The Enemy At Home (18 page)

Here in America, a longtime man of the left, Christopher Hitchens, argues that modern America represents the values of secularism, feminism, and homosexuality. An outspoken atheist, Hitchens is the author of a book vilifying Mother Teresa titled
The Missionary Position
. It is “godless hedonistic America” and the state of Massachusetts’s recent sanction of practices such as homosexual marriage, Hitchens gleefully points out, that provoke “the writhing faces and hoarse yells of the mullahs and the fanatics.” It is in defense of this godless, hedonistic America that Hitchens supports the Bush administration’s war on radical Islam.
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Is this, then, what the war on terrorism is all about—to impose the values of secularism, feminism, homosexuality, prostitution, and pornography on the world?

REMARKABLY, THERE HAS
been no serious debate in America over the moral content of American popular culture. America has witnessed huge changes in its culture over the past few decades, changes that put contemporary American values sharply at odds not only with non-Western cultures but also with the values of America’s own past. Some of these changes are, of course, for the better. American culture is more varied, spirited, and individualistic than in previous generations. There is an infectious spirit of freedom that Americans and non-Americans find irresistible. At the same time, there has been a coarsening, a debasement, a collapse of standards in American culture that makes much of it intolerable to older Americans, repulsive to most immigrants from traditional cultures, and alarming to many parents.

One small indication of this is in the use of language. Terms that would never previously have appeared on television, such as “ass,” “bitch,” and “bastard,” now routinely appear even during the early evening, when children are watching. Only in rare cases can the use of obscenities be justified as necessary to character or plot development. In many cases the mere use of obscenity is intended to be humorous. Indeed the f-word is now so gratuitously common in films that some movie characters would be rendered virtually mute if they didn’t use the term.

Talk shows on television have sunk so low that I am virtually nostalgic for
The Phil Donahue Show.
Not that I was a fan of earnest, gaseous Phil, but at least he tried to discuss legitimate social questions. Donahue was rudely pushed off the air by the likes of Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Rikki Lake, Oprah Winfrey, Montel Williams, Maury Povich, and Jerry Springer. Each tried to outdo the other. “My Mom Had an Affair with My Man.” “Women Who Fall in Love with Gay Men.” “Women Who Marry Their Rapists.” Finally Oprah moved to more uplifting programming. Even Geraldo concluded that “I went too far…I used up my quota on deviant behavior”
¹⁰
and joined Fox News Channel as a foreign reporter. But the others continue their daily routine of exploiting mostly poor, highly screwed-up guests—all under the guise of helping them. “So tell us, Jolene. When did you find out that the man you had been having sex with was your real dad? And how did that make you feel?” Seeking distinctiveness in the talk-show lineup, Jerry Springer developed his trademark shows in which guests—typically men who are having sex with the same woman, or women who are having sex with the same man—come to blows while the audience appreciatively chants, “Jerry! Jerry!” For sheer shock value, however, it is hard to outdo Howard Stern, who has developed a huge and virtually cult following. Stern’s show regularly features an endless parade of women who are asked to take off their clothes, let Howard touch their breasts, let Howard evaluate their ass, let Howard shave their private parts, and so on. Occasionally, to vary the pace, Stern will conduct a “Spot the Jew by His Nose” contest or “Man with the Smallest Dick” contest.

Television sitcoms have reached a new level of polymorphous promiscuity, as some recent examples show. On the CBS show
Two and a Half Men,
Charlie gets together with an old girlfriend, only to discover that she is now a he. This is intended to be very funny. The humor deepens when Charlie discovers that the former girlfriend, now a man, is having sex with Charlie’s middle-aged mom. Charlie faces a moral dilemma: whether to tell his mother that “Bill” used to be “Jill.” On NBC’s prime-time hit show
Will
&
Grace,
a young woman named Tina confesses to Will that his father, with whom she is having an affair, is cheating on her with another woman. When Will offers to help Tina, she is extremely grateful, because, as she explains, “I have no one else to go to. I’d go to my girlfriends but I’ve slept with all their husbands.” Hilarious. Eventually we discover that Will’s father is cheating on Tina with his ex-wife, Will’s mother. Time for a showdown between the two women? Not at all. We find out that Will’s mother is so openminded that she doesn’t mind sharing. She tells Tina, “I’ll take George Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.” Tina adds, “And I’ll keep him on the weekends. We’ll give him Tuesdays and Thursdays to rest.” The laughter at this point has reached its crescendo.

Shocking the morals of the American public—“pushing the envelope”—is a central theme of contemporary entertainment, although the public has become so desensitized that this is becoming increasingly difficult to do. Madonna perfected the genre in the 1980s, not just because of her salacious lyrics and dance routines, but also because she juxtaposed those with the symbols of traditional morality and religiosity. Her name is “Madonna”—a reference to the Virgin Mary. She often wore highly revealing outfits with a large cross necklace bouncing on her breasts. Even her videos, with titles such as
Like a Prayer,
and her songs, with titles such as “Like a Virgin,” evoke traditional religion and morality if only to mock them. Madonna’s appeal rests on a kind of blasphemy: she is a pagan goddess who is posing as the Virgin Mary. Madonna made headlines recently for her openmouthed kiss with Britney Spears on the MTV Video Music Awards show. As was no doubt intended, the kiss made headlines around the world, including the front page of
USA Today
. Entertainment sages informed the public that Madonna was symbolically anointing Britney Spears as her successor.

