More on Kultursmog

A Jewish reader -- I point that out only to indicate that this conservative sensibility I keep talking about is by no means limited to Christians -- who is the father of a small child writes:

I share your sentiments 100 %; I suspect Noah probably shook his head and muttered “screw ‘em” as he sailed off. The desire to escape from all this lunacy is strong in our household as well, but, as you say, you can’t escape it. And it’s not like the popular ethos is passive, it will hunt you down if you do try to escape (unless you become a complete hermit out in the middle of nowhere, which, I confess, I would seriously consider if I was still single). The thing that gets me the maddest is every time I read of some person or group who tries to carve out a little island of moral normalcy for themselves. Does the popular culture leave them be? Of course not, it becomes a call to trot out the ACLU and all the so-called do-gooders to stamp out the poor misguided fools who dare question the values of the secular elites. You can’t escape even if you want to. Bastards.

As Neil Postman has written, in the age of electronic media, childhood ceases to exist in the traditional sense (as a time of relative innocence) because there's no way to control the information environment. Small towns used to be a refuge from the craziness, but now the same conformity that used to make them bulwarks against moral innovation now serve to accelerate it, thanks to the electronic media. It's not true, as many conservatives suppose, that the news and entertainment media tell you what to think. No, they drive the culture by setting the boundaries for our conversation. This is one reason why conservative talk radio took off like a shot: the things that tens of millions of conservatives care about, and their opinions about them, have long been effectively shut out of the mainstream media, except when they've been demonized. The situation is a lot better today, but those of us old enough to remember when Rush Limbaugh first hit it big will recall what an absolute blast of free speech and fresh air he was in the stifling media landscape.

Anyway, when the moral and cultural agenda is set by cable TV and the Internet piped into houses everywhere, there is no escape from it, unless you find some way to withdraw. Unless you find some community wherever you live where people refuse and resist the popular culture, and raise their kids to do the same -- and that's a lot harder to do, it seems to me, in a small town. That's been my experience as someone who was raised in a small town, and who has lived in big cities all his adult life.

In Matthew's Christian school, the kids are not allowed to talk about pop culture. That's a blanket rule. The school doesn't require that they stay away from it outside of school, but it does set that rule to help support parents who are trying to raise their children counterculturally. I tell you, it's a godsend. Matthew is a big Harry Potter fan, but he can't talk about that at school. While I might personally draw the line more liberally, I'm grateful to the school for its blanket policy. From what we can tell, other parents there feel pretty much like we do about protecting their kids from the pervasive and predatory popular culture, and that makes Julie and me feel more confident about the environment in which we're raising him.

The so-called "real world" will demand Matthew's attention soon enough. What we hope to do is to shield him as much as possible from the sex, the violence, the crudity and the hard-sell of that world as his conscience is being formed, and he's developing defenses against the lies of the world. I want him to learn how to breathe clean air before he has to breathe the Kultursmog.