Richard Wagner: Most Hated Composer

Today's the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner.  He's #3 in Charles Murray's list of classical composers compiled in Human Accomplisment.  But he's probably #1 on the list of most-hated composers.

That would partly be due to his anti-semitism.  And partly due to the fact that he wrecked the good old opera formula of recitative followed by beautiful songs.

But really, he upended music as a whole.  The best way to understand this is to listen to a movie (while you watch it).  It was Wagner that invented that kind of music, setting the tone of the movie, telling you in the feeling in sound of what is going on visually and what you should feel about it.

Wagner always lived the spirit of the age.  He was a Romantic, then a lefty revolutionary, then a Schopenhauerian pessimist.  And he did his best to bring all that out in his music.

This sort of thing infuriated the purists.  He took the Nordic myths about power struggles between the gods and turned it into a drama about power, duty, and love.  He took the Arthurian Tristan and made it all about sex.  He took Eschenbach's Parzival and made him into a post-aristocratic post-Christian upper-class ascetic.

That points up the main thing to know about Wagner.  He requires total surrender.  Think the opera is too slow? Too long? Too chromatic?  Too improbable?  Too bad.

My own relationship with Wagner began in the 1970s.  My wife had asked me to get tickets to the Flying Dutchman and Mr. Skinflint didn't do it.  But I got an LP of the Dutchman from the library and was blown over.   Not by the singing, but by the Prelude, which is an astonishing impressionistic piece that evokes wind and storm.  The story is about Senta's sacrifice of love.  All heroines in Wagner sacrifice themselves for love.

Wouldn't you know, by the time I actually got season tickets to the opera, Director Glynn Ross in Seattle was mobilizing for a full Ring cycle for the centenary Ring year of 1976.  So I got to go to Der Ring des Nibelungen, the whole thing.

People ask: how can you sit through four nights of opera, and long operas at that.  The answer, of course, is that going to the Ring is a ritual, and rituals are supposed to be boring; they are supposed to force you to get rid of your monkey mind and surrender to the experience.  It is, if you like, a form of meditation.

At the end of the Ring, after the end of Götterdämmerung, you know you have experienced one of the great aesthetic experiences known to man.  That is why the Ring is so popular, even though Wagner's music is so challenging.

What about the bad parts, the anti-semitism?  Wagner was undoubtedly a minor monster.  He aligned his life completely with the various spirits of the age.  And one of them was anti-semitism. When the Jews were released from their ghettos in Germany in the 19th century they exploded into the economy and the culture with a power that frightened lots of people.  Kinda like the way that liberals are terrified of conservatives and Christians.  Where do these people come from?

But like it or not, Richard Wagner was a musical genius, and after Wagner music will never be the same.

Putting a Name on Obama Politics

It's lucky that liberals never have to look at themselves in a mirror, and never have to listen to their hate speech.

Because what liberals do is an utter betrayal of what they say they believe.

They say that everything they do is for the little people.  But they don't have a problem siccing the IRS on the little people of the Tea Party.  They say that dissent is the highest form of patriotism, but don't you dare dissent against liberalism, in the university or in the public square.  Not if you know what is good for you.

Liberals justify their gun-control politics with the mantra "if it saves one life."  But the brave media was hiding behind the ink barrel when abortionist Kermit Gosnell was on trial for snipping the spinal cords of live babies.

That is why I have developed the mantra "government is force; politics is division; system is domination."

Because it is all too easy -- for anyone, liberal or conservative -- to justify bigger government when you assume that there's nobody here but us chickens, and we care.  That's phoney baloney.  Because when you have the power of government you have the power of force, the power to peer into peoples' lives, to count them, to tax them, to send in OSHA or the ATF.

And when you have the power of government, sooner or later you are going to use it, as the Obamis did, to help win the next election.  And you do it not just by buying votes but by siccing enforcement officers on your opponents.  Get that?  "Enforcement?" As in force.  Golly, could it be that government is force?

It's natural in the to-and-fro of politics to think of your team as the good guys and the other team as the bad guys.  You can see this very human instinct at work in every sports stadium.

But our liberal friends have built a whole secular religion on the notion that they are the forces of good. They know that God -- or in the liberal case, justice -- is on their side.

That's why God created the First Amendment and the separation of Church and State.  The idea is that the moralists and the good guys don't get to tell the government enforcement officers what to do.

