Bill’s insane, but I think he’s got the rest of the bases covered.]
Now I know what some of you are going to say: Aha! You have a problem with character because Kerry’s character is being attacked and you’re likely to vote for him; how friggin’ convenient for you!…[No, I don’t think that. I follow your blog, and I’d say that you’re more likely to vote for Bush than for Kerry. But I still disagree with you about the character issue.]
I find that I have many problems with character as a campaign issue:
1. Character is not a measure of competence. And what I really want in a President is competence. [To what end? To micromanage the economy? Competence at what? Competence, as a word in itself, is meaningless.] Jimmy Carter had character….[Yeah, the character of a sanctimonious, lip-pursing deacon that he is. I saw that in 1976, that’s why I voted against him.] Bill Clinton ended up with a cracked character [To say the least.] but I say he was a good President….[You may say that; I won’t. Clinton was too busy triangulating, ingratiating himself to domestic interest groups, and trying to create a paper legacy for himself to pay attention to what was going on in the world. Look what it got us: 9/11. Yes, I know that you barely survived it. But you’re not the only one and the fact of your near-death doesn’t give you a monopoly on wisdom.]
2. Character is used mostly as an excuse for good old-fashioned political mudslinging….[True. But not exclusively true, as you admit when you say “mostly.”]
3. Character is the argument that will never end. If you don’t like the candidate, you’ll say he has crappy character. If you like the candidate, you’ll defend his character and say that the other side is just a bunch of character assassins. Wheels spin, mud spurts, and we don’t get anywhere. It’s mean-spirited. It’s unproductive. [Actually, I started out not liking Kerry for entirely different reasons. I knew nothing of his character until he began with the flip-flops. The more I learn, the more convinced I am that Kerry’s character makes him unfit to be a president in whom I would repose confidence. How is that mean-spirited or unproductive.]
4. Character cannot truly be measured until it is tested….[Kerry’s character has been tested, amply, since he declared himself as a presidential candidate last year. He has flipped, he has flopped, he has evaded the truth about himself, and he has been hypocritical in the nth degree about the use of character assassination. How’s that for starters?]
5. Character is a distraction from the issues that really matter, the issues a President can influence that, in turn, affect our lives….[The best thing a president can do is to honor his oath of office and uphold the Constitution. Kerry’s character flaws suggest that he will do neither; he will simply do what is politically expedient (much like Clinton) and, in the process, he will drag the country further down the slope of socialism. And, does he really have what it takes to deal with terrorism, or will he be too politically correct and hung up on multilateralism. Based on his character, I fear the latter.]
6. Character is a proxy for morality and morality is a proxy for religion and religion mixed with government always scares me. [It ain’t necessarily so. See my preceding comment.]
None of this is to say that we will not or should not vote on character. [Well, then, why did you bother to write this post?] At the end of the day, unless a candidate has a stand or stands we simply abhor, each of us will inevitably end up judging whether to vote for candidates based on whether we trust or admire or like them. That’s as it should be.
But when we start arguing over such intangible and personal criteria — when we start yelling at other people that they should or should not trust or admire or like someone the way we do — then the argument reaches often absurd and usually useless depths. [Who’s to say what’s relevant or irrelevant in politics? You? McCain and Feingold and the Supreme Court? Where do you come off trying to tell us what’s important and what’s not important? Sure, some of the stuff people are yelling about is absurd. Sure, there’s lots of scurrilous crap floating around in the blogosphere. So what? That’s politics in the U.S. as it has been practiced since the election of 1800. Worry about something that really matters — like John Kerry’s character.]
A Victory Blog
Here.
An Addendum about Classical Music
My litany of off-putting things about most “classical” music written after 1900 should have included dissonance, atonality, and downright dreariness. Music can be serious, but it needn’t be boring or depressing or just plain unlistenable. But a trip through the list of 20th century composers turns up relatively few who wrote much music that’s endurable. Among the many 20th century specialists in sheer boredom or cacophony are John Adams, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, George Crumb, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern.
If you want to hear how a true master delivers somberness and dissonance, all the while keeping the listener engaged, listen to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, op. 133. Click here and scroll down to track 7 to hear the first minute of Beethoven’s 16-minute masterpiece. Beethoven composed the piece in 1825-26. One hundred seventy-eight years have passed and no one has come close to matching its effervescent blend of inventiveness, sobriety, and esprit.
