You Say You’re Tired of Entertainment That Puts You Down and Screams at You? : TOUGH. : NEO-NASTY : Why Is It That Much of Life--and Art--Assaults Our Civilized Sensibilities and Is Sooooo Depressing?

Who would’ve thought that it was nearly 50 years ago when W. H. Auden wrote:

I sit in one of the dives on 52nd Street,

uncertain and afraid,

as the clever hopes expire

of a low, dishonest decade.

Auden was gloomily responding to events in a Europe plagued with militant fascism. But the lines might just as well fit the American ‘80s, which still await their descriptive tag as they grind to a fretful close--unlike the ‘70s, which was noted as “The Me Decade” or the ‘60s, “The Age of Aquarius.”

The decade that began as a new “Morning in America” is now choking in a dusk of smoldering disappointments over reports of ubiquitous scandal. Duplicity at the top. Insider trading. Evangelical gouging of the credulous (pony up if you love Jesus).

The fallout seems to have seeped into our personal lives already littered with media-trash (will the spoils of success keep Vanna White from learning the other half of the alphabet?). It has permeated our culture, whose mounting commercial acquisitiveness speeds across our attention span with less pause for the redemptive clue.

Critic Robert Hughes tagged modern art’s impulse as “The Shock of the New,” but it could be a sociological term as well: As the clamor for our money and our attention has heightened in pitch, we’ve grown more shockproof. Like the air around us that nips the eyes and coats the tongue with metallic residue, our Post-Modern taste has grown distinctly nasty.

What would a reflective foreign visitor like Auden experience right now in a night on the town? To begin, he would not be brooding in a whiskey bar. Bars are out. They’re too loud and AIDS has made sexual complaisance unthinkable. Health-food stores and fast-food emporia are in. He might be composing his lines in a takeout chicken joint, wondering if the news he had heard within the past week were true and what he was about to eat might well have been fished out of a contaminated bin.

Let’s extend the scenario. A more finicky companion may join him, and in deference he may book a reservation at a trendy Melrose Avenue restaurant, noting, as they drive through Los Angeles, a proliferation of trash in the street, some of it clustering around the sleeping bodies of the homeless (reft of the succor of any Reaganomic trickle). They edge with care through the arrogantly zany automobile traffic that zips around them--disdainful of red lights and stop signs. Any alarmed protest is met with a finger raised in bold phallic rebuke, or homicidal glowering.

At the restaurant, they’re kept waiting for an hour. They think about leaving but realize it would take just as long to go somewhere else. When they sit, they can’t hear each other speak over the din. After another hour, the maitre d’ appears and asks them to leave--someone else is waiting for their table.

They agree that this is depressing, an assault on civilized sensibility. Perhaps a stop at a local comedy club will offer a quick fix for their bludgeoned spirits. The theater, which is artistically enervated and pricey at the commercial level and often amateurish or shallowly nihilistic--or plain dull--at the Equity Waiver level, is too much of a gamble. And some time ago they tired of performance art’s infantile preoccupation with excrescence and brutality.

At the club, expecting some humorous reflections on America’s phantasmagoric excess, its thundering nervous tension, its relentless media clamor and sexual misery, they might blanch as Sam Kinison plumps himself up like a blowfish, reddens and bellows barely articulate epithets into their stricken faces. Or, if the visitor’s Los Angeles companion is female and blond, they may hear comedienne Karen Babbitt scornfully single her out as a “A Malibu Barbie-doll slut.”

Enough of this hostility. The visitor suggests a movie. No, answers his companion, the little cineboxes are too jammed, and fetid with dead air. Besides, people have been so conditioned by television to assuming that they’re in their own living rooms that they’ve been effectively de-socialized. In other words, they won’t shut up. And the floors are so gooey with the detritus of cola syrup and uneaten candy that they suck your shoes right off your feet.

The movies themselves, preoccupied with visual effect, seem essentially locked into formula depictions of senseless violence, sexual alienation, shallow self-interest and corrupt authority (including parenthood). The comedies are dumb and the rest is mostly empty, with a frequent spattering of blood.

Home to the tube, then? The visitor asks his companion to turn off the voice on the car radio fulminating with comments that skewer racial and sexual minorities and the handicapped with swift malevolent cackles. He wants to think about what it means to live in a land where 23 million (or 13% of the population) are functionally illiterate and 35 million more are only semiliterate, meaning they read at the eighth-grade level.

On the way home, they stop at a service station for gasoline. But the word service is a misnomer. A clerk barricaded within a bulletproof booth pushes out a mechanical croupier’s arm to snatch the poet’s $20. After gassing the car, the visitor jiggles with the recalcitrant nozzle and manages to replace it in the pump without spilling too much gasoline on his shoes. They drive on with the car windows open.

Even though the service industry makes up the largest sector in the economy, his companion explains, fewer people are hired and trained to truly serve. And many don’t hesitate to let you know that they consider service beneath them.

