CREEMWDIA

CREEMWDIA

STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!

THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND

by Allan Bloom (Simon & Schuster)

CULTURAL LITERACY

by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

(Houghton Mifflin Co.)

by Richard C. Walls

You’ve seen it a hundred times. Ted Koppel (let’s say) is on Donahue (let’s imagine). People are asking him why news shows aren’t more in-depth, more succinct, more probing...well, says Koppel, we’d like to do more in-depth shows but people don’t want to watch them, they’d rather watch junk (applause). Really, how can we cover Nicaragua when most people have only the vaguest idea where it is (applause, cheers, whistles). In fact, says Koppel, the only thing holding us back is that most people are thumbsucking, selfabsorbed, USELESS MORONS! (applause, cheers, whistles, footstomps, and shouts of “yahoo!”). Always, the more precisely the audience is insulted, the more resounding the ovation; mainly because, through some trick of denial, the majority of any audience sees itself as exempt from accusations leveled at People In General. It’s always comments on other people’s stupidity that excite the crowds, that address the general feeling that things would somehow be better if it just wasn’t for all these idiots one has to suffer. This explains, in part, the phenomenal success of the two books under review today (unlikely books to land on CREEM’s pop culture desk, but then we just pay attention to the hits, we don’t make ’em). People don’t rush to the store to find out why they themselves have become closed-minded cultural illiterates, but rather how all them other slobs got themselves in such a dire state (so as to properly despise them).

Each of these books has a hook which could be easily summed up. With Bloom, who’s sold a quarter of a million in hardcover, word of mouth has it that he unleashes a professorial ire on a host of mod targets, sort of like an articulate Jerry Falwell, Reagan with brains, etc. People are buying it expecting to get an intellectual screed justifying their tensions and hatreds; and though there is some of that, they’re finding they’ve purchased a 400-page history of philosophy from the point of view of a university-based philosopher (UBP) who maintains that UBPs have fallen from the Way (as delineated in the Great Books of Ancient Greece) and so have their charges, the offspring of the ruling elite. That’s about it. It’s a narrow focus (unless you’re also a UBP) and one wonders how many of those quarter million purchasers have the philosophical chops to even mingle with Bloom’s idiosyncratic history (from the Greeks to the Enlightenment, from the postEnlightenment German philosophers to the Black Panthers), let alone dispute it.

There are some cheap thrills here, though, bracketing the lecture. It seems that back in ’69, while a prof at Cornell, Bloom was mau-mau’ed by some would-be black revos, and the twitchy sarcasm of parts of this book are his payback. He’s especially hard on his current crop of students, “flatsouled” zombies and premature ejaculators, having experienced orgasm before reading Plato. Oblivious to the Eternal Truths, their puny souls have been pummeled into pancake-shaped pap by the pounding pulse of, you got it, that ol’ debbil rock—which, Bloom informs us, reached its evil nadir in the form of one Mick Jagger. Reading his anachronistic fulminations on rock and Jagger I kept thinking how satisfying it would be to witness Bloom’s first exposure to, say, Motley Crue or the Dead Kennedys—the guy’ll shit!

For the UBP to view rock with incomprehension and alarm is expected; likewise that he should sniff at his students. It isn’t even surprising that blacks are opaque to him, feminism (a word as amorphous as “rock”) threatening, the ’60s a nightmarish memory (typical of Bloom’s ivory towerism, Vietnam is mentioned only once, in passing). It is, though, a bit depressing that all of Bloom’s furious cogitating leads to the same old neoconservative cliches; the most cogent message of this book is that all of his ecstatic hours spent mining insights from the Great Thinkers haven’t prevented Bloom from becoming a windy, self-obsessed crank. It could happen to any one of us. Beware.

