by martha bayles
yale, 336 pages, $30
D
uring the Cold War the United States government madeimportant attempts to manage America’s image in the world. Besides the radiostations—Voice of America and Radio Free Europe—and the U.S. AdvisoryCommission on Public Diplomacy, there was the U.S. Information Agency, whoseaim was to ensure that an upbeat and truthful image of America would prevailagainst the adverse propaganda of the Soviet Union. The USIA was closed down in1999, and the scope of the radio networks has been curtailed.
One consequence of this—lamented at length by MarthaBayles—is that the image of America in the world is now entirely the productof American popular culture, which has succeeded in giving a worse name toAmerica than anything that could conceivably have been implanted by the Sovietpropaganda machine. The Muslim peasant in his village has only to turn on thetelevision to witness the Great Satan in flagrante delicto, and even if he is not immediately prompted to join al-Qaeda he is likely to be glad thatothers are doing so, with a view to punishing the blasphemies and obscenitiesthat pour out across the screen.
Martha Bayles is an intelligent, learned, and sensitiveperson who has spent a long time studying the world of morons, apparentlywithout going mad in the process. Her earlier book, Hole in Our Soul,described the loss of beauty in American popular music, and drew attention to asingular fact, which is that the music of modern life, which was born inAmerica, has also died there. And the same has happened to the drama of modernlife. Just as the life-affirming melodies of jazz have declined into thetuneless aggression of rap, so have the innocent romances of Hollywood morphedinto movies in which explicit sex and manic violence are almost the only pointsof interest.
It is this second transformation that concerns Martha Baylesin her latest book, and the reader quickly learns why. She describes reality TVdesigned to pour scorn on humanity; raunchy comedies addressed to the lowest ofvoyeuristic appetites; and scenes of destruction, profanity, and narcissismthat seem to have no other purpose than to remove what small marks of valuestill attach to the American family and the American way of life. It is a markof my comparative innocence that I was shocked to read about these things.Rumors of Big Brother and Sex and the City have, in recent years,reached the gates of our farm. And I regret to say that the children have atlast prevailed on me to install a television. They have yet to persuade me toturn it on, however, and after reading Bayles I doubt that I shall.
Bayles’s concern is not so much with the awfulness ofAmerican popular culture as with its effect on the wider world. She hastravelled in the Middle East, India, and China, exploring the views of peoplewho have had the opportunity to compare American soaps, movies, pop songs, andvideo clips with the native products. Her fascinating description of theworld’s favorite TV shows suggests that many of those local products havenegotiated the difficult business of being true to modern life withoutdeparting too far from the constraints of customary morality. Sometimes thestate steps in to ensure this—as in Saudi Arabia. Sometimes, as with Bollywoodand the Turkish soaps that have had such an influence across the Middle East,popular taste exerts the kind of pressure toward family values that seems tohave largely disappeared from America.
I found this part of Bayles’s narrative rather reassuring.But the implication is that the respite from the crass sensuality of theAmerican product is at best only temporary. Since nothing is done to controlthe monsters who are producing it—porn and sadistic violence being protected as“free speech” in America—and since the Internet ensures that barriers are transgressedwith impunity, the lowest forms of human life will in due course dominate thescreen in every living room, and the blame for this will fall squarely onAmerica. Of course, that will be unjust. The blame for watching destructiveimages falls on the person watching them. The problem is that people are sorelytempted beings, unable to protect themselves from their own worst desireswithout the help of a culture that backs up their efforts.
Bayles ends her book with a series of suggestions as to howthe American government might recapture the diplomatic high ground. After all,there is a high culture of America. There is a right and proper use of Americanfreedom. There are occasional stabs at decency in the world of the soaps andHollywood epics. Sometimes, on the screen, people are seen fighting forhonorable causes, and attracted to each other in ways that might lead to loveand commitment. And, in my experience and also in Bayles’s, that is the realAmerica, observable to all who take the trouble to spend some time outside thecoastal cities. Furthermore this real America occasionally finds its way into apop song, a movie, or a TV sitcom.
I read that part of Bayles’s book with sympathy but, Iconfess, a measure of skepticism. Unless and until Congress and the SupremeCourt wake up to the damage done by explicit sexual images, these images willbe the annihilating center of money-making dramas that have little or nothingelse to recommend them. No diplomacy will be able to neutralize these images,as they find their way into the hearts and minds of people for whom the mysteryof the other sex was, until this moment, fundamental to their life projects.The problem Bayles is describing is not a problem of diplomacy, but a problemof culture. American popular culture is popular because that is the way manyAmericans think of themselves. And they think of themselves in that way becausethe barriers to being that way no longer exist.
As Bayles remarks, sex is seen in the standard yuppie soap asan event whose sole meaning is pleasure. It occurs between young people—youngerevery day—who are ambitious for themselves but largely indifferent to others.And it is detached from the past and the future. The effect of this view of sexis apparent throughout society. It underlies the belief that abortion should bea constitutional right, and has produced a new kind of sexeducation—essentially, instructions for having fun without having babies.
Arab and Indian societies reflect the older idea of sex, asa secret thing, not to be put on display or reduced to a moment of pleasure,but to be contained within the bonds of affection and respect that link thegenerations along the great chain of being. You don’t need much knowledge ofliterature or evolutionary psychology to see that the old idea reflects whathuman beings fundamentally are. Given what is obvious, it is hardly surprisingif human nature is now taking its revenge, and taking it on America.
Bayles has interesting things to say about the way Americanpopular music undermined totalitarian government. It is depressing, thoughtrue, that it was not Beethoven but the Beatles who brought down the Berlinwall. Her discussion reminded me of my own experiences as an unofficialcultural diplomat during the 1980s. My self-appointed task was to give supportto the dissidents in Eastern Europe, and this inevitably brought me intocontact with young people who were striving to find an alternative to thenihilism that the communists promoted.
Although it is true that many of the young were drawn totheir quaint versions of Anglo-American pop—the Czech group Plastic People ofthe Universebeing well known in this respect, on account of theirnotorious jail sentence—they did not regard this as a departure from the highculture and Christian heritage of Europe. Those good things were attractivepartly because the communists hated them, but more importantly because theywere part of a world of meaning that was still real and available.
The lyrics provided to the Plastic People by Magor, as hewas called—an art historian with a highly mystical worldview—were genuinepoetry in the Czech surrealist tradition. And the young people whom I knew inCzechoslovakia found solace in the music of Janá?ek and Martin?, in the novelsof Kafka and ?apek, and in the art and architecture of a country that thecommunists had tried in vain to remove from the archive.
Much was gained by the liberation of Eastern Europe fromcommunism; something too was lost. After 1989, American popular culture becamethe obstreperous and unignorable voice of a new and liberated world. Almostovernight, the young people of Eastern Europe let go of their past, and withit, the things that had inspired their search for freedom. What they obtainedwas freedom, too—but a freedom released from all the constraints that makefreedom valuable. And no cultural diplomacy will give them back what they havelost.
Roger Scruton is an author, most recently of Notesfrom Underground and The Soul of the World.
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