Jay Nordlinger: The Poisonous Nature of Strength Worship

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Additional terms apply. Well, good morning and welcome to the Bulwark podcast.
I am Mona Charon sitting in for vacationing Charlie Sykes. And we are doing something a little different while the cat's away.
For many years, Jay Nordlinger and I were podcast buddies and fellow disillusioned right wingers. So I decided to invite Jay back to catch up on where we are now.
If you're not familiar with Jay Nordlinger's work, which I find hard to believe, but it's possible. Jay is a political pundit, a longtime essayist for National Review, an international human rights watchdog, a music critic, and all-around polymath.
So, Jay, thanks for joining me. You said today was different, but it seems so familiar to me.
It seems so natural. It does.
The podcast with you is like breathing to me. Well, I want to start because there's news about Ukraine.
So, just in the last 24 hours or so, the Turks have dropped their objection to Sweden joining NATO. There's a NATO meeting, of course, going on in Vilnius.
So this is good news for the alliance and potentially good news for Ukraine, although Ukraine is pushing for actual membership in NATO. And I wonder if you

have some thoughts about that, because I'm not sure what I should think. It strikes me that

the objection that, well, if we allow Ukraine into NATO now, obviously they should become a member

soon. But if we allow them in now, then are we in a hot war? Is NATO in a hot war with Russia immediately? What do you think about that? Well, Article 5 says what it says.
An attack on one is an attack on all. So if Ukraine is a NATO member and Putin is making war on Ukraine,raine well that's an attack on nato so it gets very very sticky and it's so interesting that the the fins have joined nato and that the swedes are about to apparently i was just reviewing in 2017 i went to sweden to look into this issue of defense and the resulting piece piece was called Sweden Jolted Awake.
And Sweden was always known as a so-called peace nation. But it found itself as a nation on guard against this revanchist Russia.
So it's very, very sticky. NATO membership quite possibly would have saved Ukraine some years ago.
But yes, there's a hot war now. So one of the things that I'm sure you're paying close attention to is the fact that support for Ukraine has declined dramatically in the GOP, but not among Democrats.
And for people like you and me who spent our formative years thinking of the Democratic Party as the one who was less vigorous about international alliances and about national defense. And to put it politely, to put it mildly and about standing up to the Russians.
It's amazing. So here's a June poll found that 44 percent of GOP and GOP leaning independents say that we are giving too much aid to Ukraine.
And of course, it's trending in the wrong direction. Since the invasion, the number of Republicans who support aid to Ukraine has been dropping dramatically, whereas there's been a slight decline among Democrats.
Mostly it's held steady. And it's like 14% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say we're spending too much.
So I'd be curious to hear you on this topic. I mean, you know, if you look around the right-wing infotainment sphere, you have figures like Tucker Carlson, who, again, he is no longer, thank God, doesn't have the platform he once did.
But influencers like that who are outright Putin apologists, folks, people, talk about what's happened to the right. There's an old expression, you are what you eat.
And for the last several years, I've taken the saying, you are the media you consume. I listen to people.
I have a sense of what media they consume.

And a lot of the media on the right are hostile to Ukraine and friendly to the Kremlin. This is quite a reversal.
And, you know, some people who are near and dear to me are anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin. And they are victims, if you will.
Maybe they aren't. but I'll say victims of the media they consume, which says that Ukraine is a woke nation with pride flags.
In a free society, you can fly the flags you want, and that Putin's Russia is some, pardon the expression, bulwark against wokeness, and that Putin is a great defender of Christian civilization and all this, and it's just rank propaganda. It's all lies, and a lot of people have bought it.
And there's also the fact that the president is a Democrat, and if you're in one tribe, you have to be against what the other tribe is doing, even if the other tribe is pushing motherhood and hot fudge sundaes. Yeah.
You know, announces that he is for puppy rescue organizations support for them will go down among republicans immediately and vice versa yeah it's a tribalistic instinct but it is um thoroughly disgusting thoroughly disgusting i mean these ukrainians ought to be celebrated the right. Who today would receive a warmer reception at CPAC or Turning Point? Putin or Zelensky? I hate even to contemplate the question.
That's right. So I want to pursue this a little further because you were one of the first commenters to notice the poisonous nature of this worship of strength for strength's sake.
Very old thing in human affairs. That's right.
And you picked up on it with the Trump attraction to Putin and just to strength in general. And I think you were the first one to dig out that quotation from a Playboy interview where Trump had praised the Chinese communists for Tiananmen Square, for being strong.
That at first they weren't right to talk about that. Oh, yeah, that's true.
People often talk about Trump's inconsistency. He's a flip-flopper.
He evolves. He goes with the flow wherever the crowd is, wherever the mob is on abortion and other issues.

