ABOVE:Nordlinger demonstrates a pas de poisson, saut de
chat, pirouette, battement tendu, and a tours en l’air.”
Jay Nerdlinger, the nelliest Cornerite, leads a difficult life in Upper Manhattan. It’s not just difficult for Jay to pretend to be butch at all those NRO staff meetings even though he’s a bachelor music critic in his forties. Even more difficult for him is finding what he calls a “safe zone.” Now what he means by a “safe zone” is not what you and I and most other people would call a “safe zone.” Jay doesn’t mean a place where Chinese restaurants don’t shove hundreds of menus under your apartment door on a nightly basis. Nor is a “safe zone” a place where your car won’t get broken into.
No, Jay’s idea of a “safe zone” is a place where there are no liberals or, alternatively, where there are some liberals but only ones that have their lips glued together with some permanent adhesive that renders them unable to talk and, therefore, unable to disturb Jay’s equanimity by expressing a liberal opinion in his presence.
You may remember that, last winter, I went on and on about “safe zones” — zones free of politics. I was concentrating on concert halls, where anti-Bush and pro-Obama comments were being made all the time. I mean, from the stage. Concert halls were some of the least safe zones in America — at least as I experienced them, here in New York.
If concert halls for classical music have more liberals opening their mouths then, say, Planned Parenthood Clinics, ACLU meetings, Ivy League campuses, or Upper West Side cocktail parties, then there must be some serious shit going down at Lincoln Center I suppose that now they’ve renamed Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony (“The Pathetique“) to Tchaikovsky’s “George Bush is Pathetic” Symphony. The Met must be doing “The Gay Marriage of Figaro.” Sopranos in Alice Tully Hall are apparently singing Schubert lieder to words taken from Obama’s speeches.
Er, not so much:
Anyway, I have another “safe zone” note. … For their summer concerts, the New York Philharmonic has a conductor named Bramwell Tovey. British. Debonair. Charming. Does a lot of talking from the stage. … Tovey always presides over the Fourth of July concert. … This year — last week — he made an anti-Bush, pro-Obama comment. He did this by implication, but his meaning was unmistakably clear. Naturally, the audience cheered, and so did some members of the orchestra. …
So, what did Tovey say, exactly?
You might want to be sitting down before reading the actual quote, because, even to a flaming homoliberalfascist and proto-Marxist Maoist supporter of universal health care such as myself, it is probably the most scandalous calumny ever uttered against Bush from a concert podium or from anywhere else for that matter.
He said that, with Obama in office, Anglo-American relations are going swimmingly, and “we are very pleased.”
Jay has truly gone round the bend when a positive remark about Obama is, by implication, a vile slur against Bush. I suppose by implication its also a vile slur against Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and every other former President, including George Washington, FDR and Millard Fillmore.
Don’t be surprised if we later learn that Nerdlinger has been writing to Mayor Bloomberg to complain about the unwarranted political slander that the stop sign at the end of Nerdlinger’s block is heaping on former President Bush, not to mention the unnecessary pro-Obama bias of the round, O-shaped wheels on city-owned vehicles.
