On a recent episode of Fox TV's "The Simpsons", I am told, young Bart was playing a "religious" video game with some fundamentalist friends. Apparently, the object was to strike a "heathen" with a ray of God's love and convert him to Jesus. Bart "hits" a suspect heathen and exclaims, "I got one!" The friend says, "No, you just winged him and made him a Unitarian."
I didn't see this episode; I'm not much of a TV viewer. However funny this little vignette is, it hints at one of my deepest concerns - American culture has become rude and crude - with all our economic prosperity we are witnessing the barbarization of American culture and the triumph of meanness in our midst.
And so, please indulge me in this homiletical jeremiad - after the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah who bemoaned the moral collapse of ancient Israel. At the outset I confess that while I am an economic radical, a political and theological liberal, I am at the same time a cultural conservative - you might even say a Puritan. That is my bias. But hear my case.
Item 1: Athletes are increasingly seen (unfortunately) as role models for youth. Take the case of Major League Baseball's John Rocker and his interview in Sports Illustrated magazine. You must have heard about it. Rocker is a star relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves baseball team - you know, the team whose fans irritate Native Americans with their tomahawk chop cheer.
In this interview he made baldly racist and homophobic remarks. For his bad behavior he has been ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation and has been suspended for part of the season. Whether his contempt for others is amenable to psychiatric treatment or is simply plain old sin requiring a spiritual/ethical conversion, Rocker illustrates how meanness has become commonplace in popular culture.
We must also note Miami Heat basketball coach Pat Riley, who once fined his players for helping an opponent up from the court."[1] If you are a sports fan, you will understand my antipathy for players who engage in trash talking on field or court, and who taunt their opponents in a passing moment of vainglory. It will not surprise you to hear of a Florida athletic association which conducts a class to prevent grown-ups from misbehaving at kids' games.[2] As a former athlete and a sports fan, I find this unutterably sad, and characteristic of the barbarization of American culture. Learning sportsmanship is one of the reasons I treasure my involvement in athletics and have encouraged my sons to participate.
Item 2: TV's "vast wasteland." My TV options are PBS and the big four networks, where I watch previews of upcoming programs. I sit there appalled. The sit-coms seem more crude than funny. I didn't even like the one episode of "Seinfeld" I saw. What's wrong with me? But I am in shocked disbelief at the number of programs with gratuitous violence as the main theme - the disaster movies, the horror films, "The X Files," the Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones talk shows, in which success is to turn guests against each other in humiliating tell-all battles.[3]
While recuperating from my back surgery I saw more TV than usual. I hadn't watched late night television for some time, and I was deeply disappointed. The "Tonight Show" with Jay Leno and "Late Night with David Letterman" border on meanness with their scatological and tasteless jokes. Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky jokes are very old. The monologues were, quite frankly, boringly crude. It didn't help me sleep.
A week or so ago I heard an interview on public radio with the creators of two shows dedicated to men, "The X Show" and "The Man Show." These evidently play to men who are angry about feminism, and have been reviewed as "testosterone TV - a genre dedicated to the proposition that men, or at least men who date women, are pigs."[4] Where is Alan Alda when you need him?
Even the TV political talk shows have deteriorated into shouting matches. You may remember the promotion for Pat Buchanan's "Crossfire" program on CNN featured cowboy six guns blazing and holes appearing. Even now the "McLaughlin Group" is little more than a shouting match, a spectacle of incivility and low-grade infotainment. Thank heaven for "The Jim Lehrer News Hour" and "Washington Week in Review."
Whether on hospital shows like "ER," sit-coms, "N.Y.P.D. Blue" or the evening news ("if it bleeds, it leads"), non-violence is counter-productive; violence is the way people deal with their problems. Whatever their merits as comedy, drama or news, they suggest violence is the American way of life. Future anthropologists will wonder if there were any redeeming virtues in our culture.
While I often disagree with conservative columnist George Will, I remember a column in which he claimed that the introduction of TV and the increase in crime were simultaneous.[5] While that may well be too simplistic, I must confess that TV, for all its good programming has done much to coarsen our culture.
