What Celebrity Culture Has Wrought

That an individual as shallow as Donald Trump could run for president and get so much media attention is the inevitable result of America's obsession with celebrities and the culture of celebrity worship. Trump is the product of that culture. He has been called a "false prophet" by Mexico's past and current presidents. I think that is a very fitting epithet -- his public babble is extremely dangerous, and if taken seriously by the moronic masses it will only lead to destruction on a "huge" scale.

A Few English-American Pop Culture Satires

DOWNTOWN CABBY, the newest import by PBS from the BBC

The shocking drama of a London cab driver's family caught up in the conflicts brought upon them by their sudden and unexpected wealth. When a rider dies of a heart attack in the back of  Bob Crowley's cab, he discovers a lottery ticket in the pocket of the man's suit. He keeps it and the next day learns that he has the winning ticket to a jackpot of ten million pounds. He now becomes one of the most affluent of London's upper crust and buys a mansion in the country. His crabby aging mother and both his wife's annoying parents move in with him and his wife and three daughters. A few years later, when he is diagnosed with a fatal disease and given a few months to live, he must decide how to divide his wealth among his three daughters and tells them that whoever proves she loves him the most will get the largest share of the family fortune. Set in merry old England at the turn of the century.

MISS MARBLES MOVES IN by Aghasta Christie

In this latest BBC production of an Aghasta Christie novel, Miss Jane Marbles is feeling bored in London. There haven’t been any murders in days and she is at loose ends, so she decides to visit her cousin Emily in the country.

She arrives in Manchester on a Friday evening and the next morning the local pastor is found dead in the rectory. Her cousin tells her to leave at once because every time she comes to visit someone is murdered. Offended and frustrated that she won’t be able to stay long enough to solve the crime, Miss Marbles boards the Flying Scotsman for Edinburgh. She arrives at her great nephew’s castle, the Wee Dreadful, and later that day the gardener is found dead in the greenhouse. Her great nephew insists she take the Flying Scotsman home, saying, “I’m so sorry, Auntie Jane, but every time you come to visit someone is found dead on the property. The neighbors are beginning to talk. Have some tea while old Donnie packs your bags.”

On an impulse Miss Marbles decides to disembark from the Flying Scotsman at Sheffield so she can drop in on her old friend, Lizzie. As she is walking up the path to Lizzie’s cottage, she hears someone scream. She rushes to the door and knocks loudly. A woman’s voice from inside the cottage cries out, “Go away, Jane!” Crestfallen, Miss Marbles trudges back to the station and waits overnight for the morning train.

As the train pulls into the station Miss Marbles picks up her suitcase and waits to board, feeling rather downcast at not having solved any of the murders. She gets on and finds a seat. A moment later she thinks she hears the sound of a gunshot, but she can’t be sure. She asks the conductor who is taking tickets if he heard a gunshot. “You must be Jane Marbles,” he replies. “Take your suitcase and come along with me.” Miss Marbles happily follows the conductor thinking, “At last. I have a crime to solve. And this time no one will tell me to leave.” As she is passing between the train cars she is suddenly shoved out the door, making a hard landing on top of her suitcase beside the tracks. Flummoxed, she stands up and brushes herself off. Fortunately she is unharmed, but her pride is terribly wounded. But she is a plucky woman. She grabs her suitcase and begins walking to the nearest police station where she hopes she can be of use, or at least find a ride back to London. 

Charles Dickens on Oprah

NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Dickens, how do you feel about having two of your books, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, chosen by Oprah for her book club?

CHARLES DICKENS: Who’s Oprah?

NYT: An African American woman with a nationally broadcast television show.

CD: Ah, I see. And this means . . . ?

NYT: That more people will buy and read your books. They will give them as Christmas gifts to people they think will enjoy them. You see, it’s all about marketing and publicity. There are too many books being published today and readers are overwhelmed.

CD: Really? But they should already know about my books because they are classics, shouldn‘t they?

NYT: True, but as Mark Twain said, classics are books everybody talks about but nobody reads.

NYT: Yes, Mark did have a great sense of humor, different from mine but still as great. Well, here’s what I have to say about all this marketing hype . . . Bah humbug! If Americans are in need of some television personality to tell them what’s worth reading then you’re a nation of very silly people! And I wish you good day, sir.  

