Mention The Closing of the American Mind, and there’s a very good chance someone will dredge up Bloom’s attack on students and rock music. Here is Bloom in full flow:
"Picture a 13-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home during his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, life-like electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a non-stop, commercially pre-packaged masturbational fantasy."
