This book is the result of a project undertaken in 1988 under the auspices of the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship (CCCS) at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI. Participants, all professors at Calvin at the time, were Quentin J. Schultze (Communications), Roy M. Anker (English), James D. Bratt (History), William D. Romanowski (Communications), John W. Worst (Music) and Lambert Zuidervaart (Philosophy). In the preface, the authors declare "if it were not for our Calvinist bent, which provided ample intellectual space for God's grace amid human depravity, we probably would have given up the project" (ix). They also admit 2 biases; one good, one bad. The good bias is their shared Reformed Christian commitment; the bad bias is their homogeneity (all white, middle-aged, North American males). Their basic thesis is that "Youth everywhere increasingly share the same cultural boat, bouyed by the electronic media and steered more and more by large corporations run by adults" (x) (i.e. due to the abdication of other social institutions such as families, schools, churches, civic organizations).
Jack Balswick of Fuller comments on the back cover: "By integrating insightful historical, sociological, artistic, and literary analysis, the authors...avoid simplistic judgmental explanations." Good point, well said.
In addition to its general interest, I have two personal reasons for paying close attention to this book; to understand more fully my own deep influence by the youth culture while growing up as well as to gain new insights as a parent to help my daughter through these years in the future.
The book's title is taken from Bruce Springsteen's song of the same name, whose lyrics are printed on page 102:
Message keeps getting clearer
Radio's on and I'm moving 'round the place
I check my look in the mirror
I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
Man, I ain't getting nowhere
Just living in a dump like this
There's something happening somewhere
Baby I just know that there isYou can't start a fire
You can't start a fire without a spark
This gun's for hire
Even if we're just dancing in the dark
The meaning seems to be pursuing thrills for their own sake and due to dissatisfaction with the status quo, but with no greater purpose in mind, just an aimless search for something better.
Interestingly, the book Husbands Who Won't Lead and Wives Who Won't Follow by James Walker (1989) opens with a similar allusion (relating to unfulfilling marriages):
I met my husband at a dance. Now, years later, it seems as if I'm still dancing in the dark with a total stranger. I would like to turn on the lights and look at this man, or just sit down and rest, but I can't. So I just keep moving, pretending I'm having a good time and waiting for him to talk to me. I guess I'll just keep dancing until I die.
In both cases, the allusion seems to refer to a situation where someone is not happy, doesn't really know what to do about it (they're stuck), and will try to find (or at least pretend to find) happiness by pursuing something (anything!) different (Springsteen) or the same old thing.
In chapter 1 (The Big Chill: Adults, Youth, and Popular Culture), the basic dilemma is set up. Adults, exasperated with the immaturity and energy of youth, although well-meaning, end up using institutions like media, churches and schools to create a youth subculture in which youth "have little to do but expend energy on looking good and entertaining themselves" (2). Not all aspects of that subculture are good, but parents find it much easier to "give youth what they want than to listen to them, explore other options, or show them what they should have" (2) (especially since they increasingly have their own hopes and dreams to pursue and, when distracted by wild youth, tend to respond with either permissive apathy or authoritarian discipline, turning schools into either playgrounds or prisons, reinforcing youth alienation [5]). Rather than bashing youth, the authors want us adults to see that we have been unwittingly conspiring with media and other social institutions (family, school, church) to make the lives of youth more difficult (and that some adults actually nurture and profit from cool relations between youth and adults). This initial survey chapter covers 5 themes: generational conflict, planned immaturity, buying happiness, adult compliance and passive entertainment.
While generational conflict is not new, what is new is corporate encouragement of these distinct subcultural market niches (like an arms dealer encouraging war and then profiting mightily from sales to all sides). Corporate niche-marketing has lead to ever-increasing rates of change in style (music, video, clothing, hairstyles, etc.), particularly for youth. This has created a particular problem for churches, which tend to experience rapid turnover in youth pastors and age-segregation.
Our culture doesn't really reward maturity. Deep down, we all admire youthful beauty, energy, sponteneity, sense of fun, immaturity and freedom. We want youth to grow up not so much for their sake or because we value maturity as to lighten our own load. Even many adults resist maturity, believing it will drain life of joy and fun. "Unfortunately, such delayed maturity extends the identity and intimacy crises faced by so many North American[s]...[adopting] one cultural fad after another in search of their real 'self,' as if they can find it by constantly changing their look or speech or car...handl[ing] romantic relationships in an adolescent fashion, trying out one person after another in hopes of finally finding the ideal mate" (6). As before, media both exacerbate and slake these thirsts.
Our consumer culture teaches youth (and all) that happiness can be bought. It turns the main constituents of happiness; identity and intimacy, "into marketable commodities, like clothes that consumers try on for fit and look" (7). Media look beyond mere entertainment (fun and pleasure) to "develop dedicated customers by offering what few seem to have - the keys to knowing oneself and becoming popular with...peers...function[ing] like a kind of alternative high school on life" (7-8). While media make poor ersatz parents, it is unfair to expect this of them ("as traditional sources of nurture lose their confidence and resolve" 8). "The rise of the entertainment industry, then, parallels the decline of local sources of authority and modes of communication" (8).
Many adults aid and abet this process not only by failing to provide effective leadership in families, churches, schools and communities, but by trying to solve the "youth problem" by creating and supporting the alternative youth subculture, then pushing youth more deeply into it (most churches develop youth-oriented media and programs), thereby assisting corporate market segmentation efforts and reinforcing the consumerist ethos (mass produced answers, youth as passive receptors, anonymous economic transaction replaces caring relationship, e.g. CCM, much of which is "artistically inferior 'cleaned-up' ... secular rock" 10). The author suggests instead having adults and youth work together on community projects (e.g. renovating older homes for resale to the poor, vacation rural redevelopment).
Finally, youth struggle with "North America's pervasive cultural confusion over whether life should leisure or work" (10), which the authors feel "reflect[s their] larger obsession with the self." Many see consumption of entertainment as the basic reason for living (vs. the Calvinist tendency to err on the other side and see work as the point of life) and work as merely the means to support this goal. "Having accomplished little with their own hands, hearts, and minds, their self-esteem is low and their dependence upon the products produced by others is very high" (11). In contrast, the authors want youth to act "in and on the world rather than simply" being consumers, although this may seem threatening to adult culture.
The basic thesis of this initial survey chapter is that electronic media and youth have a symbiotic relationship - they rely on each other. Some claim the media itself fabricates supposed youth needs (including identity and intimacy) but the authors disagree, realizing media must sell to youth, therefore heeding their wants and even needs.
