Urban Renaissance Institute

Preston Jones
The Next City
June 21, 1999

by Robert Bothwell (University of British Columbia Press, 1998. 279 pages)

THIS REVISED EDITION OF UPDATES IMPORTANT EVENTSCANADA AND QUEBEC in Canada from 1994 through Quebec’s 1997 referendum on sovereignty, with snippets from some 100 media interviews of Canadian historians, politicians, columnists, and assorted intellectuals (pseudo and real). Among the serious brains who contributed to this project are Ramsay Cook and one of his students, Michael Behiels — Trudeau enthusiasts both — and Thomas Flanagan and Stephen Harper. Bothwell’s historical narrative and commentary link the words of these disparate individuals.

Being a literal cut-and-paste job, this book is sometimes difficult to stick with. Not because the material is challenging — most literate Canadians could follow what is essentially an outline of Canadian history, with an emphasis on the past 30 years — but because reading the comments of different interviewees requires regularly shifting gears to adjust to their various syntaxes, manners of speech, and so on.

Though awkward, this book is nevertheless useful, particularly for high school students and university undergraduates approaching Canadian history for the first time. It addresses events — such as French President Charles de Gaulle’s cry from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall in 1967 — succinctly and usually fairly, and on many occasions, it offers different points of view on a particular event or phenomenon.

That said, in at least two instances, this text comes up short. In one case, journalist and author Ron Graham says mid-20th century French Quebeckers viewed non-Catholic anglophones as “the devil incarnate.” To the uninformed reader, French Quebeckers appear as a rather nasty bunch, yet Bothwell includes not even one corresponding peep on the outrageous anti-Quebec propaganda of prominent Torontonians such as Thomas Todhunter Shields, nor on historian Donald Creighton’s less-than-charitable anti-Québécois brooding.

The most unfortunate generalization, however, is A. I. Silver’s claim that Quebec’s ultramontane Catholics viewed Jews as “always evil.” Surely antisemitism was as alive and well in Quebec as in many other places in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but Silver goes over the top. Given his proclamation, how is it that Quebec’s ultramontane literature frequently includes admiring references to ancient Israel and to the favored status of the Jewish people within the divine economy? How such admiration could have coexisted with a general derision for modern Jews is perplexing, and the matter deserves more attention than Silver, or Bothwell, allows.

Neal Gabler
The Next City
June 21, 1999

Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality
by Neal Gabler (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. 303 pages) $35

STRANGE TIMES, THESE LAST DAYS OF THE MILLENNIUM. AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT IS exposed as a serial philanderer and a perjurer, and his popularity increases. A woman whose fame depends on producing heirs to a throne and wearing expensive clothes dies in a drunk-driving accident and is canonized as a goddess of goodness. A TV talk show host whose ratings are slipping announces plans to retire because she’s disgusted with television vulgarity.

Such are the phenomena that attract the attention of American social theorist Neal Gabler. In two previous books — An Empire of Their Own, a 1988 study of the Jewish moguls who made Hollywood such a dominant cultural force, and Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, a 1994 biography of American social critic Walter Winchell — Gabler proved himself an insightful analyst of North American society. His new book continues his probing of the forces that shape our collective psyche. What he finds is provocative and worrisome.

The essence of his argument is well captured in the book’s title and subtitle: Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Drawing on a variety of scholars and critics — everyone from Marshall McLuhan and Daniel Boorstin to Neil Postman and Jean Baudrillard — Gabler argues that through the unintended alchemy of technology, pop culture, and collective psychology, “entertainment” has become our most essential “value” and, thus, our effective reality.

As he writes in a central passage: “It is not any ‘ism’ but entertainment that is arguably the most pervasive, powerful, and ineluctable force of our time — a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life.”

Gabler defines entertainment in its widest sense: movies and talk shows, newspapers and television news, fashion and advertising, as well as that most bathetic phenomenon — the fetishizing of brand name consumer goods.

A commentary on the movie The Truman Show contains his basic thesis. The film tells the story of Truman Burbank, who lives under the scrutiny of thousands of hidden cameras, unaware that his life, in all its mundane detail, is really a television show. Even his “parents” are actors playing parts. The show is so popular, according to the movie, that millions of viewers schedule their own lives around its broadcast. (Seinfeld fans will be familiar with this, of course.) The Truman Show, according to Gabler, depicts a society no longer able to distinguish between reality and entertainment. Or, more precisely, a society where reality is entertainment.

Gabler argues that we are heading into a future where we can all be Trumans, albeit with the singular difference that we will be conscious of preferring a fictional existence — our own life movies, our “lifies,” to use Gabler’s word — to reality. In a nutshell, thanks to the cocoon of technology and the abundance of the consumer society, reality will barely touch us if we so choose.

