Bloom and Television's influence

When I was in the fourth grade, my dad announced, somewhat out of the blue, that he was going to, as he put it, “Throw out all the damn TVs.” My brother and sisters and I took this as just another one of his many empty threats, until the Goodwill truck appeared and an evil looking man with big, sausage arms carried the color TVs out of our house and onto his truck and drove away. My mom said we cried more that day than the time they told us they were getting rid of the cat. Maybe my parents had hopes that we would fill our leisure with loftier pursuits, like reading great works of literature and listening to classical music. That was not the case. One might argue, as Bloom suggests, that it was too late; pop culture had already burled its way through our brains causing extensive and irreparable damage.

Four years after the TVs were banished from our home, my brother, Marty, was born. Marty was never exposed to T.V. in the home. I remember the day he came home from my grandparents’ house and with big, round toddler eyes filled with innocence and wonder asked my parents if they could buy one of those boxes with the moving pictures inside. Poor kid. As Bloom would expect, without the distraction of television, Marty turned out to be a voracious reader. He was crazy about books. He coveted them and collected them and carried them everywhere. But his book collection didn’t include Plato, Shakespeare, and Balzac. He read Tom Clancy, and Raymond Chandler, and Ken Follett, that is, after my mother had ripped out the two or three pages in the middle of the book – the requisite steamy sex scene – that she claimed had nothing to do with the book and everything to do with book sales. Perhaps Marty preferred these modern writers because these were the authors my parents were reading. Maybe he would have chosen the “great” writers if he had been more exposed to them. From my own experience, after having been forced to read Beowulf, anything touted as a “great work of literature” made me highly suspicious; that is, until I took a Russian History class in high school. We were told to select a book by one of the Russian authors. It was our choice. I researched several books before choosing Anna Karenina. I can truthfully say that I really enjoyed most of the book.

Maybe it’s the way great works of literature and classical music is typically presented to us that makes most of us recoil. Maybe it’s the way guys like Bloom make us feel vulgar and stupid for not having an immediate appreciation for classical literature and music that turns us off. I agree that children should be exposed to literature and classical music, but it should be presented in a positive manner. Children should feel free to express their opinions about the works, both positive and negative. A more open approach to the classics might encourage children to pursue reading, classical, and other types of music for both enlightenment and pleasure. After all, it ultimately is the reader or listener who determines what is or what is not to be a classic.