Good evening. For those of you who don't know me I am not Chris DeMuth, the President of the American Enterprise Institute who reluctantly is not present tonight because he is out of town. So I - it's my task to welcome you to this Bradley Lecture, part of an 18-year program made possible by a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee. Incidentally there will be a reception with our speaker tonight in the room behind me after the lecture and of course, there will be, I presume she knows, there will be questions after she finishes speaking. I should announce that the next Bradley Lecture will be on January 8th Monday, the 8th and the lecture will be Lawrence Mead of New York University. He will be lecturing on some aspect of the End of History. If I am not mistaken Frank I am going to first to introduce that concept here perhaps as part of a Bradley Lecture the End of History. It's become famous and infamous since then. Our lecture tonight is an expert on popular culture including popular music as I have occasion to find out somewhat reluctantly in the nearest past. I made a practice of criticizing modern popular music. Once gone so far I have a very popular place to say that I was all in favor of the cultural exchange with the Soviet Union. They sent us famous ballet dancers, Mikhail Baryshnikov, for example, and we sent them rock music which had the salutary effect of corrupting the young. I don't say that anymore in part because of Martha Bayles who persuaded me that not all modern music was corrupting and she also said by way of making her point that not all of the music that I grew up with was Cole Potter or George Gershwin and a good deal of it was corrupt. I thought of that recently when I read of the death of Anita O'Day, I wonder how many people in this room remember Anita O'Day. I remember her especially because she was a Chicago girl and I was a Chicago boy. She went to Austin High School and burst out of Austin High School at a very young age. I first saw her perhaps in 1939 and 1940 at a jazz club called the Three Deuces in Chicago, 222 North State Street and she sang there and made famous a song called Hold Tight, Hold Tight. I am part of the rest of the lyrics except to mention that the lyrics contain many references to shrimp lobsters and other kinds of seafood, all I am told metaphors for things that I need not or I cannot hear mentioned. But I am told that if you knew all these metaphors you knew that this was a piece that was as vulgar as anything now being sung. But what really characterized the music of the past of my time at least was not it's vulgarity but most of it was so insipid. I will give you one example. A song called Careless. It ends with a couplet and it went something like this. "Are you are so careless as you seem to be or do you just care less for me?" You get it? In a way that was not the worst. That was one better and and by better, I mean, on the scale of insipidity. I think of this frequently when being driven downtown by my wife. We pass on Massachusetts's Avenue, a red tiled house that looks something like what I imagine the Spanish house looked like and it reminds me of a Spanish song of my time and this I offer as a really insipid piece of music. It went something like this "In the little Spanish town, it was on a night like this, stars were peek-a-boo-ing la-de-da-de-dah, bliss or kiss" I forget which. It ended up with something you know, like this. "I whispered 'Be true to me' and she sighed 'Si Si'" As if it is a song written by someone from Berlitz probably. At any rate I am not making this up as Russle would say. This was some of the music that I grew up with and I would have to say that any one who grew up with that kind of music has no right to complain of anything sung by Elvis Presley or for that matter even Mick Jagger. I don't complain about this contemporary music since knowing Martha. I remember an occasion at the University of Chicago, a symposium where she held up her own and more than that against a collection of very famous American University Professors. And I know I realized then that this is a very serious business, what she had to say about modern music and modern culture. And so I am delighted that she is here with us tonight. Her title tonight, I am anxious to find out what she means by it. Now what is the title tonight? "That Aint Us: How America's Cultural Image Got Wrecked, and How It Can Be Fixed." Please welcome Martha Bayles. That was a little switcheroo on the title from what you got on your invitation. Or I should say a failed switcheroo. I haven't made up my mind what the title of this talk is, so I won't worry about it right now. I thought these lyrics were rather good, while I could - I could quote some rap lyrics for you in front of this company but I maybe I better not. They don't scan as well or rhyme as well and are although they you wouldn't say they were insipid, you might use another word which is not to condemn all of rap lyrics, I am not saying that. I would like to thank the people who helped to organize this event. Jessica Browning and the others who took care of the invitations and all the other organizational details. I would like to thank Carline Bowmann who is not here, but who was kind enough to invite me and persuade me to do this and, of course, Chris DeMuth who is also not here, whose whose idea it was to have me come and give this talk. And I would like to thank you Walter for your introduction and for showing me what graceful dancing means at many of the AEI proms of the past. I would like to start off by saying that this project of mine is