Our American Culture

 Another dispatch from Ted Gioia about the stagnation of American culture, Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?  I have been wondering about certain things regarding rock music for about 30 years. Mr. Gioia writes more clearly on the subject than I ever will. He thinks more deeply than I do. Which is why I keep reading him.

Is there any creative field where America’s best work from the 1940s and early 1950s is cherished and celebrated?

• The symphonies from that era have almost entirely disappeared from the repertoire.

• The popular songs are no longer familiar to us (except for a few holiday tunes resurrected each Christmas).

• The musicals (by Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, etc.) are clearly superior to today’s Broadway fare, but are fading from the public’s memory.

Not all of these works deserve lasting acclaim. Some of the tropes and attitudes are outdated. Avant-garde obsessions of the era often feel arbitrary or constraining when viewed from a later perspective. Censorship prevented artists from pursuing a more stringent realism in their works.

But those reasons don’t really justify the wholesale erasure of an extraordinary era of American creativity.

 There is material in the idea that the Kings of the Algorithm control our understanding of our culture - a dystopian idea, of course. Why this should be eludes me, nor does Mr. Gioia have a ready explanation. The obvious choice is, of course, profits, but who is the one profiting, or the nature of the profits.

The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.

• Everything on YouTube is happening right now!

• Everything on Netflix is happening right now!

• Everything on Spotify is happening right now!

Of course, this is an illusion. Just compare these platforms with libraries and archives and other repositories of history. The contrast is extreme.

My own interest has been Turner Classic Movies, which seems to have cornered the market on older films and segregated them from the mainstream of society. Mr. Gioia writes about Netflix.

He conjures up a hatred of the past, which should be a worry - especially nowadays.

The web has cultivated an impatience with that weight of the past. You might even say that it conveys a hatred of the past.

And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control. When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it cancelled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.

That’s how Netflix erases Citizen Kane and Casablanca. It can’t deny the greatness of these films. It can’t remove their artistry, even by the smallest iota.

But it can act as if they never happened.

Since America's surge towards a dictatorship comes from a movement that wants to make America great again, obscuring America's past makes possible a rewriting of history that plays to authoritarianism's fantasies that will, in turn, create a present and a future for fostering authoritarian government. 

It must seem that I am teetering on depression, if not worse, when I feel in a rather light-hearted mood. Dystopian visions while not feeling nihilistic. What a better way of thinking when I was nihilistic and depressed.  

But one question has dogged me through the writing of this post: are the problems diagnosed by Mr. Gioia (and myself) also true out of the USA?

 

sch 9/27