Customer Reviews

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It's strange that, during the 1990s, the two people who have thought most clearly about American culture and politics aren't American. One is the British journalist Christopher Hitchens; the other is the Australian art critic Robert Hughes.

Why should a Hughes have such an advantage over the native literati? In a sentence, he comes from a culture that is brutally direct. Australians, in print and otherwise, don't care much for euphemism. Hughes writes without the stream of caveats, pre-emptive apologies, and other bad-faith gestures that fill most books on the "culture wars." This most un-American way of writing sheds considerable light on this overdone subject, and at his best Hughes verges on Tocquevillean.

It's a shame that some clown at a publishing house rewrote the subtitle as "A Passionate Look into the Ailing Heart of America." The new subtitle represents just the type of therapeutic pap Hughes is out to squash. The original ("The Fraying of America") said it much better, and with fewer words.

Granted, attacking contemporary America's cultural love for the debased, the self-indulgent extreme, the hapless and unskilled mediocrity as well as the insipid cults that have risen around exhalting the helpless victim, nurturing the stunted "inner child" and bandaging the wounded self-esteem seems too obvious.

Fortunately TIME Magazine Art Critic and writer extraordinaire Robert Hughes laces his acid-dripping pen with adroit observations and incredible verbal acrobatics in an all-out attack that provides hints of solutions and actual celebrations of all that is good in America.

Hughes pulls no punches and spares no prisoners as he lambasts (always with great aplomb and wit) extremism from both sides. Liberals and Conservatives receive broadsword swashes and pin-point snipes in equal measures. Hughes calls ultimately calls for true eclectism as opposed to multi-culturalism- a movement in his mind that wrongly excludes other cultures in favor of often fictious historical revisionism.

The rich bounty of American Culture, Hughes claims-the very culture that inspired him to leave Australia and settle in New York- lies in her melting pot of culture. America, in Hughes' expert eye, is a beautiful amalgamation of many cultures: European, Native, African, Spanish, Asian and so forth. He sees history as a complex organism made up of many diverse parts. Effective scholarship, debate and production must incorperate all while eschewing the demagoguery and finger pointing that tragically seems to prevail in so much public discourse.

Make no mistake,like any good critic or thinker, Hughes is out to pick a fight and he certainly challenges all comers. One may not agree with all of his points or supports, but that isn't the point. Hughes' number one objective is to confront American apathy with an electo-shock to the system.

In short, Hughes does indeed call for a certain brand of elitism in both art and public life. An elitism bred not of social class, race or economics but rather an hierarchy based upon skill, intelligence and vision.

THE CULTURE OF COMPLAINT will challenge the reader as well as entertain. A magnificent read.

I thoroughly enjoyed Hughes' lively and pointed skewering of the apostles of PC and their tiresome love of victimhood. I must question how closely the Kirkus Reviews writer (cited above) read "Culture of Complaint" because the reviewer takes Hughes to task for not addressing some issues in more ponderous depth. The explanation is simple and is provided in the preface: "Culture" was drawn from a series of three lectures Hughes gave at Yale University, and the lectures are presented in the book with a minimum of editing. Heavily-footnoted lectures would have been a sure path to mass narcolepsy among Hughes' original sudiences.

This is probably the best of the anti-PC books that came out in the early 1990s. Others like Arthur Scheslinger's "The Disuniting of America" are boring by comparison. Who knows how or when this debate about the "culture wars" will resolve itself, but I think later scholars will see this as a book that stands out from the scores of simplistic anti-PC rants that are published each year. (Oxford University Press hasn't really cornered that market.)

And this is for one simple reason... Hughes attacks the "politically correct" Left and the "patriotically correct" Right equally in this manifesto. They are two sides of the same coin, he argues. Religious fundamentalists and PC revisionists are appealing to the same sense of anti-reason. This book is more than just another right-wing, anti-PC rant. He asks, what it is about Ronald Reagan's attack on the mythical Welfare Queen and the Left's charge that Christopher Columbus is a "murderer" that makes them both popular on their respective sides of the political spectrum? How are the two arguments, and by extension, the people who make them, similar?

This is not a the-world-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket book either. Hughes predicts that the high tide of PC will recede, leaving behind its scum of dead words on the beach, ready to wither away and die in the sunlight of reason.

One last reason why the book gets five stars is that Hughes only takes 200 or so pages to get to this conclusion, but you still feel like you got hit by a wall of solid evidence. Sometimes I wish the book did have footnotes (the original hardback doesn't at least) so that I could track down some of the erudite Hughes' more obscure targets. But then again, this book is just a collection of addresses delievered at Yale, not an academic tome. It's the best of both worlds-- a cri de coeur that never gets fluffy or emotional.

Robert Hughes takes aim at Americans' preoccupation with victimhood, the battleground of multiculturalism, and the mediocrity of modern art in this collection of three essays expanded from speeches that he had given. I basically agree with him, but the first two sections of this book read like the ramblings of a grouchy old man, albeit a very well-educated one. It comes alive in the final section, in which Hughes laments that Americans have come to see art as something therapeutic, that the intention to heal or offer solace has come to be of more value than the technical merits of the piece. This section also includes a very interesting and entertaining account of the furor over the work of Robert Mappelthorpe.

