Wagner’s Fans

I suppose I should not have been surprised when I read last week at The Sunday Times that our assiduous cultivator of his own subversive image, David Bullard, is a Richard Wagner’s fan (http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=552418) . After all the tone and context of his column, Out To Lunch, does read like he’s someone infected with embourgeoisement and Deutschtum [the German guiding idea of regenerating the human race], so disgustingly exploited by the Nazis. Thus Mr. Bullard is in the invidious company of Adolf Hitler who too was a Wagner fanatic.

I do not want to labour the similarities, or coincidences, of Mr. Bullard’s attendance of Wagnerian festival—of all the festivals to attend—but I’m using the same logic he uses in his satirical provocation that parodied South African politics to Wagnerian music. So if bright scorn is good for the gender it is good for the goose. In fact let’s do more than just follow Mr. Bullard let’s go into the attitudinising behind the topes and motes of his sarcastic grouchiness using the Wagnerian music he chose.

How and what Mr. Bullard writes in his column is not knew. Through out history imperialistic consciousness has needed and utilised culture to justify its hegemonic claim. From that has always been a small step for it to prattle in self-regarding aggressive mentality. Imperialist consciousness despises contamination to its own cultural ideal, and calls foreign influences vulgar to justify its racist and ethnic elitism.

What Mr. Bullard conveniently forgets to mention in his ominous piece, . . . are pompous and bombastic tendencies of Wagner’s music—just the thought of listening to Lohegrin makes my blood churn—perhaps because there are disturbing similarities to his writing style and Wagner’s stage theatrics, and pretensions to culture.

Thomas Mann was one writer who had a clear love hate relation to Wanger’s music. He defined it better when he equated it to a delighting adrenalin surge, holding the promise of flight and freedom. But he also warned that Wagner’s music has deathly powers of seduction; and when played, more often than not paralyzes the will. Perhaps frau Bullhard should make note too because Wagner’s music has been linked with impotence also, something the Nazi were very susceptible to.

Mr. Bullard in his comparison of The Rhinegold to South African politics; where the family of gods taking possession of a castle in Valhalla, and the Buddenbrooks occupy the house in Mengstrasse in Lübeck, is in his iconoclastic best. He forgot to add that conflicts ensue when the giants demand reimbursement for their construction work, and the Gotthold Buddenbrook seek payment for services rendered. Perhaps because this would have compelled him to mention that Gold and Geld [German for money] are at the heart of the story.

Some tend to read The Rhinegold as the demand by the ‘uncultured’ for their due; seeing that the proud ‘culture’ the Bildungsbürgertum (cultivated middle class) preen about is mostly built by the blood sweat of servile poor. But that cuts too close for the denunciatory embourgeoisement tendencies of Mr. Bullard.

Nazism has taught us, if anything, that there’s a fatal connection between conscious elitism of culture with subtle racism. Once it achieves power its outlets run tragically amok. Nazism used the dominant Wagnerian culture as a gateway into the educated bourgeois classes.

In South Africa, racial laagers use the competent articulating contempt of Mr. Bullard that prattles as integrity for similar tendencies. His column has ingratiated itself to the subtle prejudiced minds. In a country like ours, where rats are returning with steaming fetors of ideas of Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene], it would be ideal for columnists to medicine manners instead of adding force of cultural pretensions to racial illusions. Culture is never maintained in political vacuum.

Irony is the modern mode of commenting on frivolity and bleakness of our lives without falling into dourness and didactism. But sensitive balance has to be kept since our past is still a bruising place. That’s the lesson Mr. Bullard still needs to learn. Our future will also be coloured and refracted by our present cultural assumptions and attitudinising. And despite what the chattering class believes, the winner of the propaganda battle does not get to mold society, reality always gets the last laugh.

The skunk and skelter is pilling in at the rucks as our ruling party goes to Polokwane to nominate our next leader. Debate is vigorous and very healthy within our media, a wonderful thing one hopes the ruling party would adopt at the Polokwane National Conference. But freedom comes with respective responsibilities. And responsibility does not necessary mean dour dullness and lapsing into bien pensant clichés.