Among the younger Vietnam-era progressives, though (and I was not yet middle-aged myself, but already in the suspect Over-Thirty cohort), along with the antiwar and pro-integration agenda that gave their generational rebellion its moral and political force, came the attitude that the high culture was part of what had to be displaced. It was not enough to be against the war and for racial equality; it was also necessary to embrace the cultural displacement along with the sociopolitical one, on pain of being declared heretical. This stance wasn’t unanimous on the Left, but it had an intolerant energy behind it, and its ramifications—especially in education, I think—have been lasting. And so one legacy of those years for me was a divide in the mental self, with political and social inclinations on one side, and cultural (particularly artistic) allegiances on the other. Both sides were inheritances, and as such deeply implanted. The divide could also be defined as an intermittent separation of one’s beliefs from one’s feelings—an uneasy state of being, but one I have learned to embrace as a unified identity.

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The “Porgy” Exchange: Recently, as my regular readers know, I was enlisted in a Zoom chat on the subject of Porgy and Bess, having written at some length about its production at the Metropolitan last season. (The link to the chat is on my posting of 6/19/20; my articles on the production are at 11/3/19 and 11/22/19.) The chat was organized well before the upheavals related to the George Floyd murder and other police depredations, but took place just as they gathered steam. One of the topics on the agenda was the question of whether or not it is permissible for a white artist to assume the role of Porgy, and the example we used was that of Lawrence Tibbett, who was in fact the first singer to record the principal excerpts from the part, even as the original production (1935) was underway.^(I) Two distinguished African-American singers, Kevin Deas and George Shirley, were on our panel. They both stated that the wonderful music of Gershwin’s score is the property of every singer, of color or not. But that is different from actually undertaking the role in the theatre, and when I asked how they felt about that, they were in agreement that this, too, was allowable for a singer with the appropriate skills. That would, presumably, require the use of makeup.