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Our culture's crude? It happens in every era

By Richard Walter

Has American culture truly coarsened over the past several years? Or is our national nostalgia for the 1950s actually misguided and misplaced? A show of hands, please: Who wants “The Simpsons” canceled in favor of a resurrected “Leave it to Beaver”?

Let’s not forget: The ’50s age of “Father Knows Best” and “Ozzie and Harriet” was also that of McCarthyism, Jim Crow and kitschy food, fashion, architecture and design. For women back then, careers didn’t have glass ceilings but ceilings of high-tensile steel. As late as 1967, a woman runner was rudely plucked from the men-only Boston Marathon she had attempted to join.

Yet the notion persists that those days were solely sweet, serene and secure, a time when public discourse was civilized. God — a wise and kindly old white man with a long white beard — was not only in heaven but at long last in the Pledge of Allegiance. Comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to jail for using language in a private grown-ups’ club that Tony Soprano speaks routinely to millions of TV viewers.

Does this demonstrate the coarsening of culture? In a word: no. In those days, as now and always, the older generation saw the culture of the times as debauched. If video games and violent films threaten to destroy moral character today, 50 years ago it was comic books. Today’s movies are viewed as uniquely violent, but are they truly so? Conflict has resided at the center of dramatic expression since its earliest days. Oedipus kills his father, and you know what he does to his mother. Medea butchers her children and feeds them for dinner to their faithless, philandering father. By the end of Hamlet there are nine corpses onstage, some poisoned, some run through on swords. Richard III slays his nephews, boys 9 and 11 years old.

Children are properly set aside in the Constitution as a special class. They need to be protected from exposure to inappropriate material. That protection must flow, however, not from a faceless bureau, but from parents who spend time with their kids and care about what they see and hear. In my house, we have one of those TVs that has a switch that lets you change channels. There’s also a switch that lets you turn it off.

Americans who occasionally overhear a brutal, violent rap lyric or inadvertently stumble across some unsolicited pornographic image ought to rejoice because what they hear and see tells them they live in a free society. They will never encounter such fare in Saudi Arabia or North Korea.

Lighten up, America. Take a deep breath. Must the nation go crazy because a pop star mutters a curse word during the Grammys? Does the exposure of a woman’s nipple, for a fraction of a second, from 1,000 yards away, warrant paroxysms of rage and government sanction? Why is it OK to expose a man’s nipple? It hasn’t always been so. Didn’t men’s bathing suits, early in the last century, also have tops? Does the acceptance of public exposure of men’s nipples represent a coarsening of contemporary culture?

Chill, my fellow citizens. Take a deep breath. Will somebody tell me what’s the big deal?

Walter is the chair of screenwriting in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media. A longer version of this article recently appeared in the Baltimore Sun.