On New Year’s, Lady Gaga showed much of America where the Gag in her name came from as she kissed New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on live television. A dozen days later, outrage spread across the Muslim world as a video of four Marines urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban soldiers spread across the Internet. These two incidents were widely separated in space, but not in spirit, for they are both manifestations of a broad cultural decline unlike any since the fall of Rome.
As far back as the 1890s, the American way of life has been increasingly dominated by what many historians refer to as a culture of consumption, a term which includes our preoccupation with shopping, pride of ownership, getting ahead of the Jones’ and other such manifestations of worship of our national idol, money. The cultivation of this ethos by our businessmen and politicians required a lot of glitz and glamour in order to properly motivate people to buy products, for example in the constant bombardment of advertising we have suffered for the last century. By the ‘70s it had degenerated further into what historian Christopher Lasch called the “culture of narcissism,” a concept that explained the new atmosphere of egoism during the “Me Decade.” Its widely differing manifestations included a sudden proliferation of self-help books and the new emphasis on self-esteem in psychology, all of which occurred on top of a further growth in the self-centered focus on money that came before it. Both the narcissism and the consumerism that plagued our culture in the last century are still with us, but like a ceilings in a broken building that is collapsing from the weight of the floorboards above it, the cultures of narcissism and consumption have given way to something far worse. In the last decade or so, we have fallen further to an even lower level that might best be described as the Culture of Contempt.
A Litmus Test for the Gutter
In every age before this, America and the Western civilization that birthed it brought forth a rich variety of art, music and literature, most of which deserves our respect, even if we do not like it. For example, it is possible for a musician to be irritated by opera or fail to find joy in singing old Irish folk songs, but still respect them as legitimate art forms; the fact that they exist is good, because someone, somewhere is getting enjoyment out of them. When Western civilization began to learn the valuable principles of tolerance and seeing good in other cultures in the middle of the last century, however, we forgot the opposite lesson, that there is plenty potential for evil as well as good in every art form, just as there is in every culture. As a result, we now have reached a pitiful situation where anyone calling themselves an artist can demand applause for anything they do, whether it is actually an art form or not - especially if it sells well - regardless of how affects the conduct of the viewer or even whether or not it provides any pleasure to anyone, even the artist. Judging whether or not an art form is valid or not of course carries with it the risk of snobbery, so it is helpful to have a clear litmus test that we can apply to discern the level of dissoluteness. Some of the warning signs include a habit of rehashing the old ideas of previous generations and making them their own, without adding anything of substance; the mixing in of more and more sex of increasing depravity; gradual transformation of heroes into villains in theater; greater amounts of violence against victims who deserve it less and less; and a general lack of restraint that makes the skillful cultivation of a good storyline impossible in works of fiction. Throughout human history, one of the most cogent signs of degeneration has been the substitution of shock value for content, in which the breaking of taboos becomes the attraction itself. In the absence of any good fruit of their own, such artists must titillate audiences with forbidden fruits. And because such fruits are usually forbidden for the very sound reason that they are rotten, the stench has to be covered up with increasing amounts of glamour and glitz, just as a mortician has to put makeup on a corpse. Forbidden fruits aren’t nutritious, so they leave those who consume them more ravenous than ever for greater doses of shock value, creating a vicious circle of degeneracy. These distinctive marks of cultural decline have occurred in many times and places throughout human history, but have never proliferated over such a vast section of humanity at such a rapid speed as they have in Western civilization since our last great culture explosion, which ended in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. One of the first signs was a gradual substitution of nihilism for passion in American music, as the new wave and punk movements protested against the self-importance and atmosphere of profundity found in the ‘60s. Rockers like Sex Pistols were among the first warning signs of a sort of contempt for content that has since spread into every other aspect of Western art and literature. The only mission of our new breed of artists is to remove any feeling from their works, save that of revulsion and to negate the very principle of art by intentionally making their work devoid of meaning. Increasingly, our least talented pop artists are not just shallow shams, but are proud of their banality and lack of talent; mediocrity has become a badge of success. The embers of our last great cultural explosion in the ‘60s are being deliberately put out by this cold tidal wave, which is why the proportion of legitimate art has steadily decreased over the last four decades. Many of the signs of our cultural decline have occurred in ages past in various corners of the world, save for this one disturbing new symptom: a growing proportion of our artists are not only bad, but take pride in the fact that they are bad. The best of them are almost ashamed of their talent, so they feel forced to mix in some sign of crudity, but the worst of them don’t receive any enjoyment for their own works. Certainly, they will demand applause for them for reasons of pride, but they have breached a crucial barrier of sanity, in that they are now proud not of being good enough to provide their audience with some content, but are proud of the fact that they have no content at all.
