Victor Davis Hanson goes down the list of modern “culture” and why he’s no longer interested – and concludes, in part:
…As I have dropped out of contemporary American culture and retreated inside some sort of 1950s time-warp, in a strange fashion of compensation for non-participation , I have tried to remain more engaged than ever in the country’s political and military crises, which are acute and growing. One’s distancing from the popular culture of movies, TV, newspapers, and establishment culture makes one perhaps wish to overcompensate in other directions, from the trivial to the important.
Lately more than ever I try to obey the speed limit, overpay my taxes, pay more estimates and withholding than I need, pay all the property taxes at once, pick up trash I see on the sidewalk, try to be overly polite to strangers in line, always stop on the freeway when I see an elderly person or single woman with a flat, leave 20% tips, let cars cut me off in the parking lot (not in my youth, not for a second), and patronize as many of Selma’s small businesses as I can (from the hardware store to insurance to cars). I don’t necessarily do that out of any sense of personal ethics, but rather because in these increasingly crass and lawless times, we all have to try something, even symbolically, to restore some common thread to the frayed veneer of American civilization, to balance the rips from a Letterman attack on Palin’s 14-year-old daughter or a Serena Williams’s threat to a line judge, or the President’s communication director’s praise of Mao, civilization’s most lethal mass murderer, or all of what I described above.
I don’t fathom the attraction of a Kanye West (I know that name after his outburst), a David Letterman, Van Jones, Michael Moore (all parasitic on the very culture they mock), or the New York Review of Books or People Magazine (they seem about the same in their world view). So goodbye to all that…
Yeah, I’m like that, too. It started for me, in a serious way, when I returned to Christianity. As I go through the grocery store check out and see the tabloid headlines about celebrity scandal, I often haven’t the foggiest notion of who’s on the front page. I do still watch my Chargers, but after the way the NFL has treated Rush, I’m a lot less enthused than I used to be – meanwhile, baseball and basketball are not on my agenda. As for popular music – I’ve gone way past retreating to the music of my youth: often its Mozart or Bach on the CD player, and thank God for their talents! Movies are usually horrible, in my view: either too much sex or too much violence or too much phony, liberal preaching.
Additionally, I do find myself not speeding, giving larger tips, being more willing to help and be patient…and as I read that from Hanson, I guess I got the same feeling he did when he was thinking it over: aren’t there more and more like this, all the time? Have any of you withdrawn from our nauseating culture and re-connected with civilization? To me, a lie has become a horror, the merest hint of marital infidelity a hideous crime, the smallest malfeasance cause for grave soul-searching, the least manifestation of impatience with others a monstrous cruelty. Why on earth would anyone do such things? I can’t watch people destroy themselves and giggle about it – I’m sure they giggled in Rome about how the gladiators died, or about the latest scandal out of the Imperial Palace…people sick in their souls, degraded by a depraved culture.
Life is too serious for anyone to pay attention to pop-culture. Life is also too fun to be bogged down in the voyeurism and scandal-mongering which is the grist for our pop-culture mill. So, yes, indeed – goodbye to all that.
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