Shortly before Christmas, I posted an item in the Corner called “The Conductor’s Podium as Political Platform.” This drew an unusually big response, from readers. I propose to examine that response and see what it tells us about our political culture today — or about our culture plain and simple.

But first, that item:

One reason I became a conservative, many years ago, is that the Left in my hometown — Ann Arbor, Mich. — insisted on politicizing everything. There was never any respite from politics. There was no “safe zone.” Politics was infused into everything — and it was one kind of politics, of course: Left.

This sort of “creeped me out,” to use a modern expression.

So, on Friday night, I go to Carnegie Hall for a Christmas concert. The King’s Singers are performing with the New York Pops Orchestra; Marilyn Horne is a special guest. This should be an evening away from politics — just a little fodder for my next New Criterion music piece, you know?

Shortly into the concert, the conductor turns to the audience and speaks about “the holidays.” This year, he says, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa are overlapping with Christmas. (According to what I can find, Kwanzaa begins on December 26, but never mind.) Then we have New Year’s Day. And “on January 20, there will be a new beginning for our country.” The crowd, of course, erupts into cheers. Then he says, “I see I’m not the only one who’s ready.”

They can’t help themselves, can they? They can’t help preening, saying, in effect, “See how virtuous I am? My politics are correct. I am a fully paid-up member of the herd — nothing independent-minded about me.” I have seen this in Carnegie Hall before (as elsewhere): The conductor, or someone else, makes a partisan political statement, releasing a little stink bomb that smells up the entire evening, no matter how good the music is.

At least it’s that way for some of us.

Politics aside, where are manners? Where is consideration for a minority of audience members? Where is a sense of public space, and what is appropriate and not? The guy was uncouth, as much as anything. And the sad thing is: There’s no one to call him on it.

And, no, I don’t count. One of his own — someone from the New York Times or The New Yorker or the local arts establishment — has to call him on it. Otherwise, it doesn’t count.

I suppose that conservatives, somewhere, act like that conductor, injecting politics where it doesn’t belong, transgressing against public decorum (and simply displaying bad manners). I have not witnessed it, though.

And before we get to reader responses, let me excerpt a review from last September. I published it in the New York Sun, and it was of Carnegie Hall’s opening concert of the season: Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in an all-Bernstein concert:

Mr. Tilson Thomas proceeded with excerpts from Bernstein’s opera “A Quiet Place.” Actually, he proceeded with a lecture — which is de rigueur these days. Critics and administrators demand it — they call it “outreach.” Musicians used to “reach out” with their music-making. And nothing can deaden, delay, or prolong a concert like talking.

In the middle of his lecture, Mr. Tilson Thomas said — no, yelled — that Bernstein was a “LIB-ER-AL.” And that’s how he pronounced that word: with three distinct, fist-shaking syllables. The crowd erupted in applause and cheers. It was one of those self-congratulatory New York moments. People were almost North Korean in their robust unanimity.

Mr. Tilson Thomas then explained that Bernstein wanted to make music “to inspire a better world” — and, as we all know, only liberals wish a better world.

In truth, it is debatable whether Bernstein was a liberal in any genuine sense. Take his fundraising for the Black Panthers, when they were at their cop-killing height. Tom Wolfe labeled that “radical chic” — and the “chic” part depends on your taste.

After I published the first item — “The Conductor’s Podium as Political Platform” — a friend wrote,

The same thing happened at the end of a really nice Bernstein concert in Zankel Hall [which is downstairs in the Carnegie Hall building]. They did, as an encore, “Take Care of This House,” from Bernstein’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And, in announcing the encore, they did the whole Barack Obama spiel — with cheers and all the other things you described.

And who did this? Susan Graham [a mezzo-soprano], who sang at Bush’s second inauguration.

I have a theory — just a theory: Graham did it precisely because she had sung at the Bush inauguration. (She is from Midland, Texas — hometown of the Bushes — and almost certainly for that reason was invited.) It was her way of saying, “Please don’t hate me: I’m just like you. I run with the herd. I am not a dissenter. I’m on the team, man — really.”

As I said, just a theory.

From a reader:

A couple weekends back, I was listening to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. And Renée Fleming [the great soprano] sang “In the Bleak Midwinter.” But the lyrics to this beloved and touching carol were changed, in order to celebrate Barack Obama. The original carol is about Christ. But, in this version, Obama was the central figure. What is happening to us?

The new lyrics, if you’re interested, are

In the bleak midwinter
At the Christmas feast
A family leaves Chicago
And travels to the East

For a public mansion
In Washington, D.C.,
In a time of trouble
And festivity.

All across the nation,
Sea to shining sea,
People watch the passage
Of that family.

And our loving wishes
Go out to them there.
All the nation breathes
A silent, hopeful prayer.