I'll quote at length the introductory summary of the following chapters of the book:
Chapter 2 shows that the "youth problem" is hardly a new one; it has roots in early American culture...describes how generation[s]...of adults have tried to keep youth in line by using the latest innovations in media. Chapter 3 looks at how communications technologies have affected the cultural and social environment, especially the relationship between generations and the rise of a distinct youth culture in North America...The next 2 chapters [4,5] examine the business side of the youth-media symbiosis. Chapter 4 develops the theme of symbiosis by examining the rise of the contemporary youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Those decades were the heyday of Top 40 radio stations and drive-in movies, among other youth-oriented media. Chapter 5 traces the ethos of consumption that increasingly pervades media marketing and the youth culture. At present, the latest media technologies foster expanding global communications systems controlled by a small number of high-finance corporate players.The next 3 chapters [6,7,8] offer portraits of particular youth media. Chapter 6 focuses on rock music, probably the most hotly contested and widely misunderstood form of youth entertainment. Chapter 7 takes rock music to its obvious conclusion in the era of the image - rock videos and music television...Chapter 8 looks at teenage films, especially horror movies and teen initiation films...
The last 2 chapters [9,10] analyze important aspects of the youth-media symbiosis in an attempt to offer some guidelines for redeeming North America's complex and frustrating predicament. Chapter 9 strives to offer a balanced approach to the proper role of leisure in contemporary culture - an important topic, since North America largely lacks the sort of daily labor that dominates most other cultures...Finally, Chapter 10 offers guidelines for evaluating both the quality and the appropriateness of popular art for youth and adults (12-13).
The entertainment industry is one of the largest exporters. Even as the cold war ends and the world seems more peaceful (written before 9/11!), the culture war rages at home. "Surely the decline in education, the spread of drugs, and the breakdown of the family are as important as international politics" (13). The authors offer no simple solutions to these problems, but hope their analysis allows us to better understand the predicament and to "take up the reconstructive task with renewed energy and fresh perspectives" (13).
I found chapter 2 (From Revivalism to Rock and Roll: Youth and Media Historically Considered) to be a fascinating look at American history and one of the best and most helpful chapters overall. The author shows how generational conflict is not new, but "only the latest variation on centuries-old problems" (14), which have always been accompanied by major innovations in media, popular culture and entertainment as part of the broader process of modernization.
Since early 18C America, powerful forces have fostered an economic development that has regularly triggered profound social and cultural changes. Modernization has (1) moved economic exchange from local, face-to-face encounters into a larger impersonal market; (2) constantly advanced technologically; (3) multiplied social institutions; and (4) complicated interpersonal relations...some of the most interesting social movements in American history struggled to combat it...to win their cause, the sponsors of economic modernization attacked the power of tradition; in particular, individual mobility and profit-seeking challenged the norms of community and social hierarchy. In response, every social institution changed. Some disappeared, like the local militia, and some prospered, like business corporations. Still others - especially the church, the family, and the school - have at once seemed imperiled and strengthened (15).
While modernization's boosters have assured the future would be "brighter, better, richer, and happier," youth especially have felt the burden of finding their way in a rapidly changing world. Like their parents, they can either rebel against "the machine" or try to adapt to it. Adding to the confusion has been that parents want to both help and (perhaps not as consciously) control their children. In response, youth want to both emulate and escape their parents.
The author notes a recurring irony in all this. Again and again, modernistic innovations (e.g. lending libraries, telegraph, radio, TV) have been promoted as ways to solve the very problems (e.g. "saving the young" from crime, sin, ignorance, moral chaos) that modernism has created. In each case, the result has been only to adapt youth (and everyone) to the new socio-economic system. "Cultural leaders always intend to use new media to convey and even revive old values, but the new media usually end up obscuring, weakening, or triumphing precisely over those conservative values" (16).
[This] ironic drama [has] persistantly [been] repeated on the American cultural stage. Act I: a youth-targeted, youth-championed form of entertainment emerges, drawing sharp parental suspicion. (The recent adult alarm over heavy-metal music is the latest instance, but the same objections greeted the popular pastimes we will treat subsequently: irregular preaching in the 1740s, women's novels a century later, football in the 1890s, movies and jazz in the 1920s, comic books and rock and roll in the 1950s.) Act II: the new format's promoters proclaim its "health" and "safety" and its "educational value" or some other legitimate end. Act III: that defense invites attempts to harness the new form to the ends of order and control, specifically of reviving threatened values. Act IV: success in Act III generates efforts to recover the format's original ideal, to push it toward more extreme expressions, or to seize upon a still newer medium, which begins the drama all over again.
And so the promise of freedom and independence lures youth, the promise of revival and control lures adults, into further conformance to the new socio-economic system. Youth seek identity, intimacy, meaningful futures, "recognition as adults from adults while avoiding the drudgery, routine, and compromise in which adults seem to be mired...[they] battle to find a voice all their own but one that will also win adults' respect and response. These 2 desires cannot both be met, however. For once heeded and shared, the voice no longer belongs exclusively to the sender...as much as the youth culture in its struggle for independence wishes to set its own agenda, the terms of that agenda can emerge only from an adult-dominated culture" (17).
In describing the history of the ironic drama of youth, media and popular entertainment in America, the author interestingly focuses on the following eras:
- Youth and Revival Discipline: 1740-1790
- Revival Discipline in the Young Republic: 1790-1840
- Youth and Victorian Nurture, 1840-1890
- The 1890s
- The 1920s
He admits to focusing on the experience of northeastern, white, upper and middle classes "not to imply their superiority but to recognize their power to shape public life, the policies, structures, and expectations that impinge upon other populations as well" (17).
The rest of this chapter is so fascinating, I'd like to quote the entire passage, but I'll try to restrain myself and only quote certain blocks and try to summarize the rest:
1790-1840
For our purposes, the first significant "act" [of this unfolding drama] spanned the century-long "commercial revolution" that began in New England in the 1730s and climaxed in upstate NY in the 1830s...significantly, both the place where this transformation began and the place where it ended were notorious for religious explosions. American revivalism was virtually invented in New England in the 1730s-1740s (the Great Awakening) and reached its wildest crescendo along the Erie Canal in the 1830s (the "burned-over district" of the Second Great Awakening). In both cases youth were the revival's special target, new communications its special tool, and a mixture of protest and accommodation its overal social function. In short, in the great century of commercialization, evangelical revivalism played a leading role in the larger cultural transactions of modernization.For a hundred years before the first Awakening (that is, since the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630), New England had tried to order itself by means of a tight, thoroughgoing, patriarchal communalism...the young...remained under their parents' authority for...[a] long time. The marks of adulthood - marriage, full church membership, and inheritance - often did not come to men before their thirties...[meanwhile] they would remain dependent upon...their parents.
