The damnation of Dr. Atomic

Can an anti-war opera be reactionary? This question crossed my mind as I watched the recent production of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

“Reactionary” usually means backward-looking or backward—doing, but it implies more—a response to ideas or actions or an epoch or a combination of these. Think of how conservatives exploited some reactions to the 1960s. Their capital grew by ascribing all woes to that decade’s rebellions. They offered an alternative cosmology—the 1950s. Everything was well ordered in that decade. We had Oklahoma!, not the Rolling Stones, in this reverie of resentment. Its purview left out, just for one example, what might happen to an African American who sat in the front of a Birmingham bus. Came the 1960s, conservatives—some liberals too—damned “pot smoking draft-dodgers” rather than those who sent soldiers to southeast Asia. Came 1980 and a movie star of yesteryear led a “conservative revolution.”