Flashback 1999: Crudity in eye of beholder

 

Uffizi Gallery

    In looking up M.C. Escher references, I noticed this column. Note the unashamed pointy-headedness of the opening. Young, I just assumed people were with me. It also ran on a Tuesday, in the features section, where my columns were briefer: only 550 words, compared to the column today at almost 800 words.

     When the subject of the crudity of our day arises, as it so often does, I like to tell this story from Herodotus*:
     An Egyptian army mutinies, fleeing toward Ethiopia. The pharaoh, Psammetichus, finds out and confronts the soldiers, begging them to reconsider. Think of your wives and children back in Egypt, he says.
     At that, a deserter pulls aside his tunic* and says, "Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children."
     That's a crude story — charmingly crude, in my eyes, because the macho bluster resonates over the eons and makes the anonymous Egyptian foot soldier seem very real.
     I tell this as introduction to a letter I received this week. A lone person who wrote to object to my defense of Niles North presenting the risque musical "A Chorus Line" and to argue that vulgarities in school are wrong.
     "Please tell me, how is that supposed to be helpful to our young people?" he asks, listing the various off-color details of the play. "It seems that there is a complete loss of any kind of standards here."
     My purpose is not to embarrass the reader, whose letter was erudite and well-reasoned. I believe that he speaks for a large number of people who look around and see a world in 1999 very different from the world in which they grew up, and who aren't pleased with the changes.
     And "A Chorus Line" isn't the half of it. We see things now that we would never see, even a few years ago. For instance, Simon & Schuster is publishing a book, aimed at teens no less, with the newspaper-unprintable title of "The - - - - -Up."
     This is far from what our letter writer wants schools to teach. He quotes Samuel Johnson:
     "The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things — the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit." He adds: "There is nothing in Johnson's words about barnyard epithets."
     Or is there? This is where he lost me. I would argue that, as in the case of our anonymous Egyptian soldier, or "A Chorus Line," there are instances when, to be good and genuine, to reflect real people, a work also needs to be somewhat obscene.
     After all, is not life itself often obscene, messy, crude? The more you delve into the real lives of people, the messier it gets. The degree to which this mess is reflected in the culture is dictated not by questions of right or wrong, but by fashion.
      Many fail to see this. They view culture as an endlessly descending staircase, like one of those M.C. Escher prints, that goes down and down but never bottoms out.
     It doesn't bottom out because standards do tighten, though we seldom notice. For instance, certain words that could be sung out on a high school stage in the 1940s — say in a minstrel show — would not be sung today. Our sensibilities changed.
     The most important thing, whether you find something offensive or artistic, is to remember that being crude and being bad do not always go together. Sometimes evil hides in the guise of high culture, as the great Dr. Johnson himself noted:
     "Most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly; he may cheat at cards genteelly."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 6, 1999

*  From "Speculations about the Nile," Herodotus, II. 19-31, translated by D. Grene, quoted in Michael Grant's "Readings in the Classic Historians." The exact phrase is, "...one of their number showed him his prick and said, 'Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children.'" I don't recall if I tried to get that published and failed, or didn't bother. But it remains unprintable in the Sun-Times, then and now. Their loss.