By the 1730s that arrangement began to break down. A population explosion took over more and more of the land reserves, making property more expensive, and drove many young people to...the frontier or to cities...[or to] stay at home and rebel...[high youth pregancy rates] forced parents, sometimes grudgingly, to grant land, independence, and adulthood at an earlier age. Analogous disruptions reverberated through the rest of society: political factionalism, regional animosities, and disputes over currency and trade - all forbidden by traditional norms - rose sharply. The well-ordered rural commune had begun to come apart under the demands of the marketplace.
Seen in this light, the Great Awakening served to restore social order for youth by supplying a new discipline to take the place of the old. [It] began, in fact, with Jonathan Edwards' pointed sermons to the...[youthful rebels] in his own congregation...turn[ing] revelers into saints...[and teaching them] to separate themselves psychologically from "the world" in order to bond intensively with each other, to guard their lives by strict conscience, and to watch fellow believers. Thus, their reordered souls and the spiritual bonds of fellowship created for many youth a new identity that enabled them to steer a clear path through the maze of a fragmenting world (17-19).
The revival was aimed at youth and emphasized youthfulness. Although the old order was suspicious of "the Awakening's unusual means of persuasion" (20), they had to admit its effectiveness at reaching the formerly "spiritually recalcitrant" younger set. The new style was itinerant, ad hoc (anyplace, anytime), emotional, and spontaneous vs. the older method of intellectual, standardized, authoritative, prepared sermons delivered in a traditional church ("repentance of the heart was to come later, in the privacy of home"). Youth responded in droves, in the process creating "a new type of community - a voluntary association led by charismatic force and bound by mutually 'edifying conversation'" (20).
Inadvertently, half-consciously, the Awakening crystallized and spread a new form of entertainment...as popular-culture theory would put it, the itinerant preachers repackaged pieces of folk sentiment (traditional denominational religion) into a new, broader-reaching "pitch" that defied established limits. And their performances clearly had entertainment values: commonplace idiom, dramatic force, and theatrical flair. George Whitefield, the greatest itinerant, matched 20th century rock-stars in celebrity and (self-)promotion. His critics sensed the point in their litany of rebuke. The revival was "wild" and "extravagant," luring the innocent from their "plain duty" (i.e. work) to an orgy of "enthusiasm." The orgies of spirit proved fleshly as well. Because of the revival, one critic complained, "our presses are teeming with books and our women with bastards."As with other fads, the trappings of revivalism disappeared from New England almost as fast as they had come. But the evangelical movement lived on in its own institutional and theological framework, and it continued to help many youth secure a place in society. For society as a whole, however, the Awakening inserted but one more element of discord amid the forces of modernization...[while it continued to work for some,] increasingly thereafter, politics came to supplant religion as the ground of social unity. Instead of seeing the devil lurking in the woods, New Englanders began to see the devil first in French and then in British designs on North America. New communications strategies from the revival fit the political cause well. Committees of correspondence, polemical pamphleteering, and especially spontaneous mass meetings of fervid oratory helped trigger the American Revolution. In addition, another strain from revivalism, a youthful, anti-patriarchal idiom, colored the rhetoric of revolution...In the first decades after Independence, authority of all sorts came under challenge...Ironically, the fruits of the Awakening, its churches and colleges (Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth), were now the targets, set upon with riots by none other than young students. In this climate, the president of Yale and grandson of Jonathan Edwards, Timothy Dwight, began a conversion campaign among students that heralded the Second Awakening. The solution to the disorders that had for 3 generations fed and followed upon revival dynamics would be...well, more revival (21-24).
Moving on to the 1790-1840 period (2nd Great Awakening), the author notes that "rekindling revivalism made sense in that the same forces the first Awakening had addressed were again pressing very hard, only now on a much wider front" (24). These forces included westward migration, urbanization and industrialization. Young women were especially challenged, having been pushed out of farm households into factories, school teaching, domestic service or even prostitution. Young males savored their new independence, but their "roaming en masse haunted the fledgling republic with questions of order and virtue. The young were haunted too, but by questions of freedom and identity" (25).
In this unstable environment, "revivalists arose to once again turn personal and social confusion to order...Charles Finney...led the way theologically by dumping the first Awakening's Calvinism for an explicit doctrine of free will" (25). This "one big choice" offered youth identity, life purpose, community, anchorage and discipline (against temptation and for profitable endeavor).
Unfortunately, this fusion of morality and enterprise, piety and market, righteousness and productivity, led to multiplying theological novelties and increased hucksterism of both religious and secular types. "Free will was hounded on every side, called to titanic exertions...like the free enterpriser in the free market" (26). In offering freedom through discipline, the self-help movement was born, making "a free-lance, advice-giving career possible for the first time" (26). Examples were pushing "culture" (Emerson), phrenology, teetotaling (WCTL), diets, schools, avoiding coffee and tea, meat and spices, sexual regulations and on and on. "National leagues for every sort of reform organized to use print to disseminate their program systematically" (26).
1840-1890
By 1840 it had become obvious that leaders had asked too much of individual willpower to overcome a wide-open world with overabundant temptation. In response, a few weary radicals removed themselves to wilderness communes or joined apocalyptic sects. The bulk of the middle class favored a more moderate refuge - the home. In fact, the home seemed to promise solutions for all the problems of the urban-commercial world, and that hopeful, if sentimental, image reigned over bourgeois life for the rest of the century (27-8).
The idea was to keep children home longer, protect them from the wicked world and nurture good character development. This Victorian project lead to "regular" (rule-based, routinized) schools for city children, vs. the older, more haphazard approach. A similar change occurred in religion, replacing "haphazard" revivalism with gradual nurture. "The developmental psychology of Charles Finney was reversed: conditioning replaced catalyzing; children replaced young adults; growth supplanted crisis; and maturation displaced decision. If the revival had tried to end anxiety, Victorian nurture proposed to ban anxiety altogether" (29). The prime nurturers in this new scheme were women, and they were assisted in this venture by "the first mass-produced cultural artifacts in American history...'ladies' magazines, gift books, children's stories, advice manuals, and above all novels...traditionally, cultural leaders had proscribed fiction as false and seductive...but few held out against the tidal wave of popularity. Once again, the 'dangerous' was to be turned into the educational and uplifting, into the very salvation of society" (30).
