THE CULTURE WARS
Pridger isn't the only one who has noted, with lasting regret and dismay, Hollywood's (and thus the nation's pop culture), three or four decade infatuation with the "F" word. The following is from a recent issue of Gary North's "The Daily Reckoning" newsletter.
QUOTE
'Our friend Frank Holmes sends this little note: "Whatever reason
Hollywood has for its love affair with the "f" word, it is
decidedly not about the money," writes Dan Ferris. "Since the
year 2000, Hollywood has turned out five times as many R-rated films as it
has films rated G or PG or PG-13. No less than 2,146 films released since
2000 received R-ratings, compared with 137 films rated G and 252 films
rated PG.
'"Is it a case of simple supply and demand at work? Apparently not.
Of the top 20 moneymaking films of all time, not a single one is rated R,
and of the top 50, only five are rated R - with the other 45 rated G or
PG.
'"It's all about the art, man. The "f" word is
"bad," which, of course is good... only you're not supposed to
be good... you're supposed to be bad... not that being bad is good, or
being good bad... "'
END OF QUOTES
PG-13 movies and network TV programming are bad enough these days. They
often contain most of the more benign cuss words and "modest
vulgarities" of yore plus plenty of semi-explicit sex scenes. Many of
the most popular network TV programs are resplendent with
"bleeped" out dialog, but all the kids know what's being bleeped
out. The typical R-rated movie will have the "F" word injected
into the script at least once somewhere, no matter how unnecessary or even
out of context it may be. And blood, gore, and violence is often carried
to a truly exaggerated level in the name of "realism."
No, it isn't all about money, it's apparently required for cultural
reasons -- the indoctrination of youth. R-rated movies are made to draw
young impressionable viewers, and it is in such movies that our young
people learn to become comfortable with "adult" things
(so-called adult language and adult conduct), like using the "F"
word in the most casual manner at every opportunity. In the same movies,
our youth learn about sex in graphic detail just shy of actual explicit
pornography. The "F" word even appears these days in the
subscripts of foreign language movies! "Educational" or
docudramas often even have it. Oliver Stone's JFK movie even had to have
it. After all, it was intended to be educational. The "F" word
has become even more American than mom's apple pie. A movie without the
"F" word is considered almost corny. Imagine a
"realistic" movie about war with the G.I.s swearing oaths such
as just "damn!" or "hell!" or
"son-of-a-bitch!" even "G-- D---n!" Imagine the
Terminator just saying "Damn you!" It just wouldn't fly. It
isn't "adult" enough. No, it's got to be obscene and have
explicit sexual connotations in order to lend real linguistic realism of
latter day Americana. Profuse reference to things urinal or fecal are also
deemed adult. Street language has gone mainstream since the early 1960's
and has even infected the parliamentary system.
Use of the "F" word in print and other public media had been
considered so taboo and rare prior to our Civil Rights era that
dictionaries did not even list it, and hadn't since dictionaries had been
printed. The 1971 Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive authority on
the English language, still didn't list it. Nor did Merriam Webster, Funk
and Wagnall's, or the American Heritage Dictionary. The 1987 Supplement to
the Oxford English Dictionary, "respectfully dedicated to Her Majesty
the Queen, by her gracious permission," lists the word together with
many of its derivatives and history of usage with this notation, "For
centuries, and still by the great majority, regarded as a taboo-word;
until recent times not often recorded in print but frequent in coarse
speech." "The coarsest equivalent of Damn." The word began
to appear spelled out in print circa 1965, the year after Civil Rights,
and has since become more than just common. Soon thereafter it began
appearing in major Hollywood productions. In the 1993 edition of "The
New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary" no qualifiers were mentioned
-- the word apparently having become so commonly accepted. The British
have embraced it too, abandoning their former "bloody" this or
"bloody" that for the new American standard of "F"
this or "F" that and "MF" this and "MF"
that. This has been considered social and cultural progress by those who
seem to count in the modern era.
