{"id":7250,"date":"2009-12-17T09:09:43","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T14:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7250"},"modified":"2009-12-17T09:10:38","modified_gmt":"2009-12-17T14:10:38","slug":"america-through-the-reality-lens-by-jonah-goldberg-on-national-review-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7250","title":{"rendered":"Society Lost In The Swamps Of Jersey"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t have a lot of tolerance for stupid.<\/p>\n

Part of it is that I am <\/em>a conservative; I believe that society and its members should strive to be worthy of the best <\/em>of its legacy.<\/p>\n

Part of it is that I spent some of the best<\/span> worst years of my life working in bars, among the drunks and the idiots.\u00a0 This was at the same time I was dealing with a famously-addled roommate<\/a>, “Wyatt”, a child of boundless privilege with uncountable advantages, whose stated mission in life was to stay high all the time and “f[ornicate with] every woman in the world”.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to “Jersey Shore”, another vapid MTV “reality” series chronicling the “lives” of a bunch of meatheads who could well be, I kid you not, “Wyatt”‘s younger siblings.\u00a0 I saw about ten minutes of it, more or less by accident.<\/p>\n

I almost puked.\u00a0 I’ve thought about writing something about that wretched waste of time focused on wretched wastes of flesh.\u00a0 And then I almost puked again.<\/p>\n

So I’ll leave it to Jonah Goldberg to A suck it up and actually address what Jersey Shore <\/em>and reality TV in general really mean:<\/a><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong; it\u2019s great television. But gladiatorial games would be great TV, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Orwell noted that in 1984<\/em>.\u00a0 But I digress:<\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Times reported the other day that the reality-show industry is suddenly having a crisis of conscience about its impact on the culture. That\u2019s nice to hear, but it\u2019s not nearly enough.<\/p>\n

British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations thrive when the lower classes aspire to be like the upper classes, and they decay when the upper classes try to be like the lower classes. Looked at through this prism, it\u2019s hard not to see America in a prolonged period of decay.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not all bad news, to be sure. The elite minority\u2019s general acceptance of racial and sexual equality as important values has been a moral triumph. But not without costs. As part of this transformation, society has embraced what social scientist Charles Murray calls \u201cecumenical niceness.\u201d A core tenet of ecumenical niceness is that harsh judgments of the underclass \u2014 or people with underclass values \u2014 are forbidden.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meaning that I’d be considered declasse <\/em>to say that “The Kardashians are not just vapid dimbulb tramps, but in fact signs that our society is basically screwed”, or that “Jon and Kate Plus Eight <\/em>the show was a vacuous waste of time, but the two “parents” themselves should make every parent in America hang their head in shame that we collectively allow child abuse to become an entertainment sport”, or “the “people” on Jersey Shore<\/em> are fit only to be used as compost”.<\/p>\n

A corollary: People with old-fashioned notions of decency are fair game.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Paging Carrie Prejean.<\/p>\n

Long before the rise of reality shows, ecumenical niceness created a moral vacuum. Out-of-wedlock birth was once a great shame; now it\u2019s something of a happy lifestyle choice. The cavalier use of profanity was once crude; now it\u2019s increasingly conversational. Self-discipline was once a virtue; now self-expression is king.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not just “king” – but a form of “art” along the lines of “music criticism”; people with nothing useful (much less ennobling) to say, saying it without any constraint.<\/p>\n

Whatever you think of what Toynbee and Murray would call the \u201cproletarianization of the elites,\u201d one point is beyond dispute: The rich can afford moral lassitude more than the poor can. [Paris] Hilton, heir to a hotel fortune, has life as simple as she wants it to be. Tiger Woods is surely a cad, but as a pure matter of economics, he can afford to be one.<\/p>\n

The question is: Can the rest of us afford to live in a society constantly auditioning to make an ass of itself on TV?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n

As for me?\u00a0 I’m going to throw darts at the picture of the latest cast of Real World.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t have a lot of tolerance for stupid. Part of it is that I am a conservative; I believe that society and its members should strive to be worthy of the best of its legacy. Part of it is that I spent some of the best worst years of my life working in bars, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-the-universe-and-everything"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7250"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7252,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7250\/revisions\/7252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}