The Only Vote That Counts
As of the moment, if you believe polls, Kerry will collect more popular votes than Bush, even in a three-way race with Nader. But it’s close, and the election is more than two months away.
Well, suppose Kerry does “win” the popular vote, at the national level. So what? Why should anyone pay attention to that vote? The only vote that matters is the electoral vote.
Repeat after me…
Why Kerry’s War Record Means So Much to Democrats
Democrats are mostly against all wars and have been since the venture in Vietnam went sour (here in America, not there in Vietnam). Democrats flocked to Kerry when it seemed that his war record — coupled with his sort-of, sometimes opposition to the war in Iraq — would legitimate their knee-jerk antiwar stance.
When you live by a candidate’s war record, you die by the candidate’s war record. Kerry’s candidacy is beginning to die the death of a thousand swift cuts.
Krugman, Fisked
I’ve written a few things about Paul Krugman, a self-promoting economist of middling talent who has taken up a second career as a shill for the Democrat Party on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Krugman’s nemesis in the blogosphere is Donald L. Luskin, proprietor of The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid. Luskin has just delivered a ferociously accurate Fisking of Krugman. Read it.
McGovern(ment) to Earth
George McGovernment,* speaking from somewhere in space, has transmitted these thoughts to breathlessly waiting Earthlings:
“Liberals are lambasted,” he said. “Some people don’t even want to say the word.”
He said conservatism and liberalism have always had their place in U.S. history and both should continue to be at the cornerstone of American politics.
It’s true that “liberals” don’t even want to say the word; they’ve switched to “progressives”, for all the good it will do them.
So conservatism is okay? What kind of “progressive” are you, McGovernment? But what about libertarianism? Probably never heard of it.
__________
* One of my children — who have always been wise beyond their years — gave McGovern this more appropriate surname sometime in the 1970s.
Democracy, Is It for the Masses?
That’s the subtext of a piece in The New Yorker, with the title “The Unpolitical Animal”, by Louis Menand. Some excerpts:
Skepticism about the competence of the masses to govern themselves is as old as mass self-government. Even so, when that competence began to be measured statistically, around the end of the Second World War, the numbers startled almost everyone. The data were interpreted most powerfully by the political scientist Philip Converse, in an article on “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” published in 1964. Forty years later, Converse’s conclusions are still the bones at which the science of voting behavior picks.
Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologies,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what” -— of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy….
Just because someone’s opinions don’t square with what a political scientist recognizes as a political ideology doesn’t mean that those opinions aren’t coherent by the lights of some more personal system of beliefs. But Converse found reason to doubt this possibility….
All political systems make their claim to legitimacy by some theory, whether it’s the divine right of kings or the iron law of history. Divine rights and iron laws are not subject to empirical confirmation, which is one reason that democracy’s claims have always seemed superior. What polls and surveys suggest, though, is that the belief that elections express the true preferences of the people may be nearly as imaginary. When you move downward through what Converse called the public’s “belief strata,” candidates are quickly separated from ideology and issues, and they become attached, in voters’ minds, to idiosyncratic clusters of ideas and attitudes.
In the face of this evidence, three theories have arisen. The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as “the will of the people” is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. The fraction of the electorate that responds to substantive political arguments is hugely outweighed by the fraction that responds to slogans, misinformation, “fire alarms” (sensational news), “October surprises” (last-minute sensational news), random personal associations, and “gotchas.”…
A second theory is that although people may not be working with a full deck of information and beliefs, their preferences are dictated by something, and that something is élite opinion….
The third theory of democratic politics is the theory that the cues to which most voters respond are, in fact, adequate bases on which to form political preferences. People use shortcuts—the social-scientific term is “heuristics” -— to reach judgments about political candidates, and, on the whole, these shortcuts are as good as the long and winding road of reading party platforms, listening to candidate debates, and all the other elements of civic duty….
The principal shortcut that people use in deciding which candidates to vote for is, of course, the political party. The party is the ultimate Uncle Charlie in American politics. Even élite voters use it when they are confronted, in the voting booth, with candidates whose names they have never seen before….
Of course, if Converse is correct, and most voters really don’t have meaningful political beliefs, even ideological “closeness” is an artifact of survey anxiety, of people’s felt need, when they are asked for an opinion, to have one. This absence of “real opinions” is not from lack of brains; it’s from lack of interest….
And whence the lack of interest?
