Birgit Nilsson Dies: End of an Era

She died on Christmas Day 2005, aged 87, in the village in southern Sweden where she was born in 1918. And it appears that the Swedes had her memorialized and put into the earth before the rest of the world knew what had happened.

Birgit Nilsson was the biggest star singer in the bright star-studded age of singers: the years after World War II when the world had Flagstad, Callas, and Nilsson all singing at once. And that was just the dramatic sopranos.

She wasn’t a very good actress, and she wasn’t a particularly expressive singer, but she had a huge golden voice, a really big golden voice. Writes Jay Nordlinger:

A few years ago I was talking to a famous opera singer about Nilsson, and this lady was waxing rhapsodic about that incredible sound. “It was so loud, it blew your hair back! It rattled your bones!”

One of today’s major sopranos is Seattle’s Jane Eaglen. She writes:

When I went to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, to study singing, my background was as a pianist, so my knowledge of opera was limited. My teacher, Joseph Ward, told me he thought I would sing Wagner’s Brünnhilde one day, which meant nothing to me, so he told me to go to the library and listen to "The Ring" conducted by Georg Solti and with Nilsson singing Brünnhilde. It would be safe to say that within five minutes I was hooked and my life changed forever. To think, as an 18-year-old, that one day I would sing this amazing music that the most incredible human voice I had ever heard was singing didn’t seem possible.

To memorialize Nilsson in Seattle, opera director Speight Jenkins had Eaglen sing the Liebestod (love death) from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—right in the middle of a performance of Die Fledermaus.

You can get The New York Times obituary here, and The Daily Telegraph obit here.

We young punks never got to hear her in the flesh. But we have the recordings, of which the centerpiece is the Solti Ring in which Nilsson sings Brünnhilde. I used to have it on vinyl. Now I have it on CD.

It should be on your iPod.

Abused Girl Doesn't Make Good: Government Child Protective Services AWOL

Sorry about that, old chap. Could have happened to anyone. Not our fault. That seems to be the attitude of the government’s child protective services after Nixzmary Brown was beaten to death in New York City by her stepfather.

Of course, the signs were all out there in the wind for anyone that cared. The government had a case file on the girl. The officials at the government school had attempted to get intervention to happen. Conservative columnist John Podhoretz has a quick recap.

You see, the problem was that the caseworker Roger Moore at the child protection agency in Bedford-Stuyvesant was overwhelmed, swamped with cases. Understaffed is the word they like to use.

"I didn’t drop any balls," Moore said last week as the city reeled from the Nixzmary’s murder. The thing was, Moore just had too much on his plate. "I couldn’t cover all the cases in my area," he said.

Podhoretz goes on in the traditionally outraged tone of your average ink stained wretch.

Roger Moore is 55 years old. I hope he leads a long life so that every night, Nixzmary Brown can enter his dreams and ask him why he didn’t save her from her torture chamber of a home.

But aren’t we missing the point here? Why should anyone, least of all a conservative columnist, expect a government to do any job right except the job of extracting taxes from the citizenry?

After all, if the bureaucratic method were so great then we wouldn’t have families and churches and the little platoons that make life civilized. We would have nice bureaucratic everything, just like Plato’s tremendously succesful Republic, and Aldous Huxley’s incomparable Brave New World.

Come on folks. Let’s admit it. Government can’t protect children. Never could. Never will. What protects children is their natural married parents. And when they fail, then you hope that the little platoons, the neighbors, the church members, will feel they have the authority to intervene and stop cruelty and abuse—to do something.

But don’t ever expect the welfare state to succeed at that sort of thing.

Abused Girl Makes Good Despite Failure of Child Protective Services

British barrister Constance Briscoe is a poster child for the meritocratic society. Daughter of Jamaican immigrants to Britain in the 1950s she went to college and became a barrister, a Queen’s Counsel, a level in the British legal hierarchy that poor old Rumpole of the Bailey could never quite rise to.

Only there is a little more to her story than that. One of six children, she was brutally abused by her mother, who did everything she could to abort her desire for education and advancement. The story is told by Briscoe in Ugly.

