Rock ‘N’ Roll And The Influence Of Party Culture On Western Civilization

 

 Party Culture [60:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Western Word Radio Interview
With Diana West

Original Air  Date
11:00 Am Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Synopsis

In this powerful interview, Avi Davis engages Washington Times columnist Diana West, author of The Death of the Grown Up, in a fascinating discussion of the impact of rock and party culture in elevating bohemianism, obscenity and pornography as prominent features of our culture.  It also deals with the way infantilizing trends have eroded the boundaries between private and public life and the disappearance of shame and modesty in the relationships between men and women.

Introduction

Avi Davis: This is Avi Davis. Welcome to Western World Radio where we discuss issues relevant to the defense and protection of Western values and ideals.

Today’s discussion revolves around a subject very close to my heart.  For years I’ve successfully hidden it; shielding my readers, my closest associates from the truth. Yes, dear friends, I have an admission. I love rock and roll. I love the beat. I love the adrenaline, the energy and the passion of the music. I love power chords. From the first time I heard my first Beatles tune in 1964, I’ve been avidly bopping around in my bedroom playing air guitar with the rest of my generation; despite the scorn of parents, siblings, and now even my children.

Yet, does loving rock music, or rock and roll, mean – necessarily – endorsing the culture it has spawned? The advent of Rock Culture could be said to have opened the doors to obscenity, pornography and the erosion of the boundaries between private and public life. The elimination of shame is an element in defining relationships between men and women. If that is so, then what kind of permanent damage to our values and ideals has rock culture wrought? And what are it’s consequences for our civilization?

To answer that question today, we’re fortunate to have with us Diana West, a syndicated Washington Times columnist and the author of the widely acclaimed, non-fiction work, The Death of the Grown Up: How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization.  Diana, welcome.

Diana West: Thank you, Avi.

Rock Music vs. Mainstream Culture

Avi Davis: So the main thesis of your book, if I might state it, is that our civilization has become so infantilized that it has weakened our cultural and moral resolve to defy supremacist ideologies that are seeking to destroy it. What role, do you think, rock music and rock culture has played in that process?

Diana West:  Well, I think it’s a huge role, and I say that in having looked back at the development of adolescent youth culture. And what I concluded was that rock and roll was really the single expression of that culture. It came about in the years following World War II, when all of a sudden we went from a depression – which is not sounding so unfamiliar to our ears these days – but we had the depression years in the 1930’s; and then we had the turn around of the economy becoming a war economy in the 1940’s. Then, following the war, we had a very different cultural and familial and economic climate to deal with. What came out of that in the 1950’s – and even the late 1940’s – was a culture that was, for the first time perhaps in human history, oriented toward youth. We saw this manifesting itself in the new advent of pocket money and access to funds in the pockets of young people really – again, for the first time on this sort of scale – whereby they could express themselves in this newly vibrant marketplace; that was – again, for the first time in human history – actually producing product and entertainment for very young, and I would say undeveloped, tastes of children and teenagers. Out of this, we saw all kinds of new product, new kinds of consumerism; and, again, the most lasting impact – is the rise of rock and roll. So when you actually start looking at cultural revolution, which I think many of us recognize in different aspects of life, I think you do have to go back to the origins of the much beloved rock and roll. Which, amazingly enough, endures a half century after it began.

Avi Davis: Well I was born exactly a half century ago and came of age right at the dawn of the rock era. So The Beatles, and The Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, and The Byrds formed the soundtrack to my early years. And I’m still magnetically drawn to the sunny lyricism of those times. Of course, there’s a story here of how a, supposed, neo-con can be so wrapped up in a musical revolution  that has done so much to shred the civilized norms that we once took for granted.  So how do we perceive it today? Is this music some sort of escape, or some kind of refuge or is it, perhaps, something even more basic than that; like an innate desire to recapture adolescence, an escape from responsibility, or rejection of authority?  Mind you, I’m not trying to appoint you my therapist but I am interested in those details.

Diana West: (laughing) Well, I would first of all, say that you’re a little too young for the “dawn” of the rock n’ roll era.  I would place it earlier in the 1950’s, before you were actually born, when we did see this phenomenon take hold.  What was interesting to me in going back and looking at some of the old trade publications – like Variety or Hollywood Reporter, these hard-bitten, entertainment writers with their funny “Hollywood Reporter-eze” and “Variety-eze”, the way they had certain slang in those publications – were trying to grapple with this new form of rhythm & blues (R&B), rock n’ roll as it was coming out and they saw it as just another craze; one of many like the Samba, or the Merengue, or the Cha-Cha, or something.  They didn’t see it, yet, as something that would actually come to dominate popular music.

