‘Shut Up and Syncopate!’

I am heartened that the response to last month’s Static column, “Tearing Apart the Arts,” was overwhelmingly positive. I was expecting a flood tide of condemnation, but there was barely a trickle. Here is the trickle:

Dearest Andy,

It is my belief that most of the subscribers to The Syncopated Times and most of the fans and supporters of Traditional Jazz are fiscally, socially, and politically conservative. It is very common for liberals not to realize they live in a sea of conservatives because the conservatives are . . . nice and respectful. I think that you owe it to your true constituents, conservatives, to make the effort required to understand their points of view that do not exist merely to tear apart the arts and irritate you.

Liberals—as I was—feel free to give vent to unconsidered points of view because they mistakenly think that most people are liberal and only a few bad people are conservative. In fact most people in the US are conservative.

NPR and PBS hold forth as neutral purveyors of the culture we all enjoy. They are not. They are liberal to left-wing and so entitled in their views that they cannot even see what abusive language they use in reference to the majority. Conservative news sources and broadcasts label themselves as conservative.

You are using your platform at the Times to promote your personal views, but the Times belongs to you. True, we are paying for it, but it is not subsidized by the federal government. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know where all the money comes from. But NPR gets $500M to speak to me abusively, and it’s my money. If the information on NPR and PBS is so appreciated, then why can’t they support themselves? In Los Angeles, some liberals tried to have a self-supporting talk station. It failed.

We love you, Andy, in spite of your ill-considered, uncharitable, and wrong opinions. I think you should love us.

Your friend, …

Since we’re pinning labels here, what exactly is a “conservative?”

In 1977, Gore Vidal appeared on an installment of WNEW’s Midday with Bill Boggs. (Interestingly enough, the other person on the panel was Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor.) Vidal said, “This country is divided about evenly between conservatives and reactionaries. The idea that there is any far left to this country is madness.”

I have long known that a chunk of my readers who voted for Donald Trump (thrice) consider themselves “conservatives.” What I wrote for my May Static column was not tossed off lightly. I’ve been holding my dissonant opinions in for nine years. In the back of my mind it gnawed at me that I was publishing a periodical mostly at my own expense for readers whose encroaching authoritarian sympathies I held to be bonkers. Everybody to the left of Joe McCarthy looks like a Communist from their perspective. But how is storming the Capitol and smearing excrement on its walls by any definition of the word, “conservative?”

A significant chunk of the “conservative” Jazz community begins to feel problematic. A woman who calls herself “Jazzgirl” posted the following on a friend’s Facebook thread: “A little over a year ago I told my friends they could double their money if Trump got elected so make sure you vote for him. How? I told them to buy all the gold bullion coins they could. I said if Trump gets elected he is no economic genius and will make a lot of bad economic decisions that will foul up the economy big time and the price of gold will skyrocket in the first few months he is elected. That is exactly what happened. Price of gold has doubled in just over a year … So when people tell Republicans they are getting what they voted for some can say we sure did what we voted for. We doubled our money buying gold. And I hope we keep getting what we voted for.”

This encapsulates everything that is wrong with our society. Buy up all the gold, build a bigger moat, bar the door, and let all those outside starve, sicken, and die. That may be what Trump supporters voted for, but it is no way to sustain and grow a civilization. This isn’t a red vs blue, conservative vs liberal dynamic. It’s a siege mentality. It’s building fallout shelters and not opening them to the neighbors. To me, a conservative is one who wants to do the least amount of harm to stay the course. The current path is right-wing radicalism. It is about as far from enlightened self-interest as one can get. You don’t help yourself by hobbling your neighbors. We all prosper when we help each other—and not just people we personally like, who look like us and go to our church. We all need each other.

And, regarding the arts and other public cultural amenities, in olden times the aristocracy used to support the humanities. The rulers and nobility hired musicians like Haydn and Mozart to serenade them. The patrons regarded them as employees, and kept their exquisite creations to themselves. Beethoven was the first musician who insisted on walking in the front door rather than coming in by the service entrance.

That the arts and humanities have been largely subsidized in the US redounds to the dignity and respect of the artists and to the benefit of everyone who has the opportunity to enjoy their work. Public media means that news and cultural programming are not skewed by sponsors selling aluminum siding or nutritional supplements—or their ulterior agendas.

I have always regarded musicians, artists, and writers far above presidents. A president is merely the winner of a popularity contest, while to write a symphony, a rag, or a limerick is doing something.

My opinions are deeply considered, as charitable as humanly possible, and I will stand by them.