In an interview with Deirdre Fernand timed to coincide with the release of her book in Britain, Briscoe speaks in

measured, almost flat, tones recalling her troubled childhood. As she rehearses the violence, starvation and deprivation she endured, she could be reciting a shopping list...

When she asked her mother why she treated her so badly, she replied: “Oh, just the fact that you breathe...”

I thought all this child abuse was supposed to be a thing of the past, now that we have professional child protective services in every advanced nation. How could this abuse go on when there are squadrons of eager helping professionals organized into mighty bureaucratic armies intended precisely to seek out and put a stop to child abuse?

In the case of Constance Briscoe, she only got to escape from her mother when a teacher at her school informally took her in. For,

Eventually her mother attacked her so badly that her headmaster called her mother in. Briscoe refused to go back home with her but would not say why. A teacher, Miss K, agreed to take her in. Life proved sweet at Miss K’s flat in Streatham and her grades soared. She became prefect and captain of games.

And then she went on to university and qualified as a barrister. Now she is “Miss Recorder Briscoe”, a municipal judge.

Her son, now at university himself, could only get half way through her memoir.

But what should we do about this gross abuse? Can we say that the German bureaucratic method of credentialed experts has failed? Should we return to the Burkean “little platoons” of informal community to protect the least among us? What is to be done?

The End of the Bork Era

Nineteen years ago, Senator Edward Kennedy rushed onto the floor of the United States Senate and opened the Bork era. He said:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would have to sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police would break down citizen’s doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

That was then. Nineteen years later, Senator Kennedy is just another ageing Democratic senator with a taste for bullying witnesses.

This is now. Despite the nastiness of Senator Kennedy’s questioning of Judge Alito, who cares? Who cares what white-haired liberal senators think and do? Their time is past. They are voices of the past, mumbling the ideas of the past. Liberal ideas have consequences, and liberals would rather not talk about it. Because

Ted Kennedy’s America is a land in which mourning women cannot forget how old their aborted baby would be if it were alive today, blacks have been taught to hate the nation that confessed and honestly atoned for its Original Sin, rogue gang-bangers make life a misery for poor people, schoolchildren are not taught much of anything, writers and artists are censored at the whim of the politically correct, and the doors of the federal courts are slammed shut on the fingers of ordinary people to avoid disturbing the latest elite séance channeling a new constitutional penumbra or emanation.

But with Ted Kennedy now a rutted bully rather than the rutting bull of his prime, we can see the Bork era coming to a close. Conservatives have learned how to beat the bork. You nominate a brilliant, mild-mannered appeals court judge who can talk for days and days about the law and about the nice legal issues in this case or that case, and with every word demonstrate that he knows more about the law and about judging than any senator past, present, or future.

And, of course, after being roundly borked, insulted, demeaned, and humiliated for a month or two, the new justice has been thoroughly vaccinated against the disease of Strange New Respect, that malady discovered by political epidemiologist Tom Bethell that often turns good conservative justices into blithering liberals, just so that they can say to the Washington social elite: “You like me! You really like me!”

Democrats Smear Alito: What's the Point?

Why do they do it? Why are national politicians like Senators Kennedy and Schumer descending to cheap attacks and witness baiting in the hearings to confirm Judge Samuel A. Alito to a seat on the United States Supreme Court? Are they crazy?

It is common in political controversy to represent the other side as idiots. Private people often call politicians they disagree with as fools.

But this is a mistake. Politicians are not fools, even if they often act like it. National politicians like Kennedy and Schumer, who led the attack on Judge Alito in the confirmation hearings this week, are not fools. They are highly successful national politicians who have won state-wide campaigns time and time again. These are smart, successful people.

So why do they turn the Alito confirmation hearings into a playground brawl?

Is it because it worked in the Bork hearings, and almost worked in the Thomas hearings? That’s what Rush Limbaugh suggests when he says that Democrats are calling plays out of a 30-year-old playbook. It worked in the past, and so the Democrats will keep using it until the Republicans intercept a couple of passes for touchdowns.

Is it because the Democrats want to keep their base on a permanent war footing? That seems to have been their tactics ever since the election of 2000. But you wonder whether that is really paying off for them. When you keep your base on a war footing, it also keeps the opposing base on a war footing. Democrats are enraging Republicans just as much as they are encouraging their Daily Kos and MoveOn.org enthusiasts.