The success of Hirsch’s book—not quite as huge as Bloom’s but still unique for a tract that has all the zip of a child development text—is even easier to understand. Hirsch has a plan (plan 10 from Academia) to deal with the fact that so many students today graduate from high school without knowing the basic facts that constitute our shared culture—like what the My Lai massacre was or what the libido is. Hirsch has devised a list of facts, phrases, names, and places that we should all know and this, which makes up about a quarter of this short book, gives it a Trivial Pursuit aspect. The rest of the book is a dry-as-dust explication of why the list is important and how it may be implemented (more on this in a future volume, Hirsch threatens). Although boring, the book has an unintentionally amusing aspect as the author courts his ideal reader—someone just a little distrustful of too much booklearnin’ (what’s the practical angle?), mildly spooked by the concept of a dominant culture (will we all have to wear red, white and blue ties? Will I have to give up my grandmother’s kreplach?) but still fed up with all those kids who don’t groove on the Bard. After Bloom, Hirsch seems the soul of reasonableness, trying to salvage the concept of universal education, at least as a method for turning out people who can communicate with each other. Then we can all live happily ever after, dropping famous names, quoting the great books, and pointing out world capitals on the map without hesitation. Sounds like paradise, yeah, boy oh boy.

FEED THE POOR

EAT THE RICH

(New Line Cinema)

by Iman Lababedi

Eat The Rich, a dark political comedy film from England, reaches its penultimate moment halfway through, and it isn’t funny. Alex (Lanah Pellay), fired from his job as a waiter at a nouveau riche restaurant, Bastards, on the run after robbing a welfare office, with a cast of misfits who’ve joined him in a People’s Uprising against the heartless Conservative government, returns to Bastards to get revenge.

The clientele of Bastards are scum—rich, pampered animals, insolent and inconsiderate morons. From the first frame, and every time we’ve seen them since, we’ve been made to loathe them by director Peter Richardson. Alex and cohorts attack the place with bows and arrows and slaughter the lot; the scene is bloody and realistic and breathtaking. But why it’s great, and why it lifts Eat The Rich from comedy to brilliant political satire, is because as much as we have cause to despise these rich creeps, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime: we feel sorry for them. That’s the basic paradigm of Western civilization: while we attempt for some form of real financial equality and fair deal, society has formed us so that we can’t, or won’t, or shouldn’t, pay the price of equality.

Eat The Rich was made by The Comedy Strip team, third generation skit-orientated comics following in the footsteps of the Goons and Monty Python. This is their second movie (I haven’t seen the first) and Richardson claims to view future films as a continuing process akin to the late-’50s to mid-’70s Carry 0ns. But I’m not quite sure how he can say that: Eat The Rich isn’t in

the same ballpark as the smirky-thoughfunny soft sex comedies.

Anyway, Alex & Co. take over Bastards, rename it, and let the clientele literally eat themselves. Commander Fortune (Ronald Allen), the head of MI5 (England’s CIA) is a Soviet Agent who supports Alex. Like the cavalry, Fortune appears in the nick of time. But he’s using Alex as part of a scheme to discredit Foreign Minister Nosher (Nosher Powell), who’s fast becoming a very popular politician; given to breaking up terrorist plots by banging their heads together and shouting “YOU, give ’im back ’is country. And YOU, stop bothering ’im.” Nosher has his eyes on No. 10 Downing Street and it’s up to Fortune to stop this semi-fascist thug.

Among the peripheral characters is Fiona Richmond, a former porn star who plays a

prostitute carrying Nosher’s baby and is instrumental in his eventual downfall. Lemmy of Motorhead is a gunrunner and Fortune’s confidante, and there are also cameo performances by the likes of Paul McCartney, Angie Bowie, Miles Copeland, Shane McGowan and Bill Wyman.

I’m not sure how Americans will take to a film in which the only sympathetic person is a Soviet Agent. By the end of Eat The Rich Fortune metaphorically gives England back its youth. Certainly the acting is broad enough for its subtext to be viewed as ironic rather than subversive. They should see it and so should you. Near the beginning, a destitute Alex is sleeping on the street with another man who shares his only possession, a newspaper, for warmth. One of the terrorists passes them on the way to blow up an Embassy, pauses and gives them her coat before moving on. The trouble with life, and not the problem with Eat The Rich, is that politics are shades of gray as black as this.