Stupid is as stupid never learns

Funny I should stumble on a post on the Boar's Head Tavern blog, praising the praise the executive director of Mars Hill Audio gave to the excellent commencement address National Endowment for the Arts chief Dana Gioia gave to new Stanford graduates on a subject Mrs. Favog and I were discussing just the other night.

(Pausing to catch my breath after that lede.)

Anyway, I was telling my lovely and patient wife that despite growing up pretty much white trash in the 1960s and '70s, I had gotten a vastly superior cultural foundation than kids today are getting. One vastly superior to even those Millennials who have lots more money than I had, much better schools than I had, lots brighter parents than I had and stunningly more advanced knowledge resources than any of us back then could have dreamed of.

For example, by the time I hit high school, I was pretty well familiar with large swaths of the popular culture of my parents' generation and before. I could tell you about Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Walter Winchell and The Shadow.

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"

I had heard of -- and even seen -- luminaries like Leonard Bernstein, Beverly Sills and Vladimir Horowitz.

Today, you're shooting craps if you expect a 14-year-old to know who someone as seemingly culturally ubiquitous as Bruce Springsteen is. I know this. I have mentioned Springsteen to a room of teens and gotten blank stares.

I also had, by the time I was in high school, learned to love -- gasp! -- my parents' music: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, the Dorseys (brothers Tommy and Jimmy). Never did acquire my folks' taste for Lawrence Welk or Guy Lombardo, but I couldn't escape Welk's TV show every week . . . no matter how desperately my adolescent self desired to say "Adios, au revoir, auf wiedersehen . . . good night!"

AND PERHAPS that was the key. Couldn't escape. There were three networks, and much of what was on was a smorgasbord -- a little something for everyone. My parents knew enough about "my music" to hate it.

I knew enough about their music to eventually figure out it didn't all suck.

Actually, I figured that out pretty early on; I literally grew up playing my folks' old 78 RPM records. Their 45s, too. From about age four on, I was playing Hank Williams and Red Foley. Louis Jordan and Jerry Lee Lewis. Jim Reeves and Tennessee Ernie Ford.

And The King, Elvis Presley. My mother, a good 12 years' Elvis' senior, was gaga for the guy.

My generation's cultural formation wasn't all due to limited choices, however. Partly it was due to fame being based on talent or newsworthiness, as opposed to mere notoriety. As in notorious.

Dana Gioia, the NEA chairman, expanded on this point at Stanford:

I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.

Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.

There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

Of course, I'm not forgetting that politicians can also be famous, but it is interesting how our political process grows more like the entertainment industry each year. When a successful guest appearance on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation, democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics "show business for ugly people."

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.

When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn't trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.

The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.

There is only one social force in America potentially large and strong enough to counterbalance this profit-driven commercialization of cultural values, our educational system, especially public education. Traditionally, education has been one thing that our nation has agreed cannot be left entirely to the marketplace—but made mandatory and freely available to everyone.

At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training.

I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available to the new generation of Americans. This once visionary and democratic system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic school boards, county commissioners, and state officials, with the federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price. Today a child's access to arts education is largely a function of his or her parents' income.

In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we experienced this colossal cultural and political decline? There are several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social, and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to reestablish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life.

AMEN. And I, too, am missing The Ed Sullivan Show.