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Context N°9

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I have suspected for some time that there is something missing in the way we usually construct the Culture Wars. Bennett, Cheney, D’Souza, Kimball, etc., on one side. Fish, Graff, Berube, Mapplethorpe, etc., on the other. I’ve been as involved and absorbed in this faux drama as anyone, but at the same time, dimly, I have wondered: do these characters really stand for things people care about? I mean, in places other than the Chronicle for Higher Education and the National Review?

And then at last it occurred to me that this titanic agon (as dear Harold Bloom might put it) was just a diversion from the real action. There is another cultural politics in our midst, perhaps even more organic then the academic Left or ideological Right. It is moving, making its way, accumulating its forces, winning while putative conservatives and tenured radicals beat the bloody hell out of each other to no end at all. This third force I call our Middle Mind. It is a vast mind, my friends, and I fear it is already something towering and permanent on our national horizon.

The Middle Mind attempts to find a middle way between the ideological hacks of the Right and the theorized Left. Unlike Middlebrow, the Middle Mind does not locate itself between high and low culture. Rather, it asserts its right to speak for high culture indifferent to both the traditionalist Right and the academic Left.

The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the Right’s narrowness, and incredulous before the Left’s convolutions. It is adventuresome, eclectic, spiritual, and in general agreement with liberal political assumptions about race, gender and class. The Middle Mind really rather liked Bill Clinton, thoroughly supported his policies, but wished that the children didn’t have to know so much about his personal life. The Middle Mind is liberal. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has even bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way that that very SUV spells the Arctic’s doom. Most importantly, the Middle Mind imagines that it honors the highest culture, and that it lives through the arts. From the perspective of the theorized Left academy (of which I confess myself an ineluctable member—with reservations), the Middle Mind’s take on culture is both well intended and deeply deluded.

One way or the other, what I’m here to tell you is that the Middle Mind is winning. That is, it has the most plausible claim to being the true representative of the public’s opinion. This is good news insofar as it means William Bennett is not winning, but oh boy are there qualifications on this triumph.

I’d like to review a few of the most recent excursions of the Middle Mind that have drifted by me. It’s not always easy to know when one is in the presence of the Middle Mind. It generally flies below critique’s radar because it has the advantage of not being associated with a particular political camp. It feels "natural," which is how we can be pretty sure it’s winning. It has its effect without being noticed. A neat trick in Kulturkampf.

The Middle Mind is very well connected. It doesn’t need bags of money from conservative foundations and think tanks to create its presence. The Middle Mind is present effortlessly. It comes to us with the convincing and implicit claim, "You’ve been curious about this, you’ve been waiting for it, and wondering about it, and here it is." The Middle Mind is frequently on public TV (Charlie Rose), in city weeklies, and in book review sections of slick magazines (Spin and GQ). It is everywhere on National Public Radio, even shows like Whad’Ya Know?, but our collective nose is rubbed in it on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Fresh Air is not merely a promotional vehicle for the Middle Mind, it is itself a prime example of the Middle Mind in all its charm and banality.

Let’s think about Terry Gross and Fresh Air for just a moment. Here is an interview program that claims quite earnestly to be for intelligence, for the fresh and new, for something other than regular stale network culture, for the arts and for artists. But anyone who much listens to the show knows (I certainly hope that I’m not the only one who has noticed) that: 1) Terry rarely interviews an artist or intellectual that real-deal artists and intellectuals would recognize. 2) She has no capacity for even the grossest distinctions between artists and utter poseurs. Many of the "writers" she has interviewed recently have been writers for TV series and movies. People who can with a straight face say, "Seinfeld is a great show because of the brilliant script writing" love Fresh Air. Now, Seinfeld may be a cut above the average sit-com, but it’s a sit-com! 3) The show is a pornographic farce.

Let me develop this last idea about the pornographic a bit. Terry Gross’s interest in books and writers is too often morbid, perverse and voyeuristic. Two quick examples: she recently interviewed the main writer of the new HBO series Six Feet Under. The critical moment in the interview came when she asked him (I’m paraphrasing from memory), "What was it like when you were in that car accident and your sister was driving and she died but you didn’t?" Was she leading up to a telling psychological reading of the work in question? No. She wanted to know and I suspect her audience wanted to know what it was like to be in an auto accident in which his sister died! That’s it. Do we learn something about writing, or the arts, or culture? Do we learn anything? No, we learn that he was traumatized by the event.

As to what the folks who go on this show are thinking, knowing they’ll face this kind of personal inquisition, I won’t speculate. They’re probably thinking either, "Fresh Air! The big time!" Or "Good grief, that woman is an idiot. But my publicist will shoot me if I don’t do it."

A week or so later there was a program in which Terry interviewed an author who had written a novel in which a woman says, "Drop dead," to her husband and the next day he does drop dead. Before the novel was published, the author’s own real-life husband dropped dead on a tennis court. This was the point at which the book became interesting for Terry. If her poor husband hadn’t dropped dead, Terry would never have been interested in her or her book for this Show of Shows. "What did it feel like to suspect you’d killed your own husband with your art?" Fresh Air? How about Lurid Speculations? It’s like Dr. Laura for people with bachelor degrees. Car Talk has more intellectual content.

