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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
There's no room for real life in Gertie's America.
Feb 9, 2000 | At the college I went to, each student was required to attend the fall convocation ceremony that marked the beginning of each academic year. It was so deadly boring, though, that barely anyone did, except for my best friend Dana and me. During our freshman year we discovered a delight that we returned to witness faithfully each fall. At some point, the dean of the college, a woman who'd been there forever, would rise to address the assembled and, without fail, would work in the phrase "the turbulent '60s." Watching her mouth tauten and twitch as she said those words was something akin to seeing Emily Post forced to spew obscenities in public. It was irresistible.
In the spirit of my college dean, Gertrude Himmelfarb's new screed "One Nation, Two Cultures" can be seen as one prolonged, taut-lipped twitch.
As well as being professor emeritus at the graduate school of the City University of New York, Himmelfarb is also one of the most widely respected scholars of the Victorian age, which she has written about in books like "Victorian Minds" and "Poverty and Compassion." Such is her formidable reputation that even liberals acknowledge it. Having stuck only the daintiest toe into the waters of her erudition (an op-ed here and there, a few pages of "Poverty and Compassion"), I must say, after having waded through this shallow but stagnant pond, that I hope her other work does something to justify her repute.
The intellect on display here is about the caliber of the village biddy who sticks her blue nose into everyone else's business, offering opinions nobody asked for about how everybody else should live. Like "99 Bottles of Beer," the tune Himmelfarb sings throughout "One Nation, Two Cultures" is repetitive and seemingly endless, and you always know exactly what's coming next. It's that golden oldie, top of the pops on the conservative hit parade for the umpteenth era in a row, baby! -- "America Is Going to Hell in a Handbasket (And It's All the Fault of the '60s)."
What did conservatives do before they had the '60s to blame? It's been such a boon to them that, secretly at least, they must be grateful for it (the way liberals have always been grateful for Nixon). When Himmelfarb writes, "Whatever cultural revolution America experienced in the 1920s or before, it was a faint foreshadow of what was to follow," she's using a Saturday-afternoon serial technique, keeping us hooked before unveiling the dastardly scheme that Ming the Merciless has in store. She doesn't take long to get to the wicked plot: the destruction of the Victorian virtues of "work, thrift, temperance, fidelity, self-reliance, self-discipline, cleanliness, godliness" (in her view, America's traditional strengths) by the Kryptonite of the '60s.
Himmelfarb assigns the era just the legacy you'd expect: the "social pathology" of "crime, violence, out-of-wedlock births, teenage pregnancy, child abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, illiteracy, promiscuity, welfare dependency." And that's just a warm-up:
The loss of parental authority, the lack of discipline in schools (to say nothing of knifings and shootings), the escalating violence and vulgarity on TV, the ready accessibility of pornography and sexual perversions on the Internet, the obscenity and sadism of videos and rap music, the binge-drinking and "hooking up" on college campuses, the "dumbing down" of education at all levels -- these too are part of the social pathology of our time.
"One does not have to be nostalgic for a golden age that never was to appreciate the contrast between past and present," Himmelfarb writes, but nostalgic is exactly what she is. Implicit in all conservative hand-wringing about the sorry state of our culture, in whatever era that hand-wringing has appeared, is a longing for some lost golden age. But when was this paradisiacal era? If you started with "One Nation, Two Cultures" and worked your way backwards through all the similar tomes that have appeared in the last hundred years, it would be like traveling through an infinity of mirrors, each reflection leading you farther back without ever reaching an endpoint.
If nostalgia is the first major component of the fantasy Himmelfarb has constructed here, disease is the other. "One Nation, Two Cultures" is rife with references to it: "More recently, we have confronted yet other species of diseases, moral and cultural"; "In its most virulent form this 'decay' manifests itself in ... 'moral statistics'"; "Affluence and education, we have discovered, provide no immunity from moral and cultural disorders"; "Civil society has been described as an 'immune system against cultural disease,' but much of it has been infected by the same virus that produced the disease."
