For those of you who are interested, I have a post up over at The Public Humanist. It’s titled, "On Beating Bill Bennett, the Academic Study of Pop Culture, and the Soul of Man Under Late-stage Capitalism." It begins like this:
Of the many arguments I’ve fantasized about having, one of them, oddly enough, is on the topic of the academic study of pop culture. It takes place on the Charlie Rose Show, and I’m facing off against Bill Bennett, perhaps the grossest of the professional fuddy duddies—the fusty old white men and women who get paid to wear bow ties and pearls and write tsk-tsk articles about the sabotage of western civilization by Foucault-wielding academics.
He comes on with his standard talking points, about how, thanks to the loose morals and Frenchification of our nation’s English professors, the kids today are giving each other handjobs and smoking MTV instead of reading Shakespeare on the farm while their fathers beat their mothers for burning the meatloaf (or whatever Bennett’s vision of the good life is). And I, instead of making some thoughtful but very dry argument that there are a dozen threats to the integrity of higher education that are greater than the influence of English professors, will just accuse Bill Bennett of being a philistine who doesn’t have the moral, intellectual or literary standing to question anyone’s legitimacy as a thinker.
