Last month the dominatrixes of the Federal Communications
Commission spanked CBS with a $550,000 fine for broadcasting Mr.
Justin Timberlake and Ms. Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime
flash-dance routine. It was just one of many raunchy interludes
during a remarkable broadcast that included horse-farting
commercials, risqué impotency ads, and performances by the
reliably vulgar Kid Rock, the crotch-clasping Nelly and a
contingent of nubile strippers. Yet only the fleeting glimpse of
Ms. Jackson’s teat warranted a fine. (To put the penalty in
perspective, parent company Viacom’s 2003 operating income was $1.2
billion.)
Most viewers, doubtless well-oiled by half-time, didn’t blink an
eye during the MTV-produced Raunch-Fest, so saturated are we with
coarseness and vulgarity in our everyday lives, from morning
breakfast zoos to late night with Jerry Springer. But a record
number of outraged sports fans did lodge complaints (Mothers
Against Half-Time Hooters?), which apparently forced the usually
laissez faire FCC to stir its vast and ponderous bureaucratic
bulk.
All of which put me in mind of a certain prophecy by that
latter-day Nostradamus, the social critic Daniel Bell. Mr. Bell’s
Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism foretold how
capitalism and its cultural legacy would plant the seeds of its own
destruction by creating a desire among successful people for
personal gratification, a desire that weakens the work ethic that
led to their success in the first place. A quarter century has
passed since Bell’s prediction and the work ethic remains strong.
Today’s professionals compete against one another over who can work
the most unpaid overtime hours, take the fewest vacation days, or
pack the most satellite communication devices off with them on
their honeymoon. Indeed it is everything but the work ethic that
seems bound for Gehenna. In particular our popular culture, which
has gone way beyond simply mirroring normal teen-age rebellion and
upper class slumming to an unprecedented mainstreaming of
Raunch.
Mr. Bell seems to have confused free-market capitalism with
Western-style democracy as the true instrument of our undoing.
Okay, maybe undoing is a bit strong, but the anecdotal evidence
does seem to suggest that secular Western-style democracy is giving
a big push to our culture’s continuing freefall. The great irony is
that the same principles that allowed the West its unprecedented
wealth and freedoms — of speech, of the press, of religion — may
very well be instigating its decline. Irony is usually good for a
chuckle. So why isn’t any one laughing?
THE SYMPTOMS, IT MUST BE obvious, are all around us and especially
pronounced in our popular culture: from the New York
Times’s Best Seller List featuring porn star Jenna Jameson’s
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star (co-authored, naturally)
to the BET Network’s misogynistic gangsta videos. And yet the
antidote — a curb on our freedom to behave like drunken British
soccer hooligans after a loss to Spain-is doubtless worse than the
disease, depending on who administers that magic elixir.
Over the course of the last century as academia, the government
and the justice system liberalized, America was transformed from a
rather repressive society that banned booze and Sister Carrie to
one whose most respected media gives glowing reviews to South Park:
Bigger, Longer & Uncut (“So gleefully vulgar, so eagerly
offensive, it’s tough not to get down on all fours and beg for
more” — Los Angeles Times). Certainly the court
challenges that cleared the way for the publication of the last
century’s two greatest novelists — James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence
— were great moments in libertarian history, but they also opened
the floodgates whereby virtually everything, no matter how indecent
and awful, was celebrated and protected. American society long had
been deeply anti-intellectual; now among the casualties of the new
liberalism were modesty, shame, good manners, and common decency,
leaving only various primitive forms of expression. It was a new
curiosity pinpointed by Rabbi Daniel Lapin in his 1995 National
Review essay “In Defense of Shame”:
“When we study social decay, the question is not what brought
foul-mouthed louts to menace shoppers in our malls. Instead, the
critical questions are these: Why was a visitor to a theater or
department store in the 1950s surrounded by neatly dressed people
who exuded politeness and consideration? Why, back then were our
buses, parks, and other public places safe at all hours of the
night? What made most young people marry and raise children
responsibly? That was the miracle; what we see now is nature.”
Nature being the operative word. For the past five decades
America has been steadily ridding itself of 3,000 years of Western
civilization and returning to a Rousseaunian “state of innocence.”
Which is doubtless why such primitive accoutrements as tattoos and
nose rings are so popular today. Such expression was impossible a
hundred years ago when the common folks’ base instincts and
passions were held in check by moral codes enforced by stern
patriarchs, grim pastors, strict principals, no-nonsense cops, and
nosy community watch groups. Now that such codes have been declared
unconstitutional, sexist, or just too plain inhibiting it is
getting more and more difficult to tell the zookeeper from the zoo
animals, or to prevent middle class kids from aping the Drug Thug
Culture of the ghetto. (You’ll note that the phenomenon doesn’t
work both ways. Low and middle class blacks do not parrot the
mannerisms of hillbillies.)
TOM WOLFE HAS SUGGESTED that the middle class has adopted Raunch
culture out of fear — fear of being envied by the lower classes, a
mindless dread brought on by the guilt of being born well off. It
is a culpability peculiar to an egalitarian democratic society,
especially a schizophrenic one where there are the conflicting
pressures to achieve the American Dream through hard work and study
coupled with extreme guilt when one does indeed succeed.
No doubt conservatives will continue to rail against the
vulgarity and coarseness of modern life — but already Raunch is a
large part of the cultural mainstream. The FCC may occasionally
appease a few offended mothers’ groups by coquettishly slapping
Howard Stern’s wrist, but the FCC has no control over what raunchy
spectacles occur in our homes and public spaces. It is there that
Raunch, like a scene cut from The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers,
has slipped largely undetected into our everyday lives,
Since classical times there have been numerous moral
reformations aimed at halting the slide into degeneracy, but
without exception these have been enforced by strongmen like
Augustine, Calvin, Cromwell, Wesley and the Ayatollah Khomeini, and
occurred within societies with far fewer freedoms than we are used
to. Besides modern Western-style democracies are notoriously
reluctant to legislate morality, for one party’s definition of
morality is likely another’s idea of bigotry. Nor will
conservatives risk having the “morals” and “values” of liberals,
old school feminists and New Victorians imposed during such a
reformation.
Just as 40 years ago the idea of a wildly popular TV show called
Sex in the City wherein single women discuss penis sizes
would have been unimaginable, Americans cannot possibly imagine the
Raunch culture of tomorrow. Though we are certainly free to
try.
