AUSTIN, Texas -- The Tonya Harding/Paula Jones match on
"Celebrity Boxing" ... I have no idea how to finish that sentence. OK, it's
a concept. Maybe it's camp. Or haute tacky. Sure, we could shoot whoever
thought of it, but don't you get the creepy feeling it says something awful
about the culture? I just can't figure out what. It's a "What is the world
coming to?" moment.
The New York Times critic says this "is not a postmodern joke
about Warholian fame," she thinks it's a cruelty joke. I suppose people have
always paid to see freak shows. But I suspect even P.T. Barnum would have
been taken aback by this. Once you start thinking about it, though, it has a
perverse fascination. How about "Fantasy Celebrity Boxing" with Medea versus
Lizzie Borden?
The Broadway revival of "The Sweet Smell of Success" has touched
off a round of cultural analysis about our obsession with fame. The trouble
with cultural analysis is that it tends to end up with some depressing
conclusion, like, "We are all terrible, terrible people." That, or some
French intellectual announces Jerry Lewis is a genius.
Decrying the Decline and Fall of Absolutely Everything has been
an easy way to make yourself sound smart at least since Jeremiah, but every
now and then even I am tempted to join the pessimists.
A few months ago, I had what I thought was a weird conversation
with an editor at "People" magazine. "Who is your publicist?" she asked, as
though it were a reasonable question.
"My publicist?"
"Yes, your publicist."
"I don't have a publicist."
"You don't have a publicist?"
"No, I don't have a publicist."
The comedy was that we were both equally confounded. Then I
found out (always the last to know) that some journalists do have
publicists.
Eric Alterman, one of our better media critics, recently wrote
an unhappy-anniversary salute to "The McLaughlin Group." "Public affairs
television programs were often dry and pompous ... but devoted to the
proposition that reporters should appear on news programs only when they've
learned something of value of which most people are unaware (hence the word
reporter). The McLaughlin Group transformed the essential qualification from
specialized knowledge to salable shtick. Not only television but journalism
itself has never recovered."
A broader indictment of American culture is in the March issue
of Harper's magazine by Curtis White, a splendidly cranky academic who takes
on such icons of enlightenment as National Public Radio in general and Terry
Gross in particular, Time magazine, self-hating boomers, inane Buddhists,
Louise Erdrich, Jane Campion and The Antiques Road Show, just for starters.
White's bete noire is the flabby thinking of what he calls the
Middle Mind. "Unlike Middlebrow, the Middle Mind does not locate itself
between high and low culture. Rather, it asserts its right to speak for high
culture, indifferent to both the traditionalist Right and the academic
Left."
White believes the Culture Wars are over, and Middle Mind won.
Middle Mind, for example, sees nothing odd about the premise, "Some of our
best writers work for TV." Middle Mind does not distinguish between artists
and poseurs. Of Gross, he writes, "From the perspective of a person really interested in
art and culture, one can only say, 'Well, I think she's on my side, but,
God, she's so stupidly on my side that I hardly recognize my side as my
side.'"
Attacking NPR is like attacking Minnesota Nice -- you could, but
you could probably find better targets, too. We can always use a few shots
at the trite and the simple, but the mean and the dangerous are more
deserving. And then there is the ineffable.
The Tonya Harding/Paula Jones match on "Celebrity Boxing" ...
So where's Jeremiah now that we really need him?
To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web
page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
