“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

“Students at East Orange school named for Whitney Houston mourn singer’s death,” the Newark, NJ-based Star-Ledger reports. The school was renamed in 1997; it was previously called Benjamin Franklin Elementary School.

As the very young Saturday anchor on duty scrambled to fill the air time, viewers and Houston fans were treated, on top of the usual grasping at straws inanities to the following:

• A parade of America’s leading ghouls and vultures fighting for their a bit of air time in the wake of the death including Al Sharpton, Dr. Drew and Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman – the latter a regular presence on Breaking News Hollywood death broadcasts, this time appearing with the stunning report that the Grammy Party of Clive Davis, Houston’s mentor, was likely to be affected by the news.
• A reporter stopping people on the street to gleefully break the news of Houston’s death and capture their stunned reactions, like some sort of Letterman prank.
• The only “news” the Cable News Network provided in these first hours has thus far been reading of celebrity tweets responding to the death.  The fun began in the first hour of the coverage when the anchor suddenly announced that Malcolm Jamal Warner had tweeted his condolences. The 140 character regrets of Kim Kardashian among others soon followed.

This seems to be what we need a major news organization for these days: to read celebrity tweets to us.  Because apparently they think 140 characters are more than we could get through on our own.

Because Twitter has been so kind to the network’s on-air “talent.”

Related: Another recent look at the MSM bungling a celebrity’s obit: “Joe Paterno, 1926-2012; CBS Jumps the Gun Reporting Obit.”

Whitney Houston, who reigned as pop music’s queen until her majestic voice and regal image were ravaged by drug use, erratic behavior and a tumultuous marriage to singer Bobby Brown, has died. She was 48.

Publicist Kristen Foster said Saturday that the singer had died, but the cause and the location of her death were unknown.

At her peak, Houston the golden girl of the music industry. From the middle 1980s to the late 1990s, she was one of the world’s best-selling artists. She wowed audiences with effortless, powerful, and peerless vocals that were rooted in the black church but made palatable to the masses with a pop sheen.

Her success carried her beyond music to movies, where she starred in hits like “The Bodyguard” and “Waiting to Exhale.”

She had the he perfect voice, and the perfect image: a gorgeous singer who had sex appeal but was never overtly sexual, who maintained perfect poise.

She influenced a generation of younger singers, from Christina Aguilera to Mariah Carey, who when she first came out sounded so much like Houston that many thought it was Houston.

But by the end of her career, Houston became a stunning cautionary tale of the toll of drug use. Her album sales plummeted and the hits stopped coming; her once serene image was shattered by a wild demeanor and bizarre public appearances. She confessed to abusing cocaine, marijuana and pills, and her once pristine voice became raspy and hoarse, unable to hit the high notes as she had during her prime.

Not surprisingly, Houston’s Wikipedia page already has been updated to reflect her death.

Update: TMZ reports, “According to our sources, Houston died at the Beverly Hilton hotel. A police crime lab vehicle was seen outside the hotel just moments ago.

Related: “Whitney Houston’s Tragic Death Takes CNN to New Lows.”

Yesterday’s Arts section of the New York Times contained an interesting report about the status of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl balladeer, in his native Oklahoma. Reporter Patricia Cohen writes that “Oklahoma has always had a troubled relationship with her native son Woody Guthrie. The communist sympathies of America’s balladeer infuriated local detractors.” Note that word, “communist sympathies;” evidently, Guthrie had some kind of innocuous sympathies, perhaps those of a naïve fellow traveler, but not those of a self-proclaimed hard-nosed Red.  As one resident of Guthrie’s hometown Okemah, who loved Guthrie told Cohen, Guthrie had been “kind of taboo because some influential people thought Woody Guthrie had communist leanings.” The implication, as you can see, is that those attitudes were the ill-informed opinions of old school Red-baiters from the ’30s.

Now, after years of denial, Oklahoma is ready to welcome Woody home. The story reports on how The George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa has bought Guthrie’s archives from his children, and are “building an exhibition and study center to honor his legacy.” It will include his notebooks and diaries, art work, letters, scrapbooks, and the like, including the lyrics of 3000 songs to which he never had the chance to write music. It cost George Kaiser some $3 million to undertake the project. We also learn that Kaiser is, as Cohen reports, “one of the richest men in Oklahoma,” a man who made his millions from the Kaiser-Francis Oil Company.

