[I know I said I wasn’t going to do anything here until February, but this current kerfuffle about the TV programme on C4 – ‘Celebrity’ Big Brother touches on one of the things that I would like to make a main theme of this blog – namely the failure of popular culture]
[Here and many other places too]
This bit below started out as a comment on Power Games at The Guardian’s CiF site.
Actually - in a way - I'm rather pleased by all this. For I hope that this will show - at least a few more - people just how nasty Popular Culture has become as it goes through its death throes. How it has destroyed itself.
A decade or three ago Popular Culture was so full of promise. It seemed that TV, film, pop music and so on could all take - for the first time - a mass audience to those places only a high culture had taken an 'elite' minority to before. But now all that (naive?) optimism is long gone in the ever-intensifying all-out rush for more sensation, more thrills, more of all the things its dumbed-down, stultified audience thinks it wants and needs, while its producers grow ever richer from providing less and less.
None of this would really matter - not even to the Guardianistas and all others that like to feel they 'really care' about the underclass - if it was just a matter of the proles and the prolefeed that keeps them mollified. But another failing of the great post-war liberal experiment has been how instead of raising up the working class to be more like the middle-class, it has - instead - led to the middle-class 'dumbing-down' to merge into the lower orders, developing a taste for the fare that gets dumped into the prolefeed trough (no matter how 'ironically').
What I have decided to call ‘The Great Liberal Experiment’ destroyed aspiration – or rather non-material aspiration - see, for example how the destruction of Grammar schools reduced social mobility etc - rather than increasing it, as the policy-makers hoped. The desire to ‘better oneself’ was then replaced with this self-satisfied moronic complacency so typified by folk such as this Jade person.
I wish I had more time to go into this now, but I haven’t. However, I’m sure I will – in the coming months – be returning to gnaw on this particular bone again.
