>idiocracy

>From here about Leonard Bernstein

“It’s no coincidence—though it was Bernstein’s immense good fortune—that his zenith came at a moment when some powerful people shared this desire. The Kennedys made their White House, in the words of Richard Hofstadter, “a center of receptivity to culture.” Bernstein performed at the Inaugural Gala, and, like Pablo Casals, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost and other high-art luminaries, found a warm welcome throughout the Camelot years. Swept up in the notion that Americans might be able to meet not at the lowest common denominator but at the cultural peak, Bernstein was devastated by JFK’s death, which was also the death of Camelot. He dedicated his Third Symphony, “Kaddish,” to the late president….

…Still, Bernstein continued to show that the pursuit of excellence could coexist with American democracy. (It is one of the qualities that made him such an effective cultural emissary during the cold war.) But that position became decidedly lonelier after 1968, when Richard Nixon replaced the old economic resentments of presidential campaigns with obnoxious new cultural ones pitting “the silent majority” against assorted decadent elites. By the time Bernstein died in 1990, the very things he hoped might unite us had become a tool for driving us apart.

Anybody reading the papers can see how vicious the culture wars have grown. Just about any personal quality with a whiff of distinction—a hobby, a vegetable preference—can get you branded an elitist and a threat to our values. Remember how, in a desperate bid for self-preservation, John Kerry pretended four years ago he didn’t speak French? Or consider how, at this year’s Republican convention, Barack Obama was mocked by the multimillionaire former mayor of New York City and prominent opera buff Rudy Giuliani for being “cosmopolitan.” Maybe Tocqueville was right about us.

Nobody thinks that if only Sean Hannity listeners had a subtler appreciation of Mahler, they’d cozy right up to Nancy Pelosi fans, or that a wave of “Bad Dicky” revivals might heal the wounds of the body politic. But the Bernstein festival reminds us that one of our civilization’s triumphs has been finding ways to reconcile “elite” and “popular,” to stop treating the words like opposing epithets. At a time when so many other echoes of Camelot are in the air, we may yet see the return of its cultural spirit, one that few Americans have embodied as fully as Lenny Bernstein.”