In recognition of Richard Wagner’s birthday, (born May 22nd, 195 years ago) Wagnerians will appreciate forthcoming releases this year of more rare Ring recordings. Coming off the widely acclaimed historic first stereo recording of the complete Ring cycle at the 1955 Bayreuth under conductor Joseph Keilberth, the Testament label will release two more complementary recordings—performances of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung—from 1955 (same year but different performances of these operas from the Ring cycle).

Keilberth’s 1955 Bayreuth Ring (Testament SBT141412), according to music critics, ranks as one of the all-time great recordings. Michael Kennedy, writing in London’s Sunday Telegraph, lists Keilberth’s Ring in his choice of 100 essential classical recordings. A team of Decca sound engineers recorded the live Bayreuth performances but they remained unavailable until Testament issued the remastered recordings.  The New York Times accurately describes the sound quality of Keilberth’s Flying Dutchman, also recorded during the summer of 1955 and released by Testament in 2006, as having “body, richness, and detail.”

Testament has just released the full Ring cycle under the baton of Rudolf Kempe from 1957 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The fully remastered recording of the complete cycle will feature Birgit Nilsson, Hans Hotter and Wolfgang Windgassen along side a stellar cast in what is considered to be an outstanding performance of Wagner’s Ring.

As the allmusic.com website notes, Kempe, an accomplished conductor, is “One of the great unsung conductors of the middle twentieth century, Rudolf Kempe enjoyed a strong reputation in England but never quite achieved the international acclaim that he might have had with more aggressive management, promotion, and recording. Not well enough known to be a celebrity but too widely respected to count as a cult figure, Kempe is perhaps best remembered as a connoisseur’s conductor, one valued for his strong creative temperament rather than for any personal mystique.”

2008 is shaping up as a promising year for Wagnerites.

The old saying: “What goes around comes around” applies to the latest turn of events in presidential politics.

During the recent debate in Philadelphia between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Obama downplayed the fact that he had affiliations with 60s radical Bill Ayers, [email him] a former leader of the Weather Underground. Obama dismissed a question about his connections to the ex-fugitive by describing Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” [Transcript] Questions about Obama’s association with Ayers had surfaced in recent months on various blogs.

Obama not only served along side Ayers as a director of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based anti-poverty organization, but according to the Chicago Sun-Times, “In the mid-1990s, Ayers and Dohrn hosted a meet-and-greet at their house to introduce Obama to their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois Senate. In 2001, Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s campaign.”

The Chicago Sun-Times also notes that a “book Ayers penned about those years, Fugitive Days, landed him in hot water on Sept. 11, 2001. That morning, the New York Times ran a story about the book in which Ayers said, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.’ Ayers’ statement was made before the World Trade Center attacks, but its timing led some to believe it was in response.”

Although the latest media coverage of Ayers contains a critical edge, much of this reportage puts the past in a nostalgic context and emphasizes how Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, [email her] also a former Weather Underground fugitive, have transformed themselves into establishment figures and are now “distinguished professors” at the University of Illinois in Chicago and Northwestern University.

Dohrn once praised the Charles Manson massacres of 1969 in which actress Sharon Tate and others were brutally butchered to death. During a 1969 speech to the “War Council” in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn made her controversial remarks regarding the Manson Family murders: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”

The 2003 Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, a candid retrospective of former Weather Underground leaders reminiscing about their militant past, begins with Dorhn speaking before a press conference in the early 1970s: “Hello, I’m going to read a declaration of a state of war…within the next 14 days we will attack a symbol or institution of American injustice.”

The headline in today’s Washington Post: “Former 60s Radical Is Now Considered Mainstream in Chicago” confirms that ex-60s fugitives, contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s proclamation that there are “no second acts in American lives,” often re-establish themselves as distinguished and productive members of American society. As long as the cause is fighting “social injustice,” “racism,” and “inequality” then the spin on some ex-fugitive’s militant past will be excused as one bad acid trip or some other youthful indiscretion. Imagine the New York Times or Washington Post describing some anti-government militants on the Far Right in comparable terms.

The irony of recent attempts by the Southern Poverty Law Center to discredit Professor Kevin MacDonald, a tenured professor of psychology at California State at Long Beach, and undermine his continued employment with the university is that Teaching Tolerance magazine, a project of the SPLC, published a glowing interview with Bill Ayers in their Spring 1998 issue.[An Unconditional Embrace]

Although mentioned as an “education activist,” nowhere in the interview is Ayers’ background adequately described. The introduction describes him in the following endearing terms: “Throughout his career as a civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author, Ayers has developed a rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection.” Just how “self-reflecting” Mr. Ayers is was disclosed in the above mentioned New York Times interview of September 11, 2001 in which he showed no regrets for dynamiting government buildings.

The bottom-line is that for unrepentant 60s militants with a violent, fugitive past rehabilitation into society is a likely outcome, but for scholars who are branded as Far Right reactionaries simply exercising one’s free speech and association carries the unprecedented risks of job loss, career annihilation, and total social ostracism by one’s colleagues, family, and friends.

Nothing like living freely in a “free society”—culturally dominated by the Left.

As another commemorative date rolls around on the nation’s civil rights calendar—the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death—the Fourth Estate pushes the expected monotonous tales of injustice, disparity, and oppression through a distorted retrospective lens.

In terms of race relations, the nation’s media elite predictably views full “equality” as an unmet goal. Lost in all the spilled ink on King and the Kerner Commission report is the lack of honesty and candor in thoroughly assessing the nation’s ongoing racial problems.

