Take Me Back to the Sixties

Take Me Back To The Sixties is a look back at a time when the values I learned from '50s TV were still in force. Enjoy the presentation!

Life was simpler then. Percy Faith's "Theme from a Summer Place" was ubiquitous on the radio. Everyone listened to the same three stations, heard the same songs on the car radio as they drove around on 31-cent gas. The car, if it was a brand new Chevy, cost about $2,500. You didn't have to lock its doors, and everyone picked up hitchhikers.

TV shows were not afraid to portray strong parental role models. Movies had heroes, not antiheroes.

To borrow language from postmodern philosophy, we all believed in one overarching meta-narrative, whose sub-themes included the victories to be won by individuals of conscience who stand up to the bitter end for what they believe in. Reluctant warriors all, there were in the movies of the era secular heroes (Shane, 1953; Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, 1957), religious heroes (A Man for All Seasons, 1966), and heroes who were somewhere in the middle (Christopher Plummer as Baron von Trapp in The Sound of Music, 1965, who led his Nazi-menaced family to a Catholic abbey for sanctuary).

The meta-narrative was straight from the Bible: goodness defeats evil, with all but the truly lost redeemed in the end.

Most Americans were quietly religious. No matter your creed or denomination, you believed in the good-defeats-evil master narrative — that it was somehow able to shape outcomes in this world. Even if you were not religious, for that matter, you still tended to believe that.

You may or may not have recognized the fact, if you were around back then, but our various enemies — first the Nazis and then the Communists — were tuned into one and the same meta-narrative: totalitarianism. According to their story line, justice and individual conscience were opposed. Justice was collective, imposed on unruly individuals from the top down. So the time-honored Judeo-Christian belief in freedom of conscience and in the independence of the personal soul was anathema to totalitarians.

Our heroes never put a foot wrong in serving their overarching meta-narrative ... but we as a country did exactly that when we got in too deep in the Vietnam War. Billed as a necessary war against Communist evil, it did little to hurt the enemy, even as it was undermining our own faith in truth, justice, and the American way.

The year was 1968. The two national leaders who had the best chance of changing Americans' minds about Vietnam without compromising their idealism were both assassinated within months of one another: Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Riots broke out in major cities after King was shot, and not long after the RFK killing cynical radicals turned the streets of Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was being held, into a playground for chaos.

The antiwar movement became a demonic parody of itself, as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the rest of the Chicago Seven, put on trial for organizing the violent DNC protests, turned the courtroom proceedings into a mockery. Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation to Abbie) was ridiculed as a "fascist dog," a "pig," and a "racist" by co-defendant Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers ... when he wasn't doing his best to turn the courthouse into a circus, that is.

It was as if these radical leftists were saying that the powers that be had played our Western, Judeo-Christian, quintessentially American meta-narrative so false, in pursuing an unjust war and in making second-class citizens of black Americans, that all bets were now off. Henceforth, there would be no controlling meta-narrative whatsoever, no master story whose flag we all would salute with pride, in the name of human progress.

It was their nihilism that ushered in the cynicism that still besets us today. That's why I say, too, "Take me back to the Sixties" — to a time before the wheels came off the cart of heroism, idealism, and the dictates of personal conscience in 1968.

Marketplace of Incivility

Check out Ellen Goodman's recent Marketplace of Incivility column at The Boston Globe. Ms. Goodman's response to the Don Imus flap is right on. She says the Rutgers basketball players whom Imus dissed as "nappy-headed hos" are "canaries in [a] cultural mineshaft," and that "the official name over the mineshaft is incivility."

She goes on: "Sociologists talk about the disinhibitors, the factors that lower control of behavior. In some places the controls are permanently off." Blame the Internet, blame shock-jock talk radio, blame whatever you want — the dominant attitude today is that "civility is [only] for face to face."

Actually, as you can tell from my previous post, Getting the Joke, I myself blame the demise of "meta-narrative," in what philosophers call postmodernism, for the decline of civility.


Let me lay my thinking out in detail. As Ms. Goodman indicates, the lack of civility in our culture parallels the loss of "old-time intimate communities":

In the real life communities of the past, says [P.M. Forni, who co-founded the Civility Project at Johns Hopkins University], "we acted as though we were trustees of one another's contentment, happiness, well-being. Since you wanted to keep your friends and couldn't replace them, you treated them with moderation. You had a stake in their lives and they in yours." Today? More of our interactions are faceless, anonymous, disconnected.

In my estimation, the cement to hold communities together in happiness and civil moderation has always been their meta-narratives. Meta-narratives are grand, surpassing story arcs: sin giving way to redemption, from a Christian perspective, or the ceaseless march of progress, from a secular one.

Some of these master plots are not as global as others. "The South shall rise again!" is certainly less than universal. Yet it indubitably has served one particular community as a basis for continued hope and fellow-feeling.


When I say I oppose and resent the demise of meta-narrative, I do not mean to imply that all meta-narratives are created equal. Those that include by excluding — "The South shall rise again!" implicitly excludes blacks — deserve to die.

In my view, however, meta-narratives that are sufficiently universal and all-inclusive can be just what the doctor ordered. (Remember when you could say "just what the doctor ordered" and everyone knew what you meant?) To the extent that I call myself a Christian, what that means to me is basically this: I treat the Christian meta-narrative of sin and redemption — of Christ's saving all humans from the fires of hell by his heroism on the cross — as a metaphor for the same values that are enshrined in the secular story of unceasing progress about which today's postmodernists are so incredulous.


