"To argue against rock and roll is now as quaintly irrelevant as arguing for the divine right of kings." So writes Mark Steyn in the right-of-center New Criterion. He is commenting--interestingly--on conservatives' views on rock 'n roll. He looks back on Allan Bloom (the late Closing of the American Mind guy) who hated rock.
Steyn: "The 'Music' chapter is the most difficult one for young fans of The Closing Of The American Mind — because it’s the point at which you realize just how much Allan Bloom means it" when he said he loathed popular music.
But royalism as merely "quaint." It's a cute analogy but think about it long enough and it starts to seem more than a little disturbing.
Here's the whole article.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
