In England, yobs chant for David Beckham's baby to die. In Italy, Verona fans put on small white masks - the sort dentists wear - to shield themselves from the implied stench of visiting Napoli supporters. In the US, Vince McMahon, whose crotch-grabbing World Wrestling Federation (WWF) fakes have turned over a very real billion dollars, has moved to turn over American football.
McMahon's Xtreme Football League (XFL), which he describes as a "more visceral, smash-mouth" (smash-mouth?) version of the game, promises spectacularly violent plays, raunchier cheerleaders and WWF-style mayhem. "They're going to be carrying quarterbacks off the field this year," boasts Keith Millard, an XFL coach. Media moguls aside, McMahon is the most influential trash guru in showbiz. He's promising to "revolutionise" not just American football but all sport. For now though, his most pressing aim is to return gridiron football to the era when "the whole idea was to kill the quarterback". Go Vince . . .
That's just sport. Television, its chat shows long since Jerry Springerised, has cast a prime-time quiz show as an insultfest. Behaving as though afflicted with unspeakably inflamed piles, presenter Anne Robinson abuses contestants for their "stupidity" and then insolently dismisses them for being "the weakest link". Such rudeness and ritual humiliation . . . and on the BBC, no less. It's telling, all the same, that they don't allow abused contestants to moon or even yell back at Ms Piles. Not very interactive, that. The old Beeb was so balanced.
Pop music has Eminem rapping about raping "hos and bitches". Charming. Like yob vileness, McMahon's wrestlers and Robinson's rudeness, it's all so glaringly contrived (and in the case of rap music, jaded too) that it's more tiresome than shocking. Despite the hype, "irony" and "art" have little to do with Eminem. Pillaging the deprivation of urban black America, his tripe is aimed at a generation several hundred light years younger than I am and perhaps you too. If we're expected to act as outraged, well, count me out. His record company can find another sucker.
But in sport, television and pop, downright nastiness, theatrical trash and self-glorifying bad taste undeniably form a vogue these days. Why? Obviously, being oarse, such a vogue generates the kind of conflict which grabs attention. It's a pitch. It sells and it makes money. In the past, generation gaps opened over Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones and The Sex Pistols. But the current Eminem furore seems like a re-enactment too far, principally notable for its lack of originality. Been there, done that, already have the Tshirt in too many colours. Yawn! The puerile desire to shock seems too jaded now.
Or are Eminem and the rest of the coarse-meisters kicking in principle against something? Stuffiness? Hypocrisy? Effeteness? Maybe. After all, it depends on your perspective. But whose stuffiness, hypocrisy or effeteness? Society's? Hardly, since that laughably archaic entity has long ago been shown up as a fake by Maggie Thatcher, her legions of liberating entrepreneurs and their ideological descendants. No, the coarseness doesn't appear to be kicking against anything especially restrictive or repulsive. The dominant force is the market and the nastiness is, at least in part, a marketing ploy.
Fair enough, it invariably has been. Now, however, it seems as if there's so much coarseness that mass culture is in danger of becoming one giant, perpetually screaming advertisement for itself. It has all the worst symptoms of swaggering advertising: be "in-your-face"; screw the product, sell an image; appeal to the emotions - feel don't think. That's the key message: feel don't think. As a result, because of the passions involved, sport - especially sport which can be hyped by TV - is particularly prone to nonsense. Sure, in the case of the WWF, it's blatantly not proper sport but even proper TV wrestling was never, well, proper wrestling.
In its case, image is the product. Mind you, McMahon's wrestling packages its parody with such supremely unembarrassable conviction that, arguably, it misses the point just to dismiss it as mere drivel. Of course it's drivel but it's processed drivel which, like reading a people's values from their garbage, tells you just as much about contemporary life in the wealthy West as, say, a Booker nominated novel on the same topic might. What it tells you, apart from the obvious showbiz links to advertising, marketing and sensation, is that there's deep disillusionment about. Vince's discovery has been that you can even sell that and make a fortune.
So, it's gaudily packaged nihilism for sale. Everything is crap, suggests the WWF . . . except money, power and sex and, if you've got the first one, you can always get the other two. Let's get down to basics here. Only money matters. This is smash-mouth culture: feel don't think. In that sense, WWF may well be a first round in a kind of cultural endgame. It's appropriate for the times in which we live. With boxing already dead, the next sport targeted to have meaning filleted out of it is American football. After that, who knows? TV and pop music seem in danger of facing a meltdown of meaning too.