But there are two things in life on which he has been absolutely consistent.

He's been hostile to trade, always, international trade.

He's never moved on that.

And he's always been admiring of dictators, strongmen, always.

And he faulted Gorbachev and the Soviet Union for not being strong enough,

unlike the communist Chinese who put down the Tiananmen Square uprising. He said they did it with strength.
He put it, it was awful. It was bloody maybe, but boy, they did it.
And he said, that's my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand, not a firm enough hand.
And it was honest. Yeah.
It was honest. He likes this kind of thing.
Just earlier this year and not very long ago, he was praising his top three, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un. And they're all top of the line.
He said, top of the line. And he spoke with glowing admiration about all of them.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
You could even be a two-bit dictator like Duterte in the Philippines, but if you engaged in extrajudicial killings, then Trump was all for you. So he praised Duterte, who killed thousands of people.
He even changed about Maduro in Venezuela. We had that democratic push there for a while with Juan Guaido and so on.
And apparently, Trump was kind of impressed by Maduro's resistance to it. I mean, he didn't crumble.
Yeah. This has influenced the whole Republican Party.
And years ago, I used to look at Putin's crude propaganda for himself, posing shirtless on horseback and supposedly killing wildlife and so on. Or cuddling it, depending.
Or cuddling it, depending, yeah. And I would think, boy, those Russians, boy, are they gullible.
They're falling for this stuff. I owe the Russians a big apology.
Yeah, I yeah i know okay so now um you know when you look around at the republican primary we currently have a so-called masculinity contest among some of these people where they're bragging about did you see that video are we going to talk about desantis with those oiled up bodies yes okay gross that was porn okay so it is so let's play you can't quite get a sense of it from the audio but let's just play a little piece of this so that we can get a sense of what we're talking about this is something that was tweeted out i guess or somewhere on social media that was picked up by the DeSantis team and reproduced on behalf of DeSantis, supposedly.

So it's supposed to criticize Trump, get to Trump's right.

Trump is too woke.

OK, so let's hear a little bit of this.

I will do everything in my power to protect our LG LGBTQ citizens. If Caitlyn Jenner were to walk into Trump Tower and want to use the bathroom, you would be fine with her using any bathroom she chooses.
That is correct. In the future, can transgender women compete in this universe? Yes.ica great again oh but you've got to see the visuals though oh my god okay so describe the visuals because now we're transitioning i'm not that type of guy i can't describe we're transitioning from that part where it's you know pulling up these old clips transitioning may be the word if you really are woke just like your critics say what you're all transitioning all that you live you know author of sex matters guilty guilty so the second part of this which is supposed to be the pro de santis part you know has that you know baseline music and everything and it shows these got these lasers coming out of lasers coming out of his eyes but these images of oiled up muscle man that is lots of homoerotic overtones i know of course you know in this segment that's supposed to advertise the anti-wokeness of DeSantis, lots of mixed messaging going on here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

As Jonah would say, gayer than the volleyball scene in Top Gun. Oh, gosh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is actually cartoonish, but it's also serious because, well, first of all, the whole concept that DeSantis thinks he can get the nomination by persuading everybody that Donald Trump is too liberal.
A squish. I mean.
Yeah, rots or ruck. Yeah, exactly.
It's a very, very questionable strategy. Cruz and Rubio and the rest of them tried that.
No one cares about policy positions. No.
It's all the feels ending with the letter Z. That's right.
Yeah. But there's another aspect of this that really bothers me.
And that is that, as people know, I feel like there is a very necessary conversation that we have to have in this country about how best to treat kids with gender dysphoria, which is a real thing. Trans people are a real thing.
But I do think that we are in the midst of an overreaction, and we are sweeping too many disturbed kids up into this fad for transitioning, and I'm worried about that. It's the new anorexia.
Yeah, kind of like anorexia, like cutting, these other things

that are sort of their social contagion involved. But in order to have a reasonable conversation

about this, you can't have the Republicans attempting to just use trans stuff as their

sort of waving the bloody shirt. It makes it so impossible to have a reasonable conversation,

but that's what they're doing.