Robert Hughes is one of my favorite writers on history and art, and I also enjoyed his book, The Fatal Shore, a history of the Botany Bay colony in Australia. Hughes has always had an interest in modern art (many of you may recall his great TV series, "The Shock of the New," back in the 80's), and since much of modern art has come out of America, perhaps it's no surprise he wrote this book, which takes a broader look at American culture.

Hughes's devastating critique of the foibles of modern American politics, political correctness, racial and gender issues, pop culture, post-modern criticism, and graduate liberal arts education, to name a few of the things he takes aim at, is articulate, entertaining, and deadly accurate. Unlike the post-modern critics whose obscure and turgid prose he skewers, Hughes knows how to write, and he puts that to good effect in this book. Cultural ideas, icons, and events, both high- and lowbrow, don't fail to escape his purview and his petard. (He even has an entertaining discussion of religion and masturbation on pages 56-57).

Hughes's book reminds me of another important work, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by sociologist Daniel Bell, in which he noted America is a country where seemingly paradoxical cultural traits often find happy marriages and perhaps even happier divorces. And as Hughes points out, our increasingly politically correct Zeitgeist threatens to underwhelm us all with the ever more blanched and bloodless cornucopia of American pop culture.

Overall, this is a fun romp through the cultural minefield of modern America, and I'd actually give it 4.5 stars if I could. If we listen to Hughes, perhaps it won't become the sterile, cultural necropolis full of the "stuffed and hollow" men that T.S. Elliot wrote about in his famous poem, "The Wasteland."

From the title of Hughes' book you might think this is a tale of woe; a malady of national discontent. Not so. It's too concise, humorous, and ultimately, optimistic, to be a Jeremiad. Nevertheless, Mr Hughes does spend a lot of time lamenting what's wrong with American culture, politics, and the society at large. His focus, and some of his wittiest criticisms are directed at the political ideologues; in academics, the arts and sciences, journalism, and of course party politics. He is dismissive of both extremes; the politically correct left and what he calls the patriotic correct right. He disabuses both sides of any idea that we are enthralled with their message. "One would rather swim than get in the same dinghy as the P.C. folk. But neither would one wish to don blazer and top-siders on the gin palace with it's twin 400-horsepower Buckleys, it's Buchanan squawk box, Falwell & Robertson compass, it's Quayle depth finder and it's broken bilge pump, that now sits listing on the Potomac..." Mr Hughes trains his critical spotlight on dogma, hypocrisy, biases, and bigotry; the opinion makers, spin-doctors, jargon generators and euphemists that have obfuscated the issues, and worse, have sacrificed consensus on the altar of ideology.

He is ultimately optimistic as the problem does not lie with citizenry, as we are 'America' The problem remains squarely with ideologues. "The fact remains that America is a collective work of the imagination whose making never ends, and once that sense of collectivity, and mutual respect is broken the possibilities of Americanness begin to unravel. If they are fraying now, it is because the politics of ideology has for the last 20 years weakened and in some cases broken the traditional American genius for consensus, for getting along by making up practical compromises to meet real social needs". In a word - balance! Exactly the approach we need, and precisely the type of analysis in this well written and incisive book.

Robert Hughes tries to position himself somewhere in between Karen Finley and Jesse Helms in his essays about the politics of art in America. The result is that he comes out about where the Supreme Court has found itself in June 1998 -- linked to Jesse Helms anyway by critics, despite trying hard to distance himself. He apparently thinks Karen Finley is a fraud, and that's just not what the art crowd wants to hear. It was courageous of Hughes to write the book, which contains the seeds of "American Visions" (also worth reading).

Robert Hughes managed to make clear what ails us as a culture and a people in this book, and it is simply ignorance, immaturity and mediocrity hiding behind the Constitution, in all its guises. There are times, when I didn't agree with him and his assessments, and times where I felt he knew little of what he was talking about in a given arena- he didn't "get it"; the real emotional/spiritual motivation behind the arguments and work of those he criticizes. That, laughingly, more than the "yes!", "exactly", and "that's what I've been trying to tell them"'s I cheered when I agreed with him, is what made me know, humbly, that he was essentially right on each and every point. Robert Hughes, tying it all into the end of the Cold War and the ennui and the emerging sociological addictive personality that is now a hallmark of American society under the surface of our achievements, cretaes a book that has lasting value as a prognosis as much as a polemic. As we all know, anyone can write a polemic- no talent needed there. Not everyone can chart the history and symptoms of a spiritual disease; a disease, like all others, that is not partial to any particular gender, race, ethnicity, social standing, or political leanings. Just look at his listing of those who suffer from it!

The causes and effects of the infantilization of American culture, moral attitudes and politics. Read this book.

Like myself, Robert Hughes was a transplant from another country, and after 20-some years living here absorbing American customs, education, and cultural ideals he wrote a book outlining his perceptions. He touches on many of the issues I've come to recognize about America, and what it is to be American, but that I would scarcely have managed to elucidate so clearly.

This is a sober, rational and impartial assessment of the state of the nation (from someone who has shown to know a thing or two).

Published shortly after the 1992 presidential election, it is just as relevant, current and insightful as it was when it was first published. If anything, many of the ills and evils Hughes points out have only become more exacerbated by American puritanism, its political fundamentalism, and its cultural incapacities.

(The last chapter deals with American art and art criticism, which struck me as curiously out-of-place, but Hughes is an art critic and his points are valid here too.)