Bennett asked the executives “whether there was anything so low, so bad, that you will not sell it.” There was a long silence. But when Bennett said “baloney” a couple of times to the vapid responses he was getting, Time Warner’s chairman, Gerald M. Levin, in a sudden onrush of sensitivity about words, objected to such language and walked out of the meeting.
The industry’s responses to the criticism were even more instructive. Michael Fuchs, then chairman of Time Warner Music Group, shot back that offensive lyrics are “the price you pay for freedom of expression.“14 But obscenity in word and thought is a price that should not be paid simply so we can say there are no limits to what may be said. Fuchs might as well have said that crack addicts are the price you pay for a free market. Danny Goldberg, chairman of Warner Bros. Records, said: “Nine Inch Nails is a Grammy Award-winning, critically acclaimed artist [sic] who millions of people love. Why should a corporation listen to a bunch of middle-aged people who don’t like the music and don’t listen to it, and ignore the people who do love it and who do buy it?“15 The reason the corporation should listen to those middle-aged people is that they are attempting to uphold some standard of decency for the protection, among others, of those who love and buy the filth. It says something frightening about this culture that lyrics like “Big Man with a Gun” win Grammy Awards, critical acclaim, and the love of millions.
The industry rallied round Time Warner with a rolling barrage of witless platitudes. Mark Canton, chairman of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, said: “The issue here is creative rights. We have to retain the right to make creative choices with diversity and freedom.“16 The industry’s chieftains have apparently lost touch with both logic and morality. To speak of songs about ripping vaginas and licking anuses as necessary to retain the right to make creative choices is a rhetorical obscenity that almost matches what is on the records. There has to be a limit somewhere to what a culture can tolerate and still retain not just creative choice but a vestige of decency. That limit is now behind us.
Though there certainly is a simmering dissatisfaction with popular culture, that apparently does not portend any effective action. The Tucker-Bennett episode was entertaining, but Time Warner, apparently embarrassed, sold the unit that produced gangsta rap. The beat apparently goes on as before under new management. In any case, the confrontation tactic had such success as it did because it was new. Attempts to repeat it will have less and less impact, and the music executives will begin to refuse to meet with critics. Popular culture remains just that, popular. The American public watches, listens to, and makes profitable art forms it agrees are debased. That is an important point. The entertainment industry is not forcing depravity on an unwilling American public. The demand for decadence is there. That fact does not excuse those who sell such degraded material any more than the demand for crack cocaine excuses the crack dealer. But we must be reminded that the fault is in ourselves, in human nature not constrained by external forces. If that were not so, the problem would not be so dangerous and difficult to solve.
The casual acceptance and rationalization of this culture by people, intellectuals in particular, who reached maturity before the Sixties hit, is not, I suppose, surprising. The theme of radical individualism was in the air long before the Sixties and, in any event, intellectuals are attracted to modern liberalism. A few years back, the American Enterprise Institute held a conference planned and moderated by Ben Wattenberg to discuss “The New Global Popular Culture,” which is increasingly an exported American popular culture. The discussants, a large and quite distinguished group, seemed, by and large, quite sanguine about where we are and where we are headed. One stated that the “core of American ideology is a uniquely insistent and far-reaching individualism—a view of the individual person which gives unprecedented weight to his or her choices, interests, and claims.“17 He said that Americans are distinctively attached to the same values of individualism that Tocqueville, Bryce, and Chesterton saw in us.
No doubt that observation is true, but it is true only semantically. Individualism does not have the same meaning and content today as it had when Tocqueville, Bryce, and Chesterton described us. The individualistic component of liberalism incessantly presses against the limits set by a culture’s sense of decency and shame. In America, and perhaps in the nations of the West generally, the limits have been stretched to, and perhaps beyond, the breaking point. What was seen as American individualism a century or more ago becomes a quality different in kind: an absorption in unrestrained hedonism and personal license that is reflected in and magnified by popular culture. Only a modern intellectual could imagine that Tocqueville, Bryce, and Chesterton would recognize rap lyrics as just another manifestation of the individualism they saw in the Americans of their time. They would call it by its proper name: depravity.
The conferees sought to account for the enormous popularity around the world of American pop culture. And our popular culture is everywhere: when the American sociologist Peter Berger, who is completely bald, walked through a remote Indonesian village, the children ran after him shouting “Kojak, Kojak.” American rock music can be heard on the radio almost anywhere in the world. Foreign television carries our sitcoms and movies. Why should this be? One participant struck a note of optimism that was echoed by most of the others: “the more straitened or shut-off a culture, the more urgent its hunger for all the qualities it associates with America: freedom and wealth and modernity.“18 The other and more accurate description of what American popular culture increasingly offers to “straitened” cultures is the opportunity for unlimited self-gratification.
At another conference, I referred, not approvingly, to Michael Jackson’s crotch-clutching performance at the Super Bowl. Another panelist tartly informed me that it was precisely the desire to enjoy such manifestations of American culture that had brought down the Berlin wall. That seems as good an argument as any for putting the wall back up again. If my informant was right, though I prefer not to believe it, radical individualism expressed in hedonism may be the wave of the future everywhere.
