Censorship & Culture Wars

 Catching up on my email brought me to Chris Yogerst's Endless Culture Wars: On Kliph Nesteroff’s “Outrageous” from the LA Review of Books (a site I have found interesting, and free).

Every time we come across viral anger about popular culture, it can feel like “[w]e are engaged in a battle for the soul of the nation,” writes Nesteroff, a pop culture historian, in his new book. Having cut his teeth as a stand-up comic, Nesteroff is best known as a welcome talking head in numerous documentaries about the history of comedy, as well as the author of The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy (2015) and We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy (2021). Purposefully avoiding comment on today’s debates, Nesteroff’s goal is to show us that the old refrain that “you can’t joke about anything anymore” is just that—an outdated chorus. “The purpose of this book is to provide context for showbiz controversies as they arise—and how to make sense of them,” he writes.

The review highlights the book's use of history, and how much we have been entrapped by the craziness of the John Birch Society. 

One of the book’s greatest strengths is how it outlines the origins of outrage, tracking its evolution (and stasis) historically. What was once anger expressed by religious groups became lavishly funded outrage machines stemming from the Cold War–era John Birch Society, an organization which continues to impact the nation. Among the founders was candy and conspiracy solicitor Robert W. Welch Jr. One of the Society’s bookstores was operated by Charles Koch (whose last name should ring a few bells). The Society propagated anti-integration views, held book burnings, and kept pressure on Hollywood and the media for liberalizing the country. Some members of Hollywood were recruited by the Society, such as screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, who authored some marvelous comedies of the 1930s, including Animal Crackers (1930) and My Man Godfrey (1936). Ryskind’s son Allan, it is worth noting, published Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters; Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler in 2015, a book carrying evaporated water and decrying Hollywood’s communist-infiltrated Golden Age. The John Birch Society was lampooned by comedians in every medium. Original Tonight Show host Steve Allen received death threats for his jokes about the Birchers.

Later profiled is Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank funded by a multimillion-dollar donation by Joseph Coors. The name of the foundation may sound scholarly, but all it did on its founding in 1973 was provide a new veneer for Bircher beliefs. The organization sparked a growth of other similar groups, all Christian-affiliated, working toward the dismantling of popular culture. By the 1980s, such groups attracted televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and stoked public fears around music and entertainment, resulting in the burning of hip-hop and heavy metal records.

My first step-father brought home Bircher books when I was in high school. I have been thinking about this for the past year: I cannot recall why I came to the conclusion that they were BS.  All I can recall is thinking there was no way everyone could be a Communist. Today, I would say it was a self-devouring paranoia put into print with footnotes. It was not conservatism - William F. Buckely, Jr wrote the BRichers out of his conservative movement - and it certainly was not sane scholarship.

Of course, the excuse for all this activity is to save the children. One day Americans will open concentration camps to protect our children.

Nesteroff doesn’t explicitly tell us what to do with the knowledge he’s shared, and maybe he doesn’t have to. But I would argue that one thing we need to do is continue sharing the history of the culture wars. It’s why I teach the aforementioned class and am considering my own book on the subject. We need to expand conversation outside of the social media black hole where algorithms privilege the most idiotic content, and books like Outrageous give us a tool to share with others. Information, especially good information, is an undervalued commodity in today’s data-driven economy. If we are going to cut through the fearmongering around so-called “dangerous” popular culture, we first need to show that we can fight the outrage machine by exposing the hypocrisy of save the children–type rhetoric.

I hate Manichean worldviews, I rebel at either/or ultimatums, and so I reluctantly suggest that this country, therefore all of humanity, has been in combat between the irrational and the rational. For America, it feels like a giant hairball that needs to come out. Self-government depends on rationality. Authoritarian government means giving up our sovereignty to a leader. Are we ready to do that?

We may wind up with someone who is an actual danger to the future, and to the children:

sch 12/9