Sultan Knish
The last election has brought on essays bemoaning the conservative
disconnect from popular culture and the need to somehow reconnect with
it. The means of this reconnection are hardly ever stated, though there
is the implication that conservatives would need to "evolve" on certain
social issues in the hopes that its economic viewpoint will be taken
seriously by a population whose social way of life doom it to be
dependent on government support.
As plans go, this one is nearly as clever as trying to promote weight
loss by opening a cake shop. And it ignores the obvious reality that the
only way that conservatives will be allowed to participate in popular
culture is as the butt of a joke. Whether it's Sarah Palin's appearance
on Saturday Night Live or Rush Limbaugh's Family Guy appearance, trying
to be a good sport about liberal culture is the strategy of a good loser
playing into the prepared stereotype, rather than destroying it.
The culture is polarized. That means there is no place for conservatives
in it except by playing the villain's part, and the villain's part,
whether played with good humor or reluctantly, is not the winning part.
But it's also a mistake to call it the culture, when what we really mean
is the culture created and perpetuated by a small number of
corporations, their affiliated creatives and their affiliated press.
Take Girls, an HBO series that is one part nepotism and nine parts
artificially generated corporate trend, that was recently the subject of
several essays insisting that we take it seriously because it is "the
culture". How big of a slice of the culture is Girls? It's on HBO, which
means it has limited viewership and unlimited publicity. HBO exists to
promote the illusion, not so much of quality, but of relevance. And
Girls is a triumph of fake relevance. It is the show that you must
consider relevant, because well... it's relevant. Isn't it?
The Girls Season 2 premiere scored 866,000 viewers. After multiple
airings it made it up to 1.6 million. It wasn't exactly a case of the
entire country tuning in. Nor its entire female population or even its
entire population of women in their twenties. And since HBO only exists
as a desperate effort by the dying cable industry to hang on to its
subscribers, its episodes are not available on iTunes, Hulu Plus or any
of the other concessions to the age of internet broadcast entertainment.
Girls is doubtlessly relevant to the daughters of wealthy urban liberal
families who find themselves with too much money and too little common
sense. And it's probably not even relevant to them since its larger
audience share is with men over 50 and its median viewer age is 43. Is
it relevant to the culture as a whole? Not really. And its perceived
importance highlights the disconnect between the Low Culture of the free
TV sitcom and the High Culture of the cable indie drama. Both may have a
leftie agenda, but one exists to be consumed by overeducated
professionals, many of whom also work in media, in the major cities,
while the other is mass culture entertainment.
Trying to tackle, adapt to or duplicate leftie High Culture is a
senseless and useless task in every sense of the word. Their only
relevance comes from their trickle down effect into mass culture. It's
mass culture that is relevant, but though that Low Culture is mass
consumed, it's still created by the same sort of people who create the
High Culture and packed with many of the same agendas.
The difference between them is in tone and the perception of importance.
Elites imagine that what interests them is important, because they are
important. What interests the masses is less important, because they are
less important. Important people and their important programs influence
the culture or even are the culture. Unimportant people are not. In
fact it's the other way around.
Girls is not America. No television show is.. But the closest to America
may be American Idol or Sunday Night Football, which dominate the
ratings and reflect the culture far more than it ever will. That's not
something to celebrate either. Not when you consider that most
entertainment emerges out of the bowels of a cultural and corporate
establishment well to the left of the country at large. And unlike
Girls, much of what it spews forth does slowly push the country to the
left. But that also shows why trying to run alongside it in the hopes of
staying relevant is a dead end. Not unless the goal is to go on being
the villains, comic relief or otherwise.
Competing with the cultural establishment is becoming more viable as the
structural barriers begin coming down. When the entire cable model
dies, the internet will have done to broadcast entertainment what it did
to the print press and what the book reader did to the publishing
house. But that doesn't necessarily mean that conservatives will be any
better positioned to compete in the culture war than they were before.
And they won't be if they keep on worrying about the latest incarnation
of New York and LA media High Culture.
There's bad news and good news in all this. The good news is that the
top-down model is shakier than ever before. The less centralized the
culture becomes, the less it has to run through New York and Los
Angeles' incestuous media establishments, the fewer political
gatekeepers there are. The bad news is that entertainment with fewer
gatekeepers can also be worse than the left's worst excesses. And the
other bad news is that the new decentralized gatekeepers are more likely
to be social media tastemakers crying racism for pageviews and
denouncing thought-crimes on an hourly schedule.
The culture is more up for grabs than ever before, but it's also a lot
harder to corral. The problem is much bigger than buying a woman's
magazine or a television network or some airtime. None of those things
really matter anymore. They're like buying a telegraph pole to compete
with AT&T. There is no shortcut to creating a counter-culture. The
good news is that the bones of the counter-culture exist in the
conservative movement. All that's left is organizing them into a force.
Worrying about what HBO airs is futile. HBO is a dinosaur, but it has
freedom of action and a great deal of media leverage. It is at that
perfect intersection of media elites where things are important because
everyone you know, who is in the same business as you, pays attention to
them. That structural power to monopolize attention is becoming a lot
harder to come by. In the long run HBO will be dead, but the problems of
competing with a cultural establishment that is organized, trained and
has the inside track will remain.
This isn't about Hollywood. It's about America. Creative industries tend
to come with their own built in decay. That has been true for centuries
and was probably true for thousands of years before that. It does not
mean that the theater stage or the movie theater, the artist's studio or
the concert hall are bad places, but creativity tends to involve
redefinition and a tearing down of the old to make way for the new. It
can be a good thing, so long as a society has stabilizing values that it
places above those of its entertainments, giving it something to
believe in and giving them something to push against.
The entertainment industry is too big and powerful, but that will
change. What will not change is that the nation is losing its values.
And when a country's values erode, then the critics and cynics, the
poets and artists, the philosophers and raconteurs, don't push against a
pillar, but against a wheel, and discover that they can make the
culture go where they want. They are not the real problem. The lack of
stability is.
Changing all that will require thinking about more than what is wrong
with Hollywood, but about what is wrong with America. Countering
destructive entertainment with constructive entertainment is more doable
than ever before. Building a consensus of conservative culture warriors
is also doable. But the greater challenge lies not in the
entertainment, but in the people. The agenda of the left has fit into a
comfortable groove in a culture that has chosen the softer things over
the harder things. It's easy enough to create culture that fits into
such lazy grooves, but harder to create ideas that challenge a nation to
choose the harder path and the more difficult choices.
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