Raise your hand if you know what Charles Murray is talking about in this conversation with The New Yorker‘s Rebecca Mead, related in this week’s Talk of the Town:
Murray was asked what emanations of popular culture would appear on his own top-twenty list. “The movie ‘Groundhog Day,'” he immediately offered. “It is a brilliant moral fable, offering an Aristotelian view of the world.” What else? “The genre of the hardboiled detective novel,” he said. “I think people may still be reading Sherlock Holmes two hundred years from now.” How about television? “I don’t go along with the ‘I Love Lucy’ stuff,” he said, as if an “I Love Lucy” lobby were outside, picketing the Hertog home.
It’s not outside, it’s out here! To Mead, Murray’s reference to “I Love Lucy” is just a loopy non sequitur. Committed arts blog readers will have instantly recognized it as one of David Frum’s top ten cultural items produced since 1950 that will still matter in 200 years.
Cup of Chicha was just one of many such sites to link to Frum’s list last week.
By the way, you can read my illustrious cohort’s take on Murray’s Human Accomplishment over here.
And you can put your hand down now.