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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
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