The Bulwark Podcast - Jay Nordlinger: The Poisonous Nature of Strength Worship

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

The masculinity contest in the Republican presidential primary ramps up, Chris Christie keeps dropping truth bombs, and the trans issue is the new wall. Plus, Sweden, Ukraine and NATO, and a debate over ending legacy admissions. Jay Nordlinger joins guest host Mona Charen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 this, 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, well, that's an attack on NATO. So it gets very, very sticky. And it's so interesting that the Finns 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 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- I'm just putting it politely. To put it mildly, about standing up to the Russians. It's amazing. So here's a June poll found that 44% 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, you know, it's like 14% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, they were spending too much. So I'd be curious to hear you on this topic. I mean, 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 to 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 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 flag 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 Sundays. Yeah. You know, if Biden announces that he is for puppy rescue organizations, support for them will go down among Republicans immediately. And vice versa. Yeah, and vice versa. It's a tribalistic instinct, but it is thoroughly disgusting, thoroughly disgusting. I mean, these Ukrainians ought to be celebrated on 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. But at first they weren't, right? 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's been absolutely consistent. He's been hostile to trade always, international trade. 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-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, you know, posing shirtless on horseback and supposedly killing wildlife, you know, and so on.

Or cuddling it, depending. Or cuddling it, depending, yeah. And I would think, boy, you know, those Russians, boy, are they gullible. You know, they're falling for this stuff. I owe the Russians a big apology. Yeah, I know. Okay. So now, 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. I thought 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. Okay, so let's hear a little bit of this. I will do everything in my power to protect our LGTBQ 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. Make America greater. Psych! 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 it. We're transitioning from that part where it's, you know, pulling up these old clips. Transitioning may be the word. You really are woke, just like your critics say. You're all into transitioning and all that. You lib you, you know, author of Sex Matters. Guilty, guilty.

So the second part of this, which is supposed to be the pro DeSantis part, you know, has that, you know, baseline music and everything. And it shows these. He's got these lasers coming out of his eyes. Lasers coming out of his eyes. But these images of oiled up muscle man. 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. As Jonah would say, gayer than the volleyball scene and 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, rats are 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. It 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, 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 this 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 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. Just about my favorite thinker and writer about immigration is one Mona Charon. And yet, 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. Look, 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 he 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. 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 or 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 you? You know, sorry, ladies and gentlemen, I just made Mona Cher and I think spit her, 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 Christie 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 but yeah yeah you know magna est veritas you know he says things like jared kushner got two billion dollars out of the saudis the second he left office. That is a fact. Exactly. It's not even an opinion. 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 coolly 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 little green shoots of people telling the truth. I want to read what Nick Cattoggio, also known as Alla Pundit, used to be called Alla Pundit, 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 benefit.

Well, it's what Vaclav Havel did. That's what he wrote about in The Power of the Powerless. Just try to live in truth. 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. He's 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 Charon. 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. And he's just gone to Ukraine. What other GOP candidate would do so? And my feeling was, 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 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 scared. Maybe it's a male-female thing, frankly, but I was higher on Sarah Palin for a lot longer than you were. Oh yeah, I remember that. I'm like, come on, come on, give her a break. Yeah, yeah. No, 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 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 few elite universities and so much is riding on where you go, so much is riding on it. You know, 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, you know, 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, yeah, yeah. They get to get that. Yeah, yeah. All these little snowflakey nation.

Grow the hell up. I mean, you'll find a college or university to go to. So I'm going to sit here and take my rebuke from one Mona Charan. I'm going to listen very carefully. Okay. I think we do disagree on this, 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 like 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. 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 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 Hall. 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. 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 on under my name you know and patrick hunter didn't say it my bad 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? What did his father do?

I'm against him now, baby. No more of this privilege. No more of these elites, generation after generation, locking 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, Mona, 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. 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 in a healthy society, manliness, properly understood, means taking care of weaker people, taking care of those who need help. Damn right. 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 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, etc. 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. 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 just had to back up an Elvis impersonator. No, not that. Yes. Yeah. 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, who knows whether their parents ever bathed more than once a month or so. 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, 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, 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, played 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, I always have, resist the temptation to whore after popularity. You will never be popular, ever. You're not supposed to be. Classical music 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 go, we have to be light. No, you'll never be light 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, Jay.

And I know from unpopularity. We are unpopular and proud. New political party, you know. 2% of the vote or bust. All right. Well, thank you so much. Where can people find you? They can follow you on 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, as a bolt hole. Well, and they can read your music criticism in the new criterion. Highly recommended. Are you plugging, Mona? Yeah. 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 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.