Kaiser, in other words, is just the kind of capitalist the Communists always yell about — an exploiter of both the workers and our country’s natural resources. If you read the Wikipedia entry about him, you will find that his net worth in 2008 was some $12 billion, although his  current net worth has dropped to a paltry $9 billion in today’s downward economy. He is still the richest man in Oklahoma (who also lives half time in San Francisco) but no longer one of the 20 richest in America, having slipped only to a tie for the 43^rd richest person in the world!

Yes, Kaiser does good things with his wealth. He gives his money to causes like childhood education and the Oklahoma Jewish community. But he is also evidently part of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, a man who argued before Oklahoma’s legislature that tax incentives for the oil and gas industry should be eliminated or reduced, and the money be used instead for health care, education and tax cuts for regular people. (He did not, as you might expect, make that argument as he was accumulating his riches.) As you might expect, Mr. Kaiser was also one of Barack Obama’s “bundlers” in the 2008 election campaign, as well as a major investor in — you guessed it — Solyndra! (A bundler, as the Wikipedia entry explains, is “an individual who collects contributions to a candidate from others that are then simultaneously given to the candidate.”)

Incidentally, note this six degrees of Soviet separation moment later in Ron’s article:

In the ’50s, when I took banjo lessons from Pete Seeger, his banjo case would be stuffed full of issues of the Communist paper. Why, I asked Pete, did he have a week’s supply of The Worker in the banjo case? He told me that while he was in the city, he would go visit Woody in the hospital where he was confined because of his Huntington’s disease, and would read him the issues aloud so he could keep up with the Party news and positions. Later, in a TV documentary made for British TV, Pete said proudly that “Woody and I were Communists.”

This is no big secret anymore, except evidently, for those who still believe that unless one makes it clear he or she is a Communist to identify the person as one is Red-baiting.

Of course, as James Lileks noted a decade ago, that’s long been SOP at the NYT:

On Wednesday, James Lileks wrote:

Nowadays, if you point out that someone’s a Communist, you might well be accused of – dum dum DUMMMM – McCarthyism. The term has morphed from its original meaning. It no longer means falsely accusing someone of being a Communist. It now includes correctly identifying someone as a Communist, or ascribing a taint to someone because they don’t reject the Communists in their midst. (I’ll admit there’s a significant difference between the two.)

Yesterday’s New York Times has finally gotten around to reporting on A.N.S.W.E.R.’s communist ties, almost a week after several other publications on both sides of the aisle did. The Times’ article has these lines, printed without comment or dissent by the reporter who wrote the article:

In an interview today, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a spokeswoman for Answer, said questions raised about the group’s role were “classic McCarthy-era Red-baiting.”"When you select out the Socialists or Marxists,” she said, “the point is to demonize and divide and diminish a massive, growing movement.”

In reply, Glenn Reynolds writes:

It’s not McCarthyite to call people who are communists, communists. Communists, as devoted followers of murderous totalitarianism, deserve to be called to account every bit as much as their Nazi colleagues. And in the 21st century, they can hardly pretend to be ignorant of their ideology’s true nature.

Sure they can — just ask The Nation, which at the end of 2011 is busy attempting to rehabilitate the rep of the Soviet Union.

Click here to view the embedded video.

H/T: Roger Kimball, who writes that OWS has finally found its own Leonard Bernstein to slum with them:

For a vivid taste of the humor, savor this delicious tidbit from The New York Times‘s  daily report on OWS:

The composer Philip Glass will make a statement at a General Assembly at Lincoln Center Thursday evening, where his opera, Satyagraha, on the life of Gandhi, is closing.

Occupy Wall Street. Philip Glass. Gandhi.  It really is droll.  There is a reason that George Orwell began his devastating essay on that Indian fraud with the observation that saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent. (It cost a lot of money, the historian Paul Johnson observed in his tart assessment of Gandhi in Modern Times, to keep Gandhi living in poverty.)

Perhaps Philip Glass will write one of his minimalist operas on Occupy Wall Street — if you thought the drum circles at OWS were repetitive, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. On the other hand, Glass’s reputation was made in the early 1980s with his soundtrack to the visually striking film Koyaanisqatsi, whose plot is focused on mankind’s destruction of pristine virginal Mother Earth (stop me if you’ve heard that one before from Hollywood). Curious that Glass would side with them, given that’s a topic that OWS and its offshoots have proven definitively that they’re expert on.

