by Penny, Laura
The National Endowment for the Arts has tracked the number of Americans who read for pleasure since the 1980s, and their reports have consistently shown that fewer Americans, particularly young Americans, read books. But their most recent survey, released in 2008, revealed a nice little jump: a 7 per cent increase in the number of adults who read. More young people were picking up books too. The number of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds who read had increased by 9 per cent.
This is happy news, but the NEA survey doesn’t tell us what people are reading, beyond broad categories like poetry and drama (down) or novels and short stories (up). Those increases could represent the combined effects of Harry Potter, Twilight, and unemployment. Reading is cheap, recession-friendly fun. And even though the number of readers is growing, the U.S. remains pretty evenly split on reading: 50.2 per cent of the respondents had read a novel in the past year; 54 per cent had read a book – any book – without their school or employer forcing them to do so.13
Canadians fancy themselves more bookish than the neighbours, but this depends on whom you ask. A 2007 poll, conducted by Ipsos-Reid for CanWest Global, found that fewer Canadians than Americans read: 31 per cent of respondents had not read a single book that year.14 A 2007 report on the retail book trade, published by Canadian Heritage, was much more positive, asserting that the number of Canucks who read for pleasure stayed consistent throughout the 1990s and 2000s. However, based on StatsCan numbers from 2005, they also claim that nine out of ten Canadians read for pleasure, which frankly seems way too good to be true.15
Again, like the NEA surveys, this doesn’t tell us much about what people are reading. A cursory scan of the fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists on either side of the border reveals that most North Americans like the same things: vampires, magic, spirituality, conspiracies, celebrities, weight loss, getting rich quick, and triumphing over adversity.
One of the biggest bestsellers on both sides of the border lo these past few years is Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture. Like many publishing sensations, it started as something else, achieving success in another cultural medium before it became a book. Pausch delivered the lecture in 2007 at his home campus, Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught computer programming. He had recently learned that he had pancreatic cancer, and he used the speech to deliver life lessons to his very young children. The speech became a hit on YouTube, Pausch appeared on Oprah, and the lecture appeared in book form in the spring of 2008.
Pausch’s book enjoyed a seventy-nine-week ride on the New York Times advice list, and it was on the Globe and Mail‘s non-fiction bestseller list for more than a year. This is the kind of book that people buy in triplicate, quadruplicate, to give to their friends and relatives. It was a smash, but it did not manage to best Mitch Albom’s 205-week streak of NYT bestsellerdom for Tuesdays with Morrie, another sentimental swan song from a wise prof. Pausch, to be fair, joked about the success of both books. “I didn’t know there was a dying professor section at the bookstore,” he said.16
If there were a dying professor section, it would do much brisker trade than one dedicated to the work of vigorous nerds. Suffering the inevitable, suffering cheerfully and gratefully, is a far more impressive credential than any degree. Even people who gave Pausch’s book a one-star rating on Amazon prefaced their reviews by saying they were sorry he was dying, they hated to pick on a guy with cancer, but he really shoulda saved this pile of platitudes for his family.
A video of The Last Lecture has also aired repeatedly on PBS, where a pledge-week host enthused, “Did you notice that Randy uses the word dream more than the words teach or learn?“ I did – it’s hard not to – but I was considerably less tickled by that than the talking head was. Pausch offers a very contemporary cocktail of techno-rationalism and sentiment. His title for the lecture was “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” and he talks about how he did precisely that, by never giving up, by greeting every brick wall as a new opportunity. Pausch is also part of Camp Quit Bitching. One of his chapter titles is “Don’t Complain, Just Work Harder,” the kind of jocular, boss-friendly advice that is common in positive thinking.
Pausch mocks the professoriate, telling us that he’s always felt uncomfortable in academia, as “he comes from a long line of people who had to work for a living.” He repeatedly says that his unique practical, technical master’s degree could not happen at any old conventional university, and sneers at the merely theoretical. For example, when his students arrive, he tells them, “No more book-learning. You’ve already spent four years doing book-learning.” Instead his students get to consort with Pixar and make “real” projects such as artificial computer environments and simulations.
Pausch is the ideal professor for a culture that does not like professors very much. He taught computer programming, and anything related to computers is a serious major, a lucrative major, the “one word: plastics” of the twenty-first century. However, he does not spend much time talking about his area of expertise, which would doubtless baffle and bore the audience. Instead he tells them things they already know or things they want to believe, such as that hard work will be rewarded and dreams will come true. The lecture is a dying declaration, the farewell of a good dad and husband with an especially evil disease, which appeals to our taste for the maudlin and the morbid. But his jokey demeanour also demonstrates the pluck-in-the-face-of-adversity that positive thinkers adore.
The educational computer program Pausch mentions in the lecture is called Alice, and it is based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Pausch and his colleagues may have the technical skills to write a sleek program for a blinky box and make a child’s dream come to life on a screen, but when they need ideas – content such as plot or character – they often end up going back to the mouldy old books. This is also why approximately one-third of all video games take place in the fake Middle Ages. Just as the blogosphere and cable news still leech off newspapers, so too do games, TV shows, and movies feed off the old print culture, for all that they may belittle it or claim to have bested it.
