Working-class people are not doomed to a lifetime of scatological humor and
Duck Dynasty by virtue of being working-class. There is no such thing as poor people blood that genetically dooms one to have “lowbrow” taste. The generally poorer than not town where I grew up had a piano teacher whose repertoire was a combination of classical études and jazz standards, and she was always in high demand. In Italy the ~plain people~ loved and admired Verdi even in his lifetime, and I’ve heard that they have public lectures on Dante that are jam-packed with people from all walks of life. My best friend’s family spent most of her childhood in mid-level poverty and they have a tradition of reading Shakespeare out loud on New Year’s Eve. Even if there
were “poor people blood”, plenty of our cultural standards and heritage started out as “poor people things” before standing the test of time. Who remembers the writers people were “supposed” to like back when novels were for the lower element?
The idea that the Golden Age of Television ended because suddenly Those People could afford TVs and demanded fast, cheap, mindless swill may have some merit but if so it says more about the people making programming decisions than about the viewers. There is such a thing as the culture industry. Programming and publishing decisions are ideological in that they are based in more or less coherent
worldviews about what people want or should want. The cancellation of
The Bell Telephone Hour and the Rural Purge were the product of similar sets of machinations aimed at appealing to and in a sense
creating a proto-yuppie middle class that ate up the sort of middlebrow (the worst kind of brow!), faux-sentimental, mawkish bullsh**t that the suits themselves liked (which these days finds itself joined by middlebrow, faux-edgy, nihilistic bullsh**t like
Family Guy and Bill Maher). You know what people who live
way out in the sticks where they still don’t get many channels watch? They—many of them—watch PBS.
People talk about education and lifting people out of their material and spiritual circumstances through education but never give any thought to the use of
mass media as a pedagogical force,
for good or for ill. Jeff Zucker is an engineer of human souls. About one thing C.S. Lewis, whose conservative sensibilities so often make him unappealing as a cultural critic, was right: Deny a man food and he will gobble poison. If people with “good taste
” won’t make any effort to present “the poorly educated” with material that is thoughtful but that also takes their lives seriously,
of course they’ll gravitate towards crap. And this crap has its own effects on people’s psyches.
People do actually read, if you give them good public libraries and have well-intentioned teachers allowed to assign interesting material. Read enough and you
will get “an education”, even if it’s an unsystematic one. You still probably won’t become a biotech venture capitalist like J.D. Vance or even a grad school prima donna like me, but so [Inks]ing what? A rounded, textured understanding of the world is its own reward.
Also, like, there’s nothing inherently stupid or “backwards”
anyway about preferring
Petticoat Junction to
The Brady Bunch, or
The Walking Dead (or
Pretty Little Liars or
Empire for that matter; it's not only the white male part of the working class that this applies to) to
Modern Family. Or even
16 and Pregnant to
Tosh.0. For God’s sake.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this and I might have contradicted myself at least once but I felt that a lot of this had to be said.
