Category: Music

Californian John Adams, who Ed Driscoll of PJMedia.com calls the most famous and important classical composer in the world, premiered his new work Scheherazade.2, March 26, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in the heart of hip Manhattan.

Adams introduced his work saying he was motivated by an exhibition he saw in Paris concerning the legendary Islamic queen Scheherazade. If you don’t know the story, it concerns  an Islamic Persian king who upon marrying a new wife would behead the old one. He had gone through a thousand women by the time he got to Scheherazade.

Scheherazade, of  course, had a plan. Before her beheading, she asked to bid farewell to her sister.  The king consented and during her farewell she told the sister a story which the king overheard. She stopped in the middle as dawn was breaking and the king asked her to continue. She said should couldn’t as it was time for her beheading. The king postponed the execution for a day so she could finish it for him. She did the next night but started another which again stopped in the middle before dawn. So the king again postponed things and this went on for 1,001 nights and become the inspiration for Bugs Bunny cartoons and Walt Disney movies.

Anyway by the time the stories were finished, the king had fallen in love with Scheherazade and she lived happily ever after with a serial killer.

Adams said that after seeing the exhibit he read One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and was appalled by “casual brutality toward women” it depicted. During this time, he also began reading of the treatment of women in various third-world Islamic-influenced places such as Egypt and Afghanistan.

So he explained this to his audience at his work’s premier, and then for some bizarre reason felt obliged to add regarding the oppression of women: “find it on Rush Limbaugh.”

This sanctimonious twit compared Rush Limbaugh to people who kill girls because they had been raped and women because they had affairs.

There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with Limbaugh. There is nothing wrong with calling Rush a blowhard.  But bearing false witness is a big wrong and that’s what Adams did.

We seriously doubt that the has every listened to Limbaugh live and in any sort of context but is merely parroting the conventional wisdom of the his insular crowd.

What’s even sicker is the reaction of his crowd which gave a long round of applause to the slander.

In 2009, Limbaugh was part of a group that was attempting to buy the St. Louis Rams football team. The old media reported that he said on his radio show that James Earl Ray deserved a medal for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and that slavery was beneficial. The quotes were fabricated but still placed in his Wikipedia biography as fact. Those who know of the scrutiny Limbaugh faces  for every word he utters — which one would reasonably think is everyone in professional journalism — would reject the quotes out of hand. Yet they were reported as true and hence ended his chance at becoming a team owner.

All decent people have a responsibility to defend those being slandered not just if but especially if they disagree with them. Further, all intelligent people should be suspicious of those who use slander to further a political cause.

What Adams and his crowd did was shameful.

For what it’s worth,  Wiki, in the latest editing of Rush’s bio, does not even mention the Rams incident.

For those interested in a first-hand take, Rush can be heard in the Philadelphia area from noon to 3 p.m. on WPHT 1210 AM or on the web here.

Below is Adams introduction to  Scheherazade.2

Je Suis Rush Limbaugh