THE ROYAL BALLYHOO, a dialogue with the Cynic

CYNIC: Why hasn’t humanity had enough of monarchs, royal bloodlines, aristocracy, and ogliarchs? Why aren’t we heartily sick of of throne-sitters and other such parasites?

REPORTER: I wonder too, but I don’t have an answer. I was hoping you might enlighten me.

CYNIC: Bah, humbug!

REPORTER: Okay. Well, what do you think of the “Royal Baby” phenomenon?

CYNIC: Why all this fuss over a child born into the House of Windsor? Do we really believe that this baby is somehow superior to all others because of his paternal bloodline? After all, only one of his parents is “royal,” and that parent is himself only a half-royal given that his mother, Diana “the Princess” Spencer, was herself from a family of non-royals. Similarly, President Obama is called black or African American despite the fact that he is bi-racial.

REPORTER: Good point. I guess a lot of people have a hang-up about the Queen and her family. And not just in England.

CYNIC: What foolishness. Their lives are very empty, and they need some kind of a thrill. They want to believe in the myth of an elite eschelon of superior beings. It gives them a sense of security, but at the same time they hate them for being rich and privileged.

REPORTER: Exactly.

CYNIC: So why all the media frenzy and public ballyhoo? Thousands of children are born everyday to loving parents, and if each child, healthy or not, wealthy or not, is indeed a miracle then why aren’t the news media crowding around a few other hospital entrances with their cameras thrust forward like the hungry maws of so many sharks? What a royal farce!

REPORTER: May I quote you on that?

CYNIC: Absolutely.

THE OVER-THERE STORY

Feeling overwhelmed, I went into my local pub and sat down in my overcoat for over and hour. I thought, “I wish this episode was over.”  It all started over lunch, when he told me it was over, and I started feeling over the hill, thrown over for a younger lover. Damn it! I fell into a funk and thought seriously about taking an overdose of my over-the-counter drugs, just to get it over with. But I heard it takes over five hours for them to take effect. Huh! Is it worth it? I guess I’m just over-reacting. I’m starting to feel I’m over it already. Time to turn over a new leaf, I guess. I’ll call my closest friend and ask her to come over. Better yet, I’ll invite her out to a restaurant and we can talk about it over dinner.

Today's Cultural Immaturity

To sum up the current state of American culture, I’d have to say it has a brilliantly glittering surface but no depth, very much like American culture of the 1920s. It took an economic crash and the Great Depression to restore some gravitas to American thinking, which gradually found its way into American society and culture in general.

Let’s look at the reception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Tender is the Night, as an example. Fitzgerald worked hard on that book for nine years, harder than he had worked on his previous three novels, including The Great Gatsby, and when it came out in 1939 it sold a mere 12,000 copies and was all but dismissed by the critics as lacking in wisdom and maturity. Although Malcolm Cowley has written that it remained in people’s minds “like an unanswered question,” and Hemingway said that it got better and better in retrospect, most readers in the years that followed its publication found it difficult to care much about its wealthy and privileged main characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, as they struggle to overcome marital discord while enjoying life on the French Riviera. I wouldn’t completely dismiss the novel as shallow – it does have some emotional resonance – but I wonder if it is about to be rediscovered by readers who don’t care much about wisdom and maturity in the books they read. (The story does reflect the lives of many privileged people today, particularly celebrities and movie stars.)

At the present time, American culture has returned to its adolescence, to the frivolities of the 1920s, and many of us who love and value the seriousness it once had must wait for it to mature all over again. Will it take another global disaster on the scale of the Great Depression to bring that about?

Pulp Culture

Without a doubt, the US is the world’s most outrageous producer of pulp fiction and moronic mass entertainment. That’s a reality I’ve accepted and have learned how to ignore. If the majority of Americans want to veg out in front of the idiot box after a hard day’s work, or take their families to see the latest mindless comedy or hardcore special-effects “product” calling itself a “movie,” or numb themselves to sleep with a romance or crime novel, that’s their business, and who am I to tell them they can’t?

