JOLLY DAYS

Scholarly Objectivity

In this lecture DANIEL MENDELSOHN: From Roman Games to Reality TV--Mass Entertainment & Imperial Politics presented at the New York Public Library, you can hear a scholarly, tendentious, most preciously superior, subtextually contemptuous mix -- a conflation of often disgusting, delightfully historical tidbits and simple bias about the US meant to make the audience feel justified in its condescension towards the country in which they live.

This is faux cultural discussion used to the purposes of ideology -- a common perversion of scholarly objectivity in many of the dark corners of academia these days. The US sucks is what Mendelsohn is saying; the culture is the pop culture, and that pop culture expresses what lowlifes we are. It is all the same: melodrama is drama, a vibrant public debate is meaningless, things of value are to be ignored (he jokes about what he characterizes as intentional elisions upon questioning).

Questions the lecture evokes: Aren't these TV shows he attacks often imported/copied from other countries? How could these shows be resonant with the collapse of our society if other societies eat up the pop culture productions that do originate here when they are exported elsewhere? Doesn't the pop culture express bias on both sides of the political spectrum? Aren't cheaply produced reality shows on TV at present because mainstream media is what is now collapsing from the competition of other media, not our society itself. Mendelsohn remembered that when he was a kid quiz shows were what expressed the better standards of the times. This fond remembrance ignores that in this period an assistant professor at Columbia cheated on a quiz show -- a major scandal at the time.

Easy criticisms of "the American Empirium" and pop culture are pulled together to show that all is lost -- our decline all but complete. Even politically correct TV is dismissed; compared to the Ancient Greeks and their fathomless wisdom our culture is worthless. The real point, "Imperial Politics", is right there in the lecture title. It's almost as though there is a contempt for the audience at the NYPL as well -- too clueless to get it unless the real point is pushed in its face in the lecture title itself.

At the end, a woman in the audience asked how Mendelsohn could compare the Roman spectacles which ended in the death of the participants and _American Idol_ winners gaining lucrative careers.