    20

    emb argo that left normally confident American motorists stranded for hours

    in line waiting for a few gallons of gas.  It was our first taste of helplessness.

    Presidential advisor Pat Caddell sent a memo to Jimmy Carter in 1979

    saying that the US was in a new, invisible kind of crisis, "a crisis of

    confidence marked by a dwindling faith in the future, ...[a crisis that]

    threatens the  political and social fabric of the nation."34  The year of Caddell's

    memo, 33% of Americas saw their lives going straight downhill.35  By 1987,

    things had gotten worse.  According to pollster Louis Harris, a full 60% "felt

    a basic sense of powerlessness" despite the apparent prosperity of the

    1980's.36

    Then an author came to the rescue.  In 1987, America disgorged its own

    Max Nordau.  He was an obscure professor from The University of Chicago

    named Allan Bloom.  Like Nordau, Bloom knew exactly who to blame for

    America's decline.  Did he level a bony finger at the industrialists who

    ignored the commercial possibilities of the flat-panel video and the VCR?

    No.

    Eerily echoing Nordau,  Bloom fulminated against a set of dead

    German philosophers--Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger.  And like Nordau,

    he  raged against popular culture.  But instead of Oscar Wilde, Bloom

    attacked rock and roll.  "Sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of

    brotherly love" are the themes of rock, he declared dogmatically.37    "Such

    polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim."

    In MTV videos, Bloom pontificated, "Hitler's image recurs frequently... in

    exciting contexts....  Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or

    even decent can find a place in such tableaux."   Rock is a "gutter

    phenomenon," obsessed with sex, violence and drugs, ruining "the

    imagination of young people,"38 stealing their zest for learning,

    impoverishing their emotions, turning them into callow participants in a

    nation's decline.

    One of rock's primary crimes, Bloom claimed, was an overt celebration

    of sexuality.  In Bloom's view, only when sex is driven underground can man

    create.  The pent-up libido, Bloom claimed, is the driving force behind all

    <<  <  GO  >  >>