研究生英语精读课程9.doc

Unit Nine Is Rock Music Rotting Our Kids Minds? ［1］Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman① headphones or watching MTV②. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated* by the blood of martyrs*; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproductions he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate*? A pubescent* child whose body throbs* with orgasmic* rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate* in hymns* to the joys of onanism* or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen① who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational* fantasy*. ［2］This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such. The continuing exposure to rock music is a reality, not one confined to a particular class or type of child. One need only ask first-year university students what music they listen to, how much of it and what it means to them, in order to discover that the phenomenon is universal in America, that it begins in adolescence* or a bit before and continues through the college years. It is the youth culture and, as I have so often insisted, there is now no other countervailing* nourishment* for the spirit. Some of this cultures power comes from the fact that it is so loud. It makes conversation impossible, so that much of friendship must be without the shared speech that Aristotle① asserts* is the essence of friendship and the only true common ground. With rock, illusions* of shared feelings, bodily contact and grunted* formulas, which are supposed to contain so much meaning beyond speech, are the basis