Public Enemy
I WRITE to set the record straight regarding classical music on public radio (Andrew Ferguson’s “Radio Silence,” June 14).
Contrary to the article’s skewed view, public radio is the most vibrant presenter of classical music, and other forms of cultural expression, on the nation’s airwaves. The nonprofit public radio community, including NPR stations and independent producers, brings a wide selection of classical music to millions of listeners weekly. Most is produced by local stations, complemented by national programs like NPR’s World of Opera, Symphonycast, and Performance Today, with the latter the most listened-to classical program in America. In hundreds of communities, local stations partner with cultural organizations to promote the arts, broadcast performances live, or record them for later use.
NPR was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2000–the only broadcast organization ever to receive it–for 30 years of exemplary cultural programming. The award reflected our community’s devotion to cultural expression–including classical music.
Among the 773 public radio stations in the NPR system, classical music is the most common format. Arbitron research shows that classical music has a larger audience than local news/talk programs.
Overall, audiences to NPR and member stations have skyrocketed in the past decade, from 14.7 million to 29.3 million weekly listeners. They are drawn to public radio’s award-winning excellence in fact-based local and national journalism, and our rich diversity of cultural presentations–including classical music.
Kevin Klose
President and CEO, NPR
Washington, DC
IN “RADIO SILENCE,” Andrew Ferguson wrongly cites Boston as one of the larger markets that “suddenly finds itself, for the first time in 50 years, without a public radio station that plays classical music.”
WGBH 89.7 in Boston presented its inaugural live broadcast of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in October 1951, and more than 50 years later we are still dedicated to presenting these performances on our air. Over 50 hours of our schedule is devoted to classical music each week. It is worth noting that we continually invite both local and national artists and ensembles to perform live in our studio. Many of these performances–from the New England String Ensemble to Yo-Yo Ma–are archived online and are accessible 24/7 at www.wgbh.org, enabling us to offer our classical service beyond the Boston area.
WGBH also collaborates with NPR to bring a number of our remote recordings of concerts throughout the region for broadcast to a national audience. We are active participants in New England’s vibrant music community and take great pride in being Boston’s NPR arts and culture station.
Marita Rivero
General Manager, WGBH Radio
Boston, MA
Mart Talk
IN HIS ESSAY on the struggle between Vermont and Wal-Mart (“Stone Walls and Wal-Mart,” June 14), Geoffrey Norman touches upon an issue long neglected by conservatives: sprawl.
As Norman points out, many people simply see sprawl as the consequence of market forces, the result of the natural process of Schumpeterian “creative destruction.” Certainly it is important to defend these market forces. But it is equally important to examine, in Norman’s words, “what’s being destroyed and what is being created.” To refuse to consider the social context in which markets occur is to be just as blindly ideological as the utopian left.
In contrast to nearly all other recent conservative commentary on Vermont, Norman’s piece was respectful of local concerns, as well as thought-provoking. We can only hope that it will stimulate further debate on the subject of sprawl–and a reconsideration of Wal-Mart’s plans for seven big-box stores across our hills.
Alvino-Mario Fantini
Dummerston, VT
Dutch Treat
IN “GOING DUTCH?” (May 31) Stanley Kurtz shows that he does not understand the Netherlands.
First, Kurtz misrepresents the relationship between legal recognition of gay couples and out-of-wedlock births. As Kurtz’s own chart shows, the rate of increase in illegitimate births accelerated in 1993, and that rate of increase has held steady ever since. Legal recognition of gay relationships came in 1997. Widespread public acceptance of gay marriage has only happened in the last few years. The recent increase in illegitimate births preceded by several years both legal recognition and public acceptance of gay marriage. It ought not require explaining to a fellow of the Hoover Institution that effects cannot precede their causes.
Kurtz makes two additional errors in his analysis of Dutch history and society. First, he dates the breakdown of the “Three Pillars” of Dutch society–Catholicism, Protestantism, and socialism–to the social turmoil of the 1960s. Any Dutchman will tell you that the Three Pillars model of politics never recovered from the German occupation of World War II. During that period, most Dutch institutions were revealed to be defeatist, collaborationist, or impotent. Only the monarchy and the trade unions survived the occupation with their reputations intact. As a result, postwar Dutch politics has been characterized by the “Polder model” of pragmatic consensus-building rather than by the ideological jostling of the Three Pillars.