Well,

Thank you. as they're sort of waving the bloody shirt.
It makes it so impossible to have a reasonable conversation, but that's what they're doing. Well, I call the trans issue the new wall.
Why do you say? Good question. In 2016, in January, I believe, Donald Trump had a sit-down with the editors of the New York Times.
And he said, you know, I'll be doing a rally. I'll be conducting a rally and the crowd will get a little bit bored.
We'll grow listless and maybe even start heading for the exits. And then I'll say, we're going to build a wall and they go nuts.
Flash forward to last month, June, 2023. He's saying, you know, five years ago, no one ever heard of this transgender stuff.
But when I start talking about transgenders, people go nuts. And it's true.
It is a deadly serious issue. And I think the stuff involving minors is horrific, horrific.
I think it's abusive. I think it's wrong.
And also, I think that biological males should not compete against females in sports. I think it's just common sense and elementary justice.
Now, in the field of adults, I'm a little more laissez-faire about that. Me too, 100%.
George W. Bush, you recall, in 2003, hosted a reception, an event for his college classmates on the 25th anniversary of their graduation.
Yale class of 68, I think. And there was a receiving line, I guess.
And there was this woman, I'm going to say woman. And things were a little bit awkward.
And she didn't know quite what to say. And she said, you may remember me as Peter.
And then I think she was searching for words. And the president intervened and said, and now you've come back as yourself.
Great. This woman had a sex change operation.
That seems to me to be an attitude of maturity. But when it comes to minors, I must say, I'm a tiger, if you like.
I'm as hardline as all the people the progressives would hate. Yeah.
I have a lot of views on this. I won't bore everybody with them, but I just think this tendency in our society, especially on something like this that requires so much sensitivity and care and attention to the evidence and so on, I think both sides make that extremely difficult.
You know, the trans activists who say that any criticism of what's going on means that you don't want trans people to exist and you want trans people to die. And then people like in this ad with DeSantis, one of the things he allows them to praise him for is saying trans people won't exist under the, you know, the new DeSantis regime.
Yeah, trans people can exist whether you like it or not. Well, damn right.
And they always have and they always will. There are serious discussions to be had about asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.
Yes. Just about my favorite thinker and writer about immigration is one Mona Charon.
And yet, you know, when DeSantis puts those Venezuelans in Texas on a plane to Martha's Vineyard, without notifying the Massachusetts authorities, of course, this is a governor, mind you. These people aren't people anymore.
They're not human beings and men and women. They're just political pawns.
And the same with transgenders. Life for these people is not a picnic, so far as I understand, at least for most of them.
It's just a very painful issue. And yeah, I agree with you, Mona.
By the way, DeSantis never acknowledges the difference between somebody who's trying to sneak across the border, which is a crime, and for which you can be immediately deported, and people who are following the rules that we made saying that you can ask for asylum when you come to a recognized border entry post. You know, if you want to say too many people are asking for asylum, change the law, but don't make the people who are desperate and who have followed the rules into political pawns.
All right. So we agree about him.
I want to hear you on Chris Christie. He's the one we remember pre-2016.
It's like he's a ghost that's come back. Right.
There was this other Chris Christie for four, five, six years, whatever. And this is the guy, I used to say, pardon the expression, I used to say I watched his videos when he was governor of New Jersey like porn.
I mean, he was talking back to the teachers' unions. And so I couldn't get enough Christy videos.
Like my masculine idol weighed about 400 pounds, right? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I just made Mona chair and I think spit her.
Practically spit my coffee out. But yeah, that was my masculine ideal.
This blobby Chris. I'm like, get him, Chris, get him.
And it was a little too early for him to run in 2012, I guess. But in the last couple of months, I've been reminded of that Christy, who's just dropping truth bomb after truth bomb.
And it feels great. Is he hypocritical? Well, well, two and two is still four, even if you said it was seven for some years.
Yeah, yeah. I had occasion to attend a dinner for Chris Christie a few weeks ago.
There were about 20 people there. And I would say he's enjoying himself.
So that's a good sign, right? He's a bird out of a cage, a big bird, mind you. But yeah, you know, magna est veritas.