If we use this litmus test, then the signs of depravity in American culture are proliferating with each passing decade. One of the most disgusting symptoms is this almost irresistible compulsion many artists now have with staining every work they produce with some sort of reference to toilet humor. This has gone beyond the point of merely laughing at flatulence like junior high school boys to becoming an obsession among grown adults in powerful places, like comedians, Hollywood script writers and authors of fiction, none of whom can seem to resist the temptation to mention a bathroom function of some kind. What I am speaking of goes beyond the antics of cartoons like South Park, which consciously push the envelope and make an explicit joke out of breaking such taboos. All of that detracts from the true brilliance of creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, which sometimes still shines through, almost like a flashlight with mud on it.[1] Even in the history of South Park, however, you can trace an interior decline as the creators have become less funny with each passing season, in tandem with their dependence on shock value. In the beginning they could at least say that they made ingenious use of bathroom humor and sexual perversions, but outside of their fictional whitebread mountain town, such references have spread far and wide without providing any humor at all. The late, great comedian George Carlin used to get a lot of laughs with a skit about how the one thing you could never discuss on network television was passing gas, but now the situation has completely reversed; it is mentioned frequently, but without providing any of the humor that talented men like Carlin could find in it. In recent years I have seen constant references to bathroom humor or genitalia in places where they once never would have been found, like The Tonight Show or the once clean programming that PBS imports from Britain. A case in point is a British comedy called Doc Martin, whose writers felt compelled to bring up the topic of penis size for some unfathomable reason in the only episode I have seen to date. It didn’t add anything to the episode, but as in other examples scattered across our culture, the makers seemed to feel it was their duty to include it.
The same pattern can be found in many Marvel comics, whose “heroes” now randomly pepper every conversation with thinly veiled dirty talk, in everything from jokes about flatulence to sexual perversions. If it added anything to the storylines, there might be a defense, but if anything it distracts from them; some of the plotting in Marvel’s recent storylines, like Civil War, Secret Invasion and Dark Reign, was among the most skillful in the history of comics, but some of the constituent issues were almost ruined by such interferences. If such talk came out of the mouths of villains, it might serve the valuable purpose of underlining the evil behavior that separates them from the heroes, but the line between them is now blurred. Between twenty and thirty years ago, brilliant writers like Chris Claremont and Scott Lobdell taught a generation of American boys many noble principles through such comics as the X-Men, which took on such touchy topics as racism in every issue. Some of the villains they fought were classified as evil because they employed violence in the wrong amount, without resorting to outright murder; now Marvel has dedicated an entire comic to a group of mutants (including household names like Wolverine) who have formed a death squad that murders villains in cold blood, without any semblance of a day in court or of being subject to any authority. Some of the buyers may identify with them because they too are becoming more villainous every day; as our civilization’s morals decline, so too will our definition of what is heroic be completely reversed. This is all complemented by a surrender by the highest authorities at Marvel to the worst elements of America’s new atmosphere of Pharisaical morality, which I have discussed in depth in past columns. It is not a sin to smoke in moderation, but Marvel now forbids its characters to smoke; acting on homosexual impulses is in itself a hate crime, which is why it may lead to eternal damnation, but Marvel has recently begun recasting some of its oldest characters as homosexuals. I would prefer to see my children light up a cigarette than to become flamers, especially if that flame risks igniting eventual hellfire. If you want your kids to pick up dirty thoughts and to learn that heroism means executing criminals and having cheap random sex, by all means give them a modern comic.
Soundtracks to the Apocalypse
The whole phenomenon of dirty phrases being thrown into popular sources of entertainment as diverse as The Tonight Show and X-Men comics is disturbing evidence of cultural decline, because it was only a short time ago that these would be the last places that we would find such depravity. If the producers didn’t stop the writers, then the FCC and Comics Code Authority would have, and if that line of defense had failed, then the public would have been in an uproar. It is also puzzling, since the kind of interjections I am speaking of rarely add any humor or any other kind of value to the works, until the underlying principle becomes clear: “The good man out of the good treasure in his heart produces good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure produces evil; for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”[2] This also explains the puzzling habit many rappers and their fans have of using or tolerating the N-word, even if they are themselves black: it is the worst treasure they can bring forth out of their evil hearts. Few aspects of our culture illustrate our decline better than the popularity of our rap music, which is merely a fascination with filthy nursery rhymes. The really shocking truth about it, however, is that it’s not popular at all, despite all of the millions of rap CDs sold across the world. Nobody likes it, not even the rappers themselves. I have heard fans of all types of music ranging from barbershop quartets to classical to jazz fusion to old country and western speak of how a particular song spoke to their hearts, but not once have I heard a fan of rap say that a specific song sent a shiver up their spine. Until someone tells me that honestly, I will stand by my statement, that none of the millions of people who listen to rap actually like it. It may put them in a certain mood or it may make the listener say to themselves, “I am now as bad as M.C. Cool J.” or some other illiterate rap icon, while some people will buy it just to prove to themselves how cultured, tolerant and inclusive they are – but it doesn’t send a shiver up the spines of a single one of them.