It is remarkable how vigorously the modern intellectual defends the descent of popular culture not merely into vulgarity but into obscenity. At the AEI conference, several of us expressed dismay at the more profane manifestations of popular culture and said that we would favor censorship, were it not already too late: standards can be reinforced by censorship but perhaps not reinstated once they have been abandoned. Most of those present hastened to distance themselves from such reactionary heresy. An eminent scholar expressed horror that anyone would attempt to interfere with the direction of culture. “American culture,” he protested with some passion, “is a culture constantly in quest of itself.“19 He liked the image so much that he repeated it twice. And, indeed, questing has a romantic ring to it. It conjures up the image of a knight of the round table travelling in an endless search for the Holy Grail. But the sentiment seems less enchanting if the quest ends in a sewer. Right now, the sewer seems the likely destination.
So far, one low point has been followed by another even lower. It is hardly surprising that rock was followed by such delightful art forms as punk rock, heavy metal, speed metal, death metal, rap, gangsta rap, and grunge. And it is hardly to be doubted, as Martha Bayles says, that these have effects on their “vulnerable target: angry, troubled adolescents.“20 “Only a fool would argue that music—especially music combined with gut-wrenching spectacle—has no impact on audiences. Yet this is exactly what the defenders of heavy metal do when they suggest that a steady diet of gleeful sadism does no harm.“21 The music industry executives are most assuredly not fools, but they must think the rest of us are.
The tastes cultivated by gleeful sadism may be the reason we have now come to “hate rock,” which the New York Times reviewer John J. O’Connor calls “a racism-and-violence virus in pop music that has become an international infection.” (Since O’Connor wrote this review, the egregious Michael Jackson put o
ut a record with anti-Semitic lyrics that caused such an uproar that Jackson had to rerecord at least one song.) Reviewing an MTV documentary on the subject, O’Connor says that MTV straddles the fence: “Should these rockers be silenced? No. Should they be monitored carefully? ‘According to what we learned,’ says MTV, ‘absolutely.’” O’Connor asks,” And then what?“22
It is a question we all must soon ask, and not just about the racism and violence of hate rock, the violently obscene and brutal lyrics of rap music, and the obscenities and wild violence of motion pictures. Technology is now bringing worse material than we have ever seen or imagined, and, as technology develops further, the material will become still worse. The Internet now provides users access to what Simon Winchester calls “an untrammelled, uncontrolled, wholly liberated ocean of information.“23 He thought it wonderful. Then one day he came upon a category called alt.sex, which has fifty-five groups including alt.sex.anal, alt.sex.intergen (intergenerational: the pedophile bulletin board), alt.sex.snuff (the killing of the victim) which includes subcategories for bestiality, torture, bloodletting, and sadistic injury.
The first category Winchester tried was alt.sex.stories, which contained a story about the kidnapping of two children. The castration of the 6-year-old boy is “reported in loving detail” and occurs before he is shot. The 7-year-old girl is then repeatedly raped by nine men before having her nipples cut off and her throat slashed. There were 200 such stories and the number was growing daily. “You want tales of fathers sodomising their three-year-old daughters, or of mothers performing fellatio on their pre-pubescent sons, or of girls coupling with horses, or of the giving of enemas to child virgins? Then you need do no more than visit the newsgroup that is named ‘alt.sex.stories’ and all will reliably be there, 24 hours a day, for everyone with a computer and a telephone, anywhere on (or above) the face of the earth.“24 The stories are written by pseudonymous authors and are filtered through two or three computers so that the authors and the points of origin are not known. The material is not only disgusting, it is a dangerous incitement. There is, for example: “A long and graphic account of exactly how and at what hour you wait outside a girls’ school, how best to bundle a seven-year-old into your van, whether to tell her at the start of her ordeal that she is going to be killed at the end of it … how best to tie her down, which aperture to approach first, and with what—such things can only tempt those who verge on such acts to take a greater interest in them.“25
Users can download pornographic pictures as well as prose from the Internet. And there is a lot of both available. The demand, moreover, is for material that can’t be easily found elsewhere—pedophilia, sadomasochism, eroticized urination, defecation, and vaginal and rectal fisting. Among the most popular are sex acts with a wide variety of animals, nude children, and incest. The adult bulletin board service describes videos for sale and also provides over 25,000 pictures. The material is too obscene to be quoted here, but it involves girls defecating, girls eating feces (in both cases far more obscene language is used), oral sex with animals. One video is described as “Rape, torture, pussy nailed to table.” It is impossible in short compass to give an adequate idea of the depravity that is being sold, apparently profitably.
The Internet, Stephen Bates informs us, offers plans for making bombs, instructions for painless suicide, the anti-Semitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion (compressed for faster downloading), and racist diatribes, along with sexual perversion. There are certain to be offline harms from this material. “Pedophiles will abuse children they first met online, kids will blow off fingers with Net’s bomb recipes, despondent teens will poison themselves using recipes from alt.suicide.holiday. Maybe all these tragedies would have occurred without the Net, but that’s tough to prove.“26 It would be even tougher to prove that this material has any social value. Only the most radical individualism imaginable could countenance these uses of the Internet.
