Ideas from another Christiansen

After reading Rupert Christiansen's column, "Karaoke crooners hijack classical music" at arts.telegraph, I'm left asking many of the same questions...and actually have been for years. If classical music is indeed better, deeper, more important, different from all forms of popular music, we should have an easy time convincing potential audiences of this. We don't, mainly because its very difficult to convince the culture at large that the culture that produced this music is better, deeper, more important, etc. The automatic respect for the old forms (not just music) is seemingly gone forever. So do we hold on to the belief or do we "karaoke-ize?"