Advertisement
Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
How low can the Orchestra go? Will you welcome, please, Condoleeza Rice!
Unindicted war criminal to play at Mann Center
Robert Zaller
The Liberty Bell hasn't rung in Philadelphia in some time, and not only because of that big crack. The city's recently sold paper of record, the Philadelphia Inquirer, has featured the musings of John Yoo for the past year. Professor Yoo, while toiling in the bowels of George W. Bush's Justice Department, produced a series of memos calling the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and justifying any infliction of torture short of organ failure on prisoners— and that, too, if there was no direct intention to cause such an event.
We are not talking about whether it's legitimate to torture to extract information that may save many lives— say, to discover the location of a bomb about to go off— but about casual, everyday detention practices. We are not talking about necessity, or the pretext of necessity. We are talking about the raw application of power in its most brutal and unconscionable form.
This is the learned scholar whom the Inquirer's departing publisher, Brian Tierney, thought we needed to hear. Presumably, Himmler was unavailable.
Her qualifications?
You'd think this was as low as a responsible institution could go. But now comes the news that the noted concert artist Condoleeza Rice will play an entire slow movement from a Mozart piano concerto, the K. 466, at a gala Mann Center concert this summer with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Say what?
No one seriously pretends that Dr. Rice is qualified to perform in public, much less with an orchestra that has played with Rachmaninoff, Rubinstein and Horowitz. It is her notoriety alone that has attracted the Mann's programmers. Perhaps they'd have preferred Nero for the Mendelssohn concerto if he'd been available?
Condi, her exalted positions as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in Bush's White House notwithstanding, was a bit player beside heavyweight villains such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Nevertheless she played a critical role— as their enabler. It was Rice who gave the speech that spread the bunkum about the looming "mushroom cloud" that Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction threatened. No single image was more shamelessly exploited to sell the Iraq war in the run-up to invasion.
Did Rice believe that Saddam actually possessed WMD? She was present at the infamous meeting of December 21, 2002 described in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, in which the CIA presented its evidence for weapons sites, and Bush famously exclaimed, "Is that all you've got?"
Nonexistent threat
But whether Rice was genuinely duped, merely complaisant, or cynically indifferent, is beside the point. In a 2000 Foreign Affairs article that drew much attention, she had said that even if rogue states such as Iran and North Korea might turn out to possess WMD, they would pose no security threat to the U.S. because they knew that the use of such weapons would bring instant and annihilating retaliation. In other words, the soon-to-be National Security Advisor of the U.S. acknowledged that WMD were a red herring, even should they exist in the arsenals of its declared enemies.
Yet two years later, she would elevate the suppositional possession of those same weapons into a casus belli requiring nothing less than a war of regime change that would effectively wipe Iraq off the map of the world.
The members of the Bush rat pack walk the streets, give interviews, write memoirs. Barack Obama gives them cover to rewrite history, ordering his Justice Department to stand silent and discouraging Congress from even conducting an inquest. All of this is bad enough. But Mozart? If there is one artist whose unforced integrity and purity is manifest in every bar he wrote, it is Mozart.
Stain on the city
No one can prevent Condoleezza Rice from playing Mozart's music in private; it might even do her some good. But a public concert? It stains the Philadelphia Orchestra, whatever the politics of its individual members; it stains the city; worst of all, it stains Mozart himself.
To be sure, when we hear music, we don't ordinarily inquire about the moral status of those who perform it, or even those who composed it. We understand that art is a kingdom where many sins are absolved. But those sins are generally private ones.
If some private organization wants to besmirch itself by giving ear or honor to Dr. Rice, so be it. If the Philadelphia Orchestra, for whatever perverse reason, wants to besmirch its own reputation, I suppose it's entitled to do so. But hands off Mozart. Couldn't the Orchestra team Dr. Rice with a more suitable composer, like Czerny?♦
To read a response, click here.
We are not talking about whether it's legitimate to torture to extract information that may save many lives— say, to discover the location of a bomb about to go off— but about casual, everyday detention practices. We are not talking about necessity, or the pretext of necessity. We are talking about the raw application of power in its most brutal and unconscionable form.
This is the learned scholar whom the Inquirer's departing publisher, Brian Tierney, thought we needed to hear. Presumably, Himmler was unavailable.
Her qualifications?
You'd think this was as low as a responsible institution could go. But now comes the news that the noted concert artist Condoleeza Rice will play an entire slow movement from a Mozart piano concerto, the K. 466, at a gala Mann Center concert this summer with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Say what?
No one seriously pretends that Dr. Rice is qualified to perform in public, much less with an orchestra that has played with Rachmaninoff, Rubinstein and Horowitz. It is her notoriety alone that has attracted the Mann's programmers. Perhaps they'd have preferred Nero for the Mendelssohn concerto if he'd been available?
Condi, her exalted positions as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in Bush's White House notwithstanding, was a bit player beside heavyweight villains such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Nevertheless she played a critical role— as their enabler. It was Rice who gave the speech that spread the bunkum about the looming "mushroom cloud" that Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction threatened. No single image was more shamelessly exploited to sell the Iraq war in the run-up to invasion.
Did Rice believe that Saddam actually possessed WMD? She was present at the infamous meeting of December 21, 2002 described in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, in which the CIA presented its evidence for weapons sites, and Bush famously exclaimed, "Is that all you've got?"
Nonexistent threat
But whether Rice was genuinely duped, merely complaisant, or cynically indifferent, is beside the point. In a 2000 Foreign Affairs article that drew much attention, she had said that even if rogue states such as Iran and North Korea might turn out to possess WMD, they would pose no security threat to the U.S. because they knew that the use of such weapons would bring instant and annihilating retaliation. In other words, the soon-to-be National Security Advisor of the U.S. acknowledged that WMD were a red herring, even should they exist in the arsenals of its declared enemies.
Yet two years later, she would elevate the suppositional possession of those same weapons into a casus belli requiring nothing less than a war of regime change that would effectively wipe Iraq off the map of the world.
The members of the Bush rat pack walk the streets, give interviews, write memoirs. Barack Obama gives them cover to rewrite history, ordering his Justice Department to stand silent and discouraging Congress from even conducting an inquest. All of this is bad enough. But Mozart? If there is one artist whose unforced integrity and purity is manifest in every bar he wrote, it is Mozart.
Stain on the city
No one can prevent Condoleezza Rice from playing Mozart's music in private; it might even do her some good. But a public concert? It stains the Philadelphia Orchestra, whatever the politics of its individual members; it stains the city; worst of all, it stains Mozart himself.
To be sure, when we hear music, we don't ordinarily inquire about the moral status of those who perform it, or even those who composed it. We understand that art is a kingdom where many sins are absolved. But those sins are generally private ones.
If some private organization wants to besmirch itself by giving ear or honor to Dr. Rice, so be it. If the Philadelphia Orchestra, for whatever perverse reason, wants to besmirch its own reputation, I suppose it's entitled to do so. But hands off Mozart. Couldn't the Orchestra team Dr. Rice with a more suitable composer, like Czerny?♦
To read a response, click here.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.
