Culture Archives — Page 3 of 3

One good thing about getting older is that you begin to disregard all those things that used to irk you. It’s like putting them forever in Spam. About two years ago I wrote a piece called “Retreat of the Elders” which listed some of the symptoms of a growing solitude as we age:

a penchant for eating at home; fewer visits with friends; a preference for books over TV; souring on politics and current affairs; pique with the common culture; not suffering fools gladly; and so on.

Lately I’ve discovered a few more things that aging permits us to dispense with. It’s not so much a withdrawal from the common culture as it is preserving one’s own equanimity. Here are a few big ones.

- Leaving your house for social/cultural affairs. Your old motivations to party or attend an event don’t pull you out anymore. Home is comfort and convenience; parties are typically boring; and you could fall down on the way to a concert.

- Driving. God, I used to love cars. Now they are an occasional convenience, nothing more. See “Old People Driving” for a full report. “Oldsters are naturally jealous about keeping their driving privileges, and they can get very testy about it.”

- Drinking and eating. One’s appetite for both declines with age. Booze no longer has the effect it once had, and going out to eat is expensive and often disappointing.

- Arguing with idiots. Actor Keanu Reeves “gave an interview about growing older and said he protects his peace by refusing to argue with anyone about anything. He said, ‘2+2 is 5? You are correct. Have a nice day.’” As we age our tendency is to avoid all bullshit if possible. Your drama is not my drama.

Now, the real test is to avoid being caught up emotionally with all the current Trump melodrama. The media constantly assaults us with the gravity of what’s at stake, the indictments, their historical relevance, the intransigence of MAGA, the folly of T’s clownish advisors—none of which we can do anything about.

Trump fatigue affects everybody, right and left. We’re stuck watching the same bad B-movie over and over with no end in sight. Or, pick your metaphor, you’re slogging through the desert with no water, cast adrift at sea, feasting on the sugar high of anger, etc.

We’re all confounded by Trump. But we don’t have to let him take over our lives. Older people have the luxury of memories, not just to escape the present chaos but to give us context for what we’re now living through. Better to be old these days than young.

Bad taste is a complicated subject. I know this because I’ve been exploring it as a subject for a book. If you think about it, we are living in a world dominated by bad taste, however you want to define the term.

It used to be that bad taste could be shuffled off by the elites as just something the kinky and unenlightened produce. Elites like Susan Sontag (On Camp, 1964) treated bad taste (here, camp and kitsch) to lengthy academic analysis, a superior form of lighthearted putdown.

I have a book called The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste (1991) in which Jane and Michael Stern roast and ridicule everything from nose jobs and Polynesian food to Lawrence Welk. It used to be a class identifier that we could snicker and laugh at these things. But no more.

I recently looked over my blog posts and saw a host of grim subjects that I sometimes tried to lighten up with personal humor. I hope that was not like the impulse that moved the Sterns to make fun of lower-class culture. But recent polls by Pew show that Americans are grim and very pessimistic about the future, not to mention the present.

And why shouldn’t they be? About some bad taste there’s really no disputing, the latest example being Marjorie Greene’s recent display of Hunter Biden’s naked sex pix in Congress. She should have been expelled for that but was not because even extreme bad taste is now tolerated and accepted—in Congress yet.

When we were growing up, a fart in church was funny bad taste, according to George Carlin. How far we’ve come from those days. A 2022 survey of pop culture is totally depressing, in part because I can’t recognize most of the people and events referred to. “A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika,” said Dorothy Parker. Too much is like a dose of habanero.

Last year Time Magazine said in pop-eyed language:

The 20-year nostalgia cycle, climate-change nihilism, information saturation, streaming-era content overload, and our collective Long COVID of the soul have converged in a tidal wave of tackiness. . . . Yet what’s remarkable about this particular pendulum swing is that after centuries of wrestling with hierarchies of taste, the cultural stigma that has always come with indulging in bad taste has disappeared.

So far there seems to be no backlash to the flurry of bad taste. I mean why haven’t the Democrats produced compromising pictures of M.T. Greene in flagrante and shown them in Congress? The younger culture seems at times to be pursuing a sense of doom, maybe nihilism. If culture is enlightenment, the new bad taste glorifies most any excess and flouts the most accepted of values. Are the Barbarians at the gates?

In a way, bad taste has always done this but often with a sense of humor, as in camp and kitsch. Humor is not fashionable now, but as I tried to say in a piece about Oscar Wilde it is part of survival. Now whatever we define as good taste must subsume everything bad taste is not. Without bad taste, how could good taste thrive?

P.S. The game is not over. Hearing yesterday about Tony Bennett’s passing made me realize that good taste still exists; it’s just hibernating. Tony was a wonderful man who made a career out of good taste—in music and in his life. That life and his talent, all 96 years of it, represented the kindest and best of American culture. He made good taste popular.

Category: Culture

Accepting the Symptoms of Aging

The Devolution of Bad Taste