Critics - mostly affluent and highly educated – complain that televised Monday night football, faked wrestling, 350 cable channels, nonstop coverage of Monica Lewinsky's antics or the tragedy of Chandra Levy all erode and cheapen our society. They suggest that we now predictably prefer the ephemeral to the lasting, and so care little anymore about good poetry, classical music, ballet, contemporary art, or even the fellowship of small farms, businesses and community get-togethers. And they are, of course, right. The kind of stable and uplifting culture that demands knowledge, training, education or familiarity for inclusion now thrives only in small enclaves in our major cities and some rural oases.
I have seen globalization's onslaught of cheap imported fruits and vegetables, and illegal and massive immigration simply destroy the agrarian world of the 1950s in which I grew up - including much of our own farm, lost to the bank because of poor prices and high costs. But I also appreciate that the local Wal-Mart - five minutes away from our doomed vineyard - is crowded with new consumers, recently arrived from Mexico, who drive Camrys and Civics purchased with easy credit, talk on cell phones for mere pennies, and reside in subsidized tract houses, with comforts superior to those found in more tasteful European homes. When I was in junior high school, summer jobs in town were prized and often meant a laborious apprenticeship under a hectoring small businessman who peered over your shoulder constantly as you tried to memorize his price tags and navigate through the maze of his ancient bronze cash register. Now, newly arrived clerks from Mexico at Jack-in-the-Box punch colored buttons with pictures of shakes and burgers and then instantly hand you a computer printout of your order - no dexterity, no languages, no skills needed other than physical and psychic resistance to the burdens of rote. The illegal alien makes fewer computing mistakes than I did three decades ago - and the "manager" is never really there, as his franchise seems to operate on autopilot and is monitored by videos far more percipient than any cantankerous boss of the past.
Our sophisticated and discontented in the universities are also correct that American tastes spread insidiously, and like bad money drive out any competing expression that offers real contentment and transcendence. But these more discerning critics still are profoundly mistaken in suggesting that grasping corporations, through the evil of advertising and the lust for obscene profits, foist a depressing mass culture upon the people.
Would that this were the case, and that the popular culture could therefore be reshaped with a magic wand of regulations into something a little more tasteful, less shocking to a submissive populace. But the truth, instead, is that Americans find their movies, videos, bestsellers, Internet surfing, TV shows and magazine crass-ness immensely relaxing and entertaining as well as easily accessible. In short, it is all a shared addiction that inexorably builds affinity across racial lines, despite the best efforts of the sophisticates to tear such commonality apart.
What leftists have completely missed is that the greatest engine for social and cultural equality and harmony in America is the corporations they denounce - amoral entities that follow profits rather than allegiance to ideas, prejudices good and bad, or tradition. Jack-in-the-Box couldn't care less that its clerk at the window is of illegal status or dark hue, or has values that are very different from most native Californians. Nor does it care whether she talks with her car-bound customers, or whether she needs government money to supplement her minimum-wage earnings. If she has hands and legs that work, then she is like any other human in the world; and if her English is nonexistent, well, then the corporation can craft a machine of universal symbols to bypass that slight impediment for the nine hours she is on its watch.
In my own community, the great fans of Business-Max and Home Club are Hispanics, not fifth-generation Anglos who have the education, affluence and perhaps memories to support the local family-owned grocery and the town's beleaguered lumber store. The former are cheap, always open, and more likely to offer help in Spanish; the latter are discriminating, prefer quality to quantity, and may hold forth on the problems in the community as you purchase a can of paint.
We are at the last frontier of cultural democratization and limitless mass production, where for the first time in history, entertainment, fashion and media are economical, understandable, reachable and apparently enjoyed by everyone - regardless of race, age or gender. Whether this plethora of cheap goods and boorish entertainment derives from the labors of one billion Chinese who are now exporting their wares on the world market, or the ability to send satellite signals and the Internet into Amazon villages is unclear. What is indisputable is that the drudgery of the American workplace - forty full hours each week, with few European-style perks, and dismal wages for the uneducated - is ameliorated by cheap electronic goods, cheap clothes, cheap almost everything, spiced with sounds, images and tastes that are uniformly accessible and unifying. Europeans who drive their safe government cars to the beach, work seven hours a day, enjoy six to eight weeks off yearly, and have nearly all their medical problems, tuition, natal care and rest home worries taken care of by a maternal government see us as impoverished. Yet Americans find Europeans' tiny homes, solitary small cars, single televisions, and outrageously expensive food, clothes, entertainment and gasoline a real poverty that restricts the individual's ability to satisfy his cravings.
I used to roll my eyes when my parents turned on Perry Como and Frank Sinatra; today my children and I listen to Moby. My father and mother once complained that our clothes were too raggedy; our children now are likely to be dressed like us. My grandmother wore a pleated skirt and my grandfather wore railroad bib overalls; today my