The worst of them listen to vilest forms of it out of the abundance of evil treasure in their hearts, while the best of them listen to the least offensive kind for a simple and sad reason that afflicts most modern music, the manufacturing of desire through marketing. Since the early days of rock and roll, factors such as hype and record company promotions have molded the tastes of consumers, but now there is nothing left but the hype and manipulation of the music market. We now have a generation that chooses its music not because they like it regardless of what anyone else thinks, but because everyone else is doing it too – all the while believing that they are acting freely and independently, when they are merely rebelling in a way approved of by institutions like MTV and the major record labels. Rap is unique in that it is designed to put listeners in the mood to sneer, which is the one thing a good man can never do. Any other emotion can be fairly invoked by musicians towards entirely Christian ends, even sorrow and anger, but the one thing a Christian cannot do is smirk and scorn Creation. All other genres of modern music (with the exception of industrial music, which is akin to tapping someone on the shoulder repeatedly until it drives them crazy) have this one common denominator, the draining away of all passion. Since the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a clear, steady trend towards elimination of any signs of honesty and fervor in music is easily discernible. That is why violins haven’t been prominent in any hit song since disco died; that is why guitar solos were almost entirely absent from the rock of the 1990s. It is also why almost every modern ballad is sung without any real emotion at all; you will never find any of the honest heartbreak of a Karen Carpenter or a Janice Ian in them. Today’s songs still sell by the millions, but I doubt that they evoke a millionth of the emotion or enjoyment that any musical form for the last two thousand years, in any generation or ethnic group. They still sell, but only because they are inexpensive and Americans are increasingly susceptible to manipulative marketing strategies. I know music fans who used to do as much as ten hours of manual labor just to be able to afford one album with one or two favorite songs on it and until I see people with similar levels of devotion to newer music, I will not backtrack from my statement. The music scene has never been so thoroughly under the control of the Establishment than today, which is exactly why the content has been sucked out of it to reduce it to the lower common denominator.
The sad case of Britney Spears illustrates how the Culture of Contempt has affected the music industry better than anything else, because she actually does have talent. Long ago, I saw a clip of an appearance she made around age 10 on some national talent show (if it wasn’t Solid Gold, then it was a show in the same mold) in which she demonstrated an amazing vocal range while passionately belting out a tune that both she and the audience clearly enjoyed. In order to sell records, however, Britney chose to remove every trace of passion from her singing and substitute bare skin and sexual innuendoes. The tactic worked, but everyone lost; she sold millions of records to people who cared so little about them that they can now barely name any of her hit songs, while Britney herself went off the rails into a bout of insanity. I suspect she enjoyed her hit songs even less than her audience, but could have pleased both herself and the rest of the world in the long run by making music designed to sends shivers up everyone’s spines. She certainly had the talent to do it, but the Culture of Contempt is devoid of content. It not only does not have content, but frowns upon it.
One of the worst offenders, unfortunately, is so-called Christian rock, which has none of the vast power of either Christianity or rock. As one of the most melodramatic philosophies of all time, it ought to find a close complement in rock music, which is one of the most melodramatic art forms, but the potential for a union between the two has gone entirely to waste. Instead of converting competent musicians in monster rock groups like Black Sabbath or Nirvana to orthodox Christianity, we are instead saddled with inept musicians who usually follow some unorthodox and even effeminate brand of the Christian religion, usually some kind of Pentecostal or “charismatic” madness. Christian rock, mainstream secular music and rap all have this in common: they have all the emotion of elevator muzak, but none of the accompanying talent or sense of serenity. Nobody really likes it, but nobody has the energy to stop them either, let alone produce their own music; all three provide perfect soundtracks to the widespread apostasy that secretly underlies much of the decline of Western civilization. It is mood music for the damned. A few years ago, I witnessed a deejay playing a famous rap song with the lyrics “I like big butts and I cannot lie” at a birthday party for a girl who was not even yet a teenager, attended by dozens of kids who may not have even entered junior high yet. None of the parents tried to stop the deejay, nor did any of the kids seem passionately attached to the song to stop them if they did. It was at that point that I realized that if the Apocalypse hit tomorrow, no one would really miss our culture. And I doubt today’s Christian rockers would be prepared for it, since their art tends to put one in the mood for a group therapy session with Stuart Smalley - when it ought to pump them up enough to withstand hanging from a cross, like a certain bleeding man in The Passion of the Christ.
