Haven’t seen Mark Steyn speak yet? Here’s your chance, via video, at Minding The Campus. Steyn spoke here at the Manhattan Institute for the Center for the American University’s conference on the Twentieth Anniversary of The Closing of the American Mind. He addressed what is easily the most contentious portion of the book – the chapter on rock music. Here’s a sample:
Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird – though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.
The lecture will soon be appearing in print in the New Criterion, but it’d be far more fun to simply watch the speech right now, wouldn’t it?