AGAINST CONSERVATIVE COOL

There was no need to explain Presley’s reticence. To meet with the president, Presley knew he had to jump the then-unbreached wall between the antibourgeois rock culture and the anti-rock bourgeoisie. “If the rock ‘n’ roll world had known of this letter’s contents,” chides Patricia Jobe Pierce in The Ultimate Elyis, one of numerous volumes of packaged Presleyana, ” it would have felt deeply betrayed.” (Imagine the pain of the nation’s First Elvis Impersonator, at the time a non-inhaling youth-in-protest.) And so “Jon Burroughs” checked into the Hotel Washington to await the president’s pleasure, incognito, if resplendent, in purple cape and extra-terrestrial- chic amber shades erablazoned with the initials “EP.”

Across the cultural divide, Richard Nixon too was content to keep the hastily scheduled “drop-by” confidential. No flash-popping, full-press photo- op for this president, no matter how many voters were loyal Elvis fans. The president seemed to know he and Presley made a joltingly odd couple, one that would be unacceptable to both men’s still-separate constituencies. In fact, during the 35-minute Oval Office chat, as recorded in a slim book on the meeting by former White House assistant Egil “Bud” Krogh, Nixon repeatedly emphasized the importance of Presley’s maintaining his “credibility” — i.e., independence from Establishment links. This, Krogh speculates, underscored Nixon’s awareness of the hazards of guilt-by-association for both the king of rock ‘n’ roll and the selfappointed leader of the silent majority. The meeting remained a secret for more than a year.

All of which is to say that a very important social wall still existed a quarter-century ago, a demarcation between bourgeois culture and the rock culture — variously and overlappingly known as the silent majority and the protest generation, squares and cool people, Us and Them.

That wall is gone. Even the rubble has been swept away, with hardly a souvenir to show for it. The rock ‘n’ roll sensibility grew up and over the line until it became a prevailing influence on Us and Them alike. It’s no accident that Detroit (not to mention Japan) now markets family sedans — tangible markers of stability — with such rock ‘n’ roll anthems of recklessness as “No Boundaries.” There are no boundaries.

Although such metaphors don’t mix, they make an increasingly common coupling as the unmoored bourgeoisie pursues a rock ‘n’ roll karma. The counterculture has overrun the mainstream, becoming, in Mark Steyn’s memorable phrase in the American Spectator, “the lunch-counter culture, all lined up side by side and instantly available.” The U.S. Postal Service, for example, issues a stamp commemorating actor James Dean, the brief-lived sulky neurotic whose screen image exemplifies the vapid rebellion that now tinges the mainstream. The J. C. Penney catalogue, purveyor to the heartland, features “Bad to the Bone” vinyl biker jackets (made in China) with matching caps for dogs. Sen. Dan Coats, a Republican stalwart, makes a lunge for rebel coattails (or, rather, biker-jacket tails) by lobbying the Post Office to have the Dean stamp released in his and Dean’s home state of Indiana.

Scions of Us are seeking alliance with legions of Them in an elusive quest for acceptance; for validation; for an edge of hipness; for a sense of cool from what used to be the other side. It doesn’t seem to matter that this benighted quest for cool undermines — indeed, nullifies — the very principles that bourgeois culture, however marginalized it may be, still rests upon. It may, however, explain why it is, as Roger Kimball has noted in the New Criterion, that “conservative electoral victories have made nary a dent in the march of left-wing attitudes and ideas in our culture.”

In fact, those very attitudes and ideas, having become both unexceptional and ubiquitous, are the most significant influences on our national character. The notion of personal responsibility, for example, even championed by a ruling majority, can do little for a nation autonomically pulsing to a countercultural beat.

