cultural literacy

Time For My Cultural Literacy Check…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I believe, and have believed for as long as I can remember—Shut up, I remember more than most people—that everyone in our society has an ethical obligation to know as much as possible about the society and culture we live in. This takes time and effort, as well as humility. For the young, it means showing an interest in what had transpired before they were born, if it had a significant effect on history and culture.

I have related here my interaction with a professional woman, ten years my junior, who revealed that she didn’t know who Jackie Robinson was. I told her that was inexcusable, and sent her to some sources. A lawyer I worked with at one point, even younger, couldn’t come within 70 years of the dates of the Civil War, despite graduating with honors from Cornell and being an associate at Skadden Arps.

The case was made powerfully in the Eighties by J.D. Hirsch in his best-seller “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” and he updated his book several times. His main declaration was that without a shared cultural knowledge, communication and understanding between generations becomes impossible, and society’s connective tissue is eventually degraded and destroyed. Analogies and metaphors no longer work; patterns are no longer detected; “presentism” becomes epidemic. Jackie Robinson was on Hirsch’s list; so were John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Sen. Joe McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe, James Watson, Will Rogers, Elvis Presley and Fred Astaire.

Older generations have obligations too. As a child who watched more television than anyone I know (or knew), I became convinced that TV was an essential cultural literacy tool. My parents, one a lawyer and Harvard College grad and the other a career Harvard administrator, had many friends who boasted of either never watching TV or only deigning to watch PBS. Even when I was ten, I regarded them as arrogant and foolish, which they were. They didn’t see the Sixties coming, or comprehend the culture that was its catalyst when it fell on then like a rock squishing Wile E. Coyote.

I acknowledge that keeping up with current culture, while in some respects easier than it used to be due to technology, is overwhelming, and to some extent even impossible. We have many parallel cultures trying to coexist today, and some are antithetical to each other. At very least, I believe, all of us have to try to keep abreast of popular culture, which includes important societal developments that drive that relentless engine.

Last week EA expressed disgust that Sen. Jim Clyburn had revealed that he only recently became aware of ChatGPT. He’s 80: it’s no excuse. It would be almost as inexcusable if Clyburn announced that he didn’t know who Taylor Swift is. President Trump was recently dragged in social media for apparently conflating a kids’ TV host from the Fifties with Eighties star Paul Reubens, aka. Peewee Herman. At least Trump is aware of Peewee’s existence; that fulfills his cultural literacy obligation.

Five years ago, I wrote a discouraged post about how my cultural literacy commitment was failing, Confession Of A Life Competence Failure. I am obviously over-due for an audit, so I went to the same source for a pop quiz: WeSmirch, a web aggregator of celebrity news. In 2021, I regarded my performance as a failure, writing in part,

“It was horrifying. I never heard of most of these people. Those I have heard of seem completely irrelevant to me. Almost all of the important people in these stories seem to be morons, famous for being famous, illiterate, notable mostly for being rich. The so-called “news,” breathlessly shouted from various headlines, seemed less than inconsequential. And yet this is what a rising generation cares about. Here is a typical headline from this morning: “Vanessa Morgan’s son is called River.” Who is Vanessa Morgan? Who cares what her son is named? It turns out that she is an actress on “Riverdale,” a TV show based on the comic book whose appeal I never understood (but I read the damn thing so I knew what my friends were reading). My score was 15 celebrity names recognized, with 17 complete mysteries. My conclusion: “When all the celebrities are strangers, I will have reached the dreaded stage of my uncle, who got the Beatles mixed up with the Rolling Stones, and the codgers today who talk about the internet like it’s some new-fangled fad. And at that point, I will be useless.”

Let’s see what my score is today. The “celebrities”…

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Yes, Ted Turner Is An Ethics Hero For This…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Verdict: True.

Turner’s contribution to cultural literacy and cross-generational communication as a result cannot be denied or understated. Ted Turner used his power and wealth to create what might never have existed without him.

He lived a worthwhile life indeed.

