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Pat Sajak and Common Culture
Dave Carter alerted me to this unwarranted controversy surrounding Ricochet contributor Pat Sajak.
“As we lose our common culture, one odd side effect: it’s harder to find puzzles on Wheel that are fair to all,” Sajak tweeted out on June 1.
Here is Sajak’s Twitter feed, full of his signature wit and wisdom.
Some have apparently interpreted Pat’s comment in light of his politics, believing it a veiled jab at Democrats or progressives. I think he was making a fairly mundane and yet striking observation about a cultural loss, one that creates difficulty for a game show that tries to unite generations. We’ve lost the cultural touchstones that older and younger generations once shared.
It’s normal for the elderly to watch or listen to their grandchildren and encounter pop culture references, idioms, beliefs, or customs that seem strange. Societies are forever changing. In modern America, during this era of rapidly advancing technologies and instant interactions between distant peoples, those changes can be especially daunting.
But in most societies (please correct me if I’m wrong), the generations spend considerable time together. So they develop a wealth of common knowledge and experience.
Some of this knowledge is history. Stories are told, questions are asked, one anecdote leads to another, and so the elder’s experiences are connected with the child’s experiences. History gains a personal aspect. National histories are placed into a context of family histories.
Intertwined with those histories are pleasures, passtimes, and dramas — the little things that color our lives. The generations might play sports together, play board games, piece together puzzles, watch TV or films together, or listen to music together. When the children become parents, they can reminisce about the good times and share those experiences with the next generation.
Then there are pragmatic skills, like mechanical know-how, cooking, or basic carpentry. Some needs and challenges change from generation to generation, but some remain. Why figure out best practices all over again when one can learn from family?
And there’s the rub.
Why do Sajak’s coworkers on Wheel of Fortune struggle to write for modern contestants and audiences? Because knowledge and experiences in modern America are more scattered and individualized than they used to be. Family norms — and much else — have changed.
I was born in 1980. The only reason I’m as familiar as I am with black-and-white movies and TV shows is because my parents and uncles invited me to watch with them, just as they did with their parents when they were children. The main reason I’m familiar with centuries-old symphonies or jazz from the 1940s is because my elders made me listen. We can share references to Lucille Ball, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Vivaldi, Wagner, Copeland, Michelangelo, Norman Rockwell, and many more artists because we experienced their works together.
My parents considered that an essential part of their role as parents. They didn’t just teach us reading, writing, and arithmetic. They taught us culture. They taught us how to appreciate the arts and games they grew up with, even if we preferred more modern fare. Yes, even a simple game of horseshoes or dominoes can be important. They told us about great athletes, pioneering companies, and various movers and shakers in American society before our time. Such things strengthen the bonds between generations and instill a sense of continuity.
Many people of my generation, and later ones, don’t have that shared knowledge and experience. They didn’t have to gather with their families for dinner or join family outings — if their parents were even available for socialising at all. They were not expected to participate in old traditions or family activities. They roamed free or alone. So their knowledge is similarly separated.
Perhaps online interactions offer a way back to unity between young and old. Certainly, many online games and forums like Ricochet enable us to learn from each other and gain common ground. Is it enough?
In what ways might families and neighbors reestablish the connection that seems to have been lost since Wheel of Fortune began 40 years ago? (Need I add that Pat’s show is another American touchstone?)
Published in Culture, Entertainment, General, History, Literature
If both parents work out of the home and there is no grandmother in the house to hold it all together, it’s extraordinarily difficult. Families transmit culture but if there is no family it becomes the peers and therein lies the decay. Too many believe the stuff extra income allows is more important than family. They are wrong. Too many women escaped the home to work full time. It’s understandable because raising children is far more challenging than most of the jobs they might do. And the kids want all the stuff their peers have and parents don’t want to deny them. They should earn it themselves, but we don’t allow kids to work, we impose minimum wages, etc. so part of the problem is the regulatory state.
The vertical separation you stress, which leads to horizontal spreading, is only one enabler of the proximate cause, multiculturalism. That is another way of saying “loss of common culture”.
My wife and I were deliberate about introducing our children to the Marx Brothers … just as I’m sure people across the water in Seattle were deliberate about introducing their children to Marx.
Aaron, I had not heard the Sajak quote until you revealed it. I hadn’t thought of the loss of culture in this aspect until you drew it out for me.
I knew a woman who died at 105 about two years ago. She had no peers. She had friends and family, but her sister was both getting very old and suffering from Alzheimer’s, so no connection was left between them.
The people who had shared her experiences were gone. The people who knew her kind of suffering, with Jim Crow (she was black), the depression (an equal opportunity venue) and more, were largely gone. Her only son? Died of lung cancer. She had grandchildren, some of whom visited her, and some of whom did not.