“Life itself,” Gabler writes, is “gradually becoming a medium all its own.” We are “becoming at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show. . . . Life has become art, so that the two are now indistinguishable from each other.”

To some, his analysis might seem an exaggeration. Man has always been prone to illusion; unrelieved reality is too hard to bear. As T. S. Eliot once wrote: “Mankind cannot take very much reality.” Out of this existential condition, we created art and culture as ways to help us comprehend our condition and make it intelligible. In other words, we assumed a linkage between art and reality and truth.

But in our post-modern society, with its surfeit of data, illusion takes the form of hype and misinformation. Think of the newscasts where what is considered newsworthy is that which can be sensationalized to be as dramatic as possible, where so-called reality TV and “shockumentaries” such as the World’s Scariest Police Chases attract the biggest audiences, and where celebrities and movie stars are sought out for their negligible wisdom on world affairs; you cannot help but conclude that Gabler is on to something.

Indeed, given the evidence he offers, it is difficult to dispute his claim that North Americans increasingly occupy a world that privileges sensual satisfaction over mental reflection, emotionalism over reason, and Dionysian indulgence over Apollonian intelligibility.

Is this not what Bill Clinton and Lady Diana really represent? Despite his obvious perjury and abuse of power, the president remains a flawed but popular character for many Americans, the great “entertainer-in-chief,” providing endless “politainment,” to use Gabler’s word.

Ditto for Lady Di, the “saint of Sentimentality.” After years as a spoiled aristocrat refusing to grow up, her death transmogrified her into an icon for middle-class pilgrims desperate to maintain her entertainment value in their bathetic lives.

As for Oprah Winfrey, well, after years of gripes-and-hugs with the latest person-who-overcame-adversity and of promoting an endless series of New Age gurus du jour, it’s difficult to believe she’s suddenly discovered the moral and intellectual shallowness of her stock-in-trade. In fact, cynical as it sounds, her promise to pack it in seems nothing more than entertainment razzle-dazzle, another bid to boost the ratings.

But this is in line with Gabler’s observation: “While an entertainment-driven, celebrity-oriented society is not necessarily one that destroys all moral value, as some would have it, it is one in which the standard of value is whether or not something can grab and then hold the public’s attention. . . . It is a society in which celebrities become paragons because they are the ones who have learned how to steal the spotlight, no matter what they have done to steal it.”

Gabler traces this convergence of entertainment and reality to the tabloids of the last century, when the news was shaped according to the hoariest conventions of melodrama. But the arrival of television really blurred the border between reality and fantasy, between politics and entertainment.

Television is now the primary means by which people learn about the world around them. Television also promulgates a certain way of understanding the world. It has to be popular to gain people’s attention. But to be popular requires being entertaining. Thus, television must reduce the reality it portrays — war, famine, crime, politics — to entertainment.

“If television made news out of anything that had the rudiments of entertainment,” Gabler argues, “it also made entertainment out of anything that had the rudiments of news.” Because the news is entertaining, entertainment tends to become “the standard for reality itself.”

Gabler does a good job of applying his thesis to contemporary politics, arguing that every American president from John F. Kennedy through to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton has become a vehicle for keeping the masses entertained, or, if you will, reducing politics to pacification. Reagan’s fondness for splicing movie plots into political decision making was not the sign of a forgetful buffoon, but the consequence of a society that had surrendered the rigors of politics to the culture of entertainment.

“The real political revolution of the 1980s,” Gabler writes, was not “the much-bruited demise of postwar liberalism and the rise of conservatism but the triumph of entertainment over political ideology of any sort.” As a result, politicians are now celebrities, elections are auditions for certain roles, and the electorate is an audience to be enthralled and, hence, pacified. Gabler observes that in a society where politics is judged on its dramatic value, it is hard to resist the idea that only what is entertaining is worthy of public attention.

From the video gamelike bombing of Serbia and Iraq and the bizarre attack on skater Nancy Kerrigan to the O. J. Simpson murder trial and Jack Kevorkian’s advertisements for euthanasia, we pay attention because even when we are appalled, we are also, in a certain sense, entertained. By comparison, how many reach for the remote when some talking head reading from a TelePrompTer offers a sophomoric explanation of why the Serbs and ethnic Albanians are at each others’ throats?

Gabler is certainly not the first to wonder at this situation. Everyone from philosophers and historians to novelists (Don DeLillo’s magnificent novel, White Noise, for example) have considered the subject, worrying about the potential consequences to society. Some suggest that North America’s ascription to entertainment-as-reality is rooted in the New World psyche and its essential premise that individuals can remake themselves as they will, regardless of social tradition and heritage.