More fundamentally, Kurtz’s argument rests on the notion that the Netherlands is a nation of ideas. Because arguments for gay marriage are based on the idea of the equality of relationships, Kurtz would have us believe, implementing the policy meant accepting the idea.
This might be true in the United States, which is a nation of ideas with a vigorous political life. But the Netherlands is not the United States. Approach any American and call the president a no-good scoundrel and you will probably provoke a passionate response one way or the other. Even Americans who do not vote tend to hold strong opinions about politics, and most Americans are happy to talk at length about those opinions. But approach any Nederlander and call the prime minister a no-good scoundrel and you will probably provoke a shrug and a polite comment about the weather or cheese.
In fact, Dutch acceptance of gay marriage has not been based on an ideological revolution. The Netherlands has not been thinking deeply about the meaning of marriage or the philosophical bases for legally recognizing some relationships but not others. Discrimination against gay couples did not seem to be accomplishing anything worthwhile, and legal discrimination of any sort (unless it is against those who favor discrimination) does not strike the Dutch conscience as a decent thing for government to do.
This is the real paradox of Dutch society that Americans, myself and Kurtz apparently included, find most difficult to understand. Small-“c” conservative values dominate Dutch culture, as they do American culture. But whereas Americans prefer to ban practices that violate community standards, the Dutch prefer to regulate such behaviors. In America, to make something legal is to express the community’s approval of the thing. Not so in the Netherlands, where much is allowed that is not accepted.
R. Scott Rogers
Amsterdam
STANLEY KURTZ RESPONDS: R. Scott Rogers is wrong about the rising Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate. The rate went up only one percentage point in 1993, 1994, and 1996. The steady increase of two percentage points a year didn’t begin until 1997. In any case, the jump of two percentage points in 1995 occurred as the five-year-old campaign for gay marriage was gaining ground. Polls taken in 1995 showed strong public support for gay marriage. Those polls are what got national politicians to shed their caution and move forward with legislation. So acceptance of gay marriage by the Dutch public was growing at the very time the out-of-wedlock birthrate began to rise more rapidly. Opinion on this issue is changed by public debate, not by legislation alone.
Rogers claims the Dutch are too pragmatic to be affected by public debate. It’s true that changes in Dutch law don’t necessarily signal changes in fundamental outlook. I made that point myself. When the Dutch legally equalized marriage and cohabitation in the 1980s, they did not embrace radical theories of marriage. Yet that fact itself rests on the power of cultural tradition for the Dutch. Given the legal demotion of marriage in the 1980s, and given high Dutch premarital cohabitation rates, scholars agreed that it was only the power of tradition that made the Dutch continue to marry before having children. Sometime in the mid-1990s, that equation began to change.
What changed it? The answer is that the campaign for gay marriage forced the Dutch to draw the radical conclusions of the legislative decisions they had so pragmatically made in the 1980s. A major nationwide campaign for gay marriage, involving all media, centering around symbolic weddings in scores of municipalities, and stirring up debates in legislatures and opinion pages, worked a transformation in public perceptions of marriage that the liberalization of cohabitation law in the 1980s could not. That is why Dutch parents finally shed their traditionalism and began to cohabit in ever-increasing numbers. Merely “pragmatic” accommodation can’t go on forever without consequences. In the end, Holland’s acquiescence in one radical experiment after another took a toll on its social fabric.
There are the usual rationalizations for parental cohabitation. The children are born to parents who live together, and the parents often marry eventually anyway. But the problem with this is that cohabiting parents break up at two to three times the rate of married parents. That’s hardly surprising, since these parents are effectively treating the birth of their first child as a test of their relationship. And Scandinavia shows that once this process begins, it doesn’t stop. In Norway cohabiting parents used to marry before the birth of the second child (if they didn’t break up first). Now cohabiting Norwegian parents are as likely to have two children as one. Once the connection between marriage and parenthood becomes optional, the institution is set up for slow decline, and eventual collapse.
State of War
I AGREE WITH EACH of the steps listed in William Kristol’s “Of Mice and Men” (May 24). And I’d like to add one more: President Bush has to correct the widely held belief that the United States is now performing a peacekeeping operation in Iraq. The implication of this belief is that the war in Iraq is basically over. Yes, there are factions and unruly elements in Iraq that we have to police and keep apart, but there are also thousands of our sworn enemies there whom we still have to engage and destroy. That isn’t peacekeeping. It’s war.
Max Davies
Celebration, FL
