DEMOCRACY
or DUMB-OCRACY?DEMOCRACY
or DUMB-OCRACY?
The decline of American society: reduction of mass social awareness and behavior to the lowest common denominator?
Very recently, an American NASCAR race driver named Earnhardt died in a crash when his seat restraint failed (on impact with another racecar). NASCAR, as many of you may know, is the National Association of Stock Car Racing. NASCAR drivers race large American automobiles around circular tracks at high rates of speed, as opposed to Sports Car Club of America events, in which drivers race over 'road-racing' courses that are more similar to actual roads, with tight turns, straightaways, and considerably more varied, European style roadway conditions. NASCAR race cars are configured to run extremely fast around oval tracks and are set up only for continuous left turns; SCCA cars, on the other hand, are set up to handle much as a regular automobile would on the straight, as well as through both left and right hand turns. Although both types of race car originated as 'unmodified' street-type automobiles, over the years each group has evolved into high-performance hybrids that resemble street automobiles only in the sense that all automobiles have 4 wheels and a driver....beyond this, the resemblance ends.
As the two major racing organisations in the USA, these two groups are about a dissimilar as oil and water. NASCAR racing attracts what I call the 'good old boy, Detroit-steel' crowd, while SCCA draws more traditionally minded (European style racing) drivers who favor European sports cars. NASCAR racing has great appeal to what I term the 'cowboy/redneck' crowd, while SCCA attracts a somewhat more 'refined' and tradition-minded group of racing enthusiasts. There are definitely strong class distinctions between these two groups, with NASCAR having more appeal to blue-collar, lower middle class Americans and SCCA finding greater favor with white-collar, upper middle class individuals.
The recent death of Earnhardt, a man who was known as "The Intimidator" for his extremely aggressive driving tactics, brought this contrast out quite clearly. Immediately the death occurred, the media was flooded with stories about sobbing, emotionally distraught NASCAR racing fans whose grossly effusive and disproportionately maudlin public displays of grief and sadness over Earnhardt's death might have been more appropriate to the sudden demise of a greatly respected and much revered national leader.
As I watched a few of these news stories, I was once again forced to focus on the greater process that is strangling America today and turning a nation of potential greatness into a political economy more aptly characterised by cheap bathos, mawkish sentimentality, and emotional cheapness, than by noble motivations and actions drawn from the highest aspirations of collective moral and ethical mindfulness.
It is no secret our great American experiment of social democracy has been undergoing a sea-change in recent decades that has been aided and greatly facilitated by the very privileges that we enjoy as the 'inalienable' rights of free members of the greatest democratic nation the world has ever known. While this transformation is a complex process, greatly abetted by a unique admixture of diverse cultural interactions, the clash of contrasting social traditions, the transformation of modern media into a primary agent of socialisation, and the evolution of corporate America into a monolith of world-wide economic power, it struck me as being signal that in this recent death of a favorite NASCAR race driver, we have a very revealing illustration of just how pervasive and disturbing the effects of this reductio ad absurdum process have become.
Professor Gary Cross addresses this in part in his book AN ALL-CONSUMING CENTURY: WHY COMMERCIALISM WON IN MODERN
AMERICA (Columbia University Press, New York,
2000). Much of this process of the reduction of American mass consciousness to such levels
of tasteless emotionalisation (as is the public obsession with Earnhardt's death) has
resulted from what Cross describes as the cultural 'pollution' of 'traditional' higher
consciousness (read 'Western Civilisation') with such things as the music, dance, and
sexuality of younger working-class and minority individuals (viz. teenagers). It has been
further reinforced by such phenomena as the long-standing American romantic fascination
with the social 'outlaw' or outcast, and still further by the inherent conservative
reactionary sentiment of the American lower classes. Other equally strong
influences having substantial impact on the acceleration of this trend include corporate
and media pandering to the simplistic and volatile emotionalisations of that vast bulk of lumpen
humanity under the mid 25% to 75% arc of the Gaussian IQ curve. Cheap and sleazy, shocking
and violent, coarse and lascivious subjects will always be more 'profitable' in the long
term view of media and advertising than those that are more constrained, and which appeal
to a higher level of thoughtfulness. And of course, all of these dark and disturbing
aspects of the human condition have great mass sales and marketing potential--a fact that
is seized upon by the forces that work unceasingly day and night to promote and maintain
the consumer ethos that is squeezing what little brain tissue the average 25th-75th
percentile person has left in his (or her) pathetic little head.
Other examples of this are found daily on evening newscasts, wherein survivors of victims of public tragedy (airliner crashes, school killing rampages, senseless mass murders, etc.) are milked for every possible fragment of tawdry, tasteless emotionalising and 'human interest' displays of grief by a perfectly coifed and poised news team, with cameras blazing so as to compellingly catch every tear and trembling lip on tape for the '6 O'clock News'.
A further part of this process may be certainly blamed on the PC ('politically correct') movement, wherein every social parasite or marginally excluded member on the fringes of mainstream society is elevated to the status of privileged elite, by virtue of the fact that they are somehow or other not receiving their full entitlement of basic civil rights. The PC movement is of course strengthened and functionally enabled by the legal establishment, with its army of jackal-like lawyers, prepared to jump into any minority issue to rip their piece of the action from the prey (the social 'victim').
At
any rate, so all pervasive has this process of 'commonalisation' of American public
awareness become that it is clear that our great American experiment, wherein all have
theoretically been given the freedom of opportunity to rise to their highest level of
individual achievement, has been reduced (in the crucible of our base preoccupations with
popular gutter culture) to the morass wherein all are being effectively reduced to the
awareness of the lowest, basest common denominator among us.
A further and even more recent example of this severely disturbing downward spiral of social awareness may be found in the example of the 'rap artist' (and I hate to use the term 'artist' in this context) EMINEM, whose strident and violent anti-gay and anti-woman lyrics were legitimised with a number of Emmy Awards. Unbelievably, Elton John, an openly and acknowledged gay song writer and singer of international fame, appeared on stage with EMINEM, effusively praising this execrable young pop-music icon's 'talents'. To say this was a disgusting display of just how far America has lost touch with the reality of the universal human condition, is considerably understating things. Although I certainly didn't waste my time watching any of the glitzy, self-congratulatory Emmy proceedings, I felt more than a bit nauseous when I learned of this, the following day.
Finally, it is disheartening, but I feel a sad fact, that there is really no ultimate hope for any substantial deflection of this headlong (if infinitely subtle) plunge into a pool of social merde we Americans are all making, for as Sartre aptly phrased it "People are hell....."
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(26 Feb 2001) (Return to AEOLUS AEROSPACE Homepage)
Credits: Cartoon images courtesy of Matt Wuerker and Kirk Anderson, from "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News", Common Courage Press, 1999, ISBN 1-56751-154-6 (paperback).
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