That said, I think we have to remember that recorded music is a relatively new development. I mean, we can now look back 50, 60, 75, even 80 years but I think part of it is that now we have soundtracks for whatever decade one thinks of fondly about youth. We all have our sound tracks, whereas previous centuries of course didn’t relate, or live with, music in the same sense.  It wasn’t a constant. I mean, we’re the people who have the radio, or now the iPod and so on, on all the time. So I think there is the, sort of, Proustian quality of youth wrapped up in whatever the pop music was at the time. But again, I think that it is the impact of what we deal with, even if our politics take us toward the right and we are more traditionalist in our intellectual approach of the world.

I think, though, that we have to grapple with the change in sensibility that rock n’ roll – no matter what variety, or decade, or who the popular creator at the time – all seem to share, a crudeness to music, to emotion – allowing for exceptions, allowing for virtuosity – but just looking at the overall impact – a narrowing, even, of emotional experience that I think has been destructive.  The sexualization is another constant. So these are things that may come out in music in a fetching way, or a fun way, or whatever your taste is. But these are serious messages that, I think, we’ve all been conditioned toward and shaped by. You would be one, it sounds like, who  grapples with the mixed message of what you think and what you respond to musically; but these have created lasting, I think, problems in how we relate to each other as men and women, in how we relate to growing up.  Again, my book goes beyond that and tries to apply these sorts of changes across politics and education and so on. I think you have to go back to this emotional and developmental impact.

Bohemianism

Avi Davis: Do you think that people today, when they listen to the lyrics of rap music or anything like that, have sort of become deaf to the message?  I mean, I have to tell you that I remember when my first recognition of the power of rock music to project a message came to me in 1972, or 71, when I heard Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”, which was about a transsexual. I didn’t discover this until 6 months after I’d first heard it, but it shocked me that that was being played. I was only 14, but it shocked me!  I guess the question I have Bohemianism has always been around, the rejection of authority is as old as the French Revolution . . .

Diana West: Or older.

Avi Davis:   I’m just wondering if society was building towards this anyway. The post-war generation, the Baby-Boomers, felt they faced no constraints. The war was over, and won, and communism, of course, was looming.  Yet, there wasn’t this pressing existential threat that had weighed on civilization since the beginning of the century with the first two world wars. So was this sort of a build up that had been coming anyway, and rock music just sort of unleashed it?

Diana West:  Could be, yes. I think it was coming anyway. You could call it a “perfect storm” of factors. Yes, I think that that is very true.  What I think is also interesting, and this is something that came to me when I was doing my research, was that you could argue that the 1920’s – another period of great dislocation following a great war; and new manners and morés.  Short skirts, bobbed hair, new kind of sexuality; woman going out of the house and working in somewhat different modes – was the revolution that happened, but didn’t all-the-way happen; in the sense that it was interrupted by the Great Depression at the end of the decade. I think that there was also always a counter-weight to the Bohemianism that was coming and expressing itself in new mass communication, in the new coast-to-coast radio and so on and movies.  There was still a counter-weight of, what I call, the Babbitry – after our favorite Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis. It was sort of a touchstone even when I was a kid, even though I hadn’t read that book at the time, but I knew what it was. But the Babbitt, the booste,r based on The Rotary Club which still exists of course, but was lampooned in the 1920’s book and actually became a noun meaning the “conventional, middle class, business man” which I found very interesting.

Rejection of Babbit

Diana West: That’s quite all right.  It’s just that there were enough Babbits still in the 1920’s, I think, to pose a counter-weight to the new kind of weightlessness that was coming in the cultural changes. Now, three decades forward to the 1960’s, and I would argue the 1950’s as well, the Babbitry has also been Bohemianized by jazz, by the movies, by a mass culture that – again – gave access to ideas and attitudes that were just not prevalent previously. We change. People change. It’s just something to document, and also, I think, take stock of and understand that it isn’t always the way you think it is now. That is actually one thing that shocked me, I was born in 1961 and, even though I knew, I was still kind of shocked at how new some of these developments were. Whether it had to do with Feminism, or some of the new attitudes – I can’t think of any off the top of my head – but the newness of the past 50 years in comparison to what came before somewhat gave me pause and made me also wonder if one can change again. Not to turn back any clocks because, obviously, there is no way to turn back – or even a desire to turn back a clock – that’s very counter-productive; but just ways to understand these sorts of trends that are, very often, acting upon us from the outside.  I think that that, again, is a challenge of living in a media culture where we’re saturated by this stuff.

The Effect of the Vietnam War on Society

Avi Davis: Now, I’m very interested in the impact of the Vietnam War, and the Baby Boom Generation in general. I like this line that you provide us in the book, “The Baby Boomer generation is perpetually in revolt, but never  its own master.”  I’m interested to know did the Vietnam War alter the consciousness of the 60’s generation and set the course, or the cultural agenda of the country, for the next 40 years? Just to add to that – it’s interesting that you quote the U2 singer, Bono, at the 2004 Grammy Awards when he urges the audience to “keep f -ing up the mainstream!!” when,  he fails to realize that  he is the mainstream.

