Happily, yesterday’s mail brought the hot-off-the-press issue of Reason magazine.
I’m eager to read the debate between Tyler Cowen and James Glassman on Social Security reform. (I’d provide a link here, but I’m unable now to find one.)
What struck me most forcefully in this issue of Reason, however, is this reported quotation from Robert Bork. Bork so hates modern American pop culture that he’s ambivalent about the fall of the Berlin Wall. The reason is that its destruction permitted blue jeans, rock music, and the rest of the panoply of American decadence to spill eastward into countries once protected from this scourge. Opines Bork: "You almost began to want to put the wall back up."
Even allowing for rhetorical overstatement, what kind of person would harbor such a sentiment? I emphatically do not share in Bork’s assessment of modern American pop culture as uniformly degenerate and debauched, but even if I did agree with Bork on this matter, I can’t imagine being anything but overjoyed at the fact that the Iron Curtain is in shreds.
What kind of person entertains the possibility that access to Sunday shopping, rap music, sit-coms, and even pornography might be worse than institutionalized murder, torture, mind-control, and impoverishment?
….
The Democrats’ single greatest contribution to America during the 1980s was to keep Bork off of the U.S. Supreme Court.
