Race to The Foggy Bottom: Toddler Nation

“When I attempt to describe the culture in which I live to residents of countries where excellence is still pursued, citizens still engage with one another in rational, multifaceted discourse, literacy is increasing, and instant, fleeting gratification is not the primary goal in life, I find myself unable to communicate the reality on the ground here. No one, in fact, believes me: It cannot be as bad as I say.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Ruminant With A View

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Literally, if we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.”—Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN 6th District)

“Look, I’m in favor of shutting down the government and not raising the debt ceiling, but let’s not kid ourselves. Those are only half measures.  . . .  If we are really serious about stopping Obamacare, we’ll destroy the entire planet.”—Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)

“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American Left who hates Christendom. . . . What I’m talking about is onward American soldiers. What we’re talking about are core American values?—Fmr. US Sen. Rick Santorum

“If I’d been required to identify the Ninth Amendment when I was in law school, or in the early years of practice, and if my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you what the Ninth Amendment was.”—US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—10/14/2013—At some tipping point in the early 2000s, the country where I was born went South, round the bend, over the cliff, and out to lunch. I’m not sure precisely when we lost our way for good, but I know we’re now a nation of toddlers (by the toddlers, for the toddlers and of the toddlers).

When I attempt to describe the culture in which I live to residents of countries where excellence is still pursued, citizens still engage with one another in rational, multifaceted discourse, literacy is increasing, and instant, fleeting gratification is not the primary goal in life, I find myself unable to communicate the reality on the ground here. No one, in fact, believes me: It cannot be as bad as I say.

I live and breathe and move in a miasma of anti-intellectualism as pervasive as one of Dickens’s London fogs but, unless you experience it firsthand, you may take any description of it as an exaggeration.

But psychiatrist Dr. John Boghasian Arden, a fellow inhabitant of the fog here who, in 2003, wrote a book titled America’s Meltdown: The Lowest-Common Denominator Society  has probably already said everything I might have to say on the subject within the 238 pages of his now-all-but-unfindable book . . . but I’m a bit slow. Arden was ahead of me by a decade.

Instead—call me a cockeyed optimist—I’ve thought, hoped, really for some 30 years now, that there might be some swing-back of our pendulum here in the US; that we might recover, if not our wits, at least a modicum of our common sense. I’ve decided though, based on the piling up of irrefutable and analog evidence (see Tea Party and Republican wingnut quotes at the top of this essay), that we will be going the way of the Dodo, the Roman Empire, and the glacier. We’re a failed culture; a land populated by gormless toddlers. Doomed.

I’m not even convinced that Americans, by and large, are still entirely conscious.

And the demise of what I term “Sentient America” has occurred on my watch. I’ve had to stand by and observe the process in horrified wonder. Mine will not only be the last American generation able to write in cursive, it will be the last American generation able to reason based on anything resembling fact; the last generation somewhat able to distinguish between truth and truthiness; the last generation with an attention span longer than that of a FOX daytime TV show host (and that is one short attention span).

We have become a nation of illiterates. Illiterates governed and controlled by illiterates (with apologies to the rare outlier, such as Bernie Sanders or Jon Stewart). It’s a situation in fact much worse than either George Orwell or Aldous Huxley could imagine. It is not so much that we are now dictated to and manipulated by “Big Brother.” We are, in fact, in the thrall of “Baby Brother.”

When George W. Bush told Yale graduates, early in this new century, “To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States,” he was speaking for the majority of Americans; all those who, unlike Al Gore, are not “thinkers.” And he was speaking the God’s truth. By George, most of our elected leaders will be C- or D- or even F-students from here on out. We’ll see to that.

Bush was saying, in essence: “Get on board for the race to the bottom. It’s a zero-sum life, and it’s best to sleepwalk through it, mouthing talking-points, armed to the teeth, and always settling for simplicity. Nay, stupidity, if you can swing it. Get yours, keep yours, and damn the torpedoes.”

