Entertainment Officials Report New Reserves Found Miles Below Lowest Common Denominator

Entertainment Officials Report New Reserves Found Miles Below Lowest Common Denominator

Officials in the entertainment industry revealed today that they have struck upon huge new reserves of television material lying miles beneath the lowest common denominator which now plagues the airwaves.

OK, I came up with that phony headline for a contest over at my favorite blog, www.onegoodmove.org. I think that we as citizens share most of the blame for the almost total lack of quality in what we choose to ingest from the culture around us. There is no shortage of intelligent choices we could be making in our entertainment consumption, yet reality TV, mediocre talent, and the lowest common denominator occupy our primary attention.

If you go to Youtube, the popular web site for videos, they feature the following videos:
-a farting baby
-strange faces and noises I can make
-New Year’s beavers cartoon
-Pigs are like men (animation)

The New York Times has a story on how libraries in Fairfax Country, Virginia are cutting back on classics to make more room for modern bestsellers.

I could cite more examples of the decline of Western civilization. I could look in the TV Guide and see what’s on prime time tonight, but I think we all get the idea. I am guilty of doing a lot of intellectual slumming myself. It’s not like I sit around playing classical music on the piano and then read a Shakespeare play before drinking a glass of port and going to bed. I don’t see anything wrong with watching an hour or two of shitty television, or reading a popular novel, or listening to the latest popular tune. I do think it’s a problem when as a society we feel that there is no need for anything beyond these ephemeral entertainments.

I may often be too lazy to actually do it but at least I know that it is better for me to read a Shakespeare play than to watch another episode of The Simpsons (and I don’t mean to pick on that show because it is one of the best examples of quality modern entertainment—God help us). As I write this my eyes are rolling back in my own head so far that I feel like I am going to fall over. I’m another voice telling us how stupid we all are, another hack complaining about the closing of the American mind. I should stop but I’ve already gone this far.

As I try to assimilate into a new culture I am made more aware of the things in American culture that separate us from Spanish culture and which things bridge these two worlds. America’s cultural hegemony is evident everywhere in Spain, anyone who has ever left the country is aware of this. If you look closer you will see that although Spain borrows a bit from the United States, it has its own popular culture which doesn’t intersect often with ours.

Popular culture is almost as different here as are our two languages. Within the United States the fragmented popular culture is like an ever-growing group of separate dialects only completely understood by those who have invested the time necessary to become fluent. If people are talking about Paris Hilton, or American Idol, or Survivor I am able to understand less than if they are speaking Catalan. The accelerated fragmentation of popular culture makes communication between factions more difficult. I wrote about how the English of rap music has changed more in twenty years than the English of Chaucer almost 600 years ago. I was talking with a group of people the other day and they introduced me to an acquaintance of theirs from London. His cockney accent was so pronounced that I switched languages and was better able to understand him in Spanish (although his accent in Spanish was very unusual). I immediately recognized that conversation as metaphorical.

As with anything else, there are elements of popular culture that are good and those which are completely vapid. For the most part, the more insipid aspects of pop culture are those that mutate the most quickly. America’s Funniest Home Videos are forgotten before you are three seconds into the commercial break while some of the new HBO series are breaking new ground, not only in television, but in how film can be used to tell stories.

I really don’t know what I am saying except that it seems to me that there is more momentum in popular culture towards the vulgar than the sublime. In an era with such heavy levels of popular culture consumption it is just easier to produce large amounts of trash than quality. With 24 hours news, sports, and entertainment programming, television will naturally gravitate towards what is the easiest and most profitable to produce. I don’t understand how these same forces drive literature and music. I’m no businessman but it seems like it would be just as easy to promote and sell quality music and books as it is to market Paris Hilton songs and Da Vinci Code quality pabulum.

I couldn’t even name a new author of fiction whose work we all should be reading and talking about. The voices we should be listening to are drowned out by the airport bestsellers. Who has time to ferret out the modern day classics when there are farting baby videos to watch?