Maybe in the end it’s just a piece of rhetorical journo-prop a way to fend

Maybe in the end it’s just a piece of rhetorical journo-prop, a way to fend off our feeling that a little piece of familiar territory – books, classical music, morality – has been colonised by a new generation and we don’t really get it.No one reads Books are dead. It’s the buzz phrase, the catchall assertion, used by hacks in search of a subject or dinner party guests looking for high-minded banter. Gimme a book!What I really think is that “Dumbing Down” is, in fact, this year’s Political Correctness. As Miss Adelaide says (in Guys & Dolls), “a person could develop a cold”.What I really think is we’re all beginning to sound like a lot of crusty old Luddites who sometimes want to break up the machines out of sheer ignorance The computer won’t start My head hurts.

I mean, without it, how would Mastermind have existed, or University Challenge endure? Last week alone I met several educated people in London who did not know that Arthur C Clarke invented the geo-stationary satellite and one who insisted that Sinologists study respiratory problems. It is the end of the world as we know it, the end of European culture, of that universal store of facts once known as General Knowledge, a shared file you could assume most reasonably well educated people could access. I don’t even want to think about education.By God, we’re talking moral decay here, we’re talking the breakdown of civil society, the end of family values, the rise of crime, the takeover by machines of the human spirit, the catering to the politically correct in aid of the know-nothings and care less. Paul Johnson’s view of television as the satanic medium – it was Johnson, wasn’t it? The corruption of the language, bad grammar, the illiterate young, the stupido old, pop culture, pop culture applied to high art, high art made easy whether it’s classical musicians in cowboy suits or CDs of Beethoven-for-Brides. The problem’s not just cable television, of course; anyone who watches News at Ten or reads the tabloids can tell you that.You can read the dumbing down of just everything in pretty much everything, it seems In the death of books The death of television The takeover by television. You can head straight for the golf channel or the celebrity station now without ever encountering so much as a headline about Zaire or Albania as you just might have done when forced to watch the network news or read a newspaper. With dozens of channels you get narrow-casting and with narrow-casting you get narrow minds, at least according to Walter Cronkite, America’s venerable newsman.

You can almost hear the universal television barker cry, “Dumb on Down”. (Did anyone catch Jane Eyre for Dummies the other week?) Thrillers are less thrilling, documentaries personality-driven, everything easier, simpler Youth TV Narrow-casting. The rest of TV is in a pretty parlous state, too: costume dramas look tackier every year, the scripts are sillier, the classics dumbed down to suit the attention span of a video generation of channel-surfers. Nor does the coming of Channel 5 hold out any particular promise of vigorous debate or brilliant entertainment. This is a situation where exactly the same value is accorded to Jeremy Paxman and the News Bunny.Anyone who’s got cable in the UK knows that, just like the States, 72 channels of TV means 72 channels of mostly crap You spell that C-R-A- P and it’s synonymous with D-U-M-B. Not to mention 106,000 books published every year in Britain, all apparently unread, if you heed the daily commentaries of wise persons.
Every day I read commentaries about the evils of the new information delivery systems, how they contribute to the dumbing down of society, about the airwaves and newspapers stuffed with stuff, but where nothing means more than the thing itself and all things are, therefore, equal: Michael Jackson’s baby, oestrogen replacement therapy, Labour Party economic policy, Zaire’s rebel soldiers, Selma Hayak’s Oscar dress, Bill Clinton’s hanky-panky, mortgage rates, topless darts. The Information Age without information, only raw data, gobbets of news without any context, sound- bites which are now down to, is it 14 seconds, or is it eight? All those satellites All those channels.