Attempting to promote "love, support, and mutual responsibility" in place of the "mercenary and exploitive...male market world," women saw an "historic opportunity to 'master not only themselves but the world'" (30-1). The irony was that women, seeking moral influence, focused on cultivating and exhibiting their inner lives, leading at times to self-absorption and (as the strategy failed) even rage against male defiance, power, brutality and culpability. Further the irony, "denouncing the commercial ethos proved big business" (32).
The picture being painted is the onslaught of the market, with various traditional institutional forces attempting to face it down; first the church (revivalism), then the family (Victorian nurture), then civic action (progressivism). These attempts each seemed to succeed for a time, but ultimately failed.
The 1890s
The 20th century has been the heyday of youth, and it dawned with the 1890s. In that decade a great public outcry erupted over the problems of youth [and society]. A bevy of reform efforts tried to resolve these, and an intellectual enterprise struggled to redefine what "youth" was - or ought to be. That concept was labelled "adolescence" and has prevailed ever since (33).
There were problems at both ends of the social spectrum. Slum children were "too clever, too 'physical,' too numerous, and altogether immune to the regime of the Victorian home" while upper class children lacked "the vitality and sponteneity of the streets" and suffered "an epidemic of 'neurasthenia' or the 'collapse of nervous energy' (33). The Boy Scouts, YMCA and the national cult of football rose to "toughen up" priveleged youth (e.g. "Rough Rider" Teddy Roosevelt played to this concern, also H. G. Wells' The Time Machine with its brainy weaklings vs. simpleton laborers). It was assumed that "Wall Street and the White House could use a tough boys gang to set them right" (34).
However, this new movement represented a shift in cultural authority. "Whereas the revivalists and motherly nurturers had linked their ideas more or less closely to religion, the chief sponsors of 'adolescence' were largely secular colleges and universities, their research coming out of the social sciences" (34). They believed youth should be removed from the adult world ("sequestered in their own institutions"), where they could be made to work through adolescence, i.e. "recapitulating" as individuals society's steps from primitive to civilized behavior (based on Darwinian theory). They sought to shield youth from (lower class) crime and labor and (upper class) "adult worries about career, moral obligation, and metaphysical certainty" (36). Thence came child labor laws, compulsary longer schooling, public parks and playgrounds, and public high schools. They would stay in school longer and emphasize vigor of all types.
[Both] school and church had to be reoriented to new purposes. Christianity in this era turned "muscular" and connoted moral vigor; that translated for adolescents into physical vigor. Camping, hiking, and competitive games became both the lure and the end of church youth group. High schools expanded from their classical intellectial curriculum to offer commercial, vocational, and general education courses...[and] mandated "social education" - that is, training for "leisure, home life, and citizenship" [through]...courses...student activities...and [especially] athletics.
"If the house of adolescence was designed by psychology, it was the economy that would build it and bring it to every corner of the country. Technological innovations...decimated the youth labor market...the diploma became the passport beyond the 'dead-end' job...success required a different set of traits than it had before...[less] heroic creation of new enterprises...[more] effective organization and promotion of existing ones" (36-7). This change especially affected elite youth. Having "been taught 'character' - to be decisive, unbudging, and self-reliant, as befit the doughty entrepreneurial past...[they now] had to learn 'personality' - to be flexible, progressive, oriented to others, fit for a sleek managerial future" (37). Youth were to "associate with their peers but only in special youth institutions managed by adult professionals. Athletics, student activities, and casual play were to fit into an adult-regulated system that would discourage spontaneity, autonomy, and self-formation" (37-8). Youth were to avoid adult concerns such as "religion, vocation, and intellectual life." But creation of this self-contained youth world backfired. It became "less a time to prepare for adulthood than an attempt to delay or prevent it...a world in which prolonged immaturity could sustain itself...[and] became self-educat[ing] as well, shaping its own culture and mores. The new ideology of adolescence made possible a new youth community with a powerful influence that could surpass any outside influence on its members' lives. The creation of that community remains one of the 1890s' profound legacies to American life. The same decade forged new transportation and communications technologies, producing the automobile, the radio, and moving pictures. And the 1920s would bring the new community and the new technologies together in volatile combination" (38)
The 1920s
The images of the 1920s; "Wall Street boom and corporate derring-do, the hyper-advertising of ballyhoo, the national craze for sports, the psychology of 'self-realization' and 'adjustment,' and, of course, 'flaming youth,'...spelled the arrival (1) of the managerial economy for broad ranges of the middle class and (2) of that phenomenon which is this book's primary concern - the symbiosis between a self-standing youth culture and a self-conscious entertainment industry" (38).
Success in the new system of "big business" involved a curious combination of competition and teamwork, exemplified by the world of sports. The 1920s saw huge increases in high school and college enrollment. "Yet the life of the mind did not fare as well...schools had become centers of youth life and...activities which had little to do with the basic aims of education as they had been heretofore understood...[peer group] demands were, first, to 'become an individual' - that is, to leave behind family, ethnic, and religious identity; and second, to conform to the ways of the group...business advertising sprang upon this market as a gold mine ... 'youth' ... became not only a market for sales but also an object - an image commodity - for sale [to others]...in this respect, its [colleges'] real educational mission was to acculturate large portions of the middle class to high-scale, rapid-turnover consumption as a way of life" (38-41). Movies, glossy magazines, cars, radio, records, dancing all "spelled SEX - more precisely, the open display of sexuality, particularly by women. Nowhere did youth assert their liberation more graphically or elders react more fearfully" (42). The youth culture formed its own status system, with BMOCs (frat leaders and athletes) "the high priests of the cult, the regulators of conformity" (42). "Around these two poles - 'competition within conformity and conformity in the service of competition' - revolved all of campus life"
While middle-class parents might wish their children to slow down sexually, those same parents held few scruples, to judge from their role in the '20s economy, about those "lusts of the flesh" that were speculative and consumerist. The Protestant churches in the '20s were too busy conducting theological civil war to do much more than scold youth from the sidelines. In the 1930s, with that war over, the mainline denominations took up a "peace of mind" theology that gave the notions of adjusted personality and manipulable image a vaguely Christian sanction. The Fundamentalist losers of the war renounced modern culture altogether but did so by means of the latest communications technologies - using radio to rally an anonymous, scattered clientele, and the automobile to ride the faith-healing circuit (43).
