The Mind's Eye

TRISTAN VOX

The Case Against the New Victorians

What becomes a culture most? The American political class seems suddenly to know. Item. One fine September morning Twisted Sister met Big Brother. Well, not exactly; Big Brother never materialized. But it was close. At a hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation the Parents' Music Resource Center confronted representatives of the tawdriest American rock 'n' roll with a demand for a warning label for records. The argument was that American children are being despoiled by songs that exalt sex, sadomasochism, Satanism, and what the Washington Post called "substance abuse." Who can doubt the genuineness of this maternal concern? There have been periods of history much kinder to parents. Still, the mortified mothers were quickly put to use by the conservative forces of culture; the affair had, finally, a mild air of Kulturkampf.

Item. The National Endowment for the Arts, probably American government's greatest gift to American civilization, came under attack a few months ago for grants awarded to poets whose poems are deemed by some to be "pornographic" and "sexually explicit." Representative Dick Armey, Republican of Texas, observed at a public hearing that "I know that I am an average American and I was patently offended when I saw these poems." There is no reason to doubt either of these claims. When asked to define pornography, he replied that "I know it when I see it." And he proceeded to propose, in the best tradition of Ronald Reagan's America, a most striking and sociologically sincere criterion for federal intervention in the arts: "I'm asking the N.E.A. to live by the same standards that I set for my daughter: He who pays the bill sets the standards."

Item. At the opening of "L'Amour Fou," an unforgettable exhibition about surrealism and photography, mandarins of culture and society wandering through the cavernous corridors of the Corcoran Gallery were observed slowly starting to squirm. The surrealists on the walls, you see, were evidencing the unconscious, and the unconscious is, well, rude. As the show unfolded, the images of sexual variety and violence multiplied. There was some relief to be had from the strange chastity of Man Ray's nude pictures of Lee Miller—but then there appeared Jacques-Andre Boiffard's photographs of a masked and bound woman, and Hans Bellmer's explicit illustrations for a rather advanced pornographic tale, and Andre Kertesz's tortured deformations of the female figure in a fun-house mirror. Some of the tasteful ladies in attendance seemed to wonder if a trick had not been played on them. One gentleman, a scholar and a connoisseur, conceded that the show was valuable, but pronounced that it was "finally too raunchy."

It all adds up to the least remarked Reagan revolution, which is the revolution in culture. There has occurred a great restoration of certainty, and a corresponding delegitimation of doubt. Much of this was accomplished for reasons of politics, by way of firming the national resolve in international affairs, which was supposed to be calamitously on the wane, and reversing our "malaise" and our "failure of will." Early in the Reagan years arguments abounded to the effect that a nation does not grow great by doubting itself, indeed that self-criticism was the trap that American democracy had laid for American greatness.

Nor was the influence of culture upon politics omitted from the indictment. Almost any deviation from the principles and the practices that were called "American," almost any experiment in fiction (such as Donald Barthelme's) or film (such as John Cassavetes's), and certainly every experiment in erotic experience was denounced as a contribution to American decline. You had the feeling that a sustained look inward, an absorption in the private, an independence of history, was the beginning of a betrayal—almost in the way that abstention from public life was a crime for the ancient Athenians. So it was that homophobia became a form of anti-Communism, and the American people began to breakfast, lunch, and dine on values.

What is good for politics, however, is not always good for culture. Doubt is precisely what makes a culture grow. Our improvement as a civilization depends upon our antinomian energy. How many of what we call our "classics" were conceived as the breaking of laws, as exercises in subversion, as the expression of doubts about the self and the society that could no longer be contained? The imagination of the forbidden, the experience with the extreme—they are what keep a culture from desuetude.

It may be time, then, after half a decade of mass rectitude, to make a partial defense of raunch. No, not of child pornography, or of murder; pace Norman Mailer, culture never comes at such a cost. But sometimes there is contained within raunch a kernel of wakefulness about human possibility, of interest in life more uncommonly lived. Raunch may be an exaggeration of an essence. Like many of the more refined agents of a culture's unsettling, it may be produced by people who are not sure of the ground beneath them. It betrays an odd, imbalanced commitment to truth—or, at the very least, a defiance of hypocrisy.

Even a perfunctory look at the history of culture will show, moreover, that the primary mechanism of its progress has been scandal. The giving of offense was part of the artist's calling; and the human quality that made it possible used to be called courage. Obviously, by this late and tired date, such courage has become a cliche. Obviously, also, the modem instruments of immortality that we call "the media" have made courage unnecessary, and in its place have recommended careerism. The shocks of culture today come cheap, and the bargain-basement outrages of Twisted Sister and the like should not be allowed to hide behind the prestige of the past. Still, there remains no warrant for the new Victorianism, according to which culture should be raised like Representative Armey's daughter. A civilization is not a minor; and it has no parents, except self-appointed ones.

If there is a Victorian among us, it is Ronald Reagan; yet the only delicious irony of the new Victorianism is the extent to which Reagan is exempt from it. In the Washington Weekly the astute Hendrik Hertzberg once compared the president's deeds in morals and manners with his words. What he found was world-historical hypocrisy. Reviewing everything from his personal histoiy to his personnel policy (Reagan's staff in Sacramento was composed largely of gays), Hertzberg concluded that "the supposed paladin of the old morality" is really "the consolidator of the sexual revolution. Forget the harrumphing about pom and promiscuity. Reagan is destined to go down in American social history as the president who finally and for all time legitimized lust and its outriders: divorce, serial monogamy, premarital sex.. .and homosexuality."

Imagine, hard as it is to imagine, that Ronald Reagan read poems, or generally cared about culture. We might have enjoyed the most impossible of cultural and political pleasures, the Republican as refuse.