Greil Marcus

Digging around a bit on Google about Albert Goldman, I found an interesting response from writer Greil Marcus.
After citing a long list of appalling behaviour by Elvis in the Goldman book Marcus says:

The real significance of Goldman's Elvis is in its attempt at cultural genocide.

Wow! Think of that. What do you have to believe about yourself and your culture to think that one book, one book! making an, admittedly excessive, attack on Elvis Presley constitutes cultural genocide?
And he means it! Check this out:

It is Goldman's purpose to entirely discredit Elvis Presley, the culture that produced him, and the culture he helped create--to altogether dismiss and condemn, in other words, not just Elvis Presley, but the white working-class South from which he came, and the pop world which emerged in his wake.

We might stop here and wonder if Mr. Marcus is quite so fond of the "white working-class south" when they vote Republican? And does he get similarly worked up when writers set out to utterly discredit, oh I don't know, Frank Sinatra or Pius XII or Winston Churchill. That digression over, back to the text:

But because the book is having its intended impact, and because Elvis Presley is so large a figure, intertwined with the lives of millions of people in ways that have hardly begun to be examined, a good deal is at stake. What is at stake is this: any book that means to separate a people from the sources of its history and its identity, that means to make the past meaningless and the present incomprehensible, is destructive of that people's ability to know itself as a people, to determine the things it might do as a people, and to discover how and why those things might be done. This is precisely the weight of Goldman's book, and it is precisely the weight of the cultural genocide he wishes to enact.  

You know, I could publish a book tomorrow that claimed to have proved that Jesus Christ was completely different from what millions of people have believed. A book that attempted to shred his reputation. I might worry that somebody might assault me or even kill me for doing this. I wouldn't stay up nights worrying that Greil Marcus would write a book accusing me of cultural genocide, or that Harvard University Press would publish such a book by him or anyone else.

Publishing a book and getting lots of people to read it is not an act of cultural genocide and could not be. Read that last quote again—especially the bit about Goldman's book being "destructive of that people's ability to know itself as a people"—and then mentally compare the fate of Elvis-loving baby boomers after Goldman with say, the Ojibwe people after Canadians took over their territory or the Cherokee people after Americans took over their territory and you can get a rough grasp of how foolish this is. That Mr. Marcus could write with a straight face that it was cultural genocide suggests a lack of a sense of proportion that is staggering.