1964 is significant because it was the year of major Civil Rights
legislation. It was also about the time our immigration laws were being
turned inside out to appease minorities. But Pridger isn't implying that
the debasement of our culture is the fault of African Americans or any
other racial minority. Not at all. Blacks have been used as pawns in the
game like the rest of us. The idea of Civil Rights was to upgrade the
Black condition in our nation, not debase the society. Truly progressive
blacks would have much preferred that their race had been pointed onto the
high road rather than the low road that society as a whole has been
conducted down. It was not the design of Martin Luther King to bring white
society down to a lower common denominator. At least Pridger (who is not
exactly a member of the MLK fan club), gives him that much credit.
(However, destruction of American society, and western culture, was
undoubtedly the design of some of MLK's communist friends whose hands he
unavoidably or inadvertently strengthened).
Martin Luther King hoped to upgrade the economic and political condition
of his race while making character, rather than the color of skin, the
matter that counted most. The idea of integration in housing and education
was to permit the black man to climb up to the white establishment
standard, not to bring down white community as actually happened. No,
cultural decline was not the plan of MLK. Our cultural debasement has been
a product of whites in both high and low places, rather than blacks in
unfortunate circumstances. (Unfortunately, and despite the foregoing, the
black leadership has consistently had its eye on the wrong ball.) The
white counter-culture movement was far more significant to the debasement
of our culture than the establishment aftermath of the black Civil Rights
movement. The movement, of course, was driven, or at least encouraged, by
the same leftist forces that drove the Civil Rights movement from behind
the scenes. The Vietnam War didn't help either, as war protestors lent
their support to the "peaceniks" of the counter-culture, not to
mention thousands of angry young veterans embittered by their experience
both in Vietnam and upon returning home.
The major cracks in the culture (and particularly "pop"
culture), go back to the "beatnik" era and the advent of the
rock-in-roll revolution. Elvis, the King himself, was a significant part
of the opening salvos of the assault on the culture. During the mid and
late 50's, rock-in-roll, and especially Elvis, were correctly seen by the
older generation to be as dangerous to the morals of youth and cultural
fiber of the nation as many of us see rap music today. The beatniks
stimulated intellectuals to begin to openly attack the establishment, and
the recording companies learned that there was a lucrative white market
for "black" rhythm and blues, especially if white artists could
be found to perform it. The "new" music was exciting and very
seductive. It reconnected us with something primeval in human nature --
something that modern civilization and western "culture" had
been devoted to distancing itself from for at least two thousand years.
Ironically, today we look back at Elvis Presley not only as a cultural
icon, but a symbol of simpler and more wholesome times. He is even
commemorated on a new quarter minted in his honor on the 25th anniversary
of his death. The "25th Anniversary Tennessee Quarter" is the
first U.S. coin to honor a recording star. Though many of us, including
Pridger, liked Elvis and early rock-in-roll, this "official"
recognition on a genuine United States coin is very symbolic of how we
have come to accept both a debased culture and coinage as the national
norm, and how a culture can be totally overturned in a generation or two.
Pridger admits that he was seduced too, and was very much a product of the
50's in which he grew up. As a teenager, he identified with the
articulated anti-establishment feelings of the "beat
generation." And though Pridger was never a "hippy," one of
his aunts nonetheless once saw fit to describe him as "The first
hippy." By the time the flower children were settled in San
Francisco, however, Pridger had already found his niche in the
establishment (as sort of what he considered a mercenary in the
"establishment"), by going off to sea -- first as a navy sailor
and then as a merchant mariner. This was circa early 1960s, and Pridger,
having shortsightedly rejected the option of further formal education, had
"sentenced himself" to three years in the navy in hopes of
getting off of what appeared to be a hopeless dead-end street. Another
decade would pass before Pridger became fully aware of the political world
in which he had become both a pawn and victim and began to reassess the
way he viewed the world around him. As Benjamin Franklin said,
"Experience teaches a fine school, but a fool will learn by no
other." Pridger's education, such as it is, would come by slow
degrees in that school tailored by nature to the needs of fools. He had,
however, enjoyed one major early advantage. That advantage was in the form
of a well read father who had tutored him in an appreciation for reading,
the value of good literature, the views of the major philosophers, general
skepticism, broad interests and intellectual horizons, and
non-establishment thought.
