Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Got the latest issue of Grit Magazine in the mail this weekend. I don't subscribe, but a received a complimentary copy because an article of mine was included in the magazine. It is not available online, but if you look at the table of contents in the link, it is the one about pigs - who'd have guessed?
 
I wish I had the time to write and publish more. I used to write articles (and get them published) pretty regularly, but mostly in Catholic online magazines - and those don't pay anything! These days I really can't afford to work for free even if I had the time.
 
I have continued in my journey through The Closing of the American Mind. The chapter on music has a devastating indictment of rock and roll. I don't have the text available to me as I write today, but if I can come up with a representative quote later, I may update this post.
 
Energy and hope still linger from my visit to Aquinas College in Nashville this past weekend.
 
Oremus pro invicem!

2 comments:

Charlie said...

I read the book two decades ago along with Neil Postman's work about the dangers of television. The gist of these books was that the American public was becoming stupid. I agreed with this for awhile until I realized that the American public has never been smart.

The common man enjoys fake wrestling, tackle football, and cheap domestic beer. If he even bothers at literacy, it is too read a Tom Clancy novel. Yet, I prefer this common rube to the gender theorists and cultural Marxists of today's intellectual elite.

The closing of the American mind was not a homicide perpetrated by modern culture so much as a suicide of academics who have competed with each other in their denigration of objective truth, natural law, and the Christian religion. The common man may lack the sophistication of these so-called intellectuals, but his innate common sense tells him that these people are deluded fools spouting nonsense.

Here is a little story I have always found amusing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Jim Curley said...

Interesting story (Sokal). I had never heard of it.

Bloom states from the outset that he is writing about what he has found in students at elite universities.

However, the causes of what he has found is not isolated to elite population. The break up of the family has different implications for different economic classes, but it is devastating none-the-less, even if in different ways.

Some of the book is dated. But I would venture that whether one is part of the academic elite or a common man, the modern culture is not the same as the culture 60 years ago. For the most part, the change has not been positive.

The common man may seem to have more common sense, but he can either seethe inside about (for instance) homosexual "marriage" or he can drink another beer and watch football and try to forget about it-becoming a reluctant part of the problem. Unfortunately, we have had too much of the latter.

I would argue (I haven't read the Postman book) that Bloom is definitely not saying Americans have become stupid. He is trying to flesh out what has changed in the culture which has resulted in the change he sees in the students coming to college in 1986.

I haven't finished it and will have a better thing to say then - maybe.

Cheers.