From the perspective of a person really interested in art and culture, one can only say, "Well, I think she’s on my side, but, God, she’s so stupidly on my side that I hardly recognize my side as my side." Thus the Middle Mind.

As I’ve considered various avatars of the Middle Mind, I’ve occasionally felt that my criticisms were a bit unseemly or even unkind. Terry Gross. Isn’t she probably a very nice person? Good companion? Probably picks up the tab for lunch more than her share of the time and doesn’t complain if you had a couple of drinks. Of my next instance, however, one need have no such reservations because Joe Queenan’s Balsamic Dreams is one of the nastiest books I’ve read in some time. The Right Wing character assassin has nothing on this guy.

Queenan’s thesis is not deceptively simple. It’s just simple. And familiar. Simple and familiar used to equal trite, but the Middle Mind has infused the trite with a new vigor. Queenan argues that Baby Boomers are a failed generation, largely because of their overwhelming obsession with "me." Queenan has little to add to the usual conservative critique of the Me Generation except the novel observation that what’s most wrong about the obsession with "me" is that it is "annoying." "Decent folk," he explains, are "annoyed" by Boomer cars, jobs, money, music, self- referential conversation, hypocritical moralizing, and lack of self-awareness. Leave it to a Boomer, as Queenan confesses he is, to base a moral judgment on the never defined term "annoying." Annoying to whom? Queenan and "decent folk"?

But exactly who, one might ask, ever manages to be "decent" in Queenan’s worldview? Queenan makes it clear that it is not Tom Brokaw’s "Greatest Generation" of World War Two, which he finds to be a sad embarrassment, and Generation X is no better at all than its Boomer parents. So, were the decent people all born before 1920? Should we imagine a lot of annoyed octogenarians tottering around? Seriously, given Queenan’s methods, it’s a miracle that he ever found a single decent person.

Of course, this ethos constructed of that-which-annoys is itself very annoying. The greatest annoyance proper to Balsamic Dreams itself is its persistent willingness to contend that it means anything at all to generalize about generations. Perhaps one should say, "what goes around comes around" (to use one of the Boomerisms that Queenan hates so much). Balsamic Dreams is Ginsberg’s Howl in full retreat. But Ginsberg at least had the wisdom to see that the mammon he howled against was not the responsibility of any one generation. I’d happily join Queenan in a good old-fashioned rant against humanity as such, as Philip Wylie does in A Generation of Vipers, Twain did before him and Swift did before Twain. But that wouldn’t have the buzz and commercial hook that bashing Boomers has. And it won’t get him on Fresh Air.

Terry: "Do you really dislike your own generation because it likes balsamic vinegar?"

Quel scandale! How interesting, fresh and utterly Middle Mind.

Why can’t he admit that balsamic vinaigrette tastes better than that thousand-island crap made out of mayonnaise and pickle relish that we had to eat on iceberg lettuce in the fifties?

Two last comments on Queenan: since when do we have to put up with ethical diatribes from columnists for GQ? Is that where all the decent folk have gone? They’re all at GQ? Why isn’t GQ an expression of Boomer culture? Do they all eschew the balsamic vinaigrette at GQ?

Ironically, the ultimate retort to my critique of Balsamic Dreams could very well be that my thesis about the Middle Mind simply confirms Queenan’s propositions about Boomers because the Middle Mind is what you get when Boomers take over high culture. Okay, Joe, I get it. Good job.

The Middle Mind is also interested in the spiritual, but it is not the Christian fundamentalist spirituality-with-teeth of the Right Wing. By and large, the Middle Mind is in pursuit of the Buddha. Books that seek to explain Buddhism or introduce it to North Americans are a large and growing publishing phenomenon making certain spiritual leaders, like Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher of "Mindfulness," into something approaching international celebrities. One of the hottest such books recently was Dinty W. Moore’s The Accidental Buddhist. The book is a mostly chronological description of the author’s experiences and reflections on what he calls "my American Buddhism project."

Then I had this bright idea—the best way to learn about Buddhism would be to see it in action, the best way to imagine how it might fit into my hectic life would be to see how other Americans are fitting it into their busy American lives. I was always a big fan of quests of adventures, and here was a chance to have my own.

What makes this book an example of the Middle Mind is:

1) The author’s conviction that his audience wouldn’t know anything about Buddhism, and couldn’t distinguish it from Hare Krishna pan-handlers at an airport (by the way, what happened to those guys? A national consequence of the great Giuliani clean-up?); the Middle Mind assumes the people it takes as its audience don’t know anything; it assumes most people are benevolently stupid: "Oh Buddhism. Tell me about that."

2) It is written in the kind of prose that works in novels written with Hollywood in mind: "About this time, an auburn-haired, distinctly beautiful young woman walks by in the sort of exceedingly tight red dress that can make a man’s heart do the hokeypokey."

