Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, argued that listening to rock music destroyed a young person’s ability to appreciate high culture. Could it also be true that an appreciation of high culture destroys a person’s ability to appreciate popular culture?

Interesting proposition, but let’s look a little further.

I encountered critiques of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia by two of my favourite intellectuals, Germaine Greer and Bryan Appleyard. Ha, I thought, that’s just so typical of intellectuals! Their overeducated minds and over-refined sensibilities have left them incapable of appreciating a good weepie.

Then I started to talk to non-intellectuals about Australia, and they also had a sneery and snooty view of the film, which left me wondering: have we all become too cynical, too damn sophisticated, to enjoy a film like this?

Or maybe dislike for the film comes from reasons other than being an intellectual.  What his definition of an intellectual is however is anyone’s guess, particularly given that he considers Kerry Katona to be comparable to Virginia Woolf.

A much simpler explanation would be that people have different tastes, and that isn’t always to do with their status.  There is high culture and popular culture I like, and there is high culture and popular culture that isn’t my cup of tea.  There is no philosophical contradiction in my enjoying both Family Guy and Bizet.

The idea that “the masses” have some innate inability to appreciate high culture is a myth anyway.  The Sun managed to explode that little myth with their cut-price tickets to Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera House, which sold out.  Their point is that what we consider high culture has very rarely been some mythical exclusive enterprise open only to elites.  Shakespeare was originally performed with a starting ticket price of a penny, Chaucer deliberately wrote his works in the vernacular.

It is the myth of the snob that high and popular culture are incompatible.

HT: Normblog.

It looks like a good idea on paper, but there are several objections that have not yet been addressed (as far as I can see).

• It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation: we complain about the continual professionalisation and exclusivity of politics, and yet this would have contributed to that trend;
• There is a significant risk of losing important contacts;
• The job description of a shadow minister is not identical to that of a government minister;
• Forcing members of the Shadow Cabinet to abandon their interests will limit David Cameron’s ability to reshuffle.  If a member is forced to give up a lucrative job and is subsequently demoted, or fails to get a ministerial job, bad blood will follow;
• Cameron and Osborne, unlike many of the other SC members, have large fortunes to support them that the others do not;
• Nobody seems to be complaining that Harriet Harman has five ministerial jobs (there was some about Des Browne, but he was holding one of the Great Offices of State).

I’ve not made my mind up on the issue yet; but unless these are dealt with, it’s hard to see Cameron’s argument being won.

Ok, you think: it’s not really a word that could be acceptable in civilised conversation.  Well, possibly, except for the following:

1. This wasn’t some high-minded discussion but a put-down to a chav who’d already crossed the line with his abusive language;
2. The LibDems had a campaign called “Homophobia is Gay”;
3. See title.

The LibDems need to get a sense of perspective here: teaching a kid about not being homophobic is a bit pointless when the kid in question doesn’t pay much heed to the idea of respecting anyone in the first place.  They have all picked up on a gay man using the word “gay”, but none have complained about the thug calling him a C***, a far more offensive word.  I doubt Mr. Dale will, in the grand scheme of things, have inflicted some irrevocable homophobic psychological  complex as a result of his remarks.  In fact we should all admire Iain’s so-far unnoticed preaching of non-violence as political philosophy, preferring the put-down to the uppercut.

The people deriding Dale as some kind of self-loathing gay-basher should examine how minorities reclaim derogatory terms.  The word “Queer” and the pink triangle are cases in point.  Minorities use these derogatory terms without breaking many of the social taboos associated.  It’s why I can call myself a “Yid”, but would get rathe offended if a non-Jew who wasn’t a close friend used it.  A gay man using the word “gay” is no different.

If you want to challenge homophobic attitudes, find a real homophobe, and stop kidding yourself that you’re being really courageous and “progressive” by bashing a gay commentator.

Merry Christmas Everyone

Merry Christmas.

Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign highlights how an effective use of inline communications and digital strategy can transfer the online advocates into real-time voters, influential enough to bring revolutionary change to the world’s most powerful nation

Tr. “Effective campaigning on the internet wins you new voters.”

I’m guessing that all that oratory was irrelevant then.

From the Weber Shandwick website.

She is described as having “little experience of top-table politics” , having “blocked… attempts to remove Councillors Meehan and Santry, and is still now - today - blocking … attempts to discuss the damning Joint Area Review report commissioned by the secretary of state.” She has served as a councillor for fewer than three years.

Oh, and she was elected along strictly party lines.  That wouldn’t be playing party politics with the matter would it?

Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan.

One would have thought that such folly would have been confined to the scrapheap of history after the Restoration. Not so, it seems, for over at City Hall the Grinches considered the following acceptable regulations for a Christmas tree :

Usual rules, no Christian symbols, colours or fairies! We cannot have any political colours for the decorations e.g. red, blue, green, yellow, so white and silver is best. Any decorations must be from a recycled, eco friendly source. No star or fairy please.”

Alas, this is not an isolated event. IPPR last year suggested downgrading Christmas in an attempt to please people they probably never consulted, and over at Edinburgh University the Students Union decides that the rich cultural tradition of Christmas should be replaced with a bland, soulless “Winter Festival” .

The behaviour of such people deserves nothing short of ridicule and contempt. Rather than demonstrating some multi-cultural awareness of the sensitivities of other religions, it simply demonstrates the narrow-minded bigotry of those involved in the decision. The underlying logic is that Jews, Muslims and other religious believers are so thin-skinned or volatile that any whiff of a predominantly Christian country celebrating possibly the most positive and inoffensive festival it has in its calendar would result in us all feeling dreadfully excluded and therefore get upset and possibly blow something up in an orgy of violence. You can almost bet that the policy was proposed by some mindless white middle-class twenty-or-thirtysomething.

The reality of course is utterly detached from the mindless bien pensant and patronisng view that holds non-Christians to be po-faced and intolerant of the established religion. Like many of these PC measures, they are neither suggested, or wanted, by the minorities in question, but are steamrollered through by some over-employed joyless Grinch. No suicide bomber has ever declared in his “martyrdom video” that he was motivated by anger at the celebration of Christmas. Indeed, browsing the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir website, the only objection I could find to Christmas from them was the increasing commercialisation. No mass riots, no fatwa imposed on Santa, likening him to Salman Rushdie. Jewish and Muslim communities have felt under greater threat since 2001, but banning Christmas is the resort of those who would like to be seen to be caring, rather than actually bothering to inform themselves about the concerns of minorities.

Send anything other than this and you're a racist.

The greater danger with these policies is that we lose something far greater in the process. If our cultural insitutions are unwilling to celebrate Christmas in a Christian context, we will concede it entirely to a crass commercialisation and kill off the very spirit that makes it such a wonderful time of year. Burke’s Corner warns that “The result of such Puritanism would be a mere celebration of consumerism and materialism, a season without a soul.” Tom Harris too has hit the nail on the head in pointing out that the culture of Britain, a culture that spawned the very rights that allow me to practice a religion different to that of the majority, is inherentl Christian. That should be cherished and defended.

As a final point, should public policy be kowtowing to the sort of Scrooge who takes offence at people celebrating religious festivals?

This year, let’s all stick two fingers up to the po-faced latter-day Puritans and celebrate Christmas and its rich religious-cultural heritage.

Yes, I have a massive interest to declare: I go to the same college as one of them (never met any of them though). This isn’t a music issue, this is a matter of pride, college rivalry and bragging rights.

If it eases your conscience think of it like the geopolitical bloc voting of Eurovision, only without the Cold War. Also remember that if they win my already-massive ego will be massaged, making me happy, and therefore able to write more for this blog.