The Politically Incorrect Show - 24/11/2000

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Friday November 24, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down!]

It's Friday again - already! - so I want as usual to try to end the week on an inspirational note, to spend a few minutes away from the bossyboots & busybodies & contemplate the spectacle of mankind at his best. Guest of honour today is Beethoven, specifically his Ninth Symphony, as written about so eloquently by the designer of my Free Radical web site, David Adams. The full article can be found on the site: www.freeradical.co.nz Here's its conclusion:

"The finale starts with the famous recapitulation of the first three movements. The double-basses, in ingenious mimicry of a human voice, interrupt each theme with notes anticipating the first words sung: 'O friends, not these tones.' Beethoven casts aside the dissonance and irresolution that has come before. There is another theme. We have arrived. It comes quietly from the double basses, a first light of resplendent dawn. Then it is in the strings, bursting to prismatic counterpoint, before the whole orchestra, and finally the chorus, take up the song.

"Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuer-trunken
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

"Joy, thou source of light immortal,
Daughter of Elysium,
Touched with fire, to the portal
Of thy radiant shrine we come.

"Friedrich Schiller truly intended to write not freude, but freiheit. It was to be an ode to freedom. But Beethoven and Schiller knew the dangers of challenging the state; in the early nineteenth century, "freedom" too much smacked of revolution. What we have instead is as true to the original intention as it is to exalted joy, and Beethoven surely saw the connection between the two. He spent his life at odds with any type of mediocre man, and to the aristocracy Beethoven gave his full contempt, seeing them as a class of pandering poseurs. Beethoven's early support of Napoleon, who initially inspired his Eroica symphony, was due to what Beethoven saw as Napoleon's republican ideals. When the composer realized that Napoleon was fighting not for individual freedom, but for empire, Beethoven tore the dedication from the symphony's score. Just as he despised the parasites among men, so Beethoven saw glory in the man who stood alone. Each of his works expresses this passion, but the Ninth is the summit. It is his ode to Man.

"I will not describe the final moments. It is a thing of music, ill-contained in words. And it is not a thing to beg of further comment; it is complete. Its power threw the composers after him into long paralysis, their pens silent. It has pressed heartless men to tears. Like the skyscrapers that reconfigure horizons, the landscape still reverberates with this unrepentant, elated song, and we are greater for it.

"When you face the unfocused eyes of sneering youth, or read of bodies crushed beneath the myths of elected men; when you feel the sharp pinch of despair, wishing the night a little warmer; it is enough to know the Ninth exists. For if a man has walked tall enough to see such notes as this, there is no end of hope - for we are human, and here is human glory."

(Play Tk 6, 12' 22'' to end)

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