Item 3: Talk Radio and the Rush Limbaughization of the airwaves. This sermon idea was inspired (if that is the word) by Rush and his constant demeaning of his political adversaries by crude language. Calling members of the women's liberation movement Feminazis is my chief exhibit. "After learning that a Christian television station had dropped his show because some viewers complained that he sometimes made off-color remarks, Limbaugh rejoined modestly: "Jesus loves me, this I know. And I think he watches the show."[6]
And, of course, we remember that G. Gordon Liddy told listeners how to murder Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents who enter their homes and how he laughed about using pictures of the Clintons as target practice. Bob Mohan of KFYI Phoenix said of handgun-control advocate Sarah Brady, "She ought to be put down. A humane shot at a veterinarian's would be an easy way to do it." Gun shows sell bumper stickers that say "First Lincoln, then Kennedy, now Clinton?" and "Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when his country needs him?"[7] A U.S. senator once warned Bill Clinton that he "better have a bodyguard" if he enters the senator's state."[8] This Vulture Culture, as it has been called, with its "endless shouting and demonizing . . . doesn't necessarily lead to violence but coarsens and worsens us all."[9]
While station surfing some time ago on local radio, I happened to hear a promotion for an upcoming program on WHAM. The host gleefully invited people to participate in a bashing of the President and his wife. There was no suggestion this would be an opportunity to discuss the issues - only a gratuitous confirmation of rumor and innuendo by people who had already made up their minds. Don't confuse me with facts; my mind is made up. Fortunately public radio has thoughtful programming that makes a genuine, if imperfect, attempt at objectivity.
Item 4: Rock N' Roll and Rap: My new ally George Will wrote a column entitled "By venerating rock, boomers worship own development." "(A rock concert) is a sensory blitzkrieg: 'I am bombarded, therefore I am.'. . . It is an interesting experience driving down broad suburban streets, listening to two eight-year-old girls in the back seat singing along with the radio - it is tuned to one of the 'classic rock' stations - their clear, bird-like voices, as sweet as swallows, singing, 'I can't get no satisfaction.'"[10]
Item 5: Political acrimony and cynicism: In what must be a sign of the times the most publicized scene in the 1996 sci-fi thriller "Independence Day" was blowing up the White House which "drew loud cheers form audiences rather than, as the movie's producers had expected, gasps of horror."[11]
Our current campaign illustrates the politics of anger and negative campaigning. Al Gore and Bill Bradley, whose positions are similar in many ways, are doing battle as if they were in the Roman Coliseum. Gore looks ready to punch anybody out with his macho demeanor. Bradley just looks uncomfortable being nasty. John McCain and George W. Bush were gentlemanly until the race got tight. Now look at them exchanging charges and counter-charges like the charming technique of push polling - calling up voters under guise of doing a poll and badmouthing your opponent. And then, of course, there was the Reform Party fiasco last weekend. Does this model the civilization of the dialogue? Why do they do it? People say they don't like it, but it works. It reveals a nasty mean streak in the body politic.
On the floor of the House, a U.S. representative urged Congress to "tell the president to shove his veto pen up his deficit." House majority leader Dick Armey called fellow congressman Barney Frank a fag,[12] though he later apologized.
Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a Unitarian Universalist, a Republican and former U.S. Senator from Maine, announced early in 1996 he would not run again. He explained that what bothered him most was the worsening partisan atmosphere of the Congress, an "increase in personal hostilities" and a "rhetorical finger-pointing" which replaced civility.
We are familiar with the vituperative rhetoric of the Religious Right which calls homosexuality an abomination and abortion providers murderers. Pat Robertson: "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians." Jerry Falwell: "Modern U.S. Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches." Randall Terry of Operation Rescue: "I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good." Congressman William Dannemeyer: "The homosexual blitzkrieg has been better planned and executed than Hitler's."[13]
As South Carolina debates flying the Confederate Flag over the Capitol, State Senator Arthur Ravenel called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People the "National Association of Retarded People" and then "apologized to retarded people for lumping them in the same category as the NAACP."[14]
Even the left gets in on the mean rhetoric bandwagon. During some protest marches in which I have participated, I have been uncomfortable with shouted or sung slogans that are gross - even in the face of grave injustice. "One, two, three, four, we don't want your (bleeping) war." Sometimes peaceful silence is the best witness against war and injustice, or songs like Holly Near's classic "We Are a Gentle, Angry People."
But, enough already. You get the idea. My concern is well expressed by the British playwright Edward Bond, who wrote in 1994 for the French paper Le Monde: "Our technology is infinitely more powerful than that of the Greeks. Our theater, on the other hand, is a scandal; our television, harmful; our films are corrupt - all of them, without exception."[15] That is a scathing indictment of Western culture. Is he right? Whatever happened to civility? With all our material achievements, what has happened to our souls? Must rude and crude mark the day in politics, culture and religion?