In his conclusion, the author that "since the 1890s, 'youth' seem to reappear on the national stage as a 'problem' about every 30 years, a problem signaled by their 'dangerous' forms of entertainment. In fact, these intervals chart the immersion of new groups in the 20th century corporate-magagerial economy ... If the 1890s marked the entry point for the elite and the 1920s for the broader middle class, the 1950s brought the turn of the South, of blacks, and of the white working class. Nicely, just these 3 contributed the elements ... [of] rock and roll music ... Youth were sequestered and disenfranchized. Their discovering this triggered the [1960s] campus revolt ... [showing that] the instruments adults intended for control, youth could turn to liberty" (44). The 1960s potpouri of "alternative lifestyles" spread throughout the culture, leading the author to claim that "the 1980s [the next 30-year benchmark] showed a scale of confusion that portends future dramatic change. Confusion arose because the 'youth' values of the 50s and 60s seemed to become the regnant adult values of 1980, namely, the pursuit of perpetual personal freedom, of material plenty, of romance that will never have to settle down ... the classic youth tasks of 'growth,' 'finding oneself,' and preparing for one's life-work have become the American life-work, even into 'the golden years' of retirement" (45). As adults have become more like children, children have been forced to become more like adults (i.e. working to support their entertainment needs). The author expects "another struggle between the ages, mixing freedom and control [via] communications technology."
In the next chapter (3, Lost in Time and Space: Youth in an Electronic Culture), the author notes the ability of mass media to both bring together across huge distances like-minded youth (good) but also to isolate them from their parents and other traditional, local influences (bad). The media "sails across space" but not across trans-generational time. This spatial "bias" has given rise to a distinct "youth" culture "whose unsteady center promotes the production and consumption of mass-media entertainment." The author says we need to consider limiting "the commercial hunger and optimism of media producers and regulators" (48). He makes the interesting observation that American pop culture will eventually "Americanize" European (even world?) youth, much to the chagrin of their elders and culture monitors. "While teenagers thought and felt as if they were breaking free from the binding localism of parents, they merely exchanged one sort of coercive conformity for another" (53).
The author notes that the electronic media depend upon and have "contributed to the general crisis of authority in Western societies" (56). He also notes the "inherently transient quality of what the electronic media produce. By their very nature, these media can show little respect for the cumulative wisdom of previous generations. They communicate many messages quickly over vast spaces, allowing little time for either absorption or reflection" (58). Its fast-changing styles and fads lead to increased market fragmentation. By creating the "illusion and feeling" (but not the reality, 61) of intimacy, media appeal to a basic youth need and increase inter-generational alienation. "Parents often exert authority without (taking the time and effort to) develop intimacy" (62). In their search for intimacy (and more generally for "reliable and trustworthy sources of information and ideas" (62), youth increasingly "turn to peers and the media, the only two groups that always seem to be there with open arms" (62). Of these two sources, the media alone is ever-affirming, accepting, non-judgemental and risk- and pain-free.
The author notes that American mobility has aggravated the media's tendency to disconnect youth from their elders, ethnicity and locality. Another way to say this is the media especially speaks to the human need for rootedness amid American transience. Unfortunately, media are themselves unstable, making it harder for youth to "find themselves" in a "fluid and multivocal culture" (64). The media's lack of mature adult content doesn't help either. "Programmers reduce love to romance and raw sex; rock music concerns itself with little else...there is rarely any glimpse of self-sacrifice or long-term commitment, marital or otherwise" (65). So the media inhibit both the maintenance of local communities and the formation of adult identities. "A veritable 'cult of youth' encourages everyone, including adults and young children, to think and act like adolescents" (65). This includes "view[ing] life as a perpetual unsolvable identity crisis...an unending process of adapting to [and consuming] the latest adolescent fads" (66). "Perpetual adolescence and consumption [become] developmental ideals...[and] constitute the twin-pronged gospel of these media" (67). While promising much, media deliver little but aggravation and frustration. Lacking anchors in geographic space and cultural time, media "will necessarily foil committed searchers of any age" (67). "Meanwhile, everyone gets older, responsibilities invariably mount, and the quest for adolescent fulfillment seems ever more unattabinable - and more desperate" (68).
The author notes disapprovingly that "lacking a coherent public policy for the communications industry, North America has decided to let the marketplace establish the cultural landscape of adolescent life" (68). He seems to want more government intervention to protect "local community life [and] traditional social institutions" and laments that the (national, commercial) media's effect on cultural stability is taken for granted and not much discussed publicly (68). He does admit that "in a democratic society, of course, it is extremely difficult for the government to determine which groups and purposes should shape the public sphere," but then goes on to state that it is obvious that "certain steps should be taken" (69). He suggests more public discussion for starters and then goes on to advocate media regulation (begun in the 1930s, but not followed through, he says) to "establish workable standards that will serve the 'public interest, convenience, and necessity'" [1930s FCC wording]. With that goal in mind, he suggests enforcing (a) true pluralism (vs. promotion of a homogenized, standardized, dominant, consumption-oriented, mainstream, profitable content) by promoting minority views of life (i.e. ethnic, religious, racial, etc.), (b) cultural preservation (vs. national market penetration). The author applauds PBS for their greater program diversity, but notes that most of their programming is national, not local in nature. He calls for more local and regional programming and empowerment of indigenous local groups with media savvy.
The author sees this as a crisis ("it is vital that the media do not further weaken and thus dominate oral communication and the rich cultures that depend upon face-to-face interaction" 72) and calls for (in addition to regulation) "mediating structures" to stand between media and audiences. "It is increasingly clear that the entertainment industry has contributed significantly to weakened schools, churches, and ethnic identities" (72). As a libertarian conservative, I am not in favor of increased government interference in mass media (not to mention government subsidies to promote "diversity"), but I can see the dangers of centralization. I have sympathy for the "states rights" (extended to "local" and "regional" rights, i.e. the principle of subsidiarity, keep power as close as possible to the people, dispersed, not centralized) argument (e.g. Jefferson, Madison, the Southern conservatives). Hmmm, must think more about this one. This probably goes back to the Hamiltonian urge to centralize, nationalize, industrialize, marketize, urbanize vs. the Jeffersonian/Madisonian resistance (prefer agrarian, dispersed power). His position invites the "who watches the watchers?" line of argument. We've seen the tendency of PBS, NEA, NEH, ...to favor political leftism. Here's also the concern again about highly (excessively?) organized churches (CRC [Calvin], RCA, PCUSA, RCC, ...) tending leftist, favoring government "solutions." In general, my feeling is properly functioning markets do not allow monopoly and centralization is usually the result of and evidence of government interference.
