Ah, it’s a quaint notion, isn’t it? The sort of thing you remember hearing from the sisters in parochial school when you were five or six, or that you’d hear on public television during the fund drive just before they showed some particularly heart-wrenching documentary about the vanishing traditions of the Mapuche Indians down in Chile. “A people never speaks to us so directly and forcefully as through their music” — it sounds to modern ears like it must be setting us up for a punch line, the point of which, once you got done unpacking it from several layers of smarminess, would be something along the lines of: “We are no longer so naive.” |