Contempt and Curiositas
“I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you from my mouth.” This warning from Revelation applies to Christians who are tepid in their religious fervor for otherworldly things, but we have sunk far below that, to the point where we don’t even really enjoy secular things. This is the one distinguishing characteristic that sets the new Culture of Contempt apart from the decades when America was merely besotted by cultures of consumption and narcissism. In fact, any product of this culture really can’t make anyone happy; it is doomed from the start, because it is designed to pander to the sin of pride, which makes a person worship themselves rather than having any passionate attachment to anything external. If you don’t assign any value to anything outside of yourself, then there is nothing external that can make you happy – which is exactly why humble people can find joy in the simplest of things, while the proud must continually search for new pleasures to satisfy their jaded senses. A man who can still get enjoyment out of playing with children’s blocks can also enjoy the most exotic or expensive pleasures, like bungee jumping and skiing trips. A man who is content drinking cheap beer will also be happy with the most refined imported beer, but a man who isn’t satisfied with anything but the latter has doomed himself to unhappiness; in my lifetime a radical shift has taken place in American night life as large numbers of people who once were content with beerballs and foamy kegs will no longer drink anything but the most expensive imported ales, in an effort to make themselves appear more cultured and refined. Likewise, a person who can enjoy black and white movies will also be capable of watching today’s blockbuster films in vivid color, whereas the discriminating taste of today’s average jaded moviegoer limits their sources of enjoyment. Pride is a sin which is designed to divide people, by placing one person on a higher plane than another, which by necessity entails looking down on others. In our day, when the Christian moral code has been thrown out, that often takes the form of class prejudice, which entails valuing things merely because they’re expensive and the other guy doesn’t have them. It also often means reviling people for their cultural tastes rather than their conduct, which is why an adult may be picked on for watching WWF wrestling matches, but not for knowing the roster of the New York Yankees. This impetus that pride gives to look down on others also drives them to look down at the culture of other generations like a snob. An honest debater can easily counter this criticism by pointing out the good in other generations besides their own, as I have tried to do here by showing respect to genres of music like opera and classical than I would rather die than listen to. I grew up with Generation X, which carried on less of what was good in the culture of the Baby Boomers and the latest generation has likewise carried on even less, because fewer and fewer of them have been willing to sweat to create good art that people can actually enjoy. The artists of our day demand recognition merely because their content is new, without working to deserve the honor, which also comes from pride. The idea that every generation’s art is of equal value is untrue; I know little about visual art (which is why I barely mention it here) but it is obvious that throwing mud on a canvas does not make it a painting. This is especially true when the producers do not even get any real joy from the anarchic act of throwing the mud. Certainly some critic will point out that each generation says that the next generation’s culture is more corrupt than that which came before it – but that is exactly what we’d expect if our civilization was going through the historical process of degeneration, which may span many generations.
Pride and discontent have always gone hand in hand, as the Thomist philosophers of the Middle Ages knew back when they developed an alternative system of psychology built around the seven virtues and seven vices. It is a useful framework for explaining many aspects of human behavior that perplex the learned men of our time, including our cultural weakening. For our discussion, we need only discuss the first and the last of the vices, pride and acedia. The Thomist psychologists of the past recognized that pride is the first sin that motivates all others and as it expands, the more secondary vices it will generate. In this sense it is a spiritual disease that eventually leads to the terminal condition known as spiritual sloth. This is much closer to jadedness than to laziness, so I will substitute its other name, acedia, to avoid confusion. As a person’s pride continually grows, it eventually burns out the “hot sins” like lust or gluttony until the person becomes incapable of finding joy in anything, which leads to a secondary problem of continually looking for new thrills, which the Thomists referred to as curiositas. This deadening of the person’s appetites through overindulgence has only one remedy: strict ascetic self-denial. In order to recover their faculties for pleasure, the person will have to forego much of what little they still enjoy, at a point in life where they have been conditioned to take their rewards first and make sacrifices later. Of course, at this juncture their appreciation of spiritual things is often completely ruined, making it even more difficult to reverse course, but if they cannot their soul will be completely lost even if their body lives on. Their appreciation for both otherworldly virtues and worldly vices has been lost, which goes hand-in-hand with a lukewarm contempt for old, familiar things. These are also the defining characteristics of a sociopath. Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, provides an extreme but clear example of how all of this ties together. He has contempt for everything and everyone else; his tastes and manners are exceptionally refined; and he commits the most heinous acts, not out of anger or jealousy, but merely for what little cold satisfaction the novelty may bring. His ego, however, has risen above the heavens themselves. Similarly, the German philosopher Nietzsche came up with a whole system of thought that revolved around the worship of pride and completely reversed the Christian moral code; long after he had gone insane, the Nazis used his thinking as justification for their atrocities. He would have hated the gangsta rappers of today, just as much as they would have hated him, but they both served the master of Hate. Serial killers and crazy philosophers are rare examples of acedia, but it is no wonder that their ranks are increasing in our day, since our entire culture is suffering from acedia. Our music either puts people in the mood to sneer or to feel nothing at all, as a sociopath would. Our avant garde painters throw chaos on a canvas and demand recognition; likewise, even our best comedians and our writers are compelled to sully even the best of their works with perverted remarks that don’t add value. The best of them are throwing mud on their Mona Lisas without really knowing why, whereas the worst of them speak constantly of foul things for the same reason that a monkey throws its feces: out of contempt. The proliferation of such people in high places and the tolerance they are shown by the public are both worrisome, because if our whole nation is suffering from acedia, it is unlikely that some future generation can muster the resolve to practice ascetic self-denial, which is the only cure. There is no really no denying that America has really had a culture of consumption for more than a century and a culture of narcissism for at least the last few decades. A Thomist would instantly recognize the motivations behind both as the love of money, which is the root of all evil, and pride, which is the Original Sin. They might also point out that a culture of contempt is really the completion of both, since acedia is the predictable yet horrible result when both sins go unchecked for a long time.