The author makes the interesting point that youth in "protective" homes may be at higher risk, since 1) they spend more time absorbing media and 2) they've not been taught to think independently ("when parents value protection above all, 'obedience and social harmony are valued and there is little concern with conceptual matters'" 72). "Youth deeply desire to share their lives - ideas, feelings, hopes - with ... parents [but] they interpret a lack of parental interest in their interests as an indication that parents do not really care" (73). Bottom line, parents must teach their kids (i.e. spend time with, model) to be critical and selective media consumers. The author laments consolodation in the media industry, with fewer huge firms controlling more of the market. Although many had hoped technological advances (e.g. more channels) would allow localized (even personalized) tayloring, centralization has increased. "Only with strong traditional local structures will a new generation of media producers create entertainment as representatives of the public rather than as hacks for a consumerist industry" (74).
Chapter 4 (Risky Business: Youth and the Entertainment Industry) focuses on the self-serving nature of the media industry and youth-media symbiosis. "To a surprising extent, young people rely on the industry's products to learn about life and society" (77, i.e. "maps of reality"). Youth culture flowered after WWII, fully emerging by the 1960s, driven primarily by surging postwar prosperity and universal education. The Protestant work ethic was reversed as leisure and enjoyment (i.e. consumption) became preeminent. Teens became more independent from their parents and appeared to care less and less about the latter's expectations. Adolescence has two key features: "an intense preoccupation with sex" and institutional age isolation (creating a need for more general cultural education). Both of these needs are met by popular entertainment. Whether adults abdicated or the media usurped is unclear.
The author notes that the emerging youth culture was a godsend for the entertainment industry. He walks us through many significant innovations; Top 40 format in 1955 (later MTV in 1981), disc jockeys, transistor radios, LPs and 45s, huge improvements in recording technologies and, most significant, rock music itself. This music came "from everywhere, a melange of 3 popular music traditions" (90).
The first was Tin Pan Alley music, which had emerged from 19th Anglo-American high culture. Full of melodic sounds and sentimental lyrics, the music seemed determined not to offend the domestic sensibility of Victorian America. Considerably less tame was the second tradition - the largely African-American music of the deep South: blues, R&B, jazz, and gospel. The third tradition came mainly from the middle South and the Southern uplands, the music of rural Southern whites that falls under the general heading of "country music" - blues, gospel, honky-tonk, and bluegrass ... Rock's first inroad came in 1951. A Cleveland record-store owner alerted disc jockey Alan Freed to the popularity of R&B records among white teenagers ... rock did for white suburban teenagers what R&B did for urban blacks, who sought relief from grueling industrial labor or unemployed "leisure" (90-1).
Hollywood later followed this success (responding to their own postwar slump) by targetting the youth market with "restless youth" films (mostly from small independents, but the majors did produce e.g. Blackboard Jungle (1955), Rebel without a Cause, The Wild One). Fortunately, "the virtues of Americanism won out over the teenage rebels" (92). As parents complained, many outlets tried to "tame" youth with polka or otherwise "sanitized" content, but youth demand won out eventually. "By 1964 the gulf ... had [widened to] a 'generation gap,' and American teenagers were ripe for the British Invasion ... led primarily by the Rolling Stones and the Beatles" (93). The major movie studios finally began to catch the baby boom wave with Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), culminating with Saturday Night Fever and Grease (1977-78). The boom faltered in the 1980s as the boomers aged (more conservative 80s youth didn't resonate with 60s protest or 70s disco themes). Once MTV was created in 1981, a string of rock music videos/movies made huge profits (Thriller (1983), Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984), Batman (1989)).
The themes of love and death (often translating into the baser sex and violence) are universal and permeate all forms of art. Another common theme is the gap between expectations and reality (especially in Bruce Springsteen's work). "Images of rivers, cars, streets, and highways suggest, says Springsteen, people in transition. They've left and they haven't arrived anywhere" (101). Another is refusal to surrender to disillusionment, recognizing that "a secret to survival lies in finding new dreams to replace those that have suffered damage or been lost." Yet another is nostalgic yearning for high school "glory days."
The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) seemed to capture the spirit of the 1960s (counterculture, rebellion, Vietnam, Watergate, generation gap), while Saturday Night Fever (1977) seemed to do the same for the 1970s ("retreat from politics and an assimilation of American middle-class values ... an ethic of self-preservation and the passion of the moment, making a hero out of an everyday may ... if you dance well and look great, you're on top, even if you work pumping gas ... boring jobs vs. exciting night-life ... an escape from the darkness of everyday living in an age of diminishing expectations" 105). All in the Family capitalized on the left-right debate, The Mary Tyler Moore Show changing sex roles and the feminization of work, M*A*S*H antiwar sentiment. Todd Gitlin noted that all involved younger people bearing the newer values battling with arbitrary authority. A common formula for success is to identify the cultural fault lines, then find ways to soothe them. American Graffiti was about "young love, hot cars, big dreams." Countering the pessimistic and self-hating mood of the 1970s were the Star Wars movies, which were "classic western adventure fables set in the new fontier of space" depicting "a future of hope where ... good triumphed over evil" (108). George Lucas had discovered that 70s kids "missed having a fantasy life inspired by the cinema."
Noting the importance of media in our culture, George Lucas said it has usurped the former role of the church. He asked producers to take their responsibility seriously, learning ethics, philosophy, history, lest they be merely witch doctors. "Entertainment impressarios have indeed become in some ways the popular revivalists of the late 20th century. Worse ... most ... [are] witch doctors (high-priest hucksters). The Springteens and Lucases are few and far between. While they are seen as gurus, gods, and prophets by the young, most artists are in the profit-minded bottom-line business of entertainment" (110).
I found chapter 5 (Consuming Visions: Popular Art in Consumer Capitalism) to be quite leftist oriented, which fuels my uneasy sense that there may be a linkage between the more highly intellectual, scholarly approach to social analysis represented by this book (and Calvin, Noll, Marsden, et. al.) and political leftism. I hope any such linkage is not necessary or inherent, but merely circumstantial and correctible.
The author notes that "the conflict between popular art and high art is at least as old as the mid-19th century" (112). But he adds that advances in the media have given popular art a huge boost in the conflict. Interestingly, this reminds me of the parallel theme I'm currently reading about in Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, in which he highlights how increased political democritization often harms liberalism (in the 19th century sense), as "mass politics" pathologies overwhelm liberal wisdom. Here, too, mass culture (i.e. cultural democratization) can overwhelm time-tested cultural wisdom. Just one more reminder that everything is connected.
