The Arts & Leisure section of today's New York Times carries an article that runs under the headline "The Blunt Appeal of Being Stupid." The article purports to be about something called "post-comedy comedy," which, according to the Times, includes such phenomena as "Doodie.com, a much-attended Web site that features 15-second cartoons in which simple animated figures defecate." Also an example of "post-comedy comedy," according to the Times, is a new MTV series called "Jackass," which features the show's host, Johnny Knoxville, being strapped into a used portable toilet that is then turned "upside down, ensuring that the contents pour all over Mr. Knoxville." The MTV program also features, the Times tells us, a "segment in which Mr. Knoxville puts a rubber penis in his pants and proceeds to traverse the highways and byways of greater Los Angeles in a happy-go-lucky way, and in what appears to be a tumescent state."
What is the Times' reaction to this phenomenon? The newspaper essentially excuses it, and practically endorses it, as a reasonable rebellion against the real problem: parents that want their children to achieve academic success. In fact, the Times writes that running around with a rubber penis or drenched in the effluvia of a portable toilet is comparable to the heroic civil-rights protests of the 1960s in the American South. Here is the Times: "You can see how burning a draft card was, rightly or wrongly, a relevant rebellion against a war, how having sex was a rebellion against confining cultural norms, how staging a sit-in at a lunch counter was a rebellion against segregation, how taking drugs was a rebellion against a restrictive culture. What is being stupid a rebellion against?"
The Times answers its own question: "Maybe the answer is not so obscure. Our children are being scheduled to death, pushed by their loving Bobo parents into an array of stimulating, educational, skill-enhancing classes, programs and activities that often leave them frazzled. Maybe watching a show in which people revel in being irredeemably stupid is a way of sending a message to achievement-obsessed parents. In that case, it's not a program's level of stupidity, or how unfunny it is, that we should pay attention to. It's the anger."
You don't have to be a hard-core Bible-thumping cultural critic like William Bennett or like Joseph Lieberman before Mr. Lieberman abandoned his principles to find something tasteless about a television show that features a man running around with a rubber penis or drenched in human excrement. But the critical judgment of the New York Times is not to consider the program beneath commenting upon, not even to condemn the program as tasteless. No, the Times' response is to liken the television programs to sit-ins at segregated lunch-counters in the South, and then to say that the real problem isn't tasteless television programs but the hard-driving achievement-oriented parents whose children are potential viewers of these programs.
Late Again: The "hit parade" at www.kausfiles.com has already done a fine job today of criticizing the Times' front-page story using car metaphors to discuss the gender gap between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Kausfiles.com points out that the Times is late to both the car metaphors and the gender gap story. So rather than re-hoe that territory, I'd suggest that Smartertimes.com readers check out what Mr. Kaus has to say. Kausfiles.com also criticizes the Times for letting Mr. Gore off too easily on the embellishment issue.
Note: In observance of Yom Kippur, Smartertimes.com will not appear on Monday, October 9. The next update will be Tuesday morning October 10.