In fact, many people wrote about Garrison Keillor. One reader said,

Four years ago, I attended a VocalEssence concert in Minneapolis’s Orchestra Hall that was being recorded for airing on NPR. Garrison Keillor was the master of ceremonies, and on at least two occasions during the evening he went off on President Bush. I thought, “What a total self-important boor. This is neither the time nor the place.” But like your conductor in Carnegie Hall, he just couldn’t help himself. It’s a sickness.

Another reader said,

I used to listen to Garrison Keillor with huge enjoyment. I believe that he has a talent that approaches Mark Twain territory. But I had to stop listening to him in the early days of the Bush presidency. Because he repeatedly expressed his contempt for conservatives in the most bilious language. . . .

By the way, I have a piece on this aspect of Keillor’s personality — “The Political Garrison Keillor” — in this collection.

Another reader:

We experienced something similar at a Boston Pops holiday performance this past Sunday. Midway through the performance, Santa made a surprise appearance and joined the conductor on the stage. He ho-ho-ho’d a bit and then told us that times are tough in the North Pole, too — even Joe the Elf has trouble making ends meet.

Santa then went on to inform us that he’s been busy remodeling his kitchen and changing his landscaping. (I guess times aren’t so tough for Santa.) The installation of a big picture window, combined with the removal of bushes at the end of his driveway, revealed to him that he can see Russia from his house! Ho ho ho, indeed. The audience was tickled pink.

But my husband and I were not. We grimly crossed our arms, our holiday spirit diminishing a bit, and my husband leaned over to me and hissed, “No more money for the Boston Pops!”

From San Francisco:

We used to enjoy going to the Symphony’s performance of Peter and the Wolf, which is usually narrated by some celebrity. This year it will be Leonard Nimoy, for example. Some years ago it was “Lemony Snicket,” the alias for the author of the terrific set of children’s books A Series of Unfortunate Events. Unfortunately, even Mr. “Snicket” was unable to avoid injecting his politics into the affair, making some disparaging remarks about President Bush.

The audience had the same reaction you describe [cheers, etc.]. And, of course, there was no one to call him, or them, on it.

Would you like a missive from my dear hometown? A reader wrote,

I’m still stuck here in the People’s Republic of Ann Arbor. Your comments reminded me of the University of Michigan’s annual Halloween concert this year. It featured a chorus line of dancing “McCains” and a person dressed as Sarah Palin shooting a dinosaur (don’t ask). Ruined the event for me.

Teaches you to live in Ann Arbor . . . (like I should talk).



A musician friend of mine who grew up in a Communist country wrote,

For me, it is perhaps even worse, because it brings back all the stench of Communist propaganda, which filled my early years. Now the same thing is creeping into everyday American life. Sick, sick, sick.

A principal player in an important orchestra wrote,

I too have long been sick of conductors and other musicians who use their positions to expound on political issues during concerts or other allegedly musical events. It is always very transparent — to me, at least — that the point of the act is not their beliefs but their wanting to be sure that everyone else sees them as this, that, or the other thing.

For conductors, it’s never enough to be paid absurd amounts of money for conducting. [There’s an orchestra player talking!] They also have to believe that they are somehow prime movers in the political world, which ought to revolve around them.

A different reader:

Jay,

You should have yelled out for the conductor to just “shut up and sing!” This happens at rock concerts very often. When the performer drones on about politics, someone always yells for him or her to shut up.

I heard a clip of Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, giving a political speech during one of his concerts. A spectator loudly told him to shut up already. Vedder then said, “Ever heard of free speech, man?”

Someone should have told him that that’s what the spectator was engaged in.

Let’s leave the realm of music — for the theater. This writer lives in Florida:

My husband and I are frequent attendees at all local theaters, and we go to one of them for its choice of plays: usually somewhat controversial or difficult to digest. We like them because they lead to interesting discussions between our friends and us.

What we don’t like — and, frankly, we can’t understand why the audience puts up with it — is the pre-curtain “welcoming remarks” by the artistic director. With few exceptions, he launches into a tirade about how liberals support the arts more than conservatives and how the Bush administration believes in censorship, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Quite tolerantly, we sit through it, but more than a year ago I reached the point where I thought something should be done. He started attacking the Bush daughters in the most vile, disgusting way. [I am going to omit what he said — it is really beyond endurance.] As I looked around the audience, nobody seemed to react in the least. What I wanted was to march out and have every woman follow me, which — of course — was merely a hope and a fantasy.

Sometimes, voting with our feet is the only vote we have.