"In spite of youth's posture of autonomy and defiance, young people in fact rely upon the adults who create and distribute the very products and ethos by which youth define their distance from the adult world" (112). Good ironic point, reminds me of the irony of "The Liberal History Lesson" in which leftists demonize as a chief enemy of liberty the very Christian faith that gave birth to their liberties in the first place. Also reminds me of the irony that Islamic fundamentalists use ideas they learned in Western universities (communism, fascism, nazism) to organize themselves and attack the West (and pervert their faith?, if it isn't inherently perverted). The author says that, although youth and adult cultures seem very different, they are both based on consumerism. This chapter's argument is "that disputes about the style or content of popular art amount to mere skirmishes in a larger battle between consumerist values and other values in North American life." The author is definitely an enemy of consumerism and here is where his leftism shows most clearly throughout the chapter.
"Western Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno" is quoted as critiquing "the culture industry" (and as being the prevailing wisdom) being primarily at fault for producing popular art that is neither popular nor art. The author believes that, in contrast to Adorno, "symbiosis" better explains the reality (and is, for him, more hopeful in allowing change, which he, like Adorno, believes is needed). His model pits "the system" (or the establishment, likened to Homer's cyclops, demands conformity, "subtly forces all people and organizations to adapt to its pursuit of power and money, regardless of what they might wish to be or do," he cites Juergen Habermas here, 116) against the cultural "life world" (which challenges "the system," e.g. in the 1960s and 1970s). He believes art should question and ennoble, not merely endorse the status quo. He draws attention to the fact that our system relies on the need to "keep people buying" (suggesting they're being manipulated into doing so), while failing to note that people love to buy things that appeal to them and that this is completed natural and healthy. I want to say to him, look around, where do people want to live? In America where there's freedom. Not in some leftist utopia that allows them to get in touch with their inner [nonconsuming] artist!
In attacking "consumer capitalism," the author wants to characterize it as an evolving system (perhaps to lessen our historical-based loyalty for and sympathy to it), one that has gone through several distinct phases (after economic historian Ernest Mandel):
1) 1840s-1890s, freely competitive capitalism, manufacturing dominant, machine-made steam engines
2) 1890s-1940s, monopoly capitalism, finance dominant, electric and combustion engines
3) 1940s-1990s, consumer or "late" (perhaps signifying its imminent demise?) capitalism, service dominant, electronics and automation
The author cites approvingly an article from the New Left Review entitled Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Admitting that consumer capitalism meets countless human needs, he tars it with wastefulness of natural resources, favoring economic mobility and acquisition, and obscuring demands for social justice (122). He cites Juergen Habermas' 'sociocultural crisis' in which people rebel against 'the system' (i.e. 'government-administered economy') (he also mentions Habits of the Heart here). Following Habermas, he challenges "such quasi-sacred notions as the idea that social rewards match individual achievement or that economic competition benefits everyone" (123).
He dusts off the old leftist critique that "businesses compete not so much in prices or product quality as in the status, appeal, or faddishness of their products" (124); image over substance, planned obsolesence, "neomania" (124). Though noting that real, technical improvements resulted from foreign competition, the lesson (competition works!) seems lost on him. The author cites George Lucas' clever mix of timeless themes with slick marketing and style, likening this approach to Reagan-era nostalgia for simpler times (i.e. just another fad). He laments that marketing has displaced production; salesmanship, workmanship. He ominously depicts the (diabolical?) entertainment industry accumulating dangerous levels of worldwide economic power. "Few North Americans seem to realize that every concentration of economic power has its winners and losers, and that economic gain for a few often comes at a cultural cost for many" (136, classic leftist anti-corporatism). The "triple threat" to youth, says the author, is that the industry could become powerful enough to ignore their true needs, stifle cultural diversity and further entrap them in its snare. He later admits "the struggle lacks clear sides, let alone obvious heroes and villains" (139), belying the tone he has already set.
The author believes shopaholics, chronic deficit spending (we could add high debt), financial maneuverings, and health-and-wealth TV televangelists point to an unhealthy focus on consumption in our society. To find the cultural pulse of society, examine important public spaces (medieval cathedral vs. modern mall). The author summarizes social critics' indictments of consumerism (deflecting attention from lasting to superficial, "inanimate objects serve as stand-ins for momentous notions" 140, reductionism from social justice (etc.) to mere economics, obligation to love and care for neighbors shifted from individual/community to professionals/govt). Although the media industry attempts to "ritually induct" ("colonize") youth into consumerism, youth often have their own agenda and resist colonization (i.e. consumers rule, good news, undercuts all the demonization of the industry).
David Brooks provides an interesting counter to the idea (expressed in chapter 5 and also in The Space Merchants) that the masses always follow the elites. He notes the progressive (following European radicalism) tendency to "assume that the most oppressive and reactionary parts of society are the rich, powerful, and the wellborn" and that they have therefore "tended to direct their protests against elites." But, he says, "the notion that a self-confident elite exercises cultural hegemony over the masses and that big media corporations and advertising geniuses create ideas and products and then manipulate society into accepting them was always badly oversimplified and often completely misleading" and cites misogynistic rap culture as a typical example of popular culture being lead from the fringes, not from above (Atlantic Monthly, April 2003, p. 24).
My question: OK, what do they suggest as solutions, prescriptions, correctives? It almost sounds like they're promoting a return to the good old days before "modernism." Do they want more government to control modernist market forces (i.e. leftism)?
Another note: contrast the message of this book that commercialism is detrimental to proper culture with Tyler Cowen's In Praise of Commercial Culture, which argues the opposite, that its good to let market forces rule art and entertainment worlds. Cowen debunks the idea that markets lead to lesser quality art.
In Chapter 6 (The Heart of Rock and Roll: The Landscape of a Musical Style), the author summarizes that "what attacts adolescents to rock and roll is its emotional immediacy and honesty, its exuberant proclamation of adolescent freedom and autonomy, and its constant dramatization of the human quest, felt with particular urgency during the teen years, for intimacy and identity" (149). I'd add its power under (sometimes) precise control.
By the late 1970s, rock music had itself become a major movie star. "There is no doubt that rock and roll lives. It has heart and it has soul - an elusive deep-down something that profoundly attracts and affects teenagers ... [and] continues to be a vital presence in the lives of countless listeners, both young and (now) middle-aged" (148). This chapter "will try to produce a 'gestalt' of the experience and the meaning of rock" (149).
