THE MEDIA AND OUR COUNTRY'S AGENDA
597
becomes even more outrageously insistent than it
i~.
Otherwise, democ–
racy still allows stirrings of aspiration or ambition, demands for atten–
tion and admiration, desires for transcendent understanding-impulses
that shape many of a culture's greatest achievements. These impulses
break through American democratic ideology again and again, allowing
mass media and popular entertainments to harbor extraordinary
achievements . There is also no need to believe in an intrinsic contradic–
tion between the idea of an "elite" or high achievement in culture and
a democratic view of human nature and possibility. Many great exam–
ples of high art, whether created by the religious culture of Renaissance
Italy or by the early modern passions of nineteenth-century Europe,
attempt to discern the nature of the human in all its variability and pos–
sibility. And what is that sort of discernment but the early stirrings of
democratic sentiment? Many of the most elite achievements of the West–
ern tradition helped in the evolution of democratic culture.
In Britain, for example, during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen–
turies all forms of literature were incorporated into the daily life of the
lower classes and became familiar to millers, coal miners, and weavers.
In eighteenth-century Wales, weavers propped up books at their looms
and held discussion groups. Wheelwrights in the Scottish Lowlands dur–
ing the eighteenth century possessed a 94 percent literacy rate. During
the nineteenth century "mutual improvement societies" developed–
predecessors of the Settlement Schools in the United States. There was
no presumption that literature was beyond the reach of the poor or
irrelevant to their plight. Reading once satisfied social and intellectual
aspirations and helped transform the working classes into the modern
middle and democratic class.
In the United States, there has also been a sense that in the midst of
the egalitarian something higher might be possible. Such aesthetic aspi–
rations could, of course, lead to kitsch and pretense-a pretense mocked
by Mark Twain in
Huckleberry Finn,
in which the self-styled Duke and
King traveled from town to town with their Shakespearean swindle. But
nevertheless, the aspirations were there, first for the achievements of
European high art, then for a resilient American art, as yearned for by
Whitman. In music, some obvious examples should be extended: the
New York Philharmonic is actually older than the Vienna Philharmonic;
pianos were played even in isolated nineteenth-century log cabins; lec–
ture societies and educational groups developed; in the r890s, New
Yorkers flocked to the beaches at Coney Island to hear Wagner's music;
even silent movie houses in the early part of the nineteenth century mod–
eled themselves on the epic sca le of opera houses-and many of the first
