AMERICA IN THE LATE 1980s AND EARLY '90s IS A POLITY OBSESSED
WITHTHERAPIES AND FILLED WITH DISTRUST OF FORMAL POLITICS. IT IS
SKEPTICAL OF AUTHORITY AND PREY TO SUPERSTITION, AND ITS POLITICAL
LANGUAGE IS CORRODED BY FAKE PITY AND EUPHEMISM. IT IS ALSO A CULTURE
THAT HAS REPLACED GLADIATORIAL GAMES, AS A MEANS OF PACIFYING THE MOB,
WITH HIGH-TECH WARS ON TELEVISION THAT CAUSE IMMENSE SLAUGHTER YET LEAVE
THE RULERS IN FULL POWER OVER THEIR SUBJECTS.
Mainly it is women who do the objecting, for due to the prevalence
of mystery religions the men are off in the woods, affirming their
manhood by sniffing one another's armpits and listening to third-rate
poets rant about the moist, hairy satyr that lives inside each of them.
Those who crave a female prophet get Shirley MacLaine and a
35,000-year-old Cro-Magnon warrior named Ramtha who takes up residence
inside a blonde housewife on the West Coast and generates millions of
cult dollars in seminars, tapes, and books.
Meanwhile artists vacillate between a largely self-indulgent
expressiveness and a mainly impotent politicization, and the contest
between education and TV has been won by television, a medium now more
debased than ever before. Even the popular arts, once the wonder and
delight of the world, have decayed.
There was a time when popular music was full of exaltation and pain
and wit--and appealed to grown-ups. Today, instead of the raw intensity
of Muddy Waters or the virile inventiveness of Duke Ellington, we have
Michael Jackson, and from the theatrical compositions of Gershwin and
Cole Porter we are down to illiterate spectaculars about cats or the fall
of Saigon. Even the great American form of rock 'n' roll has become
overtechnologized and run through the corporate grinder until it is 95
percent synthetic.
For the young, more and more, entertainment sets education
standards and creates "truth" about the past. Millions of Americans,
especially young ones, imagined that the truth about the Kennedy
assassination resided in Oliver Stone's vivid, lying film JFK, with its
paranoid elevation of a discredited New Orleans prosecutor into a
political hero beset by an evil, omnipresent military establishment that
murdered Kennedy to keep us in Vietnam. How many of them saw anything
wrong with Stone's frequent claim that he was "creating a counter-myth"
to the Warren Commission's findings, as though one's knowledge of the
past equated with the propagation of myth?
Hollywood's treatment of history used not to matter. But in a time
of televised docudramas and simulations, when the difference between TV
and real events is more and more blurred, such exercises fall into a
mushy, anxious context of suspended disbelief that old Hollywood
pseudohistory never had.
The self is now the sacred cow of American culture, self-esteem is
sacrosanct, and so we labor to turn arts education into a system in which
no one can fail. In the same spirit, tennis could be shorn of its elitist
overtones: You just get rid of the net.
ON VICTIM STATUS
Since our newfound sensitivity decrees that only the victim shall
be the hero, the white American male starts bawling for victim status,
too. Hence the rise of cult therapies that teach that we are all the
victims of our parents; that whatever our folly, venality, or outright
thuggishness, we are not to be blamed for it, since we come from
"dysfunctional families"--and, as John Bradshaw, Melody Beattie, and
other gurus of the 12-step program are quick to point out on no evidence
whatsoever, 96 percent of American families are dysfunctional.
We have been given imperfect role models, or starved of affection,
or beaten, or perhaps subjected to the goatish lusts of Papa; and if we
don't think we have, it is only because we have repressed the memory and
are therefore in even more urgent need of the quack's latest book.
The number of Americans who were abused as children and hence
absolved from all blame for anything they might now do is more or less
equal to the number who, a few years ago, had once been Cleopatra or
Henry VIII. Thus the ether is now jammed with confessional shows in which
a parade of citizens and their role models, from Latoya Jackson to
Roseanne Barr, rise to denounce the sins of their parents, real or
imagined.
Not to be aware of a miserable childhood is prima facie evidence,
in the eyes of Recovery, of "denial"--the assumption being that everyone
had one and is thus a potential source of revenue. The pursuit of the
Inner Child has taken over just at the moment when Americans ought to be
figuring out where their Inner Adult is, and how that disregarded oldster
got buried under the rubble of pop psychology and short-term
gratification.
If the Inner Child doesn't let you off the hook, the embrace of
redemption will. It used to be said that there are no second acts in
American lives. That was before TV started burning out our memory cells.
The public life of America today is largely made up of second acts and
has become an unconvincing parody of the original promise of America as a
place where anyone could make a fresh start. Even David Duke said he was
reborn from Nazism into the brotherhood of Christ--and thousands of
people believed him.
Tags:
armpits,
blonde housewife,
cole porter,
duke ellington,
education standards,
entertainment sets,
exaltation,
expressiveness,
fall of saigon,
female prophet,
muddy waters,
mystery religions,
political language,
politicization,
politics,
polity,
pop culture,
popular arts,
race,
raw intensity,
satyr,
shirley maclaine,
spectaculars,
victim,
women