Look at the rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame. Once upon a time, Cleveland city fathers were repelled by rock ‘n’ roll. Those were the days, of course, when the entertainment trade paper Variety could describe the city as being ” in an uproar” over two teenage girls who had withdrawn their college savings to chase the Beatles home to England after the group’s Cleveland debut. In reprimanding the two runaways, the juvenile-court judge presiding over the 1965 case said that presenting rock concerts to youngsters is “like feeding narcotics to kids.” (He probably didn’t realize the extent to which his words could be taken literally.) Mayor Ralph Locher went so far as to ban future rock concerts from public city venues, having “averred that [rock ‘n’ roll] did not contribute to the culture of the city and tended to incite riots.”

By the 1990s, of course, another Cleveland mayor, Michael R. White, joined by Republican governor George Voinovich, had decided that not only did rock ‘n’ roll contribute to the culture of the city, it was the culture of the city: hence Cleveland’s fight to make itself the site of the rock “museum.” Designed by I. M. Pei, the $ 92 million complex (which includes a load of chotchkas from John Lennon) was built to enshrine the memorabilia of rock culture — the same rock culture that brought free love, getting high, and anti-Americanism to the masses, all practices not usually associated with civic boosterism. But there they were on opening day in 1995, government officials and assorted Babbitts to honor — and to be honored by — Yoko Ono, Little Richard, Jann Wenner, and other oligarchs of the anti-bourgeoisie.

Everyone smiled. Everyone clapped. Everyone stood for a Woodstock recording of Jimi Hendrix’s amplified assault on “The Star-Spangled Banner” as Marine Corps Harrier jets performed a fly-by salute. Middle America cheered, oblivious to the stupendous irony of the moment. That thunderbolts failed to cleave the skies is no less amazing than that this resounding clash of symbols failed to arch any eyebrows.

But as the rock culture’s princes willfully blind themselves to their mainstream, indeed, corporate status (U2’s Bono promised Grammy-night fans that he’d keep “f–ing up the mainstream,” not realizing, as Mark Steyn has noted, he is the mainstream), the leaders of the bourgeoisie fail to see the implications of their embrace of rock. This is particularly distressing on the part of ideological conservatives. They may have honed their skills at reading left-wing bias in the media, for example, but they stumble when it comes to the bias in contemporary culture.

And so it comes to pass on the floor of the U.S. Senate that Spence Abraham, a Republican senator known as a principled conservative, eulogizes narcoculture poster child Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Having neatly de- coupled Garcia’s destructive influence on untold masses of youngsters from his philanthropic record, Abraham finds himself regaling his senatorial colleagues with tales of a troupe of Tibetan monks, the Gyoto Tantric Choir, and their adventures at San Quentin: “As the monks passed San Quentin in a van, they said they felt the presence of ‘trapped souls’ within. . . . When the monks later performed at San Quentin through the [Grateful Dead’s] Rex Foundation they were able to see the prison’s gospel choir perform. According to [Grateful Dead drummer Mickey] Hart, one prison guard began playing the drums and another played the organ. Guards and inmates were mixing and singing sacred songs.”

According to Abraham’s peroration, the proceeds from the resulting album went to the “victims of the inmates” (no one in this entertainment age “mixes and sings sacred songs” willy-nilly). Whether this incident, among others the senator singled out for praise, puts Jerry Garcia in league with conservative efforts to promote private funding of the arts is beside the point. The fact remains that 25 years ago, when Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley mutually declined to share the spotlight, no senator would have actively sought links to a preeminent symbol of the rock culture.

Times change? You bet. Still, the essential ideals of bourgeois culture — responsibility, fidelity, sobriety, and other badges of maturity — remain the same. So, for that matter, does the cumulative message of the rock culture — sexual and narcotic gratification, anarchism, self-pity, and other forms of infantilism. There is no getting around it: The aims of the one are wholly at odds with the aims of the other. But never say never the twain shall meet. Today, an all-but-irresistible cultural force field pulls from Right to Left, luring bourgeois types into anti-bourgeois guises.

