George F. Will (column, Nov. 26) recently lent his voice to thechorus of public figures and commentators bemoaning what passes forentertainment in our society. Putting aside the usual debate oversexuality as depicted in the arts, it is true that much of popularentertainment seems to cater to a degenerate, post-literate culture -a place where violence is preferable to the difficulties of conflictresolution and where opposing views shout gibberish at each other.
Television, which once carried with it the promise to enlightenand inform on an unprecedented scale, has instead been encouraged toreplace the popular carnival freak show of another supposedly lessrefined time.
The call of the modern conservative is to return to the church,pray in schools, respect the flag and embrace good old-fashionedfamily values and personal responsibilities, forcing pornographersback into the shadows. Laws can then be drafted to keep them there,away from both the aberrant and the innocent.
Left unacknowledged is the part that 20th century conservativephilosophy has played to encourage the growth of this cesspool we allnow swim in.
When the free market can be used as a barometer to determine thecontinued existence of entire species, how then are we to believe itis not good enough to determine how shallow or base our preferredentertainment may become?
It was the free market that demanded the government turnpublicly owned airwaves over to private interests and the free marketthat mandated those interests to act for the enrichment of theirshareholders, public be damned.
With conservative Republican policy encouraging the creation ofever larger media conglomerates, concentrating an exploding array ofinformation resources in always fewer hands, is there good reason tobelieve that in the future, altruism will win out over the bottomline?
A generation or so ago, we began to realize that market forceswould have us drinking chemical swill for water and breathingindustrial fumes for air. The same market forces encourage privategrazing, mining and drilling on public land, with public subsidy.This is not lifestyle, it is about dollars.
It is the current conservative philosophy that has rushed in tofill the vacuum created when liberal thinking in this country becameso fuzzy-headed as to believe that such things as values, morals andsimple decency were strictly relative concepts and so defied bothdefinition and persuasion.
If conservatives have a problem with the state of popularculture in this country, then they should look to their own house andacknowledge those responsibilities that they have long since sold formean profit.
They can then return to the American public to present aphilosophy more coherent than the present one, which in this caseamounts to little more than the old parental admonition, "Do as Isay, not as I do."
Frank J. Hutton lives in the Portage Park neighborhood.
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