Diana West: Yes, well, it’s all connected in the sense of perpetual, revolutionary attitude, which is perpetual cool. Not realizing at a certain point that the cool and the hip, in a sense, have become about as square as it can possibly be, given its prevalence and staleness.  I mean, at some point if everybody shows up in a motorcycle jacket, including the J.C.Penney Catalog- which sells them at a discount, you’re no longer on the cutting edge. But the fantasy remains that you are on the cutting edge. I think that, in a sense, is where someone like Bono would be in urging his fans to keep up with this kind of behavior even as he is the most corporately enriching, global figure of stature now; even political stature. There is no sense that he is not mainstream. That was one irony I thought needed to be highlighted.

The Vietnam War

As far as the Vietnam War, I think you have to go back a little bit to understand the new development of everybody in the middle class, and below, and above, going to college. This was unprecedented and you saw this explosion of higher education – again, following World War II – and this created a gigantic avant-guard. Instead of having – what the word really means: the force in front – everybody was in the same mindset. You had this whole generation of young and cosseted American youth going and getting higher degrees, again, that their parents would not have had themselves. So there was a certain power structure that was being interrupted . You also had the rise of the belief in science, belief in no longer needing the home as the main educator, but delegating to the various institutions that had cropped up to educate us and to teach wisdom to our kids. So then you end up in the 60’s with this war that, due to the eternal wisdom of our leaders, created a terrible rift in our classes by allowing the draft to stop at the college door. So you ended up with that whole impetus. You ended with this, in a sense, loss of control of the campuses to this war effort and you ended up with professors – and others in the educated classes and elites and so on – aping the new politics of leftism of their students and finding moral vindication. So you ended up with this very, kind of, ugly situation.  I find, especially looking back on it, it doesn’t wear well over time. Again, this was sort of a manifestation of this explosion of youth and privilege.

Rejection of Authority

Avi Davis:  So bucking authority, or rejection of authority, do you think it began at that time? It’s interesting that you quote David Horowitz. You know, he wrote in his memoirs about the protest demonstration in June 1970 drew close to one million people and exactly a year later, in 1971 when the draft had ended, only 30,000 attended the same protest. So Horowitz said the rationale for most people to protest was gone. When this fact registered with him, the effect was devastating.  He recognized  that the driving force behind the massive anti-war movement on America’s campuses was not anti-war, but to the desire avoid military service.  Was the consequence of this, ultimately,  a rejection of authority and the fear of the exercise of power that penetrated the consciousness of a generation?

Diana West: Yes, I found that incredibly shocking.  I didn’t know that such a stark figure existed. I mean, that really gave a light to the whole moral authority of this movement — that it was all about saving their own skin. Again, you saw that repeated with the plight of the boat people that did not seem to arouse the tears of the anti-war movement a little later on in the decade. But again, what the campus movements comes down to is terribly bad behavior on the part of the students; whether it was cutting fire hoses, destroying professors, occupying buildings, trashing ROTC offices, protesting, sit-ins, etc., all of which the students expected no punishment for. The professors, administrators and parents who were paying their way did nothing to correct the behavior. I think, in a sense, that was it. That really showed the absolute hollowness of that older generation that this behavior was allowed – temper trantrums were allowed – to continue absolutely uncorrected. Even in situations where it came down to a suspension, it seemed invariably they were negated. I may have found one case where they actually wanted credit, course credit for their aberrant conduct, and it’s just astonishing when you think of it. Again, the older generation gave in and just surrendered. I think you find few memoirs where this becomes very plain and shocking, very shocking behavior, but it was the norm at the time. I don’t know how it would be greeted today. I think in some sense, that sort of tantrum is no longer necessary. All these changes have already been effected on the campuses, there’s really nothing more to protest. It’s an amazing thing to look back on with a little distance.

Avi Davis:  Well, it wasn’t just the parents, it was also the college professors and the faculties, as you say in the book who allowed, “ liberalism rolled over on it’s back, like a turtle and waited to die”; and that’s absolutely true. The liberal college was under attack from radicals. And the radicals, essentially, won and now occupy the academy.

Diana West: Right. Yes. Exactly. The takeover was complete and entrenched and that is how we have the kind of campuses we have where multiculturalism rules, and speech codes have come up. And there have been great intrusions into the private lives and thoughts of students who have any desire to speak out or rebel.

Parents Acting as Children

Avi Davis: One of the commanding questions you ask throughout this book is: where were the parents? Where are the parents? You’ve actually got a chapter titled, Parents Who Need Parents. There’s plenty of examples that you give of parents who completely abdicated their responsibility. I’m just thinking of one of those examples, I think it’s in Maryland, where a couple facilitate their children’s involvement in pornographic acts by bringing in a stripper . . .

