Years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote that the difference between classic Hollywood and today was not that classic Hollywood didn’t turn out trash but that even the people who made trash knew art was real, knew it mattered, and knew they weren’t making art. Susan Jacoby’s THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON from 2008 makes the same point at greater length and less effectively.
Jacoby’s argument is that while anti-intellectualism has always been a strain in American life, Americans traditionally valued education and culture. They wanted to learn, they wanted to acquire sophistication, they wanted to see their kids become better educated than they were. That might mean college, trips to museums or “middlebrow” sources of culture such as the last century’s Book of the Month Club. People, at least some of them, were willing to learn about classic literature and classical music.
That belief in the life of the mind, Jacoby argues, has collapsed under the combined impact of sixties radicalism, fundamentalist religion, drugs, non-intellectual pursuits such as movies, TV and videogames, the cult of celebrity, and nobody being willing to uphold intellectual rigor. Colleges offer puff courses for an easy A; intellectuals refuse to call out bullshit, preferring to tolerate nonsense (religion, in Jacoby’s eyes, gets way too much of a free pass).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sympathetic to her view. If anything, it’s gotten worse as we plunge into a world where any crackpot can use YouTube or a podcast to reach millions with idiotic takes, students use AI for their term papers, and the administration actively denies facts in favor of political right-wing orthodoxy. At the same time there were lots of little things that nagged at me, like assuming videogames are strictly a guy thing (lots of women played them) or that religion is inherently anti-rational (the Abrahamic religions start with faith and divine revelation but they’ve poured a lot of logical thought into them). And how much the media contributed to this decline even before they began sanewashing the Toddler. From what I’ve read, they didn’t pick W as the winner of the first Bush/Gore debate, the media told them repeatedly that he’d won (the rationale, IIRC, was that they had low expectations and W surpassed them, so there you are).
This also comes off a lot as an intellectual snob’s rant about Kids These Days — sure, the Beatles are nice, but why aren’t people listening to classical music? Reading serious literature (I think she’d be either astonished or annoyed that I’m comfortable reading both nonfiction and comic books)? Taking fluff courses instead of serious academics (as someone who took several fluff courses, they can make a fun break from the serious stuff. It doesn’t mean I didn’t have hard ones). Ultimately I wanted to like the book much more than I actually liked it.
KIDS FOR CASH: Two Judges, Thousands of Children and a $2.6 million Kickback Scheme by William Ecenbarger induced rage in me much as Empire of Pain did. Ecenbarger shows how Pennsylvania Justice Mark Conahan and juvenile court judge Mark Ciaravella shut down their county’s juvenile detention center, then became silent partners in a local for-profit center the county contracted with (their decision — Ciaravella’s position gave him a lot of clout in such things). To make up for the huge kickbacks the company owners had paid them, the judges made sure lots of kids had stays there, regardless of how trivial the offense. Flipped a passing police car the bird? Got into an argument with your step-parent? Threw a piece of lunchmeat at a fellow student? Three days to a week in juvie, maybe as punishment, maybe so that their psychiatrist (a relative of one of the judges IIRC) could evaluate you — something that could normally done as an outpatient.
To be fair, Ciaravella wasn’t just a corrupt judge, he was a shitty judge. He sentenced kids who’d committed trivial offenses to months in detention at facilities he didn’t have any investment in. He did this without any regard for their rights. Probation officers assured kids they’d get lighter sentences without an attorney — this was a lie — and if they insisted on having a public defender, Ciaravella often ignored the PD or talked over them. The kids would usually leave the courtroom in shackles. Their permanent record was tarnished; kids their age assumed they were serious criminals and shunned them; and many of them grappled with trauma, guilt and shame as a result.
Ciavarella didn’t care. Conahan didn’t care. Almost nobody else did. The system collaborated willingly. Schools got rid of troublemakers, however trivial the trouble was; prosecutors got their conviction stats up; probation officers kept their caseload down; staffers in the courts protected their jobs by not pushing back against the powerful; the judicial review board which was supposed to investigate things like this did nothing. The entire system was corrupt, which was typical of that part of Pennsylvania (teachers mention in passing that it took a $5,000 payment to the school board to land a job).
Happily, there were officials, reporters and activists who pushed back. It took far too long but both judges were eventually convicted of some of their crimes. Ciavarella remains in prison; Conahan unfortunately got shifted to home arrest during the pandemic, and got his sentence commuted under Biden. Those who fought the good fight were a light in the heart of darkness, and this was a shitty darkness indeed.
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