AMERICA’S GREAT CULTURAL DIVIDE

I’m not sure what terms to use to describe the different groups on the opposite sides of the cultural divide in America. That the divide exists there can be no doubt. What to call them is not as important as acknowledging the enormous gap between what used to be designated as “high brow and low brow” culture.  Or should we say popular and serious culture? Is that more “politically correct”? In any case, let’s break it down by category:

Newspapers: The less said about tabloid and checkbook journalism the better. We all know what they are selling and why. Then we have The New York Times.

Magazines: Huge first group: Sex and celebrity gossip, fashion and luxury lifestyles. Scanty second group: National Geographic, Mother Jones, the Humanist, The Nation, Commentary, New York Review of Books.

Television: On one side, a plethora of reality shows, celebrity shows, talk shows, sit coms, and general fluff and nonsense. On the other, public television, BBC dramas, some serious in-depth interviews and journalism.

Movies: The vast ocean of entertainment is of course Hollywood movies. The small voice crying out with its head barely above the waves is that of some independent low-budget artistic feature films and documentaries. The auteur director Woody Allen is perhaps the only exception: he has managed to make consistently entertaining movies with psychological depth and witty social commentary.

Music: Pop music is everywhere and it all but drowns out jazz and classical. We have wonderful symphony orchestras struggling all over the country, we have Tanglewood and many other regional and local summer festivals of classical, jazz, blues, and folk, New York has the Metropolitan Opera as well as other opera companies, there are many small opera companies scattered throughout the land, and there are still many public radio stations broadcasting classical music, folk and jazz. And let’s not forget the concerts held at every university.

Theater: There’s Broadway looming above the nation with its bright lights and loud mixture of melodies both past and present. Broadway tends to dominate the theatrical life and consciousness of the country.  Opposing this are the many small theater companies of New York City that stage new work by emerging and established American and European playwrights. Every state in the union has a regional theater company, and some are thriving, some do quite well, most struggle, but none of them could survive on ticket sales alone and all of them are dependent on some form of sponsorship and expend a great deal of time and energy on fundraising. There are many fine college and university productions of the classics.

Books: The gargantuan commercial publishers of New York have swallowed up most of the serious literary publishers such as Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Knopf, Random House, Atheneum, and Scribner’s. They stand like so many colossi astride the main river of book publishing. One great exception is New Directions, the house started by James Laughlin. However, we still have many small presses around the country, presses run by the blood and sweat of dedicated men and women who love literature and are devoted to its preservation at all costs – publishers such as Steerforth in Vermont, Coffeehouse Press in Minneapolis, City Lights Books in San Francisco, Melville House in New York,, and many, many others, as well as august university presses such as Yale, Harvard, and Wesleyan.

In conclusion, there has always been some sort of cultural divide in America, and no doubt there always will be. But never before in our history has culture been so polarized and the division so deeply entrenched. The mainstream or low brow or popular culture seems to grow stronger and bigger every day, perhaps because of the internet, while high brow or serious culture is weakened by the lack of big profits and seems to become more marginalized and in danger of being labeled as “elitist” simply by virtue of its appeal to a smaller and smaller segment of the populace. Yes, there are exceptions, as always and with everything – new generations of young people who study the classics, dedicate their careers to classical music or jazz, discover the opera, and follow young classical musicians on YouTube and in concert halls, but they are relatively few and rare compared with the numbers of fans and followers of popular culture.