BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
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cratic contract is supposed to supplant. This happened during the Civil
Rights Movement period when, at too many educated social gatherings
in the North, a mark of shame was automatially bestowed wherever the
Southern accent rose off of a white person's tongue. This vocal inflection
alone rallied suspicions of its connection to social gremlins, condescension
or insulting presumptions. We most recently observed this very same ten–
dency when so many people assumed, following the World Trade Center
bombing, that the Oklahoma City tragedy must surely have been the
work of Middle Eastern extremists. This prejudice, given the way the
media influences us, is also fed by the actions of Hamas as it goes about its
war against all Israelis, men, women, children, making no distinctions
between civilians and soldiers. Yet we cannot realize ourselves within the
grand scheme of our social contract if we allow attitudes toward entire
groups of immigrants or native- born people to be determined by the
worst actions of individuals from certain religious, geographical, and cul–
tural categories. This pollutes our politics and our society, even when the
loudest voices from those groups sometimes demand that we look at them
in a special way.
There can be no greater gathering of pollutants than what we have
come to accept, or gather to witness, in our popular entertainments, from
television to film, in our advertisements for clothing, for perfumes, for
automobiles. As the controversy surrounding the content of popular en–
tertainment proves, I am far from alone in believing that such things have
a debilitating effect on the spirit of society, on race relations, on sexual
trends, on manners themselves. Such material debases what arose in
America as a kind of democratic spunk, internationally famous on the
charismatic basis of its unpretentious disdain for unearned privilege and
for its own expression of deadpan compassion and lyrical flippancy. We
are surrounded by a crass combination of cynicism and whorishness. It
seeks to replace the stimulation of originality with shocking affront.
Ex–
ploiting variations, played to the tune of what the jazz musician Roland
Kirk called "volunteered slavery," stretch across our culture. No longer
seen as the root of all evil, money is recognized as the justification for
personal or collective debasement. In the dark world of profit, the quality
of the product is only as significant as the public is gullible.
We cannot, in a time as uncivil as ours, fail to contemplate how
manners have deteriorated and how we often find ourselves more alien–
ated from others than we can recall ever having been. We expect abuse in
public places and often get it, from foul-mouthed children to excessively
rude adults. We recall the old Greek tale told by one who was perhaps a
blind slave. One of the central themes of
The
Odyssey
is how civilization
reveals itself to the vulnerable stranger. With Odysseus we recognize, in