Of course, along with the white counter-cultural movement, there was a
much more significant and powerful movement going on in the influential
white "progressive-left" academia, in which "language
slumming" and and cultural denigration of the nation became a fetish
that continues to this day. It's purpose, supposedly, was to sink all
boats, and re-float them on a different standard. The debasement of
educational standards has, of course, became a key ingredient to cultural
decline. The almost all white Supreme Court itself has done much more than
its rightful share in the process of debasing the national culture --
including, among other things, the official repudiation of the sanctity of
human life in the womb. To his credit, Clarence Thomas, as a lone black
conservative member of the Court, has dragged his feet a little from time
to time -- but to little avail.
It wasn't a coincidence, nor accidental, that the debasement of our
national culture and standards of common decency roughly coincided with
the final debasement of the national currency. Silver coinage was replaced
by copper-nickel circa 1964 -- the year of the major "Civil
Rights" legislation. The gold window was slammed shut in 1973,
releasing the American dollar from it's last pitiful vestige of claim to
being anything close to honest money. This opened a literal flood-gate,
facilitating a reorientation of our national economy toward being a credit
and deficit driven economy. By this time "freedom of expression"
had became a civil right regardless of any traditional notions of common
decency, and white youth had begun to become comfortable with the coarsest
Black vernacular. It made no difference that the majority of the people
were outraged by these developments, yet it became an unforgivable sin to
in the least insult a minority person. Commercial interests joined in the
debauchery of the culture too. Outrage against the majority establishment
sells -- thus major establishment corporations have joined in the
commercial selling frenzy, marketing sleaze and outrage for profit to
confused and rebellious youth -- always catering to the lowest cultural
denominator. The Civil Rights "upgrade" turned into a dive toward a
lowest common cultural denominator.
Two generations have grown to adulthood since the sixties. Cultural and
monetary debasement opened the door to the wholesale debasement of society
and the economy at large. Consumer and public debt have grown apace since
the same era. Since then the dollar has continued to lose its value, while
society at large has progressively lost its values. Today we have a
materialistic and hedonistic national society, a ten cent dollar,
functionally illiterate high school graduates, and a society in which
pornography has become an accepted and significant industry, the products
of which permeate the nation. Significantly, now that all that has been
accomplished, God is being removed from the national identity as quickly
as the ACLU and an assortment of federal judges can facilitate it.
Hollywood has helped reinvent American culture, and homosexuals have
become politically powerful enough to debase the institution of holy
matrimony -- making an unholy mockery of marriage.
The left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, have played co-equal
roles in bringing us to our present impasse. They comprise the left and
right hand of big government. Thus, there is no hope in a change of
administrations. The Democratic party stands for social and economic
debasement of the nation, and the Republicans stand for the same thing in
slightly different form. They operate as a good cop, bad cop, team.
Surprise, so-called "conservatives" increasingly produce social
debasement too, in the form of "get tough on this or that" and
the resultant vast American Gulag this has engendered. The right has also
pushed corporate hegemony, and license for corporations to betray the
national purpose. The left "frees up" the economically
disadvantaged and the right incarcerates the results of that
"freedom," more aptly termed licentiousness. The emerging police
state is very much a bipartisan creature. In other words, the very
political machinery upon which we depend to sustain "freedom and
liberty, and the American way" has itself been hopelessly debased. It
simply no longer works as it was intended. Our present leadership is
largely the products of the post 1960's era, and it seems national compass
has been irrevocably and hopelessly lost.
