American popular culture has always been distinguished (if that's the right word) by a certain degree of low-brow style, dating at least as far back as P.T. Barnum and as recently as "Beavis and Butt-head." By and large, this is a good thing. It helps to ground us in the unpretentious ways that make our democracy tick. It reminds us -- sole superpower though we are -- to keep our heads unswelled, our shirts unstuffed, our sense of self-importance under control.
But like all good things, a dose of low-brow can be done to wretched excess. Which brings us to the epidemic of dumbness afflicting the culture today.
Take the cinema. (Who said "please"?) Yes, first-rate films continue to be made, but we can't help noting that three of the hottest movies in America are "Dumb and Dumber," "Billy Madison" and "The Brady Bunch Movie." The first concerns two dumb guys who wreak havoc as they try to return a woman's missing briefcase. The second is about a dumb guy in his 20s who must pass 12 school grades in six months if he is to inherit the family business. And the third takes a dumb family from a dumb 1970s sitcom and plops them, unaltered and still proudly polyestered, into the nasty 1990s.
Further evidence of what The New York Times has labeled "The pTC New Stupidity" is easily found on other fronts. Broadway seems unable to do much better than revivals and riotous musicals that aim more for the eardrums than the soul. The best-seller lists are crammed with cheesy thrillers, Robert James Waller's novella-length greeting cards, and assorted attempts to cash in on the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The pop music charts teem with angst-ridden millionaires rehashing punk, heavy metal and other genres of the Brady Decade. And television. . . Don't get us started.
Granted, every generation's cultural arbiters tend to bemoan the absence of real quality in the work of contemporary creators. One decade's paint splotches are a later decade's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Yesterday's incoherent prose is today's required reading in the collegiate core curriculum. The same applies to the bluesy "devil's music" of years past, now a fit subject for musicologists to expound on in scholarly journals.
But overhanging is a nagging feeling that there's something unique about our current epoch of exquisite dumbness. Maybe it's the midwinter blahs. Or maybe it's what's at the movies and on the boob tube. How low can we go? Stay tuned. The answer might be coming to a theater near you.