The first remedy for acedia would obviously be to make more and better art, but it is entirely my point that increasing numbers of people wouldn’t want it precisely because they couldn’t look down on it. This is bad news for genuine artists, many of whom are puzzled today about why no one appreciates their works. Most of my friends are musicians and I know quite a few who are talented enough to produce melodies the likes of which have never been heard, yet as I try to explain to them, no matter how good they are they cannot inspire as many people as the musicians of previous generations could have; there is not going to be any substantial cultural explosion like we saw in the days of Woodstock until some sort of suffering or better yet, fasting and self-denial, restores our capacity for enjoyment. We are up against an ethos that rejects art when it is genuine because it is genuine and against that, no artist has any defense. It is beyond the point of being able to lead a horse to water but not being able to make him drink to putting a ten-course gourmet meal in front of the corpse of a dead horse and expecting it to chow down. No matter how nutritious it is, it will never eat. Likewise, it doesn’t matter how good of an artist you are if the audience has gone deaf and blind in a spiritual sense. Many musicians I know have given up their art because of the shrinking crowds and I say to them, it is better to keep it alive for both their own sake and for the remaining few fans, who ought not be deprived of their joy because of the frigidness of the majority; quitting will only make things worse, but we cannot expect to set the world on fire if acedia has drowned it like a bucket of cold water. Outside of keeping the existing community of artists going, our second refuge from the Culture of Contempt can be found in discovering old art of less degenerate times. Modern technology like the Internet is well-suited for preserving and distributing everything from pictures of old paintings to old novels and recordings made decades ago as if they were brand new and free from the stain of decay. Personally, over the last decade or more the Internet has made it possible for me to discover dozens of good bands I never would have heard, whose recordings are basically brand new even though many were recorded decades ago. Among them is a the Kashmere Stage Band, a group from the early ‘70s which melded together hard rock, jazz and a big band orchestra in ways I never thought possible; I put them in the same pantheon as Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple even before I found out that they were actually a high school band put together by a music teacher in ghetto of Houston decades ago. Technology has enabled us to preserve and disseminate previously unknown gems from America’s better days, thereby providing shelter to that section of the Western world which is revolted by the Culture of Contempt. If we are suffering from acedia, however, we will need increasing doses of such undiscovered gems in order to retain the same amount of enjoyment. And if it is an advanced case, we will sneer at them merely because they are old and get no enjoyment at all.
Gore, Gimmicks, Glamour and Glitz
Outside of these shrinking refuges there is nothing but a vicious circle of descent. St. Thomas Aquinas (who the Thomist philosophers are named after) once conjectured that demons can never be happy, because even when they succeed into tempting a man into damning himself, that only makes their contempt for him grow. Then they are even more unsatisfied and ravenous than before. Those infected with acedia likewise suffer from curiositas, a quest for ever-more exotic thrills to fill the void in their hearts that pride has created by ruining their humble appreciation of old, familiar things. The more they try to satisfy the strange desires that take their place, the more unhappy they make themselves though. One of the signs of this in our time is the attempts to jar our jaded senses into like by making our films more visceral, by increasing the amount of skin and gore. Another is the peculiar habit directors have now of showing their characters vomiting on camera, which occurs now in far too many films. There may be situations where one or the other is absolutely necessary to getting the point of a film across, but normally it is not the case. Schindler’s List might have been slightly less effective in demonstrating Nazi cruelty if it did not include it scenes of Jewish prisoners being marched around in the nude, just as Alien would not have been quite as good of a film without its horrifying chest-bursting scene. In almost all cases today, however, this sort of schlock is either a substitute for real content by mediocre artists with little talent or a sort of grudging concession by talented ones who think they have to follow the crowd. Personally, in the days when I tried to write my mediocre horror novels I included far too much swearing because I thought it made it more realistic, until I realized that one of my favorite horror films, The Ring, had virtually no profanity. Regardless of the morality of it, most of the new realism adds nothing because it is purely unpleasant; I may need to know that a person is retching or getting beheaded to understand the film, but seeing it doesn’t bring me enjoyment. The revulsion may bring an adrenaline rush, but that’s all it brings. Seeing skin may be different, depending on the person, because some people are ugly and some are not. Even the pleasure that might bring is often negated, however, by their connection to sexual perversions that dehumanize them and rob them of any redeeming value. At one time, filmmakers were content to show unnecessary nudity, but they are increasingly resorting to showing nudity in connection with some sex act that is intrinsically ugly, not beautiful – such as rape scenes, or fellatio or whatever. Softcore nudity might be sinful, but the mainstream has progressed into openly depicting and constantly speaking of hardcore perversions as if they were commonplace. What our ancestors knew and we have forgotten is that increasingly complex lovemaking betrays an absence of love, which can only be restored by self-denial; if the love behind it is dead, then sooner or later sex will be motivated by hate, which is why all perversions turn the radical equality of healthy sex into some form of inequality and the beauty into some form of ugliness. Too many of today’s producers of art have descended even further into a facile belief that merely mentioning a perversion is “hot” and will make their art more attractive, when in fact it will repel even those who routinely practice them[3]; just as demons are only made more miserable when they succeed in damning a man, so too do perverts feel only contempt for those they abuse once the act itself is complete. If such acts cannot possibly make anyone happy, then showing them or even merely mentioning them is not going to captivate an audience.
