October 30, 2023

In October 2023, an official responsible for programming at North Carolina public radio station WCPE rejected broadcasting several operas being produced this season at the New York Metropolitan Opera.  An article, now scrubbed from the net, entitled “North Carolina Public Radio Station Rejects Contemporary Operas” explains that the programmer cited her Christian faith and viewpoint that the operas are vulgar and inappropriate for children as reasons for declining to broadcast them.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”); } }); }); }

The viewpoint intolerance and anti-Christian cultural fascism of NPR and institutions such as the N.Y. Met are fanatical.  It was intolerable that a single dissident public radio station would be allowed to decline to broadcast opera believed to be disrespectful to the Bible.  There was a firestorm of outrage against the station official, and her decision was quickly reversed.  From a National Public Radio (NPR) article:

WCPE’s protest came at a time when the Metropolitan Opera is eager to showcase its commitment to recently written operas and works from outside the traditional canon of music written by white men. Three of the operas that WCPE planned to reject in the 2023-24 season were written by Black or Mexican composers. This past April, WCPE also refused to broadcast another Met-produced opera written by a Black composer that included LGBTQ themes.

This victory lap paragraph encapsulates the cultural ignorance, bigotry, and stupidity of the progressive mind and why NPR should not get a penny of taxpayer money.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”); } }); }); }

The first point of ignorance is that race and sexuality are “contemporary” themes.  Race and sexuality are the oldest hats on the rack of American culture.  These political fixations have been choking the life out of American art and culture for fifty years.  Consider the so-called smash hit Hamilton.  Its initial casting call was pure racism — no whites could try out.  Is there memorable music from Hamilton?  Of course not.  But the racialist Hamilton was the must-see for the American sheeple because of mindless obeisance to left-wing race dogma.

Furthermore, it is understandable that non-European Americans would commit cultural appropriation upon the life of Alexander Hamilton.  Only Europe could have produced such a visionary of freedom and constitutional law in the 1700s.

Regarding the assertion that the anti-moral deconstruction perpetrated under the gaslighting letter-salad LGBT is “contemporary,” one can only assume the writer has not watched television, gone to a movie, or seen a play for fifty years to regurgitate such senselessness.  Endless sexuality dogma is deadening to art because sexuality in itself cannot be made profound or artistically interesting.  A line of drag queens a mile long is still artistically one inch deep.

I was recently at the Frist Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.  Like hundreds of museums across America, it has sunk into the quicksand of left-wing political tedium.  The featured exhibit, “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage,” will soon be changing to “Art of Imperial Expansion, Conquest and Colonization in Spanish America.”  Ironically, any African- or Hispanic-American artist of exceptional talent would be passed over unless he were exploring political themes of racial identity and oppression.

Human beings are not LEGO people formed in white, yellow, red, brown, and black.  Recombinant DNA and human interaction with emergent reality create a staggering range of individual differences, wherein lies the glory of artistic creativity.

Victor Davis Hanson has said the worst thing Obama did was to revise the unique, successful struggle of African-Americans into a formula of every race against “whites.”