Abstract
As noted in the introductory chapter, the early 1990s debate over the “culture war” has carried on in the new millennium, largely among the concept’s progenitor, James Hunter, and the political scientists Alan Wolfe and Morris Fiorina. This was made most evident with the publication of Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Life (2006), which Hunter and Wolfe coedited and to which Fiorina contributed. Although Hunter has continued to use the culture war metaphor, he now concedes that the divisions among people within the nation are not as stark or as binary as the culture war thesis once made it seem. Nevertheless, Hunter and many other scholars remain convinced that a battle still exists. As I have tried to demonstrate in the preceding chapters, I do as well. The powerful clash of worldviews evident in American society today is part of an ongoing struggle, one concerned not only with which worldview will predominate—the more conservative or the more progressive—but also with how the various skirmishes in the culture war will shape the very definition of “American” identity for the future. In a recent essay on this topic, James Hunter accurately notes that there is some common ground in the culture war: both sides of the debate, for example, embrace the “symbolic identity of America as e pluribus unum”; what the opponents differ on, Hunter notes, has to do with the limits and range of the pluralism implied by that famous phrase.2 Hunter continues,
In our time, what does exist of a dominant culture is attenuated. Indeed, if there is a center in American culture and politics today, it is certainly not “the vital center” that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. described and hoped for at mid-century. In fact, it is probably fair to say that Schlesinger’s “vital center” and the WASP consensus that underwrote it may have begun to erode the moment he declared its triumph.3
Oh, Marge, cartoons don’t have any deep meaning. They’re just stupid drawings that give you a cheap laugh.
—Homer Simpson1
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Notes
James D. Hunter, “The Culture War and the Sacred/Secular Divide: The Problem of Pluralism and Weak Hegemony,” Social Research 76, no. 4 (2009): 1308.
Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson, eds., Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 25.
Paul Simpson, On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humour (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003), 4.
Ann Johnson, Esteban del Rio, and Alicia Kemmitt, “Missing the Joke: A Reception Analysis of Satirical Texts,” Communication, Culture & Critique 3 (2010): 397.
William Savage, “‘So Television’s Responsible!’: Oppositionality and the Interpretive Logic of Satire and Censorship in The Simpsons and South Park,” in Leaving Springfield: “The Simpsons” and the Possibilities of Oppositional Television, ed. John Alberti (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 200.
For more on Lee’s film, see Ray Black, “Satire’s Cruelest Cut: Exorcising Blackness in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,” Black Scholar 33, no. 1 (2003): 19–24
Jamie Barlowe, “‘You Must Never Be a Misrepresented People’: Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,” Canadian Review of American Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): 1–16
Michael H. Epp, “Raising Minstrelsy: Humour, Satire, and the Stereotype in The Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled,” Canadian Review of American Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): 17–36
Phil Chidester et al., “‘Black is Blak’: Bamboozled and the Crisis of a Postmodern Racial Identity,” Journal of Communications 17, no. 4 (2006): 287–306.
Rachel Sklar, “David Remnick on That New Yorker Cover,” Huffington Post Online, July 13, 2008, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/13/david-remnick-on-emnew-yo_n_112456.html.
Joe Gandelman, “Furor Swirls around Liberal New Yorker’s Caricature of Obama,” Moderate Voice, July 22, 2008, http://themoderatevoice.com/21052/furor-swirls -around-liberal-new-yorkers-caricature-obama-cover/.
Rachel Weiner, “Obama’s Larry King Inter view,” Huffington Post Online, July 15, 2008, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/15/obamas-larry-king-intervi_n_112930.html.
See Phillip Kennicott, “It’s Funny How Humor Is So Ticklish,” Washington Post, July 15, 2008, C01
Tim Rutten, “If You Can’t Take a Joke …,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2008, A19
Scot Lehigh, “What’s So Shocking about Satire?” Boston Globe, July 16, 2008, A15
Lee Siegel, “We’re Not Laughing at You, or With You,” New York Times, July 20, 2008, late ed., WK5.
Josh Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change, 1968–1978 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 70.
Ibid. Also see Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach, “Archie Bunker’s Bigotry: A Study in Selective Perception and Exposure,” Journal of Communication (Winter 1974): 36–47. The authors concluded that “many persons did not see the program as a satire on bigotry,” that “these persons were more likely to be viewers who scored high on measures of prejudice,” and that “high prejudiced persons were more likely to identify with Archie Bunker and to see him winning in the end.” Quoted in Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America, 168.
For more on the Islamic community center in New York, see Mark Jacobson, “Muhammad Comes to Manhattan,” New York 43, no. 27 (2010): 24–32.
For more on the Dearborn Four, see Cathy Young, “Fear of a Muslim America,” Reason 43, no. 4 (2011): 20–26.
See Samuel G. Freedman, “Waging a One-Man War on American Muslims,” New York Times, December 16, 2011, A19
John Esposito, “The Madness over All-American Muslim,” On Religion, Washington Post, December 16, 2011, http://www.washington-post.com/blogs/on-faith/post/the-madness-over-all-american-muslim/2011/12/16 /gIQAquwtyO_blog.html.
Stuart Elliott and Brian Stelter, “Controversy Drives Advertisers from ‘All-American Muslim’—Or Does It?” Media Decoder, New York Times, December 11, 2011, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/.
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© 2012 Matthew A. Henry
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Henry, M.A. (2012). Conclusion: American Culture, Satire, and The Simpsons . In: The Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027795_8
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