Showing more gore, violence, nudity and ugly sex is often referred to as “spicing up” a movie, but if you need more spice, then that is a clue that the meal beneath it must taste pretty bad. Likewise, the uglier a corpse is, the more makeup a mortician has to put on it. Unfortunately, our film and television producers of our day are not merely content to dress up their dead ideas in more frankincense and myrrh, but are resorting to digging up the art of generations past. The public has been murmuring for some time about the disturbing new habit Hollywood has developed in the last decade of remaking everything without adding anything of value, but this is merely a sign of further degeneration. Thanks to pride, the producers cannot resist the temptation to getting their filthy fingers on the classics of old, which they insist on stamping with their own egos, like they would everything else in the universe if they could. On some rare occasions, they may actually contribute something, as in the case of the 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven, which can coexist with the 1960 version because they tell different stories. On other occasions, a black and white film may be upgraded to color or similarly enhanced[4] Increasingly, however, we’re getting something completely different, a string of films that are being remade in order to empty them of content by making them shallower, often by substituting gore, vomiting, skin, swear words, gender-bending characters and the like for characterization and plot. One of the worst examples of this was the remake of John Carpenter’s classic The Fog, which violated every rule of good horror filmmaking. The cardinal rule in any horror movie is to make the viewers identify as closely as possible with the characters, so that they can suspend disbelief and feel as if it was them or their neighbors being chased by the monster, but this can’t happen if the actors and actresses look like Chippendales and Barbies. Every corner of the film and television industry has been so thoroughly penetrated by such shallowness that there is really no room left anywhere for ordinary folks, let alone ugly ones, to appear on camera. Our news anchors have to look presentable and speak well, yet it is a running joke among print journalists that they are the stupidest people in white collar America. Our presidents now have to look appealing to the public to such a degree that Abraham Lincoln could never get elected. It doesn’t even matter how good our musicians sound, as long as they look good; had Mama Cass not already been famous before MTV, her voice would not still be heard on radios all over America. That is why our musicians, our politicians and our journalists are all mediocre at best. It is also why our soap operas are being cancelled left and right and our thrillers fail to scare us: the audiences may like to look at the actors and actresses, but they can’t identify with them. The producers in all of these widely varied genres are painfully realistic when it comes to depicting base, ugly things like vomiting and gore, but go to the opposite extreme of being laughably unrealistic when it comes to casting. They think that their audiences are too weak to look at anything but the most attractive people, when in fact the use of nothing but beautiful people dooms them. Another manifestation of this is the recent trend towards reimagining old characters as different genders or different races, by writers too incompetent to create their own. Quite often this is merely the sign of the corporate brass shamelessly and transparently attempting to manipulate new market segments, but all they usually succeed in doing is alienating their hardcore fans. The same goes for bringing back characters from the dead, as occurs so often in comic books, which in the long run erodes the whole atmosphere of suspense that all fiction depends on; if you already know that the characters will be resurrected no matter what, there is no point in watching or reading any longer. And once a company has thoroughly ruined a franchise, it can still sink further by rebooting it from the beginning; at that point, longtime fans will have no reason to watch or read at all, since anything the characters do will simply be erased by the next generation of incompetent artists.
Rebooting franchises and resurrecting dead characters without just cause are just the beginning of the gimmicks that curiositas will drive artists to invent. A fresh sign of Marvel’s stale souls is its new proclivity for tinkering with the numbering systems on its comic books; it used to be the numbers went in a straight line in the order of their release, from #1 up to #1000, but now they are adding points and negatives, as well as restarting at #1 periodically and then suddenly going back to a nice round number, like #300 or #450, in order to boost sales temporarily. This is not adding spice; this is like a doctor shooting up a patient with adrenaline he doesn’t need, by blindly jabbing him with a needle. Gimmicks of this sort are less destructive than the addictions that come with shock value, but they tend to fail faster once it becomes impossible to stimulate the audience like exhausted speed freaks. Glamour is normally a more successful strategy than such gimmicks. By cultivating an atmosphere that “something is happening” in a particular place, those who understand glamour and fashion can lure a certain segment of people, regardless of what that something is. That is why it is difficult to identify exactly what it is many of our modern-day celebrities are actually famous for. The answer is insanely tautological: because they are being talked about in the media, we have to go on talking about them. With each passing decade, the mass media adopts more and more of this packrat mentality, which determines which candidates we select for our highest offices as well as which celebrities we gossip about. People skilled manipulation can deliberately nurture this same air about them in order to build up a cult of personality, quite often by applying yet another false remedy for acedia, glitz. It has always been with us, perhaps never more so than the 1970s, but back in the days when people wore plaid pants and platform shoes and played with pet rocks, it was actually a healthy sign of a great nation laughing at itself after a traumatic period of tumult. These days the glitz is taken with horrible seriousness.
