Not “popular culture,” just culture
By
grant
At a cocktail party, the topic would come up. Inevitably. And when it did, all
the academics would make condemnatory, exasperated noises. TV was bad, soulless, empty, moronic. Everyone knew that. One by one, they would take the pledge, one
of the pledges, anyhow:
“We have no television.”
“We have a television but it’s black and white.”
“We have a color TV but it only gets a couple of channels.”
“We have a TV with cable but we never watch it.”
“We watch cable TV but only PBS and ‘serious’ programming.”
“We watch several channels on TV but we make fun of
everything we see.”
You only had to wait, oh, about 17 minutes before these same
academics would be demonstrating an astonishingly thorough knowledge of Law and
Order and the specific accomplishments of Michael Moriarty and Sam Waterston as the Executive Assistant District Attorney.
This was not just the sherry talking. The academics had to give one another
permission to take the topic seriously, to settle into it by degrees. Because of course they did. It was only for official purposes that TV
was “not done.”
Some of the more desperate neo-Cons continue to insist on
this position. But the rest of the world
managed to come to its senses. Most
academics no longer regard TV watching as a “shameful secret” and a
“guilty pleasure.”
This is a very big cultural difference, one of those
differences that makes a difference. I
am not sure who gets the credit. Some of
it must go to people born in the late 60s and 70s. It’s also true that TV got better (HBO and all
that). But this weekend I came across something
that might some day be seen as a watershed: in 1993, there was a changing of
the guard at the Times crossword puzzle.
No, really. Before
1993, the author of the crossword was Eugene T. Maleska, former Latin teacher
and, according to the Times, a curmudgeon of some standing. “If you were of a certain age or a cultural
snob or raised in or around New York City (or, ideally, all three), he was your
hero.” On Maleska’s death, the job fell
to Will Shortz whereupon, “the puzzle began to demand much more extensive
knowledge of contemporary culture.” It was now necessary to read something other than the Times
to dispatch its crossword.
But this is just the surface thing, really, the obvious one. For Shortz’s puzzles also demand “the ability
on the would-be solver’s part to come to terms with a number of other puzzle
dimensions: themes that bear on how one interprets clues correctly, rebuses,
squares containing more than one letter or figure, graded levels of difficulty,
and so on.” In sum, the puzzle began to
demand a dynamic engagement. You have to
listen to the game as you play it. The
game instructs you as you go.
Ah, cultures, by their puzzles we may know them. Ah, puzzles…
References
All quotes from: Romano, Marc. 2005. First chapter: Crossworld. As excerpted
in the New York Times. July 10,
2005. here.
Acknowledgments
Hargurchet Bhabra (for the title of this post)
2 Comments
July 12th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
By bizarre coincidence, I was very recently scolded by a neo-Con academic to Kill My TV and experience ultimate freedom and bliss. Just as you say, the academic crowed that he hadn't had a TV since the Reagan administration.
http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/libertas/index.php?p=572#comments
July 13th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
Amanda, Thanks! It is hard to imagine that you can claim cultural competence and never watch TV, but this is not uncommon. Thanks, Grant