First, the rise of the professional political class and its support system of allied interest groups has taken most decisions out of the hands of the typical voter. It’s like the workplace: most of the work gets done by a minority of workers. Why take an interest when what you do matters little to the outcome?
Second, the rise of the professional political class and its support system of allied interest groups has dragged government into matters in which government shouldn’t be involved, such as social security and redistributive taxation. Such issues are too complex for most professional politicians and academicians, the majority of whom are mindlessly predisposed toward tinkering with the economy. So, it’s really a matter of blind elites trying to lead blind masses.
No wonder voters take shortcuts. It enables them to spend more time on things they can do something about: making a living, raising a family, and having fun.
More on the Debate about Judicial Supremacy
The debate about judicial supremacy continues. Well, William Watkins at Southern Appeal is keeping it alive. His latest post is here. He rebuts the notion that Marbury v. Madison (1803) settled the matter in favor of the U.S. Supreme Court. Watkins refers to an earlier post in which he discusses Larry Kramer’s book, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review:
Perhaps the hardest part for lawyers in understanding Kramer’s argument is our legal education. We are taught that the Framers intended the Supreme Court to be the final arbiter of the Constitution and that in Marbury John Marshall enshrined this principle forever. This is the “first principle” from which we begin. Kramer challenges this and distinguishes fundamental law from ordinary law. He argues that fundamental law (i.e., the Constitution) was never understood to be subject to the same judicial authority as ordinary law. To a modern lawyer this sounds like heresy, but Kramer assembles impressive evidence to support his position.
So, what is the solution? Kramer makes this suggestion:
To control the Supreme Court, we must first lay claim to the Constitution ourselves. That means publicly repudiating justices who say that they, not we, possess the ultimate authority to interpret the Constitution. It means publicly reprimanding politicians who insist that “as Americans” we should submissively yield to whatever the Supreme Court decides. It means refusing to be deflected by arguments that constitutional law is too complex or difficult for ordinary citizens. Constitutional law is indeed complex, because legitimating judicial authority has offered the legal system an excuse to emphasize technical requirements of precedent and formal argument that necessarily complicated matters. But this complexity was created by the Court for the Court and is itself a product of judicializing constitutional law. In reclaiming the Constitution we reclaim the Constitution’s legacy as, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, “a layman’s instrument of government” and not “a lawyer’s contract.” Above all, it means insisting that the Supreme Court is our servant and not our master: a servant whose seriousness and knowledge deserves much deference but who is ultimately supposed to yield to our judgments about what the Constitution means and not the reverse.
It reads like a passage from the script for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It also reads like a recipe for anarchy. There’s no doubt that the Supreme Court has badly twisted the Constitution. But think of where we might be if very many people were to take Kramer seriously. It makes me shudder.
As I have written before, the logic of judicial supremacy is irrefutable — like it or not:
1. Congress enacts laws for whatever reasons it will. Members of Congress may have stirring debates about the constitutionality of a particular law, but in the end Congress will do what it will do. It’s true that Congress should enact only constitutional laws, but that’s like saying children who live in a match factory shouldn’t play with matches.
2. If the executive doesn’t like a particular law for any reason (one of which may be his opinion that the law is unconstitutional) he may veto the law. If his veto is overridden, the law is the law.
3. In the absence of a specific judicial decision nullifying a specific law, the executive is bound to enforce that law. That is what the Constitution contemplates: The legislature legislates and the executive executes. There’s nothing mysterious or arcane about that.
4. If a party with standing challenges a law, it’s up to the courts to decide whether or not it’s a constitutional law. As it says in Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States….
Which means, as far as I’m concerned, that the executive must defer to judicial decisions about the application of a specific law.
Kerry and Vietnam
He was for it before he was against it before he was for it.
Making Sense about Classical Music
ArtsJournal.com recently ran a 10-day blog, “Critical Conversation: Classical Music Critics on the Future of Music”. It “tackled the question what/where/are the Big Ideas in classical music?” The blog “involved 13 prominent American music critics.”
One of the critics, Greg Sandow of the Wall Street Journal, is also a composer. Sandow’s home page is here. It includes a link to a page about his “Quartet for Anne” (his wife). You can hear it performed by the Fine Arts Quartet by clicking here. (It’s only about five and a half minutes long.) If this is the new direction of classical music, I’m all for it. It’s a hauntingly lovely piece reminiscent of Antonín Dvořák’s work.
