In “The Sahara of the Bozart,” one of his most famed and acerbic essays, HL Mencken referred to the American south with a calculated awe:

It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether…. for all its size and all its wealth and all the ‘progress’ that it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert….It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of civilization.

Welcome to the final years of the Dixification of the United States. Though Mencken’s damnation of the South was no doubt far too sweeping, as if life there consisted solely of outcasts from Yoknapatawpha County– a bestiary of phrenologically dubious kissing cousins and Snopes-ean psychopaths– one of his sharpest criticisms, that the south of the 1920s lacked even “the impulse to seek beauty and to experiment with ideas, and so to give the life of every day a certain dignity and purpose,” now suits the nation as a whole. Disregard for a moment that Mencken’s explanation for this unprecedented slide into barbarism appealed to the decimation of the antebellum gentry. His argument that the Civil War, in culling the aristocracy, thinned the region’s collective “blood” has a eugenic tone to it now. In our day, when the rankest elitism is slopped out on paper plates like barbecue for mass consumption it often follows that the aspiration for an intellectual life beyond drive-thru/ wallpaper culture provokes a faux-democratic response which posits corporation-confected drivel as some kind of organic expression of the people. Leaving aside cultural studies practioners’ complicity in this valorization of media sausage skins stuffed with sawdust, we can see that Mencken’s criticism still applies: culture comes in many variants but surely the most ubiquitous is that brand which acts as a palliative, an anodyne for all ailments, whether in the form of syndicated Seinfeld re-runs consumed in the aftermath of yet another painful 10 hour stretch of humiliation and purposelessness (work) or the poor man’s time travel across barely apprehended concepts and factoids that characterizes a night trawling the net. In each case culture distracts, and if that function is hardly new– “color” reportage of the late 19th century deemed nickel dumps and amusement parks as much, cementing middle-class complacency and widening the age’s high/low breach the great-grandchildren of those arbiters of bourgeois taste worked so feverishly to anneal– it has expanded, and now threatens to extinguish even the possibility of thought. 

There is a difference between the arrogance of assuming a right to improve the residuum as the fabled and defamed Reformers undertook to accomplish during the Progressive Era– a project that sought embourgeoisement of the masses while retaining the vertiginous gap between haves and have-nots– and leaving people collectively to the stultifications of a culture which operates according to the debasing illogic of a market. Theodor Adorno caught flack for disparaging what he has been misrepresented as terming “Jazz,” particularly his criticisms that such music represents a stereotyped idiom, a regimented unruliness that inevitably accedes to the demands of commercialization. These remarks are apposite to his most discussed work (written with Max Horkheimer), The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, an essay concerned with the creation of mass-society individuals whose deepest intuitions and desires are revealed to be the outcome of technical-economic practices. In On Popular Music, Adorno writes 

The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or “pre-digested”. The most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so “normalized” as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations — passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted (“Swing it boys”) — are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme. In a great many cases, such as the “break” of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Since these possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation — pseudo-individualization.

In a culture prefixed with the first-person possessive pronoun– “my” space, “my” insert name of product/institution here, ipod, iphone, etc.– this pseudo-individualization has fully penetrated our consciousness. Reduced from citizens to consumers we download not only our thoughts but the components of our personalities which are accumulated from a stock of existing types and flavors to be assembled and advertised among a shrinking circle of actual acquaintances or uploaded and injected into the world wide web. In the process, whatever cognitive fluency might have been extracted from an encounter with some culture of depth becomes a stutter of repetition and incoherency. Though we maintain a certain self-reflexiveness– an obligatory ironizing which is, after all, the social distinction and lubricant of the hep– the image that bounces back is itself a reflection, mere bent light.