Last Tuesday, I was sitting in my recliner chair, and just like any other Tuesday night, I was doing what most Americans do on that day - I was watching American Idol. It's like a drug, a torrid love affair, a guilty pleasure like watching hockey or eating macaroni and cheese from the box. And now, since I've had time to really let the experience settle in, I've come to one conclusion, and it's really the only conclusion one can come from after watching that show - oh, boy, are we in trouble.
American culture, if one can even claim there is such a thing, is in the toilet. Wait, scratch that - it is a toilet, one that takes all the predigested, market-tested, sterile entertainment the world has to offer, dumps it into time slots and lets America obsess. Mine is a generation whose sole contribution to the world is the phrase "More cowbell!" We are the inventors of the Weird Al's of the world, the purveyors of classless, shallow laughs, distillers of wit and fart jokes, consumers of anything with a shiny coat of bullshit.
But like I said, I was watching American Idol. I'm not a victim of the system, I'm an active participant, a knowing conspirator in the death of culture.
I cannot help but ask, how did we get here? What has changed in the last few hundred years that has caused us to remove any value in entertainment, any sense of intelligence to consumerism - where, O' God, did we go wrong? Are there some hidden toxins in our food that make up prefer ass jokes to Shakespeare?
When comparing the popular culture of a few hundred years ago to today, one must come to a conclusion that humanity is on its way out. In the span of civilized culture all throughout the world, it has been in the last 30 years that popular culture has utterly dumbed down. Gone are the poets, the great novelists, the witty playwrites and meaningful discussions on all things laughter and sex. Now, we are given lust, greed, violence, fear, distaste, and vulgarity, and they call it "good fun". Don't get me wrong , this isn't a moral lesson, it's a matter of taste!
I recall studying the medieval town of Florence, Italy this last semester. In its time, it stood as a monument of culture, one of the greatest cities since Rome's Golden Age. In the evenings, the people would gather in a commons area to discuss love, religion, politics, art, sex ... whatever was important at the time, then disperse to cafes for dinner, then perhaps catch a public reading of Dante's Divine Comedy or Machiavelli's The Prince. And this was their entertainment! It was their way of unwinding after a particularly hard day weaving cloth or perhaps changing money. And this was the way of the antiquated world - community, intelligence, and art were entertainment, not aversions to it.
Now, thanks in large part to the advent of television and film, our tastes have been homogenized to whatever those in power (also known as those in money) deem tasteful for us. We are just driftwood on a tide of incoming and outgoing trends and styles, blank slates to be dressed up in the latest sitcom, torturous horror film, or catch-phrase.
That's not to say that there's not the occasional gem in today's pop culture bog. I recently saw the film Stranger than Fiction and was utterly moved by it - it was graceful, understated, witty, and, get this, meaningful. It shot me back to the times I long so much to be a part of - it was a slice of antiquated goodness. And from time to time, there are those moments in modern culture that beg us to return to that goodness, the Schindler's Lists among the Hostels, if you will. It is in those brilliant moments that I find myself lost in antiquity, nostalgic for a time that I will never know - I remember, with my classicist imagination, a time when life was beautiful, when art was culture, and community was self. And I yearn for that attitude to return.
But until then, I'll keep rooting for the guy with the gray hair. And keep finding myself adrift on an ocean of meaninglessness.