Undaunted by reports of their demise, publishers continue to churn out a mind-boggling number of books. In 2008, U.S. publishers put out over half a million titles. Old-school publishers released 275,232 titles, and even more titles – 285,394 – were available as online print-on-demand books or feats of self-publishing.17 People have more things to not-read than ever!
The Internet may be growing rapidly, but TV still remains the central hub of the entertainment-media perplex as the medium that promotes books, websites, and movies to the broadest audience. Television displays the same wild variations in quality that the Internet does. Some critics claim that this is a golden age of television, pointing to shows such as The Wire, Deadwood, and Mad Men. Having grown up on total dreck like Three’s Company, I’m inclined to agree with them.
At the same time, the old-media complexity of these boutique cable programs – critics call them “novelistic” – also shows us how jejune a lot of mainstream TV is. The writer’s strike of 2007–08 was a telling moment. Television could keep on trucking for four months, with minimal interruptions, with a skeleton crew scripting it. Who needs writers? People are perfectly happy to watch talent shows, dance contests, and casts of nobodies scheming and squabbling.
Like the Internet, reality TV is a great leveller, an agent of the cultural duh-mocracy that we have in lieu of democratic freedom. Reality TV has also started offering and broadcasting the sorts of social services that used to be the province of the loathed nanny state, such as rebuilding wrecked houses and helping folks lose weight and kick drugs. A&E now features three therapeutic reality shows: Intervention, Hoarders, and Obsessed. The network has not specialized in Artsy Entertainment for quite some time; the A now stands for autopsies and addictions, and the E is for eating disorders and evading arrest.
Similarly, the Learning Channel schools viewers about ginormous families, life as a little person, and the perils of ex
treme obesity and undetected pregnancies. The sheer volume of medical programming on TV makes it clear that Americans are anxious about their health and the looming threat of disease and debt. Whether it is in the form of cutrate re-enactments of procedures gone horribly awry, splashy prime-time dramas about hot doctors, or kindly clinicians like Oprah’s pal Dr. Oz telling us what we should eat and how our effluvia should look, health is a constant obsession on TV, almost as ubiquitous as crime.
The most popular drama in Canada, and one of the biggest recent hits in the U.S., is a medical show, one that incorporates the mystery element of crime shows. House M.D. features a smart person who embodies some of the nerd stereotypes I listed in the first chapter. His superior mind alienates him from others. He is coldly rational to the point of cruelty, but he also teeters between genius and insanity like a mad scientist or nutty professor. He is lazy and bossy, arrogant and immature. He sucks at life, but he is also preternaturally smart and successful.
House’s brains are good because his brilliance is channelled into something useful. It’s okay for doctors to be ego-maniacal, sarcastic dicks, angry drunk on their own nerdy powers, as long as they save people’s lives. Medical dramas and forensic crime shows are also examples of our love of technical reason, our fondness for amazing innovations such as full-body scans and experimental procedures, or those fantastic fictitious machines and computer programs that do most of the thinking on the various CSIs.
House appeals to our love of the spiritual and the sentimental too. Upstanding types like Cameron and Wilson soften House’s most destructive intellectual impulses, his corrosive skepticism. House is one of most skeptical characters on network TV, but his discoveries are usually epiphanic, almost mystical, despite his oft-stated allegiance to reason. In most episodes the reasoning process of the differential diagnosis fails, repeatedly, and then the answer arrives as a revelation. Wilson or Cuddy says something seemingly unrelated that sets off a spontaneous brainwave, House snaps to attention, and the mystery is solved.
House’s blend of technology and spirituality is very au courant. But the real genius of the show is the way that House pleases two very different audiences. Hugh Laurie is a Cambridge-educated British wit (highbrow) whose character speaks perfect American, peppers his rants with slang, and amuses himself with video games and electric guitars (lowbrow). Nerds like yours truly can enjoy the spectacle of a smart man exercising his intellect unfettered by social convention. An intelligent person who requires serious drugs to endure the indignities of a world full of idiots – stupidity pains him as much as his bad leg – is catnip for persecuted nerds. At the same time, the fact that House is a sad, funny monster, a jerk and a junkie, means he also appeals to an anti-intellectual audience by confirming their opinions about the instability, irresponsibility, and godless misery of the nerd elite.
This cultural double-jointedness is one of the reasons why Fox is so successful. Former Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori said, “We’re the populist network. The audience always comes first.”18 Fox sells pseudo-populism, but it also pushes products that satirize its pseudo-populist base. The audience comprises at least two groups. One is the dum dums who want to watch cars crash, animals attack, and Paris Hilton attempt to live simply and befriend humans. The other is people who want to laugh at the dum dums who watch that tripe. A really populist network caters to both, so Fox offers products for both self-declared populists (Fox News; their reality roster) and the people who disdain pseudo-populist philistinism (two shows, Dollhouse and Firefly, by smarty-pants Buffy scribe Joss Whedon; Arrested Development; the golden age of The Simpsons).
