<< Gertrude Himmlfarb just farted and out came:
"Rock and Roll music is true moral and cultural decay, and
therefore cannot be held as 'harmless'". That's a pretty
close, though not exact quote and was uttered to undermine the
notion that Alan Bloom's sybaritic 'eccentricities' were not OK.
Too many negatives in this. What does it mean? Bloom saidt this sort of thing about rock. Of course, since Straussians are self-conscious liars, it's hard to know whether he meant it. Probably he didn't like rock. Some time back someone on the list quoted Paul Sweezy (from the early 50s) to the same effect, btw.
> I didn't think serious people still said things like that about
RnR. But that begs a further question...
> How quaint. >>
Quaint is right. Athough I recall telling my highly cultivated college mentor, Harvard '37, about Donna Summers; Love to Love ya Baby, a hit at the time (dates me!), with its heavy breathing and on-air orgasm. He refused to believe me. I found it on the radio, and after a few minutes, Szathmary said to me, "This is the end of Western civilization."
--jks