Liberal orthodoxy collapses the separation between their secular church and the government.  Their politics and their religion are one and the same.  It means nothing to them to accuse their opponents of the worst evils they can think of: racism, sexism, anti-choice fascism, homophobia.  Liberals diligently teach college students to hate racists and homophobes, starting with freshman orientation.

So it's just one small step to ordering IRS agents to harass Tea Party applicants with requests for their Facebook posts and their reading lists.

Reading lists!  Just imagine what would have happened if the Bush administration had asked for the reading lists of the Soros funded non-profits.

As I've written, it's one thing for the little darlings of the ruling class to run around harassing the evil racists, sexists, and homophobes when they are learning their trade in college.  It is another thing when they are doing it as government officials.

When private persons are harassing racists and sexists and homophobes they are just nasty little Alinskyite thugs.  But when government officials do it they are nasty little petty tyrants.  And there is a word for what they are doing as they tyrannize over their political opponents.

The word is Injustice.

Obama's War on Women

One of the underappreciated facts about the Tea Party movement is that women have been in the vanguard.  And they started organizing in the fall of 2008.

We're supposed to believe that all women are Democrats.  But Keli Carender (@LiberTBelle), who started the Tea Party here in the Seattle area, is a graduate of Oxford, a teacher and sometime actor.

Doesn't fit the profile.

And of course many of the Tea Party groups that the IRS was targeting in the run-up to the 2012 election were moms that didn't like what they saw coming out of Washington, DC.

Now we have the case of True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht, profiled on NRO today.  From Houston, Texas, this wife of a small manufacturer got involved also in the fall of 2008.  When she did some election monitoring she decided to do something about it and founded True the Vote.

I have found that election shenanigans seems to touch a sensitive nerve with women.

True the Vote got the attention of the Feds, and even Democratic legislators, and since then they have been regular visitors at the Engelbrecht business: IRS, OSHA, even the ATF!

As we crank up into the current scandal season, there is one thing in the back of my mind.  What was it that triggered these women off in the fall of 2008?

The easy thing would be that they are all racists.  Didn't like the powerful black man getting elected to the White House.

Trouble is: many of these women don't fit the profile.  They are educated, articulate.

So what did set them off?  Was it the Alinsky tactics?  But back in 2008 you had to be really paying attention to get that.  Was it the left-wing agenda?  But Obama kept that under wraps back then.

Well.  Now that we have three, four scandals going full bore, we may get to find out.  I think I'll go to the Seattle Tea Party rally at the IRS tomorrow, just to take a gander.

Because I always think that what women are thinking and feeling is the only thing that matters.

The hand that rocks the cradle.

Obama. A Gift from the Gods

In a thumb-sucker about the managerial shortcomings of the Obama White House, John Fund surfaces the worries of Democrats, that "chaotic implementation" of Obamacare could "could become the biggest political liability Democrats will face in next year’s midterm elections."

Don't set your sights too high, Mr. Fund.  How about: the train wreck of Obamacare implementation could result in the biggest electoral meltdown since the Republican Party nearly destructed in the Great Depression.

Because the meltdown of Obamacare is going to be personal to the millions of women who want to keep their healthcare arrangements and who spend half their lives discussing their healthcare experiences and procedures with their friends.  That's why President Obama told Americans again and again that if they liked their health insurance they could keep it.

But now there's a good chance that not only will people not be able to keep their health insurance but everything about health care will be thrown into a maelstrom.

It's been telling this week that Obama campaign guru David Axelrod has been on TV saying that the government is just too big for one man to supervise.  The HotAir guys were right on it.

What’s significant about Axelrod’s defense of O is that he’s pointing to the size of government as a structural reason for why scandal might proliferate, which is downright Reaganesque as a critique of the federal leviathan. The bigger the government gets, the less accountability there’ll be. That’s conservatism 101.

The problem for conservatives is that, most of the time, the administrative welfare state sorta kinda rubs along.  Sure the dollar has been reduced to $0.02 in a century by the repeated need to get the government out of a jam.  But people still get their Social Security checks.

But suppose that the complete centralization and bureaucratization of health care leads to a meltdown?

Imagine that Mitt Romney had won the presidential election and the Democrats had kept the Senate.  Then any problems with Obamacare implementation would be cried down by the mainstream media and Democratic lawmakers as all the fault of Romney, who didn't care who dies, as in Joe Soptic's wife.  One-term president anyone?

