Mozarts Geburtstag: Amateurs Playing Mozart

Everyone is doing their Mozart piece today, the 250th anniversary of his birth. The American philsopher Lee Harris wrote about Mozart’s music, epitomized by The Marriage of Figaro as the one thing we would want to save when aliens are about to vaporize the Earth.

As Harris imagines it, after watching him listen to his CD of Figaro the aliens ask him:

“Tell us about this world of Figaro you have been visiting?”

“It is, strange to say, very much like our human world. It is a world where men are jealous of women for no reason. Where adolescent boys throb with passions they cannot comprehend. It is a world where the strong try to take advantage of their positions of power, and their inferiors fight back with their cunning and wits. It is a world where good and virtuous women sigh because their husbands have inexplicably fallen out of love with them. It is a world where the noble-hearted ultimately forgive the errors of the lesser mortals with whom they are compelled to live.

That is all very well, and very elegantly put. But there is another side to Mozart, and that is that ordinary amateur musicians like you and me can play his music.

One of the great joys of my life has been to play Mozart string quartets. There are a bunch of them, usually published in two volumes as the Early Quartets and the Late Quartets.

To play a Mozart string quartet is to feel yourself participating, in a palpable way, in the very center of the western experience. First of all, you are playing a violin, the most perfect musical instrument ever conceived and executed. It demonstrates in its form and its sound both the male principle of tautness and tension and the female principle of lushness and pregnant beauty.
Then, of course, you are actually playing the music, this remarkable outpouring of a young genius. What music can compare with the power of the Quartet K.465 the “Dissonant,” the mystery of its opening measures, the bleakness of its second movement, the Andante Cantabile?

Next month, we are playing an early Mozart quartet at the concert of the string orchestra I play with, Hildman Strings. In addition to Mozart we’ll be playing Benda, C.P.E. Bach, and premiering a composition by composer Dell Wade.

You could play the violin, you know. You can start any time and any age, and in a couple of years find a sandbox orchestra in which to play, as I did. There are amateur orchestras all over the United States. One of them is waiting for you.

Chicago to Wal-Mart: We Dont Need Your Stinkin' Jobs

Everyone agrees that Democrats are on the side of the little guy. Without Democrats and their programs, why, people would starve, children would not go to school, and old people would lack health care.

That’s why the Chicago City Council voted against giving Wal-Mart a zoning change so they could build a store on the South Side. The local alderman, Howard Brookins Jr., tried.

Eighteen months ago, Brookins negotiated with Wal-Mart for a store at 83rd and Stewart, former site of the Ryerson steel plant. His plan fell apart when other South Side aldermen failed to support his request for a zoning change.

No problem. Wal-Mart want ahead and built their store outside Chicago city limits.

So why did did 24,500 Chicagoans apply for a job at the new Wal-Mart just outside city limits, as Leslie Baldacci reports?

And that is after 11,000 people applied for a job at a new Wal-Mart in Oakland, California.

What is wrong with these people? Don’t they understand that Wal-Mart is an evil influence that will snatch away their health benefits or force them onto Medicaid? And as for working them to the bone, well, you could read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed to learn about that, if you haven’t already been forced to read it in freshman orientation at your local selective college.

Of course, old Rush Limbaugh had a field day with this story, because he loves nothing more than poking fun at the Democrat shibboleths and hypocrisies: that only they can represent the little guy. He envisions an army of Wal-Marts surrounding the Democratic bastion of Chicago.

It is interesting to look at the satellite map of the site of the new Wal-Mart just outside Chicago city limits in the village of Evergreen Park. You can see the north-south arterial just to the east of the Wal-Mart location. That’s Chicago city limits. It can’t be a coincidence that the local shopping mall in which Wal-Mart is located is just to the west of the intersection. Of course, the $1 million in property taxes from the new Wal-Mart will go to Evergreen Park and not to the City of Chicago.

But we don’t need Wal-Mart’s stinkin’ taxes, or their stinkin’ jobs, eh Dems?

Peggy Noonan Worries About the Short Term

In her regular Thursday column, Peggy Noonan reviews Bush’s speech at Kansas State University. She approves of his strategic, even romantic vision, but worries about the short term.