You know, he says things like,

Jared Kushner got $2 billion out of the Saudis

the second he left office.

That is a fact.

Exactly.

It's not even an opinion, you know?

And he says to this dear young man,

this college student,

what is your message to people in the Republican Party

who think that the 2020 election was stolen? And Chris, he's not emotional. He's just cruelly lawyer-like, I would say.
He said, show me the evidence. Show me the evidence and I'll fight this thing all the way to the Supreme Court and beyond.
But there's no evidence. And then he goes through it.
Simple truth is a powerful thing. May not win you an election, but it is so powerful.
And it can change the atmosphere. Arguably, it already has.
I mean, I think Will Hurd and Asa Hutchinson, Asa Hutchinson was doing this before, and God bless him. Will Hurd jumped in.
I mean, you now have three candidates on the Republican side who are at least telling the truth, and you have more evidence, little tiny tiny little green shoots of people telling the truth. I want to read what Nick Catojo, also known as Alapundit, used to be called Alapundit, now at the dispatch.
But he said, this is about Christie, all of what he said is so plainly true as to border on banal, yet so unusual for a prominent Republican to admit. So it feels wildly transgressive.
It's not what you'd say to win votes in a national GOP primary. It's what you'd say when you've undertaken to knock down a wall of silence for the righteous fun of it.
Well, that's what Vaclav Havel did. That's what he wrote about in The Power of the Powerless, to try to live in truth.
Yeah.

Try to live in truth and not cooperate in lies. It's what Liu Xiaobo talked about in China.
I've just been reviewing his life. Just a simple truth.
He was the great Chinese democracy leader and intellectual who was imprisoned several times, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. It did not improve conditions for him, and he died still in custody in 2017.
He was a great, great man. Harry Link, with a Chinese dissident co-author, has just written a biography of him.
But simple truth, simple truth. Arthur Waldron, as I recall, the China scholar, had trouble getting tenure at Princeton.
He went to Penn, has had a long, wonderful year at Penn. But he would say such things as, the Korean War began when the North invaded the South.
And that was considered radioactive. A simple fact, Wednesday follows Tuesday, can be so powerful.
Well, now, speaking of that, Mike Pence is in the race. There's another one.
Ambivalent city for the likes of you and me, Mona Charan. God, yes.
He was such a worm throughout the Trump administration, such an invertebrate. But, of course, on January 6th, he did that all-important right thing.
And now he's being challenged about it on the campaign trail. And you talked about this.
Well, with Pence, I used to say about January 6th, what a low bar. He wasn't a traitor.
He chose not to betray his country and violate his oath. But you know, in his world, that was big.
In the world he inhabited, that was really big, not to betray his oath. When so many would have applauded him, celebrated him for doing so.
Right. You know? And he's just gone to Ukraine.
What other GOP candidate would do so? And my feeling was, I'm not, I often said on our podcast, Mona, I'm not a shrink. And then I'd go on to play shrink.
It's possible that Christie thinks something like this. If I'm going to go down, if my political career is going to end this year, this cycle, I'm going down as myself, as my authentic self, who I always was, and this is who I am.
Don't know. One of the things that you and I were talking about before we went on air, where we may possibly disagree.
I'm not sure. Oops, then I'll change my mind.
I'll reconsider at least, Mona. Goodness gracious.
No, you may persuade me. I don't know.
How many years have we podcast? I disagreed with you about one one time and you were right about a couple of things i disagreed with you on is that right well since you have a photographic memory and remember everything that i'll trust you on that because i don't remember anything you were let's say very and maybe it's a male female thing frankly but i was higher on sarah palin for a lot longer than you were with that i'm like come come on, come on, give her a break. Yeah.
No, I was not a Sarah Palin fan. Right from the beginning to quote a book title by a former colleague of yours.
Yes, exactly. Okay.
Legacy admissions. This is the new hobby horse.
People are saying, okay, now that we got rid of race-based preferences, let's get rid of legacy preferences too. That'll be more fair because legacy preferences go mostly to the children of people who've already succeeded and it goes disproportionately to white Americans.
But you say you're kind of for them. First of all, I think the issue of public funding is dicey, but I think basically colleges and universities just set their own policies.
I don't think there has to be uniform policy from sea to shining sea, as Bill would say, Bill Buckley. And also, I wouldn't favor something like legacy admissions in a country such as France or Japan, where there are a few elite universities and so much is riding on where you go, so much is riding on it.
These poor Japanese kids, my gosh, you don't get into the right school or something. It's just curtains for them.
Determines their next 60 years. It's just terrible.
In our country, from sea to shining sea with our zillions of colleges and universities, my goodness, I think there's something sweet about family traditions. It's a kind of, I would say, a benign tribalism that I like, and I think is kind of sweet.
Now, stipulate that people will be roughly qualified, roughly qualified for admission. Is there not something kind of sweet or at least benign about a family generation after generation? This is their college.
Fathers and sons may have the same professors, right? They sing the same fight song and alma mater. They wear the same colors.
They donate. It's a little tradition.
So what? But there's so much churlishness and envy and resentment in the world. Yeah they get to get that yeah yeah all this little all these little are snowflakey nation grow the hell up i mean you'll find a college or university to go to so i'm gonna sit here and take my rebuke from one monaan, I'm going to listen very carefully.