Diana West: Oh, New York. Yes.

Avi Davis: I’m very interested in this. Are parents in these circumstances seeking to appease their kids? Are they trying to win favor with them? Or is just that they want to be adolescents themselves?

Diana West: Yes, all of the above. I think it’s a situation where you have parents who succumb to peer pressure; to peer pressure of their children, their children’s friends and their parents. Again, the idea is they want to be cool. They don’t want to be “prudes.” They don’t want to be tough or hard or old-fashioned or old-fogies. Oh my gosh, don’t! You know, that’s the worst possible term of opprobrium, I find, something like being a  prude. So you have this weird situation where there is no one in charge, and no one is setting any kind of boundaries.

Indeed, that example was a very strange story. It happened just a few days before 9/11, in 2001 of course. I was, at the time, living not too far away. I was up in New York at the time in Westchester County and this was a story from the town of Chappaqua, where now Secretary of State Clinton once had her New York home. It was a situation where a football team from the local high school was having a party to celebrate the beginning of the new school year and, indeed, they invited a stripper. There were kids from, say, between 14, 15 up to 18 years old attending the party . . . with the parents! This was  the thing – you couldn’t even say” well the parents were out and the kids did this behind their backs.” No, the parents were quote “chaperoning” the party when the police came in response to some sort of a noise complaint and found these under-age minors involved in lewd acts with the stripper. So this was a great story for the New York Post briefly, before tragedy and terrorism and cataclysm struck. Again, it really underscores this complete lack of centeredness for parents. It’s almost like a cartoon, really. It’s an unusual story because it has so many high points, but it’s not really an unusual behavior. You find quite a lot of similar anecdotes from all across the country.

You know, the phenomenon of Spring Break . . . which may be one good affect of the economic downturn – the kids are not given so much license and money and freedom to travel the world as very young people, unchaperoned. But Spring Break has become a right – I don’t think it’s a rite of passage – but just a right. A bacchanalian right of many middle-class American high school students to go to some sun-drenched, booze-drenched, and other-things-drenched tropical spot and run riot for a week; and perhaps end up in jail, or perhaps end up assaulted, and perhaps end up drugged. I mean, it’s a terrible situation but the parents feel, “oh well, what can I say? They want to go.” I would say, “Well you could say no”.

Avi Davis: You could deny them the money to go.

Diana West: Yeah! They don’t have to fund it.

Obscenity

Avi Davis: Let’s talk about obscenity for a minute. You date the beginning of the obscenity culture – which passes much of the time virtually unnoticed in today’s world to Lenny Bruce in the 1960s.  What’s happened to censorship and ability of our society to control the language in public discourse?

Diana West: Well, there’s very little ability to control it. I think that by the time you are going to rely on legal mechanisms – in some ways you’ve already lost the battle. Because a lot of this comes about – a lot of the effectiveness of what you might call censorship or self-censorship in terms of not wanting to use profanity in all venues – but a lot of that comes about in just how the market, how the people react. Of course, we’ve always had bawdiness, burlesque, strippers, bad language, comedians who use their crudity; there’s any number of them that preceded Lenny Bruce certainly. What was different by the time Lenny Bruce, those who followed him, came was that he was suddenly presented in mainstream venues. I think that is one of the great losses of our society. Namely, that we no longer have boundaries between what is mainstream – and kind of anodyne – and even boring or just easy for everyone to take. It ranges  - it can be very brilliant as well, but you know what I mean – in terms of being acceptable to a broad audience; and then always having the offshoots, the racy edges, the places you have to go and maybe knock on a door, or seek out something that is truly subversive or truly disturbing to most people.

Avi Davis: You just have to ­­­­­turn the television on today.

Diana West: Exactly! So there is no longer a public square you can go to with certainty that your child is not going to be appalled, or upset; or yourself, frankly. You no longer have that sense of traveling to the dark side because it’s all over you. I think that is a very big loss for us. I think it’s not good for the human condition.

Pornography

Avi Davis: And pornography, and the prevalence of pornography . . . Several years ago I walked by a newspaper stand, and for the first time I really looked at the magazines there and I was just shocked to see that so many of the covers were all “cheesecake”. It was just lots of naked women.

Diana West: Yeah, cheesecake is a nice word for it.

Avi Davis: Really, I was quite amused by it; although it’s a troubling development as well. But you give an example of the Maryland Rotary Club that decided to put together a calendar featuring it’s male members in their, 60’s and 70’s. Of course, the calendar is of the men in the buff, and none too flattering at that. . Is this symbolic of what has happened to us? .  I mean, this is a Rotary Club, and the Rotary Club is, of course, a very staid, conservative group. This was done very tongue-in-cheek, of course;, it was designed to raise money or whatever.  But have they too  become enveloped by the Playboy ethos?    Do we have today such a highly sexualized culture that it doesn’t allow kids to walk home from school – which was a common experience for generations of Americans – because we fear sexual predators. I’m wondering if pornography has contributed to that sexualization and what it’s done to all of us in  terms of the way we view the world.