Did Steve Jobs make me poorer when I laid out $600 for an iPad the other day? Of course not. I valued the iPad more than the $600 or I wouldn’t have bought it. So I got richer and so did Steve Jobs’s estate. (And now, if a 19th century technology, electricity, ever comes back on after a freak October snowstorm, I might actually get to use it.)

Since money-grubbing businessmen are, in Bill Keller’s and the rest of the left’s opinion, beneath contempt, let’s look at another great fortune. Paul McCartney was born poor. Today he is one of the richest men in Britain. Who did he impoverish in the course of getting so rich? No one, of course. His music has greatly enriched the world and the lives of all its inhabitants.

Taxing away great fortunes or preventing their accumulation is what makes the world poorer. It transfers wealth from those who created it to those who will pay off their political allies with it. It is often dreams of great wealth that makes people work so hard to come up with the next big idea.

Why would anyone want to take wealth away from Steve Jobs and give it to the people who ran Solyndra? Liberals, that’s who.

Exit question: when will we stop calling them liberal?

Click here to view the embedded video.

As Allahpundit writes, “Watching it, two things are clear. One: Lennon’s ode to possessions-less brotherhood actually makes a hell of a corporate jingle. [No shocker there -- Ed] And two: The inauguration ball is going to be amazing.”

A new poll shows Cain beating Obama by two points.

And that was before this awesomely awesome moment. Rock on, Mr. Cain – Rock On.

Sinatra, as every obit observed, was the first true modern pop idol, inspiring in the 1940s the sort of mass adulation that was to become a familiar phenomenon in the ’50s and ’60s. One man, strolling onto the set at precisely the right moment in the youth of the Entertainment Age, made himself the prototype of the age’s essential figure: the iconic celebrity. The iconic celebrity is the result of the central confusion of the age, which is that people possessed of creative or artistic gifts are somehow teachers-role models-in matters of personal conduct. The iconic celebrity is idolized-and obsessively studied and massively imitated-not merely for the creation of art but for the creation of public self, for the confection of affect and biography that the artist projects onto the national screen.

And what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool. And here is where the damage was done. Frank invented cool, and everyone followed Frank, and everything has been going to hell ever since.

In America, B.F., there was no cool. There was smart (as in the smart set), and urbane, and sophisticated, and fast and hip; but these things were not the same as cool. The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca or Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. He possesses an outward cynicism, but this is understood to be merely clothing; at his core, he is a square. He fights a lot, generally on the side of the underdog. He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. He is on the side of the law, except when the law is crooked. He is not taken in by jingoism but he is himself a patriot; when there is a war, he goes to it. He is, after his fashion, a gentleman and, in a quite modern manner, a sexual egalitarian. He is forthright, contemptuous of dishonesty in all its forms, from posing to lying. He confronts his enemies openly and fairly, even if he might lose. He is honorable and virtuous, although he is properly suspicious of men who talk about honor and virtue. He may be world-weary, but he is not ironic.

The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature. Cool said the old values were for suckers. Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn’t get mad; it got even. Cool didn’t go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing. Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool’s philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly. Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws. Cool was not knowing but still essentially idealistic; cool was nihilistic. Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice. Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.

Quite a legacy. On the other hand, he sure could sing.

And Miles Davis (before he cracked up and started wearing outfits that M.C. Hammer would think were simply too out there) was another avatar of cool in the 1950s. Davis titled his breakthrough early 1950s recordings The Birth of the Cool, and for instrumental jazz, still fighting the bebop/swing wars at the time, it was a sonic breakthrough.

As Roger L. Simon writes in a great post today that bookends Kelly’s take from a decade or so ago:

Cool depended on liberalism. In fact, it was an offshoot of it, suckling on the mother’s milk of Keynesian economics. As long as there was plenty of deficit spending to go around, we could all be cool. Life would be one long evening at Max’s Kansas City.Of course, it’s not. In today’s pay-as-you-go world, being cool is a luxury few can afford. This accounts for the extreme discomfort we may be seeing in our media and, to a lesser extent — they still have more money — Hollywood. Our media, our journos, depend on being thought cool and, consequently and perhaps more importantly, thinking of themselves as cool. When they suspect they are not, they begin to behave like worker bees when the queen is killed. They tend to run around and act out. After a while, they seem lost. Their numbers dwindle.

This is just because cool depended on a hive mind in the first place. It was little more than fad. We are well rid of it.

