2007
Fiddeling while it burns…
As a teenager, I remember being struck by a statistic from those “brighter tomorrow” 80’s when it was reported that under Reagan’s defense increases the budget for military bands dramatically exceeded that of the National Endowment for the Arts. It seemed preposterous at the time. In retrospect, we didn’t know from preposterous.
Foreign Policy passport reports that the D.OD has more musicians than the State Department has diplomats. Normally I’d say that more music was a recipe for success, but those martial tunes (with a few exceptions) don’t win friends or influence people. Too much syncopation, corny standards, blaring orchestration with little dynamic subtlety. In fact, the more I think of it, the more I realize how the military can save money that can instead go toward diplomacy. The solution even has an appropriately martial name: General Midi.