When we visited, she would open up and tell us stories about where she lived, and what she saw and heard. She had arrived by becoming a school teacher in an era where black clergy, lawyers and school teachers were the triumvirate of black middle class society in the South.
We would see things through her eyes. We offered to buy her a recording device so she could share that information with all who followed, but she never wanted that. When she died, she took it with her. Our loss.
CandE gave me a bit of her family’s oral history and it was wonderful. I am sorry when we lose these things because we don’t tell these stories like they did.
Difficult means possible. I was a latchkey kid growing up, and our daughter was a latchkey kid, also. My parents transmitted culture to me, and my wife and I transmitted culture to our daughter by spending time in the evening when they/we got home.
It didn’t get any harder with our daughter than it was with me: I grew up in an era of broadcast TV only, and our daughter grew up on the Internet. No matter. My parents, and then my wife and I, made the time.
And that answers your question. Make the time.
Eric Hines
I agree that something is lacking in the Millennial generation’s ability to grasp anything that occurred before they were born. Recently, a co-worker of mine who is 32 was walking around the office with a golf club in his hand. When I compared him to Bob Hope, he gave me a clueless look and asked who Bob Hope was. When I told him, and said I was surprised he wasn’t familiar with Hope, he responded “I was born in the ’80s. How would I know who Bob Hope is?”
In the pre-Internet, pre-cable days many learned about black-and-white TV shows and movies because they were inexpensive filler for tv stations to air outside of primetime.
That’s how I (born in 1975) learned all about the Little Rascals, the Bowery Boys, Abbott & Costello, the travails of Andy Hardy, etc. Little Rascals was aired after-school and those movies were aired on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
Today, pretty much the entire corpus of Western film is available online, so it’s not like this culture is “lost”. However, one must take the step of doing at least a Google search.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this paradigm.
e.g. I only became familiar with the properties that the local cheapskate tv station happened to have in its library. The rest of the corpus was unavailable to me. Today, the entire corpus is available, but a smaller proportion of viewers is exposed to it because they don’t seek it out (although it can be argued that a larger number of viewers do become exposed to it, just as there is currently a huge explosion in the number of people reading classical literature thanks to gutenberg.org).
That line is going in my “favourite quotes” file.
Let’s say it was a jab at democrats or Obama.
So what?
Hollywood is a politics-free zone, now? Give me a break.
Some of my favorite memories were watching the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes black and whites with my Dad. He had a Saturday afternoon routine and due to lack of options I became engrossed in those films. Along with the great 60s flix like Great Escape, Dirty Dozen, Guns of Navarone, etc, that experience would’ve never happened if my Dad didn’t put on what he wanted to watch
I’ll admit I don’t do that with my kids. Between lack of time and their options with XBox, Netflix and their own “playroom” TV the opportunities to repeat my childhood experiences seems limited. I’ve put on a few great movies and they enjoyed them but its more the exception than the rule.
Important subject and excellent post Aaron.
I have lived in Israel for years. Friday I got a call from my third son (32) who has always lived here and is a marine bioligist in the Haifa area. Among other things he wanted to talk about were the Steelers-Chargers game.
But he also went over the GOP presidential candidates and wanted to know what I thought of them.
He is the only one of my six who is interested in either of these things. (There is yet hope for the nineteen year old.) I try to concentrate on being happy for that than on being sad for the others.
If it makes y’all feel any better, I am the only one of five children who learned half this stuff. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him enjoy Bob Hope.
hmmm just saying/asking; not a parent but uummm could you not limit their options so as to broaden their horizons ?
As kids we didn’t have options because the technology wasn’t yet born. So our default was whatever was on the living room tv. Since the overwhelming options are now ubiquitous it would become a matter of “don’t watch what interests you, watch what I want you to watch”. That probably isn’t a good way to initiate spending time together.
Good news for me is that I get couch time with my kids when the Steelers or Kings are on and my oldest will occasionally endure an older movie with Dad and admit to enjoying it. Just much less frequent than I did as a kid.
Pat just phrased it wrong.
If he’d bemoaned the show’s cultural bias, repented for his part in creating “discriminatory” puzzles that produced “disparate impact” among contestants, then urged his producers to offer settlement payments to anyone and everyone who came forward to claim injury as as result, he’d have become a media darling.
I’m always surprised when people seem baffled by the assumption that they might be familiar with events preceding their existence.
I was surprised there was controversy over such a benign tweet that is fairly obvious to anyone paying attention. Beyond the culture fragmenting, the way information is transmitted is, too.
I was born in 1975, and there were three TV channels (not counting PBS) available over the air. If you watched TV, you watched one of the three networks so pop culture references were widely understood. Today, I’m not sure anyone knows exactly how many channels there are.
Newspapers and 6 o’clock news was how news was disseminated, and it was shown through the cultural slant of those media. Today multiple channels dedicated to news with various slants. We also have the internet with its opinion sites and bloggers to the point you can pick and choose who you get your news from tailored to your interests and world view.
