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All that trash.

Article Excerpt
ALMOST 20 years ago, Allan Bloom pointed out in The Closing of the American Mind that few of us would make room on the living-room sofa for a guest who discussed or enacted the sexual raunch, incessant violence and just plain, dumb nastiness that are regularly featured in television programs. For all its noxiousness, of course, TV was and is routinely invited into living rooms across America. While criticism of pop culture's more pernicious aspects has in the meantime gained strength, so too, has pop culture's toxicity, with cable television, the pop music industry, the Internet, and video games expanding the reach--and depths--of the media cesspool exponentially.

Indeed, if ever there were anything to the riposte pop culture's defenders parrot to critics of so-called "extreme culture"--"turn it off if you don't like it"--the ubiquity of such culture renders personal selectivity practically meaningless. Turning off your own TV set--or DVD player, or Internet connection--is a little like pulling the shade on one window of a large apartment building: The effect is zilch on where you live. As Robert Bork noted in Slouching Towards Gommorah, even if we manage to bar crotch-grabbing rockers, cop-killer rap, and "Married with Children" (or American Pie, or The Matrix Reloaded, or ...) from our houses, we still have to leave home to interact with a population all...

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