These things aren't exactly new, of course. It has all happened before. No
doubt, it was considered "social progress" in ancient times just
as advocates of gay marriage and debt-based "wealth-creation" do
today. But when any great nation or empire of the past reached that point
where it mocked its religion and founding principles, and descended into a
state of hedonism and debased currency, its ultimate fate was effectively
sealed. The ruins of ancient Greece and Rome are still there for all to
see, along with the vestiges of other great civilizations. Things tend to
happen a lot faster these days than they did in ancient times. Two
centuries have been predicted to circumscribe the natural life span of
nations purporting to be democracies. Debased morals and debased money go
hand in hand and are certain to eventually produce social and economic
disaster.
Disaster is actually already upon us -- both cultural and economic. As for
the new-found status of the black man in America, entertainer Bill Cosby
recently had some poignant things to say to his fellow blacks. In short,
if they continue to chose to gravitate to the gutter, that's where they
will continue to be. But too many whites have been infected by the same
cultural disease as the blacks to whom Cosby addressed his remarks, and
these generally become the ones who shape our destiny.
The highly disproportionate percentage of blacks occupying our prison
system is not a sign of progress in the condition of blacks in America.
The high death toll caused by black on black crime causes the death toll
of lynching of blacks by whites in a former era to pall by comparison. The
Crips and Bloods street gangs alone have accounted for hundreds, if not
thousands, of more black homicides than a hundred years of Jim Crow era
lynchings might have produced. Though blatant racial injustice reigned
during that former time, at least black on white rapes and homicides were
held in check thereby, and black society at large aspired to higher
ideals. People, both white and black, were much safer then, and racial
relations were actually better then than they are now by many significant
measures. And black society and culture was much richer in many ways then
than it is now, and the two parent household was still the norm. This is
not to excuse an unjust system, of course. Its merely to point out that
when the time came to correct things, we blew it and merely changed to
another form of injustice -- one which allowed and even encouraged
cultural decline and the resultant lawlessness with a whole array of
unintended consequences. In all probability, the percentage of innocent
blacks who were lynched during our blatantly discriminatory era wasn't all
that different than the percentage of innocent whites and blacks who have
been (and continue to be), wrongfully convicted and sentenced to lengthy
prison terms, or executed, under our present justice system. This still
remains to be fixed, but we have made society so untenable that fixes are
now more illusive than ever, except through ever-tougher brands of
government authoritarianism and police state tactics.
Today black on white crime far exceeds white on black crime, though the
"establishment media" continues to prefer to dwell on white
injustices and the relatively few "hate crimes" committed by
whites against blacks, not to mention a subtle form of continuing
institutionalized racial injustice against both blacks and whites. Many
blacks have gone the extra mile to repudiate the traditional American
culture that black Civil Rights activists once aspired to. The large
movement toward adopting Islam is ample evidence of this. Islam has been
adopted by many blacks, at least in part, because they wanted to opt out
of Anglo-American culture and adopt a religion that is generally hostile
to western values in general, and the "American Creed" in
particular. Still, the black rapper has the right to "freedom of
expression" using the most vulgar language imaginable, outraging not
only whites but his own race by making the black man a sinister, hateful,
and dangerous figure. Major recording labels, in the name of profit, have
also gone the extra mile to make sure this antisocial message an
"art-form" has become exceedingly popular. And this
self-inflicted image, amply assisted by the white corporate establishment,
has defined the new black racial stereotype.
Hatred is born of fear, and the new predominate black stereotype (unlike
most of the racial stereotypes of a former era -- which have become
exceedingly politically incorrect), is a scary and threatening figure.
Pridger points all this out only to show that the black race has been used
by the very same forces or processes that have generally reshaped not only
American culture but the American economy. The ideologies, forces, and
people behind these "divide and conquer" tactics and changes are
not black. They are generally lily white in everything but motivation and
spirit. Some of the motivations have been blatantly criminal, some simply
ill-conceived and applied good intentions, and some of it merely the
profit motive.
SPEAKING OF JUSTICE: Martha Steward has received her justice. Five months
in a federal slammer followed by five months of some sort of "house
arrest" and two years of probation, and a $300,000.00 fine, for some
petty white lies about what was otherwise determined to be a non-crime.
