Jacques Vergès is a lawyer—a lawyer who makes Lynne Stewart seem like Atticus Finch. At the conclusion of Barbet Schroeder’s new documentary on Vergès, Terror’s Advocate, snapshots of a handful of his clients appear on the screen. It’s not a pretty list: Vergès has served as legal counsel for Slobodan Milosevic, Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal, and Tariq Aziz, to name a few. A die-hard radical born to a Vietnamese mother and French father, Vergès cut his teeth defending members of the Algerian National Liberation Front. From there, supposedly in the name of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, he has represented and associated with a smorgasbord of terrorists, Nazi-sympathizers, Islamists, dictators, and thugs.

It is to Schroeder’s great credit that his documentary avoids grandstanding and allows the viewer to come to his own conclusions about its subject. One might have expected this to be the case: Schroeder’s previous films include General Idi Amin Dada (1974), a fascinating and poker-faced examination of the psychopathic Ugandan dictator.

Whereas Idi Amin came across in the earlier film as creepily genial and unhinged, Vergès seems smug and self-important. As he chirpily recaps his career for the camera, he appears utterly oblivious to its moral dubiousness. And no wonder: At one point in the film, a good friend of his claims that Vergès would blithely be a terrorist himself, except for the fact that such a career wouldn’t allow him to indulge in his expensive tastes.

The end result is an engaging and disturbing documentary that investigates the relationship between revolutionary idealism and moral odiousness.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, the New Criterion’s November issue contains a series of essays offering a reappraisal of Bloom’s (in)famous polemic. Among them: Mark Steyn’s “Twenty Years Ago Today,” a characteristically witty discussion of Bloom’s excoriation of rock music.

To Bloom, rock-n-roll symbolizes the vulgar hedonism of a youth culture that is averse to liberal arts education. For presenting this view, Bloom was naturally pilloried as an elitist. In fact, Steyn says that “for Bloom to write his chapter on ‘Music’ seems to many of us braver than attacking the 1960s or the race hucksters or his various other targets.”

Steyn doesn’t entirely agree with Bloom’s perspective on rock music. Even so, he gets to the core issue surrounding the contemporary genuflection to popular culture:

Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music.

This calls to mind Joe Queenan’s crack about exercising at his local YMCA: “It was now apparent to me that if I was going to lose any weight, I was going to have to listen to an awful lot of Phil Collins records in the process.”

And here’s the point: The problem isn’t so much the popularity of rock music, which, with its rigorously undemanding aesthetic, can be fun at times. The problem is the way in which our surrender to pop-culture populism has wound up forcing classical, jazz, and other forms of music into almost complete obscurity.

The end result has been the virtual disappearance of non-rock music from American ears.