Neatly, In A Nutshell

A veritable idée fixe on this blog since its inception (and, indeed, on the two blogs that preceded it) are the idiocies of this postmodern age; idiocies whose intent and leveling impulse is to destroy the distinction between the exceptional and the commonplace; between art and kitsch; between art and trash; between genius and simpleton; between informed, intellectual rigor and the so-called Wisdom of The Common Man. In short, the relentless devaluation of all values.

In today's Independent is an article by columnist Howard Jacobson that neatly puts the whole matter in a nutshell some 1000 words in length. Talking about the run-away Brit hit TV reality show, Big Brother, Mr. Jacobson writes:

After the Revolution, the Terror. This — the invariable consequence of filling the heads of the uneducated with grandiosity — is what we are seeing on Celebrity Big Brother. In the days when she sweetly knew herself to be pig ignorant, Jade Goody [one of the show's star contestants] had neither the reason nor the confidence to launch the sort of terrifying tirades to which poor little rich girl Shilpa Shetty has been subjected — never mind with what provocation — this last week.

But then television made Jade a star. Television rewarded her with renown for all the things she didn't know. Television set her up as a sort of Ugly Betty of the reason and the intellect, an example and a promise to everyone who had hitherto felt damned in their own fatuity. You, too, said television, can be rich and famous for being an airhead. Indeed, if we have our way, you won't be rich and famous for being anything else. And now the airhead is a swollen head, and won't be spoken down to by a mistress of Indian subcontinent hauteur. Jade has rights now, whether or not she can spell them, and will shake the planet to its foundations before she forgoes a single one.

[...]

There is a vindictiveness in dumbing down. It aims to dethrone not only intelligence but the means by which we rate one thing above another. Dumbing down is an assault upon the very concept of value. Thus Jade, though she wouldn't know what I am talking about, is the child of that nihilism which gave us postmodernism and the Turner prize. A celebrity for being nobody, a belcher and a farter with her own perfume, she is an ironic reference to the unmeaningness of meaning.

RTWT here.