Lawrence E. Harrison, Baltimore Sun
- There is a moment in the first movement of Beethoven’s great Third Symphony, the Eroica, when a French horn enters on a jarring off-key note. The public gasped when it premiered, but that “wrong horn entry” turned the page from the Classical music era to the Romantic era.
The public heard another wrong horn entry last month when the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s crude complaint about Sen. Barack Obama “talking down to black people” was caught by a live microphone. The dissonance represented not the innovative tones of the vanguard but the bitter notes of a depleted and increasingly irrelevant old guard.
Mr. Jackson’s vulgarity has been widely characterized as symbolic of a generational conflict among African-Americans. It’s that, but also a lot more. It may well mark the end of the dominant, decades-old theme of “victimology” in African-American discourse that has been Mr. Jackson’s – and several other leaders’ – stock in trade.
