State of the Union, 2/26/07: Storm clouds brewing

February 26, 2007 at 5:47 pm (Apocalypse Watch, Society & Culture)

A few fun headlines (with links) from today and the past few weeks, regarding the present social, financial, and cultural situation in the United States:

Greenspan Warns of Likely U.S. Recession

Demand for Ethanol May Hike Food Prices

U.S. mortgage crisis goes into meltdown

Children’s TV ‘is linked to cancer, autism, dementia’

Get the message: it’s the medium” (scientific evidence that television rots the brain, ruins the body)

The Theme-Parking, Megachurching, Franchising, Exurbing, McMansioning of America: How Walt Disney Changed Everything

Media obsession with trivial hurts our nation

Okay, so maybe the last one’s kind of a cheat if I’m trying to provide a survey of negative-sounding items from the media recently, since it’s a shortened version of my blog post from last week titled “Anna Nicole Smith is the Fourth Horseman.” I contacted Tony Messenger, the editorial page editor of my local area daily paper who’s mentioned in the post, and asked him if he’d be interested in running the piece in the newspaper. He said yes and asked me to chop it down to around 450 words. So I did, and it appeared in yesterday’s paper as a guest editorial. Yesterday morning a number of friends mentioned it when I saw them. I guess I’m a minor local celebrity now.

Since I talk about my teaching job and my students’ general cultural ignorance in the piece, I had wondered whether I might catch some flak when I arrived at work today, but in fact not a single person has asked me about it. So I brought it up to some colleagues at lunch and found that none of them had read yesterday’s editorial page. Go figure.

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Anna Nicole Smith Is the Fourth Horseman

February 19, 2007 at 2:21 pm (Apocalypse Watch, Education, Society & Culture)

The only daily newspaper that originates from my part of the world is The News-Leader, which is located in Springfield, Missouri. It blankets southwest Missouri and part of Arkansas.

Last Tuesday, February 13th, editorial page editor Tony Messenger posted a brief observation at his blog, “Ozarks Messenger,” titled “A sign of the apocalypse…” It read as follows:

“I know that just by posting this I have become part of the problem, but I’m amazed at the coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith death and impending fight over her estate and paternity of her child. According to this study, the story has consumed more than 50 percent of cable news time. Between that and astronaut/diapergate, it’s amazing there’s any time for important coverage, such as, oh, I don’t know, a little war, health care, presidential politics. How low we as an industry, and a community, have sunk.”

I’ve really enjoyed Mr. Messenger’s handling of the paper’s editorial page ever since he took over from longtime editorial page editor Robert Leger last year, and this recent post is an example of why. I couldn’t help leaving a comment about it at his blog. Naturally, given my penchant for going on — or perhaps going off — about various indicators of cultural decline, my comment quickly bloomed to the length of an essay.

Here’s what I said:

As another commenter has already averred: Amen, brother Tony! I especially like the way you’ve framed this media insanity as an apocalyptic phenomenon. I know it’s become common to refer to things jokingly as “signs of the apocalypse,” but at present the type of idiocy you’ve decried here is hardly a joke, since the takeover of American and Western public life by trash and trivia over the past 30 to 40 years is truly a harbinger of cultural decline.

One of my favorite websites that talks about the “dumbing down” phenomenon (http://nomuzak.co.uk/dumbing_down.html) offers a vivid and accurate description of the way our collective consciousness has been hijacked by meaningless junk that obscures and edges out more serious fare: “In fact, the evidence for ‘dumbing down’ is everywhere: newspapers that once ran foreign news now feature celebrity gossip, pictures of scantily dressed young ladies, and football; television has replaced high-quality drama with gardening, cookery, and other ‘lifestyle’ programmes; bonkbusters have taken over the publishing world and pop cd’s and internet connections have taken over the libraries. In the dumbed-down world of reality TV and asinine soaps, the masses live in a perpetual present occupied by celebrity culture, fashion, a TV culture of diminished quality and range, an idealisation of mediocrity, and pop videos and brands. Speed and immediacy are the great imperatives, meaning that complex ideas are reduced to sound bites, high culture is represented by The Three Tenors and J K Rowling, people spend their spare time reading text messages instead of Dostoevsky, and listening to rap bands rather than Bartok and Stravinsky.”

Although the writer is speaking about Britain — note the British spellings — his words describe the contemporary culture of the U.S. as well. And indeed, he talks about America elsewhere in the same essay.

