“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.

• Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World, by Jay Nordlinger.
• The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg.
• Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray.
• American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

The last title dovetails nicely with my recent interview with Thomas Hibbs, the author of the newly updated Shows About Nothing, set at the corner of Hollywood and Nietzsche.

The books by Jonah and Jay Nordlinger are due out in the spring. The titles by Hibbs, Murray and Ratner-Rosenhagen have been out for a bit. If you’ve read them, please post your thoughts in the comments.

(Cross-posted at the Tatler.)

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.”

The exhibition chain reports this morning in an SEC filing that it had a $72.8M loss in the last three months of 2011 — more than double its $32.8M loss in the quarter a year ago — on revenues of $557.3M, down 7.6%.  Attendance fell 8.7%. With a decline in the number of 3D and Imax films which come with higher ticket prices, patrons on average paid 1.4% less to get in than they did a year ago.

From Hollywood and the White House’s perspective, that’s nothing but good news, right? If, as President Obama said last fall, America has “gotten a little soft,” less movie watching should help ameliorate some of the national flab he perceives, right? Robert Redford is anti-energy, and less movie attendance should help reduce our energy consumption a little bit. Less toilet paper being consumed in the restrooms should make Laurie David and Sheryl Crow happy.  Then there’s the main consumer product that movie theaters distribute. If, as James Cameron said in 2010, “DVDs are wasteful…It’s a consumer product like any consumer product.” If DVD are a wasteful consumer product, isn’t movie watching as well? It sets the Hollywood cycle of selling consumer products in motion — and sells plenty of non-Michelle Obama-approved junk food in the process.

And speaking of eco-puritans at the intersection of DC and LA, “Al Gore’s Current TV Could Go Belly-Up If Keith F’n’ Olbermann Doesn’t Start Delivering Big Ratings,” Ace writes.

If, as Al claims, we have less than four years left to save the planet, shouldn’t he eliminate his channel voluntarily to help reduce his carbon footprint?

Flashback: “Prominent Environmentalist Finally Discovers His Religion’s Catch-22.”

And that’s just what the Republicans in Congress did to Hollywood when it abandoned the rush to pass SOPA and regulate the Internet for the benefit of Tinseltown. Astonishingly, considering its usual inability to perform competently at even the most basic level, the GOP not only managed to embrace good policy but drove a wedge into the Democratic coalition that may well have dramatic consequences down the road. And, best of all, it provided a bit of long overdue payback to the smug oligarchs of LA’s West Side who have spent the last couple decades treating Republicans like something you’d hasten to flush.

Hey, suckers, how do ya like us now?

Read the whole thing.

• How post-WWII Hollywood originally explicitly rejected Nietzsche and nihilism, before ultimately embracing him with open arms.
• Why horror movies eventually eradicated God for charming nihilists who fashion their morality as “beyond good and evil,” such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
• Seinfeld: the sunny side of nihilism.
• How man successfully threw off the encumbrances of authority and tradition only to find himself subject to new, more devious, and more intractable forms of tyranny.
• How aesthetics came to usurp morality.
• Mad Men’s Don Draper: the man in the gray nihilistic suit.
• Can Hollywood move beyond nihilism?

Click here to listen to the interview.

– Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome, via Terry Teachout.

ABC News offered yesterday a risible lineup of two-timing politicians that omitted Bill Clinton, the philandering 42nd president, but included Thomas Jefferson, about whom the evidence of sexual dalliance is thin at best.

ABC’s roster of “the top eight politicians who led double lives” was posted online and promised “a look at some … tawdry affairs and public scandals” — and how the politicians implicated “weathered the storm.”

In addition to Jefferson, ABC included Grover Cleveland, the U.S. president in the 1880s and 1890s who fathered a child out of wedlock, and Eliot Spitzer, who as governor of New York consorted with a high-priced call girl.

The ABC roster also included an obscure and mostly forgotten former politician, Vito Fossella, a five-term New York congressman who in 2008 acknowledged fathering a child in an extramarital affair.

Given that the likes of Fossella made the list, it’s inexplicable that Clinton was omitted.

No, it’s pretty much SOP at ABC, which both heavily edited 2006′s The Path to 9/11 to tone down the Clinton administration’s decision to not assassinate Osama bin Laden in 1998, and then has blocked the video’s release onto DVD since. (Recall whom the presumptive Democrat presidential frontrunner was in 2006.)

I’m not sure how environmentally friendly this sort of giant airbrush operation is, but no one should expect ABC to turn off the compressors anytime soon. And as I noted earlier this week, perhaps it’s entirely coincidental, but ABC had back-to-back hits on GOP presidential candidates, even as its favored presidential candidate was occupying some of its parent company’s prime real estate.

The surroundings were utterly civilised – a villa overlooking a popular beach in Berlin.

The participants, enjoying gourmet cuisine and fine wines and discussing art and culture during breaks from business, appeared as ordinary and harmless as councillors at an average town hall meeting.

But the outcome of the infamous Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 – 70 years ago today – was previously unimagined barbarity.

In just two hours, 15 politicians and administrators of the Nazi state sealed the fate of more than 10 million people.

Here “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe” was determined.

These men, under the direction of SS General Reinhard Heydrich and his Jewish affairs expert Adolf Eichmann, decided how to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews.

This systematic, industrialised genocide ran alongside the slaughter of gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, prisoners of war and other enemies of the Nazis.

Today the victims will be remembered at ceremonies around the world – from the USA, to Israel and, of course, in Germany.

Back in 2000, HBO produced a superb — and appropriately chilling — TV movie recreating the conference, starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci, and a dozen or so mostly British character actors. I reviewed it a couple of years later at Blogcritics. If you ever get a chance, don’t miss it; it’s also worth watching to see where half the cast of Tom Cruise’s recent WWII potboiler Valkyrie originally appeared. (The other half came from here), along with an early appearance from Colin Firth in a supporting role, who would star a decade later in The King’s Speech.

It’s worth placing the conference into some perspective, however. It wasn’t a debate at all, so much as a fait accompli, as Heydrich and Eichmann presented their marching orders to all assembled. And it built on nearly a decade of earlier murders, as this recent New York Times article on “The First Killings of the Holocaust” notes:

The extermination of European Jews may have been formally outlined seven decades ago this month, but it began nearly nine years earlier, during Easter Week 1933, a few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, April 12, when four Jews — Arthur Kahn, Ernst Goldmann, Rudolf Benario and Erwin Kahn — were executed in precisely that order at a Nazi camp in the obscure Bavarian hamlet of Prittlbach.

These four killings framed the constituent parts of the genocidal process formalized at the Wannsee Conference: intentionality, chain-of-command, selection, execution. In the years to come, the process was refined, the numbers expanded monstrously, but the essential elements remained.

Even Prittlbach retained its central role. The hamlet was so small that the Nazis named their camp after the neighboring town of Dachau, which had access to a rail line. The boxcars rolled into Dachau, but the victims were marched to Prittlbach.

The Konzentrationslager Dachau in Prittlbach became the prototype for Nazi atrocity. It boasted the first crematory oven, the first gas chamber, and, on that sun-splashed spring day in April 1933, the first Jewish victims.

A Holocaust survivor once told me, and repeated to many others with equal conviction, that the trail of blood that began in Dachau ultimately led to Auschwitz. But it also almost ended there before it barely began.

Read the whole thing.