The 'Nuclear Family' Meltdown
American culture was nomadic from the beginning, and severing ties has been a way of life since the first colonists arrived here. In the Old World, people had extended families, where children had many examples of adulthood in varied aunts, uncles, etc. As much as they could, people maintained and revived the old ways, nurturing their extended families in this country, and people with such families today should be aware of how lucky they are.After the depression and World War II, people were ready for a bright new world. The sky was the limit. For many, the extended family was seen as an artifact of the past, quaint, but out of style. Two generations later, the percentage of single people, and people living alone, has skyrocketed.
The Atomization of Society
The word 'nuclear' did not enter common usage until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, well into the cold war and the McCarthy era. One interpretation of the 'nuclear' metaphor speaks of the parents at center and the children orbiting, mirroring atomic structure; this seems valid, but coincidental. Another interpretation is that applying the word 'nuclear' to 'family' was a ruthless marketing scheme. If families were divided up into smaller units, sales would increase. Grandma and Grandpa could be safely warehoused, and neighbors in housing tracts would remain strangers to each other, thus reducing the danger of community sharing of resources. More individual families meant more toasters, radios, TV sets, cars, and homes to be sold. The scheme worked magnificently.
The economic system of a society shapes the lives of its people. It has been observed many times that an Agrarian Society is Family Centered, and an Industrial Society is Individual Centered.
We have degenerated into a me-first, I-want-it-all, single-serving society. Every person has to have a 31 foot long diesel land barge to feel like they matter, to feel that their existence is any less futile, as they sit idling on the freeway in a sea of glaring metal, glass, and single occupant vehicles. Shopping has replaced religious experience, and the prozac-zombies prowling the shopping malls are its high priests and priestesses. (Yes, prozac is a lifesaver for a lot of people - but to us old timers who had to conquer crippling depression the hard way [years of therapy] it seems like it's a little too easy - and I'm always suspicious of corporate-produced anything...)
The hearth has been supplanted by the Television set. And now, every room in the house has a TV.
Pop Regurgitates Itself
Anna Nicole Smith & her attorney
Telling the truth has become a game show, as has baring one's soul, exhibiting one's shame, using shock value lke a drug, or flaunting one's wealth. Fantasy has become reality, as pop culture continuously recycles itself, with John Water's "Divine" character being upstaged by the grotesque, impossibly crass Anna Nicole Smith [the goldigger who got a fortune by marrying a decrepit billionaire]. With the explicit eye of the wildlife photographer's camera, Anna's tantrums, eating contests, complaining, and star fits are recorded and presented to a panting audience. Her fawning entourage consists of her lapdog lawyer, her blue haired, tomboy lesbian lover, and her [bewildered and amused] son. Her dog, Sugar Pie, a scruffy Toto-clone, enjoys humping one or another of Anna's many stuffed animals, which have been thoughtfully dressed in [very expensive, no doubt] lingerie, to enhance the amusement of the gang, and presumably, the television audience.
Her lawyer has her read a particularly lascivious Henry Miller passage, and her reaction is: "I really hate reading, but I might like it if it was all like this." Another of her quotes is: "The world is my pearl - uh - I mean oysture." She carries her billionaire husband's ashes around the house, and sets him on the TV set, by the cable box and an empty can of Diet Pepsi, camera closing in on her lumpy, vast, sweatpanted derriere. [Think how his family must feel, watching this!]
On one episode, Anna and her girlfriend go to have their tattoos [of each other] touched up, clacking their tongue piercings in a pornographic French kiss during the painful parts, or maybe to pig out at a local Italian restaurant, stomping out after a spat, leaving stunned waiters and third helping plates of uneaten, expensive ravioli.
Anna's outfits range from skin tight stretch pants in which she looks like the worst kind of obese trailer park trash, to French maid's lingerie and multi-hour/multi-operator makeup jobs in which she looks like a Mardi Gras float, or an entire Las Vegas chorus line rolled into one. Her eyelashes are like bird's wings, and her nails like swordfish. Her shellacked, golden blonde hair is fully two feet across, like aerodynamically contoured fiberglass. Divine, eat your heart out.
Anna Nicole Smith epitomizes where the mindless center of the United States is headed, at least to what we aspire. Whatever drugs she's on are not the Government approved standards [Prozac and Cigarettes], but she slurs her words enough to make it obvious that she's blocking out most of reality one way or another. Like middle America, she Wants It Now, and wants to eat the best part and throw the rest away. Misunderstood signs of wealth are fetishized, exaggerated, turned into manufactured widgets and available at WalMart. Deliberate wastefulness is seen as the ultimate way to demonstrate one's power, and one's significance, and to fight off the nagging feeling of futility and hopelessness that Television and Buying Stuff seeks to mask.
Souls For Sale
The permeation of the landscape with sales schemes further erodes people's trust and sincerity. Children raised from diapers in front of televisions constantly barking lies: 'Only $999.99, Your Choice, Come in Now and Get a FREE GIFT!'-- these children's x-ray eyes and ears know they are being lied to- they just can't articulate it--and it turns them to cynics.
This severity of this issue of children being lied to constantly is impossible to overstate. Children know instantly when an adult is lying. This is something a lot of people forget when they grow up and start lying to themselves, and join in the complicity.
Our young see self-obsessed adults who haven't got a clue about what's going on in their kid's heads - adults who are running headlong into disaster, 'adults' who behave like bratty children, like Anna Nicole Smith.
These kids see corruption in society's management, they see corporate advertising that cheapens their affections (music, styles) by selling it back to them; They see that in the real world, 'it's OK to take the easy way out' - people do it all the time - just watch the news. Everyone sees it, and reasons that it's fine to do a little crime now and then. Television bullets don't hurt, car chases are fun and exciting - all of life's dramas, comedies and action wrap up neatly at the hour or half-hour. Better get your 15 minutes... And then adults wonder at the aberrations of youth.
Religious experience is cheapened with television, at least with those religions crass enough to resort to it. Barking, sweating, jowly, polyester clad evangelists may rake in the dollars, but they make their "religion" repulsive.
It destroys respect, or any sense of social loyalty, being told 'drugs are bad', then seeing their parents chain smoke cigarettes and guzzle booze, seeing Viagra and Prozac equated with asprin, seeing the rampant hypocrisy in grown-up politics, and in television's canned laughter, predictable plot lines, and insistent, intrusive commercials.
KILL YOUR TV!
New Families have arisen spontaneously.
With these things in mind it should be clear what has shredded the family in this country, but unclear thinking puts the blame on the symptoms, not the cause.
Family values are the major issue today, but whose family values? The 'Nuclear Family'? Or the Human Family? Buffer this: 'It takes a whole village to raise a child.' (it's an old African saying, around long before Hillary. Flippant Republicans charge that the saying is a defense of the welfare system and that it's saying it's the village's responsibility to raise a child. That, of course, is a shallow reading of the metaphor. The deeper meaning looks at the attitude of the community; the sense of 'looking out' and 'working together' that used to be called 'good citizenship', or 'neighborliness'. It calls for a sense of community, a thing of the past in the sterile, mass-produced suburbs.)
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