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? premiered in February 2007 as one of Fox’s best-rated debuts. The show’s format has since migrated to other lands, including Canada. Watching adults flub grade-school questions is evidently a global taste. The show revels in taking grown-ups down a peg and salutes the superior intellect of children – a common sentimental myth. It also reproaches those who think they are so smart. The glee when they finally shanghaied the proverbial rocket scientist as a contestant was downright palpable.
A 2007 episode featured American Idol contestant Kellie Pickler. She got a grade 3 geography question: Budapest is the capital of what country? She was stumped, and replied, “This might be a stupid question … I thought Europe was a country? Budapest? I’ve never heard of that. I know they speak French there. Is France a country?” There was some banter with the host, redneck comedian Jeff Foxworthy, as he tried to get Pickler to focus, and she responded, “I’m listening to what you’re saying but I only hear what I want to,” which led to some jolly sexist ribbing. When Pickler heard the right answer (Hungary), she was surprised. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey …”19 They did manage to confirm at some point in this chucklefest that France is actually a country, where people do speak French, but that Yerp is not.
A few months before 5th Grader became a big hit, another branch of the Fox media conglomerate released Mike Judge’s movie Idiocracy. Both have the same theme: people are getting more ignorant and do not know as much as they used to. But 5th Grader gives ignorance an affectionate pat on the head, treats it like a joke, and waves it away with the healing wisdom of adorable moppets. Conversely, Idiocracy is pessimistic and dysgenic. The children, and their children, and their children’s children just get dumber and dumber.
Set in the year 2505, when everyone has devolved into a dolt, Idiocracy features greedy, grunting, gullible slobs wandering the dirty, decrepit, drought-ridden world that ignorance has built. When the army put Private Joe Bowers, the protagonist, to sleep in 2005, he was utterly average. When he wakes up in the future, he is the smartest man in the world.
Idiocracy is not a great movie. It, like many comedy flicks, is a bit broad and crude, and it eventually succumbs to sap. But it does have some very sharp, funny moments. It jabs reality TV – Ow, My Balls! is a hit show – corporate culture, and the movie industry itself. The Oscar-winning Ass, a snippet of film within the film, is exactly what it sounds like. Idiocracy also mocks the degradation of the English language. For example, a clinician named Doctor Lexus diagnoses Joe thus:
Don’t wanna sound like a dick or nothin,’ but it says on your chart that you’re fucked up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit’s all retarded. What I’d do, is just like … ha ha … like … aha … you know, like, you know what I mean, like … ha ha …
The film was a flop. Fox delayed its release and then sent it to a handful of theatres without any of the usual press and publicity fanfare. A number of articles about the movie’s marketing troubles suggested that it was just too dark and harsh, that it risked insulting the audience. Idiocracy also took vulgar liberties with popular brand names, potential sponsors that the Fox combine did not wish to offend. However, like Office Space, Judge’s 1999 workplace satire, Idiocracy has become something of a cult hit. It is especially popular on the Internet. Many Net-dwellers defend it in their blogs and on movie sites such as imdb.com; they post comments like “Idiocracy is a documentary” and quotes from the movie in response to the latest Darwin Award–winning stunt, idiotic political gaffe, or outrageous comment from the likes of Glenn Beck. When Web wags mock Beck’s blubbering with bits from Idiocracy, they are fighting Fox … with Fox.
Chapter Seven
If You’re So Smart, Why Ain’t You Rich?
I used to act dumb. That act is no longer cute.
– PARIS HILTON1
Once when I was teaching a class, I made an offhand comment about Paris Hilton that was half joke, half example. I do not recall which fictional dimbulb I was comparing her to, but I vividly remember the young man who disagreed with me. Paris Hilton must be smart, he said. She had all that money and got all that attention, didn’t she? I don’t know if that young dude had ever heard the phrase “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” but that was his position.
He wasn’t being argumentative. He was a solid student, and simply stati
ng a fact. His comment revealed the gap between my definition of smarts and the way many of the students in that dude’s class – a required intro to English full of career-minded majors – defined smarts. No wonder broke-ass scribblers such as Edgar Allan Poe did not interest or impress them much. If wealth is the ultimate measure of intelligence and money the surest proof of brains, then Paris trounces low-earning losers like poets and philosophers. Posthumous fame, book fame, nerd fame is not like the good kind of fame. It might last for centuries and let antique eggheads torture the young from beyond the grave, but it just doesn’t pay the bills.
It’s hardly surprising that our culture cranks out students who think Paris Hilton is smart because she is successful, because she is rich. Many of them are in school so they can be rich and successful too. Rising college costs and increasing student debt loads have made education a big investment, which leads to increased pressure to pick a practical major that will pay out. Of course, this kind of calculation sometimes backfires. When a glut of students rushes the same profession, it is harder for them to get those guaranteed, sure-thing jobs, and the cushy incomes they were promised often drop. Job markets keep on shifting while the students spend the four to seven years it takes to get a bachelor’s plus a master’s or a professional credential or trade certification.