Who's Polarizing Whom?

While waiting my turn for a haircut, about an hour ago, I perused a Time magazine (opportunity for waiting-room chuckles). One of the articles was a typical equivalence piece: Michael Moore on this side, Rush Limbaugh on that side, we're a polarized nation.

Well, the very first item from Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus today hits a related note, and I was so stunned by it — stunned, incredulous, amazed, but subtracting a degree or two of surprise from those words' meanings — that I had to stop reading the column and react:

The New York Choral Society was scheduled to sing at the Republican convention. They were to sing patriotic songs — "From the Halls of Montezuma," "Anchors Aweigh" — in honor of America's armed forces. Nothing too partisan. Nothing partisan at all.

But the Society has backed out, because — well, its members are left-wing, and they can't stomach the idea of appearing at a Republican convention.

Do Republicans and (more specifically) conservatives have to begin fielding their own regional choirs? (Perhaps a religiously affiliated group would have been smarter from the outset.) Our nation is polarized, indeed, but perhaps conservatives wouldn't be excessively partisan to suggest that one side deserves a little bit more of the blame than the other.