Rick's September Tirade
Filth
I could use a bath, and not the kind you take in a tub. The
ablution I'm talking about would require more than a leisurely half
hour of soap and sudsy water.
After Bill Clinton's televised confession of his Presidential
peccadilloes – and more to the point, after nine endless months of
press punditry and prurience about said peccadilloes – I'm in dire
need of a good cleansing. I feel begrimed by a sickening slime that
has clogged my pores and coated my soul. It's as if I've been
sleeping in hotel sheets that haven't been changed since last
January. The accumulated crud is making me queasy.
The spectacle of a self-destructing U.S. President is always a
sorry sight to behold. But what offends me is the cheesy tabloid
quality of the melodrama being played out before our unbelieving
eyes. We're not talking Euripides here, or even "Gone with the
Wind." The actors and script are equally bad, very bad indeed.
But we would expect nothing more. Compare Clinton with Don Giovanni,
Kenneth Starr with Brutus, Monica Lewinsky with Medea, and Linda
Tripp with – well, there IS no precedent for Linda Tripp. An age
gets the heroes (or antiheroes) it deserves.
The current White House peep-show is only the most recent
encrustation on the malodorous body of our culture. The grime has
actually been building up for several decades now.
The sullying of Western civilization can be traced to no single
event or milestone, though we could round up the usual suspects. We
could cite the New York Armory Show of 1914, which introduced the
empty iconoclasm of Modern Art to a mesmerized American
intelligentsia. We could blame James Joyce for making obscurity
fashionable, or Prohibition and jazz for unleashing a torrent of
willfully bad behavior. But at least the 1920s seemed to have been
epic fun, and all those mad young flappers and collegians embraced
life with infectious exuberance. A decade that gave us Babe Ruth, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and flagpole-sitting can't be all
bad.
It was after World War II that things began to slide in earnest,
with the angle of descent pitching downward ever more sharply since
the late sixties. The cult of the antihero glorified the rude
attitude and semi-coherent mumblings of a young Marlon Brando and
James Dean – fairly harmless by our standards, but monumentally
influential in forging a powerful bad-boy brotherhood that
flourishes to this day.
So now we celebrate Jack Nicholson and his triumphantly obscene
leer. We revel in the degeneracy of liver-lipped Mick Jagger, still
prancing robustly in his fifties. We applaud as Dennis Miller
pummels us with profanity in every sentence of his seedy
pop-commentaries. We delight in Howard Stern's endless references to
his weenie. And these are just the mainstream guys – the most
commercially viable of their breed.
If you want to see real antiheroes, just lift the doormat of the
music world and peer at all the grotesque little life-forms crawling
around underneath: the rap artists, metalmen, goths and similar
gargoyles of popdom. How do these unlovable vermin inspire such
loyalty? Why do we tolerate people with normal vision who wear
sunglasses indoors? What do we find so confoundedly appealing about
"in-your-face" entertainment? I don't want anyone in MY
face, thanks.
Our culture has become hard, mean and dirty, like motel sex that
bangs the headboards but produces not a scintilla of real romance.
Look at the heartless faces of the fashion models in our magazines.
Read a few chapters of Hunter S. Thompson and be contaminated by the
putrescence of the world he observes. Check the banner ads for
pornographic websites, their hired help wallowing naked in bodily
effluvia. Drive through the back-streets of any major American city,
and regard the bombed-out tenements, the barren acres of weeds and
garbage, the graffiti that covers any notable monument or facade
within reach of a spray-can. Regard the inhabitants of those
blighted regions, and contemplate the stinking sordidness of their
lives. You're gazing upon a civilization come to ruin at last.
The cynics and curmudgeons of every generation since Jeremiah
have decried the decadence of their own times. And somehow
civilization always managed to eke its way out of danger. But we may
be approaching the limit of its resilience as the decay spreads
beneath the surface – beyond the shallow tastemakers – and into
the vital organs of society. We've been witnessing an unprecedented
flight from virtue, because virtue bores us.
The late Roy Rogers, decent man that he was, could never
establish a foothold in popular culture today. How could he hope to
compete with Madonna or "South Park" or even the most
obscure street-corner rapper? How could Jesus Christ himself hope to
compete, even if he were to return with his own talk show? In a
population too benumbed to perceive the subtle beauty of a life well
lived, bad is good – and the badder the better. Wickedness
jump-starts our jaded neurons; depravity sells.
But our pursuit of the perverse is like an addictive drug; we
require ever-higher doses to attain the same level of titillation.
We're already sated with the quarreling inbred lovers who infest
daytime television. Rock musicians have to do more than smash their
guitars and expose themselves onstage. As the purveyors of bad taste
continue to push the envelope into previously uncharted territory,
we'll see them invent new ways to shock us into watching.
Lounging in the comfort of our living rooms, we might find
ourselves transfixed by a cannibal gourmet hour, or hidden-camera
encounters between man and sheep. But I jest, of course. The actual
entertainments would have to be nastier, more relentlessly
hard-edged, completely devoid of redeeming satirical value. Like a
band of profanity-spouting street punks kicking and raping a nun on
live TV while Camille Paglia furnishes the play-by-play commentary.
There we'd have the ultimate icon of our times, a perfect expression
of the direction in which our culture is trending: raw energy and
sexuality triumphant over virtue and tradition. In any clash of
cultures, the side with the most energy prevails. Why not use our
mass media to illustrate the point?
Of course, our mass media have been illustrating the point for
years, if somewhat less graphically. Back in the fifties, the
emergence of rock 'n' roll revealed that sex is power. No matter
that our progenitors had been enjoying the delights of the
bedchamber for countless centuries. What the rockers gave us was the
notion of unfettered, uncouth, unromantic sexuality – no sweet-sad
waltzes played by sighing violins, no garlands of flowers strewn
upon the wedding-bed, no cameras cutting to the pounding waves on
the beach. We began to like our sex hot, hard and nasty. And our
attitude toward sex colored our attitude toward everything else. So
we're left with a hot, hard, nasty culture: the culture of filth.
I've never been able to embrace that culture. When I make love, I
want it to feel like love. When I swear, it's primarily in the
presence of my malfunctioning computer. I harbor no affection for
artists who submerge crucifixes in urine or Presidents who use the
Oval Office to stain the dresses of impressionable young women.
But I've paid a price for my cultural vigilance. Just as a
dishcloth gradually grows as dirty as the dishes it cleans, I've
darkened a little more with each exposure to the ambient corruption.
I feel the grime of postmodern civilization upon my skin; I've been
contaminated. As I said at the outset, I need a bath.
Not in a tub, mind you. That's much too confining, and I don't
care to watch the scum float to the surface as I scrub myself clean.
No, what I have in mind is more purifying: a quick plunge into the
wild primeval pool of our collective past, into the crystalline
waters that inspired Homer to sing of Odysseus and the Sirens, that
caused the Chinese poets to shed tears over falling plum blossoms,
that inspired medieval masons to build the lofty towers of Chartres
and the merry Elizabethans to make such sweet music. I'm plunging
headfirst, my friends, and I'm plunging deep. I want to remember how
life felt when it was fresh and new.
Won't you join me? We'll be back on dry land soon enough, and
we'll be dirty again soon enough. But let's not think about it for
now. Let's swim over to that waterfall and reclaim our innocence.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
