Thomas Fleming at Chronicles excoriates pop culture. I'm not sure I wholly agree with everything, but he's not wholly wrong about anything:
I have never understand why Richard Pryor or George Carlin–as original as the village atheist, as intelligent as the village idiot–are to be revered for using words that bad little boys like to say around the campfire. I remember, as a wicked child, pulling the old wheeze on younger children, “Go ask your mamma what “––“ means,” then hiding outside the door to hear what happened. When you are 10, this is funny stuff (until you are spanked for it), but what do we think of grown men who think a whoopee cushion is the height of comedy?
It's not the prevalence of scummy language that disturbs me so much as the idolizing of perennial adolescents that is so much a part of our culture. I had a friend in graduate school, now a professor of classics at a state university in the South, and he used to bore me to tears with this theological analysis of Paul McCartney songs. “I'm an atheist,” I told him, “but if I want theology, I can read Augustine–at least his Latin is good.” Then there were the dopers who wanted to “analyze” Bob Dylan's never-ending flow of clumsy gibberish crammed into the form of greeting-card verses. Dylan's “poetry” occupies a special niche in the nonsense Hall of Fame, along with Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven,” George Will's rhapsodizings on baseball, and the foreign policy pronouncements of Condoleezza Rice.