very much a work in progress. I am busy in the middle of my research of talking with people, of learning a lot about a variety of inter-related topics and I certainly cannot pretend to have all the answers at this point. I am busy trying to collect all the questions. I think I have a good list of questions so far and I certainly have a point of view with which to go at the subject and it's more that point of view that sort of overarching conception that I want to share with you tonight. I will be very happy to take questions about specific areas and specific policies and details, but I am pretty much going to try to stay away from the details of our current cultural diplomacy efforts hoping that they will come up in discussion. The current debate over America's negative image in the world has focused very much on public diplomacy. One does not hear the phrase cultural diplomacy or indeed the word culture very often and that's because the focus is on this other matter, public diplomacy that the phrase public diplomacy was coined by Edward Gullion of The Fletcher School in the sixties actually and it was fully articulated somewhat later by the US Information Agency and I quote to you from a articulation of it in a book by William P Kiehl which is just has come out from The Public Diplomacy Council. Public Diplomacy, "Public Diplomacy seeks to promote the National Interest and the National Security of the United States through understanding, informing and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and Institutions and their counterparts abroad." Now this is a rather inclusive definition which does make room for cultural exchanges and cultural activities. But the emphasis in Public Diplomacy has been over what is now called Information, and in this area is, this is where the debate is really focused right now and has been focused since 9/11, when America woke up to realize that it did not have a very robust Public Diplomacy. And the debate is mostly about the tension and it's a perpetual tension which I don't think can be completely resolved between standards of objective journalism and the idea that our public diplomacy is just telling the truth to the world and the urge, desire and need to shape the messages that we send out to the world for strategic purposes. As I say, this is not a debate that's going to be resolved in either side, by either side, in favor of either side but it's definitely the focus of most of what has been talked about in Washington and most of the many reports that have been published since 9/11, on with 10 words in the title two of which are Public Diplomacy. Now having said all that I will point out to you that is not my topic. My topic is the cultural dimension of America's image in the world or to put it differently, the image of American culture in the world. And my impression is that our cultural image, the sense that people have of United States as a civilization, as a society and as a producer of culture in the sense of arts and literature, performing arts and visual arts, is at some kind of an all time low right now. I can do some measures of that for you, one that comes to mind is The Nation Brand Index which is put together by an organization called GMI-Anholt. This is an index of how people around the world see various countries in a kind of shorthand way which is the term 'Nation Branding' refers to this sort of shorthand conception that people have of nations and in their 2005 report, they reported that among 20 countries in each of which they polled 1000 respondents in an online survey to rank, they asked these respondents to rank 35 nations according to about five or six different measures. One of these measures was 'Cultural Heritage'. In other words, do you think this country has a civilization? Do you think this country has a history? Do you think this country has art and culture? That's a measure that actually has a positive correlation with a number of other measures, such as investment, travel, tourism and study and the United States came dead last. Number 35 out of 35 and I talked to Simon Anholt, and I have talked to other researchers who have done similar work for The British Council and I have asked them, do you think this is a punishment effect. Is this people are saying Americans have no culture, because they are mad at the Bush Administration and they are upset about American Foreign Policy and the answer I got which surprised me a little was no, they didn't think so. They felt that it was really a reflection of the fact that The United States projects its popular culture with such force, with such a loud voice in the world that this this, the quieter voice of our arts and our our literature and so forth is completely drowned out and some countries with short histories like the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand that don't have a centuries long civilization were ranked much higher and Great Britain which was our supporter in Iraq and part of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan was ranked very near the top, I think the number four for cultural heritage. So this there is only, I think, one reasonable explanation for this, and that is as as Simon Anholt put it, the loud voice of our popular culture. Now, between the end of the cold war and 9/11, in a spirit of triumphalism and cost cutting, the US Government on a bipartisan basis cut way back on our public diplomacy, cut way back on our cultural diplomacy, by a factor of about one-third. So that we were caught on 9/11, at a sort of disadvantage. But during that same period, the world has not been lacking, as