So, I have a problem with the choices the periodical made in respondents. The questions asked also seem, to me, to be - how can I put this? - not exactly timely and even a bit tiresome because, for the life of me, I can't imagine caring what any other respondents think about American popular culture, the internet and its role in public discourse, or the other questions to which they are asked to respond. Yet, I would recommend a reading for no other reason than to offer a good example of the irrelevance (sad to say) of intellectuals in American public life. There are good, thoughtful, even funny intellectuals deeply engaged in both education and larger public concerns. That none of these, nor many others I could consider, were consulted is a display not only of myopia (or perhaps ignorance), but of the marginal place the life of the mind plays in our society.
Having said that, among the more annoying things intellectuals tend to do is to dismiss with a hauteur worthy of ancien regime aristocrats our mass, popular culture. They are either diversions from the pursuit of the revolutionary goal, or (worse) the bread and circuses concocted by a conspiracy of elites to keep the public disengaged, entertained by a nearly-pornographic desire to vicariously experience all sorts of titillation. The public becomes a mass of drooling zombies, perched at the edge of their seats waiting for the next "reality program" or what-have-you. While I will admit that I am disgusted that my brain actually contains the names "Jon and Kate Gosselin" and understands the referents, that hardly means that my IQ has shrunk.
This kind of snobbish bullshit is on display in the response of Leon Wieseltier, even as he claims to defend intellectual interest in mass culture as a form of noblesse oblige:
The championship of mass culture by intellectuals must be vigorously challenged when it is done as an attack upon the legitimacy of the categories and the distinctions—for a leveling end, as yet another gospel of relaxation; or to establish irony as the highest value of culture; or as the cultural program of a political ideology. I must confess that I regard intellectuals who are immune to the power of Winterreise or The Flaying of Marsyas or Modern Love or The Four Temperaments as incomplete intellectuals, insofar as they cannot grasp such refinements of structure and meaning and make of them refinements of their own souls. I think that the life of the mind should be soulful; but that is my own inclination. Otherwise, as I say, protect the differences, find truth and beauty where you can, and slum on.(italics added)
In the course of his response above the quoted section, he considers the following question as a serious one, to which my only response is, "You need to pay attention a bit more, I think."
Whether or not Monk is like Debussy, he sure as hell is not like Kanye West.
Such paucity of understanding, by someone who considers himself an intellectual (or, serving as he does as the literary editor of The New Republic, is considered one whether he is or not) is reason enough to consider these all-too-brief takes on intellectuals and American culture more as object-lessons in all sorts of stupid than anything else.
