Criticizing Mass Culture
To the Editor:
Louis Kronenberger implies by his title [“Fashions in Vulgarity,” July] that he is investigating something whose form changes but whose essence doesn’t, like clothes. In spite of this error of lumping various kinds of behavior together by calling them by the same name, his article is interesting as a study of the changing connotations of a word—but only until it becomes evident that the historical preliminaries are merely a facade for another conventional criticism of American Mass Culture. Now I don’t think much of AMC either, but I am beginning to see that it yields profit not only for its vendors, but also for writers who criticize it in print. . . .
Ivan Rainer
San Francisco, California
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