Be a Good Boy and Drink Your Ovaltine...

or How Bono Wound Up a Role Model

A curious thought have I.

I started discussing this with my wife a few weeks ago (all my best thoughts seem to occur while discussing things with her) and it has been percolating since then. Thus, it earns the status of being bloggable, so here it is. Let's hope I can make some sense of this.

It seems to me that one of the major changes that has occured in American culture in the last several decades has been the emphasis placed on role models. I mean, duh, right? There has been loads of blabber on TV and the radio and in scads of books about the need for good role models, about the responsibility of the people who are, by default, role models, such as movie stars and pro athletes. People argue and debate about how to give our kids good role models (as if we had any ultimate say in that), about how to become a good role model yourself, about how the worship of certain high-profile people is evidence of the death of morality in our culture, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

Lots of words have been spent on the subject. What I haven't seen is any discussion on why the role model topic has suddenly become such a hot button. Does anyone remember any editorials being written on the subject back in the forties and fifties? I may be mistaken, but it doesn't seem like there was much debate about role models back in the days when Orphan Annie was a radio show and vaudeville was still packin' 'em into theaters. If I am right in assuming this, then what changed? Why, in the age of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle has the discussion about the worthiness (or lack thereof) of role models become such a big deal?

Here's my hypothesis: I think the subject of role models has become important because we have seen a drastic and very sudden shift in the types of people who qualify as such.

Before the days of mass media, I am guessing that the term "role model" was probably not even in use. Back then, the moral authority, the person who established the standard and goal of behaviour, was probably much more local. Back when my Dad was a kid, he read about baseball heroes, listened to the Shadow on the radio, and saw Buck Rogers at the movies, but those people were distant, occasional figures in his life, almost like myths and legends. I doubt it would have occured to him to emulate them in any meaningful way (apart from swinging a bat in the backyard and pretending to sock a home run at Ebbets field, or blast spacemen like good ol' Buck Rogers), mostly because there was nothing real to emulate. Dad didn't know how Babe Ruth treated waitresses in restaurants or how many DUIs Lon Chaney had. He had no concept whatsoever of how those people behaved in everyday life, so there was no practical way for him to make any of those people into true behavioural role models. The result was that, for better or worse, role models were by necessity found closer to home, in the form of parents, teachers, politicians, and ultimately, religious leaders. Kids then may not have liked what the role models were telling them, may have resisted actively for some time, but as the Borg on Star trek always said, resistance is futile. Whether they want to or not, kids eventually emulate role models the way metal filings follow a magnet. It's built into our nature. It's necessary.

Then came TV, and I am guessing the process of altering the names on the pedestals of role modelhood started to change very slowly. At first, culture probably didn't even mind. So the kids were starting to talk like John Wayne or Burl Ives. They were upstanding, all-american types, and most of the time even when they were being "themselves" they weren't much different than their scripted versions (as far as anyone knew). They were polite and patriotic and non-threatening (unless you were a jap or, later, a commie, but that was jest fine, thank-you-very-much). They were that most novel of new entities, the "good role model". Eat your vegetables, Tommy, so's you can grow up big and strong like the Lone Ranger. Glory hallelujah, world without end.

But then TV and movies began to change. I suspect that advertisers and media executives started to grasp the golden concept that there is far more money to be made selling to society's seedier nature than to any starchy mass morality. Rock and/or Roll (as the Simpsons' Principal Skinner calls it) appeared on the scene and suddenly media became scary and lewd, full or innuendo and a brand of psychedelic weirdness that few adults could understand. Role models stopped being "good", and America found itself facing the nasty reality of the "bad role model", who not only acknowledged being bad, but revelled in it. Parents seemed (or so it appears) shocked that pointing out the plain badness of their teens' role models didn't make the teens turn from them. In fact, it had the opposite effect. In yer face, ya squares. That'll teach ya's to let media define proper behaviour.

And thus we have come to today, where role models are now of utmost importance, where we live with the fact that our kids purposely use bad grammer and sport nasty attitudes and wear visible thong underwear and jeans around their butts, all because that is the behaviour they have seen from their mega-huge and mega-hyped role models. It is so, so easy to launch into hysterics about this, and frankly, doing so is not entirely unwarranted. But this is the world now. There is no way to get that cat back in that bag (barring moving to the wilderness of Montana and throwing away one's TV, computer and radio, and even then, your prospects aren't great). But there is an aspect of this new cultural reality that I find intriguing, one that I also have not heard discussed anywhere.

Back in the days of Ty Cobb and vaudeville (and probably for the whole of history prior to that), society looked up for its role models. It looked to Mom and Dad and the President and the pastors and priests and rabbis. It looked, ultimately, to "the good" (or some hopeful facsimile thereof) and emulated that. Now in our media saturated world, culture looks aside, to elements of itself. Culture has said, in the postmodern age, "screw morality and the good, I wanna be like Mike. I wanna be like the movie stars and the athletes and the music icons with the clothes and the cars and the babes and the bling"*. The funny thing is that, looking aside for models to emulate, to copy, seems to have created a sort of terminal feedback loop in the culture. It's like standing between mirrors, seeing one's own reflection marching away into grey-green obscurity, until it vanishes altogether. It's like a Xerox machine making copies of copies over and over until there is nothing left but a Rorschack blot that could be anything but is most likely nothing. But mostly, it is like royalty back in the time of kings, intermarrying over and over, inbreeding to the point of freakish idiocy.