I say, in American culture stimuli because between the 80's and about 2001, according to the Yale Center for Global Studies, in surveys that they did, the export of filmed and taped entertainment from the United States to the rest of the world increased by a factor between 400 and 500% and that's not counting piracy, that's on record export. And at the same time, our system of self-regulation by the entertainment industry that the movie ratings and the network standards and practices censors, the raised eyebrow of the Federal Communications Commission which would keep an eye on our broadcast and of course, cable TV and the the duplication of TVs and DVDs all of that has been basically slipping away from any kind of censorship, any kind of control. So we have a kind of unprecedented situation of virtually uncensored entertainment flowing out from the United States in unprecedented quantities at a time when the United States is particularly is worried about it's image. Now why is this not more the object of attention? I ask myself. Getting ready to write a book about it. The first answer I would give, I've already suggested to you, which is that the debate over public diplomacy has focused on information. It has focused on what, for lack of a better word, one could call either propaganda or information and that tension between the two. And in most of the discussions that I have seen, there is sometimes a passing reference to our entertainment export. It's usually the word light is attached. "Light entertainment". There is light entertainment on Alhurra TV, one of the new broadcast efforts being put in place by the US, by the State Department. There is light entertainment on Radio Sawa which is our Arabic language radio radio channel going into the Middle-East and elsewhere. I would suggest you that 'light' is not really the right word to describe our our entertainment as it's being exported now. And I think it deserves more and more scrutiny. The second reason I would deduce for the lack of scrutiny is that we have a long history of Washington supporting Hollywood; of the idea that the export of our popular culture is extremely good for America's image in the world. This goes back a long way, and most people I think if you ask them today, they will still say, "Well, people love our popular culture it's generally a good thing. It's our best ambassador." These sentiments echo back through the decades and then indeed to World War one. And I will, the first thing I want to do in this talk is talk a little bit about that relationship between Washington and Hollywood; and why we have this conviction that the export of our pop culture is not just good business but also good diplomacy and the second thing I want to address is how the circumstances have changed. How our popular culture has changed, and how the audience for our popular culture has changed. And why this may no longer be the case. And third, I want to suggest if I have some if I have time, I would like to indicate a couple of directions in which I think our policy should go. Maybe that will come up in the question and answer, we will see. So first to the history, it really begins in World War I when Woodrow Wilson and the committee on Public Information enlisted the aid of the Hollywood studios, actually they were not quite yet in Hollywood, the Fledgling film studios to make feature films supporting America's entry into World War I. These were heavy handed propaganda pieces which you cannot really get on Netflix. They had titles like The Hun and The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin and they were just really straight propaganda films that were made by the studios for the government to whip up war fever among the United States. The Brits by the way went in for this even more big time. The British propaganda during world war one was astonishingly heavy handed and there is a whole different there is a whole story there which I won't digress to. Having made these feature films the studios expected some sort of reward for their efforts after the war and they received it. The US government was extremely helpful in opening the markets of a war weary Europe to American films. Before World War I the the dominant film supplier in the world were the French, in particular the Pathé company. They dominated the American market, they dominated the European market, I point out to you that these were silent films. So language was not a barrier. After World War I American films became dominant. This is not to say that they were not appealing in their own right, of course they were enormously appealing, but at the same time the US Government did work very hard to open those markets and to make sure that American film could dominate. This story continues through World War II, when the office of war information enlisted the aid of a number of Hollywood producers most notably Frank Capra to make training films for US soldiers. His famous "Why We Fight" series which you can get on Netflix, and feature films, lots of them good ones, bad ones, mediocre ones basically projecting a positive image of America's war effort, its fighting forces and and the efforts being made on the home front. Not really, you can't really call these government propaganda, its actually rather interesting. Thomas Doherty of Brandeis University has written a good history of this in which he describes people from the Office of War Information going out to LA, to supervise the production of these films and they arrive in LA and they are first of all very intimidated by the studio bosses and the studio heads with of whom they are in awe and after a few weeks they decide we can't tell these people how to make films, we are going back to Washington and they basically allowed the film industry to do its thing. Which is quite a contrast with the way films were being made at the time in in Nazi Germany or Soviet Union? So we know about these World War II films. Some of them are really quite wonderful, some of them are pretty heavy handed. After World War II two again there was a tit for tat. The government was extremely helpful in opening the European film market against the resistance which was rather feeble given the battering that the - the film industries in Europe had taken, the martial plan had elements in it that tied aid to the lack of import quarters on US entertainment products. There were some rather monopolistic practices allowed on the part of US studios and distributors that wouldn't, that were illegal at home. That would have been subject to anti-trust at home, but overseas they were permitted and again US films made their conquest partly because of their popularity, I do not wish to diminish that. They were just very popular but also because they were aided and assisted by the government. So we have a kind of a win-win situation between Washington and Hollywood. You help us out when we are in trouble says Washington and we will make sure that you can get your product overseas. And this has gone on for some time. But there is a there is a kind of a wrinkle to it which is that, never written down as far as I know, I am trying to find out if it was ever written down, I seriously doubt that it was but I think there was a kind of tacit understanding in this arrangement that the films made by Hollywood would represent the United States in a positive light. As most of them did right through, I am tempted to say, right through the fifties. The relationship began to go sour with, of course, Joe McCarthy's attacks on the communists in Hollywood and then it went much more sour, not really sour but the two the two cities and the two sensibilities parted company in the sixties, of course, with rise of the sixties counter culture, the Vietnam war and during that entire period I don't think that there was anyone in Hollywood who kept up his end of the bargain in the old way, except perhaps John Wayne. So Hollywood no longer delivers and I am not sure this is a bad thing by the way but it's certainly true that Hollywood no longer delivers sort of positive images of the United States in return for all of the assistance that it still receives in its in its interest in export. Now this is partly because we all have an interest in the export of Hollywood products. I am going to quote to you from Dan Glickman the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, speaking last year he said and I quote "Alone among all the sectors of the US economy our industry is the only one that generates a positive balance of trade in every country in which it does business." So we got to warm fuzzy feelings from that and there is really very little objection in this country to doing all we can to export our entertainment products. And, I think, there is a there is a less obvious much less obvious and more subtle reason why we have continued, even after the sixties counter culture, even after movies obviously changed in their tone, there is a reason why we have continued to not question their unlimited export overseas and I think Walter alluded to it in his introduction and that is that what was counter cultural maybe outraged your parents at home in the sixties and seventies was downright subversive overseas. Not so much movies, they were a little harder to smuggle. I think they did get smuggled and there were copies made of every film that was shown to the elite and widely circulated. But certainly popular music, certainly rock music of the sixties and seventies made its way, without help from the state department, but I think without interference from the state department into Eastern Europe and into Soviet Russia. The most obvious example of this would be, of course, Frank Zappa with his band, the Mothers of Invention who was a cultural icon to the dissidents in Czechoslovakia and when after the Czechoslovakian liberation revolution Vaclav Havel wanted to make Frank Zappa his Minister of Culture. Now the way I have heard the story he was talked out of this by James Baker but I am not sure. I think it had something to do with how Frank Zappa behaved when he appeared before Tipper Gore's Senate Committee with his disparaging remarks of Hollywood, about, not Hollywood, Washington life and so forth. But the Plastic People of the Universe which was on of the records or slogans of the Mothers of Invention was the name of the dissident party in Czechoslovakia and I think this was I am sure, I have talked to a lot of wise people from the foreign service who were on the ground then and I have gotten the general impression that this was well known and and not seen as a problem. It was seen as actually a great help to our cause. Okay, there were glimmers of this sentiment actually when the Taliban were ousted in Afghanistan. I remember reading in of all places the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal which, I don't remember whose piece it was, but there was a little celebratory piece about the liberation of Kabul and there were mentions of heavy metal rock music and all sorts of things which don't normally get praised on the editorial or the op-ed of the Wall Street journal. And there was there was this little glimmer that our subversive culture is a great thing even in places like