If meta-narrative needs resuscitating, we had better be careful which meta-narratives we resurrect. I admit that. Nazism and communism had their versions of the grand narrative, as does Islamic (not to mention Christian) fundamentalism today. When meta-narrative metastasizes into ideology, watch out.

I believe the Christian meta-narrative, properly understood, avoids that pitfall. Only problem is, a lot of Christians have a different meta-narrative. Those devotees of the "Left Behind" novels who believe the world is coming to an end, if only Israel can hold onto the Holy Land until Jesus returns, are telling a different tale entirely.


Still, I'm more than eager to undertake the risk of reviving meta-narrative in our culture. I think it's the antidote to a lot of society's ills. Think of it this way. If we are today as self-centered and narcissistic as Catholic News Service columnist Therese Borchard says we are in this recent column, what can get us working together again for the common good? Well, what better than thinking of ourselves as, each of us, a member of the cast of a play?

The high school musical, as everybody knows, is where the same "obnoxious teenagers ahead of me in line at Starbucks," as Ms. Borchard puts it, come together on stage in some sort of docility and fellowship to present to their community a ... yes, a narrative or story line for the entertainment and edification of all.

Maybe today we need a little less of "life is a beach" and a lot more of "life is a high school musical." Maybe that's what we so desperately need to make us all more civil.

Getting the Joke

This squib appeared recently in the Washington Post Magazine. It seems, the squib says, that Carol Burnett, one of the doyennes of the now-outdated '50s TV culture (which managed to remain the norm during her tenure on CBS from 1967-78), is suing the Fox network over an insulting reference, broadcast on "The Family Guy" in 2006, to one of her signature comic characters.

"Burnett is angry about an 18-second blip in an episode from a year ago, which showed her trademark 'charwoman' janitor mopping up in a porn shop, aped the theme music from her hit '70s comedy show, and made a vulgar reference to Burnett's signature ear tug," the article says.

The writer of the article, Hank Stuever, thinks Burnett is just being, like, "I'm old, and I don't get it, and I sure don't dig it."

When I read that, I wondered what it is that Burnett (and myself) are too superannuated to get.


Meanwhile, the Don Imus blowup was about to happen. As the whole world knows by now, in the brief time since Easter Sunday, 2007, the talk-radio mainstay has rightfully had his show canceled for referring to the African-American women on the Rutgers basketball team as "nappy-headed hos."

David Steele of The Baltimore Sun today filed this column on the controversy. He correctly bemoans the tendency of many observers to lose focus on the fact that the Rutgers women were dehumanized by Imus for being black, female athletes. That's the main point here, I fully agree.

But there's another point, too, which is that some have been accusing the Imus-bashers of (in Steele's words) "not getting the joke."

Not getting it — there's that phrase again!


It's as if we are living in a world in which anyone can say or do anything ... as long as it can be (however remotely) construed as a "joke."

When the writers and producers of "Family Guy" trash Carol Burnett's charwoman, it's a "joke."

When a shock-jock trashes the Rutgers hoopsters on the air, it's a "joke."

When Michael "Cosmo Kramer" Richards uses the N-word while doing standup at the Laugh Factory, it's a (bad) "joke." When he apologizes later, he says he was simply trying to shut up his black hecklers by being even more "outrageous" than they were. Being "outrageous" is the new name for humor. And, as everyone knows, there is such a thing as "humorist's license," after all.


The essence of humor is to detach briefly from whatever part of the world is being laughed at. To denature it. To (if it is a human being) dehumanize it.

But if the humorist goes too far — as the "Family Guy" folks did, as Don Imus did, as Michael Richards did — the result isn't funny; it's a Mel Gibson moment.

For some reason today, people are always trying to get right up to the proverbial line on the other side of which is "too far." Maybe that's because we're so postmodern these days, we no longer believe in rules of courtesy and civility.


An op-ed piece by Reza Dibadj in The Sun asks whether postmodernism can save the world. That philosophical movement, Dibadj says, enshrines "incredulity toward meta-narratives." With that quote from Jean-François Lyotard does Dibadj finally explain postmodernism to me in a way I can understand.

A "meta-narrative," I assume, is a sort of master story, a template for the unfolding of a plot in a novel or movie or whatever: one that implicitly is understood in the same way by the audience as by the author. As, for example, "the butler did it" in a mystery, which we all understand to be a case of "the least-obvious suspect" who is actually, deep down, fated to be the true culprit.

If such narratives' "fatedness" reflects something deeply true about the reality of our world, then we should all be anything but incredulous about the validity of meta-narratives. But if fatedness is basically just a literary convention, and nothing more, then we ought to "deconstruct" it and become thereby incredulous toward it. That is the postmodern mantra.


Once we become thus immunized to meta-narratives, we can get about the serious business which is (to borrow the words of Dibadj) "to forge our own localized stories."

All this stuff about who does and does not "get the joke," it seems to me, is really a way of saying that the "joke" is what sometimes happens, by accident, as we struggle to "forge our own localized stories." Sometimes when we improvise, we cross the proverbial line. Ha ha. The "joke" may be on us ... but that's all it is: a "joke."

"Jokes" are what happen when the serious business of becoming postmodern goes temporarily awry. To which I say, bring back the meta-narrative.