Berlin’s Deutsche Oper decision to cancel Mozart’s opera Idomeneo because it may enrage Muslims has gotten me to thinking about the implications.

Artists have often skirted controversy and many venues have cancelled performance under public pressure. These things are not new. Likewise, artists have frequently come under death threats as have the audiences who attend the works. Back in the late 80s/early 90s I had to go through a metal detector and a pat down because a production featuring Vanessa Redgrave had received bomb threats in response to her views on Palestine.

While you should never be in danger of being slain by someone at anytime in your life, as an artist or attendee, you recognized the threat to yourself by others by advancing ideas or choosing to be present at a performance. Just as your car should never be subject to damage, you recognize by driving during rush hour someone may hit you intentionally out of road rage.

What concerns me is that people will harm oblivious, uninvolved individuals within 10 miles of them for something occuring 3000 miles away. The opera is, of course, worried about problems locally because Germany has many guest workers from Islamic countries. Their decision is being made in the context of the violence and slaying for from Rome in response to the pope’s recent comments about Islam. I am afraid people will see the effectiveness of the ploy in cowing people and use the threat as a means of shutting down something they have never seen but have heard enough about to get whipped into a frenzy over.

For example someone in California upon hearing that the Vagina Monologues promote a lesbian lifestyle and is the primary instrument by which young girls are brainwashed into a homosexual relationship may decide to blow up a bookstore in a California town selling the script when Oprah announces on her show that she is sponoring a huge production in Chicago.

The fact that people thousands of miles away who probably have no knowledge of or opinion on a show could be endangered is frightening. The idea that artistic choices one makes might need to be altered out of concern for people half the world away from a production gives one a lot of pause.

The questions and decisions may start out attached to religious beliefs but there is nothing to stop people from employing the tactic with economic and ecologic ones. If you don’t back down to pressure now, you may rob the tactic as a viable tool for the future but end up shouldering the blame for injury and death for people today.

The argument that if we can put a man on the moon why can’t we X is a logical disconnect because all that proves is that a different group of people possessing different skillsets were able to solve a different problem.

So too will people probably discover that what worked to influence decisions globally for a different group for a short time (because I think people will eventually become inured to the threats) won’t be effective for them in another arena.

But it won’t stop them from trying and people most likely will be hurt in the process of discovering how ineffective the tactic might be.