Bravo! Mozart
Bravo! Mozart "Posterity will not see such a talent for a century 'to come." So said Josef Haydn, shortly after Mozart's death at age 35 in 1791. Haydn might safely have said posterity would not...
...Most people like to have these elements carefully separated into different works of art so that they may feel safe...
...Most of the people in Congress don't want these reforms...
...And it skirts the real issue...
...It's not just so-called earmarks that lead to trouble...
...Barack Obama of Illinois, elected in 2004 and touted as an instant statesman...
...More broadly, it's the fact that Congress spends so much, and often in deceptive ways that go beyond earmarks, that makes Capitol Hill a rich target for lobbyists...
...And no one can complain that Mozart's 250th birthday is going unnoticed, or that his legacy isn't being treated with appropriate respect...
...Legislation proposed by Republican Reps...
...For a perfect example of the Democratic response, listen to Sen...
...And he was aware that the leading nihilists of our age, the Nazi regime in Germany, tried to make a big production of the 150th anniversary of Mozart's death...
...Haydn might safely have said posterity would not see such a talent for two centuries to come—and counting...
...In all likelihood, Congress will take the cosmetic approach, with a few innocuous reforms of lobbying...
...Congress is noisily responding to the wrong scandal...
...The solution...
...Not just fresher, but more interesting...
...He merely—like the Creator of nature—gave them individual life, and in his works his music, like the rain and the sunshine, falls alike on the just and the unjust...
...For Republicans, said Obama, "instead of meeting with lobbyists, it's time to start meeting with some of the 45 million Americans with no health care...
...Often when earmarks are "exposed to the light of day, no one steps forward to take credit," he says...
...Mozart provides no such comfort or escape...
...He does inspire, as Aaron Copland said, "a certain awe and wonder...
...Mozart's music transcends all the obvious categories...
...Appropriators are scared to death...
...He was too understanding and too profound (though active) a fatalist to be a partisan...
...You'd think it would make people feel better—you look up at someone's achievement and think, gee, the human condition isn't as hopeless as I suspected...
...Republican Rep...
...But these incidents alone don't touch on the real source of corruption...
...Based on what we know now, disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff is chiefly to blame for fleecing Indian tribes...
...Lobbyists will always be with us...
...The sheer complexity and opaqueness of the budget made it easy to do so...
...Talent that becomes greatness is another...
...And it can be, in a way, depressing...
...Members freshly elected and not firmly entrenched in their seats tend to be the most attuned to their states or districts and thus the most impervious to the blandishments of lobbyists...
...Republicans hope to avert being tarred by the Abramoff scandal, and Democrats aim to use the scandal for partisan gain...
...This time it's worse...
...One may thus laugh or weep to the full, knowing in one's heart that life is not quite like this...
...Mozart is light and grave, pretty and profound, masculine and feminine, comic and tragic—often all in the same work...
...Mozart took so very much for granted which lesser minds argue about," said W.J...
...There have been others...
...This case exposed the incentives to corruption produced by the spending and budget practices of Congress...
...Republican Rep...
...Does Bloom here run the risk of trying to make Mozart's music edifying...
...The current process allows members of Congress to insert earmarks anonymously...
...Instead of hitting up the big firms on K Street, it's time to start visiting with workers on Main Street who are wondering how they'll send their kids to college or whether their pension will still be around when they retire...
...This is another way of exposing spending abuses...
...True, there are legitimate emergencies, such as Hurricane Katrina...
...The English critic W.J...
...Mozart's greatness is far more widely, and intelligently, appreciated today than it was 100 years ago, or even 50...
...Lobbyists, for all their selfish intentions and dubious methods, aren't the problem...
...Turner observes: "What puzzles the average person is just this strange blend of the tragic and the comic...
...Earmarks, which Republicans have shamelessly expanded, should be outlawed entirely or, at a minimum, bear an actual "earmark" to identify the expenditure with the legislator who's inserting it...
...Jeff Flake of Arizona, a fearless critic of earmarks, says that restrictions on lobbyists amount to "peripheral reform at best...
...Mozart has little use for either...
...Fred Barnes...
...This is an extreme measure, but there's a strong rationale for it if one really desires to reduce the influence of lobbyists...
...So what's needed isn't lobbying reform, which deals merely with the symptom...
...Mike Pence says the budget process has "led to excessive spending and outright corruption...
...Of course, budget and spending reforms have been proposed for years and have gotten nowhere...
...And yet, because of his greatness, Mozart cannot help but be edifying...
...But we have far more reason to be grateful than to despair...
...By attaching a name, "you would create greater transparency and greater accountability overnight...
...Term limits would short-circuit this...
...Democrats want to establish a new office of public integrity to examine disclosure statements by lobbyists for possible violations...