A museumgoer:

I can’t tell you how many times in the past two months I’ve been “accosted” by this type of thing. Somehow in a lecture on the future of art museums which I attended, the speaker had to comment that a particular museum was right around the corner from where Colin Powell grew up — “and we all feel a little better about Colin Powell these days, don’t we?” [This was after the former secretary of state endorsed Obama.] The crowd burst into applause and my enjoyment of the evening was severely curtailed.

Of course, the most telling thing that lecturer said was, “We all feel a little better” (emphasis added). Yeah? He apparently could not imagine anyone outside the herd. And it apparently would not occur to him that a dissenter could be in his midst.

Into sports:

I’m not a fan of classical music, but I’ve had the same complaint you note in regard to sports reporting. Some ESPN writers are unable to discuss any perceived strategic or tactical error without comparing it to some alleged mistake of President Bush. I wrote to one of them once. I made it clear that I’d have contacted him even if he had bashed Bill Clinton. My main point was, I read sports to get away from politics. Why do we have to mix the two?

Another missive from the Bay Area:

Went to see comedian Joel McHale two weeks ago in Cupertino. Ninety-five percent of his act was very clever rants about today’s pop culture and his family. In particular, he talked about how his two-year-old son will do and say things that make him seem smart enough to be president someday, and then all of a sudden he’ll do things (like diaper accidents) that make him seem “like a retard.”

I counted down in my head — “3, 2, 1” — and right on cue: “Hey, haven’t we had a RETARD for a president over the last eight years?” Loud cheers, of course.

The writer is not yet done:

Saw Atlanta-based rockers the Black Crowes at the famous Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on Friday night. The Crowes have been around since 1990 and carry the torch for fans of 1970s-era Rolling Stones rock and roll, and carry it well, I might say. For an encore, the drummer picked up a bass drum and started banging it from both sides in the tradition of marching-band percussionists.

Only, one of the drum heads had a picture of George W. Bush on it. Get it? His mallet was hitting a picture of George W. Bush!

But wait: One of W.’s teeth was blacked out. Even funnier! Take that, Bush!

It didn’t ruin the show for me, but I was simply amazed at how infantile the whole scene was. Of course, the audience (minus at least one) ate it up.

Several people wrote to say, “Jay, they’re even putting political messages in their Christmas cards. Their Christmas cards! Praising Obama, bashing Bush. Praising the Democrats, bashing the Republicans. These are our friends! In their Christmas cards! [Holiday cards, please.] Where’s the sense of propriety?”

A friend of mine quipped, “When the Left asks for a classless society, now I know what they mean.”



One reader spoke for many when she said, 

I have asked conservative friends if they would send, for example, a liberal-bashing joke to a liberal friend. Without exception, they do what I do — send their liberal-bashing jokes to conservatives, or to no one. Yet the liberals I know practice no such restraint. When I asked one liberal friend not to send me Bush-bashing jokes, she got huffy.

I also heard from religious people — longsuffering ones:

I actually stopped attending services at Reform and Conservative synagogues and began attending Orthodox services in part because I could not abide the continual political degradation of what should have been a transcendent religious ceremony.

This reader added, “That said, there are still many on the left who have manners, such as my dear grandmother, and thank goodness for them.”

Hear, hear.

Another reader:

I used to sit in silence during outbursts like the one you witnessed. My East Coast WASPy grandmother believed in containing emotions in front of others at all costs. “We never give them something to talk about, dear” was finally wrestled to impotence by my mouthy, bloody-knuckles Irish genes a few years back.

I don’t make a scene (usually and unless it is absolutely called for) but I also don’t sit still anymore. I cannot tell you how many events I have simply left — including one Mass a few years ago while my priest was in full Bush Derangement Syndrome and was besmirching both our president and our troops.

My time, my money, my energy, and most of all my passions are too precious to waste on those who seek to politicize everything, and/or are basically announcing to the room that I’m an a**hole if I don’t agree with them . . .

Would the following sound familiar?

I ran up against liberal “manners” at a party in my own home, which I had spent three days and $$$ preparing. As they sat around my table eating the food I had prepared, a so-called literary book group proceeded to spend one and a half hours griping about the evil chimpy Bushitler and all his works and the Evil Rethuglicans and their total ignorance, etc., knowing full well that I am one of the Evil Ones.

A newcomer to the group, there for the first time, called up the next day and told me that she could not join the group after all, because she suddenly decided she had too many prior obligations. In total agreement with her, I resigned from the group myself. Their ideological purity is now unsullied by the presence of me and my ilk, and I am liberated from the possibility of more rudeness and insults from them.

I guess you can call it an amicable divorce.

Check this out:

My wife was on the receiving end of a similar speech from her optometrist recently. It seemed less than commercially astute on his part, considering that we live in a heavily Republican county. But he apparently assumed that anyone who was smart enough to use his services must not be part of the ignorant majority. That may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, since my wife now doesn’t plan to go to him again.

