THINGS THAT PASS FOR KNOWLEDGE

Vexing how persistent these misperceptions are, long after the battle was waged, won, and consumerized. Talking about the pre-Beatle years in the early 1960s, Bruce Bawer writes: “Those years were America’s liberal moment, and a pivotal point in American history.”



But his lengthy article in the Wilson Quarterly is full of misnomers, evasions, and crude conclusions:


“Paar represented a distinct, even radical departure from mainstream 1950s entertainment, but he was not a man of “The Sixties.” It was on his show (not Ed Sullivan’s, as legend has it) that the Beatles made their American TV debut, on film, singing “She Loves You” in January 1964—though as Paar has always freely admitted, he showed them not because he liked their music but because he thought they were “a joke,” a silly fad. What he was laughing at, of course, without realizing it, was the era to come, which the Beatles would personify, then and forever, and which would soon relegate the tastes and values of Paar’s heyday to the dustbin of history.”



Do I have to spell it out? I like Paar as much as anybody, but does anybody really think John Lennon couldn’t outclass, outtalk, out-anything Jack Paar, and deserved to be more famous? By omission, Bawer writes as though everything that followed Paar, Nichols and May, and the rest is inferior, without a single example or comparison. Stuff like this baffles me. Such a wayward viewpoint wouldn’t even get argued if rock’s triumph hadn’t been so complete.