Just imagine the following taking place: In idle chatter around the water cooler at the Education Department,  John Jones, an upper echelon supervisor in the office that evaluates the No Child Left Behind initiative, raises the following point to his colleague Tom Smith as others are in earshot: “Well, Tom, I don’t think we can honestly evaluate the nation’s state of race relations without considering the impact of biological and cultural differences that exists between racial groups and what these differences may mean in terms of average mental ability and educational performance…” and then ask yourself: How long will Jack Jones remain in this position or even employed at the Education Department?

For whatever else one can say about the current state of our nation’s race relations, the Left has succeeded in creating a “PC-climate” in which any candid observation that suggests racial differences are more than just surface matters and transcend socio-economic factors is a risk not worth taking in public.

Are we really better off as a result?

Tuesday’s posting of James Kirchick’s New Republic screed on Ron Paul, titled “Angry White Man,” a detailed examination of the contents of years of back issues of the Ron Paul Political Report, is the culmination of “detective” work that we now know involved the use of the Wilcox Collection at the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society (extensive repositories of literature from the political fringes of the far right and radical left). The TNR posting, perhaps fact-checked by Stephen Glass, required no fewer than four corrections.

What does this tell us about the Fourth Estate? Basically, any candidate who seeks public office must get the seal of approval of the media elite. And in their estimation, scratch the surface of a genuine maverick and you’ll discover a racist, homophobic, anti-Semite.

Predictably, in the past few days, several news organizations have focused on TNR’s reportage. CNN, National Public Radio, UPI, and the Washington Post, have weighed in. The media elite’s threshold of acceptability: not doubting that Martin Luther King, Jr. was an upstanding public figure, or questioning racial egalitarianism, or remaining skeptical about Lincoln’s greatness, or failing to embrace homosexuality, or insufficiently denouncing The Bell Curve.

When Pat Buchanan was running as a presidential candidate, I recall a similar scorched-earth treatment at Newsweek , where I then worked. The director of Library Services in New York , Madeline Cohen, put together an extensive dossier (2 or 3 large three-ring binders) of Buchanan’s writings and public commentary for Newsweek’s Washington Bureau research staff. If Buchanan ever broke wind in public, she documented it. I remember my boss William Rafferty, who once was Ted Koppel’s principal researcher, talking about how Cohen went into overdrive compiling every little anecdote about Buchanan from trolling Nexis.

Recently, when Howard Fineman interviewed Paul for Newsweek - see video posted on the magazine’s website, it wasn’t long into the interview before Fineman popped the grand enchilada: Do you think the Jewish people are entitled to a homeland of their own in Palestine? When Fineman thought Paul’s answer insufficiently explained his position, he pressed him again.

On Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show, Kirchick described the exquisite paranoia with which the media elites operate:

“What he does, Tucker, is he speaks in code. He is a transmitter. He will say certain things that, you know, at first may not appear to be overtly racist, but to certain audiences they know what he is talking about. So when he talks about secession, he says it in a way that’s not exactly neo-Confederate or isn’t exactly explicitly neo-Confederate. But to people who are in the know and people who are a part of this [sic] neo-Confederate communities, they know exactly what he is talking about.”[Transcript, January 7, 2008]

Sure, we know who isn’t going to win the Republican nomination or the 2008 Presidential election. We also know why.

Where’s Dan Rather when you need him?

M. Stanton Evans’ long-awaited investigative work Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his Fight Against America’s Enemies debunks several popular falsehoods about McCarthy and the McCarthy era—myths which are routinely repeated by “progressive” ideologues, historians and journalists alike. Evans’ book is a must-read for anyone interested in pursuing the documented record about McCarthy, Soviet espionage, and communist infiltration during the Cold War era.

In the late 1990s, during the declassification of Venona-related documents from the Soviet archives, a steady stream of information revealed the extent of communist infiltration in the upper echelon of the U.S. government in the wake of the Second World War. I was a library assistant in Newsweek’s Washington bureau. A Newsweek correspondent once confided that a feature story with the working title “Was McCarthy Right?” was under consideration. But for reasons we may never know, Newsweek blinked. Wait for the magazine’s review of Evans’ book.

The Washington Post’s lead editorial today “Not Another Katrina” was intended to put out a potential brushfire that the newspaper touched off in yesterday’s front page coverage of the calm, orderly, and relatively peaceful scene surrounding the thousands of evacuees who have fled to Qualcomm stadium in San Diego from their fire ravaged homes, which stands in sharp contrast to the horrific scene of chaos, violence, and disorder at the Superdome two years ago following hurricane Katrina.

Of course the real concern is buried in today’s WP editorial: “Some will be tempted to attribute the quick action exclusively to race.”

The editorial goes on to note that San Diego County is predominantly white, therefore wealthier, while the population of New Orleans is largely black and poorer.

Yesterday’s WP coverage quoted San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, “This is a neighbor-helping-neighbor situation.”

Staff Sgt. Zell Evans, who spent 45 days in New Orleans after the 2005 hurricane noted the Qualcomm difference: “This is real different from Katrina.Here? There’s no fear, no pushing, no fighting. Everybody is calm. It’s just a completely different situation.”[In the Great State of Serenity, Staying Cool Amid the Flames By William Booth and Sonya Geis, October 24, 2007 ]

Dean Beavers, quoted by Cox News Service said, “I’m from New Orleans , and this place is completely different…. There’s a different culture here.”[Stadium like a resort vs. Superdome By Bob Keefe,October 24, 2007 ]

Could it just be that a major reason why chaos, violence, and raw sewage were prevalent conditions in the Superdome, and cots, blankets, yoga classes, Starbucks coffee, and neighborly cooperation dominated the scene at Qualcomm is due to differences of the evacuees, which are not just socioeconomic but also racial and behavioral in nature? Why is the human element in the press coverage of natural disasters so typical of other news items whereby race is never a relevant factor?