One Reader’s Trash Is Another’s Treasure

I admit it: I love trash.

I love the tawdry and the tasteless, the sensational and the shameless. I love celebrity gossip, “exploitation” films and television programs, tacky commercials--nearly every component of our ever expanding junk culture.

Some of my media-consuming habits may shock the serious-minded: Every week I buy People magazine, a major source of my trash fix. I scan the latest scoops from Liz Smith and other gossip columnists in the five papers I get daily--often before reading the national news. A New York transplant, I still miss the New York Post’s infamous “Page Six” (particularly its Murdoch incarnation).

I would rather view the likes of “The Terminator” than “Out of Africa” or almost any movie with subtitles. And I have no moral objection to Saturday morning cartoons or Geraldo Rivera, although I do wish he would shave off that awful mustache.

I know that an educated professional and a supposedly thoughtful person--particularly one over 30--is not supposed to have such preferences. But I do. So do millions of others in all walks of life judging from the mega-dollars generated by America’s pop culture.

Yet despite our numbers, we are anything but brazen about our brassy tastes. Most of us indulge them in secret, fearing society’s disapproval. I cannot recall how many times I have instinctively hidden a newly purchased celebrity magazine between more “respectable” publications like Time and Newsweek--or the Atlantic when feeling particularly guilty. Or how often I’ve begun confessing my proclivities with a self-effacing opening like: “I know I am a trash-mongering yahoo but . . . I thought ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ was actually a good movie.”

One can’t help being affected by the critics of junk culture, whose voices have become so loud recently in articles and newscasts condemning “trash TV” and other similar ills. These trashers of trash say it has no redeeming social value. That it doesn’t teach morality and social issues. That it doesn’t add to the nation’s scientific knowledge.

They say it will never teach us how to build a better space shuttle or compete with the Japanese. Trash culture, they conclude, is crowding the minds of the young, preventing them from learning these things.

Actually, I have long believed that such condemnations are, if you’ll excuse the expression, just so much trash. If anything, one senses in the outcry a secret fascination, a certain defensiveness against stirrings from the dark side. What better indication of this than the ironic fate of some TV evangelists. Once known for fire-and-brimstone denunciation of various segments of junk culture, they ultimately became premier trash icons, thanks to their own moral foibles.

The uproar over trash calls to mind the Freudian description of the self, energized by tension between the violent, sexual id--its animal side--and the more civilized forces of the ego and superego. With its lurid facts and fictions, trash culture, I’m convinced, functions as our collective id. Uncivilized though it may be, it plays a vital role in our society as a source of energy and creativity.

Trash culture provides an arena for us to let our hair down, to relax and engage in the fantasy and mental play that so often yields creative ideas. “Life Styles of the Rich and Famous,” “Geraldo” and other trash fare may not add to our scientific store of knowledge. But they may help our scientists use their knowledge more effectively.

Indeed, the inspiration value of so-called trash was suggested some years ago when NASA named its experimental space shuttle “Enterprise”--a tribute to the classic TV series “Star Trek.” Indeed, I believe it is no accident that the Soviet Union, a society that has long punished trash culture, must come to us for technological ideas.

I am not recommending we embrace trash to the exclusion of traditional education. But we should allow it to coexist and appreciate its value. In addition to enhancing creativity, it has a number of other virtues.

For example: Trash is entertaining. Man cannot live on tales of budget deficits alone. They would make him glaze over. Nor could most of us bear the tragedy and despair that floods the daily headlines without some kind of respite.

Junk culture provides the perfect answer to the classic trash question: “How do you spell relief ?” What is wrong with checking your brain at the door for an hour or two of “The Naked Gun”? Or spacing out a few minutes each day amid the latest delectable details of the Tyson-Givens divorce.

Trash provides a sense of ongoing drama. Not all of us are astronauts or arctic explorers. Even for the most successful, life can become routine. Trashy celebrity melodramas played out in the media inject a sense of ongoing drama into our otherwise dull lives. They’re better than fiction because they contain true suspense. You don’t know how they will turn out. Will Fergie lose her pregnancy pounds? Will Prince Charles and Princess Di reconcile and live happily ever after? Will Cher dump her bagel-maker boyfriend from Queens?

Trash is reassuring. Celebrity tales contained in our trash culture validate us. They show that famous people with all manner of talent and wealth can be as mixed up as we are--or even more mixed up.

Gary Hart’s dalliance with Donna Rice in full view of the media provided major comfort along these lines. “Phew,” many of us thought. “We may have made mistakes in life. But at least we were never that dumb.”

As for those unfortunates among us who have been, it was nice to know there was someone out there of comparable intelligence.

Trash teaches. Trash culture is far from the moral vacuum it is often judged to be. Trashy news stories are more than sagas of sex and violence--they are powerful morality plays. “The Bess Mess”--the story of a former Miss America’s legal troubles--is a modern retelling of the classic myth of hubris.

Trash provides a way for society to come together and express shared emotions, such as outrage over the murder of young Lisa Steinberg. Or it may spark debate. Was Christina Onassis spoiled child or tragic figure? Was Tawana Brawley a victim or a perpetrator of a hoax? Answers to such questions delineate national moral conflicts that are hardly trashy concerns.

Trash is a leveler. While a CEO and a cab driver lead vastly different lives, they may find common ground through talking about “Favorite Son” or “The Barbara Walters Special.”

OK, so trash is not high culture. But what it gives society is anything but junk.