Afghanistan. I think that has quieted down a bit. You don't hear that quite so often today. I think a moments reflection and that is where I am urging upon you which suggest that the kind of the offspring of the sixties counter culture, the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh iterations of rebellious rock music which we have now and foul mouth hip-hop artists sniggering raunchy sitcoms and gleefully violent films and videogames with no moral compass just a kind of reveling in violence, the more graphic the better, may not be the best advertisement for our country in places like Afghanistan. So I would like now to just make a few remarks about how do our popular culture get this way? Because as I suggested, or maybe I didn't suggest, I will suggest it now, Walter suggested it, I do not condemn popular culture across the board. There is a school of thought of course which takes its cues from Plato and classical aristocratic thought, that says popular culture is the base simply because it is popular and anything that caters to the mob and it caters to the small minted coin of the popular taste as Plato put it, is bound to be the degrading and it is bound to be end up as the old show business moguls used to say a race to the bottom. I disagree with that, because when you look at American popular culture and the history of it, you see no lack of the traditional vices of democratic taste. These I would include, among these I would include sentimentality, bombast, vulgarity, violence and sensationalism. There is no denying that there is a certain strain of the popular taste that we will go for this and we will go for it, the more the better. But the genius of American culture at large and also of popular culture has been the ability to offset these vices with commensurate virtues. Such as vitality, openness, expressiveness and dynamism. How did it do this? This is a subject of great interest to me. I would argue that it was done through a kind of elite presence even within popular culture and I am not talking about, you know, professors of classical literature necessarily. I am talking about gatekeepers in the entertainment industry, in the publishing industry, record guides who worked with talent over a long period of time. The kind of people who were tastemakers to use Russell Lynes's old phrase, who were tastemakers within the popular culture and who often times did their best to maintain a sense of standards and of artistic value. Let me give you an example. We are all living with the disappointment of the fact that O.J. Simpson has not been able to publish his book "If I Did It". For those of you who have been in cryogenic suspension for the last couple of months, let me just say that, this was a fiction, fictional account of what it was liked to kill his wife and her friend Ron Goldman which was going to be published by Regan Books, a division of - Thank you, Harpers, yes. How could I not know that? And he was going to, of course, be given an exclusive interview on Fox TV and so forth. This, here you have a perfect package of this sort of state, the worst state of our culture. In a single gesture an acquitted murderer manages to violate both public sense of decency and our sacred legal protections such as double jeopardy. It is a familiar syndrome, and the fact the book was cancelled is, I would say, the exception that proves the rule. This culture of transgression which I have been known to call it, I can make an argument that its roots, apart from the natural vulgarity of democratic taste, its roots actually come partly from the elite culture, because I think the deciding factor in the change that I am describing to you is a change among elites. In the old days O.J Simpson would not have found a publisher for such a book. The Judith Regan's of the world would have said, are you kidding? No way am I going to publish a book like that. The television networks would have said, no, we are not going to air such an interview or give attention to such a person and this you can call this puritanism, you can call it stodgy fuddy-duddism. But along with those qualities that we might perhaps criticize, there was a sense of taste, there was a sense of public decency and there was a sense of quality. Where are those gatekeepers? We don't have that elite component in our popular culture that sort of acts, just sort of offset some of the basing or lowering aspects of public taste. It goes beyond, I think what is going on now in our popular culture and I might add some of our elite culture, it goes beyond the usual mantra of sex and violence, sex and violence. It's really become a question of how we portray our own society. How we portray our civil society? How we portray our mores and our customs? Let me just give you a couple of examples. I gather from fairly good sources that the most popular television shows on satellite Arab TV these days, those coming from the U.S, of course, there is a great deal of programming that is not coming from the U.S, needless to say and I can say something about that if you like. The most talked about shows, there is no Nielson ratings in the Arab world. So one has to rely on what is talked about, pretty much and sort of grapevine. The most talked about shows at the moment, are Sex and the City, South Park, Friends, Seinfeld and number one of all is Oprah. Now this is a mixed bag to me. I, those of you who get these references will be with me and those of who don't will be hoping for less. It's a mixed bag. I personally, I am one of the people who finds Seinfeld extremely funny. There are people who don't. But I can say that if you look at all of these shows with the possible exception of Oprah on a good day when she is remembering her upbringing, they do not place American society or values in a very positive light. Now a lot of the time this is, our values and our social mores are trashed for the sake of comedy and for the sake of humor. And one is tempted to give a pass to comedy, because comedy has that function, it's purpose is to serve, throw everything up in the air in a chaotic way. And so comedy is difficult to sort of be prim and proper about. But the comedy in South Park, for example, I find it deeply cynical. I see some young people laughing, because it is also funny. But it is a deeply cynical humor that it throws everything up in the air, but things never come down in the right place which is what traditional comedy does. It throws everything up and then things fall back into order. We have a style of comedy now that just throws everything against the wall and keeps throwing against the wall. Now in American society we could probably deal with this. We can argue about it, we can have, you know, I can argue with the big South Park fans in the crowd and we can sort of have it out. That's the way we do it, do these things. But overseas, I just I don't know exactly what the reception of South Park is like. There are probably some very loyal fans of South Park who are very westernized and appreciated the same way we do. But there are probably a great many people in the Arab speaking world who have a sense of what the show is like and who are really rather concerned about it. There are people in our own society who are concerned about it, so it is not too much of a stretch to imagine its effect overseas. Sex And The City I could make the same speech, only it's not funny in my opinion. The Congressional Committee headed by Edward P. Djerejian which did a report called 'Winning Hearts and Minds' a few, a couple of years ago. Among the researches they traveled around and talked to people in the Arab world and they have one little interesting report they spoke with the Syrian teacher of English who asked them in all seriousness, that her she said her students were very confused by the program "Friends". And she would like to know does Friends represent a typical American family? It's entirely possible that even programs that we think of as quite good and entertaining are sending a very strange message to the rest of the world about our society. So, we are facing a kind of unprecedented situation. One the one hand, the the censorship or self-regulation if you would like to call it that, which used to control the content of popular culture to some degree, has eroded indeed dissolved away; it's practically non-existent. You still can't say curse words on network TV, but you can sure say them on cable. And you have we still have movie ratings, but what function do they serve when young people can get movies of through all sorts of electronic channels without going to movies theaters where maybe they would be enforcing the rating at the at the box office, but may be not. I won't to even talk about piracy, that's a whole tremendous topic that's of great concern to the motion picture industry. Piracy actually interests me, because I think if you look at the numbers for piracy you get a pretty good measure of the penetration of our entertainment products into various societies. If you add piracy to what is legitimate sales, you end up with rather large numbers. You combine this lack of restraint where the culture that as I have been suggesting emphasizes for lack of a better word transgression, shock being edgy, being dark, being negative is about as many institutions and and social customs as you possibly can and you get a rather toxic combination, I fear. I am afraid that I will not have time to talk about policy implications, because I would like to get some questions from you. So let me just close with this this one remark. There is a strange dissociation between our public diplomacy which talks a great deal about freedom and liberty and the portrait of freedom and liberty that is going out vis-à-vis by way of our entertainment. And I would just call that dissociation to your attention. When political leaders and official spokesmen of the US talk about freedom and liberty, they mean it in the sort of traditional sense of either libertas in the Latin which means a state of emancipation, which has been awarded to someone or which bares with it certain duties or in the sense of freiheit, in German or a folk fray in old English. It means the kinship within a free community that has been that is not ruled by outside tyranny. Both of those linguistic traditions suggest a sense of responsibility to the community and a sense of the ability to govern the self as a necessary prerequisite to the governance of the community. The self governance of the community. This is what our leaders this is what President Bush and others mean when they talk about freedomfreedom, libertyliberty, freedomfreedom, libertyliberty. Unfortunately, I think our entertainment and our popular culture give a portrait of liberty which is more like the Latin Libertinas which is a different word, which from which we get libertinism and that word originally meant the behavior of an emancipated person who could not handle their new found freedoms. This is the route of libertinism. And I am afraid that we are projecting more libertinism than liberty. And those who are immersed in this culture, particularly the young, might be forgiven if they missed the part about responsibility and self governance. Thank you.