Look, the American people had a choice in 2012.  They could go with the man that had spent his entire life fixing dysfunctional organizations or they could go with the president who was not Mitt Romney.  Anyone who knows anything can see that a turnaround is needed and that the administrative welfare state is heading for the rapids.

But the American people said No.  We ain't ready for strong medicine, not yet, they said.

OK, fellas.  If you don't want to respond to the writing on the wall, how about getting slapped upside the head.  That is what the meltdown of Obamacare will mean, and it has the potential for a sea-change in US politics.

In that scenario the current scandals -- Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP wiretaps -- are just icing on the cake, warmup bouts for the Main Event.

Dear Liberals: About Your Politics of Hate

I dare say that, after a month of two of denial, liberal pundits will start asking: How could this happen to good people like us?

Let me help.  The answer is simple.

Racists, sexists, bigots and homophobes.

No, I don't mean that racists, sexists, bigots and homophobes did this to you.  I mean that liberal politics, which marginalizes anyone that disagrees with the liberal ruling class as a racist, sexist, bigot or homophobe, is the problem here.  Let me quote conservative writer Harry Stein.

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.

Gee, I forgot the Gosnell part of all this; that would be important to well-born feminist editors.

The point is this.  When you so easily brand your political opponents as evil monsters, it becomes very easy to decide that they don't deserve a place in the public square.  It becomes easy to, e.g., hold up applications from Tea Party groups for 401(c)(4) status at the IRS.

Mike Adams, conservative professor at the University of North Carolina goes further.  He reminds his readers that the political correctness/multicultural culture at our nations' colleges actually teaches young people to be ruthless warriors in the political wars.

Many were shocked to learn that IRS agents actually targeted conservative advocacy groups for heightened scrutiny when making decisions concerning their tax exempt status. I don't know why so many people were shocked. This is what university administrators have been doing for nearly twenty years. I've been writing about it for over ten years because I know that what you see on the campus today is what you will see in the broader culture tomorrow.

What is more, the students that show ruthlessness towards Christians and conservatives and white males get rewarded by the powers that be.  And if they cut a corner or two, hey, no worries!

So of course when these young skulls full of mush get out into the real world of liberal activism they just do as they have learned.  They sicc the IRS on the ordinary Americans that have formed Tea Party groups -- and then they sneer at the rubes for their naivete in actually following the rules.

(If they are dumb rubes then how can they be dangerous extremists?)

And that's the problem with the Alinsky culture.  You see, it's one thing to be a speaking-truth-to-power activist making the powerful follow their own rules, and going after people rather than institutions because people hurt easier.  But when you become the government then doing the Alinsky is simple injustice -- rank, raw, cruel injustice.

So let's do the full Eisenhower on this.  If you don't know how to solve a problem, make it bigger.

The real problem is that, with the Death of God in the ruling class, our liberal ruling class has made politics their religion.  But when you integrate politics and religion and add in the economy for good measure, what you get is totalitarianism.

I just happen to have been writing about that only yesterday.  The problem, as I define it, is the need for "Separation of Secular Church and State."  In the Founding Fathers' vision, there should not be an establishment of religion.  Good point.  But what about secular religion, like socialism, fascism, environmentalism (saving the planet)?  The problem is just the same.  You really don't want moralists as government officials legislating their morality on the rest of us.

But liberals don't get that.  Just try it on a liberal friend.  They don't realize that when they rail about "hate" groups they are talking about themselves.  Because politics is division, and it divides with hate, as in: "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for."

What If Romney Had Won?

Since we are entering full-scale second-term scandal mode, what with Benghazi and the IRS scandal, it's worth stepping back to think about what things would be like if Mitt Romney had won.

We would have divided government and a combative media looking for every opportunity to brand Romney and his policies as cruel and unfeeling.  Because that's what political liberals do, whether in the mainstream media, in the activist groups, or in elected office.

But now we are going to see four years of developing scandals and coverups.  The mainstream media won't like it, and will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to cover it.  But the protracted nature of the experience will energize conservatives and Republicans and demoralize Democrats and liberals.

That makes it much more likely that the 2014 midterms will see a switch in the Senate to GOP control and much more likely that 2016 will be a change election, rather than a Four More Years election.

The downside is that the nation's politics and economy will drift for four more years, as the Obamis are forced to concentrate on fighting investigations and sub-poenas and running belated coverups instead of actually governing.

