This Sandy
Huffaker cartoon is, at best, a case of collateral damage.
At first
glance, it seems to take aim at Hollywood and the vapidity of
so many movie releases, but the sub-Mad Magazine level film
titles on the marquee don't pack much of a punch. ("Laffs
About Nothing"—is that supposed to be bad?)
So, the real target, here, seems to be the audience, represented
by the crudely drawn figures in the corner. The cartoon's most
vicious contempt isn't directed at the purveyors of dreck, but
at the consumers on whom they inflict this stuff.
This is a stumbling point for many critics of pop culture—whether
of the movies or television, Top 40 radio or mass market fiction.
All of these seem like easy targets, but it's trickier than
it looks because there are too many innocent people in the way
to get off a clean shot. The critic who sets out to say that
TV is stupid and crass winds up arguing that TV viewers
are stupid and crass. The critic who opens his mouth to call
romance novels silly and unworthy closes his mouth having called
all the women who read them silly and unworthy.
And that's not cool. First of all, it's not a very winsome approach
to persuading others to accept whatever point it is one is trying
to make. "You're an idiot" is rarely a useful starting
point if one is trying to get another person to listen to the
rest of what s/he has to say. The result of this approach, as
in the cartoon, is a sneering elitism.
Let me be clear about that word, 'elitism'. There's nothing
wrong with having high standards for popular art and popular
entertainment, standards that help us to separate the good stuff
from the inferior. But when those standards are turned against
the audience, when they're used to separate the good people
from the supposedly inferior, that's when the critic loses my
respect and attention. That's when the critic loses everybody's
attention. This is what makes such critics truly elitist—the
tiny circle of people still listening to them is, indeed, an
exclusive elite.
Such critics also, perversely, end up siding with those they
initially set out to criticize because they reinforce the dreck-merchants'
standard fall-back defense: "We're just giving the audience
what they want."
The main problem, here, though, is that such critics are blaming
the victim. That's just wrong. Someone who's been tricked into
paying good money for a Clay Aiken CD has suffered enough. There's
no need to add insult to injury.
Which brings us to Joe Bageant's essay on the World's Worst
Books, "What
the 'Left Behind' Series Really Means".
Much of Bageant's essay is fun—an entertainingly and appropriately
horrified reaction to a series of books that fails on every
level (except sales). I've pointed out a few of those books'
shortcomings, myself; and, for the most part, I agree with this
aspect of Bageant's jeremiad. He's right to point out that the
Left Behind books are more than just shoddy entertainments,
that they're dangerous and damaging propaganda. And he's particularly
on the money in discussing Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' unseemly
delight in the fictional suffering and death of those who disagree
with them, as well as their bizzarre belief that this fictional
vindication provides some real-world validation for their perspective.
So, nothing Bageant writes about the books or their authors
bothers me. But what he writes about their readers does.
He begins with a promising line of thought:
| How
can anyone acquire and hold such notions? Answer: The same
way you got yours and I got mine. Conditioning. From family
and school and society, but from within a different American
caste than the one in which you were raised... |
| |
|
Tens
of millions of American fundamentalists...read and absorb
the all-time best selling Left Behind book series as prophecy
and fact. How could they possibly not after being
conditioned, all their lives, to accept the End Times
as the ultimate reality?
|
This is
promising because it begins to explore the question of why
these horrible books are such big sellers. Figuring out how
this "conditioning" was done is an important part
of figuring out how it can be undone—how these people
can be rescued from that conditioning. How these readers
might be, well, saved.
Bageant is, himself, a recovering fundamentalist. He grew up
steeped in End Times-mania and "prophecy" obsession.
So, his personal history ought to suggest to him that change
is possible, that these "tens of millions of American fundamentalists"
trapped in a warped and circumscribed worldview can be liberated
from it.
But he's not interested in liberating them. He writes them off.
It turns out his use of the word 'caste', above, was not merely
an unfortunate, careless accident. He means it. To Bageant,
the readers of Left Behind are the Untouchables—inferiors
who should be left to their own sad fates.
Here's just a sampling of the scorn heaped upon those readers,
who he calls "the great unwashed tribes of the faithful":
|
We
are talking about a group of Americans, 20% of whose children
graduate from high school identifying H2O as a cable channel.
Children who, like their parents and grandparents, come
from that roughly half of all Americans who can approximately
read, but are dysfunctionally literate to the extent they
cannot grasp any textual abstraction or overall thematic
content...
|
| |
|
Allow
me to get down to the nub of this and say what urban liberals
cannot allow themselves to say out loud: "Christian
majority or not, the readers of such apocalyptic books
as the Left Behind series are some pretty damned dumb
motherfu**ers caught up in their own black, vindictive
fantasy.
|
Bageant begins his essay by quoting a 15-year-old fan of the
series, who said, "The best thing about the Left Behind
books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out
by God."
That makes Bageant angry, and he's right to be angry. But he's
wrong to direct that anger at the 15-year-old kid or the millions
of readers like him.
"If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe
in me to sin," Jesus said, "it would be better for
him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around
his neck". That's angry. But the anger's directed
at the proper target—at the powerful and not the powerless.
LaHaye and Jenkins are fair game. They've grown wealthy and
powerful by causing the little ones who believe to sin. They
deserve to have a millstone—or, at least, a millstone-sized
book review—tied around their necks.
But their readers—these little ones—are already suffering
enough. They need our pity and our patience, not our scorn.