The simple fact seems to be this: the point at which culture decides to look at itself for emulation seems to be the point at which that culture sets itself upon a descending spiral towards confused, helplessly blathering oblivion.

Back in the day, for instance, folks were shocked at Elvis and his crazy, crazy hips. Now we have Nickelback singing about a guy's girlfriend sucking him off as he speeds deliriously along in his car, later getting caught by her dad while they are switching positions in the back seat. And this is, frankly, pretty mild stuff by modern standards. In the movie Team America, I saw a puppet poop on another puppet in an elongated, completely preposterous sex scene (which was still, I hate to admit, kind of shockingly funny). Any remotely objective observer has absolutely no choice but to admit that, from a pop culture standpoint, things have continued to escalate, to get more and more sexual, shocking, offensive, preposterous, perverse, challenging, stupid, and just plain gross. And this is no surprise whatsoever! How could it not? In a society that looks to itself to define its own role, the same concepts have to be constantly reinvented. A self-emulating culture is doomed to having to outdo its own previous iteration, but in the same essential way as the previous iteration outdid the one before it!

We see this all around us, it seems to me. And the very interesting thing to me is that I think we have finally crossed over that fine line where each new iteration stops being capable of outdoing the one before. I think we are entering that point where there is no new and interesting way to make jokes about sex, or poop, or deformity. We are running swiftly out of ways to be kinkier, or more shocking, or more disgusting. How many times can one say "fuck" before it stops raising any eyebrows? Culture has pounded the same note on the same piano for so long, louder and louder, until society has stopped really hearing it, and the piano wire is about to snap. What was once challenging and inventive has become pretty common, and then a stereotype, and then a parody. And now we are finally entering the point that it becomes just plain insipid, like a mentally ill person repeating the same bad word over and over, helplessly and without any meaning whatsoever.

So what happens then? What a question that is. When society finally blinks and shakes its head and reaches over and clicks off the roaring white noise that this downward spiral has produced, what will it turn to? Role models are always essential. We choose them helplessly and thoughtlessly, as a mere byproduct of being human. Rather understandably, when society lost trust in science, religion and politics, it turned to itself via the media. So when we finally reach that inevitable critical implosion of cultural nonsense, when we lose trust in that set of role models, who will we put on the pedestal next?

The optimist in me says maybe we, as a society, will take a step backwards, take a new look at "the good", but with the sobering knowledge that that cannot be found in any human institution. The optimist in me hopes that we will seek a role model in an even higher ideal of the good; in something bigger than us and far more trustworthy.

But the pessimist in me (and he's pretty noisy, I am unhappy to admit) says that that is an unrealistic pie-in-the-sky fantasy. The pessimist says that society will find something new and even more worrisome to aspire to. That the trend of societies from the dawn of time seems to have been to lower its sights, to descend, to give up hope and ideals and passion. The pessimist says that we may not choose to make evil into a role model, per se, because that isn't, from a practical perspective, any easier to achieve than good. The pessimist in me says we may just choose whatever's easiest. And that could be even worse. In fact, I don't think there's any "could" about it.

What a doom-and-gloomer, eh? But I am willing to be surprised. Who knows? Strictly speaking, moral history has always been more of a pendulum than a downhill ride. Over the ages, people just swing back and forth from the brink of evil to fanatical puritanism. It'd be nice if at some point we could just sort of land in the middle, but that is probably more abject wishful thinking on my part. So it could happen that society swings back the other way a bit, that we recognize the self-defeating mess that making role models of ourselves is and choose something higher (and less easy). I hope we do.

But what is most interesting to me is that, if my theory is right, the best thing most of us can do is to just sit and watch as culture sort of blasts over the brink of insipidity, like a pimped out Cadillac sailing over a cliff. Overreacting to the obvious descent of culture seems to be just a lot more of the same silliness, just more noise to throw into the already cacophanous maelstrom. There may have been a time for speaking out against it, back at the beginning of it all, when the momentum could have been slowed (although I doubt it), but now it just seems like wasted breath. All we can really do now is hug our kids close, try to teach them there is more to attain in life than just being sexy, famous and rich, and watch the big cultural role model machine begin to overheat, spin, shudder, and shoot sparks. I think we are watching the beginning of what is going to be a cultural train wreck of truly monumental proportions, and like any modern American, I am morbidly interested in seeing the final big crash.

It's what comes out of the silence that follows that I am a little worried about.

*and considering the history of failings of institutional morality, who can blame culture for finally losing some trust in those entities and looking elsewhere?