“Right To Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution” and the Duty to Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

So much of the nation’s cultural health and societal values rely on our fulfillment of the duty to remember. Thanks to our incompetent and unethical education system and the increasing estrangement of American history from our popular culture, recent generations share so little important historical and cultural touchpoints as Americans that effective cross-generational communication is becoming impossible. Television could be a nostrum for this dangerous phenomenon, if only finding the constructive and informative programming were not a task akin to finding, as the saying goes, a needle in needle stack.

I was thinking about this after I stumbled upon the 2022 Starz documentary, “Right to Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution,” a two-part series that I only saw because I am briefly getting Starz free on DirecTV. I missed it entirely when it was new, and have never read or heard anything about it. I haven’t seen the whole series yet either, and only watched an incomplete stretch of Episode One. But that was enough to trigger several thoughts, and to make me schedule a serious viewing of the whole thing from beginning to end.

Among those revelations,

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“Jaws” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

I have another classic ethics movie post in the pipeline, but this is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of “Jaws,” and attention should be paid. An obnoxious comment this morning from retired law professor blogress Ann Althouse drew my attention to the topic. She wrote,

“As for “Jaws,” I’ve never seen it. I’ve always imagined that it would bore me. I still feel that way. Waiting around for a shark to attack someone? I don’t see the point. I don’t have a tag for sharks. I have to give this post my “fish” tag. Have I ever seen a movie about fish? I don’t think so.”

Her quote isn’t exactly unethical, but it betrays an arrogance and a wilful ignorance of popular culture that does not show Ann in a good light. Althouse has some shocking gaps in her film and television literacy, and, as in this case, she often seems proud of her ignorance. As with all iconic movies and TV shows, being unfamiliar with “Jaws” means that you don’t comprehend references that have become part of modern communication: “You’re going to need a bigger boat!” and “This was no boating accident” come immediately to mind.

Someone saying, “I imagine that what so many people enjoy and remember would bore me” is a way of asserting unearned superiority; it reminds me of the snobs in Harvard bedroom community Arlington, Mass. who would say, “Oh, we never watch anything but PBS (you crass, low-brow peasants).” And they missed “Perry Mason,””The Defenders,” “The Honeymooners,” “The Hollywood Palace,” “The Avengers,” “Maverick,” “The Carol Burnett Show,” “The Smothers Comedy Brothers Hour,” “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Twilight Zone” and dozens more, all in the secure but ignorant belief that they were too sophisticated for such tripe.

Ann saying that she’s too sophisticated to watch “a movie about a fish” is like someone saying that they’ve never seen “Casablanca” because “who wants to see a movie about Morocco?,’ or “Singing in the Rain” because singing in the rain is a silly thing to do. A competent, curious, responsible member of society wants to see “Jaws” because 1) it is famous 2) it is a cultural touch-point 3) one should understand why people remember and care about it and 4) when the public embraces anything so completely, whether it is “Hamilton” or baseball or “The Mikado,” or Elvis or “Sergent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” or “Star Wars,” or “The Godfather” or Frank Sinatra or the Mona Lisa or “Oklahoma!” or John Wayne or Chuck Berry or Madonna or Taylor Swift or Bugs Bunny or Beethoven’s Fifth—the list is very long—the public’s opinion deserves respect. This why Rachel Zegler’s dissing of the original “Snow White” was so foolish and destructive. Nobody has to like or admire anything, but when a particular work of art or cultural phenomenon reaches icon status, there is always a reason. Not knowing the reason means one is just that much more incompetent as a participant in society.

“Jaws” is an important and even after 50 years, entertaining and powerful movie. Among its virtues:

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It’s Not The Ignorance and Cultural Illiteracy So Much, But The Shamelessness…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Ugh. Ann Althouse flagged this comment from a reader named Malika, reacting to a New York Time Crossword Puzzle clue that read, “Girl in Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit'”:

“I love this style of clue, where even if you don’t know the exact trivia (I’ve never heard of the band or the song) you can puzzle it out based on the context.”