Diana West: Well, I think so. I think it’s done really terrible things and I think that Rotary story, even though it is amusing, but I think it is really quite telling that the sort of stereotypical bastion, that the stalwarts of the community, the productive people, the people who run the town, who build the libraries and so on, run the businesses in the town – they’re very important people in any community, and we need more of them – but for them to kind of waltz into this spoof of the Playboy calendar really does, again, remove any sense of boundary.  And my question for them really was – when the sex video store wants to set up shop on Main Street, what is their argument against it  – assuming they would have one?  I think they still would. But again, they have brought the nude calendar from the mechanic’s garage where it hangs in the corner, right into the front room of any of the businesses. Again, where does that leave you when you’re trying to keep your community clean in the traditional sense – keep it with some sense of probity and sobriety and so on – it really leaves you in a funny, indefensible spot.  And I don’t think there’s any recognition of this. I think everyone is so swept up in ‘ha-ha’, ‘cool’,” ha ha” silly spoof, we’re hip – you know, that whole ethos – that there’s no thought to the impact.

Avi Davis: Or recognition on a subconscious level of how it erodes our very basic values.

Society’s Anesthetic

Diana West: Well, I think it does. Another thing we don’t always think of is – it also removes the excitement and the, sort of, nervy-ness of going of going into the Bohemian life, or the Dark Side, or what have you; the anti-bourgeois existence. There’s no longer any creative tension that, once upon a time, did give us wonderful art and literature. So there is this irony that, in making everything permissible, I think that we’ve kind of gone so lax, that, no longer, do you have that creative tension that allowed some of our unconventional spirits throughout time to bounce off the constricting forces of the bourgeoisie and actually give us something back that we can enjoy in a different way, or appreciate anyway. So I think it’s a funny thing. I think you kind of get this big, flabby middle.

Avi Davis: I call it the moral anesthesnization of our society. We’re just sort of blind and dumb to the realities of it and what it actually means.

Diana West: I think you have to be. For example, this has happened to me on more than one occasion – I don’t know why – I’ve been in the supermarket, in the produce department and Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night” comes on; and I always think ‘What is going on?’ I’m trying to do my shopping list and I’m listening to this song about some sort of a sexual assignation and it just seems so inappropriate; but, of course, everyone’s shopping. But I think what we do is we end up – to use your phrase – anesthesnitzing or shutting out, any sort of appreciation for what it is or says and you just go about your business. But again, you’re building a thick skin, you’re kind of closing off to stimulus and it’s just a weird way to live.

Avi Davis: Now the music, of course, a Rod Stewart song like that – which is really a description of a seduction – relates to my next question which is about the erosion of the boundary between public and private life. Reality shows, Jerry Springer, even Court TV, the dating programs – are they all a symptom of this basic moral collapse?

The Erosion of the Boundary Between Public and Private Life

Diana West: Yes. I think it’s all part and parcel of it. These are all offshoots and different manifestations of the same new sensibility. Privacy, private life, has really shrunk. And I think we’re seeing – even since I’ve written the book, which came out at the end of 2007 – now we have the advent of Facebook, and other kinds of online meeting and socializing networks. I was reading an interesting piece where a psychologist was saying that the way kids are using Facebook, and also just texting in general, it’s almost as if a feeling is not a feeling unless it is shared with a large group of people. Its a transformation of the human psyche. I think I’ve seen that just watching how conversations go with young people (kids, teens). We have a different kind of sense of what it is to be a sentient human being. At this moment it seems that private life, privacy, intimacy – I think intimacy suffers mightily – and that, I think, is another great misfortune here. But we’re seeing it really, just scalded away by all of the public-ness that we have instant access to.

Returning to Adolescence

Avi Davis: Well I’m very glad you raised Facebook because recently I’ve been bombarded with requests to be on Facebook and I surrendered to the temptation. And all of a sudden, I found myself being swept back into adolescence because the people who are trying to contact me were all of my high school friends; many I haven’t contacted for 30 years. I’m really drawn back and I’m astonished to see that the conversations are about events that happened 30 years ago in high school. It’s a phenomenon.  But it’s like a spiral; I get drawn into it deeper and deeper because I’m actually interested in these people’s lives.

I remember a song by Bruce Springsteen, “Glory Days” about how he meets an old friend and all he can talk about is the old days and nothing about present life. And I’m just wondering if this is another symptom that we value adolescence so highly as a time of exploration or, as I said before, rejection of authority and we don’t value our present lives enough.