Meanness has become pervasive, part of our everyday world. Road rage is all around us; it is hard to walk down the street without hearing the "F" word or the "S" word or the "B-S" word rain down upon one's ears. Language expert Deborah Tannen calls ours the "argument culture" with its constant battlefield metaphors. We are experiencing a more genteel version of the banality of evil - simply accepting this coarseness as part of the nature of things. This is a meanness without guilt.
It has been institutionalized in welfare reform. "We have to cut off the head of the enemy, and the enemy is the homeless," said one NYC police captain charged with rousting the homeless from Central Park in the summer of 1994.[16] One Florida Congressman, during debate on welfare reform held up a sign "Don't Feed the Alligators," making an analogy between his state's measures to keep its alligators from become overly dependent on handouts and what Congress needed to do in regard to poor people. Why, in the midst of unparalleled affluence, have we succumbed to what George Will calls the "crudification of culture"? Some observers cite the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Communism. Lacking an external enemy and sorely in need of one, we have turned on ourselves and our fellow citizens. But must we always have adversaries? Is there something in human nature that requires an enemy, that requires put-downs, that requires meanness? I don't think so.
Why have so many capitulated to this triumph of meanness? I believe that affluence tends to corrupt and absolute affluence corrupts absolutely. We who are affluent wallow in a new self-righteousness. Because we know it is a struggle to succeed as we have, we know people are winners or losers because they deserve to be. And if we aren't on top, ours is such a fiercely competitive society we feel we have to put others down to get there. And so we have created a "lifeboat ethic that rewards ruthlessness."[17]
I'm not calling for censorship of our cultural crudity, but I am asking what it says about a nation that celebrates and enriches it? What about a society that can't distinguish between reading a classic like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with its controversial language, but what the courts call "redeeming social value," and the gratuitous meanness and crudeness with which we are afflicted by popular culture every day? Does the angry Victor School District mother vent her spleen equally on the profanity, religious intolerance, homophobia and racism that surrounds her children daily?
In 1994, Raritan, New Jersey, banned cursing in public, making "noisy, rude or indecent behavior, profane, vulgar or indecent language or insulting remarks" illegal. Punishment could be a $500 fine and 90-day jail sentence.[18] I don't recommend legislating our way out of this moral morass. It is more a spiritual and ethical than a legal problem. It is, in the last analysis, a choice of values.
I think this little vignette on musical taste illustrates the climate of the times: The editor who writes under the pen name Aristides in The American Scholar wrote: "Reading an article in Esquire about David Letterman, I learn that 'he prefers music to stoke him, never to soothe.' The music of Letterman's choice, it shouldn't surprise us, is rock 'n' roll. The comedian is, musically, of the rock generation. B.R. or A.R., Before Rock or After Rock, is one of the great, perhaps uncrossable, divisions of humankind. Those of us who came before cannot hope - and, let us speak candidly, do not all that much wish to understand the musical tastes of those who came after. I, unlike David Letterman, prefer music that sooths me, for the world stokes me rather more than I like as it is, thank you very much."[19]
The world stokes me more than I like too. I would rather be soothed by the culture than stoked even more by it. I have tried to make a case for gentleness, the forgotten virtue. We usually think of gentleness as a personal virtue for our private lives, and it is that, of course. But I suggest we think of gentleness as a public virtue - that we use it as one yardstick by which to judge social, economic and political issues. There ought to be, a covenantal agreement among persons in a democratic society that is deeper than law - that suggests they be civil to one another - the bare minimum test.
Judith Martin, "Miss Manners," reminds us that courtesy, etiquette, civility rest on ethical values - as we Unitarian Universalists would say, "the inherent worth and dignity of every human being." Crudity, rudeness, meanness are symptoms of an underlying violence in the American psyche.
What should we do? We can always begin with ourselves and seek to become gentler than we are, and encourage the better angels of human nature in ourselves and in others. We can work for that peaceable kingdom where "the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the cow and the bear shall graze, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox," where people will live together in gentleness.
And so I say this to my Unitarian Universalist friends who have only been "winged" by a "ray of God's love: "In a world with ugliness, the only protest is beauty. In a world with meanness, the only protest is kindness. In a world with barbarians, the only protest is to be civilized." Be gentle with one another.
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