Are they just going through the motions for the left-wing groups like People for the American Way and the Alliance for Justice? Ralph Neas and Nan Aron run these liberal activist groups for what appears to be the sole purpose of promoting liberal judges for the federal bench and opposing conservative judges. But surely the Democratic senators have the power to say to Neas and Aron: cool it.

You have to hope that the Democrats are looking at polls that show that their slash-and-burn tactics are backfiring.

You’d like the tactics to backfire because you’d like to live in an America where a judicial candidate could tell the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Yes, Senator. I’m a pretty conservative guy: Two kids, two cars. One wife. But I’m not going to go onto the Supreme Court and reverse every liberal court decision of the past 50 years. That’s just not the way the law works.”

Senator Biden complained this week that the confirmation hearings were turning into a sham where the nominee wouldn’t tell the senators anything about his views. Well, senator, that couldn’t be because Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, ever since the Bork hearing in 1987, have tried to lynch any nominee that expresses a political view that liberals dislike, could it?

The Global Problem of the Natural Resource States

There is a difference between a state like the United States and a state like Saudi Arabia. In the United States, the people are a resource. In Saudi Arabia, the people are a cost.

In other words, the leaders of the United States need us, the American people. Our energy, our wealth-producing activities, our knowledge, our patriotism are the foundation upon which the power of the political leaders is built.

But the same is not true of a state like Saudi Arabia, where national income and wealth comes from pumping oil out of the ground. In Saudi Arabia (and in other natural resource states) the people are an annoying cost that reduces the revenue of the political leaders.

This model can be applied globally. States like the United States, Japan, South Korea, India, and China are nations that depend upon their people for their wealth. States like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, and now even little Bolivia are natural resource states. They do not produce much of anything that the world wants except their oil or their natural gas.

So when Russia turns off the gas to Ukraine, writes Irwin M. Stelzer, maybe we ought to pay attention. Maybe Russian President Vladimir Putin is sending

a warning to major energy-consuming countries that their long-term prosperity is in the hands of very dangerous people.

The joke is that the natural resource states need us much more than we need them. In the long term, if they push prices above the market then the energy-consuming countries will find other ways of getting energy. In the short term, certainly, they can swing their weight around and cause inconvenience.

Of course, there is no reason why the natural resource countries and their tin-pot dictators should have the influence they do. There are plenty of ways we can reduce their influence. We can build out nuclear power. We can aggressively prospect for oil and natural gas in the mainland US and offshore. But we don’t. We don’t do it because significant portions of our educated elite in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world belong to a post-Christian religious cult that experiences the earth as an expression of the divine. They experience the land outside the cities as a sacred place that should be kept apart. Characteristically, they want to force their religious beliefs onto other Americans.

But that will change. Eventually the people states will deal with the natural resource states. The only question is, shall we do it now, when the cost is manageable? Or shall we let the natural resource states wax in strength and pride and in their ability to cause mischief before we deal with them?

Lefty Professors Don't Get It

While the pontificators are pontificating for the cameras at the Alito nomination hearings, David Horowitz and others are testifying to a select committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature about academic freedom. The legislature is taking up Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights that protects students from abuse from their teachers, particularly one-sided presentation of controversial subject matter. As Horowitz says: how can students get an education if they only get half of the story?

And of course to back him up Frontpagemag.com has a horror story about a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia who runs a cartoonish left-wing course on “Urban Society: ‘Race,’ Class, and Gender in the City.” Needless to say, all the readings are left-wing, and anyone that disagrees with the teacher, associate professor Melissa Gilbert, gets an earful, as this student reported on ratemyprofessors.com

“Racism and Sexism are only one side. She is one of the biggest feminists I know — Oh and if you’re a white male, you can’t ask her a question, she yelled at me after class for asking test structure. She’s hypocritical and a HUGE Feminist. Very bad teacher.”

You feel sorry for the kids being subjected to this abuse, but maybe it is good for them. Maybe they need a bit of abuse from the lefties. Who knows? Maybe left-wing teaching is the biggest factor creating conservatives here in the good old USA.