IT'S not just America's typical showbiz hype which both reflects and generates a public sense of disillusionment. Sure, hype is at its most malign there and brooding disillusionment regularly prompts angry teenagers and sacked employees to "waste" (or "take out") fellow students or former colleagues. Way to make a real splash, eh Vince? But even in Ireland and Britain, where we see Sky Sports flogging The Premiership and terrestrial channels pushing rugby and the GAA championships, hype which invokes an imagined, comic-book, primordial past - real backto-basics stuff - has become an ad standard.
Such hype is not quite at WWF levels with its comic-book archetypes - The Undertaker, The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin and the rest of the circus - but what we have is already way out of kilter with our experience of reality. Sky's pushing of Naseem Hamed (a coarse boaster who does Muhammad Ali "dissing" but leaves out the irony and the humour) might seem almost cordial beside the US wrestling nonsense. But still, its aim is to make you feel - like kids feel the good v. evil circus of WWF - even though what most sane people actually feel is insulted at being treated as idiots. Still, they FEEL. That's what counts.
And, OK, boxing is almost as destroyed as wrestling. When the the "ringwalk" (the "ringwalk" - sad, eh?) is a bigger production than the bout, few can take the professional game seriously any more. But football is a little different, isn't it? At least in Europe and at least for now. Certainly, the GAA football and hurling championships seem genuinely contested. But even these are hyped by TV advertising in a manner which should cause as much alarm as embarrassment. After all, the GAA is familiar, folksy stuff with a thread running all the way back to childhood and Dev's country and even beyond.
You know . . . Croke Park, Artane Boys Band, Micheal O Muircheartaigh sending bilingual beannachtai to Gaels in Birmingham agus Boston, Father Paddy Puckout home from the missions, ta anathas orm an corn seo a glacadh . . . emblems of a different world. Now, the GAA championships are advertised as some kind of purifyingly violent, mystical, Cuchulainnon-acid experience. Lepping about to souped-up "traditional" Irish music, primordial Celtic mythology-style figures are supposed to emphasise the millennia-old cultural continuity of it all. OK, it's not excessively coarse but it is yet more "feel don't think" because if you were to think about it at all, you could only feel mortified.
It's clear that marketing is devouring everything. Supposed to promote consumption, which is fair enough, it's actually consuming culture to promote itself. It is becoming everything. Communally, there's little else. In the way that economics consumed society (leaving most people working longer, not, as promised, shorter hours) appropriating sport, TV and pop music in this way bespeaks a culture of consumption which is cannibalising itself. Little wonder that Hannibal Lecter strikes such a resounding note these days. Mind you, he is very well marketed . . .
And so it goes. It's not just marketing, of course, which has generated widespread coarsening. Openness, generally a valuable thing in any society (or economy!) has also been abused. Confessional-style media doesn't only burst hypocrisies and add to understanding and compassion. It also appeals to prurience and sensation and, naturally, shock-value suffers inflation. Being separated or having a drink problem or being gay - any of these could have produced shock value once.
Now, even if you claimed a "Full Monty" of such previously distinguishing marks, few people outside your immediate circle would care. To cut the mustard as any kind of non-criminal shocker now, you'd need to do much better. Entry level: lap dancing. The bar has been raised to smash-mouth levels. Everybody is different; therefore everybody is a deviant. It's only a matter of degree. There are no norms (some TV ads stress this notion). There remains a practically insatiable appetite for sensation out there. Sales of tabloids prove that. Seeking harder edges, coarseness becomes inevitable.
Perhaps the greatest pitfall in discussing contemporary coarsening is that the process has been going on for decades. It's nothing new. Certainly, public discourse since the 1960s (and the spread of television) has been progressively blunter than in the earlier decades of the last century. Yet, leaving aside self-indulgence and a desire to shock, there was often a genuinely, even if sometimes arguably misguided, liberating agenda in play.
Individuals often had good reason to kick against state and church control of their lives. But, for most people, state and church are not the forces they used to be. The fact that the major force nowadays is the market and the nastiness is, substantially if not only, a marketing ploy, is supposed to be ironic. In a sense it is, but more so, it's cynical - deeply cynical. The real irony is that for all the individuality and freedoms promised by the "free" market, most people have more but are also more controlled than ever. Stop working in this economy and you'll sink. Hence the growing public disillusionment. Is it worth it? It's as though the system, not people, is in control. The coarseness is not merely a lack of civility. It's an expression of fear as much as of friction.
Meanwhile, huge numbers of people are encouraged to walk around wearing clothes with writing on them. Even on the street, marketing wishes us all to be billboards and to pay for the privilege of being specific billboards. It used to be "I think, therefore I am". Now marketing encourages people to think "I'm an expensive billboard, therefore I am". Little wonder people are becoming more coarse. After all, when you think about it, which, of course, you are not supposed to do (get a life, saddo!), it is ludicrous.