I know.  That could be a good thing if it prevents them from wreaking more damage to the economy and to society.  Hopefully it won't be worse than the 1973-74 period when inflation spiralled upwards ending in a nasty recession.

But the encouraging thing is that by November 2016 the American people, even including perhaps the emerging Democratic majority of women, minorities, and young people, will be thoroughly fed up with the Obama administration that promised Hope and Change and a fundamental transformation of America.  The partisans will not blame their hero of course.  They will suspect that over-zealous underlings or dark forces "done him in."  They will think that President Obama had good ideas but was betrayed by forces beyond his control.

But if Romney had won they would be blaming him for anything that went wrong, because that's what the mainstream media would be telling them.

Then there will be the moderates and the independents.  They will not be so forgiving.  They will see that everything has gone wrong, from home prices to health insurance.  And they will think it is time for a change.

Will they be ready, in 2017, for a Republican president and a Republican Congress to cut spending, fix the entitlements, and cauterize the crony capitalist economy?  Who knows?  But it is up to the winning Republican candidate to persuade them.

And we will be, at least, four more years into the fracking energy revolution.

Mother's Day Meltdown

Remember the Saturday Night Massacre in the Nixon Administration?  It was October 10, 1973 and the Watergate scandal was going critical.

President Nixon wanted to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, but Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than do the dirty deed.  Finally Solicitor General Robert Bork agreed to do it.

Last week, in the run-up to Mothers Day the troubles of the Obama administration went critical.  Let's call it the Mothers Day Meltdown.  It was the week that the smoking Benghazi scandal caught fire as the mainstream media finally woke up from their partisan naps to realize that some bad stuff went down on September 11, 2012, when the Obama administration was dithering around wondering what to do about an Al Qaeda attack.  How could that be when supposedly Osama bin Laden was dead and Al Qaeda was on the run?

The mainstream media is finally waking up to realize that the Benghazi talking points present its shining Obama administration as a bunch of small-minded dissemblers, telling a tawdry lie to get out of a jam in the weeks before the November election.  You read media types saying: "Oh wow! And we thought Benghazi was just a Republican partisan witch-hunt."

Really.  And I have a bridge to sell you.

The other side of the Mothers Day Meltdown is the Friday afternoon admission by the IRS that a rogue office in Cincinnati was unfairly harassing the applications of conservative groups for 401(c) status as non-profit organizations.  Well, what a surprise!

No doubt in the months ahead we will be asking: "What did the White House know and when did it know it."  Don't hold your breath.  No doubt the whole business is fully protected with circuit breakers and "deniability."

But really, it doesn't need a conspiracy.  It all goes back to Thomas à Becket and the king complaining "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"  When four courtiers obliged, and murdered him in the cathedral, the king got all huffy and upset.

Yes, I'm sure that nobody in the White House actually told the black ladies in the IRS Cincinnati office to bear down on any organization with "tea party" or "patriot" in its name.

Heck, they didn't need to.  After all, the black ladies had their local Reverend Wright telling them about the racists in white Amerikkka.  They had MSNBC railing against evil conservatives.  Why shouldn't they do their bit for the First Black President and rid him of his turbulent enemies?

Back in the 2000s conservatives used to rail against President Bush because he didn't fight back against the daily calumnies against his policies and his person.  Maybe President Bush knew something that his partisans foolishly didn't.  If he'd sicced Karl Rove for a verbal attack on his enemies then some mid-level official in some department somewhere might decide to do his "bit" to help out the president.

Of course, if some bitter clinger in the IRS office in red-neck Texas back then had decided to start targeting groups with "progressive" in their names, the whole media world would have erupted.

It all goes to show that liberals are a lot less smart than they think they are.  The reason that you limit government is that all power corrupts.  The reason that presidents try not to be too partisan between elections is that it sets American against American.  And while it's the nature of politics that in each election you divide the nation into Us and Them, you are well advised not to continue the divisiveness and run a permanent campaign.  You might end up dividing the nation into a civil war.

I wrote a week or so ago about the end of the Democrats' decade-long Big Push.  The bigger question is whether it is 1942 with Army Group A strung out in the Caucausus and a flank attack developing against the Sixth Army before Stalingrad.

My guess is that the Democrats are in for a disastrous four years.  The economy is a mess, Obamacare is coming, inflation will be rearing its ugly head.  People will decide it is time for a change.  And the Democrats' "emerging majority" will suffer a bad case of the flu and stay home on election day.

But a week is a long time in politics.