Britney Spears’s participation in “the Kiss” was significant because of Spears’s status as a pop icon for very young girls. Her audience reaches down to girls as young as eight. Yet parents who bother to listen to the words in her songs are often startled by their content. Spears has gone from moderately titillating lyrics like “I’m not that innocent” and “Hit me baby one more time” to more explicit recent fare like “The Hook Up” and a song about masturbation. These topics, from her famous kiss with Madonna to her masturbation melody, are now openly discussed by “serious” journalists like Diane Sawyer. Here, for instance, is Sawyer interviewing Spears about “the Kiss” on
Primetime Thursday:

Sawyer
: You said there’s no tongue action there.

Spears
: Oh, of course there was no tongue. Gosh, no.

Sawyer
: Well, it looked like it. It looked like there was.
¹¹

Much has been said about the filthy language, sexual exploitation, and violence that are central themes in today’s rap music. Here is a relatively mild example from the white rapper Eminem:

Slut, you think I won’t choke no whore

Till the vocal cords don’t work in her throat no more?

Bitch I’m a kill you! Like a murder weapon, I’m a conceal you

In a closet with mildew, sheets, pillows and film you.

Recently the
New York Times
pointed out that for rappers, serving time for violent crime is a “resume booster” that often leads to higher sales. The
Times
noted: “On Tuesday C-Murder released his newest album. The sticker boasts: Behind Bars! Still Thugging! C-Murder has been locked up since 2003, when he was convicted of second-degree murder. Next week the Philadelphia rapper Beanie Sigel is to release
The B. Coming,
recorded last year before he began his one-year sentence for weapons possession. And one of the season’s most eagerly anticipated albums is by Jah Cure, who has been in prison since 1999, convicted of robbery, gun possession, and two counts of rape.”
¹²

I want to emphasize that the examples I am giving are neither rare nor extreme. It would be easy to provide hundreds of examples, and to find many far more explicit than the ones I have given. American culture offers a pattern so reliable that I can often make sound predictions about it, even when I have very limited information. For example, if I walk into my daughter’s room with the TV on and hear the word “God” mentioned, there is a 99 percent chance that the character is swearing (“My God!” “Good God!”) rather than praying. If I turn on an episode of a daytime soap or evening drama in which two characters are having sex, I can safely bet that they are not married—at least not to each other.

Behind the innumerable examples of excess, immodesty, and immorality there is an ideology. Here are some of the ingredients of that ideology, which constitutes Hollywood’s understanding of how the world is, or should be. Children are usually wiser than their parents and teachers, who are often portrayed as fools and bunglers. Homosexuals are typically presented as good-looking and charming, and unappealing features of the gay lifestyle are either ignored or presented in an amusing light. As countless movie plots confirm, the white businessman in the suit is usually the villain. Prostitutes are always portrayed more favorably and decently than anyone who criticizes them. Small towns are the preferred venue for evil and scary occurrences, and country pastors are usually portrayed as vicious, hypocritical, sexually repressed, and corrupt. Notwithstanding the occasional appearance of the stereotypical Elmer Gantry, nobody goes to church. Religion is simply not a feature of the lives of movie and television characters. Lots of film and TV characters have pre-marital sex, but very rarely does anyone contract a sexually transmitted disease. “Prudes” are always the subject of jokes and ridicule. One of the central themes of American movies and television is the glamorization of adultery. Adultery is almost always portrayed sympathetically, so that if a woman cheats on her husband, the husband is generally shown to be vicious, unscrupulous, abusive, impotent, or in some way deserving of the fate that befalls him.
¹³

Where, then, are the moral standards in American popular culture? It seems that there are none, just as the Muslims allege.

SO FAR I
have greatly understated the Muslim case against American popular culture. The triviality, coarseness, and vulgarity in movies, in music, and on television are bad enough. But it is far worse for a culture when those trends, far from being denounced and deplored, are actually praised and celebrated by influential figures in the society. This is precisely the case with American popular culture, which is actively championed by leading voices on the cultural left. Moreover, as Tipper Gore found out, anyone who attempts to criticize cultural depravity is vehemently denounced by the cultural left. In short, the cultural left is the political guardian of the depraved values of American popular culture.

To understand this, it is important to notice what the cultural left says and does, but also what it doesn’t say and doesn’t do. Critics on the left will deplore violence when it appears in a movie that promotes traditional religious faith, such as Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ.
The liberal critic for the
New York Daily News
found the violence in this movie “grotesque…savage…sickening.” But the left will praise violence when it appears in movies that promote liberal or avant-garde values, such as
Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers,
or
Kill Bill.
The same critic who found Mel Gibson’s movie hard to endure has written a glowing biography of the moviemaker who virtually specializes in gruesome violence, Quentin Tarantino.
¹⁴
Politicians on the cultural left, like Hillary Clinton, understand the tactical value of siding with parents who are concerned about the harms of popular culture. But while she frequently speaks of a V-chip to enable parents to control the violent programming to which their children are exposed, Clinton has never called for an S-chip to enable parents to monitor sexually explicit programming. Thus Clinton tacitly conveys her indifference to the goal of protecting childhood sexual innocence.

Some on the left have sought to deflect blame for the moral depravity of American popular culture to American business. “It is because of the market,” Thomas Frank writes, “that TV is such a sharp-tongued insulter of family values and such a zealous promoter of every species of social deviance.”
¹⁵
But if this is so, then the silence of the cultural left in criticizing the entertainment business is especially revealing. The left, after all, constantly denounces American business for various types of financial corruption. It is unfailingly vigilant in exposing business for polluting the natural environment. But when is the last time a liberal denounced Hollywood or the music industry for polluting the moral environment? When is the last time someone on the left scorned the music industry in the same way that liberals scorn Tyco and Enron? Why don’t liberals treat the movie companies with the same belligerence that they treat the cigarette companies? The movie business and the music industry appear to be the two forms of capitalism that are generally exempt from liberal criticism. It seems that the cultural left opposes capitalism except when it produces moral degeneracy.