You may (or may not) have heard about the blowup this week in Toronto about the cancellation by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra of a guest appearance by pianist Valentina Lisitsa this week, because of various offensive Tweets that she's posted over time. It's an extremely complicated story that's gotten a lot of press in Toronto, as you can imagine, complicated by the fact that Lisitsa has a huge following via her YT videos and her Twitter account. I don't claim to know all the nuances about how the TSO (mis-)handled the situation, but the TSO has gotten a major black-eye, in particular the orchestra's CEO, Jeff Melanson. This incident also reminded me of something recently in the The Guardian about the leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, and how he spun a recent weekend incident and anti-Ukip protest into something a lot more sinister than it actually was. In short, bigots in both stories played their 'opponents' for fools. More below the flip....
In chronological order, the "Farage fracas", as Stuart Jeffries described in here in The Guardian, the plan was as follows:
"About 70 people are gathering here before heading off to Nigel Farage’s local pub in Kent – to stage a Beyond Ukip cabaret."
On the actual day itself, here's the key incident in terms of how things "backfired" later, after the cabaret folks realized that Farage was at another pub:
"Before I can join the activists who rush into the Queen’s Head, Farage, looking angry and pin-striped, walks quickly from the pub into a waiting car driven, reportedly, by his wife.
The event, which up to this moment had been good-humoured and non-threatening, becomes, just for a moment, something else. Two or three activists bounce on the bonnet of the car. Others surround it, shouting teasingly at Farage."
No one was injured, no property damaged, none of that. But read later to Jeffries' account as to how Farage and Ukip spun this incident:
"Later that afternoon, some of the activists meet back at the Richmal Crompton for a debriefing. By then, though, Ukip has spun the story in a way they couldn’t anticipate. Farage has castigated the activists as “scum” who have driven him from a quiet family lunch and led to him losing touch with his children for a few fraught moments. Sky News, the Guardian, the Mirror and ITV have gone with the “scum” story. Message boards on mainstream media sites (the Mail Online, for example), seethe with middle England raging against counter-cultural protesters. Suddenly Farage looks like the victim, and the activists – whose cabaret was aimed at drawing attention to how they feel victimised by Ukip’s attacks on their communities – look like aggressors."
In a
blog post on
The Guardian's "Comment is free" blog, Suzanne Moore amplifies on this "victimization":
"Farage says his kids were scared. The protesters say they didn’t see his kids, but many will still consider this protest to have been in poor taste because of the presence of his family.
And actually, it may backfire for other reasons too, because increasingly Farage plays the victim. And this allows him to. He can present himself as the innocent victim of attacks by fruitcakes, when, in fact, he spends most of his time attacking the vulnerable."
Sound like any US wingnut politicians or movements, or pizza store owners, that you know? Jeffries quotes an American activist with no sympathy for Ukip, Andrew Boyd, with a rueful acknowledgement:
"Bouncing on politicians’ bonnets and thereby managing to make them appear as victims? Not just wrong, but tactically jejune. 'From what I can tell we pretty decisively lost the 'battle of the story' in the media,” Andrew Boyd emails me on Monday morning."
In the case of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra fracas with Lisitsa, it seems to be the consensus that the orchestra and Melanson have lost the "battle of the story" there as well, such as in
one op-ed in the
Toronto Star by Vinay Menon (although his swipe at Bono reveals VM's own bias). A
separate column from Kate Taylor in
The Globe and Mail notes that Lisitsa's views are offensive (and I'll say it; she's an out and out bigot, like Farage), but that the TSO fumbled this badly:
"....the Toronto Symphony could certainly have handled this better. Why not hold the concerts, make it clear you’ll welcome any kind of peaceful demonstration for or against Lisitsa at the doors (protesters picketed a Pittsburgh concert last year) and offer refunds to any patrons who feel they would rather not be involved? Next time, you’ll know not to book her in the first place. Instead, the TSO finds itself embroiled in somebody else’s political fight and looks as though it bowed to pressure from the Ukrainian community. At the very least, the orchestra owes the larger community a full explanation of its thinking. I’m waiting with interest to hear more from Melanson."
In fact, a day later, Melanson did provide an explanation of the type for which Taylor asked, in
this article from the website
Musical Toronto. It apparently went as far back as December 2014, where since that time:
".....Over the course of the last four months the concern over these deeply offensive and intolerant tweets has built to a chorus of a very large group of Torontonians, not just Ukranians."
I actually read the pdf document via the link that
Musical Toronto provided. Feel free to do the same if you wish, but I imagine that you'll reach the same conclusion as me, that she is a "loopy" (to use Kate Taylor's opening salvo) bigot, to put it kindly. "Deeply offensive and intolerant" is a pretty fair summation. Of course, the pro-Lisitsa camp is crying "Help, help, I'm being repressed!", playing the censorship card. Yet that card doesn't work, on even a cursory examination, as Taylor noted:
"Censorship, Lisitsa's supporters cry.
Is it? The TSO isn’t stopping her from talking or tweeting; it’s stopping her from playing two concerts – and it’s still paying her."
I also took a look at Lisitsa' Twitter account (so that you don't have to). She's milking it for all it's worth, as is to be expected. No one has blocked her account, or asked to have it shut down.
I have to agree with Taylor that Melanson handled all this quite ineptly, even if one feels sorry for him because it's a mess that I'm sure he never wanted to deal with in the first place. No matter what he had done, he would have gotten nailed from one side or the other. But if that's going to happen anyway, one has to make a choice that's the lesser of the two damages. Granted, that's easier said than done, especially from someone who wasn't in a position to make that decision.
Here, just like Farage and the anti-Ukip cabaret above, even if the anti-Ukip and anti-Lisitsa camps are correct in their assesment, how one conducts oneself when reacting to bigots is important, because the wrong side will find a way to spin any "missteps" or other action on your side against you. The fact that your opponents are bigots doesn't help your side, because the base on their side will stick by them no matter what, however intellectually invalid or revolting Lisitsa's tweets and Ukip's politics are. Remember that democracy works by the rule of the majority of all, not the majority of just those who aren't bigots.
So what happens down the line, for Lisitsa and Ukip? UK elections are soon, so one can only hope that Ukip gets shown the door in the various constituencies, at least from this side of the pond. In the case of Lisitsa, it's probably easier for any orchestras or performing arts organizations who have contracted concerts with her to honor them, even if they have to hold their noses to do so. But for the future, I would agree with Taylor's assessment, that down the line, don't book her at all, if you don't want to deal with the headaches that her tweets bring. She is free to be as bigoted as she wants to be, and publicly, if she so chooses. The rest of us are equally free not to want her around.
FWIW, Lisitsa is scheduled to perform with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra in June, as noted on the CBC here. The conductor for that concert is the orchestra's music director, Roberto Minczuk. He's guest conducted here in STL a few times years back. But back in 2011, Minczuk tried to reform the orchestra, the Orquestra Sinfônica Brasileira, in a rather extreme way.. I've noticed that since then, Minczuk has never been back to St. Louis. In fact, I don't know that he's been conducting all that many US orchestras since then.
With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week......