Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Pop culture's false dawn Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 14:51:51 EST Message-ID: \SE E;LIFE;ESSAY \HD Pop culture's false dawn \SH Thinking we've seen the light, we rush headlong into darkness \BY Rod Dreher \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES "We are the children of modern America," Al Gore told an ecstatic Little Rock crowd hours after Bill Clinton won the presidency. It was the most significant thing anybody said about the election all night. And the most worrisome. Mr. Gore was talking not only about himself and Mr. Clinton but about the generation on the verge of taking power. We knew the baby boomers would reach the mountaintop some day, but Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore will be the ones to plant the flag. Far below there is cheering. Boomers throughout the news and entertainment media - that is, the creators, transmitters and interpreters of popular culture - are beside themselves. We hear giddy talk of a cultural renaissance, of a fresh morning of creativity dawning after 12 dark years of Republican rule. Hal Hinson, a boomer-aged film critic for The Washington Post, wrote recently that events such as Sinead O'Connor's shocking act of sacrilege on live national television, Ice-T's metal-rap song calling for the killing of police officers and Madonna's vulgar doodlings, illustrated with explicit photographs, on her sexual fantasies are all worth celebrating as signs of cultural renascence. "[They] are sometimes seen as part of the disease," the critic wrote. "They're not. They're part of the cure." Such an observation brings to mind a prediction the scholar Richard Weaver made in 1948 (yes, 1948): "We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent." Before starting to bleat like a right-wing nanny goat, let me explain how I learned to hate baby boomers and everything associated with the 1960s that wasn't civil rights or the Rolling Stones. In 1988, '60s radical Abbie Hoffman, my hero, spoke at my university, Louisiana State. Because he was my hero, and because I was the only one on the lecture committee who even knew who Abbie Hoffman was, I became his handler. When he was late for his evening lecture, I found Mr. Hoffman on the phone with his bookie in New York. He bragged that he had more money riding on that night's Mets game than he was going to make for his speech. After telling off-the-cuff stories for an hour, Mr. Hoffman and a small retinue retired to a campus bar, where he downed a handful of pills and a couple of pitchers. The young campus radicals wanted to talk politics, but Mr. Hoffman had other things on his mind. "Take me somewhere I can get laid," he whispered to me. On the way to a sleazier bar, we swung by the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College for a high-speed, after-hours tour of the grounds. We were promptly pulled over by the Jimmy Swaggart Bible Police, who threatened to throw us in jail for trespassing. Somehow we got the drunk, loudmouthed Mr. Hoffman to shut up long enough to talk our way out of it. On the way to the airport the next morning, Mr. Hoffman complained that this was the first Southern college he had visited without having sex. The following week, a friend at Penn State mailed me a story from the campus newspaper, in which our friend Abbie Hoffman whined about how students at Louisiana State, like students everywhere, were dull and had no stomach for protest like undergrads in the good old days. I began to see all boomers as different shades of Abbie Hoffman. Born at the right time in history, they were lucky enough to have been raised in a time of economic abundance. They carried on like pampered, we-can-have-it-all kids, merrily assuming the world could be remade in their own image. They had the party; now my generation, Generation X, has to deal with the hangover (and whining from certain boomer quarters that we don't party as hard as they did). Unfortunately, a number of us Xers don't realize the party's over either, that the values taught us by the boomer-created pop culture don't work anymore. Whatever his faults, Bill Clinton cannot be blamed for the idiocies of Madonna, Ice-T or Sinead O'Connor. Mr. Clinton did, let us remember, speak out against a racist rapster, Sister Souljah, and Tipper Gore has done good work speaking out against the rock culture's lewd excesses. Mr. Clinton and his ascendancy are, however, as Mr. Gore noted, emblematic of the rise of the generation formed in and by the 1960s. His triumph is their triumph, and when the Arkansas governor won the White House, the culture shift that began 30 years ago locked into place. There is a clear connection between Mr. Clinton's generation and America's deepening crisis of values and concomitant cultural decline. His is the generation that chose the sensualist, anti-authoritarian, iconoclastic values that have made Madonna, Ice-T and Sinead O'Connor possible. They are without a doubt the children of the boomers. If you believe this Trinity, what truly ails society is repressed sexuality (Madonna), brutal cops (Ice-T) or devotion to that hateful patriarchy, the Roman Catholic Church (Miss O'Connor). But consider these dubious benefits of the '60s values revolution: We now live in the most thoroughly eroticized society in history; the level of crime and shocking brutality have far outstripped police ability to control; Americans consider themselves religious but in practice have little use for the discipline and sacrifice demanded by traditional creeds. In fact, the cause of our deepening crisis is precisely the lack of authority that would curb our destructive tendencies. In truth, the post-1960s American