Last month in this space we discussed right-wing consternation with the content and character of American popular culture. The Right cares about the signals sent by popular culture, we said, because they understand that those signals matter in people's everyday lives. No sooner was the ink dry on that column than Vice President J. Danforth Quayle leaped into the breach and made Murphy Brown's baby the number one social issue of the political year.
Aside from confirming my own astute grasp of the obvious, the Quayle-Brown flap does illustrate the close symbiotic relationship between top right-wing politicos and the well-funded think tanks of the Right, such as the American Enterprise Institute (sponsors of a spring conference on U.S. popular culture).
It is no accident that the opening salvo in the election year pop culture wars came from Quayle, because Quayle's staff represents the main beachhead of Far Right influence in the Bush administration. While mushy-headed moderates, like the president, persist in thinking that private life is not public business, the Far Right, in its own perverse way, knows what the feminists taught us--that the personal is political, and vice versa.
It is also interesting to note that Quayle's injection of pop cultural images into the political debate came as part of his response to the Los Angeles uprising. A key element of the right-wing cultural strategy is the reassertion of authority at every level--home, school, work place, and state. This is part of an economic shift from a single-minded emphasis on consumption (which carries the cultural values of individual gratification and "choice") to a renewed stress on productivity (more work for less wages). The "productivity" strategy, of course, calls upon the cultural values of duty, hierarchy, and docility.
The outburst in South Central LA dramatically, and even melodramatically, acted out the confusion of values the Right so fears. The state (the police) lost all authority, as did the ultimate barrier of "private property." As a result the people acted like--what else?--consumers! You could call it looting, or you could call it a retail "Christmas in May," without money. In either case the behavior is the same. This is what can happen, the Right reasons, when the symbols of authority are weakened.
OF COURSE the disintegration of the family unit does have a lot to do with the decay of communal responsibility in America today, among all social classes. But the causation is not a one-way street. The values of individualism, the driving force of a market economy, are disastrous when applied to the realm of sex, love, and family life. That's the erosion of sexual morality about which the right-wingers are so correctly concerned.
But the disappearance of the traditional family also has more than a little to do with the disappearance of the traditional family wage. There was a time when, outside of the neo-feudalist rural South, an American blue-collar worker could legitimately expect to make a wage that would support a moderate-sized family. Not coincidentally, that was also a time when America had a strong and growing labor union movement.
The jobs that once allowed a high school-educated man to participate in the building of a "traditional family" in the traditional way have disappeared. While the cause of family changes is not this simple, this economic change certainly is a big part of the equation. And it is one that J. Danforth Quayle and his classmates would, for obvious reasons, rather not discuss.
Murphy Brown is a target of opportunity that allows Quayle and his hired thinkers to skirt these messy questions of home economics. Murphy Brown is rich, comparatively speaking. At some level for the Quaylers, an attack on Murphy Brown is also a barely sublimated attack on their favorite whipping-person, the news media. After all, in the famous Murphy Brown shower episode, which featured real-life blonde newswomen from all three real-life network news departments, the news media essentially adopted the fictional Murphy as one of their own.
The fact that the Murphy Brown character is a smug, insular, and self-absorbed, aging yuppie also helps the Right. The picture of a woman like this really having it all--the baby, the bucks, and the fame--can make a convenient red flag to wave in the face of those highly prized white, male, working-class Reagan Democrats.
In 1988 the Republicans used the specter of convicted rapist Willie Horton to cook up a potent brew of racial hatred and sexual fear. "'They' are coming to take 'your' women" was the message. At a less flammable level, rich and famous Murphy Brown allows Quayle to subtly interweave gender fears and class resentments toward the same end. Both are all the more powerful for being subsumed, covertly, under the heading of divinely ordained moral order.
Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.
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