Jon Johanning wrote:

>I'm not sure how I wound up on Plato's side in this little dust-up, but
>I would like to scramble to get off of it.  First of all, I'm not setting
>up a Republic, and I am all for everyone listening to anything they want.
>When I said I respected the feelings of those who associate Wagner with
>Nazism, what I meant was their feelings about the Holocaust--many of them
>are survivors or relatives of victims.  I can certainly understand why this
>music causes them, personally, too much pain to listen to.  But if they go
>on to demand that Wagner not be performed, so that no one else could hear
>it, I do not agree with that position.  In other words, I respect their
>feelings, but not their political views.

I suspect that Jon even respects their political views, viz., that Nazism
and what it stood for, including the holocaust, constituted a disgusting
abomination.  Not to presume, I think Jon meant to say that he "respect[ed]
their feelings" but did not make the same associations w/ the music.

Having made my comment on a matter musical, let me indulge in a small
digression.

>Nor, of course, would I suggest for a moment that G & S or Mark Twain be
>banned, and certainly not (if they were living) subjected to the treatment
>Rushdie has had to suffer.

I may not be as certain about G&S, but I have strong feelings on
the Mark Twain/Huck Finn issue.  His use of the word we no longer dare
spell out occurs only to demonstrate and deplore either the ignorance (in
Huck's case) and the mean-spiritedness of the persons using it.  (In one
monologue, Huck, finding himself in a quandary of either following his
betters' instructions and turning in his runaway slave friend, thereby
avoiding eternal damnation, and loyalty to that friend, thereby ensuring
that he'll go to hell, chooses the latter alternative.) To call Mark Twain
racist for writing about characters that say "nigger" is like condemning
Spielberg for making a film depicting Nazis' killing Jews.

>However, call me an unthinking follower of trendy correctness, but I do not
>believe that a song that refers unabashedly to "n-- serenaders and others
>of their race," suggesting that none of them will be missed, and goes on
>to refer to "lady novelists" in the same vein, is really a very effective
>Socratic gad-fly bite administered to "our smug contemporary social mores,"
>whatever those may be.

I suspect Gilbert's texts may not have reflected a state of mind comparable
to that of Mark Twain, but I'm not sure.  It is clear from many of his
texts that he liked to puncture bubbles of pomposity.  Not knowing more
about him, I still think it possible that by impugning the above attitudes
(alas not totally unknown in Victorian England) to a sort of buffoon from
an exotic land, he was holding up a mirror to his own society reminding
them that they were not really so very different from what they were
laughing at.

Walter Meyer