It can be seen in every corner of popular culture today, but I will mention just a few popular examples. One was the halftime show put on by Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at the 2004 Super Bowl. An uproar occurred because one of her breasts was exposed, but the real issue ought to have been the whole tawdry sadomasochistic bondage act that the halftime show consisted of. The whole thing was seedy to an extent that Americans wouldn’t have tolerated even a decade prior. We’ve always been a nation susceptible to glitz, which is often used to cover up great ugliness; one of our biggest cities is famous for its lights, which have to be bright enough to obscure the facts that it was founded by murders and exists solely to cheat people out of their money with false promises. Now, however, the glitz itself is sometimes ugly, as at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. And when it isn’t ugly, it’s at least brighter than ever before. America’s Got Talent is a somewhat Orwellian title for a television show, because the performers it showcases often prove how little talent we have left. There are exceptions, such as the truly original dance company called the Silhouettes, but for the most part they are average at best or even incompetent. While researching this column, I was shocked to discover that the 2011 season ended with a Frank Sinatra impressionist being named the winner over the Silhouettes, when I can name several people in just a few square miles who do a better impression at karaoke. What America’s Got Talent excelled at was hype and manipulation: the performers were carefully screened and then ushered onstage with such glitzy gimmicks as fireworks. Most of the other dance companies were pale imitators or Janet Jackson’s tawdriness, while one of the magicians ripped his shirt off during a show. Conversely, all of the musicians had to showcase their singing, even though many of them were no better than the average singer at a karaoke bar. They were not allowed to write their own material, nor did the show ever feature any competent pianists, violinists, guitarists or other anyone else who had mastered a real instrument. There are reasons for this: Americans don’t have the discipline any longer to learn an instrument, so they can’t identify with such people, nor does it ever occur to them to write or play their own music at home, like so many families used to do. Most of all though, a real musician or even a truly talented singer might provide them with the one thing they have contempt for: content. America may go through the motions of applause because it is conditioned to, but few people are actually going to make real sacrifices to buy the music that they’ve heard on such programs – which would not have been true of the variety shows of the ‘70s, which usually demanded real musicians who could play more than sing. America doesn’t even have as much talent as did in the days when its mobsters founded Vegas, which is a sign of our further degeneration. We are weaker than our forebears, so we cannot resist the temptation to follow the crowd and fly mindlessly into the lights like moths.
The Blood-Dimmed Tide
A certain angel has long been notorious for leading people astray by his false light. This lightbearer is the master of glitz and gimmicks, all of which are designed to hide nasty surprises. Sometimes the mask slips though. When I saw the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, I was surrounded by people from all walks of life who were disturbed by Lady Gaga’s getup, which was so outlandish I cannot really describe it. If forced to, I would have called it a giant clamshell crown with eyes. It was covered in rhinestones, so its purpose may have been to convey a sense of class and glamour to the audience, but this time it didn’t work; the mask had slipped and for one telling instant, genuine concern about the future of our country was etched on the faces of the viewers I was with. It was clear, for just a moment, that whoever was at the helm of America was not in their right mind. Somebody had the power to put Lady Gaga on stage and no one has resisted them yet. What’s even more disturbing is that she was in the company of Bloomberg, a billionaire who bought his way into office and who has since represented the modern-day equivalent of the Pharisees, who I discussed in depth in an earlier column. The last time the Pharisees and profligates became this chummy, it was for a Crucifixion – and I surmise you can guess which angel arranged that little alliance. One of the unique aspects of the Culture of Contempt is the disturbing degree to which its corrupt artists get along with Corporate America, because historically, minstrels and businessmen tended to mix like fire and water. If gangsta rappers from the inner city can get along comfortably with the heads of Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal, we are in big trouble. If men like Bloomberg can buy the mayoral office of New York and talentless shams like Lady Gaga who don’t even belong in a karaoke bar are given center stage on New Year’s Eve, then, my friend, we are up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
Just as cancer will eventually kill anyone who doesn’t get it treated, sooner or later America will literally die from acedia if it does not change course. Eventually the addictive quality of curiositas will lead us to the point that it led the Romans shortly before their collapse, in which the public became anesthetized to the most horrific depravity in the Coliseum, such as women committing acts of bestiality with horses. For all intents and purposes, the public became addicted to the ancient equivalent of snuff films – as we have silently becoming, through the wild popularity of the new snuff genre films like Saw and Hostel. We are becoming so addicted to breaking taboos in the most contemptible ways and to faux violence on television that there are few barriers left, save the horrible idea of killing the innocent for the thrill of it. Do not take this comment lightly, for I have sat down to watch horror movies before with people who, instead of rooting for the innocent to get away, turned the healthy principle of the genre upside down by cheering when the villains killed them in the most unjust and bloody ways. The same sort of ethical reversal is occurring in romantic comedies like My Best Friend’s Girl, in which the worst man is rewarded with the love of the leading lady at the end precisely because he is a shallow Bad Boy. Such movies are supposed to end with the geek getting the girl, just as horror movies are supposed to end with justice being meted out to wrongdoers, precisely because both happen so little in real life. The upper class has always been capable of ruining reality for the poor, the unattractive and the unpopular by stealing their money, their spouses and even their lives, but in the 21st Century version of our civilization, they now spoil their very dreams. Increasingly, only the proud and the strong get to walk off into the sunset as the credits roll. Slowly but surely, they are also overturning our system of ethics; like the comic heroes I mentioned earlier, we are becoming the villains, so we identify more with villainous art. Unless we resist them, they will run America right into the ground and take much of the rest of the planet with it, just as their spiritual kin did to the Roman Empire millennia ago. Rome could not survive such depravity and neither will we, if we don’t arrest the momentum of decay, which is running much faster than Rome’s thanks to the speed boost our technology provides. Nor will we deserve to survive.