To speak more from my own personal experience, I can tell you that I teach English at a rural southwest Missouri high school, and whenever I speak to my students, if I want to make reference to any sort of common object of knowledge in order to illustrate a point about the dramatic structure of stories, or about irony or other literary techniques, or about anything else having to do with books and literature – and it’s a daily necessity to refer to a common fund of knowledge in order to illuminate something we’re studying – I find lately that the only thing I can mention with any reasonable expectation of group familiarity is the Harry Potter phenomenon. Almost all of the teens have seen the movies. Several have read one or more of the novels. I can also refer to THE LORD OF THE RINGS, but that’s because of the popular movies; only a tiny minority of students so far (as in, two or three of them) has actually read Tolkien’s books. I do have a student who has read a couple of Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” books, so he has a minor grounding in literary fantasy.

But anyway, I simply can’t expect these kids to know much of anything, not even — and here’s the rub — about pop cultural stuff! It’s astonishing to find how many of them are oblivious to mass media culture. Not that they don’t know the names and faces of actors and bands and other celebrities, but if I mention the name of any movie director besides Rob Zombie, there’s a general look of blankness. I tried it with Spielberg once and had a couple of students respond, none too confidently, “Isn’t he the guy who made Saving Private Ryan?” I’ve also been shocked and dismayed at how many of them are functionally ignorant of Stephen King. Sure, they know some of his movies, but when it comes to the man himself the overwhelming consensus is an attitude of dull, suspicious disinterest, expressed in questions such as, “Stephen King – he’s really weird, right? Like, he’s that horror guy.” So even on the level of the pop culture crap that many of us decry, these kids’ frame of reference is shockingly narrow.

That said, I did find out recently, simply by asking, that they’re all aware of the Anna Nicole Smith “story.” So hooray. I guess.

Here’s what social critic and cultural historian Morris Berman had to say about these matters in his 2000 jeremiad, The Twilight of American Culture:

“In his introduction to the book, Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture, John Simon notes that a whole world of learning is disappearing before our eyes, in merely one generation. We cannot expect, he says, to make a mythological allusion anymore, or use a foreign phrase, or refer to a famous historical event or literary character, and still be understood by more than a tiny handful of people. (Try this in virtually any group setting, and note the reaction. This is an excellent wake-up call as to what this culture is about, and how totally alien to it you are.) Indeed, using Lewis Lapham’s criteria for genuine literacy — having some familiarity with a minimum number of standard texts (Marx, Darwin, Dickens . . .), and being able to spot irony — it may even be the case that the number of genuinely literate adults in the United States amounts to fewer than 5 million people — that is, less than 3 percent of the total population.

“In 1953, Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 — later made into a movie by Francois Truffaut — which depicts a future society in which intelligence has largely collapsed and the reading of books is forbidden by law. People sit around interacting with screens (referred to as ‘the family’) and taking tranquilizers. Today, nearly five decades later, isn’t this largely the point at which we have arrived? Do not the data cited above suggest that most of our neighbors are, in fact, the mindless automatons depicted in Truffaut’s film? True, the story does contain a class of ‘book people’ who hide in the forest and memorize the classics, to pass on to future generations — and this vignette does, in fact, provide a clue as to what just might enable our civilization to eventually recover — but the majority of citizens on the eve of the twenty-first century watch an average of four hours of TV a day, pop Prozac and its derivatives like candy, and perhaps read a Danielle Steel novel once a year.”

Okay, so there’s a misanthropic tone there. But, you know, Berman’s point is difficult to argue with, and sometimes the bitter pill is the necessary medicine.

To round out this rambling comment on the aforementioned apocalyptic note of cultural decline, I’ve long been disturbed by the terminal diagnosis of American culture that appeared in Neil Postman’s influential Amusing Ourselves to Death back in 1985: “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility.” I truly think that’s where we stand now, even more so than when Postman penned those words two decades ago. And the fact that the national news media can go into a feeding frenzy over something as patently and disgustingly vapid as the Anna Nicole Smith “story” at a time when America’s foreign and domestic circumstances are as they are only drives home the truth of Postman’s (and Bradbury’s, and Berman’s) Dark Age diagnosis.

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Great reviews of my DARK ARTS story

February 12, 2007 at 4:45 pm (Authors, Books)

A couple of recent reviews of the HWA’s Dark Arts anthology have spoken quite well of “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic,” the story by Mark McLaughlin and myself that closes out the book.

One is found at the website for Rambles: A Cultural Arts Magazine. Regarding Mark’s and my story, the reviewer says, “Nowhere in Dark Arts do potentially terrifying scenes result in much more than one genuinely squeamish moment, and that’s not until the very last entry, ‘Nightmares, Imported & Domestic’ by Matt Cardin and Mark McLaughlin.” Okay, so it’s not exactly a statement of direct praise, but I’ll take being singled out in a review for any reason. And it’s not so bad when your story is described as the only one in a horror anthology that actually horrifies.

