As a Nation, We’re Proud to Be Lowbrow

Neil Larrimore didn’t hesitate for a moment. When asked what he’d do with a million dollars, his answer was immediate.

“If I win the big bucks,” speculated Larrimore on a recent episode of the hit TV show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” “I’ve always wanted, always wanted, a Mustang.”

Bingo! Jackpot! Thank goodness Larrimore didn’t suggest anything practical like investing in a retirement fund or a college education for his kids, or donating to medical research, or becoming a major-league arts patron in his community. One got the sense that if Larrimore had answered, “Help halt the production, stockpiling and use of land mines throughout the world,” he’d have been met with stony silence.

In expressing his hot-rod desires, Larrimore at once confirmed our worst fears: that we’re a nation inexorably drawn to the tacky and the lowbrow. Without fail, we seem to constantly remind ourselves that we’re a country of Spam-eating, Big Gulp-chugging, perm-haired boneheads. While outwardly we long to project an image of Martha Stewart comportment and James Joyce intellect, we know that our cupboards are full of Hamburger Helper and our coffee tables are littered with In Style magazines and dog-eared copies of “The Bridges of Madison County.”

Face it: We’re perfectly happy being ordinary, quite content embracing good ol’ American schlock. We live in a nation where Adam Sandler can be regarded as an actor, “Cats” is considered quality theater, La-Z-Boy recliners are enviable furniture, Al Roker doubles as a journalist, “Just Shoot Me” qualifies as must-see TV, Pizza Hut epitomizes family dining, and Walt Disney World is the equivalent of paradise.

Attention, Kmart shoppers, this is your life!

A pre-millennial assessment of our culture finds a society in which the arts continue to be dumbed down in the name of accessibility; politics is a showcase for lowbrow behavior (thank you, Bill Clinton); trash-talking, double-negative-spewing “real Americans” pummel the bejesus out of each other on talk shows; casinos and mini-malls spring up overnight; and people like David Schwimmer and Monica Lewinsky are considered celebrities.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Perhaps nothing. Even those who consider themselves among the cultural cognoscenti continue to come back to those familiar, comforting, middle-of-the-road touchstones for good reason. We don’t want to be rocket scientists. We have no desire to learn the intricacies of opera. We have neither the will nor the patience to volunteer en masse at the senior center. When confronted with the choice between “Crime and Punishment” or “Judge Judy,” we instantly reach for the remote.

Heresy? Hardly. “Americans work hard. And when [they’re] not working, they want to be entertained in a reasonably mindless way,” said pop-culture chronicler and author Joe Queenan. “The country never had a really strong or broad-based intellectual tradition. The taste of the people is not real high. And it never has been. Look at the most famous painter in the history of the United States: Norman Rockwell. It’s very well-executed crap. Look at our movies. They’re very well-made crap.”

So when it comes right down to it, most of us have more than a little Neil Larrimore in us. But think of it: There are a lot worse things than speeding down the freeway in a cherry Mustang. Hey, with a super-size combo meal between your legs and a Shania Twain CD blaring, life doesn’t get much better. So go for the million!

You don’t have to look far to figure out why we’re a lowbrow culture, said James B. Twitchell, a professor of English at the University of Florida who specializes in pop culture.

Advertising, said Twitchell, is almost exclusively targeted to teenage males. American boys--swilling Coke, cheering pro wrestling, addicted to video games and Internet surfing, Jedi knights in the making--are dictating the popular taste of the American public, he said.

“Why does it look as if there’s this massive dumbing down? What’s happening is that an audience that has never participated in mass culture is now the primary, dominant audience in mass culture,” said Twitchell, who published a book earlier this year called “Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism.” “It’s not about content. Who cares about content? It’s all demographics. The machinery of culture, which is now electronic, is being driven by kids.”

Author and Yale professor Wayne Koestenbaum says our taste for slumming goes much further back.

“The novel, since the 19th century, has always been interested in the so-called lower classes and their attempts, sometimes comic, sometimes pathetic, to rise to the upper classes,” said Koestenbaum, a cultural critic who has deconstructed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and whose upcoming book is titled “Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars and Aesthetics.” “The novel has always been a form of slumming, particularly Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary.’ ”

Twitchell suggests that our society is grounded in lowbrow because it lacks an intellectual base of shared knowledge. “Twenty years ago, we shared a body of material that came from literature. Fifty years ago we shared a body of material that came from religion. Today, we share a body of knowledge that comes from advertising,” he said.

So are we to paint advertising as the villain for our healthy appetite for slasher pics, nylon sweatsuits and Britney Spears? Is Madison Avenue wholly responsible for leading us into Taco Bell temptation?

“I believe advertising people know how to make you want more of something,” said Queenan, who explored the shallow waters of American pop culture in “Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan’s America.” “But they don’t know how to create the interest. The interest has always been there.”

Been there, and, apparently, very happy doing that.

“One of the reasons lowbrow entertainment is so appealing is that we’re all exhausted,” said Frank DeCaro, who writes frequently about popular culture for the New York Times and TV Guide. “When you’re tired, the stuff that gives you the most pleasure is the stuff that makes you giggle.”

But even DeCaro, a regular on the “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” worries about the low intellectual pulse of our country: “I think we have, as a nation, given over to our basest instincts,” he said. “There’s very little out there that’s shocking anymore in terms of sex or violence or bad taste or anything. To me, a lot of it comes back to Diana Vreeland’s quote about bad taste being a dash of paprika in your life. It does wake you up a bit. Too much good taste is a bore. But we’re getting to a point where there’s almost too much bad taste.”

So we’re inundated with bad taste, low morals, childish sensibilities and slight-to-nonexistent manners. What’s a tacky populace to do?

“Go with the flow. Let it go,” Queenan said. “It’s absolutely what people want. They absolutely want fast food. They absolutely love stupid movies.

“If you go back and look at the Renaissance period, you had astounding art, but they were killing each other. Today, we have a lowbrow culture but a great society. I say if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. That’s the way American society is. It doesn’t bother me a great deal that the great unwashed are not reading classical books.”