by Mark Rhoads
When President Obama told Joy Behar on "The View" on Thursday that he did not know who the MTV Reality Show character of "Snookie" was, I was happy and hoped he was telling the truth because I would hope the President has more important ways to spend his time than watching a show called "Jersey Shore."
But it turns out that President Obama mentioned Snookie during his own comedy monologue at The White House Corrspondents Dinner on May 1st. But he could still be telling the truth. A comedy writer or White House staffer maybe wrote the joke and the first time President Obama saw it was when it crawled up on his famous Telepromter in Chief.
The reason I feel some sympathy with President Obama on the Snookie question is that I don't watch much TV, and never MTV. So I often miss the import of modern pop culture references because I think so much of the popular cultrure right now and is light years from the more elevated American culture of yesteryear.
Sorry if that sounds like silly nostalgia for a bygone time coming from an old Fuddy Duddy. But that is who I am now past age 60. I get fuddier and duddier every year and see less and less to value in what contemporary pop culture has to offer. I don't see any signs that the downward slide of our culture is reversing course in any way over the near term.
When my older brothers and sisters were in grade school during World War II, families would gather around the radio on Sunday afternoon to listen to Maestro Arturo Toscanini conduct concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Some of those siblings appeared on a very popular national radio program on the NBC Blue Network called "The Quiz Kids" that originated from a studio in the Merchandise Mart.
By the time I was in grade school we had a Majestic black and white TV set with a 17-inch screen. Our family then would watch variety shows like Omnibus hosted by Alistair Cooke on CBS every Sunday. A regular feature on Omnibus was a lecture and performance from Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Everyone from visiting grandparents to the youngest would share in watching the same show.
It seems now like high brow stuff but it was very popular back then maybe because the producers searched for the highest common denominator for a mass audience rather then the lowest. Of course, sponsors then only wanted to be associated with high brow productions for the prestige and great PR they brought to a company. We had fantastic name brand drama shows like The Alcoa Hour, Philco Television Playhouse, The Armstrong Circle Theater, The Lux Video Theater, The Kraft Music Hall, The United States Steel Hour, and Playhouse 90 that were extremely well written and acted. The shows were as good or better than the BBC imports now shown mostly on PBS. The only show that still remains from that era now is the Hallmark Hall of Fame that is now shown only as specials once in a while. That show won a record 80 Emmy Awards over 60 years.
When the 1950s faded into the 1960s, President Kennedy appointed Chicago attorney Newton Minow as Chairman of the FCC. Mr. Minow, made a famous speech in which he referred to TV as "a vast wasteland." Popular high quality variety shows disappeared to be replaced by night time soap operas and adult westerns or sitcoms of erratic quality. But for young boys that 1950a ERA was a golden age of TV. The role models were truly heroic cowboys such as Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Gene Autry, The Cisco Kid, Wild Bill Hickock, and Hopalong Cassidy. They were real heroes with positive values in a way that the Saturday morning cartoon characters of later times could not be. Can anyone tell me what values Spongebob or Ninja Turtles stood for that young people would want to emulate?
We did not yet have Sesame Street in those days and that was a very positive contribution to at least public TV if not commercial TV. I hate to diss a Chicago legend, but when my younger sister started to watch Bob Bell as Bozo on WGN I thought it was a really dumb show. Frasier Thomas and WGN tried to redeem themselves with Family Classics once a week. Maybe my gang had already been spoiled by great ntional shows that stimulated the mind such as Captain Video, Watch Mr. Wizard, and Science Fiction Theater.
I guess I feel a little bit sorry for my 30 great nieces and nephews now in grammar school. I think they have been really cheated in so many ways by missing out on intelligent TV shows and movies that challenged the imagination. Yes they know more about their generational medium of computers and the net than I do but I have to wonder if video games really compensate for the loss of art and culture and active sports in other areas.
So what do IR readers think? Are children today more intelligent because they have computers and the net or are they more isolated and less social and less broadly educated and less tolerant of diversity or more ignorant of religion and the history of western culture? Is it more important to know who Snookie is on Jersey Shore this season on MTV is or who Beethoven or Mozart were 200 years ago and does anyone care or does it matter?
Am I wrong in thinking that too many young Americans have been cheated out of a great cultural legacy in favor of transient junk?
What are the trade offs?
