This has been coming up lately in my conversations and as we approach concert season I figure its appropriate to discuss the high and everlasting value of music.
Music has always played a lead role in my life, as it does for many if not most people I’m sure. I don’t work in the music industry, I can’t play any instruments andI don’t have a very good voice, but I love to listen. Music can transport you – to a favorite memory, to an idyllic future. It can comfort you, energize you, set the mood, inspire you. As such I would consider music my favorite art medium.
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. It tells man, in effect, which aspects of his experience are to be regarded as essential, significant, important.
— Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition” The Romantic Manifesto, p. 45.
In that spirit I want to recognize some artists here.
This is taken from a series of articles by Thomas Sowell which was published at Real Clear Politics and Capitalism Magazine and potentially other publications as well. I have excerpts from the articles here. This is particularly alarming to me because it demonstrates the chess like strategizing of this administration to put in place key characters and policies that will have lasting detrimental effects on the very fundamental values of American freedom. I encourage you follow up and read the articles in their entirety.
Justice David Souter’s retirement from the Supreme Court presents President Barack Obama with his first opportunity to appoint someone to the High Court. People who are speculating about whether the next nominee will be a woman, a Hispanic or whatever, are missing the point.
That we are discussing the next Supreme Court justice in terms of group “representation” is a sign of how far we have already strayed from the purpose of law and the weighty responsibility of appointing someone to sit for life on the highest court in the land.
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We would have entered a strange new world, where everybody is equal but some are more equal than others. The very idea of the rule of law would become meaningless when it is replaced by the empathies of judges.
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The biggest danger in appointing the wrong people to the Supreme Court is not just in how they might vote on some particular issues– whether private property, abortion or whatever. The biggest danger is that they will undermine or destroy the very concept of the rule of law– what has been called “a government of laws and not of men.”
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While President Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying that he wants judges with “empathy” for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal — getting judges who will ratify an ever-expanding scope of the power of the federal government and an ever-declining restraint by the Constitution of the United States.
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This is consistent with everything else that Obama has done in office and is consistent with his decades-long track record of alliances with people who reject the fundamentals of American society.
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Barack Obama’s vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.
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The only thing on the side of those who understand this, and who oppose it, is time. Reshaping the Supreme Court cannot be done overnight, the way Congress passed a vast spending bill in two days.
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Since Justice David Souter is likely to be replaced by another liberal, it is all too easy to say that it is no big deal. But with all the indications already as to how the Obama administration is trying to remake America on many fronts, the time to begin alerting the public to the dangers is now.