For example, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argues that much of American society — everything from politics and the media to advertising and even academic disciplines — consists of what he calls “simulacra” of the real. That is, we construct simulations of reality that are in effect more “real” that reality. Thus, we live in “hyperreality,” to use Baudrillard’s word, increasingly detached from the other, more traditional reality.

You’re skeptical? Well, look around: Disneyland, theme parks, historical re-enactments, and theatrical shopping malls; they’re all examples of hyperreality. Aren’t Disneyland’s “historic” tableaux, its medieval castles and pioneer settlements more real than any real village or castle? And have you been to West Edmonton Mall lately?

Gabler doesn’t make specific pronouncements or predictions about the ultimate consequences of entertainment-as-reality. But in uniting phenomena as diverse as President Clinton’s morality, the deep meaning of modern art, the nostalgia behind the Unabomber murders, the political insight of Tom Hanks, and the wisdom of Elizabeth Taylor, he convincingly demonstrates the dumbing down of North American society.

From this perspective, then, Gabler is distinctly dystopian. For example, referring to Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 and its depiction of “a harrowing future in which people lolled about most of the day watching giant television screens that featured lengthy broadcasts of police chases and criminal apprehensions,” Gabler asks how different that fictional future is from contemporary Court TV with its motto: “Great Drama. No Scripts.”

Gabler concludes that the “great cultural debate” of the 21st century will be between the “realists,” who believe that a clear-eyed appreciation of humanity’s limits and possibilities is necessary for us to even “be” human, and the “post-realists,” who believe that glossing over reality and even transforming it into a movie is perfectly acceptable if it gives us pleasure.

But what, you ask, is wrong with this? Gabler’s answer is provocative and worrisome. He quotes the poet W. B. Yeats: “We had fed the heart on fantasies / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

Okey Chigbo
The Next City
June 21, 1999

What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman
by Danielle Crittenden (Simon & Schuster, 1999. 224 pages)

A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue
by Wendy Shalit (HarperCollins, 1999. 291 pages)

PROMINENT U.S. FEMINIST KATHA POLLITT ONCE SAID THAT FEMINISM PROMISED women “a life not just with more justice but also with more freedom, more self-respect, more choices, more pleasure.” And the National Organization for Women’s Patricia Ireland weighed in with similar sentiments in her autobiography: “The essence of feminism for me is the freedom to live our lives as we please and to reinvent the world as we do so.” That onerous costs — for women and society — may accompany such radical freedom does not seem to have occurred to these women, or to countless other feminists.

Since the late ’80s, several women have written books attacking feminism’s more utopian ideas, including Danielle Crittenden and Wendy Shalit, the latest entrants into this hypercharged debate. Crittenden’s book has predictably, and tediously, drawn endless blasts of white-hot rage from feminist reviewers and commentators. What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us “is a hobo stew of cast-off, diluted and mouldering ideas,” fumes Lynn Crosbie in a Globe and Mail review that never rises higher than a petulant rant. “The real difference between Crittenden and most women is that she is wealthy [and] well connected,” writes Pollitt in a typically ad hominem New York Times piece. The blind anger is understandable to anyone who has read the book. Crittenden gleefully and savagely pokes fun at some of the more asinine advice some feminists have given women. And there is a lot: One wonders what the normally moderate and sensible Betty Friedan was thinking when she advised women who are alone in their old age to take up masturbation or lesbianism.

Crittenden argues that many women today are dissatisfied with what matters most to them. By this she means their intimate lives — marriage, family, and children. Women may have won new freedom and independence through the women’s movement, she writes, but it has involved some painful trade-offs.

Yet Crittenden does not simply say that the past was better and call for women to return to their ’50s kitchens, as some of her detractors have claimed. In fact, she clearly acknowledges that the “new freedom [won by the women’s movement] is a great accomplishment” (Crittenden’s emphasis), and agrees that “nostalgically wishing to go back” is impossible. However, she sees an irony in women’s lives today: “In Friedan’s time, the problem was that too many people failed to see that while women were women, they were also human, and they were being denied the ability to express and fulfill their human potential outside the home. The modern problem with no name is, I believe, exactly the reverse of the old one: While we now recognize that women are human, we blind ourselves to the fact that we are also women. If we feel stunted and oppressed when denied the chance to realize our human potential, we suffer every bit as much when cut off from those aspects of life that are distinctly and uniquely female.”

