Kultursmog
Rod Dreher discusses the pervasive baseness of popular culture over at his CrunchyCon blog:
In a small e-mail group I'm involved in, we started talking last night about the new Sony kids movie "Open Season." One of our number is a film critic, and got an advance preview. She said the thing was so filled with juvenile crassness that it didn't so much outrage her as leave her overwhelmingly sad. Tainted, even. She told us that she thought for the first time in a while that she wishes she could just pick up and move somewhere else to get away from the pervasive crappiness of our popular culture. But she knows there's really no escaping it.
Boy, is that ever a familiar feeling. I find it hard to work up much outrage over this or that aspect of pop culture anymore. It's just a constant low-grade depression, like a hangover headache you can't ever get rid of. It's like the whole culture lives under fluorescent light. Like there's a pervasive Kultursmog everywhere (the term originated with R. Emmett Tyrrell, as far as I can tell). This is what we're raising our kids in.
Rod gives several examples of the sort of thing he's talking about:
My kid Matthew likes to read the comics. Right next to the comics runs the daily "Dear Abby" column. Julie and I have to cut it out and throw it away most days before we can let our 6-year-old read the freakin' comics. Sure enough, one day earlier this week there was a headline that went something like, "Hubby wants public sex, but wife unsure." Right next to the comics page.
In New Hampshire, a high school cancels a dance because the kids won't stop dry-humping each other on the dance floor. Don't expect the parents to back the administrator, though. According to the report: "But some students and parents don't see it that way. They say that like the jitterbug and disco before it, grinding is just a sign of the times."
Only a moral idiot sees no difference between the jitterbug and dry-humping. Parents as corruptors of their children and the community's morals. What can you do but shrug? An entertainment writer friend predicts that within a year or two, this will be everywhere, and the only places administrators will be able to stop this is in Christian schools. I'm so glad for my son's Christian school.
So, what to do? Grin and bear it? Try to serve as a counter-example? Head for the hills?:
"But we can't withdraw, we have to engage the culture!" an Evangelical friend said to me today. Yeah, sometimes. But I tell you, I'm glad that Noah didn't decide to stick around and engage the culture when the rain got heavy, and instead climbed aboard his ark and pulled up the gangplank.
In a follow-up post, the discussion continues:
As Neil Postman has written, in the age of electronic media, childhood ceases to exist in the traditional sense (as a time of relative innocence) because there's no way to control the information environment. Small towns used to be a refuge from the craziness, but now the same conformity that used to make them bulwarks against moral innovation now serve to accelerate it, thanks to the electronic media.
[T]he moral and cultural agenda is set by cable TV and the Internet piped into houses everywhere, there is no escape from it, unless you find some way to withdraw. Unless you find some community wherever you live where people refuse and resist the popular culture, and raise their kids to do the same[...]
This is why Christian schools and the home-schooling movement have become so popular. School is the one place where kids get the most exposure to the popular culture, and most options (public schools, and even many Catholic schools) have completely surrendered to the popular culture. You can choose friends who share your values and your suspicion of popular culture. If you're lucky, you can find a church and a community that do the same. You can leave the TV off at home and only let the kids watch pre-screened DVDs. But school is the toughest nut to crack.
Lisa and I have arranged most aspects of our lives to avoid subjecting our kids to the total immersion in filth that most of the popular culture represents. They'll have to engage the culture eventually, but as Rod puts it regarding his son:
The so-called "real world" will demand Matthew's attention soon enough. What we hope to do is to shield him as much as possible from the sex, the violence, the crudity and the hard-sell of that world as his conscience is being formed, and he's developing defenses against the lies of the world. I want him to learn how to breathe clean air before he has to breathe the Kultursmog.
