Behind the Tinsel Curtain, part one

Almost five generations ago, when mass communication first began to transform our society, Emerson gave the American teacher some advice that strikes me as even more pertinent today. Sensing that the tyranny of the mass mind or the bondage of public opinion was to be one of the gravest dangers of a cultural democracy, he hoped that the scholar or teacher would "defer never to the popular cry." "Let him not quit his belief," Emerson advised in The American Scholar, "that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom."

Mediocrity in Mass Media

We live, it seems to me, in what might justly be called The Age of the Popgun. For these are times in which many small bores pretend to more calibre than they really have. Emerson's popguns, however, had only the telegraph and penny press at their disposal. Ours have an unbelievably pervasive network of mass communication that they use to envelop us in a smog of mediocrity. Press agents, ad-copy writers, and other hawkers of a chromeplated philosophy of comfort and success monopolize the mass media. They make of these potentially great instruments of enlightenment what Norman Cousins has shrewdly called a great "industry of distraction."

The dream world of popular culture prefabricated daily by the media is a two-dimensional affair. In it crewcut boy meets Vogue-ad girl with convertible ideals. They live happily ever after (bypassing birth, work, death), trying hard to keep up the payments. Most of their leisure they fritter away with time-saving gadgets. They read condensed books because they don't have time. They learn the power of positive thinking. They are the happy consumers, bedeviled to trade everything in on a new model.

Certainly, this is a caricature; but only to us who have developed a set of values. To the adolescent this fantasy world of popular culture is the real thing. In my opinion, many of the difficulties that plague the humanities teacher today derive directly from the fact that we ignore the absorption of the adolescent in the chimerical world of the popular arts. He is a helpless victim behind the tinsel curtain of superficial, glib values disseminated by the mass media.

Banality, the spurious or superficial treatment of serious subjects, sentimentality, the easy acceptance of dubious ideals, the distortion or masking of reality, shallowness and insincerity, all the meretricious gloss and false emphases of bad popular art, dispensed in a ceaseless stream to a vast public, cannot have but an enervating and distorting cumulative effect upon individuals and society. ("Guidance in Aesthetic Appreciation; The Theatre and Film," Yearbook of Education / Macmillan, 1955).

So writes Stanley Reed, a British teacher and film critic, in an important article that spells out the responsibility of the English teacher for developing student taste in the popular arts. To help our students penetrate the tinsel curtain, we must make them dissatisfied with the mediocre in popular art. Until we can break down their complacent acceptance of the fifth-rate, we will find deaf ears for our larger message of excellence in the classics.

Before suggesting practical implications of this theory for the classroom, it may be wise to suggest specifically how the media victimize our youth with their mediocre messages. Why do we face a shortage of teachers? A contributing factor is the dowdy, bumbling stereotype of the teacher wholesaled on the media. How many children can be inspired by such an image? Why are too few young people taking scientific training? Think of the mad professor you last saw on TV! Or is American artistic leadership somehow not commensurate with our material prosperity? I wonder how much the tousled hair, sloppy clothes stereotype of the artist inhibits sensitive young people from aspiring to such a life of excellence. The media distort and distract, keeping the majority of our youth at a shallow level of self-awareness.

And what are the newer media doing to that first and still most impressive mass medium, language itself? We are witnessing the decline of the superlative; "super-deluxe" now refers to an average automobile. "Best" no longer makes an overstimulated consumer flicker; even "colossal" and "stupendous" become pygmy words in the ad writer's delirious "can-you-top-this" search for blurbs. And when the words themselves are not being defiled and perverted for the grand aim of selling soap and cigarettes, they are being used to convey essentially irrelevant messages. Language, our province as English teachers, is thus both debased and abused. It is in such a context that I found Emerson's insistence that we call popguns popguns so appealing.

How would this dour theory work in the worst of all possible worlds? Suppose you find yourself faced next semester with a class of comic book addicts. No uncommon plight, surely. Such was the recent fate of a very imaginative teacher with an excellent background in English literature and criticism. She decided in desperation to beard the lion in its den. She opened the semester with a one-week unit on comic book reading.

She found, as she suspected, that her addicts were unthinking, uncritical devourers of the sub-literary species, comic. So she started them asking each other basic questions: Why do we read them? Why do adults read them? Why do parents object? What kind of comics are there? Who reads which type? What are typical comic book heroes like? What do they have in common? What values do they support? To what extent, if at all, are our own standards shaped by their conduct? The answers were thin, to put it charitably.

She passed out a bibliography of fifty items on the subject from the school library; each student had to take notes on five and then answer the questions, first in an oral report or panel, next in an individual theme. The critical storm stirred up by this invasion of unexamined areas of life blew fresh air throughout the entire year's work. In a small way, her students had begun to lead the Socratic "examined" life.