bows to nothing - no God, no law, no transcendent morality - save his own voracious appetite for sensation. Everybody's living in the material world, sang Madonna, bragging that she was a material girl. (That vamp is nothing if not a creature of her times.) As Mr. Weaver observed back in '48, we are bound by our "determination to enjoy the forbidden in the name of freedom. All reserve is sacrificed to titillation." If we hold, as did the late cultural critic Allan Bloom, that a value is not a value unless it is life-preserving and life-enhancing, we have an elementary basis from which to assess the decline of pop culture, the only culture that counts in our mass democracy. The so-called values on parade in our movies, television, books and music are the expressions not of a will to live but of a wish to die. The utter pervasiveness of sex in American culture - "Basic Instinct" is at the top of the video charts - testifies to how completely we have given ourselves over to self-gratification through Eros. Since the 1960s, those who favor libertinism have been seen as progressive and humane. Those suspicious of total sexual license and its expression in the popular arts are consigned to the church basement with the repressed crowd who would put fig leaves on Michelangelo's David. And what "life-affirming, life-enhancing" progress does our progressive sexual morality have to show for itself? Unprecedented levels of illegitimacy, unwanted children, abortion and disease, including AIDS, and all the attendant social problems. Yet the pop factory keeps grinding out hotter, sleeker propaganda for the libertines. Pop culture gives you everything from faux-author Madonna's faux-artistic flirtations with lesbianism and sado-masochism to 2 Live Crew's bawdy rap paeans to rape, to the comparatively innocent depiction of sex on prime-time television, where, according to a 1991 study by Florida State University, characters either talk about or participate in a sexual act every four minutes. The fact that we take the vulgarity of a "Married . . . With Children," "Studs" or "Mad About You" (in the pilot of which the lead characters had sex on the kitchen table) as fairly mild stuff shows how far down we've gone. The fact that we calmly go to see movies, such as the "Friday the 13th" series, that are explicitly and solely about killing people in creatively violent ways indicates an obsessive fascination with violence. We should not be surprised that our streets are killing fields when our movie screens, TV sets, books and stereos are as well. The problem is not simply that our movies and music are sexy and violent. So is life, and art cannot pretend otherwise. Defenders of the pop cultural status quo will tell you that rapper Ice Cube's violent, racist sermonizing, for example, "tells it like it is." They properly note art's descriptive function but forget that it has a prescriptive function as well. Art not only tells us what life is like, but also tells us what life could be like. It defines the boundaries of our thought, helping us imagine what we might become. Aside from bloodthirsty satyrs - barbarians, in other words - it's hard to figure what ultimate possibilities pop culture presents us with. Look, nanny goat knows it's not all bad, that there are good movies, good music and yes, even good TV out there. It's just that so much of it is so bad, so witless, so artless, cheap, phony, dumb and coarsening - and becoming even more so with each passing season - that the good stuff seems nearly drowned by the rising tide of lewd, brutal mediocrity. You can choose to ignore pop culture if you wish, but most of us don't. We all live in the same society, though, and suffer the consequences of the actions of those who live by the morality celebrated by pop culture. We got into this mess when the spoiled children of Bill Clinton's generation went wading off into the sea of moral relativism, egotism and unfettered sensuality. Having grown up in the country's huge postwar economic boom, they saw no reason why they couldn't have anything they wanted. They confidently ran giggling into the frothy ocean, casting off lifelines that would have kept them linked to the shore. Now they and my generation, which followed them, find ourselves lost and adrift, with safe, solid ground barely in sight, swimming like mad toward the deeper water and the taller waves, where we're sure the really big fun is. Five years ago, Tom Wolfe predicted the advent of the Great Relearning. When young boomers overthrew the morality of preceding generations, it amounted to a jolly refusal of the inheritance of wisdom stored up by the experience of their ancestors. They wanted to start from zero and make a new society that played by their rules. Now we have AIDS. This hideous fact, Mr. Wolfe wrote, would force people to relearn the importance of traditional sexual morality. This generation would discover that free sex has a terrible price, that - listen up, Spoiled Children - one can't have something for nothing. Fast-forward five years, to this past Monday's episode of "Geraldo." Michael Musto, who chronicles Manhattan nightlife for the Village Voice, is talking about the return of '70s-style sex clubs. In certain popular discos, there are rooms where patrons can sex each other up under the watchful eye of a monitor, who, Mr. Musto reassures us, tosses out anyone performing any "unsafe" acts. "People just got tired of not having sex," Mr. Musto says. Another panelist added later that to club-goers, "Madonna is God." So much for the Great Relearning. Party onward into the Boomer Presidency. Rod Dreher writes about television and pop culture for The Washington Times. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM