Reading fundamentalist

Today: Editor and writer Maria Bustillos.

Issue No. 203

Closing Time
Maria Bustillos

Closing Time

by Maria Bustillos

Want to hear something gross? No? You’ve been hearing nothing but gross disgusting stuff every moment for weeks on end, you’re saying? I know, but for what I hope will be an illuminating conclusion, please join me for this excerpt from an enormously popular book about the culture wars.

Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.

The “Walkman headphones” are a tell. These weirdly prurient ruminations are from Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. Camille Paglia once called this godawful bestseller “the first shot in the culture wars.” She was wrong as usual!

But when was it, really, the first shot in the culture wars?

I don’t doubt there are earlier examples, but 1642 leaps to mind, the year Cromwell’s Puritan parliament closed all the theaters in London, because Project 1642 did not care for “stage-plays representative of lascivious mirth and levity.” And then the theaters stayed shut, or mostly shut, for 18 whole years, until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. After that came about a zillion glorious Restoration plays, wonderful satirical comedies filled with dazzling wit and moral heft, like William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700).

That wasn’t the end of it, though. Because in 1698 the English clergyman Jeremy Collier wrote A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, calling out the playwrights’ “Smuttiness of Expression; Their Swearing, Profainness, and Lewd Application of Scripture; Their Abuse of the Clergy; Their making their Top Characters Libertines,” etc., and it got a lot of play. Again! Just 38 years after the theaters had reopened, and here is another Puritan bozo all on about lascivious this and that, smack in the middle of one of the greatest literary flowerings in English history. Nobody was forcing Jeremy Collier to go to the theater! But that wasn’t the point he was making, the point was to forbid people from sharing ideas, literature, gaiety. Freedom.