Regardless of one's feeling about Ms. Steward, this is a demonstration of
a broken sense of what justice ought to be in the "land of the free
and home of the brave." Still, she got off relatively easily. Many
thousands of our federal and state inmates are doing much longer sentences
after being convicted on even more petty charges -- like growing,
possessing, or smoking pot. And there are the political prisoners like
American Talaban, John Walker Lynne, who is doing twenty years for making
a few unpopular values judgments and being caught on the wrong side of
battle lines in far off Afghanistan. He committed no real crime by any
civilized standards -- except, perhaps, some thought crimes. If ours was a
Christian system of justice, both Martha Steward and John Walker Lynne
would simply have been lectured, forgiven, and released. Some people in
our present presidential administration have been caught lying or
stretching the true outlandishly in order to make their own case for war.
War, of course, is very serious business. It's more serious even that
smoking a joint or fibbing to prosecutors trying to "make" a
case. The death toll has been significant and continues to rise, and the
associated costs are nothing short of astronomical. The actual short and
long term collateral damage both at home and abroad is incalculable. Yet
nobody has been brought before a court of law yet in the matter, nor is
such an eventuality likely.
THE CULTURAL WARS
Wouldn't you know that it would take the Vice President of the still
supposedly conservative Republican party -- the party of the religious
right -- to introduce the "F" word onto the Senate floor. It
certainly wasn't a Freudian slip, and Chaney's response to criticism was
anything but apologetic. Dick Chaney not only brought sleazy language to
the legislative forum, but said, "I felt better after I said
it," and publicly allowed that it, "...badly needed to be
said." Badly needed to be said? The "F" word on the floor
of the nation's highest deliberative body?
Perhaps Chaney was sufficiently provoked to use the strongest of language.
At least this has been offered in Chaney's defense by at least one
"Conservative Christian" talk show host. "There are times
when there is no substitute for such words," the line goes. Besides,
the defense continues, the exchange was a "private" exchange,
not intended for the public ear. But the exchange, obviously, wasn't
private (not nearly as private, for example, as the damning expletives
captured on the infamous "Nixon Tapes"), it immediately made
national news. Pridger would hope that we have not become so
linguistically challenged that even the highest officials of the land (who
are hopefully also among the most articulate personages our educational
system is capable of producing), have become dependent on obscenities and
expletives to adequately express themselves.
Will Chaney be censured for this incredibly crass breach of etiquette?
Probably not. More than likely his offensive language will be heralded as
a new and refreshing birth of freedom on the Senate floor. Maybe torture
in Iraqi prisons don't fly well with the American people yet, but obscene
and vulgar language -- and especially the "F" word -- have
become much more American than apple pie. Movie stars and rappers set
national language standards these days -- even (apparently) in the
hallowed halls of Congress. (How far we have come since president Reagan
briefly attempted to lead the nation away from sleaze! [Now we even have
the Terminator in the Statehouse once occupied by Reagan.])
Days before Chaney's remark, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah,
referred to a proposal to subpoena memos on prisoner interrogation as a
"dumb-ass" idea. (This has been pointed up by Democrats (or the
media), as another recent example of "conservative" Republican
language sleaze.) Is Congress really going the way of the entertainment
and sports industries? Has the Republican party consciously decided to
abandon traditional standards of common decency in language in an effort
to win the hearts and minds of the voters? Have the obscenity advocates
won another round of the Cultural War?
Of course, democrats will use Chaney's remark to point up Republican
political and cultural hypocrisy. Democrats are perhaps a little less
hypocritical -- sleazy, debased language (in the guise of freedom of
expression), is a hallmark of the "progressive left" which the
Democratic party has come to represent. Even Christian fundamentalist
Democratic president Jimmy Carter chose a major pornographic magazine to
publish a major interview in which he humbly admitted to "lusting in
his mind." Obviously, Carter wanted to reach a "larger
audience," and he knew just where to go.
John Q. Pridger