Watertown, Stonewall, and Really Boring Music

 The teapot is tempestuous in Watertown.  That's because the band director programmed a piece which commemorates the "Stonewall Riot."  That programming decision was most likely a deliberate provocation; the Watertown Board of Ed is not sympathetic to left-wing causes and the music director knows that.  

Most histories "forget" the real reason for the police raid on the Stonewall inn.  This is a more complete picture:

... The owner of the Stonewall, Tony Lauria, was reputed to be a front man for Matty Ianniello (known as “Matty the Horse”), a capo in the Genovese crime family who oversaw a string of clubs in the city, many of which served watered-down drinks at inflated prices, often made with ill-gotten liquor from truck hijackings. The scheme worked for the mobsters in a criminally tried and true fashion: citing disorderly behavior laws, the State Liquor Authority ruled that bars catering to openly homosexual patrons were not entitled to liquor licenses. That made gay bars effectively illegal, which left them to the mob. The mob would run clubs without liquor licenses and would pay the police to look the other way. It would be several years after Stonewall before the first clubs with openly gay owners would be licensed — places like the Ballroom on West Broadway and Reno Sweeney on West 13th Street. Another fallout from the Stonewall riots was that the mob would lose its crushing grip on the gay community....

The cops were targeting the Mob and the homosexuals, not just the homosexuals.  Remember--at that time, homosexual activity was illegal in New York (!) and homosexuality was considered to be a psychiatric disorder.

Hmmm.

Anyhow.  Credit Channel 4 with running the school board's official statement on the brouhaha:

 "It is the responsibility of a public school to provide a strong, values-neutral education to all students. As the encouragement of social violence continues to rise across the country, the Watertown Unified School District Board of Education stands firm on the principle that it is not the place of a public school to endorse or celebrate acts of violence.

When concerned parents brought the upcoming performance of “A Mother of a Revolution” to public attention, the full board examined the situation to determine whether any violation of policy had occurred.

The district’s controversial issues policy is clear: use of controversial issues is permitted, but only if it does not “tend to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.” According to the composer, the piece, “A Mother of a Revolution” was commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a six-day riot which included the beating of police officers and attempting to burn down a building with human beings trapped inside.

Based on the teachers’ description, the lesson was intended to persuade students toward emotional alignment with the events of the Stonewall riot.

Considering these factors, the board decided to remove the song from the concert due to its celebration of violence.

The Watertown School Board remains committed to providing academic education free from indoctrination."

The piece itself is--frankly--boring.  It's the music you hear in an action movie when the hero is chasing the bad guys.  But in this piece, the chase never ends.  It's really just a motif, repeated and repeated and repeated, for several minutes.  Really??? 

So why does every TeeVee channel run two days' worth of stories on this?

Draw your own conclusions.