Last week, I saw several people I follow on Twitter link to a post in the Marginal Revolution blog: Why Has TV Replaced Movies as Elite Entertainment?
My first thought was, “That’s wrong.” Then I realized that the issue is that the word “elite” has multiple connotations. It means superior (higher in status, better in quality), but is also suggests exclusivity. An elite group is better than everybody and so is necessarily a smaller subset of the general population.
So, to call anything on television “elite” seems a little cuckoo (At one point, PBS was an exception to this rule, but that has faded). Television is available to pretty much everybody. It’s not like other truly elite arts, such as opera or painting, which may be out of the reach of many people for various reasons (geography, cost, language, etc.).
But that’s just a detail. If you want to argue that the quality of television has increased, while the quality of movies has declined, that’s a valid point. Let’s leave notions of elite culture out.
But then Charles Murray had an op-ed on the Washington Post this past weekend: The tea party warns of a New Elite. They’re right. Murray’s charge is that the New Elite has become “isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans.” I was incensed enough to fire off a series of tweets from my Twitter account:
- So, to be a reg’lar joe, you gots to watch The Price Is Right, Oprah, NASCAR, and Mixed Martial Arts fights.
- You gotta read the “Left Behind” series & Harlequin romances. You must vacation in RVs or take cruises.
- You must live in small towns or among people without college degrees. You must consort with poor people, evangelical Christians & factory workers.
- In short, be like Charles Murray, political scientist, author, columnist, and the W.H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute!
This elitism business is a pretty common charge. On Monday, I happen to hear Rush Limbaugh going on about the Ruling Class and their contempt for “hicks & hayseeds.” But the Murray piece still caught my eye, since it focused so much on popular culture as a barometer.
Kevin Drum demonstrated what a goofy measurement Murray’s list is. Some elites don’t backpack, but have watched Oprah. But more importantly, commenter Morris Baltimore at FrumForum notes that a lot of the activities that Murray approves of are actually only representative of small groups.
- “…far more Americans watch NFL, MLB or NBA games (not all of these together, but each individually) on television than NASCAR.”
- “7 million people toured [Branson, MO] last year. However, more 30 million visited the Smithsonian Institution’s museums.”
- “…for a number of decades now, the number of people living in small town America has been tiny compared to the number in urban and suburban areas.”
- “Authors of the Left Behind series, a 16-volume fictionalizing of the Bible’s Book of Revelations, had total sales of 65 million copies worldwide. J.K. Rowling’s 7 books in the Harry Potter series have sold more than 400 million.”
As I said before, “elite” has two meanings, one related to quality and one related to size. You can hardly call the movie Inception elite entertainment, when more than 30 million people saw it in the theaters.
Murray’s focus on Mad Men and The Sopranos versus The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Price Is Right misses a larger point. Television has become about serving niches. Most of American entertainment does the same thing. There are not many examples of popular culture that are consumed by huge masses of people, not like it used to be.
Murray is just picking niches and saying some of them are good and wholesome and others are elitist and bad. He thinks NSCAR is even more the province of ordinary Americans than football. (Wha…?)
Fly fishing is not something a lot of people do, but is that an elite sport? Skiing is an elite sport? Not if you live in Colorado.
But the worst part is when highly educated, rich and powerful people start throwing the accusation at other people about being elite. It has been my experience that almost anyone who trumpets the Man of the People label is no such thing.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: See this earlier roundup of my posts on Culture Wars.]
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The Pop View » “…the great masses of the plain people.” Says:
[...] as I wrote here, in a post about what makes things “elite,” it sometimes seems like people see the things they [...]