Crittenden identifies some of these aspects as “the pleasure of being a wife or of raising children or of making a home” and reminds us that a previous generation of women regarded them as the most natural things in the world. But today, women wonder whether marriage is right for them and whether having children will compromise their individuality. The truth, Crittenden writes, is that, at heart, most modern women want the essentials of “husband, children, home, work.” (She cites long-term polls to support this.) Even though she doesn’t explicitly say so, she clearly believes most women would rank the first three over the last. “The woman who doesn’t want these things,” she writes, “those who like living alone or who find perfectly fulfilling the companionship of their friends and cats or whose work eclipses their need for family — may be sincerely happy, but they should not be confused with the average woman.” Crittenden goes on to accuse ’60s and ’70s feminists of doing exactly this and then compounding the problem by not telling women of the sometimes irreversible trade-offs involved in postponing marriage to pursue a career, or in juggling marriage, children, and career.

Many feminists have questioned the validity of this accusation, and Crittenden’s right to speak for women (Crosbie calls Crittenden’s main argument an “idiot’s premise”), but countless articles, books, and surveys confirm Crittenden’s assertions. Consider this: a December 1989 Time magazine article (titled “Onward Women” and quite favorable to feminism) reported that Catherine Lo Galbo Goodfriend, a highly successful accounts manager for Kraft General Foods, once confronted Gloria Steinem at an awards dinner. Goodfriend demanded to know why the movement had not told ambitious, career-minded women that “the trade-offs and sacrifices [a woman] has to make are far greater than a man’s.” Steinem, a founder of modern feminism, lamely responded, “Well, we didn’t know.”

The same article reports that “the bitterest complaints come from the growing ranks of women who have reached 40 and find themselves childless, having put their careers first.” And a spate of books — A Lesser Life by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and The Biological Clock by Molly McKaughan, to name a couple — echo this dissatisfaction. Even feminist matriarch Friedan admits in The Second Stage that “our failure was our blind spot about the family. It was our own extreme reaction against that mother-wife role.” In a 1997 New York Times review of several national polls, Sarah Boxer reported that most women feel that the women’s movement has not bettered their individual lives. Rather than confront these discomfiting facts, feminists prefer to get mad, accusing people like Crittenden of using “crackpot statistics.”

Some of Crittenden’s critics have argued that today’s feminism is “flexible” and “accommodating,” including diverse viewpoints that nullify Crittenden’s criticisms, but this is only in some cases, and belatedly so. Moreover, where have feminists vigorously defended motherhood as a viable career option? Where is the feminist support for heterosexual marriage and the traditional family? Instead, prominent feminists like Barbara Ehrenreich write: “Yes, divorce is bad — but so is the institution that generates it: marriage.” Feminists have ceded traditional marriage and family to the political right, preferring to support all kinds of “alternative arrangements.” Consequently, they have had to engage in the most creative intellectual contortions to explain why most women refuse to call themselves feminists.

Crittenden arouses the greatest ire when she discusses female autonomy, career, delaying marriage, and children — sensitive issues, especially for those women whom they directly affect. A single, childless 45-year old woman who has invested everything in a career and still desires a husband and family doesn’t want to be told that time may be running out. But Crittenden performs a necessary if thankless task; she lays bare the real choices that women face when making life’s decisions, and in this she is more honest than feminists.

She argues that in pursuing independence, some women have lost the ability to make the compromises that help in finding and keeping a mate. Autonomy works against commitment to a marriage: If women withhold parts of themselves, how can they expect men not to do the same? She then points out the obvious truth: If a woman — especially an educated woman — eventually wants to get married and have children, she is taking a big risk if she waits until her late thirties or early forties. It is a given in every other culture but this one, that the chances of finding a mate diminish precipitously for women as their fertility declines.

Wendy Shalit focusses on a narrower issue — female sexual behavior. Unlike Crittenden, Shalit yearns for a bygone era, when women did not seek casual sex like men and were more “modest.” Citing increased reports of date rape and sexual harassment, Shalit argues that more promiscuity has not empowered women or made their lives better, only created more problems.

Her writing style reveals her youth — she is 23 and sometimes sounds as if she just left high school — so it is easy to dismiss her arguments as naive. But she has essentially valid points: Women are not men, when women adopt male sexual strategies they are harmed by it, and a decline in respect for women almost inevitably accompanies a decline in female sexual reserve. One can argue from now until the cows come home about why this happens, but this is something that most men know, and many women today seem to have forgotten. Shalit believes that sexual modesty will return sexual power and dignity to women and put them in a position to demand more meaningful relationships from men. In other words, women want love, commitment, and good behavior from men, otherwise they ain’t gettin’ any.

Both men and women will profit from a level-headed reading of these two books. Anyone who dismisses them out of hand is either a party line feminist or seriously mistaken.