Though not direct predecessors of rock, ragtime (appealing to all ages) at the turn of the century and jazz (mostly post-HS fans) from the 1920s appealed to youthful energy (both of African-American origin). "And then, in the 1950s, seemingly out of nowhere, came rock and roll" (150), the first music claimed almost exclusively by youth. It appealed to their sexual desire and also the general exuberance of youth. Musicologists have been mostly puzzled by its mass appeal, since it doesn't fit their highbrow theories. "The heart of rock and roll is rhythm and beat ... contain[ing] and convey[ing] ... a deeply affective sense of life that is best defined as a free, exuberant, and hungry vitality, one that is often but not always hormonal" (151). Many have criticized it as representing only base human instincts, unworthy of civilized or religious values.
It occurs to me that rock was largely a creature of "big education," being "primarily a music of urban and suburban 'white middle class HS students, who really had no native culture of their own, stranded [in large, concentration camps, er, schools] in the Kafka-land of the suburbs, neither country nor city ... ironically, it was primarily the music of America's largest minority population [blacks] that gave birth to rock and roll ... brought to [white teens] the language, attitudes, and feelings of an oppressed minority" (153). In the 1960s and early 1970s, "the rock music of the British beat bands (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, etc.) and the American bands, whether psychedelic (the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead) or bluesy (CCR), began to assume the role of a total cultural force" (152). Key cultural heroes of rock are Elvis (156) and John Lennon (157), key movies were Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Top Gun (19??).
Rock lyrics are hard to analyze, since "rock and roll has always expressed more and meant more than its lyrics alone ... [which are often] "impressionistic, nonrhetorical, or just plain confused ... [even including] expressive ambiguity, cryptic symbolism, buried irony ... [deliberately blurred in noise]" (160).
There are sections titled Rock as the New Romanticism, Celebration, Protest, Healer.
...to be continued.
In her book The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong has some insightful comments about the rock music culture in post WWII Britain. "Postwar Britain was not an easy place to grow up. We may have defeated Hitler, but the war had ruined us. Britain was now a second-rate power, and food, clothing, and petrol were strictly rationed well into the 1950s. Because thousands of homes had been destroyed during the blitz, there was a grave housing crisis. Our cities were [bomb] scarred ... After the war, we were in debt to the US for 3 billion pounds, our empire was dismantled ... Young Britons ... who came to maturity in this twilight confusion of austerity, repression, nostalgia, frustration, and denial wanted not only a different [external] world but to be changed ourselves ... the quasi-religious fervor inspired by ... [rock music] seemed to promise a new world [or at least escape] ... unabashed rebellion and sexual explosiveness ... In the world conjured up by rock 'n' roll, nobody had to do national service or listen to endless stories about the war. People could reject the self-sacrifice preached by their parents, live intensely, run wild, have sex, consume freely, and 'do as much as they could as soon as they could'" (viii-ix, parts of above quoting Jon Savage).
Chapter 7 (Rocking to Images: The Music Television Revolution) ...
Chapter 8 (Looking at Teen Films: History, Market, and Meaning) ...
From Chapter 9 (Chasing the Grail: Youth in a Culture of Leisure): "The long and toilsome journey after the tragic fall from paradisal felicity has only accentuated the human quest for meaning and delight. And in our current cultural fix, the varied conditions of the modern world - philosophic, social, economic, and technological - have very likely, as least for many adolescents, only worsened the ageless, restless quest for understanding, identity, intimacy, and delight. We have vast resources for leisure and amusement but lack a personal or collective vision to undergird them. As Western culture has become more technoligically advanced, socially fragmented, and ideologically disoriented, the quest for what entertainment has historically provided - maps of meaning, delight, and diversion - has only intensified" (264). Especially interesting is the addition of understanding and delight to the list of basic human needs (I continue to feel especially the need for understanding, as I always did growing up).
The "mythic" function of art takes on new urgency since traditional religious certainties have been diluted. "...most people confront questions, usually starting in adolescence, to which there is now a plethora of answers. North American culture now churns forth a multiplicity of attractive solutions and claims, ranging from Christian fundamentalism to New Ageism to rank hedonism...we live in a philosophical supermarket where appeal depends on packaging and much shelf space is devoted to snack food" (265). In this context, I've sometimes wondered if my own fundamentalist heritage lacks depth (more like philosophical snack food). Is this true? Was I handicapped in this way? Were my struggles for identity, intimacy, purpose, delight, understanding, etc. thereby made more intense? The authors would no doubt claim the Reformed Tradition has this depth (indeed, that's a major stealth theme of this book). Are they right?
One criticism on this chapter is that the author seems to take the stance that most (if not all) people are not able to handle their newfound leisure properly. This seems like the analogous argument that many people cannot handle other good things (e.g. money and wealth, freedoms generally, etc.). There almost seems to be a typically Calvinist wish that people didn't have so much freedom to do as they wish, that we'd all be better off with more work to do and less leisure. The right answer is for individuals to get better at handling this wonderful gift, not to discourage the having of it!
From Chapter 10 (Zappa Meets Gore: Evaluating Popular Art): Includes a discussion of the 3 main legitimate "evaluators"; the entertainment industry, the youth culture and adult guardians and the 3 main ways which art can be evaluated; content, form and function. The author gives equal weight to each evaluator group and to each evaluational method. "Throughout this book, we have stressed the point that popular art performs many legitimate functions in the lives of North American adolescents. We have emphasized that some of its most important functions for youth have to do with the formation of identity, intimacy, and purpose" (292, "purpose" is a new one here). The author proposes a 6-fold standard for evaluating popular art; technical excellence, aesthetic expressiveness, social scope, economic worth, political significance, and moral and religious integrity.
In the May 2003 CATO Institute clippings was included an article about CATO's Tom Palmer who gave a talk at Harvard (Libertarian Links Free Trade to Freedom, Peace, Alexander J. Finerman, The Harvard Crimson, 23 Apr 2003). Palmer "rebutted arguments that globalization 'exports' jobs to poor countries and promotes a 'race to the bottom' where poor countries compete for capital by offering worse working conditions ... [by noting that] foreign capital ... travels to where labor productivity is high" (where wages are higher, working conditions better) and not where wages are lowest. "Palmer also countered the argument that globalization is facilitating the global hegemony of American youth culture ... [by noting that] every generation thinks that the youth culture of its successors is venal ... Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan should wake up and realize they are old."