And in part because cool is gone, the remaining liberals are the new reactionaries. They are the ones trapped in the past, the enemies of the future.

And they’re dropping the mask of cool themselves; which helps to explain why their anger (and rage! — but non-violent rage, please! as this parody video spotlights) is so palpable these days: there’s a lot of emotion that’s been kept bottled up over the years.

In a way, it’s the a repeat of Charles Krauthammer’s Pressure Cooker Theory from 2004:

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five bestsellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came Sept. 11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud’s Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

With the president stripped of his halo, his ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally, once again, human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is reelected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They’ll need therapy.

But the therapy never came. Instead, the left attempted to reconstitute Kerry’s radical chic past and far left economic views into a slicker package, one that was initially much easier to defend against attacks, and then convinced themselves at the end of 2008 that the singularity had arrived, and the forty year leftwing nirvana would now commence. (Life would be measure pre and post-PBO, Spike Lee had assured us, echoing Kelly’s BF and PF calendar above.) And that peace, prosperity and four percent annual growth would magically arrive, even as business owners were being demonized, Alinsky-style. For almost four years, from late 2007 when Obama was on the ascendency until last year’s midterms loss and this summer’s cluster-fark of the pathetic Darth Vader Battle Bus tour, the yet-another-jobs-speech, and the electoral losses last week, the left was sure it will all eventually work. While no one knows what will happen next November, at the moment, the left’s frustration with Obama is palpable.

But really, what’s the problem?

• Obama is “the first Jewish President,” according to New York magazine. (Toni Morrison could not be reached for comment.)
• It’s all Bush’s fault.
• We can rage our way back to economic health.
• We can spend money we don’t have back to economic health.
• “We can’t just cut our way out of this hole” that we created by spending money we don’t have.
• If only we acted more like China, it would all work out.

This time, unlike in 2009 when the left controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress, it will all totally work. Right?

Right:

Barack Obama’s team seems to think that demonizing the wealthy will win him back his base and let him roll to re-election.  Not so fast, says Democratic strategist and former Hillary Clinton adviser Mark Penn at Huffington Post.  Obama’s plan makes for great strategy, Penn says, only if the President wants to pattern his next election like that famous Democrat, Walter Mondale:

Obama’s team actually believes that in the last six months they have courted independent voters and that didn’t work, so now they are turning to activating the base with higher taxes on the wealthy. However, he never made any meaningful appeal to those voters in terms they would understand. He supported extending the Bush tax cuts, temporarily zoomed up in the polls, and then promptly repudiated what he had done, only to then fall back down.

The 2010 mid-term elections were fought over Obama’s healthcare plan and on his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy by ending the Bush tax cuts. The results were, in his own words, a “shellacking.” After his most recent speech to Congress, voters in New York City’s Ninth Congressional District just elected a Republican for the first time since 1920.

And now, Obama is pressing the case for higher taxes, following in the footsteps of Walter Mondale. Higher taxes always seem to poll well, but in reality the country sees that as a last resort.

Voters see it as a last resort because the call for higher taxes always seems to follow a rapid increase in spending.  That was certainly true in 2010, when Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and nearly lost the Senate as well.  Penn reminds the White House that the anger over spending hasn’t yet dissipated from the midterms, and Obama is now stoking even more discontent by positioning himself as a typical tax-and-spend liberal — exactly as Mondale did in 1984.

That’s not the only historical parallel, either.  Penn thinks that Al Gore had the 2000 election sewed up until Gore went to his left and tried to run as a firebreathing populist.  John Kerry did the same thing in 2004, Penn says, with the same result.  Even in good times, voters don’t respond well to class warfare.

“Cool was oppressive,” Roger concludes, “It told you how to be and what to be. In some ways cool was the inverse of itself. It was the enemy of freedom while pretending to be its apostle. Nowadays there is nothing more square than to be cool. So feel free to be whatever you want to be.”

Even if it means putting up new construction in Woodstock.

Related: Speaking of establishment hipster-poseurs, Jon Stewart is disappointed that Obama “Deferred to the legislative process.” Am I misreading that quote, or does it sound very much akin to Thomas Friedman’s pining for the one party rule of China?

Stewart adds:

“He feels like the only president who begins every press conference with a heavy sigh. I think he was already kind of over us by the time he got into office. And now he’s like, ‘What the f*** is wrong with these people?’”

Let’s ensure that he’s really asking himself that question at the end of next year.