I guess it has been a while since I’ve posted a new blog, and I’m not completely sure why I haven’t been more on the ball about it. A lot of things have happened. The entire Beatles catalog was remastered and re-released, Senator Ted Kennedy passed away in the midst of congress battling about Health care reform, two musicians I really admire, Mary Travers and Jim Carroll, have both passed away, and just this week, Roman Polanski was arrested in Zürich for his statutory rape charges from 1977. I guess I was just too broke to repurchase the Beatles catalog, too bummed myself to write obituaries for Kennedy, Travers, and Carroll, and despite my respect for Polanski’s films, too angry at how the Hollywood elite are defending him for drugging and raping a 13 year old.
Senator Kennedy’s passing mattered. So did Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s joint session with the House and Senate on health care reform. Outside of that, I think that cable news has lately made me feel overall apathetic. I think it started in June with the non-stop coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. Never would I argue that Jackson is not an important icon in popular culture. Jackson did for MTV what Jackie Robinson did for baseball. Still, at the end of the day, he was just a pop artist (and those who know me, know that was probably a difficult thing for me to write). I was annoyed to see news crews staked outside of Jackson’s doctor’s office while the legislative branch of government fought about health care. I’ve never had the nicest things to say about most cable news personalities. In fact, as entertaining as I find Keith Olbermann, it makes me absolutely livid that he signs every show off with Edward R. Murrow’s, “Good night and good luck.”
I can’t completely blame the cable news anchors. I’m sure they like their jobs, and they are slaves to ratings. If CNN is discussing health care reform, and MSNBC is discussing Kanye West or Serena Williams, it seems natural that the average American viewer is going to turn to MSNBC. We no longer care about the really important things. All that we want is the really juicy gossip.
Maybe the reason that this bothers me the most is that I feel our current celebrity culture is the most anti-intellectual in decades. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Pierre Bourdieu and Susan Sontag’s writings on high and low culture. In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag wrote:
Ordinarily we value a work of art because of seriousness and diginity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds - in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies behind it. We assume a proper, that is to say, straightforward relation between intention and performance. By such standards, we appraise The Illiad, Aristophanes’ plays, The Art of Fugue, Middlemarch, the paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the poetry of Donne, The Divine Comedy, Beethoven’s quartets, and -among people- Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola. In short, the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.
I’m not sure that anything in the present day truly meets Sontag’s standards of high culture. Those who try their hardest to achieve the “truth, beauty, and seriousness” that she speaks of (Bono immediately comes to mind) often come off looking like a joke. Sontag wrote “Notes on ‘Camp’” in 1964. In 1996, Sontag wrote an essay called “Thirty Years Later...” which was a response to her book Against Interpretation. In this essay, she wrote, “If I’d had to choose between The Doors and Dostoyevsky, then -of course- I’d have chosen Dostoyevsky. But did I have to choose?” The Doors as low culture is debatable. I think about Michael Chabon winning a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, a prize that was well deserved, and how he also contributed to writing the screenplay for Spiderman 2. I think about Billy Murray providing the voice of Garfield the cat. I think about the band Modest Mouse, and how they were immediately dismissed by many of their core fans when they bursted in to the mainstream in 2004 with their album Good News for People Who Love Bad News. By the end of the year, their first single “Float On” was covered by Kidz Bop.
I’m not sure what sense to make of any of this. Jim Morrison and The Doors are lot more respected now than they were when Sontag wrote Against Interpretation, though I would still be hesitant to refer to them as high culture. As much as I love popular music, I can’t say I could really call any of it high culture. Not The Beatles or Pixies. Not U2 or REM. Maybe Bob Dylan. Then again, there was that Victoria’s Secret advertisement he did. Maybe Bob Marley. Still, high culture or not, all of these artists seem to cling to intellectual sensibilities a lot more than someone like Kanye West, Taylor Swift, or anyone else ruling the pop charts currently. Its this desire for ignorance and this gossip concerning the ignorant that now dominates our culture that has recently left me jaded.
I don’t really care that a Pulitzer Prize winner helped write Spiderman 2 or that Bob Dylan was in a Victoria’s Secret ad. I understand that people need to make money (besides Chabon is a huge comic book fan). What worries me is that this need to make money dominates the modern media, and that the people who are supposed to be keeping us informed are more interested in reporting on low culture. Perhaps the problem is just with cable news. Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and Charles Gibson only have an hour to fill, and they can’t particularly use that up with an extended discussion of Kanye West or Serena Williams. The problem is that a lot of young adults like myself have not yet found their way into a 9 - 5 career and are dependent on 24 hour news networks to tell us what is going on in our world. Of course, then again who is to say that politics falls under high culture in this debate?
Then there is the case of John Edwards. Typically, I would say that his affair with Rielle Hunter was between him, Hunter, and his wife Elizabeth, yet the fact that he was running for the highest office of the land at the time he began the affair makes me think differently. Was this just juicy gossip? Perhaps. Still, I feel that Edwards should have learned something from Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. What if Edwards had won the nomination of the Democratic party and then won the election? Surely, this scandal would have hurt him shortly after taking office. I know that Edwards is not the first politician to have an affair, but during the time of the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton’s indiscretions did bring unneeded stress to the country. Clinton’s affair does not change the fact that he was, overall, a good president, nor would Edwards’ affair have changed any good that he also might have done as President. I guess I just feel that because of the reputation that the United States has gained overseas due to the Bush years, the last thing we would have needed would be for our President to enter office with an immediate scandal.
Should I say “good job” to the media for this one (or worse yet, “good job” to the National Enquirer)? I’m not completely sure.
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