My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

14 REVENGE OF THE POET-CRITIC
I am a product of the U.S. and an example of it; this is a source of considerable
discomfort to me but this discomfort is perhaps the basis of my
work. For my themes, to call them that, have pretty consistently been awkwardness,
loss, and misrecognition.
But when I say that, I want to go on by remarking on the shrunken representation
of U.S. literary, art, and intellectual culture within the major
national intellectual and cultural journals and on the public broadcasting
channels. I would call this development the rise of the mediocracy; that
is, the triumph of the mediocre in the dominant institutions of intellectual
and literary culture. The vitality of North American (not just US)
cultural production at this time is all but elided by the selection and commentary
in so-called leading journals of opinion such as The New York
Review of Books, The Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Nation, and New
Republic, the news weeklies, the cultural sections of the major newspapers,
etc. These venues have dismally failed to account for most of the significant
intellectual and cultural work of the past decade, choosing instead
an insular repetition of the same names, issues, and explanations that
gives the impression that the culture suffers from the same terminal anemia
and mediocrity as afflicts the publishers and editors and frequent
contributors to these journals. (A striking example of this is James Atlas's
piece "Why 'Literature' Bores Me", which appeared in The New York Times
Magazine [March 16, 1997]. This is not just an idiosyncratic attack on the
innovative literary arts of the past hundred years; Atlas, an editor of the
magazine, should be taken as representing, at least in part, the newspaper's
cultural politics.)
What is striking today is the refusal to recognize that it is a degraded
cultural agenda of the major print and electronic media, and not the state
of culture, that has given rise to mediocracy.
Consider the problem of public broadcasting, a paradigm case of
mediocracy as official policy. With the deplorable decline of government
support for public radio and television, NPR, PBS, and their affiliates have
moved their focus from singularity of program content to homogenization
of audience. Within the context of public radiO, this has meant sending
out a cadre of consultants to every local public station, urging station managers
to make their programs as uniform as possible. Any diversion is considered
a dangerous refusal to focus on maximizing the audience and
increasing contributions. In practice, this means that all public radio is
being reduced to wallpaper middle-of-the road jazz or noncontemporary
classical, with the usual complement of NPR news. Nothing else is
allowed, with the possible exception of some odds and ends on the weekend
or very off-peak hours. The consultants who promote this policy
attack dissenters as "elitists" and characterize independent programming