Once home, they make themselves comfortable for a few hours of TV-watching, after which they feel they’ve been breathing the bad air of an all-night smoker. For most of the time, it’s been smart-aleck sitcoms, dressed-up put-downs, droning talk shows, forced gaiety, earnest trivia and visual Muzak--between endless layers of commercial efflorescence that will use any precious heartfelt image save that of Jesus Christ to serve up a pitch--though the empire-building televangelists come close.

The visitor takes a taxi home. An empty liquor bottle whizzes out of the darkness and shatters on the hood. The driver speeds on, and the visitor peers out to see a listless group of punkers in chains, leather and Day-Glo hair weaving along the street.

“It was probably a good night after all,” he tells his companion on the telephone later. Good friends are compelled to call each other after an evening out to report that they’ve made it home safely. “We weren’t mugged by a teen crackhead in Reeboks or leveled by a drunk driver. We weren’t gridlocked. We were simply exploited and ignored. Just like everyone else.”

Is the above merely an exaggeration to serve a catchy notion of the Decline and Fall of Practically Everything? Are we really conducting our lives at an extraordinary level of incivility?

“I don’t know how you can go about objectively measuring this,” said Todd Gitlin, who teaches sociology at UC Berkeley and is the author of “Inside Prime Time: Watching Television.”

“I first started thinking of this idea of breakdown by watching the traffic patterns in New York City. Nobody was honoring red lights.

“Traffic rules are an expression of respect for an unwritten social contract. Not law, but deference. Turn-taking. There was that, and the noticeable increase in filth, in throwing things out the window. These are things I hadn’t noticed 10 years ago. They’re expressions of a breakdown of a sense of social solidarity. They’re from the Me-First mentality. . . . “

Gitlin said this theme is constant. “You see it in best sellers like ‘Looking Out for Number One’ and books about intimidation. Now a lot of this has been a permanent part of American culture, which enshrines the profit motive.

“The earlier American social contract, based on the Declaration of Independence, posited the pursuit of happiness. But now that has been reinterpreted as the pursuit of my happiness, which diminishes the whole. Now, to be an investment banker making $150,000 a year doesn’t mean you won’t be treated like dirt in a restaurant.”

“I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I call ‘the decline of civility,’ which I see everywhere around me in American society,” said Dr. Elizabeth Brooks, a UCLA political scientist.

“I come from a generation and class that distinguished between manners and rude and crude. I don’t think the current situation reflects any deeper evil; I think it’s more a matter of unlearned behavior. America is not like Japan, where manner is proscribed.

“My grandmother used to say that manners are an expression of consideration for others,” said Brooks. “But we live in such an increasingly depersonalized society that we’re not judged by our actions as much as by our possessions. The intangibles, such as honor, aren’t seen.”

“Also, no norms are being set by national figures. I think the actions of the Reagan Administration have created a cynicism among the young and the yuppies that can’t be measured. There’s a real sense now that political involvement will only lead to betrayal.”

As a psychiatrist, Leo Rangell is preoccupied with the workings of the individual psyche more than social analysis. Nonetheless, he said, “one does get the impression that among today’s rapid changes, graciousness, civility, tolerance and respect for others have all been diminished in the drive for self-seeking ambition.”

In addition to private practice, Rangell is clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and UC Medical Center in San Francisco, and is former president of both the American and International Psychoanalytic Assns. One of his concerns over the years has been with what he calls “the syndrome of the compromise of integrity.” One of his books is called “The Mind of Watergate.”

“It used to be that ambition, power and opportunism weren’t dirty words,” Rangell said. “Don’t we want our children to be ambitious? Don’t we want them to have a mastery over their lives? Isn’t it wise to take advantage of opportunity when it arises?”

As for the current climate, Rangell added that this is “an age of anxiety. . . . The anxiety has created an atmosphere of excessive rivalry, envy, character-assassination and meanness. The spirit of cooperation is easily lost on all levels, corporate, academic, social, economic.

“We also tend more to give in to identifying with scoundrels,” Rangell said. “Nobody had any illusions about Richard Nixon, for example. He had the nickname ‘Tricky Dick’ for 25 years before he was elected President in a landslide.

“We don’t get acceptable moral explanations from our leaders. . . . The top of the pyramid gets its support from the base. All levels of society are to one degree or another in collusion. Where we see so many civil breaches, passive aggression, lack of motivation and pride, and poor work in the workplace, we know we’re working out of a morally reduced position.”

Who can tell how the future will recall the ‘80s?

In one song in his latest album, singer-composer Paul Simon called it “an age of miracles and wonder,” while in another he dreamed of mythic Graceland, a hallowed place where he and his young son might find the essence of an unspoiled beginning. The rest of us too could appreciate a respite from the inexhaustible, ravaging din of this Neo-Nasty age.