This curious force field works only one way. Never would a Jerry Garcia find kind words to say about a Spence Abraham on a concert stage or anywhere else. The same goes for James Dean and Dan Coats. Amazingly, the innate and verifiable antagonism that emanates from the Left doesn’t dampen the contemporary Right’s ardor for union, for a leftish, rock ‘n’ roll sense of identification.

Thanks to the indelible stereotypes perpetuated by 40 years of laugh-track derision and rock-star worship, a false dichotomy has been etched upon the nation’s consciousness. On one hand, there is “cool,” variations of which derive from the adolescent archetypes portrayed in rock songs — sensitive artists, angry cynics, misunderstood mavericks. These inspire legions of free spirits to flout (or, worse, pretend to flout) convention in lockstep, seeking the me-against-the-system psychodrama, contemporariness, sexual spirit, and other thrills connoted by a liberal sensibility. On the other, there is “uncool,” the upright, un-hip, square cogs who have no verve, possibly no heartbeat, and certainly no sex appeal.

This may explain why a group of young conservative women called No Left Turn decided to lure the media to a fund-raiser, according to the Washington Post, by bragging about its members’ looks: “This event will definitely lend itself to a photographer since the committee does not look anything like ‘Schlafiyites’ or ‘Barbara Bushes,'” said one member of the group. The implication is clear: Us young conservatives are real hip chicks. In a pep piece about the emergence of young conservative women in the Washington Times, group co-founder April Lassiter, an aide to majority whip Tom Delay, wrote: “They are not the traditional conservative women you may be expecting. Their life experiences range from rock bands to fashion gurus.”

Oh my. Rock bands and fashion gurus. Cliched bona fides of hipness in hand, the women flaunt their membership in the “cool” camp where vibrancy, currency, and all things electric are said to exist. Belonging to the rock mainstream, regardless of the implications, seems to be a compulsion. But this kind of selfconsciousness only highlights the awkwardness of grafting a rock sensibility onto bourgeois beliefs.

Such mismatches abound. Rush Limbaugh chatters about the happy prospect of achieving the maturity of age 50, even as he hums along to the metallic strains of the ever-wild, ever-pubescent ZZ Top. John Kasich describes himself as both a born-again Christian and “a rock ‘n’ roller.” William Bennett, the man who turns homespun virtues into lucrativc bestsellers, leads the charge against rap music even as he cherishes his rock ‘n’ roll collection. Given the crucial importance of symbols in things cultural, such mirror-imagery gives pause.

Consider some of the 40-year-old critiques of rock ‘n’ roll, William Bennett’s kind of rock ‘n’ roll, the music now referred to as “oldies.” From Variety in 1955 (dug up by Grace Palladino for her book Teenagers) comes the following: “What are we talking about? We’re talking about ‘rock and roll,’ about ‘hug,’ and ‘squeeze,’ and kindred euphemisms which are attempting a total breakdown of all reticences against sex. In the past such material was common enough but restricted to special places and out-and-out barrelhouses. . . . Compared to some of the language that loosely passes for song ‘lyrics’ today, the ‘pool-table papa’ and ‘jellyroll’ terminology of yesteryear is polite palaver. Only difference is that this sort of lyric then was off in a corner by itself. It was the music underworld not the main stream.” (Italics added.)

Another Variety story from the same year compares the box-office potency of rock ‘n’ roll to that of the 1930s swing era: “Swing, however, never had the moral threat of rock ‘n’ roll which is founded on an unabashed pitch for sex,” Variety notes. “Every note and vocal nuance is aimed in that direction.” Again, this is not the declamation of a village elder fulfilling his (erstwhile) institutional role as stick-in-the-mud, but the voice of the showbiz bible whose savvy critics had seen the evolution of popular music over half a century. As a Variety editorial on “leer-ics,” circa 1955, reminds us, that’s a lot of evolution: from “ragtime to jazz, from blues to swing, from hot to cool, from the cycles of the polka and the tango to the samba, the rhumba and the mambo . . . the country & western cycle . . . and now the rhythm & blues (r & b), with its rock ‘n’ roll side- lights.”