But what gets me really worked up is the inescapable reality that Americans in general are hostile to anything that is serious art, be it a book, a painting or a film, anything, that is, that has a challenging theme, anything that questions their fundamental prejudices. The average American just doesn’t like new ideas. He is fiercely hostile to them because he feels threatened by anything out of the ordinary. Complex works of art undermine his basic beliefs and if he tries to think about them they only end up confusing him. And anything that confuses him is just not worth bothering about. Art must be simple – in the worst sense – it must provide him with an escape from drudgery, from harsh reality, from the meaninglessness of making money, and from the senselessness of convention. It must validate his own ignorance. And most importantly, it must distract him from the emptiness of his life.

Now take a pulp author whose books are still going strong as an example – Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan series, as well as westerns and science fiction. As a young man with a family to support, Burroughs worked at a variety of low-paying jobs. He read pulp fiction in magazines such as Argosy and decided he too could write such rot (his own words) for money. Yes, for money – that’s the key to it all. How any self-respecting individual could spend a lifetime writing “rot” for money when there are so many other interesting ways to make a living is hard for me to grasp. Burroughs was well educated and came from a family that had fought in the Revolution, He was an American brahmin and his attitude towards his readers was scornful, condescending, patronizing, and contemptuous. No doubt all writers of pulp fiction feel the same way. They hate themselves for writing it and hate their readers even more.

What would people do if there weren’t a pulp culture? If Americans had nothing else to satisfy their need for escapism and entertainment, they would learn to read the classics or go to the opera or the theater. Or they would amuse themselves with games or singing or playing musical instruments with a group of like-minded folks. They would find ways to have fun by using their creative abilities (just like children do) rather than succumbing to mind-numbing mass entertainment falsely identified as “culture.”

What Killed the 60s Counterculture Movement?

Having come of age in the 1960s, I can say from personal experience that it was the most vibrant cultural flowering of my lifetime so far, and it is not likely that it will ever be matched for breadth and depth. But it was as much a deep spiritual movement as it was artistic. The Beatles music began as highly romantic ballads and became increasingly spiritual as they innovated and grew into a world phenomenon. Other rock groups followed suit. Folk artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez made social justice and political reform their first priority over selling records. Yoga was popularized in the US during that period, which taught American youth how to begin searching for greater self awareness and, ultimately, greater enlightenment. And so on. I don’t need to elaborate as most of this historical information has been discussed in the media for quite some time.

A few weeks before the death of David Bowie I started thinking about when and how the movement came to an end. This aspect of the issue hasn’t been given due consideration as far as I know. My impression is that the decline began in the late 70s and gave out its last gasp in the early 1980s. Since then, we’ve had a mass entertainment culture that is more and more shallow and profit-driven. Anything that makes money seems to be the MO of Hollywood, the television networks, the record industry, and the major book and magazine publishers. Ironically, the emptiness of contemporary culture has driven the younger generation back to the 60s for inspiration. That’s a good thing.  But the negative side is that commercial interests on a mega scale are cannibalizing the 1960s counter culture movement for whatever will sell.

I believe there is general agreement that artists such John Lennon, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Glenn Frey (of the Eagles), David Byrne (of the Talking Heads), and Frank Zappa, to name only a few of the best, were dynamic forces who had a far-reaching and deeply lasting influence on popular culture, an influence that is unmatched by contemporary rock musicians. They all came of age and into their own when the music industry served art, rather than what it is today – art serving the for-profit industry. Today music videos and web streaming predominate, and the internet is an overheated, overhyped breeding ground for mediocrity.

Is it possible to reverse this trend? Is it possible for serious musicians to gain a foothold somewhere on the huge mountain of the pop culture media without compromising their artistic integrity? I’m doubtful, but I hope so.

A Hypothetical Question (Maybe)

The British physicist Stephen Hawking says the Earth is doomed but humanity will survive by moving to another planet. So the question is: If you could only take 10 books with you, what would they be? I doubt that I would want to move to Planet X, or wherever, so I would most likely perish with our home planet. But if I had to choose 10 books, here's my list:

Dante's Divine Comedy
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or Women in Love
Twain's Huckleberry Finn
Tolstoy's War and Peace or Anna Karenina
Dicken's Pickwick Papers
The Bible
Whitman's The Leaves of Grass
Homer's Odyssey
Ovid's Metamorphoses

These books were a very tough choice, and no doubt I would revise it a few times before leaving. But my point is that I would never consider anything that was not a classic that had stood the test of time and my own enduring love. Would anyone with half a brain take a current bestseller?

This collective "Library in Space" could be the foundation of a New Culture.

Please add your own list.

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.