DAN HENNINGER: SCUZZWORLD
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304428004579355333175445194?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Justin Bieber. Miley Cyrus. Lindsay Lohan. Lady Gaga. Snooki.
Maybe the answer is to stop paying attention.
I have artist friends who say they spend all day in their studios working on art and listening to pleasant music. If you ask them, “So what do you think of the Justin Bieber mess?” they’ll say, “What’s that?” Or, “What did you think of the Miley Cyrus twerking scandal?” Reply: “Two questions: What’s twerking and who is Miley Cyrus?”
As to the rest of us, we’re in hell. We know everything. Even if you don’t want to know, you know.
Justin Bieber may have 49 million Twitter followers but until a few weeks ago, some people didn’t know who he was. Now they do.
They discovered in the past two weeks that Justin Bieber was charged with drunken driving in Miami, felony vandalism in Los Angeles and assault in Toronto. They have also learned that when he isn’t interacting with police departments everywhere, the 19-year-old from Canada is possibly the world’s most “popular” male singer.
Late this past summer, the people who last week could not avoid interfacing with Justin Bieber, found it impossible not to learn the details of Miley Cyrus and her twerking and sponge-finger scandal.
Miley Cyrus, October 2013. Charles Sykes/Associated Press
The act called twerking, until that point in the march of human history, had resided mainly inside the darkness of nightclubs. “Nightclub” is the perfect word for where twerking belongs—in a club for people of similar bent who want to do night-like things. Live and let live, in private. Or as CNN.com put it recently, “It [twerking] wasn’t firmly a part of the Zeitgeist until Miley Cyrus unleashed it upon the world.”
Twerking joined the Zeitgeist because Miley Cyrus did it during prime time on the MTV Video Music Awards in August. Ten years ago, after Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show, the idea spread that a shocked populace had blown the whistle on the free fall in public behavior. That’s a laugh. The ever-lit screens of multiple media platforms make it clear we’re all together now in the same swamp with the Biebs, Miley, LiLo and their endless wannabes who some day will be.
Wretched excess seems to be everywhere—on TV screens, movie screens, phone screens, in songs, on a website you turn to for, um, news. It’s an odd coincidence that LCD, the liquid crystal displays that put all of it in your face, also stands for lowest common denominator.
Some will say the technology that dunks you in a river of electronic slop also creates access to a virtual Library of Alexandria of great music, movies and books. And if you’re really afraid your life is going down the digital drain, you can get out into the real world and do some good, with real people.
But even if you turn yourself into a human spam filter, there is a sense that a gale of sleaze is blowing through American life day and night. It’s like a rewrite of “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s dystopian 1953 novel in which readers were hunted down and their books burned. Yes, you can hide, but eventually the scuzz squads will find you and erase your tiny Kindle Paperwhite.
The weapon of choice to survive this stuff has been satire (as oddly enough, was true during the Cold War in Eastern Europe, when the inescapable force was communist totalitarianism). Twitter satirists have had a field day with Justin Bieber, creating mock photos of his first DUI arrest—as a 5-year-old in a pedal car. They posted a photo of Miley Cyrus grinding onstage against Madonna, and next to it a photo of Miley as a normal little girl.
The postmodernists who can explain away anything would reassure us that this is all hardly different than the traveling freak shows of the 19th century, when simple curiosity made people pay to enter the tent and see P.T. Barnum’s “monkey man.” But that misses the new reality. The freak show left town for a year. Now it’s our daily bread. Adjusting ourselves to vulgarity on such a vast scale is like rust; eventually it is going to erode standards for pretty much everything. Even hard-to-shock entertainers were aghast at the content of the Miley Cyrus incident. Putting it on television makes moral baseness the new normal. At some point, even the devil gets grossed out.
Most of the U.S. population knows it’s all nuts. In 2010, a New Jersey judge asked Snooki Polizzi of “Jersey Shore” if it was “worth trading your dignity for a paycheck.” After one of Lindsay Lohan’s multiple courthouse appearances, her lawyer similarly said he was confident she’d move her life forward “with dignity, pride and respect.”
That’s the theory anyway. Dignity, pride and respect. On Jay Leno‘s show last week, Miley Cyrus explained the new model: “I’m not doing anything illegal! I’m doing a lot of s–t but I’m not doing anything illegal! So that’s all right. Everything I do is legal in California.”
We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in ScuzzWorld.
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