Carnival Culture: the Trashing of Taste in America

But the critic who wrote Carnival Culture, if timid about what makes life worth living, is confident, even swaggering, when it comes to religious belief, an area in which he, like so many others in his guild, is color blind, tone deaf, and triumphally illiterate. "An apt analogy for American show business might be the Holy Roman Catholic church of the early Renaissance," he writes. "The church's great power was its willingness to pay attention to its audience and to provide a steady stream of images that were comforting and inspiring." All right, but where does he think that willingness (and so that power) came from? And why does he think that those images were comforting and inspiring?

To dismiss such questions is to sign on with the Visigoths, which seems a lamentable thing for a culture critic to do. When Twitchell writes "like religion, television addresses our deepest concerns by first distorting them," the reader may be forgiven for wondering how a sensibility so deadened to matters of belief can recognize anything worth celebrating, defending, or enjoying in culture.

G.K. Chesterton, not a bad culture critic himself, once remarked that the young man knocking on the brothel door is looking for God. He might have said the same of the zit-faced channel surfer, or, for that matter, of the feminist assistant professor at the Modern Language Association convention. It's difficult to imagine what Chesterton would make of Twitchell's conclusion that "the mass-mediated world is worthy of our impassioned study lest Oscar Wilde's prediction [sic] prove true: |The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality."' But Twitchell would be a more interesting culture critic if he understood that Wilde's epigram is not a prediction and that is what makes it funny.

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