There's a revival of West Side Story playing on Broadway now. To add a more authentic feel to the Leonard Bernstein/Steven Sondheim classic, the producers had some of the songs translated into Spanish. But now they've decided to put some back into English:
The producers never formally asked audience members about the Spanish lyrics, let alone held a focus group, Mr. Seller and Mr. Laurents said. But Mr. Seller noted that, in postperformance conversations with friends and audience members, he was surprised by how many people had never seen “West Side Story,” with music by Leonard Bernstein, onstage or its film version and lacked a strong grasp of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which was the basis for the plot.
This depresses me on so many levels I almost don't know where to begin. But let me try.
Let's start with education. The idea that a person who can afford upwards of $150 to buy a Broadway ticket can not be familiar with Bernstein's "West Side Story" and "lack a strong grasp of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" is a pretty good barometer of the dumbing down of America that's occurred in the post-Reagan years.
When I was in grammar school in the late 1960s, we listened to West Side Story in music class, and studied Romeo and Juliet in English classes.
But Reagan began the squeeze on "frills" like music classes for all. And in today's schools, where kids spend huge chunks of class time getting crammed for the endless tests required by No Child Left Behind, god knows what they are teaching in English classes. Maybe some of you teachers can bring me up to speed on that.
The other thing that depresses me about the re-translating of West Side Story is a bit more subtle a point, but even more important. There are 47 million Hispanics in the U.S--15 percent of the population. It's the most rapidly growing minority group in the country. There's almost no place in the U.S. where you are out of range of the sound of the Spanish language. If we were a European country, every single one of us would have some basic facility in it, and many of us would be fluent.
A second language is more than a frill or an accomplishment, or a ticket to a better job. It is our key out of the box--out of our media cloud, out of our isolation. Language literacy is the first step towards cultural literacy. I'm not saying we should all become polyglots, but hey, couldn't we at least muster an ease, acceptance and familiarity with the language that surrounds us?
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I Am Constantly Shocked
at how dumb the people of this country have gotten (note - not stupid, dumb). I don't think it's just the education system. Although educational policy, like so many other areas, continues to be a bipartisan corporate giveaway.
A lot of it - a lot - is the media, IMO. Sure, there should be more foreign language in schools and public schools continue to struggle in many areas due to a lack of political support. But how can you have a smart society when its elites are so dumb? Just look at the healthcare debate. On the one side you have people lying about death panels and socialism and on the other you have people lying about the public option and rushing to try to "compromise" with the folks lying about the death panels and socialism. Rarely do any actual facts get discussed.
Or, let's look at education. Stanford issues a report that should raise concerns about the nation's rush to embrace charter schools since the study found that public school students tend to do as well or better than charter schools. Instead, on the heels of the report, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposed increasing funding to charter schools.* So the plan is to give the charters even more attention and funding so that they can compete with public schools** in the typical way government sets up systems to compete with itself, by hamstringing the public system.***
And I'm not even going to get into the stupidity that oozes out of the television on shows passing for entertainment these days. There are good tv shows, but so much of it is just a celebration of bad judgement and stupidity, it's amazing. And, no, this isn't because it's what viewers want. Television ratings continue to drop. It's because it's cheaper to produce Jay Leno five nights a week or to shoot a reality show than it is to create and produce a good drama or comedy (the latter is particularly hard to do now that a half hour of television time has so little non-commercial time). Just as it's cheaper to have Chris Matthews spew nonsense five nights a week than produce a true news show or do investigative journalism. I'm not even going to discuss what passes for movies these days.
Television and the news media, like so many other American institutions, have destroyed themselves in search of higher and higher profit margins and other corporate payoffs (like selling a particular ideology that benefits the corporate bottom line). And we're all dumber for it. I mean, I know West Side Story, but I have to search for accurate information about the most basic things constantly. It's a lot of work to be even sort of informed in American society these days and many people don't have the time or resources to do it. We're all paying a price for that. Yet another kind of rent being collected.
* Is there any limit to this nation's tendency to double down on incredibly stupid policy and politics? Healthcare with private insurance doesn't work, let's mandate private insurance. The economic bubble in real estate and stocks collapsed the economy, let's try to re-inflate it. Afghanistan is a disaster, let's send more troops without developing any plan (because no plan worked incredibly well in Iraq). Let's elect a guy with little governing experience the media loves, with a great marketing campaign filled with empty slogans that we can all project our own political beliefs on. Okay, so that was a disaster. Hey, let's do that again with a guy from the other party, it'll be totally different this time.