Okay. I think we do disagree on that.
And here's why. One of the things that I think is an underlying thread when we discuss the rights and wrongs of affirmative action is how much of the disadvantage that African Americans in America in 2023 face is because of their skin color? And how much is because of centuries of racism and Jim Crow and the accumulated disadvantage?

And I think we pay way too much attention to current discrimination against people for skin color and not enough to ancestral disadvantage. For example, I've cited this a few times, a large number of the people that get admitted to these elite schools for their skin color are not even technically African Americans.
They're African immigrants who've come recently. I mean, they're Americans now, but they're recent immigrants from places like Nigeria or the Caribbean or other places.
That's a tricky part of the phrase African-American, isn't it? It's a tricky thing. This whole thing is full of landmines, but- I just step right on them.
I'm too old. But here's the thing.
When you say, well, legacy admissions doesn't hurt anybody, people would say, well, wait a minute. You know, if you come from a family that doesn't have the advantage of centuries of people who attended this school, and there's going to be a preference for the children of people who have enjoyed that privilege, that's really not kosher.
That's not good. What we should be about is trying to equal the playing field now.
There's nothing we can do when we go back to erase a terrible history, but we can attempt to limit the benefits today of those centuries of privilege and preference. Okay, I think a couple of things.
First of all, and I'll continue my act here, well, boo-hoo, boo-hoo. You have to go to Jones College instead of Smith College.
Boo-hoo. Okay, yeah, what terrible hardship.
Okay, you know, Spelman wants legacy admissions, fine with me. If some other school wants legacy admissions, fine with me.
You know, Princeton, whatever. Maybe I'm not crazy about it, but I mean, come on.
The world has real problems. At the same time, I think people ought to be judged, if they have to be judged at all as individuals, as the men and women they are, right? And this is, I think, one of the biggest problems with affirmative action is the groupness of it rather than an individual nature.
Because people are trying to make their way in the world, age 17, 18, whatever. They're trying to be admitted to college.
They're trying to get a first job or a second job. They may be trying to get a government contract.
And they are individuals. And that, to me, is central.
But I think legacy admissions are really a ginned-up controversy, frankly. It's even a form of whataboutism.
Well, race discrimination is one thing. Legacy admissions are something else in my view.
Yeah, I'm going to disagree because if you're going to treat people as individuals, then you want to say, okay, what have you done that entitles you? Not what did your ancestors do because they happened to go to this school. I wouldn't want unqualified people admitted to a college, but also I still think this is very old-fashioned.
It's the college's own business. I have enough trouble running my own life.
Not if they take federal funds. There are a couple colleges in the country that don't take federal funds and therefore can make their own choices.
But once you take federal funds, you're under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So, okay, let's turn to one other thing that I wanted to, it's kind of just a lighter thing, but I wanted to hear you on the fake Tocqueville quotes.
Oh, yeah. You wrote about this and it was, you know, it involves our friend, Senator Josh Holland.
Right. In the first months of the Weekly Standard in 1995, we published a piece by John J.
Pitney, Jack Pitney, the political scientist at Claremont McKenna on a fake Tocqueville quote. It's a wonderful statement.
I think it goes, America is great because she is good. And if she ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
Fine. I probably even agree with it, but Tocqueville never said it.
And so Jack wrote about that. And on the 4th of July, Senator Josh Hawley circulated a quote attributed to Patrick Henry,

linking the founding of the country with Christianity.