Sidelights. Apparently, the crystal ball that day needed a little dusting.

With the explosion of rock ‘n’ roll, as rhythm obliterated melody, as sexuality overwhelmed romance, as emotions were gutted, as popular taste was infantilized, a cultural condition was created that now has its expression in gangsta rap and other pop excrescences that William Bennett, commendably, opposes. Or were these critics 40 years ago just plain wrong? Of course not. Consider the barely figleafed, prototypical rock song “60-Minute Man”: ” There’ll be 15 minutes of kissin’, and you’ll holler please don’t stop; there’ll be 15 minutes of teasin’, and 15 minutes of pleasin’, and 15 minutes of blowin’ my top.” Having come our way four years before rock ‘n’ roll first got its name, ’60-Minute Man” is without doubt a direct antecedent to the excesses of the moment. Similarly, Variety’s early skirmishes against the incipient degradation of popular culture have much in common with the good fight Bennett now wages. His own musical taste, however, casts his efforts in an ironic light that would not exist if his cultural hobbies ran to, say, operetta, the bagpipes, or Jerome Kern.

But Bennett is a creature of his time. His affnity for rock, whether genuine taste or studied pose, is maintained with astonishingly little awareness of the tension pulling between the rock and bourgeois cultures. No getting around it: Rock culture is the phenomenally popular manifestation of the political shambles conservatives have appointed themselves to rebuild. There can be no meaningful progress, philosophically or politically, until this atmosphere is understood to be smothering all attempts at social rejuvenation.

Maybe this dispiriting state of affairs was inevitable; it was certainly made imminent by the life and celebrated death in 1955 of James Dean, who, as the predominance of motion pictures in the popular culture was ending, projected the misfitting surliness that would come to characterize the culture in which we now live.

Director Elia Kazan, who first brought Dean to the big screen, has written incisively in his memoir about the Dean legend he regrets having done so much to create: “Its essence was that all parents were insensitive idiots, who didn’t understand or appreciate their kids and weren’t able to help them. Parents were the enemy. I didn’t like the way [director] Nick Ray showed the parents in Rebel Without a Cause, but I’d contributed by the way Ray Massey was shown in my film [East of Eden]. In contrast to these parent figures, all youngsters were supposed to be sensitive and full of ‘soul.’ This didn’t seem true to me. I thought them — Dean, ‘Cal,’ and the kid he played in Nick Ray’s film — self-pitying, self-dramatizing, and good for nothing. I became very impatient with the Dean legend, especially when I received letter after letter thanking me for what I’d done for him and asking me to be a sponsor of a nationwide network of Jimmy Dean clubs. I didn’t respond to those letters.”

Parent vs. child. Square vs. cool. Bourgeois vs. rock. Who won? Dean pouts on a U.S. stamp, sets the style for middle-class pooches, and is a symbol embraced by a conservative senator from the heartland. Of course, in spite of everything, bourgeois culture continues to exist. It even dominates American politics. But on a cultural level, it is an army in rout, flummoxed by or oblivious to a conflict older, and perhaps more fundamental, than the wars over political correctness.

Elvis Presley, of all people, seemed to understand the natural tension between the bourgeois culture and the rock culture. As the two camps have melded and blurred, it is bourgeois culture that has been transformed, having meekly yielded its own identity. In so doing, it seems to have lost any understanding of what it takes to survive in a meaningful form. Could that bell be tolling for thee? If ever there is to be a restoration of a culture compatible with, rather than corrosive of, civil society, the defenders and promoters of ordinary American life must listen, and seek to understand what it is that has died.

Diana West, who freelances from Washington, D.C., has written for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about the children’s horror novelist R. L. Stine and the movie director Oliver Stone.