** And, yes, I know charter school supporters claim they are part of the public system, but that's simply not true. They dress them up to look like a public system, but if they were just like other public schools (meaning no private money to be made) there wouldn't be this huge corporate, bipartisan push for them.
*** There is not nearly enough attention being paid, IMO, to what Obama is doing to education. I wish I understood education policy better, but I have little experience in it. If anyone here does, I'd love to read more about it.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
Somebody is eating their Wheaties.
Great comment, BD. You totally sum the whole thing up. Thank you.
"Someone needs to point out that elephants produce infinitely more shit than donkeys." Brad Mays
Phew...sounds like
whatever was in my coffee this morning was also in yours! :)
Was It Rage?
Because that seems to be running through my veins any time I think of our politics.
And believe it or not, I was restraining myself. Because a more complete comment would've (and should've) included the point that, of course, our media and elite have to be dumb and generally encourage dumbness because they intend to double down on the bad policies because they aren't bad for Wall Street and corporate America, they're just bad for the rest of us.
Although having said that, I think corporate America (and the political elite they control) may prove to be wrong about what's good for it. That, in the long run - which we may now be running into - an incredibly unjust and unequal society is not a stable one, socially or politically. And that societies that aren't stable tend not to be nearly as profitable as ones that are. It's not just workers who are going to be competing with the Chinese, it's also - in the long run - American capitalists and corporate overlords. And they're doing everything they can to make sure that - in the long run - they won't be able to compete. It would be a wonderful thing to watch, if it didn't mean economic and social disaster for the rest of us.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
Nah, I'm very post-rage
When I'm in the U.S. for a long time, I feel like I'm paralyzed in a dream where I'm watching a slo-mo of two locomotives about to meet in a spectacular crash. And there's nothing I can do to stop it.
You're right on when you observe that:
But isn't it really that corporate America doesn't really think at all about what's "good for it"? Late-capitalism is all about the quick turnaround, the fast-squeeze of profits. A "long-term" plan in this world is, like, one fiscal year. At the most. We live in a no-future world.
I think the only, slim, hope is that maybe some of these corpos will figure out there's no game for them in a no-future world. And then maybe we'll start seeing more attention paid to education, and slower, sustained business growth models.
The foreign language thing
may seem tangential to the "dumbing down" issue, but I actually think it is central. So much of American discourse begins with the assumption that it's all about us. That we are the center of things, and anything outside our perimeter is either threatening ("terrur") or simply not worthy of our attention.
The biggest culture shock I always get, upon returning from my months living abroad, is how utterly ignorant and unconcerned even my highly educated friends are when it comes to things and issues not-American.
Only two of my friends don't fall into that category, and hey, guess what! One is fluent in Urdu, the other in Spanish. Coincidence? I don't think so.
I Agree, MsExPat
And if my comment seemed to sideline it, that's poor writing on my part. I meant to suggest it's just one part of a larger puzzle, not that it's a small or unimportant part.
I think it was Ian Welsh who pointed out all the things Americans tend to believe about America that aren't true - we don't have the best healthcare, we aren't the richest nation, we don't have the best education, etc. And a lot of that depends on a learned ignorance about the rest of the world.
Now, some of that is inevitable. It's only natural that people in smaller countries learn more about the U.S. in their news than we learn about them in ours because, well, what we do affects them more than what they do. But there's simply no reason why we remain ignorant of other countries, like China or Russia.
You know, one of the things that has struck me about watching some of the Town Hall protestors is their constant invocation of Russia - I don't want the U.S. to be like Russia. They mean communist because that's the only Russia they know since they haven't gotten much information about the rest of the world post-graduation from high school or college.* But I also fear we're turning Russian, that what is happening to us is what happened to Russia after the fall of communism when the oligarchs robbed the country and then authoritarianism set in to protect the powerful from the growing pool of poor Russians.
* It's funny and not in a ha-ha way, how so much of the media mocks the intelligence of protestors when their lack of basic knowledge is really an indictment of the media. I have relatives who are smart people, who spend time trying to learn about the world, but they still sound like idiots because they still get their basic information from CNN or some other "news" outlet.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
Yes, you're right, the health care debate
would be exponentially different if Americans had a better grasp of the health care systems of different countries.
Because if Americans could have learned, years ago, that you can get better health care for your money in France, or heck, even in Thailand (which is where I go for much of mine) or Cuba, the health insurance industry may not have had such an easy time snowing the public.