Diana West: Well, yes; and I would add to it that we don’t want to evolve past that feeling of adolescence. That’s something that my husband and I came to understand only after our kids were born. I actually put this in the book; it really was one of those ‘eureka’ moments.  We had twin daughters, on their first birthday we had some of the grown up friends that we had not seen for that first year because we were so immersed in twin babyhood (handling that). My husband’s boss at the time, at a major media business, wanted to meet  my little girls and I introduced him and I said, ‘This is Mr. Smith’; and Mr. Smith says to me, ‘Oh no. I’m not old enough to be Mr. Smith, call me Bob.’ Now, Mr. Smith was plenty old enough to be a “Mr.” He was a man of position, he had a mortgage, he had a family of his own; he was certainly a “Mr.” compared to these one year old little moppets.  I remember just thinking ‘This is really interesting’. This only repeated throughout their baby years. This is something I realized our generation, a little bit above/a little bit below our age group, no one wanted to be acknowledged as having gone over to the stage of adulthood. Even something as symbolic, I guess it is highly symbolic, as getting an honorific as Mr. or Mrs. was troubling to them. I realized that this was probably the beginning of my book because it’s symptomatic of so many things. There is a sense that you should never actually arrive at an adult stage; that you’re constantly becoming something else.

I think that this is something I was very interested to find, that the famed and esteemed English professor from Columbia, Lionel Trilling, wrote about at the time of the Columbia revolution (I would call it). He understood that the students, in about 1969 when he was writing, rejected the notion of “becoming”; they wanted to stay in a state of “being”.  And I think that was such a brilliant understanding; to be in the midst of that turmoil and see that. But he realized that and he related it to the study of English literature because he said all great literature – whether it’s David Copperfield or anything else – it’s all about a character in a state of “becoming”, becoming who he will be.

Avi Davis:  He grows up…… in other words.

Diana West: You grow up, and in that process, you necessarily close doors on who you will not become, because you make choices. So you are, in a sense, shutting down the possibilities as you age, as you mature, as you “arrive”. He understood that the student movement rejected that notion of ever closing any door. I think that’s the personality that has lingered on all these many decades since and that is why we end up with someone who says, “I am not a Mr.”; because he is still growing up, even though he’s 45/50 years old. I don’t think he’s going to change course unless he loses his job and has to go out to be on an Obama chain gang on a new highway project or something. But it’s a funny thing. It’s a rejection of “becoming” and a desire to stay in a state of “being”.

The Disappearance of Shame

Avi Davis: That’s very interesting. I’d like to let you know, Diana, that your book inspired me to read more on this subject. I’ve read a book by Laura  Stepp Sessions; I think the name is called “Hooking Up”, Michael Kimmel’s book, “Guy Land” and Gary Cross’ book, “Men to Boys”. An overriding theme of all these books is the disappearance of shame.  The hooking up culture in particular is very, very disturbing. Session’s book is entitled, “Hooking Up: How young women debased themselves, delay marriage and lose themselves in the process.  I think you’d also call  it Party Culture. I’d like to get a sense from you, how you think it has harmed men and women’s sense of themselves.

Diana West: Again, I think it has shrunk the possibilities of emotional relationships between men and women. There is another book I would add to your list, I’m sure you came across, a book by Rochelle Gurstein. She wrote a book called “The Repeal of Reticence” which has tracked this movement in our culture going back a long way into the 19^th Century, and on. I think that when young people meet – and I have daughters, as I mentioned so I worry about this – when young people meet, the instant notion in their heads is when, if sex comes into their relationship, the period of romance, the period of excitement, at just being near someone, etc. has been lost in the sense of the cultural expectations that they see around them; whether it’s on MTV, or the fashion magazines, or the movies. There is, in their mind – indelibly, the possibilities – the actual depicted, no-holds-barred – possibilities of what their meeting can lead to. This is, again, something very different from previous generations. I think that this harms any kind of fruitful and enjoyable relationship on any level. I think it’s a very destructive thing. I think it makes people a little crazy. I don’t know how you put that genie back in the bottle; except to hope that you do teach your children to value themselves so that they are not in a constant spiral of these sorts of “hooking up” affairs that can get so tremendously disturbing, particularly for girls.

Hollywood/Television Movies: A Reflection or An Influence?

Avi Davis: I want to just draw your attention television and movies, now. There’s an article here in front of me from the Los Angeles Times from February 1, 2009. It’s about the ABC Family cable program, “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.” It says here that ­­Secret Life has become ABC’s biggest hit, and one of the most popular shows on cable, drawing an average 3.8 million viewers per episode.  But it has depictions of teens rolling out of bed, a father peppering his daughter with questions about their sex life at the dinner table, and a troubled boy revealing he was molested by his father. This is a show that Disney, of course, has put out ,  so there’s obviously a strategy.  And its identified by Ann Sweeney, ABC’s President, who is quoted here.  She is asked ‘how could you make this – this is not family entertainment. (Pat Robertson apparently started this channel). She answers, “The best way to resonate with your audience is to be authentic. You’re only authentic if you are holding up a mirror to your audience and saying ‘I see you’.”