And it's not something that Patrick Henry ever said or wrote.

Now, my view is you don't have to lean on the authority of Patrick Henry to make that point.

You can lean on others, or if you think it's true yourself, simply say it. So people pointed out that Patrick Henry didn't say this.
Now, the manful thing to do, if you will, is to say, ah, okay, sorry, my bad. I made a mistake.
It's a little embarrassing. It didn't come from Patrick Henry, but my point holds.
And here's why. This is a point I'm trying to make.
Forget Patrick Henry. But no, Hawley didn't do that.'t do that he said like i hear the libs are major triggered by he talks like some right-wing valley girl you know man up dude man the hell up i think he just wrote a book about manliness and say i made a mistake shouldn't have circulated it my intern got it wrong what maybe that wouldn't have been so manful whatever but it went out under my name you know and patrick henry didn't say it my and then go on from there but it's still correct he can say and here's why but he couldn't he just couldn't oh my goodness we ought to elect adults to the u.s senate i'm done oh good one did he get a legacy admission i'm against him now baby you know no more of this privilege no more of these elites generation after after generation, lacking in the privilege.
Josh Hawley, given the raised fist to the insurrectionist and then running for his life a few minutes later. And the thing is, Monat, seriously, he is so well-educated, this guy.
So well-educated. He clerked on the Supreme Court.
He's got to know these basic things, you know? He's not a dunce. Of course he knows.
I loved what you said about Holly and masculinity because, as you know, I wrote a whole book called Sex Matters where I talked about healthy masculinity and that we shouldn't link the words toxic and masculinity, except in rare cases where, yeah, there are situations where it is, but we shouldn't think of masculinity itself as being inherently bad. It has many good qualities, and one of them you just mentioned.
It applies to men and women, of course, but the idea of taking responsibility for yourself, manning up, being self-sufficient. And also, you know, in a healthy society, manliness, properly understood, means taking care of weaker people, taking care of those who need help.
And that is something that the whole right wing has distorted beyond recognition. Their idea of masculinity is the absolute opposite.
It's the whiniest, weakest, nasty, you know, it's little boy behavior. It's the complete opposite of what a mature manly person should be.
Well, the testimony of the mother of three sons is very, very powerful. And I will say here on the air what I've said in print many times.
Mona, I imagine you're pretty disaffected from what is called conservatism. I am.
But I'm here to tell one and all that there is more conservatism in one paragraph of sex matters than there is in 10 Trump rallies. You are a conservative, just not as understood by our topsy-turvy world today.
Well, I don't know. I've stopped calling myself one because of the associations, honestly.
I understand. Believe me.
Doesn't mean they're right, though. No, no, it doesn't.
It doesn't. I don't know.
I mean, we've often talked over the years, and our friend Bill Kristol has talked too about, you know, reclaiming that wonderful word liberal in the 19th century sense, not in the progressive sense, but in the sense of valuing individual rights and liberties and rule of law and all those good things, democracy. You are that, but Mona, I know you a bit and have read you since, I won't say how long, but you're also conservative on matters, societal, et cetera.
In addition to that. I am.
I'm a social conservative. That's true.
You're a Reaganite. Yeah, I am.
Proud to be one. Damn right.
To take us out, can you just say a few words about music and about, so I'm not sure actually you even agree with me on this. I've already blown legacy admissions.
I'll go 0 for 2 here. So you review music, classical music, and you're a great expert on all things classical music.
Do you think classical music could do more to be a little less stuffy and to bring more people in? Or do you think? It's the opposite. I think if you lower your standards, what are you worth? What do you exist for? I mean, I have a friend in the Houston Symphony and the symphony, it just had to back up an Elvis impersonator.
No, not that. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah.
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, my home orchestra, if you will, at its summer festival or former summer festival in Meadowbrook was scheduled. I believe this concert got canceled to present the music of Def Leppard.
I don't even know who that is. It's a rock band.
Okay. I believe it's an English rock band.
And one of my points is there's no fan, there's no admirer of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra that wants to hear it play Def Leppard. And there's no admirer of Def Leppard who wants to hear the Detroit Symphony Orchestra play Def Leppard.
I mean, it's just screwy. Have a little confidence in who you are and what you do in your own art, your own repertoire.
Lift people up. They may like it.
Offer them the good stuff. This goes for literature and film and everything else.
Don't always stoop. Some people may wish to rise to you.
I remember Leonard Bernstein in the 1960s and 70s. He would do these young people's concerts in Carnegie Hall.
They were televised at 8 p.m. on Saturday on CBS.
And these kids would pour in, not fancy kids from Groton and Choate and so on, but from PS 141 and so on. These kids of immigrants that, you know, who knows whether their parents ever bathed more than once a month or so.
And they'd come into Carnegie Hall and Bernstein would talk to them at such a high level and they liked it. And it was a good thing.
So no, I say, you know, keep your standards high and invite people up to them. Bill Buckley spoke the same way with all his vocabulary to everyone.
Everyone. And you know what? In those days, they liked it.
You were at his side. You know it.
Yeah, I largely agree. I would just say this, because I do think that beautiful music is beautiful music.
And you take a classroom full of second graders,

