THE DECADENT CULTURE

• Anna Nicole Smith on 6 November 2006 aired the Caesarian section delivery of her baby on “Entertainment Tonight” (ET), at a price tag to ET of $1 million.



• She also sold photographs of her adult son, Daniel, at her hospital bed in the Bahamas.  He died shortly after that of an accidental drug overdose, making the picture rather valuable to the tabloids.



• O.J. Simpson negotiated with Fox to publish his book, If I Did It, and do an interview with publisher Judith Regan.  Thankfully Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox and the publishing house, pulled the plug on the deal.



• Michael Richards, Kramer on the “Seinfeld” TV series, exploded recently in a violent, racist tirade against a small group of African-Americans who were taunting him at a nightclub.



• Britney Spears recently concluded a two-week tour of exposing her private parts to paparazzi outside of clubs in West Hollywood, as she slid from the backseats of cars.  This of course follows her scandalous divorce.



• Almost nightly, we are treated on certain cable networks to Paris Hilton and her efforts to push the standards of taste and dignity.

What is going on here?  Currently, American culture is drowning in a culture of decadence.  The “yuck factor” in American entertainment could not be higher, as entertainers and media gods/goddesses push the boundaries of decency within our culture.  What seems clear is that Americans are both revulsed by this yuck factor but at the same time amused and drawn to it.  Amazingly after the Michel Richards harangue, sales of Seinfeld DVDs went up!  Britney Spears’s sexually explicit episodes in the back seat of cars publicized her pure celebrity as a singer and entertainer.  She is more in demand than ever!  Noel Carroll, professor of humanities at Temple University writes that “There’s so much tolerance of boundary-breaking.  There’s daily experimentation going on, on the Internet—a constant, escalating war for survival.  Many excesses go by the wayside that we don’t even know about—but the ‘suits’ are watching where the interest is headed, and a lot of thresholds will be crossed.”

As I have argued countless times on this program, what was once unthinkable becomes debatable (and aired on TV) and gradually becomes acceptable.  The decadence of these above examples is being mainstreamed in our media culture.  And the result is that the public expects this “yuck” to continue.  Certain segments of the public demand the sensational and the extreme and begin to expect it nightly.  If it is not delivered, the public turns the channel and finds it somewhere else—or goes to the Internet.  Like most addictive forms of behavior, feasting on the bizarre, the sensational and the extreme becomes a normal expectation.   The various media delivery systems are committed to providing the feast—at any cost and without any boundaries.  The media gods and goddesses of this culture of decadence are the new trend setters, the new pioneers of decadence.  And, you know that the guardians of Islamic fundamentalism are watching!  All of this gives an abundance of fuel to bin Laden’s argument that the West is decadent and dying.  From my perspective, he is right!  Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are having great fun, but they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction and they just might take all of American culture with them.  May God have mercy on us!

See William L. Hamilton, “Repulsed, Yet Watching All the Same,” New York Times (3 December 2006).