Now that’s a very troubling attitude. Do any of these executives bear responsibility for what we’re seeing; or are they just reflecting back to society what it wants to see and what it wants to hear?

Diana West: Well, I think that they are reflecting, and promoting, the worst possible kinds of behavior. Because they’re doing that, and they are in positions of tremendous authority and influence, I think they are abdicating their roles as gatekeepers. You know it’s an interesting thing when you look back at Louis B. Mayer – one of the founders of MGM – and the glory days of the old movies, he did not want to make a movie that depicted a mother in a bad light. You could say that this would cut us off from all kinds of interesting, and perhaps great, literary works, but this is something he felt was very important. He has this sense that he should not go farther in that regard. I think that he was trying to act very responsibly.

Avi Davis:  If I can just interject  . . . Louis B. Mayer, himself, was a something of a vulture, a reptilian creature. My understanding of him – his personal morals – were somewhat suspect. So the personal attitudes do not always reflect public persona.   What I am saying is…..wasn’t he just reflecting the morés of the time? America wanted to see that kind of stuff. Today, isn’t it really a bit different? Don’t people want to see a bad mother? They’re craving for that kind of prurient fare.

Diana West: I think there’s a lot of chicken and egg to the discussion. I would say that it’s true that the population is much more accepting, and perhaps hungry for, some of this more prurient stuff. On the other hand, if you go back to – say, in the 1960’s – when you started seeing some of these movies like Bonnie and Clyde (that was a real landmark film for it’s very gratuitous violence and it’s, sort of, pornographication of violence in that ultimate death scene of Bonnie and Clyde. You can’t say that the population was hungry for it because they hadn’t seen it before; but, of course, it creates an appetite for it.

I think that the movies almost died in the 1920’s – and this would also involve Louis B. Mayer and the other moguls – because Hollywood behavior was coming out in the newspapers; not screen behavior, but off-screen behavior. It was so bad and so scandalous that there were any number of individual bills, in individual states and localities, calling for bans on Hollywood products across the country. This is something I found in an A. Scott Berg book about Samuel Goldwyn, and the movie moguls had to get together and figure out what to do to save their industry. So they did clean up their act, and did actually, voluntarily – well if you can call it that, they felt they were in trouble – but they decided to call in a censor.  And they ended up getting, at the time, the Post Master-General to come out and, sort of, sit over the scripts and give them a stamp of approval.  So you could say that, but I do feel that there was a sense – for example, in terms of the World War II effort, you saw a real sense of trying to stay patriotic. Again, you could say, well the population was patriotic so, yes, to a great extent you’re right. But I do think you can’t completely let these people off the hook because they do have great power in what to present to the people, and what behaviors to promote.

So I would say that they are greatly encouraging our worser angels rather than our better angels. I don’t think by encouraging better angels you’re aiming for boring or really dull material. It just so happens, they take the easy way out with the prurient and very sensationalized stuff; whether it’s the teenagers rolling out of bed, or the bad mothers, or what have you. It’s an easy out. It’s not very creative. I also think it’s damaging.

The Consequences

Avi Davis: In our last ten minutes, I want to deal with the latter part of your book which really deals with what the consequences of all this is; because America’s faced with significant threats from abroad, and significant threats within.  You talk about multiculturalism. You talk about Islamic threats in Europe. We’ve seen what’s happened in Europe – basically, a morally weakened society, that is unprepared for dealing with rise of militant Islam. Can you elaborate a little bit on that for the audience in terms of what America faces, and how it’s unprepared morally?

Diana West: I’d love to. Well, it’s interesting because I was going to write this book originally in the 1990’s; but we moved and I put it aside for personal reasons. After 9/11, I actually didn’t think my idea – of the death of the grown up – really had relevance any longer. I kept thinking, and it suddenly occurred to me, that it had tremendous applications in the post-9/11 world. Specifically, because of the points you’re outlining, in the sense that, having become an infantilized culture – and I would include Europe in this statement – we are not prepared for the advent of the most current threat which does come from expansionist Islam. And, as I studied Islam, because at the time I was also writing editorials and learning quite a lot, I realized that the position of the non-Muslim in Islamic society (a dhimmi) is very similar to an infantilized American or European. It is not a fully realized adult. There is no freedom of speech; there is no freedom of equality, of position; there is no freedom of religion; and what concerned me was that we have, in a sense, through the adaptation of things like multiculturalism and politically correct speech codes, we have already created ourselves as potential dhimmi. I see this every day. I see this, not just in Europe, I see it in Washington D.C. where I live. I see it in our government which sent out a list of speech codes about not tying the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” in governmental directives just last spring etc., and in many, many other examples. It really struck me that due to a coincidence, I think it’s coincidental of the development of our culture in coming into closer contact with Islamic culture, that we are not adult enough to withstand this terrific onslaught of a totalitarian system. I think we’re in big trouble until we grow up (to go back to the metaphor) to actually assess, without fear of speaking out – the threat as it presents itself – and to deal with it. It takes a big grown up to do that.