you play Mozart for them, you're going to find that there's going to be one or two kids in that class who just from that are going to wind up being classical music lovers because it's just got an innate appeal and people exposed to it, some people will really respond. But what I would do if I were king of the universe is that I would make classical concerts a little bit more user-friendly in the sense, I bet there are lots of people who are intimidated because they don't know the rules and they don't know when you're supposed to applaud and when you're not supposed to applaud.
And they go to a concert and it seems like everybody else knows what to do, because of that, they might be a little intimidated about attending these kinds of concerts. Maybe I'm overestimating the importance of this, but I think if they would start off a concert by saying, you know, we're going to be playing this, this, and this, and here's, this is a piece in three movements, the next one's a piece in four movements, the tradition is you don't applaud between movements.
How about that? That's a point. And in the old days, composers expected you to applaud after certain movements and would have thought it was weird if you didn't.
I know. In Beethoven's day, they made him replay a whole movement because they loved it so much.
That's a true encore. Encore originally meant again, play it again.
Later it came to me, or beasts, they say in Europe, a second time. Later it came to mean play something else Or sing something else But encore originally meant same thing again please I've written so many words about this over the years I'll say this I caution classical music people Resist the temptation To whore after popularity You will never be popular Ever, you're not supposed to be Classical is a minority taste.
There's a reason pop music is called pop music. It's popular.
It's supposed to be popular, and you are not, and that's fine. But a lot of people aren't fine with it.
They think, we have to be liked. No, you'll never be liked and approved by all, ever.
Stop trying. It's like these pathetic people in churches.
Oh, we have to make churches more. Look, just offer the best and draw people to you.
And then you'll see over the years, I've seen these efforts by classical music people to make classical music hip. It's pathetic.
It's ridiculous. People just look ridiculous.
Stop with Def Leppard and the Elvis impersonators and all that. Provide the good stuff.
A minority will appreciate it. They will like it, support it, nurture it, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's going to have to be okay. But with a lot of people, it's not okay because might makes right and popularity makes right, which you and I know ain't true.
Those are words to live by, Jayay and i know from unpopularity we are unpopular and proud new political party you know yeah two percent of the vote are bust all right well thank you so much uh where can people find you they can follow you on twitter Twitter. Are you on threads now? I opened an account.
I haven't done anything with it, but just in case, as a, what's the expression? There's a bolt hole. Well, and they can read your music criticism in the new criterion.
Highly recommended. Are you plugging Mona? I am.
Why shouldn't I? I don't know. I feel like such a charity case.
Thank you.

Mainly, I'm a great friend and admirer of Mona Charon of Longstanding.

And I so appreciate you, Mona.

I read every word you write.

Ditto.

Okay, we're going to end there.

Thank you so much for joining us. And the Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper.

The sound engineer is Jason Brown.

And we will return tomorrow and do this all over again.