...But when the N^-w Yo^k Times weighed in a few days ago with a silly, pseudo-ironic debunking of anticipated excesses in this year of celebrating Mozart, I was reminded of how much trouble we have with human greatness...
...Allan Bloom believed that listening to Mozart was as close to the "experience of the beautiful" as he ever encountered in his life...
...The case that does involves Republican Rep...
...And always have had...
...Turner...
...No, not the one to bar Senate filibusters of judicial nominations...
...Not true...
...For a price, Cunningham would slip spending measures into appropriations bills with practically no one's noticing...
...Bloom notes Mozart's "capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible...
...There's no requirement the spending be attributed to anyone," says Pence...
...And while a prohibition on congressional travel paid for by private groups is a good idea, it's not a meaningful curb on potential corruption in Congress...
...Barring them from taking members of Congress or staffers to lunch won't fundamentally alter the relationship between lobbyists and legislators...
...The Marriage of Figaro is a comic opera, but like many of Shakespeare's comedies, it's a short step from tragedy...
...it is neither so comic nor tragic...
...Don Giovanni pretends to be a moralizing tragedy, Cosi fan Tutte a demoralizing comedy—^but both are like Shakespeare's "problem plays," neither clearly comic nor tragic...
...And he adds, "As Rossini recognized, no composer was witty as Mozart...
...They are prepared to look upon life as either a comedy or a tragedy, since in such a presentation life is made a little less real and provides a form of escape, a convention or refuge...
...We first have to look at our own conduct...
...Duke Cunningham of California, who resigned from Congress after admitting taking bribes...
...But it didn't quite work...
...Of course he knew that great music does not necessarily make its listeners better human beings...
...Force Congress to take up proposed recissions on an expedited basis...
...After years in office, they often become "Washing-tonized" and pals with lobbyists...
...Nor will a ban on gifts to members or their aides...
...The conventional wisdom in Washington—self-serving as usual—is that term limits would lead to a Congress dominated by lobbyists with extraordinary influence over callow legislators...
...And when things feel stale, you can listen to Mozart, and see what moved Robert Schumann to ask: "Does it not seem as if Mozart's works become fresher and fresher the oftener we hear them...
...This seems particularly clear in the great operas written in collaboration with Lorenzo da Ponte...
...By this I don't mean that he wrote amazing works in every genre—operas, symphonies, piano and other concerti, chamber music, sonatas, and so on—but that he transcends the usual moods...
...Then there's the nuclear option...
...The current drive for lobbying reform is purely cosmetic...
...One that comes to mind is the frantic effort several decades ago to stop the National Football League from blacking out home games on local television (unless stadium tickets have already sold out...
...Members of Congress and the way they spend taxpayers' money are...
...Ryan explains why: "We have a revenue and taxing machine that Democrats built in 1974, and [Republicans] have only built on top of it...
...The process is called "recis-sion," but it doesn't work because Congress usually ignores the president's requests...
...William Kristol Fix Congress, Not the Lobbyists This is one of those moments when you realize Congress is not an altogether serious body...
...Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Jeb Hensarling of Texas would carefully define emergencies as "sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and temporary" and limit spending to those cases...
...As things now stand, the president has the authority to pluck spending measures from the budget and ask Congress to revoke them...
...Yes, he financed a golfing excursion to Scotland by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and may have prompted wrongdoing by Republican Rep...
...Bob Ney of Ohio...
...I'm referring to term limits: three terms for House members, two for senators...
...Turner wrote Mozart: The Man and His Works in 1938...
...Congress then regularly exceeds the budget limit set in the resolution with impunity...
...Another current abuse is "emergency" spending...
...At the top of the list of reforms is the transformation of the congressional budget resolution into a legally binding document, signed by the president...
...Mozart resists political appropriation...
...What's needed is congressional reform...
...This is flyspecking...
...For Bloom, Mozart's music was "an antidote to all the seductions of nihilism present in our world...
...Charles Gounod said, "Before Mozart, all my ambition turns to despair...
...Much of it has been overtaken by subsequent scholarship, but it remains full of insights: "The truth is that we mediocre men cannot even imagine what it is to be a great man like Mozart and Shakespeare and thus to be free from the domination of the contemporary prejudices, beliefs, morals, artistic rules, scruples (call them what you will) with which even the most enlightened of us are—often unconsciously—obsessed...
...Those are not the words of a serious man...
...But talent is one thing...
...He never turned his works of art into judgments...
...Now it's merely advisory, yet it gives the public the impression that Congress is holding down spending...
...Real greatness causes discomfort...
...But emergency bills are regularly larded with routine expenditures not related to any emergency...
...But greatness is nervous-making...
...We're short on awe and wonder these days, long on cheap cynicism and solemn sanctimony...
...Some members of Congress have known this for a long time...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 19