Said a reader, “I stopped listening to NPR for this reason. Why should a show about car repairs include attacks on Republicans?” Ah, yes, Car Talk. I have sighed over them before . . .

Well, at least NPR isn’t taxpayer-funded or anything.

A reader wrote to take me to task a little: “Remember, it has been a long, difficult eight years for those you call ‘liberal.’ Could you allow them a little exuberance?”

First, of course, I happen not to call them “liberal,” or seldom do — this must not be a regular reader. The people we’re talking about are filled with way too much illiberalism for that. But second: A good point, or semi-good point. A little exuberance is perfectly allowable.

But, as many others have said, there is a time and a place. And the intrusion of the political — of partisan politics — into nonpolitical spheres — into areas that should be what I have called “safe zones” — is obnoxious and well-nigh epidemic.

And, as I have asked, where are manners? Where is a sense of what is appropriate at public events such as concerts and what is not? Moreover, did Republicans behave like this after eight years of Clinton? If they had, would Democrats have said, “Well, it’s been a long, difficult eight years for them — could you allow them a little exuberance?”

Which leads me to this point: I have not witnessed this rudeness in the other direction — the imposition of Right politics where politics does not belong. The making of Democrats in the audience uncomfortable, etc. Perhaps I have simply hung out in the wrong precincts. I mean, I’ve never heard a conductor or a singer or a museum director blast the Left for its unfirmness, for example, in the War on Terror. (And, yes, there are Republican and conservative conductors, singers, and museum directors — believe me. Many of them are closeted. Because their politics, if known, would not be tolerated.)

But hey: Don’t these people have a right to do what they’re doing — making their political pronouncements from the stage and so on? Don’t they have the right to alienate or upset those Republicans who may be in their audience?

I love to quote something I once heard from Bill Bennett: “Don’t confuse what you got a right to do with what’s right to do.”

I grew up with the slogan “The personal is political.” It was more common than “A little dab’ll do ya,” in dear old Ann Arbortown. And this is one of the things I turned away from, with nausea. No, the personal is not political — at least not often. A recognition of this fact might be said to be the beginning of conservatism (or true liberalism — as distinct from fascism or communism or any totalitarianism).

I have an acquaintance who, I know, is a strong Democrat. She is also a rather somber type. Not long after the election, I saw her at a reception, and I said, “How are you?” And full of meaning — almost sarcastic meaning — she said, “Oh, I’m great — just great!” I knew she was alluding to the election.

And that served as a reminder to me: “Please never depend for your well-being on the election returns.” Politics must never be that important, at least in a liberal democracy. (In a “nonconsensual society,” as Robert Conquest would say, politics is very, very important — because the “election returns” may make the difference between a midnight knock on the door or not.)

Look, I don’t dislike politics. I am having a career as a political journalist. I like politics a lot, always have (since childhood). But I also like it in its place, which is not unlimited. And the spilling out of politics where it does not belong sours life.

I would be talking this way, incidentally, if Republicans were the offenders. In fact, I would be screaming all the more, because people need to correct their own.

You may say — and I have said, in similar discussions past — “Jay, you have a platform. You have these outlets for the expression of your political views.” True. Which is why I try to cut others some slack (when they corner me at parties about politics and so on). I, for example, would never put a bumper sticker on my car — a political bumper sticker. Why alienate at least some of the people whom I pass? Don’t they have a right, as they’re driving along, to be free of my political opinions?

But I understand that some others feel stifled and need to express what they think, in any way they can. Okay — but, you know: discretion.

Well, I have saved the worst for last — this is about the worst thing I have ever read. That will not stop me from sharing it with you, however. I apologize in advance. This may leave you trembling with anger for a while. But it illustrates my point almost too well:

Hello, Jay:

Your item on the concert is right on target. A friend of ours was killed last winter (2007) when his twin-engine plane crashed on takeoff out of Wilmington, Dela. He was a good pilot, but no match for a combination of strong winds and a faulty flap mechanism. He was 40. We’d just gone to his birthday party a few weeks before. He had been married only two years and they had an 18-month-old baby girl.

So we’re at the service. He was Jewish, and the rabbi is presiding over this “celebration of life” for Dan. And she says something to the effect of, “At least he won’t be around to see more of Bush’s errors in judgment.” The audience tittered.

The thing is, I knew that Dan was pretty darn conservative and admired President Bush in many ways. We often spoke about it. The rabbi knew nothing about his politics. But she did know her audience — at least a majority of them. The rest of us didn’t count, I guess.

I have often thought of contacting this rabbi and telling her how inappropriate and just plain offensive her comments were. But I’m not Jewish and don’t even know her name. Like you, I believe that censure must come from the constituency of the speaker to make an impact.

The memory of that remark still saddens me.