In Praise of the Fracture

We were in the car with my parents driving past the Oakland Coliseum a couple of weeks ago. My mom looked at the sign that advertised the upcoming events and asked, “Who is Steve Harvey?”

My mom does not live in a cultural vacuum. She reads the New York Times. She’s enthusiastically watched Survivor and Torchwood. She did not know who Steve Harvey is. I explained to her that he’s a comedian and he wrote a book.

Steve Harvey wrote a book that totally dominated its category on the New York Times bestseller list for the better part of a year. My mother, legitimately, does not know who he is.

The culture isn’t fracturing. It has fractured, and my mother, right there, is exhibit number one in the case of the fractured culture. I can’t think of a cultural figure who has emerged in the last ten years – since 2001 – who is known by everybody. There are Americans who don’t know who Jonathan Franzen is. There are people, millions of them in this country, who have never heard of Selena Gomez, Rick Ross, Tyler Perry, Sixteen and Pregnant. There are millions more who feel like their lives have been transformed by them.

There are so many ways we can mainline culture now that we didn’t have access to twenty years ago – hundreds of TV channels instead of six or seven, video games, the internet – that there is no longer a dominant cultural conversation, aesthetic, idea. There are hundreds of cultural institutions that are beloved to millions of Americans and completely unknown to millions more. There will never be another Oprah Winfrey. The fractured culture will not support it.

In Entertainment Weekly, there’s a feature about what was big 20 years ago. 34 million people watched Cheers on a Thursday night in November of 1990. The ratings chart later in the same magazine says that 13.6 million people watched the top-rated sitcom last week, Two and a Half Men. We don’t even think that the same things are funny anymore, and if the loss of a common sense of humor isn’t a huge sign that the culture is fractured, I don’t know what is.

I think that the fractured culture is mostly a good thing. It means that we aren’t dominated by a small set of ideas and people. If you want to find some music or tv show or writing or game that speaks to who you are, and you are not white and straight and English-speaking and male, if your parents didn’t go to college, if you are disabled or if you are so many other things – now you have a much better chance of finding something that you can identify with or that speaks to who you are.

If my mother is exhibit number one in the fracturing of the culture, she is also my exhibit number one in my argument that it needed to be fractured. I remember this clearly, it may very well have been 1990. If it was not, it was only a couple of years before or after. My mother was watching tv by herself in the evening, and she yelled, excited, for the rest of us to come to see what was on. It was a commercial, a Kodak commercial, with a young Asian woman in it. My mom was so surprised and pleased to see this one young woman on TV who looked liker her, it was such a rare thing that she called for the rest of us to see it. At the time I was only excited, too. Someone who looked like my mother on television! It was an event, remarkable.

Now, off the top of my head, I can tell you that if you want to see Asians on TV you can turn on Mythbusters, Nikita, Hawaii 5-0, Glee or Dancing with the Stars. There are probably hundreds more on the hundreds of channels, and it is no longer a remarkable moment to see a young Asian woman on TV. It sound funny or sad to relate that story of my brother and my father and me running into the living room to see the end of a commercial just because it had somebody Asian trying to sell us some Kodak product.

The culture has fractured and that is a good thing, because it means that there is more culture, more musicians and writers who can express themselves and, in the multiplication of cultures there is a multiplication of ideas and images. The poverty of being excited by a Kodak commercial has transformed into the richness of thousands of smaller, truer, more available cultural ideas.

Then, in the New York Times Friday, David Brooks (and yes, there is probably nobody with whom I disagree more on the subject of American culture than David Brooks) writes about the merging of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. They are valuable because they can revive something that has been lost, he writes. For many decades, people believed in one cultural standard.

To be respectable, it is necessary to spend your leisure time sampling the great masterworks of culture. To fight off the grubby materialism of American culture, it is necessary to be conversant in philosophy, theology and the great political events of the wider world…Poor families scratched together their dollars to buy an encyclopedia, to join the Book of the Month Club, to buy Will and Ariel Durant’s “Civilization” series or the Robert Maynard Hutchins’s Great Books… For decades, Time and Newsweek devoted more space to opera and art and theology than to Hollywood or health. You may never have visited New York City, but to be a respectable figure in your town in Wisconsin or Arizona, it was helpful to know what operas were playing or what people were reading in Paris. The magazines supplied this knowledge.

Brooks does not use the phrase “fracturing of the culture,” but this is what he bemoans when expresses his dismay that the desire for the singular vision of what is culturally important in America we were presented in Time magazine. “The new ethos valued hipness, not class,” is what he writes. That’s his view of the fractured culture. He’s wrong. His mom never called him into the living room because someone who looked like him was on tv for 30 seconds once every five years, either.

Brooks calls on the newly merged Newsweek and The Daily Beast to provide that old thing Time and Newsweek gave us, the dominant cultural ideas redominant. He’s so missing the point.

I think he’s right in saying that there were decades when you could and should have gone to the Book of the Month Club and Newsweek in order to be conversant in the culture. I think he’s wrong to say that we can or should go back to it. I believe that we are under as much obligation to study culture as he is describing, but it’s not about all of us looking to the same sources. What we must do is look beyond our own fractures. My mother should feel obligated to find out who Steve Harvey is so that she better understands the people around her for whom he is important. He’s never going to be meaningful to her – and that’s just fine. But she might owe it to her neighbors to figure out who he is. She also might laugh.

I would go to the wall to defend the idea that the fracturing of the culture is good and, at the same time, we are obligated to learn about cultures that are not our own. They exist in our cities, televisions, computers. If the fracturing of the culture has created the opportunity for more people to find culture that reflects themselves, it has also created the opportunity for us to get to know people who are nothing like us. It provides a hundred thousand shattered barriers to learning more.