The music industry promoted artists via radio play. I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to the radio, but it’s been decades. You can still listen to CDs, but you can also now stream your own channel of music, mix your own playlists from your digital library. I don’t know that we will see another Elvis or Beatles because the monolithic culture and infrastructure doesn’t exist to support it.
Movies today do big business because of inflated ticket prices, but how many have broad cultural impact beyond a target demographic?
That is not to say the quality of any of these are declining, but we’re tailoring the product more and more for niches that do not necessarily have any crossover appeal. It becomes harder to imagine a show like MASH where a large portion of the American public watched the finale, or a scene from one episode where someone starts singing “Stormy Weather” and everyone in the OR joins in because it was a shared bit of culture they all knew.
Any horse that doesn’t like Bob Hope shall be sent to the glue factory!
(It’s a well-known fact that horses love comedic road movies.)
I’m forever surprised by the number of people unfamiliar with events coincident with their existence!
When discussing re-runs of black & white movies/tv, you really can’t get away with not counting PBS.
The PBS station we got up here in the great white north seemed to have Andy Hardy movies on a continuous loop.
(I exaggerate. They also showed Lawrence Welk reruns.)
With respect, it’s extraordinarily difficult even with parents and grandparents around.
In my youth, we had a common culture because there was exactly one English language television channel that ran from 4:00pm to midnight.
In my young adulthood, I would get one magazine that represented my political opinion every two weeks.
Now we all have choices immeasurable. I go heavy on baroque music, politics of a particular flavor, and hobbyist electronics. I’m sure that puts me out of the cultural mainstream, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing!
Apropos of Nothing: I have heard that, in the pre-digital days, those who were the the youngest of several children tended to have very
uncoolnon-mainstream taste in music.The reason is that they got their first records/tapes/CDs as hand-me-downs from their older siblings. Their earliest musical experiences were several years out-of-date compared to their peers.
(This helps to explain my continued fondness for ABBA, who were already considered uncool before I had even started kindergarten.)
I wonder if this phenomenon has continued to hold true in the download era. It might not be such a bad thing for those poor children if it hasn’t.
PBS here was iffy as to whether it came through clear or not so it wasn’t universal that everyone had access to it.
I can remember a few times, growing up, when my dad would call upstairs, “are you girls busy?”
“Doin’ homework.”
“Okay, that can wait. Come downstairs, this is important.”
And we’d know right away that some classic movie must be showing that night, which Dad had determined was a “must-see” for his kids.
It’s not that he didn’t value education – – he just valued it in more ways than one.
I think this is an important point. Parents should spend time with their children, but it shouldn’t always be up to the kids to determine the activity, or its substance. Despite initial moaning, my guess is that most kids will enjoy — or quickly learn to enjoy — what their parents enjoy.
Since we did not own a TV when I was growing up, we occasionally rented one with a VCR for special occasions. My parents chose what we watched, though we usually had some input. As a consequence, we watched Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis, Elia Kazan stuff, westerns, old-time comedy compilations (think “The Honeymooners” and “Your Show of Shows”), etc.. My husband watched all the same stuff growing up (in Iran!), and aside from cartoon classics, this is what we watch with the kids. It is hilarious to watch them rolling on the floor, crying with laughter over some Jerry Lewis crack. Even the three year-old loves it.
An additional bonus: you don’t have to watch with your thumb on the remote. There are occasionally adult insinuations in the aforementioned entertainment, but they are so mild and innocent, that even if our children could figure them out, we wouldn’t be uncomfortable.
In St. Augustine’s famous prayer, he asked God to reform the world, beginning with himself.
Once y’all have seen enough My Little Pony to carry on a conversation with a brony, get back to me.
Removing the TV from the playroom, or turning off all their options periodically, is not a bad idea. Speaking as an “aged p” (see Great Expectations), it’s much easier to raise children without these options at all, but whatever, they should know that you control them.
Thank you for sharing this. I’ve no doubt your visits and her sharing of her life were very important to your friend. I learned the hard way (by failing to do this with a beloved aunt before she died) that you can’t hand someone a recording device. You have to turn it on yourself and begin. In my experience the subject will deny that they have anything of interest to say, to which you will reply, “Tell me where you were born,” and they will not stop talking until you run out of time.
I dunno about carrying a conversation on, but I do very much enjoy this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wA6eQ7uVFI
I wasn’t allowed to be in the house all day. I had a bike, we had jungle gyms and swings and slides and teeter totters and such and were expected to climb and play and air out before being allowed back in the house.
I remember enjoying those old television shows with the Bob Hopes of that time. I miss those kind of people now. The current crop of stars often seem petty and political, rather than open and joyful like their predecessors who were full of good humor and worthy of watching and sometimes of emulating.