Insult our culture, you insult us….
: Last week, a review of a children’s movie in The Times was filled with bizarre poltical and anatomical references.
This week, we have A.O. Scott looking for profound meaning in SpongeBob SquarePants (but, thankfully, not finding any):
The loud, silly innocence of Mr. Hillenburg’s imaginary world, where double entendres seem to bubble up and dissipate faster than you can catch them, is a welcome antidote to the self-seriousness and brutality that rule so much of the popular culture.
I am fed up with these overarching generalizations about popular culture. The other night on Aaron Brown’s show, the lady from the Heritage Foundation and Aaron himself went on about the coarseness of our — our culture … that is to say, us. Now we have this critic, who ought to know better, making another ovarching generalization about self-seriousness and brutality.
Well, there are brutal movies and there are children’s movies.
Folks: It’s not one culture. That is the lesson of the internet. That is the obvious lesson of the nichefication of media and entertainment: We get choice, we use it. See Jarvis’ First Law of Media. So you can’t generalize about all of our culture. And when you do, you generalize about all of us. And that’s intellectually lazy and dishonest.
