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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
So, then who?
Hannity is a massive, coast-to-coast phenomenon. He's gobbling up more and more station programming and in the long run is going to be more successful than O'Reilly. On his recent book tour, Hannity drew huge, enthusiastic crowds all over the country. He boasts disturbingly on his show about "the Hannitization of America" and refers to himself with the royal "we." He feigns modesty but is embarrassingly drunk on his cult of self. I've concluded that O'Reilly and Hannity have had huge success because of their Irish gift of gab -- a nonstop river of words where meaning sometimes becomes completely unmoored. I cannot stand Hannity. But I listen to him, because he gives good radio! He also reveres Rush and has clearly learned from him.
But it's distressing to me as a teacher to listen to Hannity. Even though he went to college, his world is amazingly simple -- as if he learned the absolute truths of the universe from Catholic catechism. He seems to be blissfully unaware of his automatic and sometimes servile deference to male authority. Of course he's emotionally pro-Bush and pro-war in Iraq: the Bush administration has made no mistakes and never stretched a fact. Anyone who questions Bush is a traitor who is undermining our troops. Liberals hate America. And America is always right, especially when it selflessly brings the joys of freedom to the down-trodden serfs of the world. Hannity seems to have had absolutely no experience of any country or people beyond our borders. For him, America is a blessed, sunny islet in a dark sea of oppression and ignorance. It's frightening because Hannity has such mental and verbal energy. What we're hearing from him, I'm afraid, is the future of America. His view is persuasive because it's so simple: The world has become too complex for people to take in.
When I listen to Hannity, which I do a lot, I feel like I'm being swept back to the rigid, conformist 1950s of my youth. In my lifetime I've seen two moments when I felt we were moving toward an expanded perspective on life, a more flexible attitude toward issues -- authentic free thought, without this horrible, irreconcilable polarization between left and right. The first moment was the 1960s, when thanks to pioneers like Lenny Bruce and Bob Dylan, you could say anything and be anything. You could be eccentric and opinionated on the left, but it was all shut down into the dogmatic, politically correct era that reached its height in the 1980s. The second liberating moment was the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton emerged as a moderate Southern Democrat. There were independent voices all over the political spectrum -- Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Madonna, who was at her zenith. And then it all shut down again. I blame it on Clinton, who should have resigned when the Monica Lewinsky affair broke. He would have spared the nation tremendous trauma, and his successor, Al Gore, could have been more attentive to the looming threat of terrorism. Instead Clinton clung to power, and it re-polarized the country. Let's not leave out the moronic stunts of the far right, who thought they had nailed Clinton and put all that porn on the Internet.
As a culture critic and intellectual, I am in despair about the immediate future of American thought. The window has closed, and we are in Sean Hannity's America, where everything is so elementary and so crystal clear.
On to another, possibly declining, important cultural figure: Madonna.
Speak of schizophrenia! Within two weeks, Madonna can appear on the MTV Video Music Awards dressed in black leather as Vampira, Queen of the Night, and in her persona of polygamous dominatrix smooch Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on the lips, then suddenly turn up in a matronly flowered dress in London kicking off her new children's book, pushing Kaballah as the future of mankind, and saying oh, pooh, it was just an innocent kiss between friends. [Sighs.] What can I say? Madonna remains a major star -- actually much bigger around the world now than she is in America. She got overexposed and lost ground in the U.S., then gravitated toward London and ended up marrying an Englishman. Because there are few real stars in the U.K., she created a big platform for herself there.
But I do feel there's something wrong with that kiss. Great stars have to learn to age gracefully. I loved it when Stevie Nicks -- who's a true artist -- zinged Madonna for "kissing girls half her age." She was right. Madonna was trying not only to compete with these figures she spawned but to overshadow and upstage them and suck them dry. It was very unfair to Britney Spears, even though she looked spectacular in white lace -- as nubile as a real bride. Jennifer Lopez was smarter and opted out.
It's crucial for the great stars to find a persona that allows them to mature with their fan base. Look at Cher! Just when Madonna's latest film and album were flopping, there's Cher on the charts for a year with her song collection. Cher has a natural warmth and rapport with the audience. But Madonna feels like she has to pound everyone into the ground like a steam hammer.
And that children's book! When I found out what the plot was, I was absolutely shocked -- and I'm rarely shocked, particularly by anything that Madonna does! But for someone who has been so concerned about shielding her child from the limelight to make Lourdes' problems with her London classmates the subject of a book -- and then to blame it on the other girls' "jealousy" because her daughter is so pretty -- and then to arrange a mega-wattage book launch with editions simultaneously released all over the world! Well, I haven't seen anything so gross since Al Gore used his son's near-fatal accident as a metaphor for America in the gutter in his speech at the Democratic convention. Anyone who exploits their children in this way is exposing a blindness to basic ethics. In the guise of helping, Madonna has crushed her daughter with her own ego -- hardly a way to help young people adapt to life's problems. I've prophesied for years that the cloud on Lourdes' horizon is the ghost of Tina Onassis, who also had too much too soon.
