There's Nothing To See Here

I've always taken it as a point of pride that I've never seen one episode of Jersey Shore, but I'm starting to wonder. I've never been one to wave a clenched fist and bewail the dumbing down of America and least-common-denominator entertainment, so it's not just that. I spent my summer standing in line for such high-brow fare as the sequel to a sequel to a movie about fighting robot cars and obsessively DVRing a show where people have to figure out the most creative way to cook duck testicles. It ain't exactly Tosca at the Met.

But maybe that was the point: it's important to have a basement. Somewhere to hide in case of cultural or personal turbulence. When the shit starts a-swirlin' and the Lexapro won't kick in, it's a comfort to know the orange people are there for me to lord it over. And I recognize we all dig our own basements; the levels at which we set our foundations are arbitrary. For me, it's what I assume is the false transparence of orchestrated guido "reality." For you maybe it's Facebook or, I don't know, the somnolent wasteland of "reading." The good news about relativity is that nobody's wrong. Well, except the American Idol people, but it almost seems like too obvious a point to make.

I recognize the social importance of the sneer, but again, I don't think it's purely elitism. I have yet to recognize anything particularly dangerous about the path we're on. VH1 just this last week, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of MTV, ran some of the footage from those first days and really: is Jersey Shore really such a cultural downgrade from these people making TV smalltalk between commercials for the recording industry? Again, I've never seen it so it's hard to say, but Mark Goodman's hair is enough to justify the question without regard to the evidence. And if we can track it diachronically over 30 years with no visible shift, is it possible even to say there is anything that qualifies a movement?

We're hardly awash in haute couture, to be sure. There's not much akin to the salon culture of pre-Revolution France going on that I can see nor even an Algonquin Round Table astounding the world with a great depth of linguistic revels and insight. Or maybe there is and I'm just not invited. Or maybe there is, but we don't know it's happening yet. At the time, did anyone know the salon culture of pre-Revolution France was going to be worth a fuck or did they just think they couldn't push two tables together and put out some finger sandwiches without that fucking Voltaire showing up and witting all over everything? And I've always been suspect of the Algonquin Round Table thing considering it was populated largely by people who slowly and painstakingly invented conversations for a living.

I suspect the good and the bad go both ways. Being immersed, it's hard to cobble together the perspective to genuinely see what is going on. Golden ages and cultural nadirs probably wash past largely unremarked-upon until the next generation is neck-deep with the aftermath. Late Imperial Rome wasn't Late Imperial Rome until a Hun stuck the first spear through the first senator's face. Before that, I think they probably just thought it was Rome.

I'd started out with a fairly low opinion of American culture as it was, so I've never been able to imagine the apocalypse foretold and foretold and reforetold by the coarsening of the discourse or the downfall of civility or whatever we have to call it when the club starts to compromise its entrance standards.

But I've been wrong before. Maybe the apocalypse is actually happening. Instead of a thunderclap and a rending of the heavens, it looks  exactly like The Bachelorette. We have been judged and found entertained. Purgatory is. The Rapture has happened. The Righteous have actually already been assumed whole into heaven, it's just that they were too fucking boring for any of the rest of us to notice.