ANOTHER VOICE
Moguls of mass entertainment, titans of tripe
AUBERON WAUGH
Before writing about new developments in the United States of America, I had bet- ter once again declare an interest, or lack of interest. At the moment, three years ago, when it emerged that not a single publisher in that vast country wished to publish my autobiography — most of my previous books had found American publishers — I not only decided, with Sir James Gold- smith, that 'American society is deeply ill' but I also found myself extraordinarily uninterested in whatever happened there. In fact, my only interest has been the slight- ly malicious one of seeing each new catas- trophe — from the arrival of Mr and Mrs Clinton and Chelsea Clinton — as a form of confirmation that the Poor White Trash culture has arrived.
There was never anything whimsical or twee in my decision — it would be impossi- ble to imagine a form of rejection more total than to be told that among the 231 million inhabitants of the United States there were not even 3 or 4,000 who might be interested in my life story — but it was certainly a subjective reaction. I could not expect others to share it. My rage and bit- terness, like Iago's, would need dissimulat- ing, as I searched for evidence that Ameri- can society is not only deeply ill, but a danger to us all.
Evidence, in that information-obsessed society, is abundant enough. One noticed an epidemic of teenage suicides, prompted by the boredom and unpleasantness of US television, I suspect, as much as by the inability of so many American teenagers to communicate verbally. This week's new horror concerns child assassins. Since 1985, we learn, the number of ten- and eleven- year-old black children who have become killers has risen threefold; the number of white child assassins is up by 50 per cent. And this in a country which is so terrified of its blacks and its white underclass that whole areas of discussion on the genetic transmission of intelligence are closed.
It would be absurd to deny that despite all these things there are reserves of organi- sation, energy and plain common sense in American society which continue to put the Old World to shame. All that is sometimes lacking is the combination of intellectual vitality and irony to make a European feel at home. There are too many sensitive sub- jects and forbidden areas. Feeling this lack, I seized eagerly upon the October issue of Vanity Fair which arrived smelling poignantly of stale violets on the grave of a long-dead spaniel and announced a new American Renaissance: out with the fuddy- duddy old Eastern establishment, in with the new Moguls of the mass entertainment culture.
`The new Establishment', we learn, is 're- defining power in America.' By great good fortune, all its members were pho- tographed attending a conference of corpo- rate leaders at 8.30 a.m. on 15 July 1994, outside the home of Herbert A. Allen, president of Allen and Co. Inc. These non- descript, grinning males, mostly dressed in jeans, are the 'post-modern magnates of the Information Age', helping America to move from its old role of military-industrial giant to a new supremacy as the 'world's entertainment-information superpower'.
Allen and his guests are dominating a new explosion of America's energy . . . From the economic point of view, this is clearly the future of our country.
Among these grinning, nondescript faces, with breathless accounts of how many bil- lion dollars each is worth — Warren Buf- fett, Sumner Redstone Can entertainment python'), Michael Eisner (head of Walt Disney Inc.), David Giffen (`fifty-one-year- old billionaire pop music impresario') — is the diffident, slightly bemused face of our old friend Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch's core belief, extracted from William Shawcross's biography, is that 'as the world is modernizing, it is Americaniz- ing'. I wonder if he is right. This may have been true in the past, but as one examines the group of men 'whose collective power and influence have eclipsed both Wall `How long have you thought you were Jeremy Hanley?' Street and Washington' one realises that Murdoch is the only truly international fig- ure among them. All the rest are Ameri- cans concerned, for the most part, to turn out American tripe for the American mar- ket.
For some time I have accepted that film- and television-film-making comprise the second biggest industry in America after defence. The Vanity Fair article puts me right:
The members of the New Establishment grew up in a time when the Hollywood and media dream machines were creating an entertain- ment culture. By the nineteen-nineties, that culture — movies, television, music, sports, computer software, magazines and books had become America's second largest net export after aero-space.
Second largest export is not quite the same thing as second largest industry. The question arises: how much longer will the rest of the world continue to put up with American tripe? One indication may be the spectacular failure of EuroDisney in France. Another is the boredom and anger one finds in all classes of British society not just the elite, chattering classes — at being fed incomprehensible American rub- bish, hour after hour, on our television sets. The truth would appear to be that as America becomes more inward looking so its own relevance diminishes in the rest of the world.
As an elite chatterer, I would like to think I was in the vanguard of popular reaction. I find almost everything produced by the American mass entertainment indus- try unendurably boring. Vanity Fair is syco- phantic, illiterate tripe from beginning to end, as one feared it would become when it found Lynn Barber too hot to handle. Even the New Yorker, edited by a highly intelli- gent English woman, seems (apart from the cartoons) completely irrelevant.
But in fact the entertainment culture is a tiny part of the American economy. Total box-office revenue is $5 billion, while expenditure on education is nearer $500 billion. Hundreds of silly ideas flourish in that huge country and it may ruin itself try- ing to introduce a welfare state. But beyond any of that, it is an admirable society, burst- ing with energy, common sense and effi- ciency. Only its entertainment culture is rotten to the core — movies, television, music, magazines and book publishing, yes, book publishing.
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