As I’ve written before and will write again, Dvořák was one of the last great composers of the golden era of classical music, which began around 1700 and came to an end around 1900. What happened after that? Another participant in the blog, Kyle Gann of the Village Voice, had a few useful insights:
Throughout the 20th century, each new movement represented an advance in complexity and abstraction over the last. Serialism brought that process to a dead end….
[O]ne thing that composers of my generation have almost universally lost patience with is the presumption of historical inevitability. The idea that 12-tone music was the inevitable music of the future and that anyone who didn’t learn to write it was “useless” (Pierre Boulez’s word) left a bitter taste in our mouths. [Just as Boulez’s so-called music left a bitter taste in audiences’ mouths: ED]
But Gann and most of the other bloggers are hung up on compositional techniques; fusions with pop, rock, and jazz; experimentation with electronic music; the role of gender; the role of political ideas; the influence of Chinese composers; and on and on. All of which misses the point.
What happened around 1900 is that classical music became — and still is, for the most part — an “inside game” for composers and music critics. So-called serious composers (barring Gershwin and a few other holdouts) began treating music as a pure exercise in notational innovation, as a technical challenge to performers, and as a way of “daring” audiences to be “open minded” (i.e., to tolerate nonsense). But the result isn’t music, it’s self-indulgent crap (there’s no other word for it).
Thus I return to Greg Sandow, who is on the trail of the “next big idea” in a post headed “Truly big classical ideas”:
A new Big Idea would be very welcome, at least to me — a reintroduction of performer freedom, but to what now would be considered a drastic degree. You can find examples of this in old recordings, especially by singers. Look at Ivan Kozlovsky, one of the two star tenors at the Bolshoi Opera during Stalin’s rule. To judge from films and recordings, he’s clearly one of the greatest tenors who ever lived, measured simply by technique, breath control, range (all the way up to an F above high C, with Cs and C sharps thrown out like thrilling candy), phrasing, and expression….
But what makes him most unusual — and, to many people, quite improper — is that he sang at least some of the time like a pop singer, using lots of falsetto, almost crooning at times, and above all taking any liberty he pleased, slowing down and speeding up as the mood suited him. To my ears, he’s mesmerizing when he does that. You can’t (to bastardize an old cliche) take your ears off him. And when he does it in the Duke’s opening solo in the duet with Gilda from Rigoletto, he nails the Duke’s character as no other singer I’ve ever heard could do. You don’t just theorize that the Duke is attractive to women; you feel it, and want to surrender to him yourself. Or, perhaps, run away, which is exactly the kind of dual reaction a man like that would really get….
[Kozlovsky is] in part just a sentimental entertainer. But what sentiment, and what entertainment! And what perfect singing. When he croons “O Mimi tu piu non torni”…, some people might roll their eyes at the way he slows down at the peak of the phrase, but you can’t ignore his genuine feeling, or his perfect control as he slowly dreams his voice into the lightest of pianissimos.
Singing like that would be absolutely forbidden in opera today. No teacher, no coach, and no conductor would let any singer try it. And yet, if someone stepped out on the stage of the Met singing that way, the audience would go insane. The applause wouldn’t end. And opera would come back to life.
When I follow Sandow’s point to its logical conclusion, here’s where I arrive: Classical music, on the whole, would come back to life if more composers were to reject self-indulgence and write music for the enjoyment of peformers and audiences.
The Meaning of Patriotism: An Introduction
It’s “love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it,” according to TheFreeDictionary.com. Before I looked up the definition, I was going to define patriotism merely as “love of country.” The part about “willingness to sacrifice for it” raises the stakes; it suggests that love of country must be backed by deeds, not just mouthed in words.
Far better than the dictionary definition of patriotism is a NYT op-ed by a U.S. Marine serving in Iraq. Key excerpts:
Now we are on the verge of victory or defeat in Iraq. Success depends not only on battlefield superiority, but also on the trust and confidence of the American people. I’ve read some articles recently that call for cutting back our military presence in Iraq and moving our troops to the peripheries of most cities. Such advice is well-intentioned but wrong – it would soon lead to a total withdrawal. Our goal needs to be a safe Iraq, free of militias and terrorists; if we simply pull back and run, then the region will pose an even greater threat than it did before the invasion. I also fear if we do not win this battle here and now, my 7-year-old son might find himself here in 10 or 11 years, fighting the same enemies and their sons.