3) No one, least of all the author, is required to think. Any genuine intellectual content attaching to Buddhism is apologized for both directly ("Understand? I’m not sure I do, frankly. . . .") and through a down-dumbing trivialization ("Why do Tibetans have Such Trouble with Their Vacuum Cleaners"). Frederick Streng’s book on Mahayana philosophy, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, is a great work of intellect about a subject which has an intellectual aspect. The Accidental Buddhist is not such a book, nor could it be since its aspirations are closely limited by the managers of the Middle Mind (in this case the editorial staff at Main Street Books, a division of Doubleday). By the way, and this is a large part of my point, Streng’s book is long out of print. Of course.

But once we recognize what kind of mind it is that we are dealing with (a middling mind, as I have said), we can acknowledge that in fact this mind is making a good faith effort to report on something that is in fact very important. This is the frustrating thing about the Middle Mind. Joe Queenan is not wrong to condemn yuppies (whoever they are) who walk their dogs while talking on cell phones from their slowly rolling SUVs. (With the reservation that this sounds an awful lot like the sort of apocryphal myth Reagan used to spin about "welfare cheats"; it’s Reagan’s technique turned the other way; have you ever seen someone walk their dog, cell phone in hand from a rolling SUV?) And Dinty Moore is not wrong to pass along to us the words of Bhante Gunaratana:

You suffer from the same malady that infects every human being. It is a monster inside all of us, and it has many arms; chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional deadness. . . . We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves from it with goals and projects and status. But it never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little wordless voice at the back of the head that keeps saying, "Not good enough yet. Got to have more. Got to make it better. Got to be better."

The Accidental Buddhist is not a horrible book and it is certainly not a good book. It cannot hurt Buddhism although it’s hard to see how it might help it (except insofar as it might lead someone to seek a truly good book about Buddhism). My contention is simply that a mediocre book—facilitated by a culture of mediocrity that forbids real intelligence—hurts us all.

One of the most common gambits of the Middle Mind is to claim to provide high culture while really providing something a good deal less. Thus, one of the operating assumptions of Fresh Air is "some of our best writers work for TV." Queenan and Moore provide a sociology and theology perfectly appropriate to the expectations and conceptual capacities of the readers of Time magazine. The Middle Mind’s motto could be "Promise him culture but give him TV." And so the Middle Mind novelist provides narrative art of the highest aspirations that, minus a few poetical profusions and recondite bits of diction, could pass for pulp fiction. Hence:

He arranged her against the wall, held her chin in one cupped hand and drew his other hand slowly up beneath her skirt until she gasped, pretended to open herself to him.

Pulp fiction or high art of the novel? Only her hairdresser knows?

Let me give you more clues. In the first thirty-five pages of this novel its heroine is in a convent, falls in love with Chopin while playing his music at the piano, moves in with a rugged but tender farmer, has torrid (and tormented) sex with same, is kidnapped by a bank robber, is shot in the hip (by the Sheriff!) and witnesses the death of her-lover-the-farmer, shot by the bank robber, but not before he gouges out the robber’s eyes with his thumbs and buries him with the sheer force of his own dying body weight in soggy prairie loam.

Well?

I regret to inform you that this concoction is the work of National Book Critics Circle Award winner Louise Erdrich in her newest novel, and National Book Award nomination, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. That I know of, there are few critics in these United States who would question her right to be taken seriously as a novelist. The Last Report is the sort of novel that will get made into a sensuous and serious independent art movie starring Harvey Keitel as the farmer and Kate Winslet as the heroine. Terry Gross will interview the director, Jane Campion, let’s say, and ask questions like, "There are feminist themes here, aren’t there? The binding of breasts is a feminist theme, isn’t it? Have you ever bound your breasts?" Our interest piqued, we will congratulate ourselves for seeing this movie at the local cinema society screening, rather than seeing the latest from Hollywood at the cineplex, and imagine in all seriousness that we are on the side of art and the angels.

To be fair, The Last Report is not a pulp romance, although it cozens its readers with the content of pulp romance. But neither is it a work of art in the tradition of the best novels. Yet no amount of whining on my part will change the fact that Erdrich, her novels and the movies to be made of them, reign triumphant and beyond question in the mundus mentis mediae. As you can perhaps tell, there is no lack of subjects for an essay on the Middle Mind. Perhaps you, readers of CONTEXT, have favorite examples of your own. Perhaps, for example, you’ve noticed that the Antique Road Show has turned arts and antiquities into crude commodity fetishism.

Expert antiquarian: "This spittoon embossed with the crest of the House of Summersoft is worth $4,000, top dollar at auction."

Pallid owner: "Ooh! I had no idea!"

Pallid owner thinks: "I could sell this now and have that money, but then I wouldn’t have the spittoon, and I’d probably just spend the money on some sort of crap, and after a while the thing I bought will be indistinguishable from all the other things I’ve bought, things I didn’t buy with this special free money from the implausibly valuable spittoon, and then I won’t remember it was special at all, because I bought it with this money, this spittoon money, and so I’ll have nothing, really, not even the spittoon, but what’s the point of keeping the spittoon? Is it the pleasure of knowing I could turn it into cash any time I liked, if I wanted? Or maybe I should actually spit in it once in a while. This smart man says that Queen Victoria probably once spat in it. Or is it spit? Spitted? No. Ooh, I’m so confused."

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