I’ve long had a dread fascination with the Culture Wars periodically fought in this country. I recall the PMRC-driven lyrics battles of the Eighties, pitting Tipper Gore against Frank Zappa.
One of the last things I wrote on this site before it took a long nap starting in 2000, was a piece about Joe Lieberman, which you can see here.
These battles have gone on in the past, presumably since the dawn of civilization. Wasn’t Socrates tried for corrupting the morals of Athenian youth? Haven’t the elders always been convinced that we’re going to hell in a handbasket?
Anyways, here’s a heads-up that there’s going to be a new blitz of this nonsense coming out over the next six months.
Timothy Noah wrote a piece on Slate about two of these books: Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton and Dinesh D’Souza The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility For 9/11. Noah footnotes the publishers’ promo pieces, such as this one from Random House:
In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America’s cultural left.
He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom — from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.
And this one for Goldberg’s book:
Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines.
Covering such hot issues as morality, anti-Semitism, science versus religion, health care, and cultural values, he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.
In addition, Niall Ferguson, the British historian, has a new book out entitled The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Decline of the West. In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, he has an article about how the West has been steadily declining over the last century, drawing comparisons from Edward Gibbon’s The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. At one point, Ferguson writes in “Empire Falls” the following:
Perhaps our most perplexing vulnerability, however, is cultural. Gibbon was acute in identifying literary decline as one symptom of a more profound Roman malaise. And if his barbed allusion to the “darkened… face of learning” does not immediately strike a chord, then some of the other symptoms may. While “the corrupt and opulent nobles of Rome gratified every vice that could be collected from the mighty conflux of nations and manners,” Gibbon wrote, “the most lively and splendid amusement of the idle multitude depended on the frequent exhibition of public games and spectacles.” Orgies and circuses are not precisely the favorite pastimes of Western society today. But if you substitute pornography and NASCAR, the parallel is not so far-fetched.
Outwardly, it is true, the institutions that exist to propagate our culture are in good shape. Never has the percentage of young people attending college been higher. Never have American universities dominated higher education and academic research as they do today. Out museums and concert halls offer more exhibitions and recitals that the enthusiast can possibly hope to attend. And to enter any branch of Barnes & Noble is to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of books being published.
Yet underneath this upper crust of high culture there simmers a less appetizing stew. Few children read for pleasure. Most boys would rather fritter away their time away on brutalizing video games such as Grand Theft Auto. Girls no longer play with dolls; they are themselves the dolls, dressed according to the dictates of the fashion industry. Endlessly gaming, chatting, and chilling with their iPods, the next generation already has a more tenuous connection to “Western civilization” than most parents appreciate.
Let me silently condemn all of this chatter and move on…