In secular terms, the greatest divide in the nation right now, the one I believe gives rise to the spectrum of current politics, is whether one believes in Pop Culture. By that I do not mean whether you believe Pop Culture exists. Rather I mean whether you believe that Pop Culture is, and should be, the center of American culture as a whole.
That Pop Culture is synonymous with American culture would appear to many people as self-evident But this is true only if one gives precedence to the voices from Pop Culture itself, above other sources of information.
I confess to having long been fascinated with Pop Culture, to put it mildly. I am still to this day a walking almanac of the politics, sports, movies, television, music and other cultural trivia for certain years of the late Twentieth Century (but not past a certain date).
I have also long been interested in the phenomenon of Pop Culture itself. I've had an awareness of its important as a thing unto itself, from my earliest days of childhood. What is Pop Culture, and what does it mean that we live with it, and in it?
Among other things I am interested in its roots---Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, Minstrel Shows, Protestant revivals, the Chautauqua movement, the Victrola, the kinetoscope, and all the other strands that went into the creation of Pop Culture at its genesis.
But Pop Culture is a Postmodern phenomenon, and I've been most interested in the phases by which Pop Culture, after its birth, came to dominate the nation to exclusion of just about all other forms of culture, to the point which American culture as it existed before Pop Culture is now a subculture.
As many have pointed out, Pop Culture could exist only in the era of mass media. This is easy to acknowledge with the merest reflection. It required the existence not only of the discovery of radio waves, and the invention of the wireless, but above all, the invention of the first radio and then television broadcast networks. I love this era of media history, during when the networks as we know it were being formed, as corporate entities. In this sense Pop Culture in America dates from the late 1920s, specifically from around the year 1927, if one could pick a single year.
Before that era, Americans certainly appreciated music. They watched theater performances. They went to sporting events. But after that time Americans increasingly gave their attention during their free time to these on a scale that would not have been possible to them. Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, they began to give their attention en masse to the same tiny set of musicians, actors, and athletes, as well as to the radio and television news broadcasters who reported on these people.
This captivation of the entire attention of a nation upon a small set of people was entirely new in the history of civilization. Certainly there was precedent in how Christianity was practiced, especially through its art and architecture. But this was something very different. Compared to earlier forms of European civilization, it was if we were all suddenly living in the same duchal court, and our society began to take on aspects of that type of interpersonal communication.
Up until that time in history, for the vast majority of people who had ever walked the earth, one's attention was by sheer necessity, focussed primarily on those things in their immediate, physical vicinity. This physical radius was typical small, even for dwellers of great cities.
One's attention could turn to physically distant events and people only through vehicles such as prayer, or through the written word, first books (post 1500) and then later newspapers (the first modern mass medium, arising around 1850 in the rise of Victorian middle class prosperity). But of course the printed word is a slow method of transmission, even in mass form.
As great thinkers have pointed out, the use of any particular vehicle of information-transmission, however simple or complex, necessarily creates certain psychological states inside the individuals who use them, and which can thereby come to dominate an society, inevitably shaping its culture, politics, religion in certain predictable ways, despite any surface intentions of the people living in the society.
Throughout my life I have been besotted with Pop Culture as much as anyone of my cohort. Yet perhaps because of that, I have been fascinated by people who lived in the era before Pop Culture became dominant. My grandparents, whom I was very close to as a child, were like that. I recognized from my earliest conscious days that they were a different kind of people than myself and the people my age. This awareness was strong in me from at least age seven.
We of the new type of human were so agile of mind in thinking about Pop Culture things. We could skip from one reference to another seamlessly. Even though the older ones watched television, they didn't have that kind of dexterity with Pop Culture references. For them television was something one watched for entertainment. After the show was over their mind turned to other things. The shows and music weren't something that someone lived.
It occurred to me a couple years ago that the people of my own generation with whom I am now most comfortable are in fact folks who, for whatever reason, grew up at least partially insulated from the Pop Culture during the 1970s and 1980s, when Pop Culture was at its height.
They are the people who might mysteriously miss my offhand references to a television show from the 1970s, or an Eighties pop music song. I thought this was weird at the time. Now I am thankful that I crossed their paths when I did.
It's not as if I envy these people for their having been spared Pop Culture's full onslaught on their souls during their formative years. I wouldn't trade my experiences for theirs. We all have our paths.
I realize it was my own path to become a hard-core follower and believer in Pop Culture, even as I cringe with sadness remembering it all. I can recollect in 1977 ditching church early, right after services ended, to sit in the passenger seat of our orange VW van to turn on the car radio and listen to Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown. It was very important to me to find out what the number one song was---had it changed?. It more important to know this than to linger inside with my family and the other people inside our little mission church on the north side of Ames.
Of course I was a teenager, so it is all forgivable. But oh, what utterly wasted time that feels like now, filling my mind with the riffs and lyrics of recorded performances made by people who did not know me personally, and would never know me personally, all of it urging me to feel emotions and imagine situations far outside the ken of what the thirteen-year-old me might have otherwise been focussing on.
If instead I had ditched my family to walk in the nearby sumac woods, down by the creek along the Skunk River, as my grandfather might have done, it might still be painful to remember for the exclusion I created, but at least I would have gained something tangible from that escape into the woods. Instead I allowed my plastic mind to passively absorb the nuances and by-laws of a fantasy simulation of the world served to me from afar by people of often questionable character and less-than-noble motivations.
How well all that time spent listening to the radio and television trained me during those years to feel, act, and react as a Pop Culture adept. This is what being a human being is about. How seductive it was, finding other people my own age who watched the same t.v. show or knew the lyrics of the same familiar songs. I understand almost all of recent history and current politics because of it, even as I recoil from it now.
How grating and banal those preserved-forever notes and lyrics strike me now. What I would give, to have those few moments back, and to go back inside St. David's and linger with those people who are now gone.
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