When critics of the war say their advocacy is on behalf of those of us risking our lives here, it’s a type of false patriotism. I believe that when Americans say they “support our troops,” it should include supporting our mission, not just sending us care packages. They don’t have to believe in the cause as I do; but they should not denigrate it. That only aids the enemy in defeating us strategically.
Michael Moore recently asked Bill O’Reilly if he would sacrifice his son for Falluja. A clever rhetorical device, but it’s the wrong question: this war is about Des Moines, not Falluja. This country is breeding and attracting militants who are all eager to grab box cutters, dirty bombs, suicide vests or biological weapons, and then come fight us in Chicago, Santa Monica or Long Island. Falluja, in fact, was very close to becoming a city our forces could have controlled, and then given new schools and sewers and hospitals, before we pulled back in the spring. Now, essentially ignored, it has become a Taliban-like state of Islamic extremism, a terrorist safe haven. We must not let the same fate befall Najaf or Ramadi or the rest of Iraq.
No, I would not sacrifice myself, my parents would not sacrifice me, and President Bush would not sacrifice a single marine or soldier simply for Falluja. Rather, that symbolic city is but one step toward a free and democratic Iraq, which is one step closer to a more safe and secure America.
I miss my family, my friends and my country, but right now there is nowhere else I’d rather be. I am a United States Marine.
Glen G. Butler is a major in the Marines.
Fatuous-Libertarian-of-the-Month Award
The winner is Gene Healy, for this post:
Questions on Iraq and the GWOT
Given that our intelligence agencies have a dearth of Arabic speakers, who’s been reading Al Qaeda email traffic since the fall of 2002? [How about contracting-out Gene? Ever hear of it? It’s a sort-of free-market way of performing government functions; it avoids the need to carry a permanent payroll of bureaucrats and, if done right, it’s a more effective way of spending taxpayers’ dollars. Haven’t you noticed that the intelligence agencies seem to have been doing a pretty good job lately? And do you suppose they’re really telling the truth about their capabilities. What kind of naive putz are you Gene?] I assume quite a few of the folks with the necessary language skills have been shifted from that task to dealing with Iraq. [See previous comment.] Who’s reading it now while we’re busy trying to deal with Moqtada al-Sadr or whoever the next enemy of the month is? [See previous comment, and stop trying to be so clever. You’re not that good at it.]
If the “flypaper” theory is true, and there is a fixed number of terrorists and it’s all about whether we want to fight them here or abroad, then why don’t we invade Saudi Arabia, put mouse ears on the Kabaa, and start charging admission to fat Christian tourists? That would really rile up the terrorist monolith, at no extra risk to us domestically! [He’s kidding, of course, because as a libertarian he doesn’t really care where his oil comes from as long as he can buy it at a good price. And an invasion of Saudi Arabia would certainly disrupt his supply of oil for a while. He’s too busy trying to be clever to understand that the Saudis must be worried about what happens when we’re through with Iraq — which is why GWB doesn’t tip his hand about such things. One despotism at a time, Gene. Patience, please.]
More seriously, if the “flypaper” theory is true, then why do we need to “drain the swamps” by democratizing the Middle East? [Drained swamps don’t always stay drained, dummy.] Doesn’t the latter theory depend on the idea that there aren’t a fixed (or relatively fixed) number of terrorists? (See the Rumsfeld memo.) If there’s a fixed number of terrorists, what important war-on-terror goal is served by turning Iraq (and later, Saudi Arabia, Syria, et al) into secular liberal democracies? [See previous comment. Also, do you have something against secular liberal democracies? Or is that you don’t think Arabs could possibly be as enlightened as we are? That’s hardly a libertarian way of looking at the world.] Surely it can’t be the case that already-practicing terrorists are going to lay down their arms in gratitude when democracy comes to the Arab world. [You’re right, Gene, that’s why we’re also trying to kill as many of them as we can while we have the chance. Oddly enough, the more we kill the fewer there will be because (1) some will be dead and (2) others will think twice about getting their butts shot off. I mean, that would be your reaction Gene, and you’re a fairly fanatical person yourself. Or do you believe that Arabs have a superior degree of fanaticism. If so, that’s racial stereotyping. Tsk, tsk.] Or is the theory that since they hate us because we’re free, once they’re free, they’ll hate themselves, and be too busy to bother with us? [If you’ve been paying attention Gene, you will have figured out that they will either be free, dead, cowed, or targeting bigots like you.]
Here’s some free advice, Gene. Don’t try to mix humor and serious commentary. You’re not up to it.
Politics and Prosperity 