Mark Steyn on Pop Culture and Allen Bloom
In a piece celebrating the anniversary of Allen Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, there are some great moments form the unstoppable Mr. Steyn:

"Popular culture" is more accurately a "present tense culture": You're celebrating the millenium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We're at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college a best part of a quarter-century later - or thirty years later in Germany. Yes in all these decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceburg, and teaches you the seven eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven eignths under the water, what's left on the surface gets thinner and thinner."

"..what happens when a society's incidental music becomes its manifesto.."

On relativism: "It's lined up for you and all have to do it pick what you want. It's the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally valid, equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish."

(The New Criterion, Vol 26 .No. 3. Nov. 2007)