In my own little backwater of the greater culture—centering upon what I used to call “literature”—I have observed the rise and virtual takeover of something called “Young Adult Fiction.” In fact, my country seems now to be reading largely at a fourth-grade level, if that and, so, all marketable fiction will, I believe, eventually become “YA.”

At least, all fiction with a chance of achieving sales and attracting what I’ll call, for lack of a more precise word, readers, will be YA.

The Hunger Games is a case in point, but it is, in terms of literary sophistication, subject matter, and intellectual scope, simply representative of the dumbing down of the written word.

We are living in an age of simple stories, simply told, for simple minds, and the film version of this “novel” was even more breathtakingly juvenile than the book (and chillingly manipulative).

When I finally saw The Hunger Games on DVD, I was astonished that a “product” so cynical, whose soft-target audience was so blatantly pre-teen, had become a major hit seemingly with everyone, with sequels soon to follow.

In The Wizard of Oz, the moral is that there’s a little man behind the screen manning the controls, and that the fairy tale is just that, a fairy tale. In the highly didactic and deadpan Hunger Games, we’re playing for keeps and suspending our precious disbelief for all it’s worth, toddlers and “adults,” alike.

All the way to the bank.

Wikipedia notes: “The Hunger Games entered the New York Times Best Seller list in November 2008, where it would feature for over 100 consecutive weeks. By the time the film adaptation . . . was released in March 2012, the book had been on USA Today’s best-sellers list for 135 consecutive weeks.The novel is the first in The Hunger Games trilogy . . . . In March 2012, during the time of The Hunger Games film’s release, Scholastic reported 26 million Hunger Games trilogy books in print, including movie tie-in books.^”

[Author] Suzanne Collins is the first children’s or young adult author to sell over one million Amazon Kindle ebooks, making her the sixth author to join the ‘Kindle Million Club.’ In March 2012, Amazon announced that Collins had become the best-selling Kindle ebook author of all time.^”

And, not surprisingly, the most popular Young Adult fiction is also classified as “Science Fiction,” and dystopian science fiction, at that.

Toddlers prefer fantasy and, as always, they prefer dark fantasy, something The Brothers Grimm twigged to in the 19^th century. But this is not Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. This is subject matter far, far closer to home, on a barely subliminal level.

Poverty, civil war, oppression, violence, gruesome death: these create the mise–en–scène of The Hunger Games. In fact, so much of YA fiction in (American) English inhabits this dark-side geography that I believe toddler-readers are using the Middle-School-level Lit to—in some way—process the horrors of contemporary life. They, we, cannot cope with the world as it is (where veterans returning from The Endless War come home to zero health care and homelessness; where the mentally ill have easy access to automatic weapons; where our form of government itself has broken down irrevocably due to flaws inherent in our Constitution) and, so, we turn to black Toddler Lit, without even the momentary escape past decades, past centuries, afforded us via humor or irony.

Wikipedia again: “[Author] Suzanne Collins has said that the inspiration for The Hunger Games came from channel surfing on television. On one channel she observed people competing on a reality show and on another she saw footage of the invasion of Iraq. The two ‘began to blur in this very unsettling way’ and the idea for the book was formed.”

Yes, it is terribly unsettling to me, too, that one of the most spectacularly best-selling “novels” of recent times has mated, at its heart, a reality show and the war in Iraq, but that Collins is conscious of the book’s sources (and their mash-up in her prose) heartens me to a degree.

She knows her audience, and she writes to it. Without the hint of a smile or a soupçon of irony.

Well, how can a nation that elected George W. Bush—twice—conceive of irony? That subtle ship left this port long ago.

When, precisely, I’m still not sure, and it bugs me.

But I do know that, when “W” said to Katie Couric, on September 7, 2006, “One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq with the war on terror,” our ship of state had already sailed.

And Suzanne Collins can connect the Real Housewives of Panem City with Saddam Hussein and WMD, in a YA-friendly format.

But Katniss Everdeen will not be steering her fans, the toddlers, back to reality, or three-syllable words, any time soon.