We want our president to love democracy and hold it high. But I would feel better if his preoccupations, and his public statements, had more to do with safety, homeland security and a heightened sense of the need for preparedness. I would like him to find Osama.

Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. If you have the strategy right, you can always deal with the tactical issues, the friction and the fog of battle. But the way to win battles is to have your troops in the right place before the battle.

The notable thing about the Bush presidency has been its strategic sense. It has put in place the tax rate cuts that blasted the economy out of stasis. It has injected the United States in between the two radical foci in the Middle East, the Sunni radical Wahabis in Saudi Arabia and the Shia radicals in Iran. It has allowed Israel to advance to a unilateral division of Palestine.

The conseqence of these strategic moves will become evident in the future when the unexpected happens and battles in the War on Terror erupt. We will realize how convenient it is to have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will observe the good fortune of having walled off the Palestinians into their own political and physical space.

But do not expect the world to thank President Bush for his strategic dispositions. Not now, and maybe not ever.

Boys and Books and Marriage and Abuse

In the past week we’ve seen The New Republic worry about Boys and Books, how boys just aren’t doing well in school, and how colleges are conducting an informal affirmative action program to favor unqualified boys because otherwise their male student percentage would go below 40 percent.

Then we have City Journal’s Kay S. Hymowitz observing how the only women who are sticking to marriage and children like glue are women who are college graduates, women devoted to “The Mission” of giving their children the best possible start in life.

Then we have Phyllis Schlafly observing that one effect of feminists insisting that Title IX be treated as a demand for exact equality of results in college sports is that boys don’t go to colleges that don’t have a good male athletic program.

Of course we should not forget the Nixzmary Brown story, the little girl beaten to death by her step-father, even though the government’s child protective services knew all about the abuse Nixzmary had suffered.

And we should certainly celebrate the amazing story of British barrister Constance Briscoe, cruelly abused by her mother as a girl, but taken in by a teacher in her school when a teenager, graduating out of high school top of her class and ending up a municipal judge.

What is all this telling us?

It is telling us that liberals are wrong. They told us that the big problem was that girls weren’t being properly served in school. They were wrong. Girls were doing fine. But boys were falling behind.

Liberals told us that the old traditional marriage was a thing of the past, that people were searching out new relationships, and this was healthy. But they are wrong. Now we know that homes without fathers are homes that will likely generate girls that have sex too early and boys that are violent and criminal. And more than that. Homes that do not contain their married mother and father are dangerous to children and other people.

Liberals told us that it was a terrible thing that girls were denied a chance to participate in sports. Now we are gutting youth sports to impose an artificial standard of participation.

Liberals told us that we needed government to come in and prevent abuse of children. Now we find out that government child protective services are hopeless.

There’s a pretty obvious lesson here, staring us in the face, isn’t there?

Of course. We need more funding for all those underfunded programs.

Joel Stein Doesn't Get It

Everybody is having a grand old time with young Joel Stein’s foolish oped in the LA Times.
“I don’t support our troops,” he writes. Still, when the troops come home, of course, he wants them to have the full use of the welfare state:

All I’m asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return.

But please, no parades.

But Joel, you completely misunderstand the whole ethos of the nation state, you and all your liberal buddies. What those soldiers need, first of all, is to know that their nation honors their service. It doesn’t matter if they were sent off on a wild goose chase, if millions of them died for nothing. When they come back, we tell them that we honor them. Period. End of story.

Forget all the stupid welfare state nostrums of hospitals, pensions, and mental health counseling. These are men, old chum. What they need is a wife and a job. And they need to be honored.

The anti-war leaders understand this: that is why they put out those mendacious signs in the spring of 2003. “Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home.”

Guess why the Swift Boat issue was so powerful in 2004. Because it reminded a whole generation of American men why they cannot vote for Democrats. It reminded them, as if they had ever forgot, of what they experienced when they came home from Vietnam a generation ago.

But go ahead. Don’t support the troops. Go ahead and send another generation of young men into the only political party that honors them, the Republican Party.

You can gauge the depth of Joel Stein’s folly by reading the interview (or try here) he gave to Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt is turning into a ferocious interviewer. He just knows exactly how to make a liberal look like a fool. So he runs Stein through a bunch of military situations: Does he support our troops in Afghanistan? In Kosovo? He gets Stein to say that he only supports the troops in missions that he, Stein, personally supports.

