Most of the American news media have been debased, too. Newspaper, magazine, and television editors and their audiences have been powerfully altered by forty-five years of television drama. The average American household now watches about seven hours of television a day, an appetite for entertainment unknown in human history. The result: The American imagination is jammed with the structures of melodrama. Not analysis, not cool judgment, not the humanizing imagery of high art. Drama. Most of it bad drama. And as it has been since the time of Aristotle, the essence of drama is conflict.
Even the conflicts of the so-called real world — the nonfiction world of news and society — must be simple, easy to follow through meals and other domestic activities, and preferably violent. Following the style of the television tabloid shows, even some network magazines are using feature-film gimmicks: music to tell the viewer what he should feel; ominous photography or bright, happy lighting to make emotional points. Don’t think is the message; feel. In all media, the best-played stories now are the ones that most resemble movies. Give us good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, and for chrissakes, don’t give us talking heads! Action, baby. Bang-bang. Conflict.
In the name of egalitarian vulgarity, the newspapers and the television shows fill up with O. J. Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt, her moronic husband, Amy Fisher, the Menendez brothers; serial killers and heroic cops; priests who corrupt kids and kids who kill parents; drug warriors, gun nuts, and politicians caught getting laid. They in turn become subjects for fictional docudramas of invincible stupidity.
Every day, the American vision becomes cruder, narrower, more parochial. In most newspapers, foreign news gets little play unless Americans are involved. The major newspapers still employ foreign correspondents of immense gifts, but even the greatest reporters must battle for space against the tremendous force of the general parochialism. The mass-circulation newspapers don’t even bother. Unless Americans are concerned, most foreign news seems to be about Princess Di.
To be sure, there are exceptions to the tide of simple-minded stupidity. C-Span has become a wonderful window into some areas of the society; it allows us to see the boring parts of the craft of governance. Court TV has the potential to educate more Americans about the law than any medium in the country’s history. CNN does a splendid job, in many ways, bringing the audience closer to the outside world than newspapers ever could. But the emphasis remains on conflict, drama, present tense, bang-bang: Crossfire is hardly the forum for thoughtful analysis. Maybe nothing is. The networks were positioned to cover the armed invasion of Haiti; when Jimmy Carter made his deal, most returned to the soap operas and talk shows, or cut back, with a sigh of relief, to the OJ. hearings. Who the hell wants to cover a peaceful intervention?
As we move toward Endgame, consider this: We live in a country that has never made a movie about Leonardo da Vinci and has produced three about Joey Buttafuoco.
II. US AGAINST THEM
In the wider society, true to the principles of conflict, an often bewildering variety of social factions batter at one another for position and victory (or, as the jargon goes, “hegemony”). Their purpose isn’t to make a better society, a place where that illusive American goal, harmony, is possible. The goal is therapy. The goal is dominance. The goal is vengeance: to take no prisoners and, in Murray Kemp-ton’s phrase, shoot the wounded.
The unraveling process can have many names: fragmentation, disunification, atomization, balkanization, disintegration. Thoughtful men and women — among them Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Gertrude Himmelfarb, Michael Walzer, Allan Bloom, the late William A. Henry III, Robert Hughes — have looked at the battlefield from different positions. They offer their own analyses of the causes of and remedies for the Endgame psychology of permanent division and confrontation. But most agree about the symptoms.
One of the most obvious is also the most disheartening: Almost a hundred years after the last great immigration wave changed the face of American society, vast numbers of Americans — including, sadly, the best-educated — are again being taught to identify themselves with the qualifying adjectives of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender. The idea of the melting pot is dismissed as cultural genocide, replaced by a social worker’s version of predestination. American identities, state the clerics of the new dogma, are not shaped by will, choice, reason, intelligence, and desire but by membership in groups. They are not individuals but components of categories, those slots and pigeonholes beloved of sociologists, pollsters, and the U.S. Census Bureau. And such categories, they believe, are destiny.
The ferocious logic of the adjective insists that the individual take sides. To refuse is to betray the larger group, your own flesh and blood. In America now, it is always Us against Them and Them against Us. And to display its anger, its innocence, its righteousness, our side must be in conflict with their side. It’s not enough to be an American; you must despise, attack, diminish, and empty the guts of those millions of other Americans who are not like you. Every grave must be pried open by scholarship, every smashed bone waved in triumph like a relic, every ancient crime posted on the schoolhouse door.
The result is a society in apparently permanent, teeming, nerve-fraying conflict: blacks against whites; straights against gays, gays against priests, priests against abortionists; sun people against ice people; citizens against immigrants; Latinos against Anglos; people who work against those who don’t; town against gown; blacks against Jews; the orthodox against the reformers; cops against bad guys, lawyers against cops, Crips against Bloods. Good guys and bad guys. Oppressors and oppressed. White hats and black hats. And vicif* versa. Us against Them. Them against Us. And get outta my fuckin’ face.
But there are additional confusions. All the victimized ethnic categories contain men. And the feminist rhetoric of the Endgame insists that men are themselves a group of oppressors — brutal, insensitive, selfish, murderous. Catharine MacKinnon and others use the word men in the same generalized, blurry way that women is used. This astonishingly broad category — men — is defined all too easily by people who believe that the same state of victimhood is endured by the Wellesley graduate and the woman grinding corn in the hills of Chiapas, by Billie Holiday and Katharine Graham, by Jean Harris and Use Koch. The existentialist philosophers of my youth insisted that existence preceded essence, that you were born and then you forged your identity; the philosophers of gender and ethnicity insist that essence precedes existence.
The ideologues of gender don’t care much about making distinctions among men or women. Common sense and experience tell us that among the earth’s billions, there must be some women who are happy and free and others who are brutal and evil. Common sense and intelligence tell us there are millions of black Americans who are not trapped in lives of welfare, violence, illegitimacy. But common sense is in disrepute. The examination of healthy lives is too often dismissed as sentimentality or “anecdotal” gossip, unverifiable under the cold-eyed scrutiny of such exact sciences as sociology or anthropology. The Endgamers of race and gender will limit their investigations to their own kind, the victims. They will define the group by its pathologies and defeats, not its triumphs. Like all believers, they begin with the truth and find evidence to support it. They adhere to a faith, abstract and rigid, full of iron certainties, free of the century’s only useful lesson: doubt.