What Winchester says of the alt.sex.stories he read is true of these other categories of prose and images: “Surely such essays tell the thinker of forbidden thoughts that there exists somewhere out there a like-minded group of men for whom such things are really not so bad, the enjoyment of which, if no one is so ill-starred as to get caught, can be limitless. Surely it is naive folly—or, the other end of the spectrum, gross irresponsibility—to suppose otherwise.“27
But the situation is likely to get still worse than this. The pornographic video industry is now doing billions of dollars worth of business and volume is increasing rapidly.28 Companies are acquiring inventories of videos for cable television, and a nationwide chain of pornographic video retail stores is in the works. This may, however, be only a transitional phase. George Gilder predicts that computers will soon replace television, allowing viewers to call up digital films and files of whatever they may desire from around the world. He discounts the idea that “liberated children [will] rush away from the network nurse, chasing Pied Piper pederasts, snuff-film sadists, and other trolls of cyberspace.“29 (The “network nurse,” as a matter of fact, looks increasingly like a lady of the evening.) The computer will give everyone his own channel to do with as he wishes, and Gilder predicts a spectacular proliferation of programs on specialized cultural, scientific, and practical subjects.
That will certainly happen, but the presence of wholesome films and files does not rule out the presence of the corrupt and even diabolical. The Internet is proving that. The more private viewing becomes, the more likely it is that salacious and perverted tastes will be indulged. That proposition is demonstrated by the explosion of pornographic films and profits when videocassettes enabled customers to avoid the embarrassment of entering “adult” theaters. An even greater surge in the demand for perverted sex with violence will certainly occur when customers don’t even have to check cassettes out of a store. Calling up films in their own homes, they will not have to face a clerk or let other customers see them browsing through x-rated films.
When digital films become available for viewing on home computers, we are likely to discover that Gilders “trolls of cyberspace” are very real, very popular, and a very great menace. Imagine Internet’s alt.sex.stories on digital film available on home computers anywhere in the world. The dramatization, in living color with lurid special effects, of men castrating and then shooting a 6-year-old boy, then gang raping and killing a 7-year-old girl, is certain to trigger imitations by borderline perverts. Don’t think such films won’t be made; they will. Don’t think that they will not be defended on First Amendment grounds; they will. And don’t suppose it will not be said that the solution is simple: if you don’t like it, don’t watch it. That, too, will be argued.
A great many people are willing to deplore such material but unwilling to take or allow action to stop its distribution. When the Senate Commerce Committee approved a proposal to impose criminal penalties on anyone who transmits on Internet material that is “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent,” ferocious opposition immediately developed from a coalition of business and civil liberties organizations. The wording of the bill leaves much to be desired, but that is not the primary objection these groups have. They do not want restrictions, period, no matter how carefully drawn. The coalition includes, of course, the ACLU and the ubiquitous Time Warner, which John Leo has said is “associated one way or another with most of the high-profile, high-profit acts, black and white, that are pumping nihilism into the culture…. We are living through a cultural collapse, and major corporations are presiding over that collapse and grabbing everything they can on the way down.“30
We are still on the way down and they are still grabbing. I do not suppose for a moment that Time Warner would produce films of the material to be found on the Internet’s alt.sex. Nor would any major entertainment corporation. Not today or tomorrow, but as we grow accustomed to brutal and perverted sex, inhibitions will be lowered still further. Some businesses will make such films and some civil libertarians will deplore them,
adding, of course, that they should not be banned. In the absence of restraints of some sort, however, everything that can be imagined, and some things that can’t, yet, will eventually be produced and shown.
Reflecting on where we have come, Maggie Gallagher wrote: “Sex was remade in the image of Hugh Hefner; Eros demoted from a god to a buffoon. Over the last thirty years, America transformed itself into a pornographic culture.“31 Gallagher accepted Angela Carter’s definition, stated in somewhat more basic Anglo-Saxon, that pornography is basically propaganda for fornication, and offered a definition of her own: “[A] pornographic culture is not one in which pornographic materials are published and distributed. A pornographic culture is one which accepts the ideas about sex on which pornography is based.“32
That is quite right, as far as it goes, but our popular culture has gone far beyond propagandizing for fornication. That seems almost innocent nowadays. What America increasingly produces and distributes is now propaganda for every perversion and obscenity imaginable. If many of us accept the assumptions on which that is based, and apparently many do, then we are well on our way to an obscene culture. The upshot is that American popular culture is in a free fall, with the bottom not yet in sight. This is what the liberal view of human nature has brought us to. The idea that men are naturally rational, moral creatures without the need for strong external restraints has been exploded by experience. There is an eager and growing market for depravity, and profitable industries devoted to supplying it. Much of such resistance as there is comes from people living on the moral capital accumulated by prior generations. That capital may be expected to dwindle further—cultures do not unravel everywhere all at once. Unless there is vigorous counterattack, which must, I think, resort to legal as well as moral sanctions, the prospects are for a chaotic and unhappy society, followed, perhaps, by an authoritarian and unhappy society.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah Page 16