Michael Moore tried to raise the level of consciousness with his film Sick-o, but he was easily throttled by the MSM.
A curriculum
I hate the loss of a common elite culture, but I don't really know whether I should. I was stunned the first time I met some people with advanced degrees who had never read or seen a single Shakespeare play. "You didn't read Julius Caesar in high school?" "No." "You've never read Hamlet?" "No." "You do know the plot of Hamlet, right?" "No."
I have to take a minute to recover from the memory.
On the other hand, my generation never got beyond the approved Western European and American writers -- not even Canadians, much less Caribbean. All white, mostly male. Standard language training got you to the point of being able to struggle through reading a classical text, but not to speak. Then, on the other hand, outside major cities or the Southwest, you were likely never to meet a non-native English speaker. TV was westerns and game shows.
Things are different now, but I'm not sure they're worse. Culture now seems to be slicker and more superficial, but also wider ranging and more diverse. The destructiveness in the political discourse comes from the successful class war, for which I am reluctant to blame the losers. Why should people enjoy sitting in educational factories learning things that they don't see will help their lives?
But then, emotionally, dammit, people ought to know Shakespeare!!!
I don't believe that de-Westernizing the cultural canon
means that the "other" takes the place of the old canon. During the nasty culture canon wars of the 80s and 90s, I remember all those conservatives fear-mongering about how teaching, say, Toni Morrison in high school would mean that students would lose Milton, or Chaucer. The either/or dichotomy plays into that trap.
I mean, it isn't an either/or situation. In my book, a well-rounded education encompasses knowing what Romeo and Juliet is about, AND Garcia Marquez' "Love in the Time of Cholera." (And also knowing why you don't refer to Gabriel Garcia Marquez as "Mr. Garcia")
I agree that most foreign language instruction in the U.S. doesn't prepare you for actual conversation in that language. Students in Hong Kong who study English complain about the same thing. But even a literary knowledge of another language opens up worlds--and it does make it easier for you to get up to speed in the spoken word later. My best friend in Hong Kong is not the best English speaker, but he knows American culture better than a lot of Americans. His MA thesis was on Pynchon.
I read Julio Cortazar in the original when I was in high school, but could hardly speak Spanish. That came later. But I am still really glad for my early exposure to one of the giants of Latin American literature.
I have an idea: shoot down the satellites
that support FauxNoise and cell phone / texting.
Seriously.
If you could with a single act, not having to wade through legislation, not having to overcome the pile-on of the 'conservative' media, not having to outscream the 'sensationalist' television and the 'entertainer' radio, cripple the corporate entities now closing their strangleholds upon the American public, would you?
You can.
There are two things you can do that won't just make your life less frenetic, but give you more time and more money to spend the way you want.
One is to do without television.
The other is to do without cellphones / text messaging.
You say, "Oh! But I'd miss out on so much!"
What do you miss if you turn off your teevee?
Hannity.
Mathews.
Savage.
"Big Brother," which I heard via BBC radio yesterday is now being cancelled in the UK. "Dancing with the Stars," which would deprive you of watching Tom DeLay in public, receiving accolades for behaving boorishly outside the Congress just as he used to receive them for behaving boorishly inside it. The NFL, which would deprive you of the chance to cheer on Michael Vick and the Philadelphia Eagles. That weeknightly dose of Jay Leno consensus seems to anticipate as a calamity.
What would you miss out on, if you didn't have Twitter? if you weren't on Myspace? If you didn't join Facebook? The revolution in the streets of Iran? Um, well ... how much news has Twitter brought you of that in the last ten days?
Of course you would miss a few things. You'd miss, for instance, the reductio-ad-absurdum tenor enforced by the 140-character limit.
What would you miss, if cell phones went away?
Being tethered to the whim of your boss even more effectively than you already are? A 10 to 20 percent greater chance of being in a car wreck caused by a distracted driver? The still-greater distraction of texting while driving?
We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0
1 John 4:18
Don't tell me how it ends
A friend had this conversation with her sister about the book "The Other Boleyn Girl":
Friend: How far are you? Has Anne lost her head yet?
Sister (angrily): Thanks for ruining the book for me!
Anne Boleyn's beheading has been common knowledge in western culture for nearly 500 years, until, apparently, now.
I think a lot about shared cultural and historical references like that. I understand that they evolve over time, and maybe Anne Boleyn is ready to slide off the edge, but I hate to lose even one.