ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: From Cool to Cringe: what’s happened to American culture?
America’s cultural machinery jammed in the late Sixties. In the decades that followed, Cool burned itself out in the Culture Wars. This agonizing and often illusory conflict is many things. Cool is not one of them. Before it sprouted liver spots, the Culture War was at least capable of the odd vital explosion. Witness Town Bloody Hall(1979): witness Norman Mailer (in 1971), fresh from writing an essay on the sex war he described as ‘the most important single intellectual event of the last four years’, as he bluffs, batters, bristles and flirts his way through an electric two-hour debate with hardcore gynocrats Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling, Susan Sontag and Jill Johnston. ‘You are all singularly without wit,’ Mailer snarls, while the libbers hiss. It’s pure theater. The sexual chemistry between Mailer and Greer could have powered USS Gerald R. Ford.
How does the sex war play out today? Agonizingly, like all Culture War battles. Take Cardi B and her porno-rap single ‘WAP’ (the initials stand for ‘Wet-Ass Pussy’). Released in August, it rapidly became the most streamed and most watched single in Billboard 100 history. Miss B, who is shaped like five Hindenburgs stuffed into a fat suit, was the focus of much try-hard celebratory commentary by the femo-hacks who staff so many of our Republic’s prestige publications. Who would defend virtue, propriety and what Roman rapper Cicero called the summum bonum against this delirious filth?
Ben Shapiro, knight-at-arms, that’s who. Seeing the opportunity to start yet another pointless moral fracas, Shapiro devoted a fussy podcast segment to Ms B’s lyrics, which range from the drolly risqué to the uncomfortably gynecological. Shapiro, whose wife is a doctor, suggested that Ms B and her fellow lyricist Megan Thee Stallion bragging about requiring ‘bucket and mop’ for their ‘pussies’ suggested they required urgent medical attention. Ho, ho, ho! Gleefully, thousands upon thousands of Twitter accounts then suggested that Shapiro had never aroused any women, anywhere, poor Mrs Shapiro included.
There was, unfortunately, more. A few weeks later, Ms B, whose entire shtick is boasting about her sexual prowess, was humiliated in turn by the public collapse of her marriage to the rapper Offset. It seemed he’d been bucket-and-mopping behind her back for years. By the end, every participant in this toe-curling saga was diminished, smaller than before. That’s the Culture of Cringe in miniature.
It’s all so tired. The Sixties set the stage, the players and the rhetorical range of cultural life. The counterculture became a co-culture, then a co-opted culture and eventually a co-opting culture. Cool was absorbed by consumerism, and became a manufactured good, like the battle between liberals and conservatives, or fights between the sexes. The old ferocity and subversiveness was bought off, lobotomized and placed in a zoo.
How bought-off? Joe Biden, President Of Cardi B(abylon). Biden gave Cardi B one of his very rare interviews (well, of sorts) that was published by Elle magazine on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in August.