The answer is “Alice,” and if Malika doesn’t know the “exact trivia,” she never heard of “Alice in Wonderland,” which is a foundational work of English literature with important literary, historical and satirical significance. It means she is unaware of the many movies made of that book (and its twin, “Through the Looking Glass”), doesn’t know who Lewis Carroll is, has no idea what firmly established “mad hatter” in our lexicon, or “Cheshire cat,” or what “Jabberwocky” refers to.

Then there’s the ignorance of the Sixties, the Vietnam era and the drug culture indicated by her lack of familiarity with the iconic song “White Rabbit.” The Jefferson Airplane anthem has been used on “The Sopranos,” “Stranger Things,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Simpsons,” in the films “The Game,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “The Matrix,””Platoon.” Not only doesn’t Malkia know about any of this, she doesn’t think she should and is willing to broadcast the fact that she doesn’t.

What else didn’t her schools, parents and narrow culture teach her? How many reference points that would help her understand the context of the issues, events and people affecting her life is she lacking? As Don Rumsfeld might say, it isn’t just that she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and doesn’t know that it’s a problem that she doesn’t know it.

A Reward For the Historically and Culturally Literate: “Unfrosted”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

If you are looking for a funny rather than syrupy entertainment diversion for your mother (or grandmother) this Mother’s Day, you couldn’t do better than spend 90 minutes or so with Jerry Seinfeld in his new movie for Netflix, “Unfrosted.”

Don’t worry: it’s a lot better than “Bee Movie.”

The film, co-written by the comic, is sly, clever and funny provided that the viewer knows enough about the popular culture of the early Sixties—you know, before everything went crazy—as well as U.S. history to understand what is being satirized. Seinfeld has always been a Sixties trivia buff as he demonstrated repeatedly on his classic sitcom, but this movie is an orgy of such references: JFK, the space program, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jack LaLanne, Werner Von Bron, Quickdraw McGraw and Saturday morning cartoons, Johnny Carson, Walter Cronkite, Silly Putty, the Twist, Thurl Ravenscroft (the original voice of Tony the Tiger who also sang “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch!” ) the Doublemint Twins (who are both apparently impregnated by JFK while Jackie is away), on and on.

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There is Hope! Part 2, The Vindication of Waylon Bailey

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Waylon Bailey, the social media-user who was arrested by a Wuhan virus totalitarian idiot for making a joke and initially denied justice by a U.S. District Judge who doesn’t know the law, finally was awarded $205,000 in compensatory and punitive damages by a federal jury. It’s not enough, not even close, and the publicity the episode has received (virtually none) underlines that point.

These are the kinds of cases juries should address with $83 million in damages (just picking a number out of the air, there) to make the next Gestapo-inclined officer who considers punishing a citizen for exercising his constitutional rights think twice, or even three times. At least, however, Waylon Bailey was vindicated by our lately maladjusted justice system.

There is hope.

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Cultural Literacy Competence Fail!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

As frequent vistors here know, I would argue that competent citizens should be sufficiently aware of cultural history to know who Bill Russell, Bob Feller and Bob Gibson are at very least. The elderly female contestant was alive and conscious while Bob Gibson and Bill Russell were active and frequently in the news. Surely someone presuming to appear as a contestant on “Jeopardy!” should have this level of U.S. sports history knowledge.

But perhaps you disagree…

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring AND You’re A Moron: The Roman Colosseum Vandal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

First, the moral: Cultural literacy is a life competence obligation both at home and abroad. Now the tale:

I had been planning on a post about the manhunt in Rome for the unethical tourist caught on video carving “Ivan + Hayley 23/6/23” into a brick on a wall of the Colosseum. Authorities went looking for “Ivan;” meanwhile, not only is destruction of natural and historical sites an occasional Ethics Alarms theme, but in this case the video-taker’s conduct was also questionable: he was more interested in taking a viral video than he was in stopping the vandalism.

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Ethics Observations On Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter Humiliation

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

 

Oates, a prolific and much-honored writer as well as a college professor,deleted the tweet after merciless mockery. In case you are, like her, unfamiliar with Marvel Comics tropes, the intergalactic supervillain Thanos wields the Infinity Gauntlet,”one of the most powerful objects in the [Marvel] Universe.” It empowers the wearer to do anything and everything imaginable.

Observations:

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