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet where our military and economic influence is at its weakest point, simple people who live by very different code of morality are smelling the stench of our new Culture of Contempt. Put yourselves in the world of the average Third World peasant: our soldiers appear in their skies and reduce the surrounding countryside to rubble for reasons they cannot fathom, even if they are just, using exotic technologies they have never seen before. Quite often after we have squashed a rebellion here or there, we have handed over control of such countries who in turn it over to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, who reduce the peasants to abject poverty by applying bizarre economic theories. This image has had some truth to it for the last hundred years, which is why America has lost some of its wars against rural guerrillas, as in Vietnam. A dangerous new element has been introduced on top of all that now, because now our soldiers represent a Culture of Contempt, not merely one of consumption (avarice) or narcissism (pride). Because they have been soaking up the whole spirit of decay back home, more and more of our soldiers are behaving like monsters, sodomizing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban soldiers. None of that serves any military purpose, except to show unreasoning contempt; if anything, these two incidents will probably cost us the war in Afghanistan more than any single car bomb or battle. To a Third World peasant, when American soldiers begin coming in listening to bad music featuring the N word and all the various perversions gangsta rappers are into, then urinate on their dead neighbors or sodomizing prisoners, it may very well appear that Iran is on to something when its mullahs call us “The Great Satan.” The more we listen to him, the less worthy our culture will be of survival, especially if we’ve gotten to the point where neither legitimate secular pleasures nor illegitimate sins bring us any real pleasure. Of course those mullahs, like Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, do not realize that they are also wholeheartedly serving that same angel of false light, who has a talent for speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Like a manipulator trying to provoke a schoolyard scrap, he is first whispering into our ears the suggestion that freedom means behaving as degenerately as possible, while simultaneously amplifying the righteous loathing of the Muslim world into a mood for murder. I’m not saying Iran’s judgment is just, only that we can bank on the fact that every manifestation of cultural decline will be used by our enemies to bring us down. Many empires before us have suffered from the same sorts of cultural decline, albeit at much slower speeds; whether it is the Roman Empire or any Chinese dynasty, they all fell when their corruption bled over into area of society, then finally into foreign policy. Unless we take action to arrest our decline, each generation of our descendants will grow up to be worse than us, to the point where we not only don’t deserve to survive but cannot. Either the cleanup will be done by us, or for us by outsiders, through human or divine hands. In its revulsion towards innocence, the Culture of Contempt is reminiscent of one section in Yeats’ famous poem, The Second Coming: “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If we cannot dam the blood-dimmed tide that is drowning America’s culture in guilt, then we can be certain that the rough beast Yeats spoke of has slouched a little closer towards Bethlehem.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.
[1] To those fellow Catholics who think there is no good at all in South Park, I must point out that I got my best, most unanswerable and most succinct argument against divorce from them. In one episode, one of the schoolboys who are the main characters points out to his parents that if they can get divorced, he ought to be able to replace his sister. If our bishops would bother to point out the evils of divorce at all, let alone with such brilliance, then we Catholics wouldn’t have to go to South Park to find our wisdom.
[2] Matthew 12:34-35; Luke 6:45.
[3] One particularly annoying case in point was a commercial that the Fox network ran constantly perhaps a decade ago for one of their failed sitcoms. One of the leading actresses repeats the phrase, “He had a butt so hard you could bounce quarters off it” in a way that was supposed to be funny and alluring at the same time, but was merely repellent and banal. Repeating this commercial ad nauseum failed to save the sitcom from its incompetent writers though. It is now buried so deep in the dustbin of television history that I cannot find any reference to it to track down, nor will I exhaut myself trying.
One of the earliest cases in point I can think of was the sequel to relatively wholesome teen movie Dream a Little Dream, which was another one of those Breakfast Club-style movies that Corey Feldman and Corey Haim performed so well together in. The universal judgment of everyone I know who has seen the sequel, however, is that it was unbelievably bad. Perhaps the most annoying part about it is that the leading lady constantly says, “But I’m not wearing any underwear,” at odd moments through the movie, as if merely bringing up the topic off her undergarments ought to be alluring or funny. Although the woman was technically attractive, the way she says it is so annoying and revolting that most men I know are tempted to turn their televisions off.
[4] One successful franchise that producers have thusfar overlooked is the Tombs of the Bind Dead films, which were originally shot on the thinnest of shoestring budgets. They are sorely in need of upgrades that might actually be of artistic value, while simultaneously making money.