Avi Davis: All tied in with this, of course, is the rise of individualism at the expense of social cohesion. The focus on individual gratification, personal fulfillment, has superceded the idea that you belong to a community. I’ve seen this happen in the Gay community with the insistence on certain rights, without an understanding of how that effects society in general.has been a terrible blow.   It’s a demand for individual fulfillment at the expense of  the implications it has for society in general.

Diana West: Yes. Well, I would also say that that quest for self fulfillment makes one very insular and easily contented. There’s a sense of abdication of any kind of defense of one’s position because one is still happy with material things and doesn’t want to bother with anything outside that. It’s a difficult situation. I think in some ways the economic turndown may be beneficial; in terms of waking people up to what’s around them, because they no longer can be so complacent. I’m looking for a silver lining (laughing).

Mick Jagger: The Perpetual Adolescent

Avi Davis: Well you should be. That’s a good thing. To conclude in the last few minutes . . . I’ll refer to Mick Jagger. I find it startling that a 64-year-old man is prancing around the stage like he did when he was in his 20’s, or in his teens. At a concert in Brazil, young girls were seen sporting t-shirts emblazoned with the words “Mick Jagger, put a baby in me!” – alluding to the fact the Jagger’s Brazilian girlfriend had become pregnant by him. I’m just interested, what does Mick Jagger represent, you could also put Paul McCartney in the same category, but Mick Jagger – for some reason – is a perpetual adolescent. Of course his face has changed, but nothing else has changed about him – not even the way he lives his personal life. I’m just interested, is he a hero to Baby-Boomers because of this, because he’s held on to his adolescence? What do you think?

Diana West: Probably. I mean, at a certain point . . . It’s funny. It keeps going. I think at a certain point it becomes farcical and I think we’re actually at that point.

Avi Davis: Well,30 years ago it was farcical. But today…..

Diana West: Well, certainly he is an exemplar of this whole notion; but it’s done very well for him. I mean, I think the sadder part is the people who are like Mick Jagger, and his age cohort, who are not multi-millionaires and don’t have private islands, and multiple women flocking to them because of their millions and private islands. I mean, the sad part are the people who never grew up and are more modest people. It’s not a good role model I guess I’m trying to say. He’s very successful, personally.

Avi Davis: It is successful, but you have to wonder about what kind of message it gives to the rest of us; who have watched him develop, and watched him grow – or not grow, I should say. Just before we finish up, I want to talk about religion and I want to talk particularly about the Catholic Church. All religions have had their sex scandals, all of them, but the Catholic Church in particular. How has it been affected by the sexualization the rock culture initiated?

How Has Religion Been Affected By the Cultural Revolution?

Diana West: Well I can only speculate, but given the timing and so on, I would think it was deeply affected. I think that just as all walks of life were sexualized, so too was the Church. It’s highly disgraceful and unfortunate beyond words, but I think that, again, we are all creatures of our time; even the Catholic Church. It’s something you hoped that they’ve dug themselves out of, but it was a terrible blow to traditional people and traditional morality, and traditional religion.

Avi Davis: Yes, I absolutely agree with that. I find that the Catholic Church is now grappling with the reality of the legacy of those years. It doesn’t quite know how to deal with it.

Diana West: Right. It’s probably, in some ways, the most damaged institution – I think – of all of them. Just because you would expect more, you expect a lot more, so it has suffered the most for its depredations.

CONCLUSION

Avi Davis: So Diana, do you have any further books in the works? Are you working on a sequel?

Diana West: Yes, I am. It’s not near completion yet, but it is titled. It’s called The Hollow Center.

Avi Davis: Well, we’ll have to keep our eyes open for that. Diana West, I really want to thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure to share this hour with you. The Death of the Grown Up has been a featured Book of the Month on the American Freedom Alliance website. Also, Diana, your book will be featured book in our literary café, which we run in Southern California.

Diana West: Wonderful. I really appreciate that.

Avi Davis: I’d like to ask our audience to join us next week when we interview Andrew McCarthy, the author of “Willful Blindness”

Diana West: He’s one of my favorite people.

Avi Davis: He’s a wonderful, wonderful author and I’m looking forward to speaking to him. We’ll be covering some of the same ground. So thank you very much for joining us and  to our listening audience, we’ll see you again next week.

Diana West: Thank you again for the opportunity.