I think you're over-analysing.  There's no accounting for taste.  
Marx loved to read the crap thrillers of his day, Bertrand Russell 
was an obsessive reader of dime novels, Zizek has made a career 
out of pop culture. On the other side, Nabokov was contemptuous 
of readers of bad literature, Lenin refused to indulge his tastes, 
and I remember an interview with Timothy Garten Ash where he was 
asked what he did for fun. He replied by reeling off a list of 
political events and crises that were far too important to allow 
time for fun.

I don't think we can generalise from all this.  Some of us like 
popular crap, some don't.

But I do think that this is different from your comment: "When 
the revolution finally comes, everyone will have time to 
write poetry, all right.  But why bother to write it at all, if 
only that written by a handful celebrity figures will ever be 
noticed, let alone enjoyed?".  In high culture/intellectual life 
we have to take some short cuts, because there's not time to read 
everything.  The pay-off from elevating some people who are only 
slightly better than the rest (or equal too, or even worse than) 
is that we can have a common frame of reference. Most educated 
people will pick up on references to, say, Shakespeare.  Marlow 
could be as good as Shakespeare, in my opinion, but he's not 
nearly as well known or read.  But if all of the very good 
playrights of the age were equally read, we wouldn't be able to 
talk about them.  The neglect of Marlow is unfortunate, but it's 
worth it.

It's hard enough having a conversation on this list when we 
have to stop to explain all of the references to Wojtek!


James Greenstein