The other recent review is found at Rick Kleffel’s excellent The Agony Column, which offers a mixed (mostly positive) review of the anthology as a whole, but which is unambiguously enthusiastic about Mark’s and my contribution: “Matt Cardin and Mark McLaughlin team to produce the sophisticated and thought-provoking ‘Nightmares, imported and domestic’, in which a painter has black-and-white dreams of another self, living a different life. The boundaries between the two existences become increasingly thin, to the point of merging in a single, tragic reality. This remarkable piece of work, possibly the best in the book, brings in echoes of Kafka and Dostoyevsky, overcoming the limits of genre fiction.” Now that’s what I’d call a positive response!

Incidentally, although I’ve long been familiar with The Agony Column and have stopped by there semi-frequently ever since the site’s inception in 2002, I was unfamiliar with Mario Guslandi, who wrote the Dark Arts review. So I did a Google search and found out a bit about him. I had thought the prose in the review was a little shaky in places, as if it were written by someone whose first language isn’t English. But the ideas themselves seemed sound and the voice solid. So it was a nice validation of my readerly perception when I saw Mr. Guslandi described as “most likely the only Italian who regularly reads (and reviews) dark fiction in English.” More power to him, says I.

For additional positive word about Dark Arts and “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic,” I refer you to the positive writeup about the anthology in Publishers Weekly.

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Reading log: January 2007

February 5, 2007 at 2:26 pm (Authors, Books)

For this, my first blog post of February 2007, I’ll be inaugurating a new series. In past years I’ve kept reading logs for weeks and months at a time, and have always been fascinated to scan back over them later and be reminded of what I was reading and thinking at a given period in my personal history. But for 2007 I decided to get really rigorous about it, in order to trace the various pathways of my involuntary attention.

I generally don’t follow a predetermined reading plan, although I’ve done so for extended periods as it’s been necessary when I’m researching a particular topic, issue, genre, or author. Having racked up as many college hours as most Ph.D.’s (at last count I think my total hours were around 210 or 215), I’ve developed an iron-clad antipathy toward structuring my reading too deliberately whenever I’m just doing it for my own pleasure and edification.

So I run wild on a common, as it were, in my reading choices, and this makes possible an almost clinical diagnosis of my general interests and cast of thought during a given period. Of course, I’m well aware that this may prove utterly useless and boring to everybody but me.

Enough with the preamble. Here’s a detailed list of what I read last month. I made a point of trying to record every last item that I actually took the time to read in full, no matter how substantial or insubstantial it was, and no matter how much or little attention I actually gave it. Of course there are things missing, some two dozen or so articles and essays that I didn’t manage to note down when I encountered them in print or on the Internet. And there’s a host of additional things that I read in part — articles I skimmed, passages in books that I revisited, and so on — that didn’t seem worthy of inclusion on a list of my “real” reading. But on the whole the list provides an accurate portrait.

I think you’ll notice, as I did, that it’s a bit lop-sided in terms of both the form and the content of its entries.

BOOKS

  • Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (2006)—chs. 4, 5, 6
  • Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: The Horror of Life and the Art of Horror (prepublication manuscript)
  • Tom Piccirilli, The Dead Letters (2006)
  • William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Acts I and II

SHORT FICTION

ARTICLES, ESSAYS, ETC.

