The other day I found myself trapped
next to the lobotomy box in the house of a friend. The show was one of those
dismal productions based on sexual innuendo, the sort that I would have found
titillating when I was eleven. The format was not complex. Neither, I suspect,
was the audience.
Several shapeless young couples sat together. The host asked them seriatim
such questions as, “Other than your wife, who did you last take a shower
with?” or “What part of your anatomy does your husband most like
to kiss?” The studio audience invariably moaned, “Oooooooooooooooooh!”
like third-graders who have heard a bad word. The couples themselves giggled
with delicious embarrassment, also in the manner of dimwitted children.
I happily imagined sending them to some barely heard-of tribe in the Amazon
Basin for use in human sacrifice. Almost human. Something involving army ants
would have done nicely.
The sexual reference didn’t offend me. I have misspent more hours in
third-world skin bars than those people had aggregate brain cells, which means
at least three skin bars. I’ve seen raunchy sex shows to the point of
boredom, and am not real shockable. Pornography doesn’t upset me. If I
had to choose whether my kids watched Dory Does Dallas, or Oprah, I
might go with Dory.
No, it was the infantilism, the snickering, low-IQ tastelessness of a class
of people who have no class. These, with their childish prurience and slum-dweller’s
aversion to civilized existence, now dominate American culture. Anyone who points
out that they are crass finds himself attacked as elitist—which, since
elitism simply means the view that the better is preferable to the worse, all
people should be.
We are not supposed to use phrases like “the lower orders,” which
is the best of reasons for using them. Yet the lower orders exist. Their members
are not necessarily poor, and the poor are not necessarily members. Nor is the
level of schooling a reliable indicator of loutdom. Nor is intelligence or race
a particularly good marker. One may be a moral moron without being unable to
tie one’s shoes. Rather the lower orders consist of people who think fart
jokes uproarious.
How did we get here? Probably Henry Ford bears responsibility. He paid workers
on his assembly lines a good wage. This was as culturally deplorable as it was
economically admirable. Before, the unwashed had lacked the money to impose
their tastes, or lack of them, on the society. The moneyed classes of the time
may have been reprehensible or contemptible in various ways, but they minded
their manners—if only because it set them apart from the lower orders,
perhaps, yet it worked. The middle class likewise eschewed bathroom humor except
in such venues as locker rooms, probably for the same reasons. Still, they knew
what “distasteful” meant.
But as the peasantry and proletariat gained economic power, inevitably they
also asserted dominance over the arts, or entertainment as the arts came to
be under their sway, as well as schooling and the nature of acceptable discourse.
If millions of people who can afford SUVs want scatological humor, television
will accommodate them. Since all watch the same television, no class of people
will escape the sex-and-sewage format. This happened. Today the cultivated can
no longer insulate themselves from the rabble.
The fear of social inferiority always concerns the peasantariat: “You
ain’t no gooder’n me.” Until the sudden florescence of pay
packets occurred, the lower orders had either accepted that they were
the lower orders, however resentfully, or tried to rise. They might learn to
speak good English, read widely, and cultivate good manners. Or they might not.
If they did, it was likely to work, since in America those who behave and speak
like gentlefolk (another inadmissible word) will usually be accepted as such.
In either case, they did not impose their barbarousness on others.
Ah, but with their new-found and enormous purchasing power, they discovered
that they could do more than compel the production of skateboards, trashy television,
and awful music. They could make boorish childishness and ignorance into actual
virtues. And did. Thus wretched grammar is now a sign of “authenticity,”
whatever that might mean, rather than of defective studies. Thus the solemnity
with which rap “music” is taken. Briefly the sound of the black
ghetto, it is now around the world the heraldic emblem of the angry unwashed.
Thus the degradation of the schools: It is easier to declare oneself educated
than to actually become so, and the half-literate now had the power to have
themselves so declared.
With the debasement of society came a simultaneous, though not necessarily
related, extension of childhood and adolescence. In the remote prehistorical
past, which for most today means anything before 1900, the young assumed responsibility
early. It wasn’t a moral question, but a practical one. If the plowing
didn’t get done, the family didn’t eat. By the age of eighteen,
a boy was likely to carry a man’s burdens.
Today, no. Now a combination of the enstupidation of the schools, the inflation
of grades, and the threat of class-action suits by the parents of failing students
means that an adolescent can graduate without assuming any burden whatsoever.
Indeed escaping schooling is easier than finding it. Countless colleges will
accept almost anyone and graduate almost anyone. Chores do not exist. Sex and
drugs are everywhere available. Few things have obvious consequences.
The result is a cocoon of childhood that stretches on almost as long as one
wants it to. I encounter adults in their mid-twenties who cannot be relied upon
to show up at an appointed time, who do not read, who judge a professor by whether
he makes the material “fun,” who have no idea where they want to
go in life. It is not grownup behavior.
I wonder whether a democracy can ever prosper without declining fast into tasteless
decadence. Half of the population is of intelligence below the average, this
being the nature of a symmetric distribution. Another goodly number aren’t
much better. Once they discover that together they can both sanctify and very
nearly require bad behavior and low tastes, will they not do so? With control
of the media goes control of the culture. Such is the power of the market.
Thus staged television shows in which fat couples shriek obscenities at each
other over discovered infidelities, adipose couplings of no significance yet
so absorbing to an audience both puerile and uncouth—but, I suppose, authentic.
“Oooooooooooooooooooooh!”
.
Fred On Everything
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Which
may or may not be a good thing. At any rate, there are other twisted,
brain-fried wackos out there who have too much time on their hands
and read this stuff, probably while cleaning their guns. But don't
worry. This site wraps its IP packets in plain brown envelopes marked
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extent that counters mean any thing, which isn't much of an extent,
this sucker gives the number of columns read, not counting subscribers,
since Monday, October 8, 2002. Whoopee-do. More or less.
Nekkid
in Austin
Buy Fred's new reprehensible
book, Nekkid In Austin! Barnes and Noble has the beast. Another collection
of outrages, irresponsible ravings, and curmudgeonry from Fred On Everything
and some innocent magazines that foolishly published him. Put Fred Reed
in the search at thingy at B&N and the book will pop up like mushrooms
on a decaying stump. Tell everyone you came to the site by mistake while
searching for articles on cannibalism. Your childhood made you do it.
We're all victims nowadays.
The Great
Possum-Squashing
and Beer Storm of 1962
Stock up. Christmas will
eventually come again, if it isn't outlawed.Possum-Squashingis a better present than an ugly tie. At least as good anyway.
