Tag: Hunter Biden

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The Devolution of Bad Taste

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.

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Grim Humor Behind the Bleak Headlines

My premise here is that we’re entering a new age of gallows humor in our dreadful politics. When you start thinking about it, you find it everywhere. Does discovering this alleviate our political nausea? Probably not, but writing about it makes me feel better.

I mean, who could have scripted these people?

The media jumped all over the Cocaine-at-the-White-House story. They seem to have taken it either as an important security breach or an occasion for bad jokes. Naturally the Republicans were quick to finger Hunter Biden and his former drug problem. The administration responded with its usual earnest gravity, their typically humorless response to everything. Maybe Biden’s numbers would improve if he and his people would just lighten up.

In Iowa Pence said he said he was a supporter of Ronald Reagan’s doctrine that “if you’re willing to fight the enemies of the United States on your soil, we’ll give you the means to fight them there so our men and women in uniform don’t have to fight them.”

Nobody has pointed out that this was the same as endorsing what Prigozhin and his mercenaries do: getting paid by others to fight on their behalf. The irony here seems to have eluded everybody—and maybe that’s not so funny.

Outside the realm of politics is the story about the British tourist who carved his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum and later said he had no idea the site was so ancient. The only thing funny about this is why he thought anyone would believe him.

In a similar vein we read that New York mayor Eric Adams, in another act of pomposity, courted controversy after claiming a recently doctored photo was an original he kept always with him. The mayor keeps cementing his reputation as creepy and incompetent.

And then there’s Robert Kennedy, Jr., the new king of conspiracy theories who also courts controversy. Is it possible to laugh at a person who takes himself so seriously? The incongruity of his relationship to his famous family is pathetic rather than funny.

And now we’re hearing still more about the December 2020 meeting of the lunatics, when Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and others spent hours proposing mad theories of how to salvage the election Trump had just lost. Here we have truly entered the world of farce.

Yet farce is something you can laugh at and laugh with. The examples I’ve cited more likely involve laughing to keep from crying. Laughter, we know, is supposed to open one’s mind and heart. That’s what Jimmy Kimmel and the other late-night comedians hope to offer. But life’s getting too grim even for them.

Where are the great clowns I grew up with—like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin? Maybe our current politics and culture would be too much, even for them. Humor is ritual cleansing, and our politics is in great need of that.

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A Surfeit of Excess

You must have noticed that so many public figures are guilty of excesses of the grossest kind. Moderation is out, self-indulgence is in. Hate and acrimony have become the coin of the realm. No wonder antisemitism is on the rise.

The top newsmakers are all masters of excess, as they parade their unique versions of cultural debauchery: Putin’s historically induced fantasies of conquest verge on madness; Musk raises egotism to new heights; Greene glories in her own idiocy; Santos gives new meaning to the concept of truth; Bankman-Fried tries to outdo Bernie Madoff. Trump, to be sure, is godfather to them all.

For sheer cultural excess, the scourge of guns in America outdoes them all.

About a year ago in a sort of whimsical piece I took to praising Oscar Wilde and his notion that “nothing succeeds like excess.” Maybe I should have thought twice about endorsing this idea. The common American culture has become excessively debauched in so many ways, and not only by the far right.

Liberal identity politics has sometimes assumed that people from red states are culturally and politically backward—and so it offers a kind of “cultural imperialism” to help these benighted souls. This is a sort of culture shock, often just another form of chauvinism like American exceptionalism. American life is full of such examples, as in the half-century it took to finally give women the right to vote. Racism is an extreme form of cultural chauvinism.

In my Oscar Wilde piece, I took on the truism that nothing succeeds like success, the notion that Oscar parodied. Another way of saying this is that “North Americans commonly believe that anyone who works hard enough will be successful and wealthy. Underlying this belief is the value that wealth is good and important.” Mm-hmm, and do we really believe that the wealthy deserve all their privileges?

The values of our society, which used to represent ideal conditions or accepted truths, seem to have lost their power. The norms that enforce them, like expecting fairness in a transaction, are consistently breached. How are we supposed to judge the controversy over Hunter Biden’s laptop? Or the immigration debate, which has been clouded over with years of ranting on both sides?

My rant here is not going to change anything. To expect us to return to Aristotle’s golden mean—avoiding extremes, the measure of virtue—is a fool’s errand. Most people don’t know who Aristotle is.

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The Aging of the President

In many societies the elders have led the way. This is called gerontocracy, giving the alte kakers real political power. In the United States this seems forever to have been the province of Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Pat Leahy, Jim Clyburn, and Dianne Feinstein—all now on or over the cusp of retirement. Nancy was smart to get out when she did, and Democratic gerontocracy has been under fire.

We know the many stories about Biden’s gaffes, his flare-ups of temper, his halting presentation skills. Gaffes go along with aging, as I can attest. Many in his party would like a younger face for 2024 but the alternatives (and a bruising primary) would make for a daunting situation. You’re not going to get a President Buttigieg in two years.

Assuming he does run in 2024, Mr. Biden will face the defining issue of his age. That, I think, is a major reason for the consistent low standings in his approval ratings. His accomplishments notwithstanding, Joe is still Uncle Joe to those who voted for him and a sometimes doddering old coot to others, i.e., Republicans and many swing voters.

Now comes the documents scandal, which the president’s staff bungled badly: no mea culpa explanations, feckless responses way too slow out of the gate, making light of the situation, altogether deplorable crisis management. Quinnipiac (and I hate to quote Byron York) found that 62% “said Biden acted inappropriately, versus just 21% who said he acted appropriately. That’s nearly a 3-to-1 margin of people who do not believe Biden acted appropriately, which does not bode well for his future attempts to get past the scandal.”

Then there’s the ongoing furor about Hunter, the wayward son. Republicans smell a rat, and the Biden folks have never come clean about all this. The latest revelations about Hunter and his crooked Chinese cohorts seem to make it a still-brewing scandal that the GOP won’t fail to exploit.

In foreign affairs, Uncle Joe is still dogged by how badly he executed the Afghanistan pullout. Still, if his handling of the Ukraine war continues to be successful with the electorate, the stain of that retreat “may be washed away,” in Ross Douthat’s opinion. How Biden handles the jittery economy and the knotty issues of immigration in the next two years may well determine his 2024 fate.

So, of course, will his health—and all the crazy vicissitudes of the world situation. The pressure on Uncle Joe to step down will continue, and I have doubts about whether he will in fact run. God knows I wouldn’t, were I in his shoes, despite his legislative accomplishments.

Biden’s people have urged the White House to “let Biden be himself, even if that occasionally leads to uncomfortable moments on camera.” As I’ve learned about myself, your friends do understand the upsides and downsides of aging. Biden’s decision will rest on whether, given the situation, he understands the conditions and limitations of his own body and mind. I don’t think politics will play a significant role in that.