  • “Academic predicts rising oil prices will prompt a local food renaissance,” Farmers Weekly Interactive, January 26, 2007
  • Jay Akasie, “Oil Will Dominate for Next 100 Years, Predicts Shell,” New York Sun, January 19, 2007
  • Moira Allen, “Self-Syndicating Your Column,” Writing-World.com, 2001
  • Kurt Anderson, “The End of the World As They Know It,” New York Magazine, October 2, 2006
  • Sharon Astyk, “The Theory of Anyway,” Energy Bulletin, January 25, 2007
  • Chris Baltimore, “Bush readies speech on climate change,” Reuters, January 16, 2007
  • Representative Roscoe Bartlett, R-Maryland, “Peak Oil Production,” presentation to the United States House of Representatives, January 17, 2007
  • Richard Bell, “The rise of the ‘axis of oil’—big trouble for the U.S.,” Global Public Media, January 10, 2007
  • Lester Brown, “Considering the Real Costs of Our Energy Economy,” The Huffington Post, January 24, 2007
  • Jo Chandler, “We’re ruining earth, scientists warn,” The Age, January 27, 2007
  • Andrew Delbanco, “The Decline and Fall of Literature,” The New York Review of Books, Volume 46, Number 17 (November 4, 1999)
  • Emily Eakin, “Going at the Changes In, Ya Know, English: An interview with John McWhorter,” The New York Times, November 15, 2003
  • Richard Embleton, “Give me a child until…”, Energy Bulletin, January 29, 2007
  • “Energy time: It’s not about something for everyone,” International Herald Tribune, January 16, 2007
  • John Ezart, “18 to 24: the dumber generation,” Guardian Unlimited, October 28, 2000
  • Andrew Garber, “Seattle ‘peak oilers’ prepare for a world without petroleum,” Seattle Times, January 2, 2007
  • Manuel Roig-Franzia, “A culinary and cultural staple in crisis: Mexico grapples with soaring prices for corn—and tortillas,” The Washington Post, January 27, 2007
  • John Taylor Gatto, “A Short Angry History of American Forced Schooling,” circa 2001
  • John Taylor Gatto, “I’m a Saboteur,” Fast Company, Issue 40 (October 2000)
  • John Michael Greer, weekly blog posts at The Archdruid Report
  • John Halle, “Meditations on a post-Literate Musical Future,” NewMusicBox, August 1, 2004
  • Blaine Harden, “Gore’s ‘Truth’ given cold reception in Seattle: Father gets schools to demand balance on global warming,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 26, 2007
  • “The ‘Real’ School Is Not Free” by Thom Hartmann, 1999
  • Russ Kick, “The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile,” The Memory Hole, July 17, 2003
  • Berit Kjos, “Molding Human Resources for the Global Workplace,” Kjos Ministries, 2001
  • Michael Klare, “Is Energy-Fascism in Your Future? The Global Energy Race and Its Consequences (part I),” Tom Dispatch, January 15, 2007
  • Michael Klare, “Petro-Power and the Nuclear Renaissance: Two Faces of an Emerging Energo-Fascism (part II),” Tom Dispatch, January 16, 2007
  • William Kotke, “Revolution Arising out of the Earth,” parts I and II, carolynbaker.org, January 15 and 22, 2007
  • James Howard Kunstler, weekly blog posts at Clusterfuck Nation
  • James Howard Kunstler, “Making Other Arrangements: A wake-up call to the citizenry in the shadow of scarce oil,” Orion Magazine, January/February 2007
  • Elizabeth Laden, “Self-Syndicating Your Weekly Column,” 2001
  • Julie Light, “The Education Industry: The Corporate Takeover of Public Schools,” CorpWatch, 1998
  • Fred Mazelis, “On the gulf between ‘high’ and ‘low’ in music,” World Socialist Web Site, August 25, 1998
  • Charles Murray, “Prole Models: America’s Elites Take Their Cues from the Underclass,” website for the American Enterprise Institute, March 1, 2001
  • Joyce Carol Oates, “The Nature of Short Fiction; or, The Nature of My Short Fiction” (preface to The Writer’s Digest handbook of Short Story Writing), 1970
  • “Polls: Wealth is a top priority for today’s youth,” CNN.com (Associated Press), January 22, 2007
  • Paul Craig Roberts, “The Disrespect for Truth Has Brought a New Dark Age,” Information Clearing House, December 29, 2006
  • Kris Sayce, “Power Failures in Melbourne…Bush Fires or Energy Crisis?”, The Daily Reckoning, January 17, 2007
  • Mike Schaefer, “The Truth about Oil,” Energy and Capital, January 2007
  • Gini Graham Scott, Ph. D., J.D., “How to Get Your Column or Article Syndicated,” Creative Communications Research, 2001
  • John Seabrook, “Q & A with John Seabrook, author of Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture, Random House website, 2001
  • Sam Smith, “The Quiet Storm: Blowin’ in the Wind of Cultural Decay,” The Progressive Review, undated
  • Gabor Steingart, “White Trash, Fast Food: How Globalization Is Creating a New European Underclass” (excerpt from Steingart’s World War for Wealth: The Global Grab for Power and Prosperity), Spiegel Online, October 26, 2006
  • Louise Story, “Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad,” The New York Times, January 15, 2007
  • Marc Tucker, 2002 letter to Hillary Clinton about remaking America’s public education system, archived at http://edaction.org/tucker.htm
  • Matthew L. Wald, “The Long Road to Energy Independence,” The New York Times, January 28, 2007
  • Molly Watson, “Why life after oil will be better,” Western Mail (Wales), January 27, 2007
  • Tom Whipple, “The peak oil crisis: Congressional Hearings—round #2,” Falls Church News-Press, January 17, 2007
  • Hymel Williams, “Do these results matter? Yes; Hywel Williams laments the triumph of ignorance over enlightenment,” Guardian Unlimited, October 28, 2000
  • Mickie Willis, “Why Do So Many Smart People Listen to Such Terrible Music?”, The Unconservatory, 2003
  • John Zerzan, “Youth and Regression in an Infantile Society,” primitivism.com, undated

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