Power in Mediocrity
Journalism Today
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that it would appear that nearly everything produced by American culture in the past ten years has represented a testament to mediocrity.
Journalism has become a bad joke divorced from any sense of professionalism or commitment to the truth. Professional sports, diluted by expansion and distorted by greed on all sides, has become almost unwatchable to anyone in search of excellence. We all know that the political choice facing us in 2012 is between a leader who hasn’t shown much leadership and someone from a group of arrogant has-beens who couldn’t have been elected dog catcher fifty years ago. Oscar-nominated movies, Grammy-nominated music and Tony-nominated theater beg the question, “Is that all you’ve got?” Television is in full decline with reality shows that bear no resemblance to reality and personality tribute shows with the nodding, jabbering head always appearing on the left side of the screen in the 15-second interview take. Literature is almost non-existent as Americans gobble up vampire and zombie novels guaranteed to prevent any possibility of self-reflection on the part of the reader. People who were once great artists (Scorsese comes to mind) are now just names, living on fumes and retainers.
Steve Jobs’ passing evoked a strong emotional response in part because he was one of the few that refused to go along with mass mediocrity. Samsung, a thoroughly mediocre company, can satirize the alleged Apple “cult” all it wants, but all they are doing (like Microsoft with its embarrassingly uninteresting stores) is targeting the mediocre by exploiting their underlying resentment of things they don’t understand. This is generally a good business strategy because the majority of Americans are pretty mediocre people and they don’t cotton to people who act uppity, especially those with artistic pretensions.
Mediocrity sells. Ask the Kardashian family, Paris Hilton, Eliot Spitzer, Chelsea Clinton. Ask the sports owners who jack up ticket prices and sit back and laugh as fans scoop them up with a vengeance. We live in a country where you can actually spend $300 on one ticket to see the Cleveland Browns, whose perennial ineptitude makes them an excellent candidate for the title of American’s Team in this mediocre period in our history.
America's New Team
This is not the first long period of American mediocrity nor will it be the last. What concerns me about this one is that it is so well-reinforced by money and media that mediocrity is now your ticket to membership in our society. We are giving into baseline stimulus-response patterns, becoming more and more programmed and controllable by those in power. America is becoming a thoroughly stupid culture and what’s worse, Americans are enjoying it. The rest of the world sees us as a tottering empire driven by arrogance and greed, but the mediocre majority dismisses any feedback from abroad as the socialist or terrorist propaganda and shouts “We’re number one!” in stupid defiance.
We have always been a very competitive culture, but instead of competing for excellence, we now compete just to win. We gladly cheat in our sports and commit fraud in our business dealings if they will give us that competitive edge leading to ultimate victory. We want to be noticed and we don’t care if we are noticed for creating a miracle cure or for having our sex video go viral.
This is the picture you get when you look at the culture as promoted by the media. One positive sign is that many people have checked out of the culture and have gone underground. We see evidence of this in voting numbers, in blogs written by people with names designed to protect them from nosy employers and in some of the daring music and books written by independents. Those who are artists face an unfortunate paradox: if they are noticed and adopted by the media machine, their daily reality will be consumed by trivial nonsense that will likely inflict some damage on the spirit that insulated them from mediocrity.
We’re currently suffering through that time of year when everyone is sending out their annual “Best of” lists, always a depressing reminder of our mediocrity and the American obsession with turning everything into a competition. When I see these lists, I’m reminded of something a co-worker once told me. We were both working at a company in serious decline and one year his branch won the “Branch Office of the Year” award. I’ll never forget his response:
“Guess that means we’re top turd on the shit pile.”
What shall we do with all this useless beauty?