But this is folly. Liberals have this fantasy that they are above the mere nation state and its patriotism, and dare one say, nationalism. Therefore they have the moral standing to pick and choose what they support.

Of course, liberals don’t extend such privileges to the rest of America. When it comes to the support of liberals and their initiatives, in the media, in the schools, in social services, and in the university, then there is no opting out. There is no right to pick and choose. Everyone must pay their taxes, and everyone must support the journalists, the teachers, the social workers, and the professors. Otherwise they are mean spirited and ultra-conservative. Or even racist, sexist, and homophobic.

Not Your Father's Economy

What is going on with the nation’s economy? Now that the era of motors and steel is going away, what does a healthy economy look like?

This question has been nagging away since about 1980 when it looked like smokestack America was finished, and the future was bleak. Instead, as we know, the economy thrived. But what was it thriving on? For the past generation we have been subjected to a neverending MSM drumbeat of layoffs and downsizings, but the economy is better than ever. We read that the median hourly wage hasn’t budged since 1973 but we see all around us the detritus of unashamed prosperity. What is going on?

That is what Mark Brown asks as Ford announces plans to lay off 30,000 workers in the next few years.

I don’t pretend to understand the economy any more.


I don’t understand how our economy can keep churning while all the good, blue-collar jobs keep disappearing, relegating more and more people to lives of earning less.

Says he:

I grew up in a railroad family in a community where the breadwinners for most of the other families worked in factories. The railroad moved the raw materials to the factories or the finished products to market. It was an easy economy to understand.

Now everything has changed.

Mark Brown is saying that the world is waiting for someone to write a book that will make the complex understandable, that will reduce our present economy down to a sound bite that politicians and media people can spout without really even understanding it.

In reality, the US economy has not changed since the industrial takeoff in the years after the Civil War. It has been continental, market driven, and always driving towards lower costs, wiping out industry after industry as new ideas and new processes appeared and undercut the old ways.

It’s just that up to now in spite of everything, you could pretend that the economy was all about sturdy workers making things and transporting them to market, rather than an abstract continental crapshoot of costs and profits and losses, of numbers and instant fortunes and terrifying bankrupties.

So, where is the genius who will peel the scales off our eyes?

NYT: Bush Reads Books! But...

We all know that President Bush is an ignoramus. So when it is reported that the First Lady gave him a copy of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Untold Story and that the president actually read it, what are we to think?

Have no fear, The New York Times’ own Elizabeth Bumiller is there to help us out.

Apparently, when Unions-bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel was visiting the White House conversation included reference to Chang and Halliday’s Mao which “has been embraced by the right as a searing indictment of Communism.”

Well, that is good, in a way. “But.” (You knew that was coming.)

But [Andrew J. Nathan, a specialist in Chinese politics at Columbia University], who last year in The London Review of Books criticized what he called the authors’ vague and inaccessible sourcing, said that the biography presented Mao as a “comic-book monster,” with little explanation of the psychological, sociological and historical forces that allowed him to rise.

Oh no! So the ill-educated and intellectually naive President Bush, lacking a proper understanding of the psychological, sociological and historical reality of Mao’s time, might get the wrong message out of the book. This, it must be admitted, is a real danger.

Although there is no real danger of, say, President Bush getting the eroneous idea that Mao was a chatty sort of chap who liked hanging out with students so much that he invited them all to come and visit him in Beijing one day in 1966.

No. The real danger is that President Bush might come to the conclusion that Mao was a fiend who starved millions of Chinese to death in the 1950s so he could export food and buy weapons and technology from the Soviets. And we can’t have that.

But not to worry, says everyone’s favorite historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. The president probably was just reading for recreation.

"To be honest, I’m not sure that it’s so weird for him to be reading this," said Doris Kearns Goodwin... "partly why presidents read is the reason that we all read: to relax, to replenish our energy and to go into another era and another time."

Anyone else detecting an odor of nauseating condescension here?

We wouldn’t want to get boxed into admitting that President Bush was a serious man with a serious grasp of world history, would we?