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_____the triumph of meanness:
++BY NICOLAUS MILLS BY CHRIS LEHMANN | as I lugged my galley copy of "The Triumph of Meanness" through lower Manhattan recently, a prepossessing young man standing on a street corner -- he appeared to be selling clothing -- demanded a closer look. "The Triumph of Meanness"? he called out and smiled. "That's right," he added more quietly and nodded his head. It's not a focus group sample, to be sure, but this incident suggests that Nicolaus Mills -- an American studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College and a contributing editor of Dissent -- has gotten hold of a provocative idea. "Meanness" does define a popular culture and political climate in which the vulnerable are sacrificed and opponents are shredded with indiscriminate glee. Mills begins to plumb the new meanness, moreover, with a refreshing view from the top, by recounting the swashbuckling, downsizing initiatives of American CEOs in recent years. Few observers have bothered to make the elementary connection between our increasingly brutal style of public discourse and an economy in which workers are cavalierly thrown upon their own resources after years of corporate service -- and then described condescendingly by their barons as "self-employed vendors." However, Mills' subsequent forays into the familiar turf of cultural confrontation -- racial rancor, immigration hysteria, gender-role retrenchment and scorched-earth political campaigns -- don't connect as strongly with his class-inflected opening arguments. He's still too attached to the mythology of the left to follow through on the considerable class blind spots on the "progressive" front of the Kulturkampf. Via the self-dramatizing excesses of identity politics, moreover, the left contributed its share to the climate of meanness. Mills, however, goes out of his way to portray liberals and the left as forever demonized, never the demonizer. Mills ruefully notes that "in contrast to the sixties counterculture with its emphasis on dropping out of the mainstream lifestyle," contemporary lifestyle rebels -- notably the fringe members of the anti-government militia movement -- have embraced "the notion of an eye for an eye." One needn't belabor the famed Weatherman "Days of Rage" or the left's witless romanticization of Third World military thugs to note that this opposition is a tad oversimplified. And militias hardly qualify as a countercultural vanguard.
In particular, what passes for counterculture in the 1990s is less noteworthy for its retributive flourishes than for its rampant corporatization. What may prove the nastiest legacy of alternative culture in our day may be the boorish leer of Jenny McCarthy or the smarmy directorial nudgework of loutish films such as "Chasing Amy" and "She's the One." The meanness in such spectacles is less lurid, to be sure, than Quentin Tarantino and Marilyn Manson, but it's arguably all the more odious for its canny narrowcasting. If Mills had kept more closely to his opening argument, he might have put together a more astringent and nuanced view of the triumph of meanness. Then I could nod my head along with my sage interlocutor on Canal Street and say, "That's right."
Chris Lehmann is the Sunday Currents editor at Newsday. |
